Sodium Lights
Mystic, Connecticut, United States | SELF
Music
Press
Sodium Lights' previous album, Post Signal, felt like a tour through a series of indie rock subgenres bound together by distinct compositional character and love of repetition. On this album, the band has found its preferred aesthetic and pursued it with enthusiasm. With songs built around programmed drums, synth patterns and bass grooves, the band swerves from thumping dance-rock with buzzy guitars to chilled-out, lightly-pulsing electro-rock. They freshen their sound with melodic variations that help the songs breathe. One might be surprised that the group's modus operandi involves recording extended studio vamps, adding vocals and editing each track down into a tight song: The music sounds purposefully constructed, and the vocal hooks sound as though they belonged there all along. On songs like “Havoc,” with Julia Farrar singing confidently over a lively bass lick, or “The Predicate,” with its catchy vocal from The Reducers' Hugh Birdsall, Sodium Lights sounds like a unified force. —Brian LaRue
- New Haven Advocate
Discography
Transtulit / full length LP released jan 2011
Rip Torn b/w Tinsel / single -part of the CDT Singles comp dec 2010
Safe Heat / six song remix EP july 2009
Post Signal / full length LP jan 2009
Photos
Feeling a bit camera shy
Bio
Alex Pellish, Mat Tarbox, and Rich Freitas played together in several bands throughout the 1980's and 90's. During this time we also recorded four-track songs in basements and apartments between Mystic, CT, Storrs, CT, and Chapel Hill, NC - while playing in seminal Mystic groups such as 17 Relics, Delta of Venus, and Skimbleshanks.
Cue the spring of 2007. Pellish has finished building a full recording studio, and wants to test drive the new equipment. He approaches Freitas and Tarbox to record rough improv jams to Pro Tools in a live setting. Six weeks of sessions produce twenty-one raw songs, which Pellish then arranges from select captured moments. Coupled with two months of drum programming and sequencing, our first LP Post Signal arose from what we felt were the most viable drafts.
We began to realize that to finish the tunes properly, we would need to call upon a diverse group of musicians who could complete each individual song. These outstanding voices would enhance the essence of the LP’s sound and scope during their limited time in the studio, helping to elevate the work. If you check the credits, you can see that Post Signal involved nine musicians!
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