Music
Press
If you were a fan of ironic rock pranksters Spore Attic, be sure to Ween yourself off the shtick before listening to SA member Seth Lepore's new project, Older Than Hours . The Berkeley-based Lepore has cut the comedy in favor of earnestness for his new songs -- abstract odes to love, identity crises, and politics, recorded at home with the help of ample electronics. Live, Lepore pads out his dissonant, new-wave bedroom pop with drummer Jason Levis (Married Couple) and other Bay Area notables.
-Stefanie Kalem - East Bay Express
Discography
Older Than Hours: self titled EP
Photos
Bio
Since 2004 Seth Lepore has been working at a steady clip with his Mac on a blueprint for his solo project Older Than Hours. At several points in the creative process he began to file songs into different emotional characters. All of them fell under the scope of electro pop and rock but some tracks had more quirks and kinks of irony, subtle nuances of smirking in the delivery of the vocal melody. He went so far as to put together a focus group, pulling together friends whose musical tastes varied the gamut of top 40 to extreme noise.
Instead of hiding behind a mirror and silently observing he sat in the room with them and tried listening to the songs with fresh ears. The pages and pages of feedback led to one surety: people are very subjective when they listen to music and the press is very influential. Instead of dividing the songs into separate projects he instead decided to keep sincerity and irony side by side, heartrending confessionals and warped observations in the same pocket.
The result is a mix of real and software instruments backing organic vocal melodies and non sequiter word play. Double bass lines crawl across three syncopated drum tracks while a simple guitar line echoes; then all of it drops to a basic background drum track and beefy organ, all the while vocals layer together as the bait. At times it is lush and spacious a la Pinback; or a brazen, multi-faceted mix of The Aluminum Group and Anticon roster. Older Than Hours is about pushing the limits of how a song or image fits in a framework and distilling it to the aspects that make it raw, heartfelt and strong.
The solo project Older Than Hours started as a home recording project, became a live project for a small amount of time, became a studio project again and is now becoming a more solidified live project with the help of a cast of rotating musicians and laptop wizards.
After a lot of tweaking, re-recording, perfectionism and a small focus group presentation, Seth knows now that Older Than Hours fits exactly where it needs to.
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