‘My Death’ by The Dead Shakers | New Album, ‘Some Shapes Reappear’
Exclusive video premiere of ‘My Death’ by The Dead Shakers featuring Lily Seabird, taken from the upcoming album, ‘Some Shapes Reappear’, out September 23, 2022.
The free-floating psychedelic rock group known as The Dead Shakers is back with their second full-length studio album, titled ‘Some Shapes Reappear’. Bandleader Kevin Bloom assembled a roster of talented collaborators from the Burlington area and beyond for this project, joining him alongside bandmates Vincenzo Sicurella, Jeremey Mendicino, Zack James, and Brenden Provost. The result is a confident progression of the band’s signature playful retro-modern spirit, with one foot planted in sun-drenched ‘60s analog pop and the other in meditative effectron ambient rock. To celebrate, the band has also created a series of music videos, one for every track on the album, and will release a new video each day in the lead-up to the album’s release on September 23, 2022.
‘Some Shapes Reappear’ was written, recorded, and mixed over a three-and-a-half-year period, almost entirely at Kevin Bloom’s SpIcY wOrLd studio in Burlington, on his treasured 1973 Yamaha PM1000 console. That console at one point belonged to Vermont Public, and was their first inventory item according to an inventory sticker on the back! Bloom is a composer, musician, and producer/engineer who approaches the recording process with an exploratory, experimental mindset. He has a talent for discovering not only interesting new sounds but interesting new ways to capture them – even if that means sneakily sampling a gong he working sound at a middle school music recital or recording two drum kits at the same time for an authentic immersive feel. A major component on the album is time itself, which Bloom manipulates with layers upon layers of tape echo, antique digital audio converters, and defunct time-stretching algorithms. Other times, he’ll layer himself: For the song ‘Doing The Dishes’ Bloom recalls, “I spent 10 hours playing the guitar part over and over and over again to get the tone you hear in the final mix. It’s an amalgamation of hundreds of guitar tracks all glued together – more tracks than there are seconds in the song itself!”.
Inspiration for the album came from unexpected corners as well. ‘All The Plants’ came to Bloom in a dream: “A spirit being instructed me on how to write this song, and I woke up in the middle of the night and drove into my studio to start recording”. The result is a pro-vegan anthem that is the band’s own heartfelt rallying cry against cruelty to animals and people as if there was no distinction between the two. The song ‘My Life’ got a lyrical boost from a romance novel Bloom borrowed from the neighboring thrift store Battery Street Jeans, and on ‘Numbers’ Bloom invited artist Nina Szenasi to contribute improvised stream-of-consciousness writing for the vocals. As for the decision to record a cover of The Monkees 1966 song, ‘Take A Giant Step’, Bloom simply says: “I love The Monkees”.
Though ‘Some Shapes Reappear’ runs the gamut from the socially conscious to the self-aware to the playfully absurd, at its heart the album is a reflection of growth – of embracing the inevitability of inconsistent change and the intimidating, enticing possibilities it entails.
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‘Violets in the Haze’ by James Forest & The Dead Shakers
