Posted By:
Kirk Siddals
-
5/17/2007 12:46:44 PM
On June 18th 2007, The Films will be releasing their debut album “Don’t Dance Rattlesnake” on 7Hz Records. The Films formed in 2003, (Michael Trent (Vocals, Guitar), Jake Sinclair (Bass, Vocals), Kenneth Harris (Guitar, Keys, Vocals) and Adam C. Blake (Drums) and had enough top tunes for a debut album within months, but decided to hold off recording it until they’d moved to New York to become “a faster-living band”. Throughout 2004, between gigging everywhere from Atlanta to Nashville to Birmingham and back, the band holed up in Charleston, South Carolina hosting scene parties where Libertines records would always end up on the stereo, playing three hour sets of Beatles, Kinks and Zombies covers in downtown wine bars to pay the rent.
In 2005 they finally moved to New York, at which point they scrapped all their previous songs and wrote an entire new album in the time it takes most bands to skin up properly. If David Lynch had directed ‘Help!’ he might have envisioned The Beatles living together in something like the Brooklyn home of The Films. “It’s like a warehouse block,” explains singer Michael Trent, “three of us live there and Adam lives in the same neighbourhood. It’s a huge place, there’s tons of people in and out, bands stay, bands go, it’s a flop-house.” The band were signed immediately - perhaps it was the scuzzy thrust of the city or perhaps it was their freaksome new housing arrangements, but the songs they were writing – fuzzed-up Southern fried punk pop with Bowie and T Rex glam influences and sparky Britpop melodies that have become their brilliant first album ‘Don’t Dance Rattlesnake’ - now had a sinister, nightmare quality to their lyrics.
There’s ‘Belt Loops’, “a paranoid jealousy kind of song”, and then there’s the downbeat country closer ‘Bodybag’, about a tragic lovers’ death pact. “It’s kind of hopeless,” lyricist Michael explains, “two people can’t be together or whatever and they end up dead at the end of it and there’s this gross bloody mess”. What emerges is a self-declared “nasty, dirty, fast and loud” album, one of the most exciting alternative debuts of recent times, and there’s a heap more where this came from.
“We’re ready to make so many records right now,” says Michael. “Elvis Costello’s first three records came out within the first two years. Let’s do that.”
Check yourselves in to the Films’ Fabulous Freakhouse then; you’ll be staying for a while.
Check out the band on www.myspace.com/thefilms or www.the-films.com. Their UK tour starts on May 23rd and includes an appearance at the Wireless Festival.
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