your new year’s resolution should be to listen to more connecticut music. and lucky you, Zanders is here to help you achieve your goals. yes, this is a post about new Zanders music. i know, i’m incredibly excited too. Zanders was one of my first ct music memes, after all (a dubious honor).
today, Zanders announce their third album: Concentration Sixty-Four. it comes out on January 24th through Funnybone Records, it’s got a dozen tracks, and you can listen to one of those dozen tracks (“Traces”) right now. [see below]. Concentration Sixty-Four follows Buried Men (2015) and Been Better (2014), so it’s been a while since we’ve gotten new music from the band. but they haven’t been strangers — if you’ve seen one of their amazing live shows in the past two years, you’ve heard some of these songs before. they’re bigger, more elaborate, and more ambitious than anything Zanders has done before.
the landscape of connecticut music is varied: you can find pockets of metal, punk, americana, country, hip hop, and electronica throughout. but the only band that sounds like Zanders is Zanders — their art-pop rock-n-roll is unique. part Gershin, part Bowie (Hunky Dory era). or as stereogum put it, part Fiona Apple, part Regina Spektor. go on and take a listen to “Traces”, and you’ll see what i mean. the playful piano riff is the stage for vivid, tactile lyrics (Alex Saraceno); the chorded bass (Kevin O’Donnell) and responsive drums (John Rule III) are happy to follow, starting and stopping on a dime, ready to erupt when the song calls for it. the song is set to be the closing track for Concentration Sixty-Four, giving the new album a beautiful, fantastic (in both senses of the word) finale.
Concentration Sixty-Four debuts on January 24th, but you should click through to the bandcamp link so that you can pre-order it right now.
