MASS BY BEDOUIN SOUNDCLASH
In late July, Eon Sinclair (bassist) and Jay Malinowski (vocals/guitar) better known as duo Bedouin Soundclash headed down to the cradle of American music to find rebirth. When they arrived, they found themselves baptized in the hottest, stickiest Louisiana weather of late summer. “It’s the kind of heat where you’re dripping with sweat, even at two in the morning.” Eon Sinclair remembers.
The band set up shop in an old speak-easy jazz club converted into a studio and filled it with musicians for three weeks. “It was a huge gathering——hard to manage at times. There was agony. There was ecstasy. We literally sweat ourselves to the bone” Jay laughs, “and the result was something bigger than ourselves. Something we could never have done alone. That was MASS—both physical and spiritual, the coming together of so many disparate forces of people and energies, distilled into something new.”
From the jangling Big Band swing-pop of “Clock-work,” the post-punk-soca of “Salt-Water,” the New Orleans second-line inspired “Full Bloom,” the apocalyptic Brian Wilson-esque “Born Into Bad Times,” the Talking Heads-channeling of “When We’re Gone,” and the dubbing afro-pop gospel of “Holy” that features Mike Dillon distorting his marimbas into another sonic dimension, MASS shows not only the eclectic post-punk-world-beat tendencies of Bedouin Soundclash but also the city that surrounded them.
