tl;dr:
Thrilled to share our self-titled album, Cheap Sensationalism. The name captures the way the last decade has been vibing.
This album has been a long time coming. We've been delaying this due to overthinking the nuances of releasing music. We decided to forgo an intricate release process and just get these songs out to some friends and family.
If the music has anything going for it, it is the variation. These songs span a lot of different phases, each increasing the odds that there is a moment that catches your attention. We'll be adding more soon. For now, we hope you have a listen. Reach out and tell us what you think. Take a risk and share with a friend.
Album notes:
I wrote most of these songs sometime between 2010 and 2014. I tracked most of these songs in 2020 at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco with my brother, Mic, who managed to learn these songs well enough at some bonkers practice space the night before. The last day at the studio was the last day of the ante-lockdown life in California.
There is enough distance in time, location, and orientation that I barely recognize myself in these songs. Maybe the very late David Hume was right: a deep look for the self will leave you (whoever that is) empty-handed.
I don't write songs like this anymore. I can't stand lyrics. I prefer awkward chords. The energy I go for is closer to what you'd hear in an elevator than a nightclub. This is probably because I am older and boring now. The luxury of ennui and angst—the juice of a good song—disappears with the profoundly mundane tasks that accrue with time along with a new set of responsibilities. The access to the vantage point of a past self, likewise, probably doesn't disappear but gets buried under the sediment that accrues across time.
Who knows: maybe I am just distancing myself from the music. Anyone who has ever created anything and shared it with others probably has a sense of the accompanying vulnerability. Blaming some other person I don't know—call them Derek T minus 1—for making the music is just some feeble, lamentable acrobatics to keep my untouched ego nice and shiny. Plus, I don't even know if someone in my stage of life is even allowed to release indie(ish) music without some profound penalty.
This isn't to say we don't dream. We have grand ambitions to play this music live, share it with a broader music community, develop this website, expand on some songs, release more songs, bring in some artwork, collaborate with friends, get better, and connect with the local scene. These aspirations were becoming a bottleneck to sharing the music and not sharing this music was becoming a bottneck to pursuing these aspirations and other new projects. We didn't want to wait another 3 months on either account --- time to move forward, ready or not.
We hope you find something, anything in the music. We'd love to hear from you. If you like it, we'd appreciate you sharing it with some friends to help us get appraised by the wonderful sensibilities of others.
- Derek
People to thank:
- Danielle Goldsmith of Tiny Telephone tracked, mixed, and mastered the vast majority of this music, and more importantly, was kind, patient, and incredible to work with. She found a way to squeeze out the good and hide away most of the bad.
- Mic DeBellis, drummer and bandmate, for learning these songs over the course of an evening well enough to deliver some funky beats. He also dealt with me asking every two days for him to come track drums.
- Matt Berger, Nina DeBellis, and Derek Hensinger for giving feedback that helped us shape these songs. A particularly huge shoutout to Nina for hearing me ask "but do you actually like this? really? like really really?" 10,000 ^ 10,000 times.