Picking Favorites: Fight Bite

Advert

Previous Posts in Music

Picking Favorites: Fight Bite

October 7, 2008 by Svetlana Send to a Friend Send to a Friend

Yes, we know this week is chock-a-block full of great (and sold out shows).
But while we wait for those Girl Talk and Love is All and Hot Chip interviews to roll in, lets spend some quality time with music YOU SHOULD LOVE, you just may not know yet.

A few weeks a go a CD arrived to BYT HQ (which is as glamorous as it sounds).
Fight Bite’s debut album “Emerald eyes”
To be self released this month.
The package was from Force Field PR, and because they handle everyone we love (from Beach House to Why to Architecture in Helsinki to Bowerbirds) I listened to it.
And have not stopped since.
The duo from (Denton?!) Texas plays the kind of lo-fi dream pop that makes you want to hug yourself.
So hard and yet so soft.
All swooshy synths and whispery vocals it makes me wonder how Slumberland has not snatched them up yet.
I asked “Are they playing DC anytime soon?”, already imagining how lovely they would sound at Iota or on one of those doomed but all-important Sunday night DC9 shows, and sadly, the answer was “NO”.
So, instead, we did the second best thing and brought you the music. In Jeff and Leanne’s own words.


Swissex Lover

Leanne: ‘Swissex Lover’ was written years ago when my first love left me for his Swiss ex-girlfriend. The song sort of fell out of me one sad afternoon while noodling on my mother’s neglected piano. I hesitated in keeping the song initially because it strikes me as being too literal and ‘belly button linty,’ but i hope it comes across as more universal than it actually is. we put this song on 7″ because the production is kind of grandiose and old fashioned.

Jeff: Yes, it was recorded on tape so the vinyl sounds very natural. This is the first song we recorded together so we were trying everything to find out what worked with the song. “Sweeping” is the word we used to describe what we wanted the final version to sound like, so we set all of our effects boxes to their “sweeping” settings.

Widow’s Peak
Leanne: Widow’s Peak was yet again one of those songs that wrote itself in five minutes. I picked up a tiny toy Casio one day and a couple months later Jeff and I had embellished, operacized, and filmscoreified it into completion. It’s supposed to be the whimsical exaggerated lament of a lost but undying love and like “Swissex Lover” was also regrettably drawn from personal experience.

Jeff: This was the second song we worked on and I’d say ‘whimsical’ is the right word for how we arranged it. We were intentionally trying to overproduce it by using lots of cheesy tones and percussion on our keyboards. I wanted it to sound like “The Metro” by Berlin.

Emerald eyes

Emerald Eyes started as a chord progression that Jeff composed. He asked me to work out some lyrics and the song ended up being our first true collaboration. It’s actually the saddest piece we’ve got and maybe my favorite. I lost one of my closest friends to cancer and a year later I realized that i had forgotten what color his eyes were. It was chosen as the title track for our debut album because the name seemed the most elegant. We’re fully aware that our band and some of our songs have unforgivable titles.

Jeff: This song started out as an attempt to combine a Carpenters song with a song from The Lion King soundtrack (or possibly Beauty and the Beast–I can’t remember) and Leanne turned it into something beautiful.

Spring Rain
Leanne: Spring Rain-Possibly the most melodramatic track on our album and the point at which I finally noticed my flagrant mention of dying and killing in about every song I’ve ever penned. This tune has a classic imagined theme and comes equipped with a monologue just to add a girl group feel to the production. It’s perhaps the only song we’ve ever attempted accoustic instuments on.

Jeff: That monologue is one of my favorite parts on the album. When Leanne wrote it, we thought it was so over the top but I think it’s perfect in the context of the song. And yes, guitars, cello, piano, bells, tambourine–it’s the only song on the album that doesn’t consist entirely of electronic instruments.

want more:
go here: http://www.myspace.com/ilyushindove,
score some MP3s here and cross fingers they come around these parts soon

Send to a Friend Send to a Friend