Pop oddballs the Holy Gasp delivered a couple of new tracks in the last year, and now they're back with a brand new full-length album — and Exclaim! is giving you an early listen to it.
The Love Songs of Oedipus Rex is a concept album that tells the "bombastic, masochistic" story of a troubled marriage. The death of the husband's father and the death of the husband's therapist only add further weight to the problems burdening the couple.
And while the record may take its name from a work of famous fiction, the stories in each song are personal to frontman Benjamin Hackman. His father and therapist passed away while he was in the midst of a painful divorce, and so he channelled that pain into a massive album written for 27 different musicians and vocalists.
In a statement about the record, Hackman tells Exclaim!:
I liken the creation of this record to the method by which a colossal squid consumes a killer whale. Which is to say, slowly, and with great compression. The squid's mouth is noteworthily small. No wider, say, than a golf ball. And the whale, well... the whale is much larger. Over the course of many days, the squid wraps its massive tentacles around its prey, and squeezes, as if the whale were a tube of toothpaste. Like a squid consuming a whale, the contents of this new record took a long while to swallow, and longer still to digest. But with a great deal of water, I ate the whole thing. I cannot say that I am satiated. But I am full. And in the cosmic ocean through which every beast must swim and starve, that will have to do.
Get an early listen to The Love Songs of Oedipus Rex below. It's officially out on September 7.
The Love Songs of Oedipus Rex is a concept album that tells the "bombastic, masochistic" story of a troubled marriage. The death of the husband's father and the death of the husband's therapist only add further weight to the problems burdening the couple.
And while the record may take its name from a work of famous fiction, the stories in each song are personal to frontman Benjamin Hackman. His father and therapist passed away while he was in the midst of a painful divorce, and so he channelled that pain into a massive album written for 27 different musicians and vocalists.
In a statement about the record, Hackman tells Exclaim!:
I liken the creation of this record to the method by which a colossal squid consumes a killer whale. Which is to say, slowly, and with great compression. The squid's mouth is noteworthily small. No wider, say, than a golf ball. And the whale, well... the whale is much larger. Over the course of many days, the squid wraps its massive tentacles around its prey, and squeezes, as if the whale were a tube of toothpaste. Like a squid consuming a whale, the contents of this new record took a long while to swallow, and longer still to digest. But with a great deal of water, I ate the whole thing. I cannot say that I am satiated. But I am full. And in the cosmic ocean through which every beast must swim and starve, that will have to do.
Get an early listen to The Love Songs of Oedipus Rex below. It's officially out on September 7.
