It wasn’t too long ago that we bounced off the walls to Philosophical Zombie’s stomping, infectious October single “Limbo.” Now, the band, which began as a solo project from former Age Rings’ frontman Ted Billings, is here on New Release Friday (still sounds weird, eh) with their debut album, Loneliness Is Blue And Not Blue, and Vanyaland is psyched to present the entire LP, led by another track off the record which you can download for the Nice Price of #free — the buzzy, riffy, and beautifully distorted “All Men.”
Loneliness Is Blue And Not Blue is out today via Killer Wail Records — score it via Bandcamp or iTunes — and as we noted last month, it’s a new-ish label created by Jessica Zambri (formerly of Zambri) and Noel Heroux (Mass Gothic, ex-Hooray For Earth). Billings recorded it last year after returning to Massachusetts after a spell in Brooklyn, using an electric guitar, a bass, one microphone, and a laptop. “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 told us a few weeks ago. “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.”
That rawness will be in full display when Philosophical Zombie play O’Brien’s Pub in Allston on November 18, a Very Clicky Clicksgiving show with ‘gazers Prom Night and fuzzy indie rock band New Dark Arts. Listen to “All Men” below.