LOOKING FOR ASTRONAUTS TO RELEASE THE TURKISH WRESTLER
Looking For Astronauts came onto the Fort Wayne music scene in late 2010, and the Indiana 5-piece hasn’t exactly had the easiest time getting to where they are now. After a year of various line up changes and the recording of a demo, the band would finally get its first solid line up after meeting Katie Humbert. “She just made the band seem complete and it just made their live show better. You have George on one side of the stage shouting into his guitar, and on the other side, you have Katie and her beautiful, soaring vocals. It was like a new energy was brought to the band.” says keyboardist Owen Longsworth, who at the time, was just a friend of the band, and a fan. The band then went to Ball State University to record with Butters Richman, brother to bassist Nate Richman, and the end result was For the Birds. With the addition of second guitarist Caleb Adams, For the Birds was released in May of 2011, and it was met with positive reviews from all across the internet and the buzz of the Astronauts was only getting louder.
The band immediately started writing and demoing new material, but it was all put on hold after Adams decided to head back to college, and Humbert left the band to pursue other interests. While planning their next steps, the band recruited Longsworth on keyboards and Robert Johnston on second guitar and vocal duties. “When Rob and I joined, we went straight to writing and at that point, it was just like, do we get another girl singer, or do we just move on? After trying out this one girl, we realized that we liked where things were going with just us guys.” says Longsworth. Those writing sessions would lead to what would become their latest EP, The Turkish Wrestler.
The Turkish Wrestler shows a shift in the band’s sound from their previous effort, and as both Gardner and Longsworth state, the change was both natural, and man-made.”I hear a distinct difference in sound. For the Birds has much more…vocal screaming, yet also highly harmonized. The Turkish Wrestler is much more instrumentally driven.” explains Gardner. Commenting on how the line up change affected the band’s sound, Longsworth explains, “When you have member changes in a band where everyone contributes to the writing process, there’s going to be a difference in the sound, and you can’t help that. That’s just the way it is. You’re bringing two new minds to the group. We also didn’t want to repeat things from the last EP. We all wanted to expand the LFA sound. We no longer had Katie’s vocals, so we decided to step things up musically and really work with the dynamics and structures of the songs.”
The band recorded The Turkish Wrestler at Saint Francis University with friend Albert Shoaff. With free range in studio, the band used everything they could use to capture the sound they wanted. “We agreed that we kind of wanted to go all out to make an excellent record and we wanted to use lots of synth layers and extra guitars and drum tracks to fatten up the sound. This would also give us a much more raw sound live as well. “Toska,” for example, has so many layers of drums and percussion on it. There’s like six toms, seven shakers, bongos, our bike tire rim that we use live. We just wanted to experiment with different sounds and make the best sounding CD that we could. On the verses of “Tigers and Elephants,” James used this old, rusty tambourine that just sounded like crap. We recorded it, threw a ton of reverb on it, put it in the background and it just adds a whole nother element to that song. There were some Moog synthesizers sitting around, we used those. Rob and George were both using this sweet Martin acoustic to layer guitars. We really went for it and just used everything we could find.”
Ready to unleash The Turkish Wrestler in January of 2012, things are really looking up for LFA and more new music is already on it’s way says Longsworth. “After we release the CD, we’re moving down to Florida for a few months to shack up in this house and start recording a new EP. We already have a couple songs that we’ve been playing live and we just keep on trying to expand our sound. Then in April I believe, we’re going to tour around the U.S. and try to get our name further out there and just try to play to as many people as we can. We have this record that we are all extremely proud of and we want to share it with everyone.”
Looking For Astronauts, The Turkish Wrestler
1. Sea Mountains
2. Toska
3. Maps of Home
4. Tristessa
5. Bellafonte
6. Tigers and Elephants
posted 5 months ago
