Review Summary: @JesperL: sorry i was doing social i missed the thing but it's all a keep from me fs
today's big question: who are fauxdeep?
l.i.a.m.: we are me (sam eastman), sloane haddock, skylar tankersley, and ruth
oh damn nice, hey sam eastman (aka loveisamixtape of sputnikmusic) how's it hanging why did you make this album?
l.i.a.m.: good question! the other songwriter and i, sloane, just love writing songs and it was time to do an LP. all of the songs were compiled from a pool of about 60 demos, going all the way back to like, 2018.
*** damn that's a long gestation! this is a veteran band?
l.i.a.m.: yes i technically wrote the first song in december of 2012, but as you might imagine it was much different then lol
dope! and you have finally released an album!?
l.i.a.m.: yes after all these years! we tried to take our time with it
can i listen to it?
l.i.a.m.: of course………
right now?
l.i.a.m.: yes let’s go…
…in track by track format?
l.i.a.m.: yes that sounds fun
okay, wicked – one sec
1. 651
so those tones and effects were very much not what i was expecting from the tags! guitars are sounding splendid and glacial now they're in, but what was that hissing/clicking/whirring at the start?
l.i.a.m.: industrial synth effect on my keyboard lol i basically wrote this song around that effect
killer ***, i love how it unsettled me right out of the gates – and now we appear to have transitioned to a proper slabs-of-grunge heavy gazing chorus and then out again. tell me about transitions, both in and out of music, while i enjoy the choice guitar interplay through this second verse.
l.i.a.m.: yes this song was written during covid and i guess i was trying to capture a lot of different moods, this was also written while a good friend was in the hospital and eventually died. grief is a main theme of this whole album
***, so sorry to hear about your friend, but i dare say you did them proud on this. the structure here is definitely ambitious! it holds together, but i dig how the chorus plays out as this big ol' crushing inevitability, but the rest of the song is pretty savvy with baiting and switching out of alternative questions and only gives it a chance to drop twice in five minutes – did not feel i was able to second-guess it at all.
2. Count to Ten
and now we're rocking. who are your favourite rock bands, and is one of them by any chance hum?
l.i.a.m.: hahaha yes, count 2 ten kinda came after we did a literal hum cover set for our town’s annual halloween celebration
paha excellent, which tracks were on your setlist? this is giving me primo you'd prefer an astronaut vibes, could see you kicking it to "the pod" q easily in between writing sessions for this (if that's fair)?
l.i.a.m.: iron clad lou, stars, the pod, if you are to bloom, i hate it too. it’s so funny that you picked up on that
also felt a bit of "if you are to bloom" in that intro – must be an awesome track to cover, but enough on that. love how low the vocals are mixed though (especially compared to "the pod"!) – this has got that angsty grunge feel down to a tee, but it's murky and intent on churning over itself in a way that sound often falls short of for me. so much meat on these bones!
3. Your Phone Is Dead
woof, up goes the suspense. this one feels very momentous – is this another grief song, and am i picking up on the morbid connotations of the title as i should [not] be?
l.i.a.m.: so this one was written by sloane, i barely touched it besides vocal harmonies which she like, guided me on. sloane is my best friend and unbelievably talented. this was our first single from the album
the writing here is tight as anything – i dug the opener for its spread of ideas and "count to ten" for its take on a sound i'm very familiar with, but this feels like the most integral entity-unto-itself so far, just a really strong, fully-formed track all round. great choice of single.
l.i.a.m.: yes when she sent me this demo like 6 years ago or something i was immediately very attached to it. it’s cool because i can listen to it almost as a different band, just my best friends rocking out and im lucky to have any small part in it
interesting that you say that – which track on this album do you associate most deeply with your input/involvement?
l.i.a.m.: so the only songs i didn’t write are your phone is dead and no one hold me, we both basically wrote the songs entirely and kinda had almost all of the say about all of each song
to what degree does this band feel like a democracy vs. a range of strong individual voices who happen to (clearly) share great chemistry?
l.i.a.m.: tough question but we definitely helped each other with takes and stuff, most of all on vocals. we spent a lot of time on vocals
4. It Glides In
apt title. sinister picking and icicle tones all over this one.
l.i.a.m.: lmao yeah i tend to leave the song title as the demo title and that is what i chose to call it. this is actually the newest song on the album; written in 2022. i wrote it when i had covid for the first time. this one took the longest to finish bc i had no vocals written. this one features individual vocals from all three of us, including our extremely talented drummer and producer
it's definitely got that uneasy, feverish quality all over it, and i could also envision this as an instrumental perhaps more easily than the others (no discredit to your performance, but it feels very much vocally complemented rather than vocally led). when you came up with the demo title, what exactly (if only just as a set of adjectives) did you conceive "it" to be?
l.i.a.m.: so this album to me is ‘ chapters’ oriented and this is the beginning of “chapter 2”, these next 3 songs all kinda go together and have similar things and were written kind of near each other
meaning that you pieced a coherent 'narrative' together out of your considerable archive of unreleased material and this intuitively slid into place here?
l.i.a.m.: yes absolutely, it was hard to pace these songs
5. Gloss Over
i feel the album has been waiting for this song for a while now – this is definitely the more catatonic stew that the rockier cuts at the start were hinting at. i feel a proper depressive funk brewing here.
l.i.a.m.: yes i would deem this possibly my favorite song on the record that i wrote at least. love this one a lot. it’s the most “us” of them all
it's always a tricky one negotiating dynamic swells and heavy inserts on tracks that telegraph wanting to curl up and expend as little energy as possible, but you got a real grip on the distortion that courses through this at its peak. how would you describe yourself as a guitarist re. timbre vs. melody/chords? which do you feel more at home expressing yourself through?
l.i.a.m.: it definitely changes a lot but the older i get i definitely lean more towards melody, im way more likely to become invested in an idea if i fall in love with a melody. sometimes i wanna feel good about technicality and sometimes i wanna make myself cry
interesting, i almost expected to hear the opposite answer – but no time to suss out why, because
6. Starfall
ah i see what you meant about tracks 5-7 running together now. if this album's protag fell down on "gloss over", they sure as *** ain't getting up again on this one.
l.i.a.m.: yes it’s a slow crash, probably the most ~ethereal~ and also example of wanting to make myself cry
like the opener and "gloss over", this one goes all-in when it comes to heavy guitars ripping the scab off for a chorus section, but i get the impression that the bass is the most menacing element here and has been throughout (potentially) the whole album. is that something you'd agree with or were conscious of while writing?
l.i.a.m.: yeah i mean, i think bass is super important and skylar and i both come from a percussion background, and he very much inspires me to be as tedious w bass that i can be
another theme i'm noticing is that these songs 'end' in a howl when they've run out of steam rather than bringing themselves to a resolution or even necessarily offering the listener catharsis. there's a chance i'll eat those words over the next few tracks, but they seem purposefully crafted to run onto one another and sustain a heavy ol' mood – which they do remarkably fluidly for an album pulled from disparate sessions.
l.i.a.m.: yeah it’s hard to explain but in compiling all of these demos, this stretch has a leaning on that sort of tendency for sure. starfall was always supposed to have a “release” that i could never write, and the next song of Sloane’s acts basically as that with its crushing beginning
7. No One Hold Me
that beginning is absolutely hitting as such lol.
l.i.a.m.: yeah sloane writes just absolute bangers. always so inspiring lol
these vocal harmonies are it, and this is perhaps the most immediate track so far after "your phone is dead" – and it also feels the least indebted to the amped up shoegaze pantheon.
l.i.a.m.: we often play this one last live for a reason. this one is so just devastating and has been since i heard the demo however long ago. idk what else to say besides sloane i love u you’re so good at songs
by the end of the last track, i had kind of given up the notion of this being a 'gratifying' record (in a good way – you're really selling me on those overtones of grief and despair), but this one felt like an immensely gratifying payoff. not much to add here. just thoroughly cogent rock music.
8. His Name Was On Fire
we now seem to be in the final chapter, as you put it earlier. what does this mean? why is there still an album?
l.i.a.m.: because while a lot of the tones are of grief in the existential sense of death, the middle chapter really goes into that theme in a different way, i guess. we’re back to death now. my demo of this has a sample from the movie Paris Texas that we didn’t use and uhhhhhhhhhh i guess that’s relevant cuz that’s why it’s an instrumental
did you avoid the sample for licensing reasons or as an artistic decision?
l.i.a.m.: yes and no, i guess we just kinda fell in love with it as is. the sample is also on a macbook that no longer works and has lots of flex timing *** that i wouldn’t even know how to do now lol. felt meant to be absent. but i still remember what it was saying
oh gawd, recreating a complicated flex timesync is not one i'd have been game for either. at least it carried you to the finish. i feel this song, oppressive as it is, has cleared the air and made way for an encore-type closer. well…
9. Yr Last Sound
i have an immediate hunch that this might be a track you've considered as a setlist opener. am i wrong?
l.i.a.m.: perhaps, we haven’t learned this one yet, but it’s certainly one of if not the most emotional song on the album
yes, i'm feeling the brimstone on this already. if you were to describe the crash-in-crash-out of your guitars with reference to a force of nature, which would it be?
l.i.a.m.: tornado, storms in general. i’m very inspired by the elements and specifically violent weather
i remember now that you're a phil elverum die-hard – which perhaps informs my awareness of some elements of this album (not many – maybe those vocals on "no one hold me"). do you have a specific writing inspiration anecdote on that theme while i gush over how tumultuous this bridge is building up to be?
l.i.a.m.: well i mean i think a huge reason i love phil so much is cuz he is openly very similar, i certainly lean into that a lot in my own way (or try to st least lol) and yeah, his approach to that has always been very inspiring. there are a plethora of others but that is certainly a main if not the main one in that way
the album has now ended and i am left, hmmm… definitely craving more,
definitely eyeing up a couple of highlight tracks to flick back to. it feels hackneyed to say it's been a 'journey', and although that closer definitely built to the climactic sense of ~something breaking and passing, i don't feel that the themes, atmosphere and emotional wavelength the rest of the album took the lid off from are something so transitory. i will be brooding on what this means well beyond the confines of this review (which, alas, is very transitory), but was it your hope or expectation that your target audience would derive something thornier than 'closure' from this record.
l.i.a.m.: well YLS is directly about a specific friend that passed away, one of my oldest friends, i wrote it very soon after he passed. he taught me so much about how i play guitar now, this song is directly about him. in an album so full of those themes i guess we placed it there for the uhhhh, i guess, ~death is real~ sort of tragic ending lol. i also i guess wrote it when i did to ~impress~ him. it’s certainly a bit different and i guess we wanted to end on the darkest possible note
i see – and i'm sorry that the format of this piece has inadvertently glazed over the context of your friend passing. it definitely felt portentous and unsettling for me, going in blind, to hear things rounded off with a song that jagged, so that darkness is very much conveyed. if you don't mind me asking, how has it felt for you as the creator to express this sense with what we can chalk up as at least reasonable success? has it felt like meaningful closure for you to see your album off as such, or is the door still open for some song-to-come you haven't written yet (or perhaps have) to that end?
l.i.a.m.: i like how the record ends for sure and feel extremely gratified by where it all ended up. we write songs constantly and already are gearing up for more, i think we really conveyed what we wanted to here. as for closure about him, not as much, but i am super thankful that his presence on this earth inspired me enough to keep doing this, and i’d like to think he’d be stoked on this record. he played one show with us even like 8 years ago. he’s an ~ex member~. i’m not sure if that answers ur question lol but yeah, no closure ever (another theme of the album) expressed correctly i think
that definitely answers my question, but sorry for you pushing you towards opening up about something so personal on a silly public platform.
l.i.a.m. oh not at all i don’t feel that way! we put it out there for a reason. i’m always down to talk about TJ. he’d be proud that anyone wants to ask me about these songs at all lol. he’d say “yezzzzirrrr”
ha, i'm sure he'd be proud of more than that having heard this! now, tell me about the future of this band – who are you playing with, what's the plan for new material, when are you coming to europe?
l.i.a.m.: our next show is with a cool band called bleary eyed, and then another a few weeks later with a band called trauma ray. love both of those bands as a music fan. we are working on doing more US touring and then i mean hell yeah we’d love to go to europe; just gotta work on touring the US more first lol. we play random out of town shows and have done two tours ever, we have a lot to catch up on. it’ll always be a band tho, i’ll always write songs for it and im sure sloane will too. we’re stuck with us…. as is everyone else, for better or worse!!!!
***in' a! and uh, one last very important question: what do i rate this?
l.i.a.m.: u love decimals so 5.1 out of 5
it's a done deal. thank you for your time!
l.i.a.m.: thank you for listening to it i am glad to have been able to do this!!! so cool
