Carrboro Southern psych-rockers Some Army are aiming to fund their debut LP via—you guessed it—popular crowdsourcing platform Kickstarter. Early February will see the start of a 30-day campaign, with the band setting its sights on respected North Carolina producer, musician, and sound engineer Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium Studio.
“It’s going to be a dark, soulful, psych-pop record,” says songwriter Russell Baggett. “We hope to raise $7,000 to make it. Yikes.”
Some Army has gathered a pool of some 15 songs, which will be tightened and narrowed down to 10 or 11 tracks before the band goes into the studio. The existing catalog—two 7″ singles and one hell of an EP—reveals a band of respectable potential, both in its confidently nuanced lyricism and Wilco-meets-Grandaddy, wall-of-jangle aesthetic. And while Baggett’s usual home-recording approach is to take his time and layer on instruments as he thinks of them, he’s excited to make a record quickly—in a week, he says—and arrange the new songs more deliberately.
If the campaign is successful, recording will start this summer, though Baggett is aware that a Kickstarter campaign is no guarantee. Some fail, and it may be an imperfect model. After weighing their options, though, the members of Some Army realized this was probably their best bet for recording in the analog studio of their choice and then having the album professionally mastered.
“We have a clear vision for these new songs and we think they deserve to be recorded professionally,” Baggett says. “It’s pretty straightforward—if enough people agree, we’ll get that chance.”