Disappears overcomes key loss with a little help from Sonic Youth
The Chicago band Disappears was on a roll, having just finished their third album in two years last summer when they faced up to the inevitable: Drummer, producer and cofounding member Graeme Gibson was ready to move on.
Gibson was also playing with the folk-rock band The Fruit Bats, originally from Chicago but now based in the Pacific Northwest, where it is signed to Sub Pop Records. Meanwhile, Disappears had “Guider” (Kranky) ready to release, an album that refines the band’s signature elements -- trance-like rhythms and dense, reverb-soaked guitar – and also expands them, with the 16-minute drone-rock epic “Revisiting.”
The band was in a great place musically, but Gibson’s departure cast some doubt on its future.
“We all saw it coming,” Disappears singer-guitarist Brian Case says. “The Fruit Bats were touring a lot, and musically that’s where Graeme’s head is at. He wanted to move to Portland to be closer to them. Our band started through friendship and last year we all sat down with him and told him it’s OK if he wanted to go. It was hard for all of us. He’s an awesome drummer, engineer and producer. He was really important to the development of this band. And we were concerned about what was going to happen without him. But I think we found a pretty decent replacement.”
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