by Holli Stephens
A detailed illustration of drummer Matt Uychich’s grandmother, who wears a smirk of neither pleasure nor regret and has her hair swept up behind her bangs, has become the face of The Front Bottoms latest release, Rose. The six-track EP contains songs that the New Jersey natives have previously performed live, but had never got the chance to record in a studio.
Lead vocalist Brian Sella talks excitedly as he explains Rose’s process. The actual recording took about three days and included the accompaniments of Tom Warren on flute and bass and Ciaran O’Donnell on keys, trumpet, and guitar. Listening to Rose you still get the personal lyricism of heartbreak and coming to terms with life that Sella so genuinely demonstrates. However, the overall sound is so much bigger.
“Being in a real, nice recording studio really helped. You have access to a lot more. The earlier stuff is a lot more acoustic because we didn’t have access to many instruments and we didn’t know how to play other instruments. We had the ability to do more and add more sounds and mic in different ways.”
Even though the EP was bound to be a success Sella says that the most difficult part about releasing Rose was convincing everyone else that it was a good idea. “The original songs have so much personality to them and if you listened to us years ago those are the songs you listened to. They’re not mastered or anything like that. You like them for what they were.”
Sella was more enthusiastic than hesitant to record. He saw it as motivation to rework and relearn old material that fans enjoyed at one point in their career. Every song is either Sella’s personal story or a friend’s and all six have ended up having common themes amongst them. Ironically, “they were taken from a pool that was floating around.”
Sella’s favorite to record, “Jim Bogart” is one he feels stays true to itself even though the recording was different from the original. Warren and O’Donnell played a big role in making the insane progressive chords and the song serves as an ode to one of Sella’s good friends from high school that had recently passed.
Rose couldn’t have came out at a better time as the band has been touring since the 10th of June. The Front Bottoms are on the road with Say Anything and Sella is especially anxious to play for the first time at the Electric Factory. “It’s one of those venues that I’ve always heard about, but never got the chance to play in. Hopefully there will be a lot of people there and it will be awesome.”
Sella requests for me to look up the venue’s capacity and sounded giddy with happiness when I told him that it fits approximately 3,000. The vibes that Philadelphia gives The Front Bottoms is at an all time high as the band played some of their earliest shows in people’s houses and various bars throughout the city. Sella thinks back to one of their first venue shows at North Star Bar and is grateful because it was one of many weekend tour options they’d have when booking places in Philadelphia.
As the summer progresses Sella hopes to stay busy and tour. He knows they’ll go home to New Jersey in August for a short time before packing up and setting out to Europe to play at festivals in Leeds and Reading, England. You can catch The Front Bottoms at the Electric Factory on Thursday along with Say Anything, The So So Glos and You Blew It!.
