RUTHERFORD, New Jersey’s autumnal rock outfit Garcia Peoples are following up their live cassette from earlier in the year with a new album, Nightcap At Wits’ End, on October 9th; and they’re teasing that release with the brilliantly trippy little animation for lead track “One At A Time”. Have a watch of it with us, it’s down below.
They’re firing on all cylinders, are Garcia Peoples these days: if you count their collaborative live set with Chris Forsyth, People’s Motel Band, Nightcap At Wits’ End will be their fifth LP since the beginning of 2019. That’s a work ethic for ya.
The video for “One At A Time”, made by Beyond is Beyond is Beyond labelmate Kendra Amalie, brings the band into an astral, animated life; line drawings, pastels, watercolour washes give them spindly and blurry, Impressionist alter-egos.
The song emerges out of a coolly laidback blues, powered by organ shimmer, and heads out toward Document-era R.E.M. – that brilliant period when acoustic guitar and riff power made them such a force. There’s big, distorted crescendos that get reined back in by that peppermint-cool organ.
Garcia Peoples’ Derek Spaldo says of that crescendo-diminuendo thang that the band have got absolutely nailed in on “One At A Time”: “When I’m at my wits’ end, I try to slow down and self-soothe to return to a place of centeredness.
“Musically, the song has a similar simmering potency that builds to an eruption, then goes down, and back up again. These dynamics are like going through dark periods in life, and then having illuminating eureka moments of awareness, power, and hope.”
Oh, that brilliant album title? Rolling Stone’s David Fricke no less, reveals in teh album’s liner notes that “there is a real-life Wit’s End, a tavern of the band’s acquaintance in rural New York, along the state line not far from Black Dirt Studios where Garcia Peoples made their 2018 album, Cosmic Cash, and the epic-title-track adventure, 2019’s One Step Behind.”
Garcia Peoples’ Nightcap At Wits’ End will be released by Beyond is Beyond is Beyond Records on October 9th on digital, CD, trad black and two iterations of blue, yellow and orange vinyl. Choose your preference here.
You can also find Garcia Peoples on Bandcamp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
