News: April 2006
TRANSCENDENCE in Studio to
Complete New Album
TRANSCENDENCE have been holed up in Miami’s Dungeon Recording Studios for the last four weeks putting the finishing touches on their follow-up to last year’s Nothing is Cohesive. Fred Freeman, who produced the band’s 2003 release Sleep with you is in the producer’s role again on this new CD which will be titled All Your Heroes Become Villains. With Freeman behind the board again, the new disc promises to be a tightly-controlled more coherent and heavier sounding collection of songs than the band’s self-produced last release. The eclectic Nothing is Cohesive, which the band recorded in their garage on their own had a seventies pop-rock flair with a wide variety of sounds and textures and earned the band top slots on many college radio stations across the country last spring, rave reviews from the critics, and was called ‘’an important and breakthrough album’ by HELLFIRE PROMOTIONS.
So what can we expect from the new album? All Your Heroes Become Villains has a modern harder-edged sound that is dark, heavy, and brooding, with a socio-political bent on several tracks. Freeman says he worked the band members hard, often re-recording the drum and bass tracks four or five times if he had to in order to get the right performances. The album also adds orchestration, a lot more piano, a gospel singer, electric sitar, and the addition of trumpet and trombone to the mix. Mixing has begun on the songs and the album should be out by mid-summer.
Tracklist For All Your Heroes Become Villains
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01. All your heroes become villains 02. Blind eye 03. Solaris 04. Waiting for Godot 05. Here it comes 06. Indian Princess 07. Messed it up again 08. We are Columbine 09. Last stand at the walls of Zion 10. After tomorrow |
"A great album is like a great painting, a great wine, a great movie or a great kiss. It takes your breath away, tickles your senses, steals time and leaves you changed -- maybe sad, maybe smiling, anything but indifferent. Nothing Is Cohesive is a great album. It is also one of the most aptly titled discs to cross my desk in many a moon. If you're looking for 12 variations on the same basic theme, go buy a Nickelback album or something. This is art here, folks -- diverse, challenging, reckless, and brilliant.
So after that build-up, what does Transcendence -- Ed Hale (vocals, guitars, piano, keys), Fernando Perdomo (guitars, drums, vocals, sitar, keys), Roger Houdaille (bass, vocals, guitar), Jon Rose (piano, keys, vocals), Bill Sommer & Ben Belin (drums) – actually sound like? Imagine Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Frank Zappa, Roger Waters, Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), Dan Wilson (Semisonic) and Bono partying all night and then cutting an album with Beatles producer George Martin manning the boards, and you might be in the neighborhood. It's an erratic, ecstatic kaleidoscope of tones, textures, voices and attitudes that takes all the right lessons from '70s rock and employs them with imagination and flair, and it adds up to utter shambling magnificence.
Indeed, Nothing Is Cohesive , but that's what makes it special. It's like an episode of Lost , where you think you finally know something, and then they find another way to turn your expectations inside out. It's musical anarchy, beautiful chaos. It's art. It's Transcendence. Do not miss it."
- Jason Warburg, www.dailyvault.com
Hear songs from the last TRANSCENDENCE CD, Nothing Is Cohesive. In stores and Amazon.com now.
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Check out the band's website at transcendence.com
