TV Party Release Single “Bag of Five Marbles” From Their Forthcoming Full Length Psychic Driving
PSYCHIC DRIVING IS AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER VIA OUTRO RECORDS
LISTEN TO “BAG OF FIVE MARBLES” – YouTube
Ventura, California’s TV PARTY invites you to explore their new single, “Bag of Five Marbles,” from their soon-to-be-released full-length Psychic Driving. “Bag of Five Marbles” is the fourth single to be released. It is a bluster of jittery energy; its fuzzy chug serenades about a math equation, creating an energy that is simultaneously unsettling and comforting. It feels like a familiar song you’ve known all your life, and yet, of course, it’s not. The album artwork is the photograph ‘De Schimmel’ by Hannes Wallrafen. Wallrafen lost his eyesight shortly after he took this photo, and please note this is the raw photo; that horse did indeed jump the kitchen table. Psychic Driving is their second release for Outro Records and is available for pre-order.
TV Party will perform at the record release party for Psychic Driving on April 21st at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center in Oxnard, California. – closing the party will be Fake Names, featuring members of Minor Threat, Fugazi, Refused, Soulside, and Embrace.
TV Party will go on to play at Punk Rock Bowling & Music Festival and Shebang Fest. More regional and national shows will be announced shortly.
TV Party will perform at the record release party for Psychic Driving on April 21st at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center in Oxnard, California. – closing the party will be Fake Names, featuring members of Minor Threat, Fugazi, Refused, Soulside, and Embrace.
TV Party will go on to play at Punk Rock Bowling & Music Festival and Shebang Fest. More regional and national shows will be announced shortly.
In the 1950s, a Canadian psychiatrist by the name of Dr Donald Ewen Cameron developed a form of radical therapy called psychic driving. The idea was that by taping positive messages and replaying them to his patients on a never-ending loop for hours (if not weeks or even months) at a time, their bad habits could be broken by destroying the existing memories, beliefs and behaviors and reprogramming the individual. Though done under the guise of helping those patients, the experiment was actually funded by the CIA and was a front for that organization’s funding of scientific research into brainwashing and mind control. And while a title is, for the most part, just a title, when it comes to TV Party’s second full-length, it certainly sets the tone for both its mood and its music, as well as the dark, off-kilter, anachronistic world the Ventura, CA five-piece—vocalist Jesse Brinkenhoff, guitarists Parker Cohen and Aiden O’Donnell, bassist Matt Kash and drummer Justin Dempsey—have created through its 12 stunning, hypnotic songs. Psychic Driving, the band’s second full-length, isn’t directly about that insidious program per se, but it still evokes and captures a fitting sense of paranoia and uncertainty.
“The night before we recorded the album,” says Kash, “ Jesse and Parker drank like ten pots of coffee and wrote all the lyrics. They just stayed up all night and just wrote and wrote, then showed up early the next morning to go record with bloodshot eyes and a yellow pad of paper saying ‘I think they’re pretty good, but we don’t know. It could also suck.’ So I thumbed through them and went ‘Oh yeah. You did good!’”
Recorded with Jon Gilbert (Off!, Mt Joy, The Kills, Oliver Hazard) at 64Sound in Los Angeles, the result is a record that exists in a timeline that’s not entirely current nor entirely real, but which nevertheless hold a mirror up to the world today, as well as the lives of those living in it. Like the band’s 2018 self-titled debut, Psychic Driving is a monochrome, Lynchian fever dream that captures the terror, the absurdity and the struggle—but also the joy—of modern existence. This time around, however, there’s a little bit of color seeping in around the edges, a slight tinge of levity and hope—and, at times, even humor—that counteracts the existential vortex threatening to swallow these 33 minutes from the inside out.
“We wanted this record to be a bit weirder than our first one,” explains Brinkenhoff. “We didn’t want to do just the same thing again. The first record is more straight ahead because of the instruments we had when we practiced, and we just went into a studio and did that. For this one, we’d been making demos for longer and they just seemed a bit weirder, so we decided to lean into that.”
It’s something that they didn’t have to work hard at, either. Defying the cliché of the difficult second record, TV Party found the process for making theirs incredibly easy and organic, even if it wasn’t quite as fast as its predecessor.
“The first record we did in two days and the whole thing cost $400,” says Kash. “It was really budget and just go, go, go! But this one was pretty quick, too because we just kept writing songs. But as we got to know each other and had bigger ideas, we decided to spend a little more money on this record and our label was willing to chip in with some cash, so we had the weird luxury of being able to try different things and sounds in the studio and expand a little bit with that.”
And so, “Bag Of Five Marbles” opens proceedings in a bluster of jittery energy, its fuzzy chug simultaneously unsettling and comforting. It feels like a familiar song you’ve known all your life and yet, of course, it’s not. That’s a pattern repeated over and over on Psychic Driving. For while the band aren’t afraid to pay homage to their influences—Bauhaus, Wire, The Beatles, The Strokes, The Kinks—they never pander to them or copy them. Instead, TV Party remove the hearts of those bands and then transplant them—messily, blood dripping everywhere—into the bodies of their own songs. Whether that’s the carefree, nighttime, windswept streets of “Motorbike Libido (She Loves The Beatles)” or the gnarly, melancholy power-pop of “Gone”, the shimmering, minor chord warmth of “Banner Avenue” and “Black Mascara”, the mournful closing song that sounds like the loneliest comedown ever known to mankind. That’s also what marks this record out – these songs are very much rooted in the band’s personal experiences, but they also transcend them to become larger than life—as well as a profound comment on it. The snotty punk of “British Petroleum”, for example, was inspired when Brinkenhoff was hiking with a friend who told him a story about someone staging a kidnapping in an African national park, which allowed BP to swoop in and displace the gorillas there for its own ends.
“I have no idea if the story is true or not,” admits the singer—and a cursory Google search doesn’t yield anything specific—but it still tells a truth, “but it’s about the sort of impotence you feel when these kind of huge corporate structures exist.”
He’s not afraid to confront his own personal demons, either, namely on “Pocket Full Of Harold” and “Fentanyl”, two back-to-back songs about very different drugs and the experiences he’s had with them. Of course, it’s not just him, and so both songs also serve as warnings about society, the things humans often feel they need to do in order to escape the clutches of the capitalist system in which they have no choice but to exist, and America’s complicated relationship with legal painkillers that has led to the opioid crisis. TV Party neither sugarcoat nor glamorize drug-taking.
“It’s definitely, at times, been a part of my lifestyle, if you can call it that,” says Brinkenhoff. “Fentanyl and heroin kind of represent the old school and the new school. Like, heroin was bad, but at least you got high, which has its positive elements. But then fentanyl just like knocks you out. It’s like an anesthetic. And it seems interesting that that’s like all there is out there right now, and it’s very sad. But I remember as a kid, my mom had, like fentanyl lollipops that you could just lick. Most of the time people, get into drugs with romantic aspirations around it. And in a way, they are romantic, but you also either ruin your life or you die.”
It’s a bleak statement, but it’s a one that sums the band up perfectly. Psychic Driving is a formidable and remarkable version of their truth. It’s one that delivers some uncomfortable truths, but which also offers comfort as it does. It’s a sleek and sloppy, sophisticated and primal portrait of humanity as it is now, one that’s full of charm and terror, and which marks the band out as something truly special.
“I wanted to make a record that we could look back on one day and be proud of,” says Kash, “and I think we did that.”
“I’d like people to be able to put on headphones and walk around a decaying city listening to it,” adds Brinkenhoff, “and just feel kind of cool while they do.”
