Flumergex is pleased to announce the release of their newest album, 2014 Outbuilding Practice Tapes, available now on your favorite online streaming service or digital download platform.

2014 Outbuilding Practice Tapes is essentially a live-in-the-studio set of recordings, the basic tracks for which were primarily recorded (as the title suggests) in an outbuilding sometime in or before the year 2014.  More than a decade later, the recordings are only now being released for the first time.

The album’s first song, most likely hit single, and most accessible number, is “Sweet Treats,” which is actually an outtake from our album Broken Pieces. This particular song “Sweet Treats” was simply too peppy and happy sounding for the self-loathing nihilism of Broken Pieces, it did not fit in with the rest of that project; so now we’re releasing it here for the first time, instead, and we think it’s a much better fit.

This album also includes a cover of an amazingly groovy song called “Put Everything Together” by this sweet soul-funk Belgian band from the 70s named +Plus, who Jesse discovered courtesy of Morcheeba. The original version of the song has a horn section; the Flumergex cover version tries to approximate that horn line with a very mellow electric piano line, which sounds super chill and groovy, we hope you’ll dig it.

All of the other songs on this album are the best-sounding or most interesting takes selected from a much larger, likely-to-remain-unreleased recording project.  For the “Outbuilding Practice Tapes” recording sessions, producer Jesse “let’s try one more take” Smith demanded that every track on every song adhere to a certain strict set of parameters.  Those rules were:

• every instrument had to perform its track all the way through: no patch-ins, no splicing takes together, no studio magic, just a person playing music
• only one track of each instrument: no overdubs.  This meant the guitar had to play rhythm up until it was time for a solo, then kick in the effects and play the solo, then turn off the effects and play rhythm again all the way through to the end of the song, just the way you would in a live environment; and if the guitarist made a mistake during the solo, he could not just go back and re-record that passage, he had to go back and play the entire song all the way through again, including the rhythm parts.  Flumergex guitarist Jesse “duuuuuude” Smith thought this requirement was unnecessarily onerous; but somehow our domineering producer browbeat him into it.
• “fixing it in the mix” was allowed, all the way up to muting any portion of the recording that failed to meet our insane producer’s exacting standards.

The album is a mix of new songs and very, very old songs, all written by indie alt-rock singer/songwriter Jesse S. Smith.  The complete song list is:

1. Sweet Treats
2. Elves
3. Everything is Perfect
4. The Monster’s Child
5. Regret
6. The Stomper
7. Do Me No Wrong
8. The Fallen
9. Sparkles
10. Put Everything Together
11. The Freak Circuit
12. Hope
13. If You…
14. Funk Me Gently

That’s the order in which they’re presented on the album; but we’re more interested in describing them in the order of their composition.

Of all the songs on 2014 Outbuilding Practice Tapes, “The Monster’s Child” (a power-chord-fueled almost Melvins-style instrumental grunge anthem in 3/4 time at a very slow tempo) was penned first: in fact that demo was one of Smith’s very first four-track tape recordings back in the early-mid-1990s.  In other words, this song is loud and obnoxious, just the way you would expect your garage rock to sound.

Next written were “The Freak Circuit” and “Regret,” both of which were written and demoed in the summer of 1996, the year Jesse lived in a basement and first had the idea to start the recording company that eventually became Basementia.  “Regret” is short, kind of punk/ska sounding, a little bit like Sublime, perhaps? You can tell that “Regret” was written by a college-age guy who’d just gotten home from a party and regretted that he hadn’t asked that one girl for her phone number.  In fact that’s pretty much the whole song.  As for “The Freak Circuit,” it’s not entirely clear what this groovy experimental jam-band-song-structure piece is really about, but the songwriter surely wants the listener to recall that “When the end meets the beginning, you know we all end up winning.”

“If You…” was written two years after that, in the summer of 1998, and first demoed on a four-track tape recording project that at the time was named Porphyritic Mush.  You can tell that Jesse had taken some jazz theory classes in the meantime, because this song is very lounge sounding with its super laid-back tempo and all those Major 7th and Dominant chords.

The songs “Sparkles,” “Do Me No Wrong,” and “Funk Me Gently” were all written in the years immediately prior to or immediately following the year Jesse spent teaching music overseas. More specifically, “Funk Me Gently” (a romantic and kinda sexy little acoustic guitar ballad) was written in a dark little apartment in Portland, and first appeared on an unreleased recording project from the year 2000 or so that we called The Lost Minute, which was Jesse’s first step into working with professional-quality recording equipment.  “Do Me No Wrong” was written during the Barnlife years about a beautiful woman named Nicole except she spelled it weird.  (She’s also the subject of “The Ballad of the Country Fair Girl” from impressions, incidentally.)  This song was previously recorded by Jesse’s band Operation J featuring Tom Morgan, Steve Hovey, and Andy Hoke.  This new recording of the song retains the sort of fusion-rock sounding gritty guitar and funky syncopated drums and keys style that Operation J was known for… to the three or four people who we were known to.  Oh, yeah, and this one drops an F bomb.  You hardly notice it in context, but it’s the reason the entire album will be slapped with an “[EXPLICIT]” tag by all the online services.  And “Sparkles” was also written during the Barnlife years, although it may have included a scrap of an idea from earlier than that; but our exacting producer wasn’t happy with that session’s recording, so the song was not included on the original Barnlife limited release. A second attempt to record this song with a performance featuring the incredible and talented drummer Tom Morgan during the Emerges sessions met a similar fate (“It was all my fault,” acknowledges bass player Jesse Smith, “because apparently I played it in the wrong key or something”). So this fun danceable spunky funk number with the clav and the wah guitar thus makes its debut recorded appearance right here, on the Outbuilding release.

Then “Hope” was written in 2008, at a time when the world surely needed some hope.  This sort of vaguely Dylan-esque folk-rock number with a hand drum, a deeply groovy bass riff, and the electric piano that steals the show, was originally slated for inclusion on the Flumergex album Emerges (which is sadly no longer available due to our old distributor suffering a corporate takeover, we’ll have to look into a re-release eventually) but we didn’t quite finish all the tracks for this song in time for that album’s release so it ended up on this project instead.

“Elves” was written about a year later, in early 2009 or so, after the Emerges sessions had wrapped; but then Jesse went back to school for his silly business degree and didn’t make any more recordings for several years: so this song was never recorded until the “Outbuilding” sessions, almost half a decade later.  This one is pure awesomeness, it is a rockin’ funk-rock groove with a bluesy chord structure, powered by an in-your-face electric wah guitar, with stream-of-consciousness flight-of-fancy lyrics about elves and gnomes and sexy forest nymphs and snowflakes that fall like kisses.

“Everything is Perfect” was written in about 2012. Producer Smith believes that this is one of the best songs on the album, although some of the cantankerous band members will argue just for the sake of arguing.  The concept for this song is to say positive-sounding things (“Everything is perfect,” “Life is beautiful”) but to sing them in such a way that the validity of the statement is called into question, with a hint of a suggestion of the ache of heartbreak and gut-wrenching sorrow and loss in lead singer Jesse Smith’s scratchy-voiced vocal performance.  It is, in a word, emotive.

“The Stomper” and “The Fallen” are both straightforward straight-ahead heavy rock guitar-driven instrumentals composed during or just before the “Outbuilding” sessions.  Of the two of these songs, “The Stomper” (with, as a the title suggests, a super driving rock beat, and a guitar riff in dropped D tuning) probably has more funk to it, while “The Fallen” (which is more melodic) might be perhaps ever so slightly reminiscent of 80s hair band metal to some listeners.

And then of course as previously mentioned “Sweet Treats” was written in say 2017 or so, and was recorded during the Broken Pieces sessions (you can tell from the drum machine, and also because the dueling lead guitars at the end are in vaguely the same sort of style as the solos at the end of “You Can’t Do It Again”) but like most of these other songs it is only first being released here and now.

Flumergex fans and newcomers alike will enjoy the rocking and groovy indie alternative rock sounds of 2014 Outbuilding Practice Tapes.  Stream or download it today from your favorite online platform!