Think About Life Are Backwards

BY Daniel SylvesterPublished Jun 23, 2009

Many artists make a conscious decision to reinvent their sound. Not many can do it within the first ten seconds of an album. Family, the sophomore LP from Montreal three-piece Think About Life, opens with "Johanna," a horn laden, spring-loaded, cut-and-paste jam that conjures up images of a G-rated Fred Wesley/DJ Shadow collaboration. The next 39 minutes and 34 seconds of Family follow suit, helping the band distance themselves from comparisons to texturally conscious guitar noisemakers like Liars or Animal Collective.

Lead vocalist Martin Cesar attributes the band's evolution to a 2008 West coast tour with fellow Montrealers Stars. "That helped us a lot in terms of seeing what the crowd's reactions and applying them to a live atmosphere." Other than a quest to get crowds moving, Cesar likens his band's newfangled direction to what can be described as a "claustrophobic sound born out of dozens of separate ideas. It comes from how we work, the way we sort of get tired of something really easily."

Further blurring the lines of what fans expect from a band, Think About Life chose to tour before the album was even mastered. Now that it's available in stores and online, you'd think that Cesar and company would take advantage of the summer festival season to tour and promote it. But as a final twist to the story, his plans are different: "I'm trying to aim at us recording again soon with [only] a couple of dates here and there."

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