With Biffy/Thrice-approved noise rockers Modern Rituals into their third album cycle by late 2021, bassist Rob Hollamby took advantage of a recent redundancy to consider this question and write Legendary Parties, his first EP as Fuzzy Heart. Sonically influenced by The Weakerthans, Hold Steady, Mountain Goats etc, his debut EP delivers five tracks of wordy indie rock about office work being terrible, and partying too hard as a result. Today, we’re giving it a proper attention with a deep dive into each and every track, and a first-hand commentary from Rob below.
Legendary Parties is out on Friday, February 10th. You can listen to it on Bandcamp, Spotify and all the other places. Follow Fuzzy Heart on Instagram or Twitter, or get in touch on [email protected].
Fuzzy Heartโs debut EP Legendary Parties track by track:
Ernesto Plays Guitar
Legendary Parties mostly concerns itself with what it means to be a middle-class, white-collar worker in London and the Home Counties. Write what you know, right?
On first track โErnestoโ, we find the protagonist bored out of their mind in a sea of emails. Grateful for the comfort that their employment provides, but in the midst of one of those soft little existential crises that are the luxury of the privileged.
For the first time, they watch this video, having been sent it by a friend.
48:30-50:50 reminds them that thereโs still ample time to pick up a guitar and rip, despite all the voices in their head telling them that theyโre too old, that theyโre talentless, that they have nothing to contribute to the world.
If you know those voices: they are mostly just you, and theyโre mostly wrong. Fuck those voices. Pick up the guitar and rip, you legend.
Legendary Parties
When you spend most of your waking life at a desk doing something inconsequential, you need something to balance the boredom. Some people find that balance in healthy endeavours: the London Marathon, cycling from Landโs End to John OโGroats, spending their free time at the business end of a Samaritans phone line.
Some people though. Well, God help โem, they like to get fucked up. So I thought Iโd write them a dumbass D-C-G anthem to yell in the living room at 4am.
At the outset of โLegendary Partiesโ, we join our narrator neck-deep in a case of what Paul Westerberg so eloquently calls the Nightclub Jitters.
Theyโre skulling lone beers on their way to a house party, tamping down the pre-sesh nerves, supplies squirrelled away in paranoid places.
Once our protagonist hits the party, they do what they have to do. If youโve been here, you know how the arc goes. Itโs good, itโs brilliant, itโs transcendent, and then itโs not. Luckily, this person has a pretty decent group around them to cushion their fall. Iโm a big advocate of telling your friends that you love them, as loudly and lavishly as possible, and โLegendary Partiesโ is nothing if not that.
WFH, Listening to Smog
Iโd been through a very, very dry spell as regards songwriting โ years, I think โ when I made myself write โWFHโ as a kind of exercise. The brief was โno chord sequence too basicโ, so itโs E and A, with the odd D thrown in. The lyrics are absolutely literal and could generously be called โtweeโ, but more accurately โlazyโ.
That said, โWFHโ is on the EP for a reason. Two, in fact.
The first is that, simple as it is, โWFHโ is a pretty decent snapshot of the malaise that comes with getting up early for work every day, coming home, falling asleep early in front of the TV, and doing the whole damn thing ad nauseam.
The second is that when we came to record, I put loads of carsick arpeggios and wonky leads over it. This lets me pretend that the song sounds like some of my favourite underrated UK bands: The Lunchtime Sardine Club, Eugene Quell and the mighty Brunch. These are all bands you should listen to right now.
Full of Stars
Letโs get the happier stuff out the way first โ the riff that opens this song is a great example of how letting yourself get away with things can open up a whole song. Without that dumb chord sequence, which I played once and decided โthatโll doโ, this song probably wouldnโt exist, and Iโd never have spent hours refining the quite-good lead part in the right ear.
That aside, โFull of Starsโ is an unpleasant little number. Itโs narrated by the same person as โLegendary Partiesโ. From the same house party, in fact. But itโs all the bits in between the dancing, the singing, the five-person bearhugs that feel like youโre communing with the cosmos.
This person spends a bit too much time in their own head, and a bit too much time alone in the toilet. Theyโre on the verge of figuring out that their vices arenโt going to make them feel better. But in the meantime, theyโre chasing an ascent heavenward โ one thatโs probably not gonna come, but maybe one more bump couldnโt hurt?
In any case, they wake up alone and unhappy. Their friends are worried and pissed off, having spent the previous night rattling at the toilet door. Our hero descends into the greedy maw of a black hole thatโs become far too familiar. Sorry, pal. Maybe next time.
From a Thameslink Luggage Rack
Thought I was dead clever when I came up with the title for this, sat in the titular space on a rammed commuter train. It lived in Notes on my phone for ages before I found the character for it โ a once-brilliant but washed-up ad man, Ogilvy gone to seed and put out to pasture to make way for new blood.
Bizarrely, I wrote โThameslinkโ long before the redundancy that afforded me the time and money to record Legendary Parties. To sing the song after everything that went down is a weird kind of time-travelling catharsis.
I tried to make โThameslinkโ occupy a similar space to Cymbals Eat Guitars, Photo Album-era Death Cab, or recent Sinai Vessel. I wasnโt convinced by the results until some key contributions from friends.
Tom Hill, who recorded and mixed the EP, laid some lovely chords over the first chorus. Harry Fanshawe of Lifter recorded a massive billowing guitar solo that sounds like a rocket taking off.
My old friend Joe Gilder, who mastered the EP, provided a twinkling bed of keys that stopped my chug from getting too pedestrian. Thank you, boys.
