Constellation is going hard in the 2015 paint and it’s not even 2015 yet. Not content with the two new records they’ve already announced — Matana Roberts’ COIN COIN Chapter Three and Siskiyou’s Nervous — they have now officially sung the song of their third release for next year. It’s their hat trick, if you will. I know I certainly will, because Constellation is a Canadian label and if there’s one thing I know about Canada it’s that everyone up there is a socialist hockey player.
That third record, though. It’s a new LP from singer-songwriter Eric Chenaux called Skullsplitter, a follow-up to 2012’s Guitar & Voice, an album that consisted of, in large part, just Chenaux’s often heavily effected guitar and plaintive voice stretching ballads out like gauze. Skullsplitter seems poised to extend this approach. On the record’s first single and title track (embedded below), Chenaux builds up this constantly confounding guitar backing track, one that sounds like an always shifting, always slipping slightly out of tune organ that never hits quite the same timbre twice, all the while held together by his smooth-as-ice croon. The production on the album reportedly made use of a number of extended techniques that include “physically swinging speakers and radical gating and panning” assisted by Chenaux’s longtime engineer, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. And with that in mind, the album’s title suddenly makes way more sense; with all those speakers flying around, someone’s gonna get brained eventually.
The album is out February 17; you can pre-order it here.
Skullsplitter tracklist:
01. Have I Lost My Eyes?
02. The Pouget
03. Skullsplitter
04. My Romance
05. Spring Has Been a Long Time Coming
06. The Henri Favourite
07. Poor Time
08. La Vieux Favori
09. Summer & Time
• Eric Chenaux: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Eric-Chenaux/155636574621601
• Constellation: http://cstrecords.com
More about: Eric Chenaux
