Biography
"New Chain is the debut long-player from New York's Small Black. Richly
coloured and thickly layered, it is an absorbing, eclectic and obsessive
body of work. The Brooklyn group have succeeded in melting together
locked and popped drum-shudder, gauzy spirographic synths and subtly
contagious, half-remembered melody into ebullient bursts of evocative,
subliminal and thoroughly modern pop. The songs are equally informed by
the rhythmic bounce and stylistic swagger of more left-leaning
contemporary radio rap and R'n'B as it is the submerged kaleidoscopic
swirl of the early 4AD dream factory.Formed at the tail-end of
2008 as a bedroom recording project, Small Black first made waves with
their eponymous debut EP. Recorded in the attic of singer Josh Kolenik's
uncle's remote Long Island beach-house/surfboard workshop, it served as
an ideal introduction to the group with its pulsing patchwork synths
and addictive, stay-gold hooks that seemed to unfurl themselves
gradually over repeated listens. Slightly more immediate and polished
than its predecessor, Small Black's new album New Chain remains a
continuation of this contrasting ethos – a delirious smudging of the
lines between melancholy and nostalgia, tension and celebration,
unabashed pop music and experimentation. "It's always been a question
for us," explains keyboardist/songwriter Ryan Heyner, "of how much to
push it, how much to reveal. I find a lot of the best music creeps up on
you."New Chain was predominantly written, recorded and fully
realized in the seclusion of sleepy, suburban Delaware, where
bassist/songwriter Juan Pieczanski spent his childhood summers., and
then mixed by Nicolas Vernhes (Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors) at
his Rare Book Room studio in New York City. The group spent the hours in
Delaware as Kolenik says "trying to take the excitement and stimulus of
NYC to a place far from distractions, where it could be organized
properly." The effect of the transposition between city life and the
isolation could explain the way the record's full-blown party jams are
tempered with weirder moments of longing and enigma, and conversely, how
its more discordant, foggy moments conceal huge moments of melody.A
thinker's party record? A party-hardy thinker's record? Not sure. All
we know is that New Chain is one of the most involved, intriguing and
effortlessly human collections of organic pop music you're likely to
hear this or any other year."From: http://www.jagjaguwar.com/onesheet.php?cat=JAG174
coloured and thickly layered, it is an absorbing, eclectic and obsessive
body of work. The Brooklyn group have succeeded in melting together
locked and popped drum-shudder, gauzy spirographic synths and subtly
contagious, half-remembered melody into ebullient bursts of evocative,
subliminal and thoroughly modern pop. The songs are equally informed by
the rhythmic bounce and stylistic swagger of more left-leaning
contemporary radio rap and R'n'B as it is the submerged kaleidoscopic
swirl of the early 4AD dream factory.Formed at the tail-end of
2008 as a bedroom recording project, Small Black first made waves with
their eponymous debut EP. Recorded in the attic of singer Josh Kolenik's
uncle's remote Long Island beach-house/surfboard workshop, it served as
an ideal introduction to the group with its pulsing patchwork synths
and addictive, stay-gold hooks that seemed to unfurl themselves
gradually over repeated listens. Slightly more immediate and polished
than its predecessor, Small Black's new album New Chain remains a
continuation of this contrasting ethos – a delirious smudging of the
lines between melancholy and nostalgia, tension and celebration,
unabashed pop music and experimentation. "It's always been a question
for us," explains keyboardist/songwriter Ryan Heyner, "of how much to
push it, how much to reveal. I find a lot of the best music creeps up on
you."New Chain was predominantly written, recorded and fully
realized in the seclusion of sleepy, suburban Delaware, where
bassist/songwriter Juan Pieczanski spent his childhood summers., and
then mixed by Nicolas Vernhes (Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors) at
his Rare Book Room studio in New York City. The group spent the hours in
Delaware as Kolenik says "trying to take the excitement and stimulus of
NYC to a place far from distractions, where it could be organized
properly." The effect of the transposition between city life and the
isolation could explain the way the record's full-blown party jams are
tempered with weirder moments of longing and enigma, and conversely, how
its more discordant, foggy moments conceal huge moments of melody.A
thinker's party record? A party-hardy thinker's record? Not sure. All
we know is that New Chain is one of the most involved, intriguing and
effortlessly human collections of organic pop music you're likely to
hear this or any other year."From: http://www.jagjaguwar.com/onesheet.php?cat=JAG174