I think you can see why this one caught my attention. Interesting band name and fantastic artwork. It looks so fully formed and professional that I was, and remain, very surprised I couldn't find it on YouTube. The album title's stupid but that's not the end of the world, plus it might help with a minor mystery--more on that in a bit. First, check out the back cover, which is also very cool:
Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name? I mean, the ghosts do seem more scared of the faceless dapper gentleman than vice versa.
Anyways, this has got to be indie rock, but that covers a lot of ground. There's a fair amount of text on the interior of the front cover, but it only helps so much.
We've got more cool artwork and whole bunch of credits. Four piece band of two guitars, drums, and bass as the main instruments, plus the usual extras: keys, funky little things like castanets and a kazoo, and programming for the electronic touches/hip hop elements/what have you. Guests on backing vocals too many places to bother enumerating and trumpet on one track. By indie rock standards that's all about as unique as a head of lettuce. That's not a zing; many a top tier band has used a head of lettuce line up to produce giant emeralds carved into the shape of a head of lettuce, but this is The Guess and that instrumentation does not help The Guess. Neither does the fact that they are clearly a local Phoenix band, since this is obviously from the internet era when all the world's sounds can be had all the places.
Well, only most of them actually, or I wouldn't have this blog.
There's a shout out to 80/20 Records in the thank yous, but since that's the only place their name shows up I'm sticking with my judgement that this album's a self-release. We get artwork credit--shout outs to Mmes. Sharpe and Amneus who did great--and that's where definitive info ends and inference begins.
I still don't have much idea of what this'll sound like, but I can take a guess at when it came out. And it will have to be a guess; the year's nowhere in the package. Here's the undertray art and the (absolutely adorable) disc.
No year. So what do we have? Well, we have a serious, well-made album with a unified aesthetic--even with two different visual artists--info for a manager, enough thank yous to imply they've been around for awhile, and then a fairly stupid punning portmanteau (punmanteau?) of an album title. The song names split the difference but not evenly; nine of the eleven tracks have titles that imply you'll hear something serious, the other two have the titles Necromancin' Dancin and Funkle Phil. Plus the last song is called Prelude, which is both kind of clever and kind of eye-rolling, and their drummer spells his name "Myke Buttonz" which would've been just plain eye-rolling even in 1995 when we were all doing shit like that and certainly is now. The message seems to be: we care about our art, but have enough ironic cool to be deliberately uncool and let the air out of it a bit.
Further, manager Mattx Bentley has a gmail address and the visual artists are represented by a website and a Tumblr. So the album postdates the fall of Hotmail but predates Instagram. I don't feel like looking up the exact date range that implies, but I know it's somewhere in the late '00s-early '10s. Which fits right in with the variety of post-modern ironic hipster cool that the mixed message album title and song names go for.
Does that narrow down the sound? Not even slightly. That era's indie scene produced, among many, many other acts, both Los Campsesinos! and Fucked Up. Til Friday, your guess is a good as mine.
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