Relatively speaking, it hasn’t been too long since we last heard from Brighton band ME REX, the solo-project-turned-full-band spearheaded by Myles McCabe and filled out by Kathryn Woods, Phoebe Cross and Rich Mandel – all current or former members of Fresh, Cheerbleederz and Happy Accidents (seriously, those three are in so many bands) – as they released their most recent EP Stegosaurus last November. They’d been working on something else while all that was going on, though, and it’s a laudably ambitious affair.
Out Friday June 18th through Big Scary Monsters, the quartet’s debut album Megabear is a 52-song record made up of short segments from 30 seconds to one minute in length, composed so that the tracks may be listened to in—get this—a damn-near infinite combination of orders. 8.06e+67 to be precise. That’s 8 with 67 zeros after it. A different experience in musical and narrative form every time – and it works.
It hits streaming services in two weeks, with BSM pressing what amounts to a canonically-ordered tracklist to vinyl on Friday August 23rd, but in the meantime, acting as a proof-of-concept of sorts, ‘Galena’, made up of five of those 52 segments, is streaming below as the single from the album. In addition, the whole thing is available to stream through this dedicated website. They even made a Jono Ganz-designed tarot card deck!
