Their new album “Dream Seeds” (due May 2012 on Africantape) marks a dramatically new creative direction in Extra Life’s still-young but prolific career.
It is perhaps their most clearly-defined concept album: seven songs dealing entirely with the twin themes of dreams and children.
In a lyrical left turn away from the morbid sexuality and black humor of “Made Flesh”, these songs look to the subconscious in search of innocence, morality and meaning.
Extra Life | Headshrinker
httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dja4b-3QwAY
According to principal songwriter and elementary school teacher Charlie Looker, the lyrics began with a consecutive series of harrowing dreams involving children, all interconnected by recurring symbols. Claiming to be in some way spiritually reborn, Looker penned the songs while mining these dreams’ buried pasts and even watching in awe as some of their prophesies unfolded in all-too-real life.
Alternately brutal and tender, haunted by ghosts of both the dead and the unborn, the songs of “Dream Seeds” express the violent yet redemptive collision of the Real and Psychic Worlds and an archaic belief in the divine truth of dreams.
Touchy Mob is the plenty-limbed, vulnerable love affair of a hauntingly warm guitar song and the body language of beats, that are meant for a floor. It’s a long-term marriage to the lyrical intensity and comforting darkness of songwriters like Chad VanGaalen, yet with a heavy crush on the riffs of the rave, throwing in found-sound stuff like The Books do, laying a kiss on the kraut history here and there, but in Four Tet marching time.
Songs grow on instant glances of admiration instead of continuous influence, scratching along towards punchlines, that can be entirely different in sound yet cohesive in general aesthetic or mood, not a dense mass, but a mass to get lost in.
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Extra Life & Touchy Mob LIVE
Saturday, 19 May 2012 | 21:00 CET
West Germany | Skalitzer Str. 133 | 10999 Berlin/Kreuzberg
extralifetheband.blogspot.de | touchymob.com
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