New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Giant Peach shared a video from their brand new album But You Made Me Such A Beautiful Thing today, just in time for them to kick off tour tonight in their hometown of Brooklyn NY (see Surviving the Golden Age debut). But You Made Me Such A Beautiful Thing is available now via Dead Broke Rekerds!
TOUR DATES:
July 11 - Brooklyn NY @ Alphaville
July 13 - Philadelphia PA @ Space 1026
July 14 - Washington DC @ Comet Ping Pong
July 15 - Harrisonburg VA @ The Golden Pony
July 16 - Richmond VA
July 17 - Baltimore MD @ Joe Squared
July 18 - Pittsburgh PA @ Rock Room
July 19 - Cleveland OH @ Happy Dog
July 20 - Grand Rapids MI @ 741/Kuzzins
July 21 -
Chicago IL @ Burlington
July 22 - Bloomington IN @ Root Cellar
July 23 - Cincinnati OH @ Urban Artifact
July 24 - Columbus OH @ Cafe Bourbon St.
July 25 - Akron OH @ It's A Kling Thing!
July 26 - Buffalo NY @ Mohawk Place
July 27 - Ithaca NY @ the Chanticleer
Giant Peach is the natural extension of the early and disparate solo bedroom projects of
Frances Chang and Mike Naideau. Naideau grew up on the north shore of Long Island amidst a thriving punk scene and an early involvement in the world of DIY, booking house shows in his parents' garage. Chang simultaneously spent her adolescent years wasting away in a suburban town in Westchester too small to have a cohesive music scene among a lot of weirdos with strong opinions about art, an experience that left her with an unconsciously eccentric out-of touchness and a healthy education in indie rock.
Upon meeting in college in 2008, their guitar-driven efforts began to merge, even as their idiosyncratic musical styles - Naideau's pastoral, rhythmic sense of abstraction, and Chang's intense sense of melody - were so undiluted and distinct that they seemed to repel like oil and water. But they found that each of them added hues unnatural to the other's spectrum. Chang and Naideau basically grew up together, in that second childhood kind of way, on-and-off partners and best friends, and along the way their long histories of musical influences, of which there was almost an eerie amount of overlap to begin with, bled into one.
Never aiming to be any "kind" of band, GP's noisy and emotional music flowed naturally from the quality of the time. Their first full-length "Glow Away, Ghetto Way," a self-released collection of songs from Chang and Naideau's personal projects was recorded as a three-piece with drummer Paul Misak. It was an album bursting with the kind of extreme energy and excitement that is unleashed by playing with a band and going on tour for the first time, and a drastic shift from the mellow and private realm of the four-track/garageband bedroom scene. Soon after the drums changed hands to Dave Shotwell, and the band continued to tour the DIY circuit and recorded two EPs, "People Don't Believe Me" (2011, self-released), four tracks of noisy art rock, and "Callous and Strange" (2012, Rok Lok Records), a generally heavier, sludgier and less haphazardly written collection of songs. Chang and Naideau continued to pen and sing their own songs in a somewhat isolated manner, but with the addition of Shotwell a greater unity through collaboration became more palpable. Finally caving to convention (as they eventually do after a long and dangerous flirtation with irrelevance: both got off the flip phone wagon in 2017, and they just got on instagram this month) they added Luke Holstein on bass, and the group utilized the stark aesthetic polarities existent between its members to write a new slew of dense and specific songs realized through elongated moments of tension. The result was their full-length "
Tarantula" (2016, Don
Giovanni Records & Shitty Present Records), ten songs of a driving and dense hybrid of pop punk and post hardcore.
Giant Peach's newest record is a product of years of perfectionism and sea change. After initial tracking in 2015 with Mike Kutchman (The Gun Outfit, Ancient Sky, Wall) Shotwell exited the band, and Chang and Naideau continued to add to the mix with home recorded vocals, guitar overdubs, and field recordings, at a pace subject to the whims of inspiration. Finally, Hunter Davidsohn (Frankie Cosmos, Porches, LVL UP,
Sheer Mag) lent his hand at mixing the tangle of tracks. The result is a cinematic and atmospheric yet extremely personal collage of moods and narratives, marking a return to the band's bedroom origins. Meanwhile, after a brief stint of Ryan Naideau (Nude Beach, Warthog) filling in on drums, Chris
Arena (Adult Magic, Crow Bait) took up the unholy mantle of Giant Peach drummer.
"But You Made Me Such A Beautiful Thing" is a breakup album, about the kind of break up that is dragged out and excruciating in its blurred boundaries, the kind of breakup that is as much about about painstakingly defining the self as it is about being in relationship to another. The songs themselves continue the band's atypical song format, evoking a meandering story rather than the pop tropes of hook and refrain. "The album should be viewed as one continuous piece, a meditative cycle of continuing revelation," Chang says. "We've become a little antisocial. A few of our songs clock in over 8 minutes in length." Yet the record as a whole is undeniably the band's most fascinating, conscious, and mature work to date.
