Clamfight Post New Single “The Oar”
11 minutes of new Clams is a big ‘yes please’ this morning as the Philly-ish riff-crunchers unveil “The Oar” as the first single from their impending self-titled follow-up to 2018’s III (review here). The four-piece who are a veteran presence both on stages up and down the Eastern Seaboard and in my heart have been working on Clamfight for years now — I know because I sing guest vocals on it (different song) and I recorded like two years ago — and as drummer/vocalist Andy Martin notes below, it will be their last collaboration with Steve Poponi, who passed away last year.
Bittersweet, then, certainly for the band. “The Oar” is big and lumbering, not without a reach in its melody and linear in its trajectory, build and flow. When it hits the comedown, you’ll be surprised the 11 minutes hare gone. If you’ve seen them live since the pandemic, I’m pretty sure they’ve been doing this one live for the last however long, epic solos and all. Plus gang vocals. Little something for everyone here.
I don’t have any idea on the release plan for Clamfight‘s Clamfight because, uh, I don’t, but I’ll keep an eye/ear for more, and there’s plenty here to dig into in the meantime. Enjoy:
In Andy’s words:
It’s very hard to sum up what this record means to us, or what the process of making it was like. The drum tracks were laid down as Lock Down was beginning and now we’re releasing it during another very dark and uncertain time. In the intervening years we lost close friends and family and gained new ones.
In making this record we leaned on each other and our collaborators more than ever before. I never write lyrics until we’re in the studio and as recording happened I found myself writing about where we were in our lives, the people we loved, the mistakes we made, and about how much I love these guys. So when it came time to name the record, the choice was obvious.
Submitted for your listening pleasure, this is “The Oar” the first song off the record “Clamfight” by the band Clamfight.
This is the last record we were privileged to make with our brother Steve Poponi. You’ll hear him on the end of the track. Words fall short when it comes out to expressing how much we miss him, so for and now always, we’ll just say Poponi Forever.
Take care of yourselves gang.
https://www.facebook.com/Clamfight
https://www.instagram.com/clamfight
https://clamfight.bandcamp.com/
