After two-plus years of touring, the band returned home to a different place than they had left. “It was a dark time when we got back. We had to water the relationships that we had neglected over those two years, and I think this darkness came out on our new record,” Aubert says.
The sediment of experience accumulated for the band, and they were eager to spit it out. They went back into the studio to produce what would become their much-anticipated second album, Swoon. The success of Carnavas offered a blessing and a challenge. There’s the breathing room that comes with a successful record and the pressure to produce a follow-up.SSPU returned to the studio with familiar friends, producer Dave Cooley (J Dilla, Darker My Love), and mixer Tony Hoffer (Depeche Mode, The Kooks), who helped create Carnavas. For Swoon, the aperture of the band opened up and allowed for possibilities the band never imagined.
Swoon is a thick, layered listen, burgeoning with rich strings and crunchy guitars. The warm noise frothing from what sounds like a thousand guitars nearly crushes the opening track, “There’s No Secrets This Year.” Aubert’s delicate, wafting voice ties the driving drums and blistering bass together in a tightly wound web that keeps the track from imploding. At the peak of noise the track does what the album proclaims: it swoons, falling backward into a free flowing Eno-esque soundscape. The album celebrates the intimacy and anonymity of getting lost in a sea of people or the swarm of the cityscape, Aubert says.
Like a community garden in Silversun City, Swoon creates spaces of introspection in the middle of chaos. For every grand concert hall built from a gentle string swell, like on “Catch and Release,” Swoon burns it down in a conflagration of noise, scorching with searing bass and growling guitar, as on “Panic Switch.” “We have a psychotic relationship with our songs – we can’t have it too clean. We have to fuck it up somehow,” Aubert declares.
Search The Store
Shopping Cart
Pre Orders
