Flumergex is delighted to announce the release of the new album, Broken Pieces, now available for streaming or digital download from your favorite online music platform.
The album itself follows a journey of personal transformation. Broken Pieces opens in a dark place with the self-loathing industrial rocker “Too Much.” Flumergex then treats the listener to a slightly gritty yet loving rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence,” and proceeds through a set perhaps reminiscent of Gorillaz with prominent blues-rock influences. After such standout songs as the instant classic “You Can’t Do It Again” and the slow and soulful R&B-flavored love ballad “Beautiful Heart,” we follow the mood down to rock bottom with the trip-hop inspired “It’s Not Tricky” before climbing back out, learning self-acceptance in the synth-heavy funky beat of “I Play a Hero On TV,” and concluding with the hopeful final refrain of the title track with its lush layers of vocal harmonies.
Broken Pieces was a long time coming. Producer, songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist performer Jesse S. Smith began recording the album in April of 2018, during the period of time he now refers to as “my own personal rock bottom.”
“My web design business had collapsed,” Smith recalls, “and my efforts to change direction had met with conflict. Nothing seemed to be working and everything seemed hopeless. So I wrote a bunch of new songs and started recording them.”
Consequently the album tends towards the dark, melancholy, and moody. It was an ambitious project of more than twenty songs (a few of which didn’t make it onto the final album). But after recording all the basic tracks and even completing several of the songs in 2019, deep depression caused Smith to shelve the remainder of the project for several years. During those intervening years, Smith discovered self-help, began exercising regularly, and eventually regained his sense of self-worth sufficiently to run for public office in 2022. Finally returning to his long-dormant recording project in late 2023, Smith put the finishing touches on the remaining tracks, and was finally able to release the album to the world in March of 2024: almost exactly six years after he first began recording it.
Although by Smith’s count this is his seventh album, Broken Pieces is Smith’s first to be made available to the public through modern streaming and digital download platforms.
“Well, you see,” Smith explains, “Flumergex Emerges was originally released through CreateSpace, way back in 2011. So you used to be able to buy that CD on Amazon. But after Amazon bought CreateSpace, they shut down its music distribution department and rolled its book publishing department into what’s now Amazon KDP. So Emerges is no longer available; and none of the other albums were ever released to anyone other than friends, family, bandmates, and a few very kind strangers.”
The upshot is that out of Smith’s quarter-century back catalog of music: including The Lost Minute (2000), the family favorite double-CD album Barnlife (2004), the full-band Operation J album Undercover Operations in the Name of JAST (2005), the groundbreaking world-influenced This One (2007) which was the first album officially created under the Flumergex band name; and the aforementioned Flumergex Emerges (2011); not to mention Just For Fun (2014) which never even received the benefit of a final mixdown: out of all these projects, Broken Pieces is the only Flumergex album currently available to the general public.
“It’s kind of weird,” Smith admits, “because in many ways Broken Pieces is a major stylistic departure from anything I’ve ever done before. So it feels strange introducing my music to the world this way. But,” he adds, “like the song says, you just gotta pick up the pieces and keep going, and do something new, because, well, that’s better than the alternative!”
We connect with others on the level of our shared humanity. Sometimes the human experience is… messy. Things get broken. And then we put the pieces back together as best we can.
Connect with Flumergex through the music of Broken Pieces, now available from your favorite major streaming and digital download platforms.