Playing With Fire

Playing With Matches releases one of the most ambitious albums Springfield has seen. Hear three of the tracks right here, right now.

The first track on Playing With Matches’ self-titled debut LP is a minute and a half of dialogue. To the band, it’s a necessary element that sets up the rest of the album, but it’s the public’s opinion that will count when Playing With Matches hits stores May 12. After all, concept albums are a feast-or-famine proposition in the music business (Anyone remember Kilroy Is Here? Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto), and PWM’s is as ambitious as any, taking the script of a play, dialogue and all, and making it into the album’s lyrics sheet.

Color the band unconcerned. Bassist Andy Marshall says when singer Derek Luna came up with the idea of Eugene, a rock singer who walks away from music only to rediscover why he loved it in the first place, Luna wrote the songs to stand on their own while keeping a cohesive plot. The band is so confident in the strength of the songs that Luna says they won’t be played in order during the band’s CD release party May 12 at Remmington’s Downtown. In other words, they will give an unconventional album the most conventional of shows: Play the best songs and crank the volume.

It’s not a bad idea, since their live show is the reason most music fans know who Playing With Matches is. For the band’s first full-length album (It released an EP a couple of years ago) it called on producer Brandon Sammons and engineer Kevin Gates, guitarist for A Day Away. All of them set up shop in a house-turned-studio to record during six weeks in March and April. The entire record was recorded one instrument at a time; none of the band members got to record together during the process. The finished product, however, has generated unanimous excitement from the band, producer and engineer. “I’m really just awestruck that we pulled it off to this extent,” Marshall says.

Hear three tracks from the new Playing With Matches CD: