Premiere: VoxEagle soars above the clouds with debut album, ‘TriumAvium’
If you try to catch Andy Crosby, your head’ll spin. The Aussie is a daredevil, in every sense of the word, and while you try to pin him down, he’s busy tearing up the floorboards, throwing out conventions and stoking a bonfire on his way to peak artistry. Flames lick at his heels as he races onward to the horizon, ca-cawing of synths, slinky hip-hop side-grinding and super-charged percussion expanding up from his shadow’s dusty imprint. With his debut long-player, TriumAvium, self-written and self-produced, the mastermind known onstage as VoxEagle plots a dangerously volatile mix of genres, weaving grunge-rock with the alternative and slickly-produced Top 40.
Uprooting his Manhattan lifestyle, Crosby, now a married man, holed up in a makeshift studio he affectionately calls The Eagles Nest. The Rocky Mountains tumbling down and away from his feet, the new location proved to be a suitable, rejuvenating backdrop, and his already-incisive focus narrowed even further. Where 2017’s Flamingo Paradiso, Pt. 1 EP alights, flapping between polished hooks and an easily-digestible commercialization, the new record sees the even-keeled music man taking real risks that pay off in grand, irresistible and distinctly bewitching ways. Ripped from the stagnation of the concrete jungle, he purchased a plot of land 9,000 feet in the sky with the Arapahoe State Forest sprawled and lush on the border. Creatively, that scenic view unlocked endless possibilities, and his integrity and passion for the music dangles in between flecks of synthetics and whipping production elements. “I began experimenting with as many sounds and genres as possible, throwing all the paint on the wall and then seeing what stuck,” he tells B-Sides & Badlands of the record, premiering today, ahead of its October 9 streetdate. “It’s a mash of Moogs, samplers, guitars, beats, pedals and singing.”
Crosby pops the top with “Stay a While,” a starched and snarling strobe-lit dance number, in which he hedges his bets but only teases what’s to come. “Won’t you stay awhile / Imaginate awhile / Fall over here / Oh, this road, spin around in reverse / Something’s in the air…,” he sings, spinning his heart-torn luck into scattered flood lights and warm bodies thrashing against each other. The club floor reaches scalding temperatures, and the gnawing primer indicates a far more intricate, genre-shattering progression. That infectious brilliance spills over onto “Race Fever,” which contains a silky chorus reminiscent of The Verve but smothered in modern tones. Admittedly, he says, “The danger was getting carried away with the creative process. There was no one there in the studio with me to say stop or alter the process this time.”
That freedom to play resulted in over 300 demos and various recordings piling up on his hard drives, so when it came to shuffling through the cream of the crop, nine songs seemed to fit the bill. His self-imposed deadline quickly approaching, Crosby trusted his instincts, letting the music speak louder than he had originally intended. “I didn’t want to create another pop record,” he says. “I wanted to make something where I sculpted every bit of the clay, from the studio build to the playing to the mixing to the release.”
“Wander,” featuring Pierre Fontaine, rushes with the gritty dazzle of a dreamy film noir-ish soundscape, passing through the past and the present, while “Too ‘Damned’ Awesome” bends between spoken word poeticism and trippy R&B glory. “No Sleep No Sleep” throbs with lustful intoxication, leading to the payoff in “Fast Car Fast Bitch,” a brazenly enticing closer that fits at home with the sizzle cinema of The Fast & the Furious franchise. Crosby’s touches are exuberant and often funkadelic, and he illustrates very little reservation in blurring styles with pure swagger. Feeling the music coursing through his veins, as he so nods with the rebelliously explosive “The Change,” a spacey mind-trip of burgeoning self-awareness and coming to terms with greater meaning. The speakers bust and crackle with each bass-heavy leap, and by the awe-inspiring finale, you’re not exactly sure what you just witnessed ⎯⎯ but you know it’s the kind of triumph that makes legends.
Listen below:
Musically, what did you want to set out to accomplish?
Evolution. I wanted to musically evolve from the last record in every sense of the craft. I wanted to develop a greater understanding of shaping sounds through mix/eq and also wanted to dive into a greater understanding of American musical landscape and song writing process. Early on, in making this record, I had the pleasure of working with Pierre [CEO of Brooklyn Hip Hop label Fresh Mind]. I had heard his lyrics, flow and writing and was blown away by it all, so I was really excited and stoked to collaborate with him.
“Wander” was one of the first tracks for the record that I had finished entirely, and I knew it had to be on the record as it was so different to anything I’d ever worked on before. So, it really became a huge building block for the whole record. Then, you kinda go, “SHIIIIT, how do you go from ‘No Sleep’ [from the ‘Flamingo’ EP] to this…” It just didn’t matter as I was more interested in the evolution of the songwriting process than pleasing people, so I just kept diving down the rabbit hole trying new ideas and new genres in the studio until I set hard deadlines to get a record out.
What did you come to understand about yourself or the world? Did you find this process cathartic in any way?
This record was the biggest learning experience I have had in terms of process and engineering. It’s the most hands-on I’ve ever been with the recording and songwriting process, start to finish. There was no budget to get any help on this record outside of timber, wiring and sound proofing for the studio build, so I was trying to do everything myself, which excited me in a way. However, having never engineered a full record or recorded in the new studio, I soon realized it was a lot to take on solo.
The studio I built is a hybrid analogue/digital studio revolving around an Analogue 32 Channel Oram console, and I had all the guitars, Moogs and keys running through a combination of digital and analogue signal paths, compressors, tape machines and a maze of wires/wiring. So, it was a big process of learning the room and environment I was building whilst simultaneously creating. It was a lot of jamming out ideas and hitting record until suddenly it got to June or July [of this year], and I had hard drives and tape reels full of tunes. It became such a minefield of songs, and I had decided to have a crack at producing, mixing and engineering this entire record solo, which meant taking on all the hats and all the roles. Having never mixed a full record before, I was building the plane and trying to fly the thing at the same time.
It was more insanity than cathartic. There was so much new learning, in terms of setting up the studio, learning the analogue board and the EQ’s, experimenting with different signal chains and paths of the audio, and on top of that, there were hard drives and tapes full of songs stacking up that I had to sort through. The positive side of this was the development of a new creative process, signal chains and studio patched and ready to produce. It’s the building and testing of the ship, and now, we ready to fly.
How do you know when to pull yourself back, in terms of not going into a place that’s too frantically mixing genres?
I don’t. I’m definitely guilty of this. However, I just go with the wind and try and not paint myself too much with a genre brush. VoxEagle is the energy of the spirit animal rather than a particular genre ⎯⎯ a show and environment where anything goes. Having grown up playing classical piano and flute then migrating to blues and then playing in garage and indie-rock bands, I’m not afraid to drift into different genres as long as the energy and melody is still there. As long as the vibe’s right, I’m doing it. The most important thing for me is enjoying the songwriting process and creating a jaw-dropping live show. Towards the end of this record, I got local Denver Colorado singer-songwriter Aaron Dixon to come hang in the studio and jam on some tunes, so he’s going to join for the live shows coming up.
Do you freestyle until you find each song’s groove? Or plot out the lyrics before recording?
I’m obsessive with writing, filing journals with lyrics, rewriting lyrics a million times, poems and whatnot. When it gets to the studio, it’s always freestyle. It’s just finding a melody and lyrics and running with it. All those words and lyrics coming out in the freestyle have come from those hours of filing the journal that just becomes engrained in the mind through the repetition and continuation of the process. I am big on feeling the song out once in the studio, though. I don’t like to be reading lyrics from paper. I’ve done this before, and it never has the right feel or flow. I usually just run the track a bunch of times and sing with a handheld mic until the melody and lyrics feel right. Once I get the flow and vibe right, I’ll sometimes put the headphones on and then track again with a condenser microphone to get a clearer signal without the speakers blaring in the background.
Why did you feel the b-sides didn’t fit where you are now? Why hold off on releasing those?
It’s not so much they didn’t fit, it was more having the time to finish a complete record whilst working on the development of the live show, mixes and music videos. 2018 was managing the juggling act. The remainder of the year and all throughout 2019, you’ll see loads of new songs being released off the back of this record. I don’t really classify them as b-sides so much. They’re all part of this same journey of songs. They just maybe didn’t sit in the first batch of nine for one reason or another. There’s another 18 songs mixed and ready to go, so I will start drip feeding them around the time of the [album] release. Maybe a secret EP or two.
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