Features Track By Track: Lemuria - The Distance Is So Big

Three albums in and ten years to the good, Lemuria are experts of their craft, unafraid to test the boundaries. Hence why their new LP ‘The Distance Is So Big’ experiences wild, frenzied combinations of daring feats, from its drone-like openings to the harsh to-and-fro between members Sheena Ozzella, Alex Kerns and Max Gregor. Max and Alex have given us a thorough accompanying guide to the album, out now via Bridge9.

Michael and Stephen Moon
Max: I forget who had the idea to do this originally, but I ended up being assigned the role of choir director. It was a very animated performance. I stood in front of 20 or so friends of ours making big sweeping gestures with my arms, guiding the swell of the chant, suggesting different octaves for the layered textures we ended up getting. At the end of each take, I’d look back into the control room, since we couldn’t really talk to one another while recording, and see J [Robbins, producer] jumping out of his seat, eyes wide and mouth agape, or giving the thumbs up, laughing. We knew we were on to something cool after the first run through or two. It was a struggle at first, though, trying to get people to sing off key. I don’t think it’s very instinctive to sing ‘wrong notes’ for most people. It was also raining while we recorded this, I think you can probably hear it in there as well.

Brilliant Dancer
Alex: This guitar melody was a very old one for us that we have been holding onto for a long time and finally found a home for it. Before Lemuria was even a band, Sheena and I were working on some songs for a project called Paladin that never ended up happening. We were so happy to finally be able to fit it onto an album. We of course doctored it up to our current style of playing and the lyrics were written around the time of recording this album.

Clay Baby
Max: First I wrote the raging bass solo at the end of this song. Then we asked ourselves ‘how dinky can we make this sound?’. What we got kinda sounds like a less skilled Matt Freeman playing a wet noodle through a telephone.

Scienceless
Alex: Sheena had the guitar parts all laid out and Max and I were able to really mess around with the rhythm section on this song. Lyrically this song puts a crumbling relationship into some literal automobile road rage scenarios.

Paint The Youth
Alex: This is a song that I recorded a demo of at my house and presented to the band. For a while it was put on hold because Sheena found it off-putting because each instrument and vocal melody is very segregated. But eventually she came around and this became one of the songs we were most excited about recording for the album.

Dream Eater
Alex: Another track sort of like ‘Paint the Youth’ that was demoed a long time ago and put on hold for a little while. The guitar riff was sort of dark and brooding, but we put an upbeat majestic bass line to balance it out. The bass line reminds me of the end of a fantasy movie where the heroes come back to the kingdom and they receive their medals from the king and queen. But that’s just me. Lyrically the song travels through three different times in a kids life. Starting off very impressionable and idolising and ending with becoming what they looked up to and realizing it’s not what they wanted to be.

Oahu, Hawaii
Alex: This song was written in Buffalo, which is the polar opposite environment of Hawaii. I found an old journal that I kept when I was younger. There was this whole two week stretch where I was in Oahu and that was when I was most inspired to write in the journal. So I made a song out of the entries from that journal.

Chihuly
Alex: The album artwork cover sort of coincides with this. We intentionally threw a lot of colorful imagery in our songs, especially with this one. The theme of the album accidentally became a break up album. A lot of the songs reflect the unchained feeling I had after a pretty sour long term relationship coming to a close.

Bluffing Statistics
Alex: This song feels like the fastest song on the album for us, but when you relax and listen to it, it’s one of the slower tunes. This song was hashed out first in Buffalo, then in Austin, and finalized in DC to be recorded in Baltimore and released on a record label from Boston. We went through many stages with this track and there are a couple demos of it that are completely different, but we really feel like we landed on the right mood with this take to properly match the lyrical content.

Public Opinion Bath
Alex: Some say this is the barnburner of the album. It’s definitely the fastest track, and maybe a little bit of a throwback to some of our earlier EPs. But that was not intentional. I think we played this song extra fast one day in the studio because the heat hadn’t kicked on and we were freezing our asses off in the studio, the Magpie Cage. We laid down a fast take and from there we developed the song cheetah remix.

Congratulations Sex
Max: We had a computer in the studio with a slide show that played all day long. There were slides of hubble telescope pictures, desert landscapes, majestic wolves howling at the moon; we kept adding to it, but it was imagery to create an atmosphere for the record. You can hear most of those images on this track.

Survivors’ Guilt
Max: This is a song we wrote together at some point in Austin. It may be the only one, but I like to think that has something to do with it’s very different sound. I believe your physical environment, the city you’re in, your practice space, heavily influences the type of music you write, and it’s a dream of mine to write a location-based record, i.e. lock ourselves in a cabin in Nova Scotia for a month and see what comes out of that. This may be a small example of how that may affect our creative process. The interlude after the song is an audio collage from various places around Baltimore. There’s all sorts of stuff buried in there: a guy talking about the super bowl, someone ordering a donut, Alex singing, street sounds, etc. It was a fun thing to do to kill a few hours on a slow recording day in Baltimore.

Ruby
Sheena: Musically, this song was written in our practice space that we had behind Dangerously Delicious Pies in Washington, DC. Lyrics were written on a sad evening alone in my bedroom. It’s probably one of the heaviest songs on the album. Max has some pretty heavy breathing parts throughout the chorus and I thought he was going to pass out when we recorded it! Also, a fun fact: Every Lemuria album has ended with a song in drop D tuning.

The Distance Is So Big by Lemuria

Lemuria play the following live shows:
JULY
21 Tramlines Festival, Sheffield

22 The Black Heart, London

23 The Marquee, Norwich

24 Minsters Bar, Stoke On Trent

25 The Cockpit, Leeds

26 Fighting Cocks, Kingston

27 The Cavern, Exeter
28 Burnout Festival, Bournemouth

29 Exchange, Bristol

30 The Old Angel, Nottingham

31 The Globe, Cardiff

AUGUST

01 White Rabbit, Plymouth
02 Classic Grand, Glasgow (w/ Texas Is The Reason)
03 Manchester Academy (w/ Texas Is The Reason)