October brings about the season of the zombie, and with eleven days until Halloween, chances are there will be some undead bodies slowly trudging down your street looking to eat your brains. But what if you’re approached not by a flesh-munching creature from the underworld, but an intelligent human of rot keen on discussing with you some of life’s great philosophers, like Descartes, Plato, or Bret Easton Ellis?
That’s the plot twist that awaits today, as Vanyaland is excited to premiere “Limbo,” the latest single from Ted Billings’ new project, Philosophical Zombie. The former Age Rings frontman and songwriter releases the band’s debut album, Loneliness Is Blue And Not Blue, on November 6 via Killer Wail Records, a fresh label created by Jessica Zambri (formerly of Zambri) and Noel Heroux (Mass Gothic, ex-Hooray For Earth), and “Limbo” is another exuberant twirl through modern rock and roll.
The new LP was recorded in the fall of last year by Billings, using an electric guitar, a bass, one microphone, and a laptop after he returned home to Massachusetts after living in Brooklyn.
“The album was originally supposed to be a large batch of demos to work on with a band, but in retrospect I may have known it was going to be its own thing at some point,” Billings tells Vanyaland. “So I spent a lot of time on what I thought was a batch of fairly elaborate demos. But by ‘a lot of time’, I don’t mean, like, tons of takes [or] re-doing stuff, but messing around with distortion and effects and layering guitars and things like that. I didn’t do more than two takes on 90 percent of any song so there are some mistakes and it’s pretty raw.”
Billings says the connection with Killer Wail was instant — in fact, he didn’t even realized he had crossed the Philosophical Zombie finish line.
“I had all these songs and I sent them to Noel and Jess to get their opinion and some perspective and they suggested that it was done,” he adds, “and I should just have it mixed and mastered and it would be done. I hadn’t considered this to be an option but the idea was really exciting and scary — this being the only time I’ve worked in ‘auteur’ fashion. And that’s pretty much it.”
Works for us. Listen to “Limbo” below…