New Chants

Description

LP isStandard Jacket + Download Card.

First 15 LP orders come with Limited Edition Custom Booklet.

Traps PS are a band that breaks less is more all the way down to less is everything. You get it: like the Minutemen, the songs are short because they dont need to be long. And like the Minutemen, sixty seconds of Traps PS hits harder and resonates longer than five-ten-twenty sloppy minutes from somebody else. Or like Gang of Four, who got it from James Brown, who is a fundamental Traps PS inspirationTraps PS cares about discipline, rhythm and clarity. Says drummer Miles Wintner: We dont waste time. Theyve always been unafraid to do what needed to be done, this practically telepathic trio of Wintner, bassist/backing vocalist Danny Miller and singer/guitarist Andrew Jeffords. They recorded and released records on their community-oriented/community-involved label Papermade and played any space theyd fitlost all ages institutions like L.A.s Pehrspace or not-exactly legal guerilla shows on city streets and in dusty Inglewood oil fields. But with their first full-length in three years coming into focus, they found L.A. independent label Innovative Leisure ready to amplify that DIY capability:

Weve done so much in our own bubble that it was exciting to explore another aspect, says Jeffords. Im enjoying inviting people into our family. By the time they walked into Long Beachs Jazzcats studiowhere label mates like Hanni El Khatib and the Molochs recorded with producer Jonny Bellthey had more than twenty songs nearly fully finished, trimmed to their most necessary components and rehearsed only enough to sharpen the original inspiration. That was the most important part, says Jeffords, to capture that ecstatic lightning-strike instant that sparked a song in the first place, and to make sure it never fizzled out. If we didnt have that feeling, he adds, the song would have never made it out of the rehearsal studio.

Their last full-length was about energy, says Jeffords, an echo of the helicopters that shook the walls in his old apartment and the car crashes in the street. New Chants would be darker in tone and color, he thoughtabout people and their machines, and the blurring relationship between them. Like the way you can sometimes see your reflection in a TV screenmaybe you lose track of where the media starts and you begin. If Fourth Walls didnt make it obvious, the black border around their cover art does: Traps PS knows theres always a frame around the image.

This is where the real spirit of that first wave of post-punk is at work on New Chants. Its that uneasiness with the future and the unpredictable effects it brings, and an effort to make an unpredictable new music to meet it. (Possibly related: theres actually one of the Jazzcats studio cats playing piano on this album, but not where youd think.)

New Chants is an album about watching and being watched, about white noise and negative space, about how whats undone or unplayed or unsaid is just as deliberate and meaningful as everything else. Jeffords even perforated his lyrics sheet with ellipsesnegative space in the language itself. So think Wires precision minimalism, antidote to the over-the-top spectacle of punk and pop both. Youll hear it in Seven Voices or the albums title track. Think Public Image and that caustic, corrosiveand purer for itdissonance.

Youll hear it in Two Truths, with its ragged semi-chorus of Emmmmmmbrace Think the Contortions, who tore out everything in their songs except the rhythm and discovered there wasnt much else theyd needed anyway, except for some saxophone used more as flamethrower than musical instrument. Youll hear that as Fourth Walls falls in on itself. And then think about Traps PS, who thought about what they didnt need and then threw it out, and who made an album only out of what they felt mattered most: Let it be what it is, says Jeffords. New Chants is barely twenty minutes longbut its got everything.