Yes, we know you’ve been wondering about new material and so we have some good news for you. At next week’s show with Only Beast at Rudz, we will debut the title track from our next album (due sometime in 2015) titled “Ampalanche.”
There is a bit of a story behind the song that goes back to our photo shoot with Carol Sandin for “Bag of Hammers.” Somehow during the shoot we got to looking at all the amps in the studio and the idea of an Ampalanche came up and we kind of went with it as a joke and didn’t really think too much about it afterwards. All of us that is except for Clinton who became obsessed with the idea. It began with studying the works of Thales of Miletus (particularly the fragments of his lost tome “ενισχυτή πτώση,”), then there were the meetings with physicists, engineers, and mathematicians at the Johnson Space Center here in Houston, and then there were the weeks where he would simply disappear only to resurface only to explain that he had gone to meet with some guru, philosopher, sage, or sensei in some far off land.
Eventually the whole thing came to a head one rehearsal in April where we arrived only to find him looking haggard, sweaty, and mad. He was frantically scrawling long, unintelligible symbols into the walls of the space. Exhausted, he paused to review his work and upon doing so he grew pale and a look of fear came over him. “The amps will have us! The amps will have us! There is no hope!” he shouted hysterically! He then began pacing the room while spouting out random mutterings about gravity, magnets, and sentience and how they would doom us all. Eventually he came to a bat in a corner, grabbed it and made a mad dash to the wall of amps in an effort to destroy them all.
It took the strength of four to restrain him until the social workers were able to take him away. When Clinton returned from the institution a few weeks later, he claimed not to recall anything of that night yet he did return with the following words in hand:
flaming doobs and flaming tubes, smoking out the room
ampalanche is coming, make a 4×12 your tomb
we got marshall mesa laney orange and fender
before the wall of power you got no choice but surrender
amp-a-lanche
let the speakers roar!
amp-a-lanche
turn it up some more!
well the congregation slowly gathers round
to sacrifice their ears upon an altar made of sound
they did not come to try to save their souls
but just to hear reverberation in their skulls
amp-a-lanche
let the speakers roar!
amp-a-lanche
turn it up some more!
monoliths of sonic doom shake fillings in your teeth
beneath the tolex towers the apes have been released
when the gig is over and your ears are oozing blood
the primates haul their gear like slaves beneath a god
amp-a-lanche
let the speakers roar!
amp-a-lanche
turn it up some more!
