New York, NY (Top40 Charts) After releasing two teaser singles in early 2018 and road testing their new songs on tours with both Buffalo Tom and Night Flowers, Norwegian indie rock band Beezewax are finally ready to announce the release of their seventh studio album, titled Peace Jazz and set for release on 3rd May 2019 via Sellout! Music.
To celebrate the news, the band have also revealed new single 'Two Diamonds', available to stream in full now. Lead singer and guitarist Kenneth Ishak says of the track: "It's based on a really old song that we'd already recorded, but then we lost the original tape. I would just play parts of the song when I played guitar at home and just got into it again and wrote some new parts and lyrics.
"It's just a straightforward love song to be honest, about finding something that is just yours, and that private world that is just full of joy. It's easy to get jaded about things in general, so it's great to find something that still excites and moves you—like seeing a color for the first time or tasting a new flavor of ice cream."
With Peace Jazz clocking in at just under 40 minutes across 8 tracks, all of the ingredients that have made Beezewax stand out from the pack over the years remain present: emotive vocals, stunning harmonies and Dinosaur Jr.-esque guitars, combined with detail-oriented production and top quality songwriting. With comparisons by Q Magazine drawn to the melodic pop precision of
Phoenix combined with the punk-fueled force of the mighty Dinosaur Jr, throw in some Teenage
Fanclub harmonies, Buffalo Tom earnestness, and Superchunk energy and you've pretty much hit the nail on the head with the Beezewax sound.
The first two singles from the record were well received—'Closer' (featuring Jon Auer of The Posies, and
Sophia Pettit of Night Flowers) remained on Apple Music's Breaking Alternative playlist for 3 months, whilst Norwegian national broadcaster NRK P13 championed it for even longer. Follow-up track 'Rainbows' was premiered by NPR and received praise from Record of The Day, Q Magazine, The 405, Magnet, The Line of Best Fit and many more.
The outfit's previous album Tomorrow (2014) saw them playing festivals including Primavera Sound (ES), Twisterella (UK), Out of Spite (UK), and Donostikluba Festival (ES), in addition to club tours in the UK, Japan, Spain & Norway.
The process of recording Peace Jazz was heavily influenced by the extensive touring the band have undertaken over the last few years. Talking about the period of relentless live shows that followed their previous album, lead singer and guitarist Kenneth Ishak says: "What we found was that people really liked—and have always liked—how our songs sound live: louder, and with a different energy."
As such, energy and harmonics became the keywords for the recording. The process was all about capturing the vibe of the band playing live together in a big room, with the guitars bleeding into each other as they would at a live show, and collectively recreating the energy of those live performances. Even though their loud live shows were a crucial influence on the record, they also found another guiding star in one of their all-time favorite records, as Ishak explains: "We thought: what would Pet
Sounds by the
Beach Boys sound like if it was really loud and distorted? Of course, that's not what the album sounds like, but that was the dream; the inspiration."
Lyrically the record is an examination of a variety of issues from the viewpoints of different characters, the idea being that each song is a snapshot of a bigger picture; "You can find your own meaning," hints Ishak, "but it's not fictional—all the events in the lyrics are pretty real and very candid, but without telling the whole story."
The album's title—taken from a piece of work by Indiana-based musical artist
Nathaniel Russell—is perhaps indicative of its contents in a wider sense, then. "He posted a picture of a little black board with the words 'peace jazz' written on it, and that's just something that really resonated with me," enthuses Ishak.
"Jazz has always appeared as something very sophisticated to me," he rounds up, "sometimes chaotic and flowing, but often educated and schooled, so as a genre it doesn't always move me. Our record is very loose, sometimes jammy and noisy, but we mean well; we come in peace. We're not trying to impress anyone or be technical—we just want to make something that means a lot to us."
UK Tour Dates TBA.
Peace Jazz is released 3rd May 2019 via Sellout! Music
Beezewax are:
Jan-Erik Hoel - bass, vocals
Thomas Garder Olsen - guitars
Chris Jacobsen - drums, percussion
Mattias Krohn Nielsen - guitar, keys
Kenneth Ishak - vocals, guitar, keys, percussion
Beezewax online:
https://www.facebook.com/beezewaxband
https://twitter.com/beezewaxband
https://www.beezewax.com
