Stormy Weather

It probably wasn't helping Luke Carr that I used my mind-boggling clout within the community to announce in last year's music issue that I have a huge music crush on him. Ditto for how, on several occasions, I mentioned I was dying to hear the debut record from his staggering and sweeping project, Storming the Beaches with Logos in Hand. Y'see, Carr's mostly acoustic debut EP, Pigrow, was one of the best local releases in years, and it kind of fits into the sci-fi lore of Storming the Beaches, in a similar way to how The Hobbit does for Lord of the Rings. As such, myself and a whole shitload of others around here have been dying to hear Southwick Howls for over two years now. That time has come.

"There has been so much work," Carr says of putting the album together. "Thousands of hours went into recording and tracking and mixing and mastering, and the music demanded more and more that we get it perfect."

The good news, then, is that Southwick Howls kills. At 20 tracks, it is massive, dense—the kind of thing meant to be heard in one sitting. Much of the material was recorded live (as in, not track by track but rather in the studio, as a band, all at once), and it shows in the lack of over-production. This isn't to say that there isn't polish by any means, far from it; everything sounds amazing. Elements of the nether-regions of indie weirdness and good old-fashioned accessible rock melt into punky breakdowns and then give way to ethereal vocal melodies and haunting percussive harmonies. There are, after all, 13 other musicians found on the record, so there is usually a lot going on. Evarusnik's Andrew Tumason lends a hand on second guitar amid multiple drummers like Max Kluger-Bell and Thieves and Gypsys' Adam Cook. Local singer Caitlin Brothers can go from softly beautiful to a straight frantic, frenetic layer of urgency, with a neo-indie prowess, not unlike Feist gone crazy and ditching her sugary-sweet restraint in favor of rocking the fuck out…simply put, good luck stopping this thing once you start.

It is an opener, of sorts, to the sci-fi legend of New Europe, a fiction rooted in vague realities of now. Without giving too much away, the world depicted in the tale is one that was previously obsessed with progress and sellable energies. This led to wars on a grand scale and the revising of international borders.

"The album is more like a soundtrack; you get themes and character and place names and little vignettes about what is going on," Carr says. "There is a prologue on the back on the record that sets up the story, but it won't be super clear for people coming in, and the story is going to continue to evolve and clarify through different mediums…like a graphic novel."

Still, one can't help but be impressed by the work accomplished thus far. There is a level of trust with his backup that has bled into certain parts of the songs, but basically everything was written by Carr. The man has a vision, and if this is the first step, it's hard to imagine how it could get better.

That's a lot of pressure, which could be daunting. But thanks to the Kickstarter campaign that funded Southwick Howls, Carr is used to it.

"It's nice to have had that support, and it's good to be held accountable to the vision, and there's a certain amount of follow-through I'm now committed to," he says. "But that has created a lot to deal with, and I thought it would take less than a year to do this, but here we are two years since I started writing the thing, and people know you're working on it, and trying to balance such a huge project with life…I'm ready to move on and write music that doesn't have to fit into that mold."

In the meantime, the release show for Southwick Howls will have to do (please note that it is a special no-shoes event, so plan ahead odor-wise). All eight core members will be there, and an immersive video project produced by Carr will be shown. This will also be the first time that Storming the Beaches with Logos in Hand will play every song on the record in one performance. Cancel any other plans—there is nothing more important than this.

Storming the Beaches with Logos in Hand
8 pm Friday, April 24. $10
Railyard Performance Center
1611 Paseo de Peralta,
982-8309

Santa Fe Reporter