Posted in Whathaveyou on December 1st, 2025 by JJ Koczan
In the parlance of the internet circa 2015, The Swell Fellas did nothing wrong. During their run from 2020-2024, the Nashville trio released three albums, the last of which, Residuum Unknown (review here), came out in 2024 concurrent to their disbanding. And until this past weekend, that was pretty much the story of it. Working with producer Ben McLeod (All Them Witches), The Swell Fellas, who were the three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Conner Poole, drummer Chris Poole and bassist Mark Rohrer, were able to harness a sound that was likewise divergent in its atmosphere and direct in its crush. The short version is they went out on their best record yet, and were a band pushing the limits of genre, which is always a tough one to lose in the great continuum of who does and doesn’t decide to be a band anymore.
All of this is to say that The Swell Fellas left off giving the distinct impression they had more to say — that their creative progression was in motion — and Materializer is the new project where, hopefully, that progression will be realized. It’s more than just a name change, since the new band is Conner and Chris as a duo, and presumably the low end will be full regardless, but it’s not like The Swell Fellas‘ sound was broken or locked into being something specific by audience expectation — they kept it pretty broad to start with — so I wouldn’t expect Materializer to… materialize… at such great remove from where the Pooles left off.
They didn’t have much to say about it, other than that the band exists. That’s good news as far as I’m concerned, so here it is from socials:
Tomorrow, July 19, marks the release of the third and reportedly final long-player from Nashville atmospheric heavy rockers The Swell Fellas, Residuum Unknown, and if you don’t think that otherwise very good news is delivered with a shot of bummerness as a result of their breakup, you probably will after listening.
A farewell release isn’t something every band gets to make. Most of the time, a band’s ‘final album’ isn’t billed that way when it’s coming out; it’s something that happens after the fact. The sense of culmination pervading Residuum Unknown is palpable through the seven-songer’s 45-minute stretch, which is marked by largesse beyond even what was harnessed on 2022’s Novaturia (review here); an expansive, heavy breadth that’s atmospheric in its churn the way gases on Jupiter seem to swirl and spin around each other, creating and unfurling massive, intense storms.
So too it goes with cuts like “Chore to Breathe” and “The Drain,” which follow album-intro “Unknown” and introduce the elements at play: airy, melodic vocals in a post-rock vein, almost Radioheaded at times, a density of low end from departing bassist Mark Rohrer that becomes a signature across the span, and intermittent bursts of intensity that offer no less crush for their refinement. As the last The Swell Fellas LP, Residuum Unknown is likewise urgent and methodical, and its songs create a sense of mood that draws the work together as a single, front-to-back experience.
Explorations of guitar in effects and riffs from Conner Poole and complementary tom runs from drummer Chris Poole fill out the spaces and sharpen in tone alongside Rohrer‘s bass as “The Drain” gets underway, a fuzz riff cutting through the aural mist and reverb-drenched voice, crashing, volatile, but not without purpose and not haphazard. As the record plays out, the human presence waxes and wanes but never departs, and though “The Drain” starts furious, its midsection break offers a comedown against which to set all the bombast. They build it back up, of course, with a buzzsaw guitar solo topping and smoothing the transition, but the impact and teased come-apart are a preface for what side B will bring in the closing duo of “Give Roses” and “Next Dawn,” both of which top eight minutes and, in succession, give Residuum Unknown its most brazenly chaotic moments.
The longest song on the record, however, is sorta-centerpiece “Pawns Parade” (8:59), which emphasizes the immersion that’s been happening all the while and moves with deceptive smoothness through multi-layer early verses en route to a takeoff after three and a half minutes; a duly resonant surge, still deep in mix and vibrant in heft. Angular guitar lines run in cycles with the drums — one suspects the Poole brothers could do that kind of thing all day — but the forward motion isn’t lost as the next verse begins and carries toward the utter consumption that marks the second half of the song, in the aftermath of which they offer a quiet epilogue of far-off, fading vocals.
If that’s where a vinyl side would split, fair enough. It feels all the more like a clear division with the acoustic guitar at the outset of “Gateway Grand” ahead of the aforementioned concluding pair “Give Roses” and “Next Dawn,” and the folkish strum comes with progressive-style drone and percussive thud, the melody layered and working toward its full realization over the course of its four and a half minutes, never quite departing the guitar-and-voice foundation that was likely how it was originally written, but expounded upon in ways that give a sense of how crucial ambience is to what The Swell Fellas are doing here.
Ringing bells — either manipulated or synthesized, I don’t know — give over to the bassy start of “Give Roses,” and a float of guitar tops the procession with surprisingly gentle twists, intricate in their tone and detail as they wrap around the verse lines, obscure but evocative. They’re shortly past the midpoint when at 4:30 the song stops short and unleashes another stage of willful cacophony, becoming a genuine onslaught for the remainder that’s not barbaric or lacking in thought behind it, but is a level of furiousness not shown before. By the time they push, roll and flatten their way through the rest of “Give Roses,” it’s difficult to imagine both the acoustic “Gateway Grand” that took place only a few minutes earlier and their being able to effectively follow “Give Roses” with anything else, but the fact is that “Next Dawn” picks up from the deconstruction at the end of the song prior and maintains that stupefying force for most of its own stretch.
The Swell Fellas are too dynamic in their craft to do one thing for eight and a half minutes, but “Next Dawn” is underscored with a doom that ripples no matter how loud a given part might be early on, and so is able to bring together the atmospheric ideals and noisy pulse that have pervaded throughout Residuum Unknown; a whole-song crescendo serving both its own needs and that of the record in its entirety. And when they find themselves shortly before the seven-minute mark, the three-piece shift over to an angular riff that reminds of nothing so much as early Mastodon echoing off canyon walls, cutting and bleeding in nod and drawl as they make their way to the end, inevitable. The vocals are last to go in a relatively quick dissipation, and even the silence after the song is finished feels heavier for what The Swell Fellas undertook in that apex charge.
I will not claim to know the future or to say that the Pooles and Rohrer might not change their minds and decide to keep being a band or move forward in some other way. But if Residuum Unknown is in fact their last outing in whatever form, it portrays a band with still more to offer, more to say than has been said. It deserves more than to be a footnote in the career arc of a band who didn’t stick around long enough to even potentially get their due, to be sure. It is otherworldly in character and yet able to slam into your eardrum with terrestrial magnitude.
Residuum Unknown streams in its entirety below. I don’t take lightly the opportunity to stream what’s ostensibly the last thing The Swell Fellas will do, and I thank the band for the chance to host the record. As always, I hope you enjoy.
PR wire info follows:
The Swell Fellas, Residuum Unknown (2024)
Hailing from their hometown of Ocean City, Maryland, and now residing in Nashville, TN, The Swell Fellas took lessons from their early days of improvising extensive riff heavy jams, and formed a dark, refreshing sound that will have you riding a wave of intense meditation into soaring musical crescendos. In 2020, the band released The Big Grand Entrance in January, three song EP The Great Play of Extension in April, and single Death Race in August. After an intensive early 2022 tour schedule supporting All Them Witches, The Swell Fellas released their latest studio effort, Novaturia, on June 17th, 2022.
This power trio is made up of a pair of brothers, Conner and Chris Poole (guitar and drums respectively) with their longtime friend, Mark Rohrer, a guitarist who they begged to buy bass gear. Growing out of their backyard home studio in MD, the band is pushed forward by Rohrer’s brand of heavy ethereal sound baths on bass, wailing lead guitar with dynamic instrumental effects, and an underscore of wonderfully technical drumming. And with so, the trio have distilled their personal chemistry into something greater than the sum of its parts. With larger than life lyrics inspired by the ebbs and flows of their personal lives, the band remains surprisingly grounded for a group who are so prone to exploration.
Nashville heavy psych trio The Swell Fellas release their third and final album Residuum Unknown late July 2024. Encompassing everything the band has to offer on one incredibly written album will leave fans in awe.
The trio have toured with giants in the industry such as All Them Witches and King Buffalo and built up quite a following in the last 4-5 years. Long time friend and Bassist Mark Rohrer unfortunately had to part ways leaving brothers Chris and Connor Poole a tough decision to end the band. However, not without a proper send off by releasing their best album to date.
The Swell Fellas were: Conner Poole // Guitar and Vocals Chris Poole // Drums and Vocals Mark Rohrer // Bass and Vocals
Posted in Reviews on September 30th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Guess this is it, huh? Always bittersweet, the end of a Quarterly Review. Bitter, because there’s still a ton of albums waiting on my desktop to be reviewed, and certainly more that have come along over the course of the last two weeks looking for coverage. Sweet because when I finish here I’ll have written about 100 albums, added a bunch of stuff to my year-end lists, and managed to keep the remaining vestiges of my sanity. If you’ve kept up, I hope you’ve enjoyed doing so. And if you haven’t, all 10 of the posts are here.
Thanks for reading.
Quarterly Review #91-100:
Hazemaze, Blinded by the Wicked
This is one of 2022’s best records cast in dark-riffed, heavy garage-style doom rock. I admit I’m late to the party for Hazemaze‘s third album and Heavy Psych Sounds label debut, Blinded by the Wicked, but what a party it is. The Swedish three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Ludvig Andersson, bassist Estefan Carrillo and drummer Nils Eineus position themselves as a lumbering forerunner of modern cultist heavy, presenting the post-“In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” lumber of “In the Night of the Light, for the Dark” and “Ethereal Disillusion” (bassline in the latter) with a clarity of purpose and sureness that builds even on what the trio accomplished with 2019’s Hymns for the Damned (review here), opening with the longest track (immediate points) “Malevolent Inveigler” and setting up a devil-as-metaphor-for-now lyrical bent alongside the roll of “In the Night of the Light, for the Dark” and the chugging-through-mud “Devil’s Spawn.” Separated by the “Planet Caravan”-y instrumental “Sectatores et Principes,” the final three tracks are relatively shorter than the first four, but there’s still space for a bass-backed organ solo in “Ceremonial Aspersion,” and the particularly Electric Wizardian “Divine Harlotry” leads effectively into the closer “Lucifierian Rite,” which caps with surprising bounce in its apex and underscores the level of songwriting throughout. Just a band nailing their sound, that’s all. Seems like maybe the kind of party you’d want to be on time for.
Released as a name-your-price benefit EP in July to help raise funds for the Ukrainian war effort, Track by Track is two songs London’s Elephant Tree recorded at the Netherlands’ Sonic Whip Festival in May of this year, “Sails” and “The Fall Chorus” — here just “Fall Chorus” — from 2020’s Habits (review here), on which the four-piece is joined by cellist Joe Butler and violinst Charlie Davis, fleshing out especially the quieter “Fall Chorus,” but definitely making their presence felt on “Sails” as well in accompanying what was one of Habits‘ strongest hooks. And the strings are all well and good, but the live harmonies on “Sails” between guitarist Jack Townley, bassist Peter Holland and guitarist/keyboardist John Slattery — arriving atop the e’er-reliable fluidity of Sam Hart‘s drumming — are perhaps even more of a highlight. Was the whole set recorded? If so, where’s that? “Fall Chorus” is more subdued and atmospheric, but likewise gorgeous, the cello and violin lending an almost Americana feel to the now-lush second-half bridge of the acoustic track. Special band, moment worth capturing, cause worth supporting. The classic no-brainer purchase.
Between Telekinetic Yeti, Mythic Sunship and Limousine Beach (not to mention Comet Control last year), Tee Pee Records has continued to offer distinct and righteous incarnations of heavy rock, and Mirror Queen‘s classic-prog-influenced strutter riffs on Inviolate fit right in. The long-running project led by guitarist/vocalist Kenny Kreisor (also the head of Tee Pee) and drummer Jeremy O’Brien is bolstered through the lead guitar work of Morgan McDaniel (ex-The Golden Grass) and the smooth low end of bassist James Corallo, and five years after 2017’s Verdigris (review here), their flowing heavy progressive rock nudges into the occult on “The Devil Seeks Control” while maintaining its ’70s-rock-meets-’80s-metal gallop, and hard-boogies in the duly shredded “A Rider on the Rain,” where experiments both in vocal effects and Mellotron sounds work well next to proto-thrash urgency. Proggers like “Inside an Icy Light,” “Sea of Tranquility” and the penultimate “Coming Round with Second Sight” show the band in top form, comfortable in tempo but still exploring, and they finish with the title-track’s highlight chorus and a well-layered, deceptively immersive wash of melody. Can’t and wouldn’t ask for more than they give here; Inviolate is a tour de force for Mirror Queen, demonstrating plainly what NYC club shows have known since the days when Aytobach Kreisor roamed the earth two decades ago.
Los Angeles-based four-piece Faetooth — guitarist/vocalist Ashla Chavez Razzano, bassist/vocalist Jenna Garcia, guitarist/vocalist Ari May, drummer Rah Kanan — make their full-length debut through Dune Altar with the atmospheric sludge doom of Remnants of the Vessel, meeting post-apocalyptic vibes as intro “(i) Naissance” leads into initial single “Echolalia,” the more spaced-out “La Sorcie|Cre” (or something like that; I think my filename got messed up) and the yet-harsher doom of “She Cast a Shadow” before the feedback-soaked interlude “(ii) Limbo” unfurls its tortured course. Blending clean croons and more biting screams assures a lack of predictability as they roll through “Remains,” the black metal-style cave echo there adding to the extremity in a way that the subsequent “Discarnate” pushes even further ahead of the nodding, you’re-still-doomed heavy-gaze of “Strange Ways.” They save the epic for last, however, with “(iii) Moribund” a minute-long organ piece leading directly into “Saturn Devouring His Son,” a nine-and-a-half-minute willful lurch toward an apex that has the majesty of death-doom and a crux of melody that doesn’t just shout out Faetooth‘s forward potential but also points to what they’ve already accomplished on Remnants of the Vessel. If this band tours, look out.
Ferocious and weighted in kind, Behold! The Monolith‘s fourth full-length and first for Ripple Music, From the Fathomless Deep finds the Los Angeles trio taking cues from progressive death metal and riff-based sludge in with a modern severity of purpose that is unmistakably heavy. Bookended by opener “Crown/The Immeasurable Void” (9:31) and closer “Stormbreaker Suite” (11:35), the six-track/45-minute offering — the band’s first since 2015’s Architects of the Void (review here) — brims with extremity and is no less intense in the crawling “Psychlopean Dread” than on the subsequent ripper “Spirit Taker” or its deathsludge-rocking companion “This Wailing Blade,” calling to mind some of what Yatra have been pushing on the opposite coast until the solo hits. The trades between onslaughts and acoustic parts are there but neither overdone nor overly telegraphed, and “The Seams of Pangea” (8:56) pairs evocative ambience with crushing volume and comes out sounding neither hackneyed nor overly poised. Extreme times call for extreme riffs? Maybe, but the bludgeoning on offer in From the Fathomless Deep speaks to a push into darkness that’s been going on over a longer term. Consuming.
The second album from Nashville’s The Swell Fellas — who I’m sure are great guys — the five-song/32-minute Novaturia encapsulates an otherworldly atmosphere laced with patient effects soundscapes, echo and moody presence, but is undeniably heavy, the opener “Something’s There…” drawing the listener deeper into “High Lightsolate,” the eight-plus minutes of which roll out with technical intricacy bent toward an outward impression of depth, a solo in the midsection carrying enough scorch for the LP as a whole but still just part of the song’s greater procession, which ends with percussive nuance and vocal melody before giving way to the acoustic interlude “Caesura,” a direct lead-in for the noisy arrival of the okay-now-we-riff “Wet Cement.” The single-ready penultimate cut is a purposeful banger, going big at its finish only after topping its immediate rhythmic momentum with ethereal vocals for a progressive effect, and as elliptically-bookending finisher “…Another Realm” nears 11 minutes, its course is its own in manifesting prior shadows of progressive and atmospheric heavy rock into concrete, crafted realizations. There’s even some more shred for good measure, brought to bear with due spaciousness through Mikey Allred‘s production. It’s a quick offering, but offers substance and reach beyond its actual runtime. They’re onto something, and I think they know it, too.
Stockhausen & the Amplified Riot, Era of the Inauthentic
For years, it has seemed Houston-based guitarist/songwriter Paul Chavez (Funeral Horse, Cactus Flowers, Baby Birds, Art Institute) has searched for a project able to contain his weirdo impulses. Stockhausen & the Amplified Riot — begun with Era of the Inauthentic as a solo-project plus — is the latest incarnation of this effort, and its krautrock-meets-hooky-proto-punk vibe indeed wants nothing for weird. “Adolescent Lightning” and “Hunky Punk” are a catchy opening salvo, and “What if it Never Ends” provokes a smile by garage-rock riffing over a ’90s dance beat to a howling finish, while the 11-minute “Tilde Mae” turns early-aughts indie jangle into a maddeningly repetitive mindfuck for its first nine minutes, mercifully shifting into a less stomach-clenching groove for the remainder before closer “Intubation Blues” melds more dance beats with harmonica and last sweep. Will the band, such as it is, at last be a home for Chavez over the longer term, or is it merely another stop on the way? I don’t know. But there’s no one else doing what he does here, and since the goal seems to be individualism and experimentalism, both those ideals are upheld to an oddly charming degree. Approach without expectations.
Nothing is Real stand ready to turn mundane miseries into darkly ethereal noise, drawing from sludge and an indefinable litany of extreme metals. The End is Near is both the Los Angeles unit’s most cohesive work to-date and its most accomplished, building on the ambient mire of earlier offerings with a down-into-the-ground churn on lead single “THE (Pt. 2).” All of the songs, incidentally, comprise the title of the album, with four of “THE” followed by two “END” pieces, two “IS”es and three “NEAR”s to close. An maybe-unhealthy dose of sample-laced interlude-type works — each section has an intro, and so on — assure that Nothing is Real‘s penchant for atmospheric crush isn’t misplaced, and the band’s uptick in production value means that the vastness and blackened psychedelia of 10-minute centerpiece “END” shows the abyssal depths being plunged in their starkest light. Capping with “NEAR (Pt. 1),” jazzy metal into freneticism, back to jazzy metal, and “NEAR (Pt. 2),” epic shred emerging from hypnotic ambience, like Jeff Hanneman ripping open YOB, The End is Near resonates with a sickened intensity that, again, it shares in common with the band’s past work, but is operating at a new level of complexity across its intentionally unmanageable 63 minutes. Nothing is Real is on their own wavelength and it is a place of horror.
Copenhagen heavy psych collective Red Lama — and I’m sorry, but if you’ve got more than five people in your band, you’re a collective — brim with pastoral escapism throughout Memory Terrain, their third album and the follow-up to 2018’s Motions (discussed here) and its companion EP, Dogma (review here). Progressive in texture but with an open sensibility at their core, pieces like the title-track unfold long-song breadth in accessible spans, the earlier “Airborne” moving from the jazzy beginning of “Gentleman” into a more tripped-out All Them Witches vein. Elsewhere, “Someone” explores krautrock intricacies before synthing toward its last lines, and “Paint a Picture” exudes pop urgency before washing it away on a repeating, sweeping tide. Range and dynamic aren’t new for Red Lama, but I’m hard-pressed to think of as dramatic a one-two turn as the psych-wash-into-electro-informed-dance-brood that takes place between “Shaking My Bones” and “Chaos is the Plan” — lest one neglect the urbane shuffle of “Justified” prior — though by that point Red Lama have made it apparent they’re ready to lead the listener wherever whims may dictate. That’s a significant amount of ground to cover, but they do it.
Existing in multiple avenues of progressive heavy rock and extreme metal, Echolot‘s Curatio only has four tracks, but each of those tracks has more range than the career arcs of most bands. Beginning with two 10-minute tracks in “Burden of Sorrows” (video premiered here) and “Countess of Ice,” they set a pattern of moving between melancholic heavy prog and black metal, the latter piece clearer in telegraphing its intentions after the opener, and introducing its “heavy part” to come with clean vocals overtop in the middle of the song, dramatic and fiery as it is. “Resilience of Floating Forms” (a mere 8:55) begins quiet and works into a post-black metal wash of melody before the double-kick and screams take hold, announcing a coming attack that — wait for it — doesn’t actually come, the band instead moving into falsetto and a more weighted but still clean verse before peeling back the curtain on the death growls and throatrippers, cymbals threatening to engulf all but still letting everything else cut through. Also eight minutes, “Wildfire” closes by flipping the structure of the opening salvo, putting the nastiness at the fore while progging out later, in this case closing Curatio with a winding movement of keys and an overarching groove that is only punishing for the fact that it’s the end. If you ever read a Quarterly Review around here, you know I like to do myself favors on the last day in choosing what to cover. It is no coincidence that Curatio is included. Not every record could be #100 and still make you excited to hear it.
Last episode, I did comfort songs the whole way through, new stuff and old, and at the risk of saying something remotely nice about myself, I thought it was the best show I’ve ever done. This time, of course, something completely different.
Yeah, the theme is still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic — how could it not be? — but it’s basically me reminding myself that when times are hard, harder, harder than that, still harder, okay-hardest-my-head’s-gonna-friggin’-explode-make-it-stop-make-it-stop, there’s still new music and new music is still awesome.
So here we are. Brand new tracks from Curse the Son, Vine Weevil, Ten Foot Wizard (who emailed me as I was putting the playlist together, as though to emphasize the point), Witchkiss, Dopelord, Nighthawk & Heavy Temple, The Mountain King, High Priestess, Wight, Marmalade Knives, Kanaan, Frozen Planet….1969 and The Swell Fellas. Some of this has been streamed here, some of it hasn’t, but it’s all new and it’s all excellent and I found that this week, at just this particular moment in time, that’s what I needed. It’s that simple, and I hope you can relate.
Thanks for listening if you do. I hope you enjoy. Or even if you just look at the list and find something new to dig on, I hope you enjoy that too. Thanks.
The Obelisk Show airs 5PM Eastern today on the Gimme app or at http://gimmeradio.com
Full playlist:
The Obelisk Show – 04.17.20
Curse the Son
Suicide by Drummer
Excruciation*
Vine Weevil
You are the Ocean
Sun in Your Eyes*
Ten Foot Wizard
Namaste Dickhead
Get Out of Your Mind*
BREAK
Witchkiss
Splitting Teeth
Splitting Teeth*
Dopelord
Doom Bastards
Sign of the Devil*
Nighthawk & Heavy Temple
Astral Hand
VA – Women of Doom*
The Mountain King
As Below, So Below
Wicked Zen*
High Priestess
Invocation
Casting the Circle*
BREAK
Wight
Motorgroove
Spank the World*
Marmalade Knives
Rivuleting
Marmalade Knives*
Kanaan
O?resund
Double Sun*
Frozen Planet….1969
900 Mile Head Rush
Cold Hand of a Gambling Man*
The Swell Fellas
Scatterbrain
The Great Play of Extension*
The Obelisk Show on Gimme Radio airs every Friday 5PM Eastern, with replays Sunday at 7PM Eastern. Next new episode is May 1 (subject to change). Thanks for listening if you do.
Posted in audiObelisk on April 14th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
Ocean City, Maryland, three-piece The Swell Fellas will issue their new EP, The Great Play of Extension, this coming Friday, April 17. Comprised of just three tracks, the offering runs a not-insubstantial 26 minutes and brings forth hypnotic breadth at the behest of spacious guitar and echoing vocals floating out over molten basslines and laid back drums on opener “Placebo,” the everybody-sings-at-one-point-or-another trio of guitarist Conner Poole, drummer Chris Poole (let’s just assume they’re related), and bassist Mark Rohrer throwing a bit of mathier angularity in “Acid Tone” while keeping the psychedelic fervor of the lead cut, and rounding out with the decidedly prog rocking “Scatterbrain,” which if it didn’t dedicate its last two minutes to drifting into oblivion, would be almost intimidatingly clear-headed. Running nearly 12 minutes long, “Scatterbrain” is obviously a focal point of The Great Play of Extension — which itself follows The Swell Fellas‘ likewise-self-awarely-titled debut LP, The Big Grand Entrance, which was released in January — and whether these are tracks left off that release or songs recorded in another session with co-producer/mixer Ben McLeod (best known as the guitarist for All Them Witches) with mastering by Mikey Allred (Across Tundras, All Them Witches, etc.), they each present a different aspect of the band’s sound, soaring between instrumental crescendos and intricate meditations.
The mix puts Conner‘s guitar forward, and that’s nothing to complain about, but if you had any doubt as to his and Chris‘ last names being the result of familial relation, the established-seeming chemistry between the guitar and drums speaks to the two having been playing together for longer than, say, the last year or two as the debut album and this release came together. To the same end, Rohrer‘s bass fits gracefully and fluidly into the progressions of “Placebo,” and the low end serves not only to reinforce the drum punctuation, but to add character and depth to the guitar as well. They are, then, a power trio. Fair enough. But it’s not just about the bass and drums locking in a groove while the guitar goes a-wanderin’, either. “Acid Tone” shifts into a pastoralism for a few measures born out of traditionalist psychedelic rock before returning to its central push, and it’s that kind of complexity that makes these songs so well suited to the EP format — each one standing out in a way that might be lost or subsumed in a full-length context. It’s worth noting that “Scatterbrain” and “Placebo” (8:22) are also longer than anything that appeared on The Big Grand Entrance, so whether that speaks to some kind of departure there, I can’t say without further investigation, though The Great Play of Extension certainly warrants and invites that.
And as much as that dynamic between the band members feels set, there is a corresponding sense of The Swell Fellas feeling out ideas and different methods to find what’s working best in (and as) their sound. It’s the way of such things generally that one side wins out over another, but in the best of cases, a group is able to bring together the angles they forge in their early work as a fuller realization of a new, individualized identity. Frankly I hear nothing in The Swell Fellas‘ sound that would make me think that couldn’t do precisely that. They have an obvious attention to detail and aesthetic and are able to convey a sense of technicality without coming across as any more indulgent than their songs want them to be. They were due to tour this month to promote The Great Play of Extension and The Big Grand Entrance, but of course that would require gathering at least three people in room, so that’s out (even though two are relatives), and one only hopes they reschedule as soon as possible, because where that fusion of elements in their sound is going to happen is on stage, and they are very clearly interested in continuing the evolution in their sound that’s obviously already in progress.
So go for it, I say.
You can stream The Great Play of Extension in its entirety below. Some quick comment from the band and more info follows.
Please enjoy:
The Swell Fellas on The Great Play of Extension:
In the midst of our 2019 fall tour we were invited to TN to record with Ben after working for a couple months on The Big Grand Entrance together. The Church where we recorded has this huge room that brought forth an amazing sound and energy, and it enabled us to track all of the instrumentation live. The bulk of our writing process happens while jamming together, so recording the EP in this environment felt really natural. This EP is a compilation of songs that stem straight from the way our minds tend to pace around during times of change and unease, while continuing to hold onto complete focus throughout the ride. Past the lyrics, we took that idea into the instrumentation by meditating on certain parts and letting the songs be as they were intended to be on that October day in The Church. These songs are extremely special to us, and we’re psyched to premiere them here with you.
The Swell Fellas are a psych rock trio out of Ocean City, MD. Following the January release of their debut full length, The Big Grand Entrance, they are gearing up for an independent release of a new EP, The Great Play of Extension.
The Great Play of Extension was recorded at The Church outside of Nashville, TN by Ben McLeod, who also mixed the EP and the band’s debut album. Mastering by Mikey Allred at Dark Art Audio.
The Swell Fellas are: Conner Poole // Guitar and Vocals Chris Poole // Drums and Vocals Mark Rohrer // Bass and Vocals
