We have a new full-length album, available Oct. 4 on all the streaming services. It's called "DrizzleFizzle," and it's the best thing we've done yet! Pre-orders are available now (including a limited edition CD version) on our Bandcamp page. Stay tuned for shows on Oct. 4 in Milwaukee and Oct. 5 in Chicago to celebrate!
Here's something Ike Turner (Minutes, OUT, Wowza in Kalamazoo) wrote about the album:
“All my life I was second best”
Ottumwa, a town of just a shade over 25,000, is situated in southeastern Iowa. There’s a very strong case to be made (outlined in Nick Reding’s Methland) that the national methamphetamine crisis was born there, spearheaded by actor Tom Arnold’s sister, Lori, who herself is probably an actual genius. She herself was far, far more significant than her “famous” brother.
This juxtaposition of the Norman Rockwell identikit of “ideal” American city with a public scourge the likes of which have been rivaled only by crack cocaine and the fairly recent pill epidemic is a key to unlocking the music of my favorite Ottumwa product, John Huston: Shit is pretty chill and cool until it gets very very unchill and very very bonkers on the turn of a dime. That trip to the bathroom for a key bump can become a fistfight in Smoker’s Alley real quick.
Huston’s long-running, Chicago-based Stomatopod have distilled their at-times-familiar-at-times-what-the-fuck sound down to its essential parts, and in doing so have created their strongest album to date.
Aided by Sharon Maloy (ex-The Dishes, Bender) on bass and backing vocals, and Elliot Dicks (of Nerves and fFlashlights) on drums, Huston fashions a song cycle that is at once tight and focused, yet in no way averse to peregrinations. The scorched-earth “Tiger Rider” blisters along, calling to mind early 90’s Chicago power pop mainstays Material Issue, with Maloy’s sugary backing vocals and bouncing bass. I have no clue what this song is about, but I feel badly for the main character here! Shit seems NOT GREAT for her.
The taut “Someone Else’s Enemies” is punctuated by Dick’s INSTANTLY recognizable snare (please try to see them play if only to witness Dick’s amazing hair flailing around in full Animal mode). Here again, the battles picked of where to deploy Maloy is expertly decided. She adds a patina of charm to everything she touches.
The centerpiece of the album is Huston’s finest song, “Ocean Slider.” I mean that quite literally, too. I’ve been listening to his music for years and years (we bonded in a hotel room at a music festival over a shared love of Roseanne), and this song winnows down his strengths into one brief glimmer of beauty. Recalling his short-lived, well-loved project Mars Hill, “Ocean Slider” unfolds like a sunset on the prairie, one I’m certain Huston witnessed thousands of times growing up where he did. When the song takes off, we’re in a smoky club in South Bend or Ann Arbor or Milwaukee in 1992, with only promise and fortune and marriages and kids in front of us. But “no one’s ever really good or smart enough; no one ever wants to be the runner up,” but at the end of the day we need Salieri as much as we do Mozart. This song scratches a very particular itch if you came up in a scene in the Midwest.
This is his finest work; he spins five plates at once and then dips out for a smoke break.
DrizzleFizzle (yes, that is what they named their album) is the most cohesive statement the band has created, and leaves me stoked for what is to come for this band.
I’m proud to know these fools, and I’m extra proud to know that someone from the veritable middle of nowhere has the rounds in the chamber to unload something as important as this work. That he’s aided by two willing compatriots in “this thing of ours” only speaks to what a significant BAND they are at this stage in their arc.
– Isaac Turner, Kalamazoo, Mich.
August 2024
