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Building The Globe
The Silent Years are a six-shot clip of well-polished and handsome bullets, locked and loaded in an atmospheric pistol of lush orchestrations that swirl around guitars haphazardly switching between entrancing riffs and violent eruptions of carefully plucked passion. This being said, it’s certainly no wonder that several of their current members wandered into The Silent Years’ very loud equation via recently defunct Rescue, another metro-Detroit heavy hitter that shared only a wildly dissimilar approach to the same kind of music. From haunting to hollering, The Silent Years leave no tone unturned and no rhythmic pulse unchecked, combining the styling of two local juggernauts and emerging victorious.
The infectious hooks and pleasantly poisonous melodies of The Silent Years, a variety of which live inside your brain until you know no other way of functioning, recently hit the road in support of their third effort, The Globe — a title that fits considering the well-rounded and voluptuously layered 12-song offering the group has masterfully brewed. But the complicatedly woven subtleties of The Globe were not triumphantly brought to fruition without the crafted touch and knowledge of engineering wunderkind Chris Coady, whose previous works stretch from TV On The Radio all the way to the Arcade Fire. “We recorded the entire album ourselves and we put so much into it,” explains Josh Epstein, the polished vocals and guitar dynamite of the group, as he and the rest of the gang head from New York City to Washington, D.C. to perform. “When we were listening back to it, we realized we needed someone who was extremely experienced to mix it, because it had the potential to become a giant clusterfuck.”
Bringing Coady from his home base of New York City to the metro-Detroit region turned into a rather unconventional task. Although Coady would prove flexible throughout the mixing process, he insisted upon using his own equipment, resulting in Epstein driving the 12-hour trek to pick him up. “I thought it would be [awkward],” laughs Epstein, “but he’s really into astrology, and immediately, he called me out on being an Aries and we bonded” — a bonding process that quickly transformed into a hardcore work ethic. To cut down on studio costs, The Silent Years booked blocks of recording time after hours, resulting in a workday that began at 5:30 p.m. and ended at dawn. The group would hit the hay, scarf down some “nutrition” and get back into the grind of things by rush hour the next day. “It was definitely unconventional,” recalls Epstein of the process.
The Globe has received rave reviews from various media outlets, being called “smart and elegantly constructed,” as well as “simultaneously immediate and timeless,” and rightfully so. But even with a wave of hype chasing the group, they’ve refused to get lost in the red tide of high hopes. “This is none of our first times [making a record],” says Epstein. “We all think that everything we do is getting better, but when and how people take notice is out of our control. If we focus on that, we’ll get lost in it.” | RDW
The Silent Years CD release • 9/6 • Magic Bag
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