Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Floating Action's Body Questions To Be Released August 26 on New West


FLOATING ACTION'S NEW WEST DEBUT, BODY QUESTIONS, TO 
BE RELEASED AUGUST 26; "UNREVENGED" SINGLE RELEASED 
ON LIMITED EDITION CLEAR 12-INCH VINYL OUT NOW 

Los Angeles, CA, July 9, 2014 - An exhilarating sensory experience constructed of extraordinary pop songs built from elements of indie rock, dub, soul and African rhythms, Floating Action's full-length album, Body Questions, will be released August 26 on New West Records. The first single, "Unrevenged" was released yesterday as a limited edition clear vinyl 12-inch featuring an instrumental dub version of Fleet Foxes' "Helplessness Blues." Wondering Sound premiered the lyric video and hailed Floating Action's Seth Kauffman as a "master craftsman" and the track as a "tiny marvel of detail" and "a glorious puzzle." The song, filled with "a tangled knot of backward guitar" a "gentle, burbling bassline" and an organ-like background vocal hook, can be watched and shared below: 
 
Floating Action - Unrevenged [Lyric Video]
Floating Action - Unrevenged [Lyric Video]
 
Seth Kauffman's sixth album and first for New West, following releases on Park the Van and Jim James' Removador label, invites the masses into the world of Floating Action, the untethered universe he creates and inhabits as a songwriter. It is a space in which Kauffman is compelled to challenge the limits of composition and handle everything from writing all the songs, playing every instrument and self-producing. He recorded the album in his studio in Black Mountain, North Carolina, a small town in the heart of the Swannanoa Valley that from 1933 to 1956 was home to Black Mountain College, which, with its rare creative energy and experimental education, attracted some of the world's most incendiary minds such as John Cage, Buckminster Fuller and Albert Einstein. 

After the junkyard apology of album opener "(Taking Me) A Little While" clears the air,"Unrevenged" drifts in like a thunderhead. The music that follows is a wholly original trek through the sublime, all the disparate sonic bits miraculously interwoven. Bodies glisten as they dance under the sun to the triumphant, Pan-African grooves of "Earth Shackles."Patrons throw money at the band in a cosmic juke joint, hoping to hear the sultry shuffle of"Hide Away Too Long" one more time. A lonely balladeer searches for answers amongst the choir of constellations that illuminates "Couldn't Be Yourself." It is a record that is lyrically cinematic, structurally sound and texturally intoxicating. 

Floating Action has long been a favorite of bands like Band of Horses, Dr. Dog, The Black Keys and My Morning Jacket. In addition to creating music as Floating Action, Kauffman has become Dan Auerbach's go-to multi-instrumentalist; that's his guitar playing on both the new Lana Del Rey and Ray LaMontagne albums. MMJ's Jim James is one of his biggest champions and released his 2012 album Fake Blood. He told Rolling Stone that Kauffman is "the most underrated person in music today" and also called his album, Desert Etiquette, "a relatively unknown masterwork of our times." 

Kauffman and a full band will bring Body Questions to life on tour this fall. Stay tuned for the tour announcement. 

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