The High Strung are pround to announce
yesterday's release of their new album ?Posible o' Imposible? out
on Paper Thin Records. The High Strung, and especially
frontman Josh Malerman, are enthralled with blending fact and fiction.
Malerman's Facebook page declares he worked at “General Faw Faw's
Impossible Meats” in 1852 and that he attended “Fabulous Posture University”
for the 95 years leading up to 1902. Because of this, their history and
experiences are like big riddles, short puzzles that are as artistic as the
albums they've made. And of their six albums, none captures this fascination with
the absurd better than the new one, rightly called ?Posible o' Imposible?
When describing how the band formed, Malerman either
discusses grade schools and gym classes or, more recently, mental homes, where
he says he was a patient and guitarist Stephen Palmer was an orderly, before
the two realized they worked well together and busted out.
The rhythm section of Chad Stocker (bass) and Derek Berk
(drums) are everything a music fan relishes; explosive, original, and
danceable, too. When describing them, Malerman says he can't remember if
they “planted” him or if he planted them but “either way we grew out of the
ground and picked each other and presented one another to mother in a vase.”
The songs on ?Posible o' Imposible? are
just as enigmatic. Thinking big is the main thread, but maybe it should
be described as “imagining” big. The album is home to many modern
characters, most of whom are on the verge of creating a grand spectacle.
The hunter who tires of animals and seeks out black holes and planets in
“Big Game Hunter”. The man who has toiled in obscurity only to be flooded
with opportunities in “On Your Way Up!”. The man who experiences the weather
before his peers in “Giant.” And, most notably, the world described in
“Rats, Rats, Rats” where “there's a job opening for a clerk at the Church of
Satan” and a “dance tonight at the Church of Raging Hormones.”
The High Strung do not present themselves as ironic; their
absurdist scenarios are delivered in a way that reveals they mean it. And
the band is on their way up, having scored the theme song for Showtime's new
hit series Shameless, starring William H. Macy as an impossibly drunk father.
Live, the band verges on a variety show, traveling hucksters
who have, as Malerman says, “between a dozen and two dozen melodies in jars,
rhythms too, sentences too, and, on stage, if we get lucky, we open the
corresponding jars so the songs make real sense.” The best known document
detailing the experience of the band's live show is a lengthy article in Vanity
Fair that covers a two-show trip to Guantanamo Bay where Malerman fell in love
with a female soldier, Berk was housed with an over zealous interrogator, and
the boys “drank more rum than water.”
The High Strung are a rock band, of this there is no doubt,
but one that clearly adores music, successfully injecting all this incredulity,
absurdity, and irrationality into ?Posible o' Imposible? and
the shows that will accompany it. It's the type of album kids will be
downloading, illegally or not, as they discuss whether or not it's true that
Berk's drums talk to him or, as Malerman says, “the first time we practiced
together, the very first time we played, the boys all struck a C chord at the
same time, without preamble. But I sang a D. And instead of thinking we'd
fallen short of some cosmic relationship that was meant to be, I immediately
understood we were destined to do something... different.”
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