SOUNDTRACKING: With The Frontman Of “Disappears”, A Chicago Band Of Bartenders

by Daniel Colussi | Rarely does a band’s name so rightly capture their aural aesthetic, but Disappears is the perfect name for what these guys do. They craft hazy visions of half forgotten memories. They’re dream house-livers. They’re ghost riders, patrolmen of lost highways. But as people, they’re much more straight forward. Frontman Brian Case is a longtime indie-rocker, and in the following conversation he sheds light on playing tunes, being a bartender, and everything else that maketh a Chicago psych rocker tick.

What I’ve heard so far from Pre Language, the new album, sounds a little more reined in than the last two. The overall sound seems a bit less gauzy, less hazy, and more focused. What was the plan going into this recording? What kind of album did you want to record? And what did having Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth drummer) on board bring to recording proceedings? Well, we definitely didn’t want to make a record like we had before. We move pretty fast in terms of writing, and in the past the recording process mirrored that. This time we had a few more resources available to us (Steve’s studio) and a little more time to work. We really just wanted to do what was best for the songs, which is always the goal, but this time we were a little more considered than we have been in the past. Lux and Guider were each recorded in 2 days and mixed in 2 days by a member of the band in the same studio. This time we had someone to engineer, someone to mix and two separate studios – gives you a little more breathing time and helps keep your head clear.

I was a fan of 90 Day Men, and thinking back to when that band was around, it feels like a different era from today. It feels like there’s just so much more music/labels/bands/etc than ever before. Do you have any thoughts or reflections on how “indie rock” music/culture has evolved in the last 10-15 years? Oh my god, I think about this all the time. Yes, things are so completely different. I mean, when 90 Day Men was around, people were worried about promo’s being sold before release date, not your record being available to anyone who felt like googling your band name. The internet was such a small, tiny part of independent music culture then – it’s so hard to illustrate how it has become a major force in creating, marketing, selling, hyping, and ultimately destroying bands today. Great question that we could talk about for hours. Read more