Anathallo

The mere fact that you are reading this sheet, sprinkled with publicist contacts, release dates, and press listings, demonstrates that things have changed for Anathallo.
Five years ago, the eight-piece ensemble squeezed into a green Dodge Caravan and embarked upon their first month-long tour. The group, a band of seventeen and eighteen year olds, slept on strangers’ floors and fixed sandwiches in grocery store parking lots. They made sure to eat lots of fresh fruit. It was those long car rides, though, with teenage knees pressed against bench seats and trombone cases at their feet, that first stirred the band to think of more than open house parties and upcoming college courses in the fall.

Two dead vans, ten self-booked national tours, and six member changes later, Anathallo finds themselves in new territory. What began as an earnest after-school post-punk experiment has since expanded outward, crossing genres with an ever-increasing sense of purpose, risk, and fluidity. The group’s steady transformation from their initially awkward and unsure beginning can be witnessed in their now intensely celebratory and theatrical indie rock meets ‘marching band gone wild’ performance. And while still relying on the floors of friends (not to mention the sandwich supplies and fresh produce of America’s grocers), Anathallo faces a new beginning with the recent release of their first full-length album, Floating World.

Built upon the foundation of four previously self-released albums, Floating World is the latest stage of a mish-mash progression--the capstone work of a half-decade’s worth of musical exploration. Reigning in the seven members’ many influences, Floating World is the product of the ensemble’s interest in pairing textural choral and chamber melodies with dark orchestral horn arrangements, pinning the 3/4 meter of a Russian piano waltz against the sparse and organic textural qualities of Velcro and socket wrenches. The “anything goes” aesthetic of the largely self-recorded album finds the band dipping their toes in many different pools, a challenging yet cohesive effort. Moving from the meditative entrance of Gennesaret to the earnestly vulnerable silence of Kasa No Hone (The Umbrella’s Bones), the record functions as a whole, interweaving themes to create a dark, sincerely joyful, and, at times, humorous collection of songs.