THE SILENT YEARS: album ‘The Globe’ to be released 19th October, 2009. Free download of album track ‘Know Your Place’ available now (Gift Music)
www.myspace.com/thesilentyears
FREE DOWNLOAD – http://www.giftmusic.uk.com/download.php?title=TheSilentYears-KnowYourPlace-GiftMusic
Michael Majewski – bass | Ryan Clancy – drums | Josh Epstein – vocals, guitars, production | Cassandra Verras – keyboards, violins | Fabian Halabou – guitar
The Silent Years’ forthcoming album ‘The Globe’ will be released in the UK on 19th October, 2009.‘The Globe’ certainly represented a sea of change for The Silent Years on multiple levels. For frontman Epstein The Globe was a challenging album: It was the first outing for a new line up of The Silent Years, as Epstein was able to recruit three-fifths of the line-up from Detroit indie rock legends Rescue to join his project; and the album was based around a prevailing concept of recognizing the universality of life. ‘The Globe’ title is itself a metaphor at play, a symbol of scale in each direction, as the songs shift naturally from the microscopic to the universal.
The Silent Years formed in Detroit in late 2005. Like so much great music, theirs is the product of the suburbs – music that dreams of others places. Music that begins in a basement but takes you on a journey far, far away. Music as escape – music as a narrative.
In four short years they have taken the US underground by storm and now look set to do the same in Britain and beyond. The Silent Years are part of that great US underground tradition that every now and again produces innovative bands capable of soundtracking lives and shaping generations – comparisons to Mercury Rev, The Shins, Arcade Fire or Fleet Foxes would not be completely misleading. Nor for that matter would a passing nod to the elemental pastoral vistas of Doves or British Sea Power. Inspiration-wise, The Silent Years don’t mind admitting to drawing inspiration from “the classics – band’s whose music has proven itself to have lasting worth.” That would be people like The Beatles, Beach Boys and Paul Simon and more recently Jeff Buckley and Radiohead. And about a thousand others.
Which isn’t to say The Silent Years (whose name was inspired by a former member’s time at mime school) are backward-looking retro-heads either. They’re not. At all. Because this band offer more than alt-rock simulacra; they are not a band living on borrowed ideas. Heck no. One listen to their second album The Globe should clear up any doubts. First released and rightly-lauded in the US in 2008, The Globe is a concept album about all the things that intelligent, literate twenty-something modern men and women concern themselves with. The Big Ideas, if you like.
“The notion that inspired the concept was the idea or theory that everything that exists probably exists everywhere,” explains articulate twenty-seven year old frontman and founding member Josh Epstein. “So the album is an attempt to explore man’s place in the scheme of things and the reason for his existence. Obviously that question never gets answered. But just exploring the possibilities of where and why was interesting enough.”
Such grand declarations are a typical of a band whose frontman was touring in other bands at the age of fifteen with guys ten years his senior. An education in itself. Josh Epstein was no teen drop-out either – after returning to school, he then went to university on a football (that would be soccer) scholarship, while also studying literature and poetry. There were no rock star ambitions then as there aren’t now; just to make music is enough.
From the band’s formation in 2005 with four core members – their line-up is somewhat fluid and has been known to feature anything up to eighteen musicians on stage – things moved quickly. The Silent Years’ self-titled, self-produced debut album was released in 2006 and by 2007 Spin magazine were voting them ‘Underground artists of the year’. Mixed and produced by Chris Coady (Grizzly Bear, TV On The Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) over the course of one intense month, The Globe followed, as did much road work, including a UK tour that was somewhat fraught when a band member had to depart on the first date due to bereavement. But The Silent Years battled through and laid the foundations for their return visit in late 2009.
And all the while the members of the band have been responsible for every aspect of what it means to be a creative collective: from creating their own artwork to booking tours; from to humping gear to releasing their own records. Unlike many bands that let that DIY ethos slide once they get a taste of success however, they’re becoming even more involved than ever. “The more people hear us, the more we need to stay in control,” says Josh. “This is our art. This is our life.”
While The Globe might be fresh to European ears, The Silent Years are already moving on. In September 2009 they enter a studio to record its follow-up. “The Globe is a record you have to sit down with and commit to listening to, whereas the new record will be one where, if it was on a party, you would have to stop what you were doing to find out who it was by,” says Josh. “It’ll be simpler, but with lots of biblical references. Lyrics matter to us and while I don’t believe in organised religion at all, The Bible is pretty good for lyrical inspiration. John Lennon said that some songs don’t have to mean anything, which is an idea that I’ve only recently been willing to accept.”
That Josh and the revolving line-up that comprises The Silent Years are music obsessives is undeniable. Aside from band duties, members are also currently writing and producing for other artists, writing children’s books, making electronic music and, in Josh Epstein’s case, working on a Broadway production and becoming involved in a project that is attempting to re-unite The Funk Brothers in legendry Detroit studio Hitsville USA.
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