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Midnight Masses

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"Moonlit Madness"

Location: New York, NY

Website: http://myspace.com/midnightmassesandtheendofdays

Bio: Death’s sooty fingerprints cover nearly every inch of Rapture Ready, I Gazed At The Body, the debut EP from Brooklyn’s Midnight Masses. But its songs, ... (more) as prone to uplift as they are to despair, are anything other than simple elegies. Writing in the 2008 wake of his father’s untimely death, Autry Rene Fulbright called on some of his closest friends to help him channel his grief via quarter-inch tape, reverb pedals, and Gospel choirs. The result is a collection of four songs (recorded by one of said friends, Gerard Smith of TV on the Radio), which exist as a beautifully succinct examination of the immutable ties of family and the difficulty we humans have with accepting death.

Rapture begins atop the mournful resignation of “Walk On Water,” Fulbright reassuring his mother (and anyone who has suffered a loss) that there’s no guilt to be had in carrying on. Swelling guitars chime in the distance, as a muffled drum mimics the stilted cadence of a hospital heart monitor. The record then crescendos through the micro-soul metaphysics of suicide saga “Preacher’s Son” and “I Was A Desperate Man,” before cresting into the delicate harmonies of “Do You Believe In Rapture,” a completely re-envisioned cover of a Rather Ripped era Sonic Youth number re-contextualized as the EP’s punctuation.

Truly communal, these songs bear the mark of countless musicians, all shepherded under the watchful eye of Brooklyn-By-Way-Of-Bible-Belter Fulbright. “Water” features TV on the Radio’s Jaleel Bunton signing lead vocals on each verse, while “Desperate Man” finds Fulbright relinquishing lead duties to the milky-voiced Katie Eastburn. Longtime collaborators Conrad Keely and Kevin Allen of Trail of Dead (the band whose recording sessions birthed Midnight Masses, and whose Jason Reece is a founding member), both lend their talents to the record, on keys and guitar respectively. But the core of the group is Eric Rodgers (guitar/vocals), Miyuki Furtado (drums/bass/guitar/vocals), and Destiny Montague (guitar/vocals/percussion), a trio of musicians able to make songs about death sound unmistakably alive, emerging as a tangle of dark hued Soul, yearning minimalism and warmly reassuring rock music.

With little more than a half dozen songs put to tape, Midnight Masses has already landed praise from Billboard Magazine, who called their self-released 2009 Heaven 7-inch “an enlightening, beautifully lush set.” Wired likened the bands’ sound to Billie Holiday fronting the Doors, while The Tripwire called them “a spiritually engrossing psychedelic rock experience.” But no matter what the descriptors, the common thread throughout everything that has been written about Midnight Masses is simple: something very, very big is going on within these simple songs about death and life and ghosts and demons. On November 10th, everyone will be able to join in the search for what exactly that is, when Rapture Ready, I Gazed At The Body will become available digitally via Collect Records. (less)