STEVE TAYLOR & THE DANIELSON FOIL
ANNOUNCE ONE-TIME COLLABORATION
WOW TO THE DEADNESS OUT FEBRUARY 5th
GUITAR WORLD PREMIERES
STEVE ALBINI PRODUCED TITLE TRACK
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Steve Albini rarely names records he's worked on when people ask him what he's been listening to, but when he sat down with Buddyhead Radio in July, he made an exception. "Dan Smith just put together this ad hoc band with a singer named Steve Taylor," he said. "And they play this really rowdy punk rock. And that record is fucked-up and great. I didn't expect that kind of music out of them, and I certainly didn't expect it to be as awesome as it was. I was expecting it to be charming or interesting, but it ended up being really raucous and really great."
"Really raucous and really great" is the perfect shorthand for Steve Taylor & the Danielson Foil, and their whipcrack 6-song EP Wow to the Deadness out on February 5th. Recorded by Albini, Wow to the Deadness applies scalding punk rage to delightfully cockeyed song structures, making for a half-dozen songs that don't have many clear musical parallels. It's Magazine covering the Godspell soundtrack or the Buzzcocks trading verses with the Free Design.
Opener "Wow to the Deadness" - which you can now hear on Guitar World - is the perfect example of their effortless fusion. Part eerie campfire singalong, part bruised-up brawler, the song volleys from Taylor's exhortation to Smith's ecstatic declaration.
More than anything, Steve Taylor & the Danielson Foil is the sound of two acts scrapping every rule of songwriting and rewriting the document according to their own impulses.
The collaboration grew out of a U.S. tour where Danielson was supporting Steve Taylor & The Perfect Foil who was on the road in support of their acclaimed 2014 album
Goliath which Entertainment Weekly hailed as "Beck's Midnight Vultures filtered through David Bowie's Low."
Though both Taylor and Smith had spent most of their careers questioning musical norms - Taylor through sharp social satire, Smith through dizzyingly inventive song structures - a musical alliance between the two of them was hardly a foregone conclusion. But they had such immediate, easy chemistry that they reached out to Albini, whom both of them have worked with, to set aside studio time when the tour swung through Chicago. The result is an EP that combines both of their sensibilities for a batch of songs full of hairpin musical left turns and sharp, deftly-observed lyrics.
Every time you think you've got its sound pinned down, it shape-shifts again, transforming into something entirely new, fantastically confounding, and utterly irresistible. It is, to paraphrase Steve Albini, really raucous and really, really great.
Stay tuned for more new music and the announcement of a special North American tour in early 2016!
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