Ben Davis
Caddywhompus Debut “Waiting Room” via AV Club
Odd Hours Out April 14th on Inflated Records
Playing New Orleans’ BUKU Music + Art Project
“Where others examine the extremes of the spare or the loud, Chris Rehm and Sean Hart mine math-rock, frenetic punk and the bombastic end of pop to generate a signature, euphoric sonic boom.” – NPR
Caddywhompus recently announced Odd Hours, their highly anticipated new record will be out April 14th via Inflated Records. Following first single “Decent” (NPR), the New Orleans duo of Chris Rehm (guitar/vocals) and Sean Hart (drums) are excited to share “Waiting Room” today via The AV Club. Three years after the well received Feathering A Nest, the band return with their most focused and mature album yet, an album of jagged art pop, jazzy structures, and unbelievably kinetic energy filtered through an array of hooks and cultivated madness. The magic of Caddywhompus shines bright on “Waiting Room,” with The AV Club sharing:
“The song starts with a simple psych-rock opening, but keeps building until Caddywhompus takes it into a borderline noise-punk space, raging as loud and hard as it can until the whole thing collapses around it.”
Caddywhompus are set to play both BUKU Music + Art Project and SXSW later this month with further tour dates to be announced.
1. Decent
2. Salmon Run
3. Appetite
4. Splinter
5. Ferment
6. Waiting Room
7. In Ways
8. Choir
9. Leak
The Caddywhompus idioverse — the shared, invented language, subtle and unspoken gestures, thoughts and quirks wrought from close bonds and experience — is one unique to Chris Rehm and Sean Hart. From growing up only a short bike ride from one another in Houston to nearly a decade of performance together as a guitar and drum duo in New Orleans, their years-in-the-making style consists of distorted walls of sound with lightspeed melodic U-turns and waves of brilliant noise, a dynamic that only could be learned by the two players on Odd Hours, their latest album out April 14, 2017 on Inflated Records.
Caddywhompus began working on Odd Hours during New Orleans’ sweltering August heat, following sessions for 2014’s Feathering a Nest, tours of Europe and South America, and countless shows filled with Hart’s massive drum sounds and Rehm’s towering speakers teetering on the verge of collapse or explosion as he bounces around them. In a now-defunct warehouse studio space helmed by Ross Farbe (Video Age), the band channeled its road-tested songwriting, warped and shaped live, into its largest effort yet, revealing a heavier, more personal Caddywhompus.
For Odd Hours, the band pulled from its love for The Beatles, The Kinks and Elliott Smith, the ecstatic harmonies of The Ink Spots and Mills Brothers, and the heavenly atmospheres conjured by Satie, Debussy, Chopin, Ravel and Rachmaninov. To say the band abandons structure, obliterating rules in seemingly unpredictable bursts, disregards its devotion to pure pop in the vein of the masters they love. To call it noise, even with the self-aware, sardonic self-mockery of “noise pop,” is to ignore their emulation of the elegant, impressionist classical composers lurking behind their gorgeous, sweeping soundscapes.
Rehm’s lyrics span addiction, regret and relief, and love and its rewards and decay, while he layers his kaleidoscopic harmonies over near-falsetto vocals. Relatively straight-forward and linear song structures (“Salmon Run”) meet lyrically dense sonic wrecking balls (“Splinter”), and a closing suite — “Choir” and “Leak” — crashes, burns, smolders and drifts on its ashes before a thundering finish. Holding it all together is their shared language, a diverse range of guitar sounds and colossal drums singing alongside one another in brilliant harmony.
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