(updated: 05/12/09)
PRAISE FOR THEIR PREVIOUS RELEASE "Modern Gospel For Modern Men & Women "
POP MATTERS : "Jazz and co. have the retro-rock strut down [and] implement its retro-kitsch well"
JERSEY BEAT: "Fuzz guitars, squealing-tire feedback [and] glam rock vocals... Every song here has "Hit" written all over it"
AVERSION: "Modern Gospel slings songs that gratuitously reference drugs, cheap sex and hangovers… like the Rolling Stones reincarnate."
REDEFINE: "This [album] will, no doubt, land him on a major radio station near you very soon."
INDEPENDENT WEEKLY: "A decadent, rebellion-riddled three-card monte of ‘60s garage-soul organ, bluesy, slashing blasts of guitar thunder, and frontman Brandon Jazz’s coolly importuning vocals."
ROCKFREAKS: "Just raw enough to appeal [to] the scenesters but soft enough to have mainstream appeal, while being miles better than the majority of what's in the charts these days."
With the release of their debut EP in 2007, Nashville's THE ARMED FORCES quickly established themselves as the hot sauce of all-American pop-rock bands. Some listeners recoiled from the obnoxious burn; others squealed in delight. What they all agreed on was that life would be bland without it.
Part devil-may-care garage rockers, part skillful pop artists tracing the deceivingly complex constructs of TOM PETTY and THE CARS, THE ARMED FORCES demanded a reaction from fans and critics alike. From measure one, frontman Brandon Jazz displayed a songwriting talent matched in its grand scale only by his own big mouth. With an in-and-out five-song debut, Jazz and his self-proclaimed "world's most dangerous pop band" forced their way into the national pop lexicon.
A year and a half later, THE ARMED FORCES are preparing to defy convention once more with their debut full-length, The Rest is Noise, which is being released track-by-track, one song per month, for 12 months in a row starting July 4, 2009. "There's a way things were in the ’60s with 45 rpm singles up until the concept album ruined everything," Jazz explains, "and it went back to being that way once people were able to download their favorite tracks instead of listening to a whole album, or an album written to fill in the blanks around 1 or 2 singles. Attention spans are increasingly short as it becomes increasingly easy for everyone to express themselves digitally."
"In the end," he states plainly, "we're not interested in casual listeners. We want people who are genuinely interested in taking a journey with us, growing with us, taking a moment to step back and appreciate the small things."
To that end: Fans who purchase The Rest Is Noise will be given a code to unlock and download a new track once a month, along with original artwork for that single, as well as other content created to thank the fans for investing in THE ARMED FORCES' musical experiment. At the end of those 12 months, in July 2010, those fans will be the proud owners of the album in its entirety.
"All these bands suddenly think they have to give their album away because RADIOHEAD did so, but that concept is only interesting or useful if happen to be RADIOHEAD, which we are not," explains bassist and co-writer Zachary Stred. "If you're JOHNNY JINGLE AND THE DOWNTOWN 3, no one cares. We worked hard on the album, and we do think it's worth something."
For The Rest is Noise, THE ARMED FORCES spike their garage rock and soul with an extra shot of ’80s new wave a la DEVO and BLONDIE, a move that reveals itself most explicitly through Jazz's vocal delivery and lyrical content. Held over from the first EP are the members' shared affinity for pop masters both past (ELVIS COSTELLO to IGGY POP) and present (WEEZER, PHANTOM PLANET). But tempering the band's overly developed piss-and-vinegar gland is a newfound respect for refined studio performance, which can be heard all over the album, notably in places like the doo-wop 60's rock n roll of "Republican Girlz", the summer time poolside anthem vibe of "Never Get Caught", and the frenetic dark pop of "Anarchy For Dummies.”
That's not to say they're ready to start coloring between the lines, especially at those manic, sweaty live shows. "New audiences are usually a little taken aback by our approach," says Jazz. "Whether it's playing a song five times in a row to end our set or putting the crowd onstage and playing to them from opposite corners of the room, our live show is an attempt to turn the preconceived notions of typical, boring, masturbatory rock shows on their axes. Some audiences don't know just what to do with us. These are our favorite shows."
Says Stred, "We have a 'love us or hate us, just don't be in the middle' attitude."
In the gray when it comes to THE ARMED FORCES? Not likely.
C2009 Black Lodge Publicity
