Listen to ‘Roof of the World’, the new single from Brooklyn indie-folk project Owlbiter taken from the forthcoming new LP, Stud Farm, out on August 10th. Led by Matt Cascella, Owlbiter’s new album is composed of 12 tracks full of gently plucked acoustic guitars and ukuleles, drowsy brass and the occasional keyboard atmospherics, but very little percussion—a result of the keep-it-simple approach Cascella sought when Owlbiter was in its nascent stages despite having grown up playing the drums. Owlbiter shines all the brighter in this low-key setting and deserves to be more on a lot more radars.
Talking about the ‘keep it simple’ approach for the album Cascella explains “The band that I’d been playing in for five, six years crumbled fast. There were a lot of unfinished ideas still kicking around in my head. I didn’t want to go into a studio and make it a big ordeal. I didn’t really have a band, I just had some oddball ideas, and I wanted to keep things scrappy. Get a good buddy of mine to come over and not think too much—just have at it, keep it really bare bones. There’s a trombone but, other than that, it’s pretty much bare minimum, which is how I wanted to do it.”
The good buddy he mentions is James Downes, who engineered and produced Stud Farm, and played guitar. Cascella wrote and sung the songs, which were embellished at times by Jeff Doyle (keyboards), Jimmy O’Donnell (trombone) and Cascella’s fiancé Jen Cordery (backing vocals).
The ramshackle but intimate environment in which the album was recorded became an essential part of its charm. “Most of Stud Farm was tracked in my apartment in Brooklyn and the rest in James’ apartment,” Cascella says. “We dealt with construction going on in both apartments at the time, which was pretty comical. There’s a playground outside, so occasionally you’ll hear children cheering and crying. There are a lot of accidental, horrendous sounds most producers would frown upon—fortunately, we weren’t aiming for sterile perfection because the record is definitely far from that. People are always like, ‘I did this bedroom recording,’ and it sounds like Mark Ronson produced it. It’s like ‘Where’s the bedroom?’ So we wanted to stick to our guns and not overdo it, just keep the songs really simple.”
Stud Farm (out Aug. 10) was influenced by artists like John Prine, Ivor Cutler & Harry Nilsson, who often tell stories that lead with a sense of humour first and then sneak the pathos in there without the listener even realizing. “It’s probably a defense mechanism, but I have a hard time with being too serious and melodramatic about things,” Cascella says. “And I think my favorite stuff, whether it’s film, books or music, is straddling the line between comedy and sadness.”
Stud Farm is a charming, subtly moving record. Cascella sees it as part of a progression for him as an artist. “I think that comes from being a little bit more comfortable with the rawness and nakedness of the record,” he explains. “With my old projects, it always turned into a production. Not that this wasn’t a production, but it was liberating as far as, ‘Ok, I can make something on the scrappier side that still has heart and soul and doesn’t need all this trickery and crazy songwriting. And that kind of simplicity is really where I’m at.”
https://owlbiter.bandcamp.com/
Photo Credit: Owlbiter‘s Matt Cascella – by Dave Adams