No more secrets – Brass Bed set to release The Secret Will Keep You

When you see Lafayette’s indie rock band Brass Bed live, you’ll notice quite a different beast than what’s on record.

On stage, the band is this visceral, pop-rock animal, not afraid to take Neil Young-style detours into fuzzy feedback while whipping through its sunnier, hook-laden tracks.

Up to this point, the band has never matched that immediacy on its records. Singer/multi-instrumentalist Christiaan Mader knows this sentiment all too well.

“With our previous albums, a lot of the recording process was discovering what recording in studios was like,” Mader says. “We were getting lost in these toy stores rather than thinking of what we were trying to say.”

Fans would come up to the band after shows, full of compliments, only to get a copy of 2008’s Midnight Matinee or 2010’s Melt White and scratch their heads.

“We would make these fancy-pants, wistful recordings, and we couldn’t recreate it; so, we got louder,” Mader says. “People enjoyed us live, though, so we thought, ‘Maybe we should record this band getting louder.'”

Enter The Secret Will Keep You, Brass Bed’s third full-length album, but perhaps the first glance of what the band truly sounds like.

“This is the first time we could say sincerely and with pride that we had cohesion in lyrical content, sonic space, tone, and emotion,” Mader says. “We set some artistic goals for this one, and it is the first time we accomplished that.”

Tracked and mixed in about 20 days at Public Hi-Fi Studios in Austin with producer Danny Reisch, the band didn’t have time to tinker with effects or “toys.” Rather, Brass Bed focused on arrangements and actual songs.

The result is as immediate as the band’s live performance, with tracks like “Bullet For You” finding the balance between studio space and more typical song structures. The song features a guitar solo freakout that rivals Wilco’s latter day Crazy Horse homages. These refined performances are turning new heads—NPR’s All Songs Considered featured the band’s ode to bitter love, “Cold Chicory.”

You can check out the band perform the record live in its entirety as well as two new music videos at Theatre 810, 810 Jefferson St. in Lafayette, Friday and Saturday night at 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 and come with a CD copy of The Secret Will Keep You. For more information on the event, click here.