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Nashville trio Music Band have spent the past decade dialing in their irreverent blend of psych, classic rock & krautrock to create hard-hitting anthems that have helped cement their status as one of Music City’s premier rock & roll bands. Their previous albums, 2014’s Can I Live and 2016’s Wake Up Laughing, garnered critical acclaim from publications including Vice, Consequence of Sound, Brooklyn Vegan, Stereogum, American Songwriter & more, and opened the door for extensive tours across the US and Canada alongside JEFF The Brotherhood, Diarrhea Planet & more. Now, after some hard earned time off, Music Band are back with a brand new LP, Celebration, a ten track collection of white-hot, fuzz-laden rock & roll that finds the group building off of the foundation they’ve built over the last ten years and rocketing to new heights.
Celebration—out April 3rd on Canada’s Dine Alone Records—stands as Music Band’s most fully-realized project to date. Where Can I Live and Wake Up Laughing were compilations of songs written over a series of years, Celebration was written in 2017 as a cohesive collection, self-produced and recorded by the band’s own Duncan Shea at his home in Nashville. The record was mixed by Grammy Award winning engineer Collin Dupuis (Angel Olsen, JEFF The Brotherhood, Ex Hex) and was mastered by John Baldwin (The Rolling Stones, Deer Tick, Jessica Lea Mayfield) at his studio in Nashville. “This album is a very clear snapshot of one year in my life,” says vocalist/guitarist Harry Kagan. “Thematically, we tend to write songs about relationships, relatable stuff, but this record is specific to my thoughts on those topics when I was turning 27. It’s interesting to see this album as encapsulating that time.”
The album kicks off with “Dog,” a slow-burning exploration of late 20s anxiety that sets the tone for the rest of Celebration as Kagan sings, “How did I expect to feel in the dawn / Of my 27th year, am I having fun?” atop organ chords and atmospheric swells of guitar before building to an explosive chorus of, “My heart’s a dog without a master / Distance only makes my heart beat faster.” On “Feel Something,” the band dives headfirst into power-pop territory, showcasing an exceptional ear for melody and featuring the catchiest chorus of their career.
Elsewhere on Celebration, the trio explores the intricacies and anxieties of romance. The album’s centerpiece, “Heat,” propelled by Lee Putney’s punishing drumming, focuses on the apprehensive potential energy that accompanies romantic entanglement, while “Tell Me” initially presents as a classic love song, but with a permeating sense of uncertainty about not living up to your partner’s expectations. Though the album deals with primarily serious subject matter, much of it is presented with a wink, characteristic of Music Band’s acute self-awareness and Kagan’s tongue-in-cheek poetry. Celebration’s title track is a sludgy slacker-rock track that harnesses Kagan’s jaded energy into a sarcastic anthem for millennial ennui as he sings, “Every day my heart breaks / I’m in love with my mistakes / As long as I don’t hurt anybody / I’m having some fun / Celebration!”
Music Band formed in 2010 while Kagan, Shea, and Putney were living together as college students in upstate New York before relocating to Nashville the following year. Once in Nashville, the trio embedded themselves in the local underground scene while developing their sound and booking, recording, and promoting their band in true DIY fashion. After a decade, though, Nashville’s scene has changed, but Music Band remain steadfast in their ethos. “When we first moved here, there were so many rock & roll bands just playing basements or wherever, and it was rad to be a part of that and grow with everyone in that wave,” says Putney. “A lot of those bands have moved away or are doing other things now. But no matter what’s happening around us with the scene, we want to be a part of it as we’ve always been. We haven’t ever let anything stand in the way of putting out the music we want to make and following our vision through to the end.”
Celebration is out April 3rd on Dine Alone Records.
