After a few years of prolific songwriting, the Disco Biscuits have emerged with a new as-yet-untitled album, due out in September or October, that bassist Marc Brownstein tells Billboard.com will challenge its jam band-friendly fanbase.
“It’s totally different for us,” Brownstein says. “For one, we don’t improvise on the record. There’s no jamming. What we do is we jam live and what we do in the studio is compose. So this album’s worth of stuff that’s coming out is just a really interesting-composed record. It’s like electro, it’s got influences by a lot of music we listened to over the past few years like Chromeo. There’s also [British psy-trance band] Younger Brother, with Simon Posford and Benji Vaughan being producers on the new record.
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“So there are all kinds of crazy influences, and it’s also influenced by hip-hop, with two Philadelphia-area producers (Don Cheegro and Dirty Harry) have been working with us nonstop. They have a lot of production input for us, which kind of sets us in a different direction right off the bat. So it ends up sounding different and that’s just how musicians evolve.”
New tracks already getting stage time on the Disco Biscuits’ current tour include the Massive Attack-esque “Concrete,” the poppy (think Ween or Weezer) “Fish Out of Water” and the electro-funk sounding “You and I.” There are also two more albums’ worth of material floating around the Disco Biscuits’ universe. The first batch was originally slated to be the band’s new album until raw demos of song ideas were stolen and leaked on the Internet. Some of those songs, such as “Glastonbury” and “Shadow,” are being played live, as are more unreleased tunes, like “Mirrors,” “Rivers” and “M80.” It’s the latter group of tracks that Brownstein is still unsure how or when they will receive a proper release.
“Really what ended up happening was we wrote an absurd amount of music in the last three years and some of it has been debuted, some of it hasn’t,” Brownstein says.
What the bassist does know for sure is The Disco Biscuits are leaning towards making its upcoming studio release, a follow-up to 2002’s “Senor Boombox,” an independent affair.
“Right now we are free agents,” Brownstein says. “We haven’t decided. We’re feeling offers, and we’re basically just looking at who is out there, what they have to offer us and what we feel the best fit will be. A lot of people feel doing it yourself is the best way in this day and age.”
The band’s annual three day Camp Bisco festival, now in its eighth year, is scheduled for July 16-18 in upstate New York. Disco Biscuits will perform three different sets over the weekend, and will be joined by a diverse roster of bands and DJs including Nas and Damian Marley, STS9, Chromeo, Asher Roth, the Orb and Dr. Dog, among others.