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billing luna / gravel road castle

by Stray Owls

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1.
Billing Luna 02:17 video
2.
Gravel Road Castle 02:58

about

Things fall apart.

Bandmates move to different towns. Houses catch on fire. If bad luck can happen, it happens.

When life handed Stray Owls lemons, however, this rural North Carolina fuzz-folk band didn't fold. They took those lemons and they made righteous noise. The Mebane trio returns with the Billing Luna / Gravel Road Castle single, a two-song followup to 2017's A Series of Circles. Singer/guitarists Scott Griffiths and Matt French continue to fuse traditional storytelling with stream-of-conscious imagery, resulting in a distinctive style that is all at once familiar, but also strange; concise, yet sprawling; refined, yet unhinged. Since the 2017 LP, it's worth noting, the band's longtime engineer Jerry Kee (whose Duck Kee studios has recorded such notable acts as Superchunk, Polvo, and early Ryan Adams) joined as its full-time drummer, turning what had been a duo into a rounded trio.

But we haven't gotten to the bad luck yet, have we? We haven't covered why Stray Owls' new songs almost didn't see the light of day. We haven't gotten to the January fire that damaged Jerry's home and studio. And we haven't gotten to Scott's relocation to Asheboro, about an hour's drive from his Stray Owls bandmates. Yet the trio has plugged on, doggedly pursuing new music, and the tracks on the new single were quite literally plucked from the ashes of the Duck Kee fire.
Both songs were saved on a hard drive that somehow survived, and their sound communicates Stray Owls' stubborn persistence in the face of shit luck. "Billing Luna" opens with the cicada-like buzz of a discordant keyboard before moving into minimalist, Troggs-reminiscent garage rock, while "Gravel Road Castle" invites fuzzy, effected guitars into what, at its core, is a bucolic, John Fahey-influenced folk instrumental. With Billing Luna / Gravel Road Castle ready to be released into the wild, Stray Owls is already at work on songs for its next album.

Things fall apart, sure. But sometimes they fall back together again.

-CH May 2018

credits

released August 24, 2018

Songs by Stray Owls.
Recorded by Jerry Kee
at Duck Kee Studio #8
with an overdub or two,
along with mixing and mastering,
at Jerry's apartment in Mebane, NC
in late 2017 / early 2018.


Scott Griffiths: guitar / vocals
Matt French: guitar / vocals / keys
Jerry Kee: drums / percussion

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Stray Owls Mebane, North Carolina

Influences include Neil Young, early Pink Floyd, Grandaddy, The Kinks, and 13th Floor Elevators.

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