Philadelphia, PA band How Much Art released the single "XO" today, a post-punk contemplation from the band, which features members of GEL, Fiddlehead, and more.
The band previously shared another single, "PR," revealing a song title pattern, perhaps.
The band features Pat Flynn (Fiddlehead, Have Heart, Free, Sweet Jesus), Darin Thompson (Downtalker, Qualms), Shawn Costa (Fiddlehead, Have Heart, Free, Sweet Jesus), Maddi Nave (GEL, Nave), Justin Mantell (Qualms), and Adam Gonsalves (So Automatic, Sweet Jesus).
Flynn gives some background on the new single, available via Convulse Records.
There’s five different languages featured in this song (English, French, Chinese, Irish and Spanish) - with native speakers each singing about love or reciting it from a poet in the native tongue of both speaker and poet. It's a love song about the ineffable nature of true, marrow-deep love and the frustration that comes from realizing just how badly words fail when trying to express such a concept to the actual source of one's feelings and thoughts.
Our French friends from Paris in the duo, Copycat, sing in their native tongue, as do close friends and family members, reciting famous love poems from the like of Li Bai, Antoine O' Rafteiri and the great Cesar Vallejo - each in their native tongue, all love poems from each poet, in a failed attempt to capture that impossible emotion we sense deep in our bones for that beloved person in our life. When Darin and I first put the music together for this song I felt like it was the sound of a dark, meditative state of reflection on only the most intense of experiences in life. So, I decided to try and communicate in five different languages all the ways in which I love my wife / my best friend / lifelong traveller / etc. I think the music and lyrics capture this attempt.
Upcoming Shows:
01/22 Cambridge, MA @ HC Stadium *
01/23 Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool *
01/24 Philadelphia, PA @ Thunderbird Hall *
01/31 Boston, MA @ Something In The Way Fest
* w/ Computer Kill, Mercy Ruin
