The Winter Coats Release Third Album

Category: music 151

Spillover is the third record by Fredericton noise duo The Winter Coats and their first new music in more than five years.

Matt Carter 

The Winter Coats are here one minute and gone the next. Like the music they play, their very existence seems spontaneous and improvised.  They’ll surface for a show or two and then it might be a year or more before we hear from them again. And it’s been that way since the beginning, nearly a decade ago. So we should appreciate these brief moments of here when they’re here. And right now they’re here. 

Sometime back around 2014, the Fredericton noise duo started exploring ideas for a new recording. It may have taken six years, but new music from The Winter Coats has finally arrived. Spillover, the third album of original music performed by Garcia (guitar) and LeNoir (percussion), is a collection of free-form improvisations complied from studio sessions and live performances. 

As Garcia explains, the inspiration behind this latest batch of recordings bears a surprising resemblance to our current pandemic reality. 

The music and atmosphere were inspired by, and the album named after, David Qaummen’s extraordinary 2012 book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, which I read back around 2013. In short, the book traces the work done by scientist ‘detectives’ who risked their lives to find the animal sources of recent epidemics like Ebola, SARS, Bird Flu, Lyme Disease and others. The book is both dark and optimistic, the stories and their real life characters are fascinating and bold, the locales are exotic and frightening – the perfect ingredients for a Winter Coats record.”

The Winter Coast have been described as “LSD on acid.”  That’s a pretty solid description. They play music for fans of noise. There are no obvious structures or forms holding the tracks on Spillover together, but that doesn’t mean they are without melody or rhythm. If improv music is a series of questions and answers, The Winter Coats seem quite content to ask the questions. The answers, those are up to us. 

Spillover was recorded at the Fuzz Royale and other live venues in Fredericton and Saint John and the album’s cover art was done by Winnipeg songwriter and artist Christine Fellows.

Spillover is available now through Bandcamp for $5.

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