The Fugitives are proud and pleased to announce the release of their new full length album, Eccentrically We Love, due out March 23. The album will be supported by a long awesome tour across Canada and back.
Read about the album below.
On March 23, albums will be available for order at Canadian record stores, the 604 Records store (www.604records.com/store), and for preorder over Itunes.
In late 2009, The Fugitives released a short EP, Find Me, which tracked extreme examples of people living in isolation: a park ranger suffering from cabin fever, a woman trapped in an unforgiving marriage, and a man whose death went unnoticed for seven years. Maybe the band’s just getting old and morbid, but the songs made them uneasy. Not to mention neurotic. After a brief spell where they walked around telling everyone, “who cares, nothing matters, we’re all going to die alone,” they decided this response was boring, and headed back into the studio.
Eccentrically We Love, The Fugitives’ newest full-length, takes anxiety and isolation as its starting point. As it turns out, the band thinks anxiety is good. They are also fans of: frustration, discontent, being overworked, and living in broken down houses with noisy roommates. It’s not that they’ve suddenly developed a pessimistic worldview – the album is primarily about gratitude, but it avoids clichés by centering on topics we’re normally not appreciative of. The album opener, ‘Snail Shell’ revels in the everyday annoyance of hearing your neighbor’s love life through the walls (and sometimes ceiling). The title track celebrates human relationships at their most exasperating, and ‘All this Trouble’ is an affectionate list of life’s sand-papery frustrations. In a sense, these are all songs about love and affection, but they aren’t offering anyone bouquets of flowers. If Find Me was about people lost to isolation, Eccentrically We Love chronicles the beautiful itchiness of being close. It’s about getting irritated, angered and distraught, and the exhilarating necessity of feeling this way.
The secret to the theme of this album might lie in how it was made. Immediately upon their return from a seven-week Canadian tour to support Find Me, the band locked themselves in North Vancouver’s Neighbourhood studios and embarked upon a month of recording. After 1,536 hours in each other’s company (yes, they were counting), the group decided that they still liked each other. More than that, they realized that their different musical backgrounds and lyrical approaches actually brought them closer, and made them a better band. Eccentrically We Love is the result of co-writing, co-editing, and co-performance – a true collaboration that balances eclecticism with the kind of unity a band earns by spending days and days in each other’s company.
Featuring co-production by Leo-Award winning producer\composer Matthew Rogers, guidance from Canadian art-rock icon Veda Hille, as well as guest appearances by Jesse Zubot and Rod Murray, Eccentrically We Love expands on the “top notch” vocal harmonies established in Find Me (ChartAttack) and the tight composition of their Canadian Folk Music Award nominated debut. The album will be supported by a cross-Canada tour in April 2010, a brief stint to Europe in the fall, and a request for fans and friends to send ‘small troubles’ to their website. These daily annoyances are to be funny, poignant, or heartfelt. Hopefully, when all is done, a quick survey of the amalgamated catalogue will make one feel grateful (and normal) for the beautiful, unavoidable difficulties in life.