We have not had many of these instances, but this was another case where we may have never met and now that we have, we can’t get away from the other and tis good. The Silent Years join the ranks of Jesse Elliott and David Strackany of These United States and Paleo respectively, along with Casey Dienel, as musicians that we might never have had the distinct pleasure of meeting without some kind of intervention – divine or otherwise – to smoosh us together like two sides of a live PB&J. The Detroit band happened to be on tour with Paleo and Master Strackany told them that Daytrotter was a place they needed to spend a few hours (he was awarded no money for his endorsement and recommendation, but the man would have just been a blusher had we done that). We got an e-mail to this extent and after we listened to their disc, there was agreement all about and so the date – an evening in November — was set for a get-together. On their way to Chicago, the session probably needed to move along faster than it did as lead singer Josh Epstein’s girlfriend was taking a train to see him there and shortly into the lengthy trip, she’d already called to tell him that she was bored. He worried about the wrath that his tardiness would bring, but the extra time we had with them made these recordings turn out swimmingly. Two songs are new songs that needed some tightening up before they were ready to lay down and when they’re heard below – in their first ever recorded forms – there’s no sense of them being green. What Epstein and his band do with atmosphere and space is they breath it all in and let it mix with their cells. They sound as if they were meant for the very places they co-habit with when they play. They did the same thing when they returned in March to play a show with The Broken West and Death Ships that we’d set up in Huckleberry’s pizza parlor on a Sunday night. They went punk rock and played a full-band set that pooled together all of the intricacies of the room – some flora at the front and the wooden tables covered in checkered tablecloths – and then proceeded to enrapture everyone there. If you’d put a mirror in the room that night they were recording, perhaps there wouldn’t have even been a reflection of them in the glass, just a square with some depth that you could reach into and not touch anyone. They were just there, making it happen, abiding by the very laws of construction that they set forth on their self-titled debut album, which seem to require shape-shifting and loose-fitting dimensions that let them find the air currents and the vibrations that suit them best and then they can flick on the Cheshire Cat makeup and be gone, but remain there still to make the sounds of glory. – Sean Moeller
  
First song
Open Up Our Eyes (The Silent Years) [5.61MB] [1675 downloads]


– unreleased
We wrote this song on a day off during a tour.  I’d had the verses and choruses floating around for a while, but the end came from playing the song together, and we tried to arrange the music in a very linear way.  The lyrics in the end are entirely open, and are only meant to convey whatever the listener gets from them.
 
Second song
Lidocaine (The Silent Years) [3.26MB] [1501 downloads]


– original version appears on The Silent Years
This song started out as a ridiculously lo-fi basement recording.  I got fascinated with the concept of a topical pain killer and began relating my experiences to it.  There are long breaths in the song which are meant to represent the loss of ambition and general apathy that I sense sometimes among my peers.

Third song
Untitled New Song (The Silent Years) [3.82MB] [1434 downloads]


– unreleased (obviously)
We began writing this song in the beginning of the tour that we were on when we came to do our session.  We wrote a ton of parts and threaded them together creating a winding and time signature shifting piece. We should really think of a title for it…Any ideas?
 
Fourth song
Sharks (The Silent Years) [3.92MB] [1474 downloads]


– original version appears on _The Silent Years_ 
This song was written after Pat got divorced.  It began as my attempt at describing his situation.  Almost immediately when we began playing it, I related it less and less to that, and the concepts have continued to become more universal.  It was probably the easiest song on the record to record for some reason.