Extra Life - Dream Seeds (CD)

Dream Seeds is the third full-length album by Brooklyn art-rock provocateurs Extra Life. Since 2008 Extra Life has challenged and seduced various
underground scenes by fusing the obsessive intricacy of minimalist composition, the suicidal swoon of Morrissey, the epic strength of Metal and the solemn
purity of Medieval chant. With a pedigree including Zs, Dirty Projectors and Dax Riggs, the band’s dark, dramatic sound, labeled by some as “Plague Pop”,
has been called everything from “genius” to “pretentious” to “religious”.
Extra Life’s first two albums Secular Works (Planaria 2008) and Made Flesh (LOAF/Africantape 2010) and their EP Ripped Heart (Last Things 2011) received
wide critical acclaim and landed on countless year-end Best Of lists. These were accompanied by split singles with Parenthetical Girls, Nat Baldwin and Larkin
Grimm, and remixes by artists including Xiu Xiu, Justin Broadrick and Tyondai Braxton. Having toured the U.S. four times and Europe three times, performing
at festivals such as Primavera Sound, Kilbi, Villette Sonique and Moers, Extra Life has built a devout internatio- nal following.
Dream Seeds marks a dramatically new creative direction in the band’s still-young but prolific career. It is perhaps Extra Life’s most clearly-defined concept
album : seven songs dealing entirely with the twin themes of dreams and children. In a lyrical left turn away from the morbid sexuality and black humor of
Made Flesh, these songs look to the subconscious in search of innocence, morality and meaning. According to principal songwriter and elementary school
teacher Charlie Looker, the lyrics began with a consecu- tive series of harrowing dreams involving children, all interconnected by recurring symbols. Claiming
to be in some way spiritually reborn, Looker penned the songs while mining these dreams’ buried pasts and even watching in awe as some of their prophesies
unfolded in all-too-real life. Alternately brutal and tender, haunted by ghosts of both the dead and the unborn, the songs of Dream Seeds express the violent
yet redemptive collision of the Real and Psychic Worlds and an archaic belief in the divine truth of dreams.
On a purely musical level as well, Dream Seeds is a shift for Extra Life, being their first record since paring down their lineup from a sprawling chamber
orchestra to a power trio. With singer Charlie Looker leaving his guitar entirely in favor of low-end analog synths, Caley Monahon-Ward leaving his violin for an
effects-damaged guitar, and drummer Nick Podgurski adding electronics to his arsenal, the new album’s harsh sound is both more varied and more austere
than their earlier work. The trio reconfiguration has also meant a new, more collaborative writing process wherein the true creative voices of Monahon-Ward
and Podgurski are far more audible and important throughout. Extra Life has never been so truly a band.

TRACK LISTING

01 - No Dreams Tonight
02 - Righteous Seed
03 - Discipline for Edwin
04 - Little One
05 - First Song
06 - Blindest Beast
07 - Ten Year Teardrop

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