8/7/2023 0 Comments Brave little abacus discomfortWe’ve been a band for a while, primarily focused on growing our live show and are currently wrapping up the recording of a project we’ve been working on for what feels like forever. Me in Capris is a Pop/Rock band that unlike Brave Little Abacus very much has live drums, haha. Could you tell us a little about it and what you've been up to recently? I think it really says something about the power of the Dreamcast that when I'm thinking of 1999 and its aesthetic identity I'm immediately brought to that little orange spiral. It's been amazing recently to see contemporary artists making music reminiscent of what I guess a lot of people now refer to as 'Y2K' culture. I find a ton of inspiration from that period in general. I open it up and just stare at the Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star Online, and Crazy Taxi designs all of the time. A couple of years ago I picked up the book Sega Dreamcast: Collected Works from the awesome publisher Read-Only Memory. My relationship with the console now is primarily with its arcade ports but also just having a reverence for its ambition and style in general. I don’t think that this was necessarily the primary driving force though, it probably was more of a publicly-used excuse for dragging a CRT to shows, ha. I also remember believing that using a CD-based set-up to play our backing tracks would overall benefit our performance given the increased audio fidelity of a CD vs. I also have some recollection of us wanting to eventually perform in front of a wall of CRTs, which, like a lot of other Brave Little Abacus ideas, was certainly a bit over-the-top ambition-wise, ha. Pre-recorded/produced drum tracks along with in-between song vignettes and samples would be played on CD via a Dreamcast or PlayStation and eventually off of an iPod or Laptop.įrom the outset of the project, we were often sampling sound effects and passages from video games in our recorded music so I think from an aesthetic sense, relying on that technology live was a good fit. In the morning I’ll be fine.For the vast majority of Brave Little Abacus’ existence, we performed without a live drummer. Adam said it best with, “Ambitions always double the weight of the world.” Eclectic, fun, challenging, catchy, The Brave Little Abacus where everything an emo band should be, but they’re dead, dead and buried, gone forever, a blip on the radar, a cult project that likely will never generate money, but that’s OK. Perhaps Adam and company were too ambitious to succeed. Pound for pound TBLA is the best emo band that ever was. The Brave Little Abacus is important to me, they’re important to the genre, and to music in general: And that’s it, two full lengths, an EP, a split, and a demo. I take solace that the average TBLA fan is a devoted fanatic, but our numbers are still alarmingly thin. It’s disheartening knowing that a band with such potential broke up, that a band whose whole discography is strange and exciting has so few fans. It took a decade after fellow emo greats American Football broke up for them to catch on, so there is hope. I hope with all my heart that starts to change. There’s really nothing new to be found, but that’s OK because Okumay is icing on the discography-cake.ĭespite their limitless appeal, The Brave Little Abacus remains largely unknown. They have the songwriting chops to pull off the stripped down sound There are no samples (OK one, but it’s short), no weird stuff, no bullshit, just four fast and furious emo tracks. Upbeat keyboard riffs and Adam’s most polished vocal performance to date make Okumay an experiment in what The Brave Little Abacus would sound like if they were a “normal” band. Keyboard is often a secondary instrument for TBLA, hanging out in the background, providing atmosphere and counterpoint, but on Okumay, Zack’s ‘boards carry the music. It’s The Brave Little Abacus' least challenging, most pop oriented record. It doesn’t even attempt to live up to JGB, and that’s what makes it perfect. Okumay is not experimental in any way, it doesn’t advance the band’s sound. But once I freed myself from lofty expectations and comparisons, I started to realize I might be approaching it wrong, and it hit me that three of the four songs (all but the cover) are among TBLA’s best songs. It’s three new songs, one cover, and hardly groundbreaking, the songs are much simpler, bare, stripped back. Okumay was an anticlimactic way for a band like The Brave Little Abacus to go out. Part 5 - Big bulging eyes like frogs in the hands of boyhoodĪt first glance Okumay is a disappointing way for the band to go out - it’s short, simple, bare, and it’s not a “revelation” like Just Got Back From The Discomfort. The Most Underrated Band on The Planet: A Retrospective
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |