Influential 90’s midwestern emo band Giants Chair is back after a 23-year absence. A new album, ‘Prefabylon’ will be released on December 6 via Spartan Records.
A new song titled “Kids Running” is debuting today in partnership with Talkhouse. Check out the track and an essay written by frontman Scott Hobart here.
“…kinda sounds like if Thin Lizzy was a ’90s Midwest emo band.”-Brooklynvegan
Hobart writes: “I don’t know about you, but I can’t sit down with a stack of old VHS tour tapes of my ‘90s post-punk emo rock band GIANTS CHAIR without thinking about my unease with nostalgia. This is a band that hasn’t made a record — scarcely even played — in the last 23 years… but a band that, nevertheless, has somehow found itself with a new record to be released on December 6, 2019. Like one of my early songwriter heroes, Bob Dylan, I don’t want to look back. I don’t want to tempt my mid-life fate getting wistful or woeful about the “good ‘ol tour days.” But I’m sitting here with these tapes whirring in this borrowed TV/VCR combo because, after all these years, this band is desperate to find some footage to help us pull together some kind of music video by the end of this adult work week. So, here I am at 48. Faced, literally, with myself believing in myself and this same old, well… young, ‘90s emo rock band — at 25 years of age, 23 years ago and now. To quote a more-recent songwriting hero, David St. Hubbins, as he considers what his epitaph should be… “And why not?”
Contemporaries and tour mates of bands such as Jimmy Eat World, Boys Life, The Dismemberment Plan, Hoover, Sweep the Leg Johnny, Cap’n Jazz, Shiner, Boilermaker, and more, Giants Chair released a pair of albums on Caulfield Records in the 90’s and were a part of the early emo scene with acts like Boys Life, Shiner, Christie Front Drive, and fellow Kansas City bands such as Molly McGuire and Season to Risk.
Pre-order ‘Prefabylon’ here: https://spr.tn/giantschair.
The band has confirmed a series of shows in late November, in support of the upcoming release. See dates below.
About Giants Chair:
In the midwest in the early nineties, three musicians serendipitously found one another and began to power a sound. This sonic synergy charged not only the band’s own individually-heralded releases but would also influence decades of artists-to-come who would cut their rock-n-roll teeth on Giants Chair records. After years of writing and recording, after innumerable sweaty basement shows, after thousands of miles of highway blur, and a million fragmented memories, lives progressed, and the fire that fueled Giants Chair gave way to new responsibilities — but it never went out.
In the fall of 1989, Scott Hobart (guitar, lyrics, vocals) and Byron Collum (bass) both arrived to attend the Kansas City Art Institute. After a catalytic connection and several early band iterations in Kansas City, Hobart and Collum opted for a move to Collum’s hometown of Green Bay, WI in the winter of 1993 to play with drummer Paul Ackerman. The trio relocated back to Kansas City the following spring as Giants Chair with their debut 7” Hot Boy on Caulfield Records. Soon after the band assembled enough songs to record their first full length album, Red and Clear, a cryptic epic – it was equal parts raw and refined. While many of the band’s peers trended toward post-rock deconstruction in the following years, Giants Chair returned with Purity and Control, the record that solidified the band’s signature balance of tight rhythms and forward melodies — deceptively simple hooks that collide with lush and layered sonic force.
For more than two decades now these records have lived on turntables, blasted through car speakers, rattled apartment walls, destroyed headphones, and have finally become recognized as the timeless artifacts of emotional experience and endeavor that they are for so many people. Yes, for many, each Giants Chair release serves as a time machine that can instantly transport them back to an earlier memory — a soundtrack for their wobbly path toward adulthood. As decades decay, the path remains, and it is no less mysterious for any of us. Now, in perfect time, 2019 marks the return of Giants Chair with the release of the bands highly-anticipated new album on Spartan Records, Prefabylon. …and a soundtrack continues.
“I feel like the band kind of found US again,” says Hobart, “like a two-decade long slap-back echo, and I’m sitting on the couch playing guitar to it. Similar to a lot of people in the world right now, we’re feeling pretty anxious, and I think these songs come from that.”
Thematically, as a concept, Prefabylon is rooted in lyrics of their new song “Lost Again” — Lost between ghost towns — prefabulous ruins / makeshift intentions to shelter hope’s fools. “I was thinking about people building lives and meaning out of leftovers — how hope springs eternal, but sometimes it’s ill-fated,” says Hobart. “So the title/concept for me is kind of a double-meaning — it calls into question disposable means and values, but also respects that, really, that’s all humans have ever done — made lives out of leftovers.”
With all of the the band’s original core components and members still intact (no small feat of itself!) listeners needn’t brace for any departure from the band’s signature post-punk DNA. Equal parts early new wave, skate punk, prog, political folk, and 70’s and 80’s radio rock, Giants Chair’s influences can be traced across their now ‘era-transcending’ catalogue. “As a band,” Hobart says “I think we must sound ‘midwestern.’ It’s essentially classic, no-frills, rock elements creating a big wall of melody. At turns, the music reminds me of rolling landscape, sky and highways, old factories and farms, distant street lights and radio towers – how these things make me feel. Kind of a lonely, but somehow-hopeful ache while looking west… then the sky shatters. I remember saying at some point early in the music writing that I was hearing AC/DC meets My Bloody Valentine, but I guess we’ve always erred, to some extent, on the side of AC/DC. And maybe more ‘D.C.’- as in District Of Columbia” by now” Hobart laughs.
Fans conquer, with Prefabylon, Giants Chair is simply picking up where they left off — the same guys, the same process, the same gear, and the same feel. After a year of intensive writing and focused pre-production, Prefabylon came to life at Weights and Measures Soundlab in Kansas City, MO. with the help of engineer Duane Trower. When the band was finally ready, drums, bass and foundational guitars were tracked live, lightning-in-a-bottle, in two sessions. Over the weeks that followed, vocals and the remaining guitar elements were meticulously added to the mix. “I’m hearing that we sound like we never stopped playing,” says Hobart. “I’d like to think that’s the timeless wonder of limitation that our minimal talents force us to work with. Guitar, bass, drums, mouth. Tape it all together and turn it way-the-fuck up.”
While most listeners will rest easy in the notion of sonic familiarity, those looking for artistic evolution will find it in Prefabylon’s lyrics. “I didn’t want to write or sing or yell about growing old – as frustrating as it can be,” says Hobart, “so, at first, I think I was going down the old safe road of lyrical crypticism – but, ultimately, I found it hard to be passionate in sheer abstraction. I really felt like I wanted to be more coherent in all this emotionalism. But, while I don’t want to be middle-aged ranting, I also can’t help that the things I’m most passionate about by now, are things about being a 48 year-old father of 2 sons, married for 21 years to the same patient woman, living in a big, rich, wasteful commercial of a country on an ailing planet — sometimes wishing I could just get in the van with my rock and roll brothers and head West forever.”
While time passes for all of us, certain feelings and emotions have the ability to remain constant with the proper amount of stoking – and volume. It is through these feelings, these memories, that glimpses of refuge and hope still shine earnestly. The wheels spin, the cycles cycle, and we all tire, but there is enchantment in things, like these records, these sonic timestamps that point us back to who we were at our best — and our worst. And now we have another. While it’s unlikely that we head west forever, through records like Prefabylon, we can certainly keep that forward spirit alive and burning – maybe laughing back, from time-to-time, at our futures forgotten, before nostalgia kills us.
Tracklist
1. Rust Belt Rooster
2. Black Static
3. Dirty Winter
4. Kids Running
5. Vaguely Familiar
6. Ghost Love
7. Russian Racehorse
8. Time Lapse Shadows
9. Lost Again
10. House Lights
+++++
Giants Chair — 2019 Tour Dates
11/22 The Heavy Anchor St. Louis, MO
11/23 Cactus Club Milwaukee, WI
11/29 The Brick Kansas City, MO