LISTEN: to JEFF The Brotherhood's “Parachute” on Billboard // YouTube
With a decade's worth of monstrous albums behind them, [JEFF The Brotherhood] really ought to rule the galaxy by now.
– NPR
Their songs are often just a couple of chords and high speed, but the brothers have acid on the brain, stirring harmonized distortion and sitar buzz into the boogie.
– Rolling Stone
JEFF the Brotherhood can play with the big boys
– Pitchfork
JEFF the Brotherhood are a band that need no introduction. For the past 15 years, the Nashville brothers Jake and Jamin Orrall have put out some of the best garage rock you’ll ever hear.
– Noisey
Creatively endless
– Stereogum
JEFF The Brotherhood, the project of brothers Jake and Jamin Orrall, started in a basement in Nashville, TN in 2002. From their basement beginnings they have traced a journey that has taken them around the world several times over, from DIY shows and self-released albums to major label contracts, network television appearances and the international festival circuit, and today, after a two year hiatus, the band are announcing their 13th full length album, Magick Songs.
The album marks a significant change of direction for the Brotherhood, who have added new band members in Jack Lawrence or Dead Weather/Raconteurs and Kunal Prakash of Viva L'American Death Ray Music, and work with several new collaborators including Daddy Issues’ Jenna Moynihan andBully‘s Reece Lazarus, both of whom feature on the album's first single “Parachute,” which is premiering today on Billboard. The track, on which Moynihan takes a co-lead vocal with Jake Orrall, showcases several of the new influences The Brotherhood have incorporated into this release, which range from ‘80s and ‘90s Japanese experimental music (a passion of Jake Orrall, who recently contributed liner notes to aLight In The Attic compilation of Japanese “New Music,”) to extreme metal. This song in particular takes cues from the Indonesian Gamelan tradition, as Jake explains to Billboard while expanding on the album's science fiction-inspired themes.
“The form, structure, and spirituality of ‘Parachute’ is rooted in Indonesian Gamelan traditions, something the band felt a strong magnetism towards during the recording process,” says Orral. “This gives the piece a sort of otherworldly feel, a dreamlike landscape that is further explored through the imagery of the lyrics.
The lyrics for Parachute began with a dream Jamin had that seemed to fall into place within the themes of the album as a whole, an off world interplanetary/interplanar apocalypse, a psychic battle against an impossibly powerful destructive force not only in the physical dimension but in one's own mind and humanity's collective consciousness.
The musical themes were born from an improvisation with Kunal Prakash (Viva L'American Death Ray Music, Quintron's Weather Warlock Band) and Jack Lawrence (Dead Weather, Raconteurs, Greenhornes) and features Jenna Moynihan (Daddy Issues, Fever Blush) on vocals and Reece Lazarus (Bully) on Clarinet.
In support of the release the band have just announced a North American tour that begins in September. Full details can be found below.
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Magick Songs was recorded in a bare bones studio, built in Jake Orrall's Nashville living room, over a 5 month span. It was a unique experience for the brothers, who had recorded each of their preceding 12 full lengths in studios under the guidance of professional engineers.
“It was a huge change for us,” Jake Orrall says, “but the music that we had been making up to this point had just kind of fizzled out. It got stale for us. We felt like we’d hit a dead end and we were really excited to try some new things. We built this record from scratch with all of us in a room together which was a really different approach than anything we'd done before, and spent 5 months working day in and day out. Our average time for recording a record before this was 3 days, so there wasn’t really any room or time for this kind of experimentation.”
Magick Songs explores a host of new influences, while emphasizing different shades of sounds that have coloured The Brotherhood's previous releases. Elements of 80's and 90s Japanese experimental music (Orrall sites Yellow Magic Orchestra, Haruomi Honso, Midori Takada, Satoshi Asakawa and Motohiko Hamase) meld with Indonesian Gamelan forms (derived from the releases in the Nonesuch Explorer series and the music of 70s experimental collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi), clever improvisation and abundant hand percussion and synthesizer. Elsewhere heavy psych, drone and the brother's rarely tapped interest in extreme metal blends with the kraut rock that has long inspired them to stretch their sound towards the outer reaches of space rock squall. Thematically they toy with a broader concept for the first time in their career, synthesizing Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Studio Ghibli films, sci fi anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Akira, and their own meticulously recorded dreams into a loose narrative that informs the albums lyrics.
Their compositional approach has also shifted, with the album constructed from a series of extended improvisations that were then edited down and reassembled into more conventional song structures by Jake Orrall and tied together with overdubs in later sessions. This technique results in frequently unusual arrangements that rarely repeat exactly, instead cycling through subtle variations around each chord progression. In a sense it's the total opposite of the garage rock and pop songwriting style that has popularly defined the band, and feels like an exorcism of the last ghosts of the band's Warner days.
“There’s so much preconception now about our band, and people have already made up their minds about what kind of band we are, which isn’t really what we’re about at this point in our lives,” says Orrall. “At one point we took a shot at being a radio rock band, and it was an interesting experience and the record that we made taught me a lot about songwriting and production. You've gotta try these things and it was an intriguing opportunity artistically as much as anything. This record is another opportunity, with no restraints outside of taking our sound in the directions we want to take it.”
The benefit of the experience won over what has remarkably already been a 16 year career is apparent throughout Magick Songs, and it is the combination of that discipline and deliberation with a boundless creative spirit that drives the album. More than a new chapter, Magick Songs reads like a whole new book.
JEFF The Brotherhood's Magick Songs will be released on Dine Alone Records on September 7th. It is available for preorder here.
Photo: Laura Williams
