vacant songs records: store

On their third album, and first release on their newly founded label, Vacant Songs; Denver, Colorado outfit Fell have created a dark and angst filled record that merges abrasive guitars and glitchy electronics, with brooding acoustic guitars and reverb drenched vocal harmonies. Heavily rooted in the psychedelic and experimental noise of ‘’Pink Floyd’’, Fell have been able to take the seeds of space rock & psychedelia and fuse them with the harsh and heavier post-rock sounds of bands such as ‘’Joy-Division’’ & ‘’Mogwai’’ to create a listening experience that is all their own.

In terms of Fell’s albums, ‘’A Farewell to Echoes’’ is more mature and claustrophobic than any of its predecessors, and furthest away from the classic dream-pop, and closer to the noisier shoegazer style, but with a modernist glitch about it. It is a record that principle songwriter Josh Wambeke calls his farewell to his twenties. He suggests that, ‘’It is a record about saying goodbye to a decade filled with uncertainty, heartache & meloncholy, as well as saying goodbye to the people and places that I have come to know and forget. It was the first time I ever sat down and wrote lyrics, but felt like I had something to say; the words just poured out of the pen and onto the paper…’’

On their second album, Denver, Colorado outfit Fell have planted a flag at the intersection point of post-rock, dream-pop and psychedelia, and claimed this unique place in the music continuum as their own. They have done this without expensive studios, name producers or extravagant budgets just a dedication to achieving sublime sonics, and a recognition of a very important guiding principle: "it's the song…stupid". The dark, post-Joy Division, post Disintegration-era Cure tonalities of their debut have been replaced by a shimmering, gorgeously-melodic trips that recall the more blissed out moments of bands like The Telescopes, as well as the space-pop of driving force Josh Wambeke's earlier project Phineas Gage. "Incoherent Lullabies" is all the more remarkable in that it was recorded part-time between 2004 and late-2007 largely by Wambeke himself, with occasional help from friends who cycled through the band at various times in that period.

As Josh says of the recordings, "Incoherent Lullabies is a record about memories. Each song on the record represents nostalgia about a person or place in time that I felt had a deep impact on me personally. Although the lyrics don't necessarily tell stories, they more or less explain the feelings of what I experienced. It is melancholy; however, there are a lot of hopeful moments in there as well. It was written and recorded during a time where I was beginning to shed the skin of my pre-adulthood adolescence. "Incoherent Lullabies" is a record about reflection".

Heavy influences during the recordings included Joy Division and the Cure's "Disintegration". As sessions for the album progressed, Wambeke took on more and more of the recording himself, the creation of the songs becoming a kind of therapy during a time of uncertainty and depression. A year's worth of basement sessions gave birth to this CD. A number of shows were played, but eventually Hilman and Dewey left the band for other ventures. Currently the group consists of Wambeke and Cedillo, who are continuing to record new songs for future releases. The Fell CD runs the gamut from psych to space to post-rock with nods in the direction of early new wave and ambient electronics but in the end it is the band's effortless song craft and precise arrangements that propel tracks like the hypnotic "Data-Backspace=Error", the melancholy "End Forever", the haunting "Vacant Song" and the sublime acoustic closer "Cause of Cancer" into hearts and stratospheres