It was all the same/just filled with rain/move our
doors to second floors and carry on...
As sea levels rose to slowly engulf the streets in his riverbound Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown, singer/guitarist Steve Yutzy-Burkey (The Swimmers) began to envision the surrounding houses gradually drifting apart into islands. Soon a stream of demos, awash in synthesizers and fractured mid-tempo drum loops, reached Alex Yaker on keyboards (Roomtone), Rick Sieber on bass (The Swimmers) and Mike Kennedy on drums (Audible, Lefty’s Deceiver), who helped reconstruct them into dynamic full band arrangements.
Static Shapes managed only one live performance before the pandemic forced the band to reconfigure. During lockdown, the members shifted to record remotely, each in their own houses adrift in the rising waters, sometimes connected by long microphone cables draped out of windows. The original premonitions of flooded neighborhoods deepened with meaning as the world sunk into the new era of a pandemic. As tracks floated in, Mike Kennedy assembled them into cohesive focus as he mixed the songs in his home studio.
Steeped in the anxious isolation of 2020, Give Me The Bad News drifts at times from disaster to personal connection to loss and hope, all the while wrapping the listener in warm home studio production.