NEWS + MP3: Bro, Brah is going Home w/ new album and digital box set

Home, as tame a name as can be, is a Tampa-based group that has long been known for its lo-fi, DIY aesthetic--the sort of mechanisms that can be discovered and recovered via a long list of current niche and mircolabels. Perhaps sticking your head out of the indie rabbit hole once in awhile will show you the world you're missing. So hopes Home and Brah, which exists under the Secretly Canadian/Jagjaguwar, snuggled up next to Dead Oceans.

Home is readying XVII for a January 26th release, but to introduce the band's earliest recordings to the world at large, the metaphysical 8 discs of digitally altered I - VIII, chronicling Home's rudimentary recordings from as far back as 1991 is hitting the internet-at-large.

Sample the first taste of XVII while you read the testimonials!

Home - "Photographed with Ease"

The lo-fi opus began unintentionally in 1991 when Eric Morrison and Andrew Deutsch, sharing a small Tampa apartment, began to use a Radio Shack "supertape" to mix down their latest songs. When the tape was filled, it seemed to fill at least the technical definition of an album. Twenty cassette copies were dubbed, loaded into a candy jar and placed on the counter of Tampa's Blue Chair Music, where they were sold for $1 -- which also gave you the OK to grab some candy out of the jar. Over the next two years, Home -- joined now by bassist Brad Truax and drummer Sean Martin -- recorded seven more tapes in the same manner, on gradually less-crude equipment, refilling the candy jar each time. That said, it's high time you get yourself some candy, dudes.

The forthcoming record is very much inspired by the band's early forays in home recording. Recently, the members converged on Devils Isle WetLab Studio to record the skeleton tracks for Home XVII and tackle the long-overdue digitizing and mastering of the first eight cassette albums. Somewhere in analyzing the tapes, Home became re-interested in the sound of songs in their genesis: the wholly imperfect object that is felt but not yet processed; the carefully crafted uber-story abandoned for passing fancy; the MS-16 fullness for the red-line compression of a 4-track. The result of this return is Home XVII, a scattershot sampling of moments and perspectives that awkwardly leaves archeological traces of cross-dressing and identity destruction.