The first of a three-part, 23-song saga from Charleston’s Little Bird, Alpha, is a little bit jam band, a little bit jazz, a little bit indie rock, some R&B – and add some spacey synths in there for fun. Beta and Gamma will come later this year, bringing two years of writing, recording, and really settling into the sounds to the light of day as Proxima. It’s super groovy, but in a way that’s still precise and clean.
The video for the stand out track, “Mega Hot Super Babe,” is inversely a whole big glorious mess of an extra low budget serial killer movie. The laid-back drumming from Oleg Terentiev along with Noah Jones’ lounge-esque piano noodling and guitarist/vocalist Jay Hurtt’s refined voice are all at odds with the intentionally disjointed editing and buckets of fake blood. The guys get one-offed by a (yep) mega-hot super babe serial killer (including Ben Mossman on bass and Jim Rubush on guitar) in a series of darwin-award ridiculous scenarios.
Of the video and EP, Hurtts says,
“We came up with the song title ‘Mega Hot Super Babe’ and we kept repeating it out loud all day, it had this great mouthfeel; 80’s ski-lodge meets MTV Beach House. The song was written in a few hours the following day and is about gender equality, and self-love; the video is just a trip. Proxima is a social commentary of the various human life experiences on Earth. Proxima as in Latin for “nearest” or ‘Proxima Centauri,’ the closest star to the sun. We wanted to contrast Proxima from our last record, Familiar, which explored looking within and remembering the past. Proxima is about looking out, observing the present, and thinking for ourselves, preparing for whatever comes next.
ALPHA, the first EP of a three-part EP series, is the most experimental yet most familiar-sounding to our listeners–it’s the beginning transition from the old Little Bird to the new.
We’ve been working on the music of Proxima for quite some time. The span of ALPHA and GAMMA is about two years, from the idea hitting us to actually pressing the record. It’s wild to hear the growth from the first EP of the series through the final EP, you can listen to us settle in by the second EP, BETA, where we start to take our time and really get comfortable which is cool. In the past, we’ve recorded in some studio paying $$$’s a day to record but for this compilation, we were in our own space and it was the first time we recorded something that feels like ‘ourselves.’ We produced it all ourselves at Mega Hot Records in Charleston, SC, we sent it to our dear friend & mixing engineer, the great Jeff Lucci, and after he got a hold of it, it started to really come alive.”
So, Alpha still has that fresh feeling to it – a little bit like that optimistic, not-a-care-in-the-world feeling of a kid who still gets excited about Christmas. Though, that’d be one super talented kid, so let’s just make it a child prodigy. In keeping with this metaphor, the Trio of EP’s chronicles their journey through the universal human experience of trauma and the growth that results. There is a tinted lens of naiveté thrown on this surveillance of humanity, but it’s highly intentional.
Listen to Alpha, out Feb 12, exclusively here:
Follow Little Bird on Instagram/ Twitter, and listen on Bandcamp / Spotify