This is wild to me bc velvet and losing it all are my favorites for how how fun they are to me and atonement and voices are closer to the bottom bc they feel very “alright we need a ballad and a concise repetitive pop song”
I just got a CD player for my stereo and my local shop has the deluxe version of Cities for 4 dollars. I gotta cop right?
New album coming with Marty: Anberlin bassist Deon Rexroat on adapting bands to books ahead of KC’s Phase Fest this Friday
How long do you think it will take Stephen to learn the new album when he comes back? He's coming back, right?
Sigh... still saddens me that Stephen not wishing to tour at this stage of his life—which I absolutely respect as a parent—also apparently means the band will write and record new music will a far lesser vocalist. With today's technology, we can't get Stephen's voice on new songs? Surely they could be performed as well/badly on tour by someone else, regardless.
Recording music and not touring has been a thing for... well, since the existence of recorded music. Didn't Brian Wilson do this with The Beach Boys? I love Protest the Hero, and their guitarist and main songwriter hasn't toured in years. He doesn't like touring, and runs the Sheet Happens publishing company. He still writes their songs and plays them on album. It's honestly such a bummer that this was never a solution like that.
I actually would be perfectly content with them still writing and releasing music with Stephen if it meant that Matty was 100% full time touring with them. That's what they made it sound like and then it's evolved to *this* I wouldn't even mind if it was an album with 4 Matty songs, 4 Stephen songs. I can make an EP of those 4.
He casually mentions they’re working on a new album with Matty writing and singing, and then when the interviewer directly asks about Stephen still recording and releasing music on his own, he just goes, “Yeah, he is,” and says Stephen just didn’t want to tour anymore. That’s it. No acknowledgment of the whole “Matty’s the touring singer, Stephen’s still in the band” narrative. Just sad.
If they announced Stephen was permanently gone, they’d lose a ton of fans. I don’t envy the position they’re in, but this feels like it could have been handled better.
"A lot of people are saying Matty is trying to change the band into a metalcore band, but really Matty is back there trying to get us to write “Time and Confusion: Part 2.” He wants the Anberlin that he fell in love with, he wants the more pop-punk vibe that we’ve had in our repertoire for years." Okay... what are we doing here? Why is Matty's fandom such a big part of the story here when long-time listeners really don't care? Why are we rehashing the old sound? This isn't how bands are supposed to progress. You're artists. Grow. Innovate. Don't chase the past. This is exactly what you guys said you weren't going to do when you hung it up, and you came back in such perfect fashion until all of this. I feel like Deon is trying to say what fans want to hear, but if you're appealing to nostalgia it makes it even worse to have a different vocalist. At least Seven felt like a step in a different direction. My goodness, every decision these guys have made in the last year has been exhausting. I can't believe an Anberlin record is coming out and I'm not looking forward to it.
Seven at least felt better than the other two because Matty only wrote the lyrics and nothing else. Chad Carouthers wrote the demo for the song and brought it to Anberlin to record. it's the main reason i give that song a bit of a pass. unfortunately i don't think we're ever getting anything that intriguing again.