Los Angeles progressive rock band PATTERN-SEEKING ANIMALS features the undoubted artistic abilities of current & former Spock’s Beard members: Ted Leonard, Jimmy Keegan & Dave Meros as well as long-time contributing songwriter-producer John Boegehold.
About the musical direction, Boegehold says: “My goal was to produce music that’s progressive and intricate while keeping things immediate and melodic. Whether a song is four minutes or ten minutes long, I didn’t want more than a few bars go by without some kind of instrumental or vocal hook.”
To begin, the project was only a vehicle for a few tracks Boegehold had been working on in early 2018.
He soon came up with enough music to work towards producing an album. With that in mind, he enlisted the talents of Keegan (drums & vox), Leonard (vox & guitar) & Meros (bass), with Boegehold handling the synths.
Boegehold adds: “Besides live strings on a few songs and a female backing vocalist on another, it was all done between the four of us with Dave and Ted ending up as co-writers on some of the material.”
With the band being manifestly connected with Spock’s Beard, John was aware of researching contrasting approaches to the sounds of P-S A in terms of musicality, voice arrangements, synths or emotional textures: “Pattern-Seeking Animals was a clean slate so I found myself drawing on a few different musical influences and using some contemporary production ideas and sounds that I probably wouldn’t use with SB for various reasons.”
Their second album “Prehensile Tales” (arf! arf!) is due May 20, 2020 via Sony / InsideOut
They’ve now shared the inspired new song “Elegant Vampires” (video below) taken from the album. It’s a highly polished performance with grunting bass, skidding synths, a gliding keyboard riff, jazzy carioca percussion and downshifting vocal-lines that glissade skilfully over the arrangements.
Leonard’s voice is honeyed and refreshing and, although the whole piece has a kinda 70s disco feel to it, it’s intricate and melodic enough to be accurately filed under “progressive rock” yet ought to appeal to prog-lite Styx/ Kansas fans as well as the choosier cognoscenti who might require something harder and more obviously convoluted.
File alongside: This Winter Machine, Flying Colors
Prehensile Tales is due May 15, 2020 PRE-ORDER NOW
Link: https://www.facebook.com/psanimals1
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