The indie super-group Pfarmers released a captivating new track, “You Shall Know The Spirit,” from their upcoming album, Gunnera.
Pfarmers brings together the talents of Bryan Devendorf of The Nationals, Menomena’s Danny Seim, and horn player Dave Nelson, who has worked with the likes of St. Vincent, Beirut, and Sufjan Stevens. And, the group’s debut album, Gunnera, is to be released on May 12th, 2015, via Jurassic Pop, according to the record label’s official website.
“You Shall Know The Spirit” follows the band’s March release of “The Ol’ River Gang,” and was “the first song we came up with as Pfarmers,” Danny Seim said in recent NME article. “Dave sent me an instrumental jam that he and Bryan recorded together on the east coast and I chopped it into bits on the west coast and sent it back to them for more layering. It was kind of a litmus test to see if the three of us could work together from across the country. We were happy with the result and decided to make a full album from there.”
So, what does this ‘litmus test’ song sound like?
“You Shall Know The Spirit” opens with a series of sonic sounding sirens that are layered overtop a staccato drum beat that continuously loops. The sonic theme and the drum loop remains throughout the song, but after the initial introduction, the bass and guitar lines assert themselves in the mix. At 0:27 seconds the lyrics, “when the spirit moves inside of me, you’ll know, cause I’ll stop breathing…,” become audible, and this dark and gloomy theme remains throughout the remaining lyrics of the other verses and chorus. Now, an interesting part about the chorus is that there is a higher – and slightly studio effect delayed – harmony vocal in addition to the lead singer.
At roughly 01.30, there is an interesting transitional piece of music that features the lead vocal backed only by a percussive hollow, or wooden, sounding drum beat. In the next verses and the chorus, this effect is removed in favour of the aforementioned sonic sounds. One could speculate that this transitional piece was styled in a different manner to be attention getting, or to cause the audience to pay more attention to the lyrics at that particular interval within the song.
The only noticeable downside to this new song by Pfarmers may be found in the production in the final mix, because it is a bit hard to grasp the lyrics and overall message of the entire song on a first listen, as the band is utilizing effects in the music for most of the recording. So, you may just have to play it through twice to remedy this ‘problem’. Check it out, below, via Soundcloud.
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