3
Dec/13

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “I’M STONED” BY FAULKNER

3
Dec/13

In the digital age, is it easier or harder to wipe out the past and reinvent oneself than it was when music was primarily heard on records and the radio? One band that appears to be doing just that is Faulkner. “A change may be just around the corner,” the Venice, California, band recently tweeted. The four-piece, which was not named after the Nobel Prize–winning southern author of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying but was given its name by an Egyptian shaman, is preparing its debut full-length, Street Axioms, working with producers Mark Needham and JP Bowersock. According to the band’s Facebook page, the group was founded in 2013, while the (of course) unofficial Wikipedia page claims they started in 2012. Meanwhile, an April 2010 profile on the band in USC’s Daily Trojan begins, appropriately enough, “Faulkner is a band that is just as eccentric as its namesake.” (Another site dates their beginnings to 2007.) The USC article also says that the band has released five music videos, but the only one that is currently easily accessible online is 2012’s “Triumph of the Underdogs,” which garnered 1.55 million hits last year and on which the band declares, “Changes are coming.” It’s also difficult to find out much information about Faulkner’s Global Ambition EP, which consists of “California Skies,” “Soul Black Absentee,” “I Did It on My Terms,” “Triumph of the Underdogs,” and the title track and can be heard on Artists First Music. Oddly, since we’ve been inquiring into the band’s history, various links to videos and songs have been taken down or no longer work. It’s most likely tied to the departure last year of lead guitarist and vocalist Brennan McGuire, who left the band because of a family emergency that affected his ability to travel on a regular basis. “It does not surprise me in the least that the band now appears to have ‘formed’ in 2013,” McGuire confirmed via e-mail, “as we had done this after each of the first three incarnations of the band Lucas [Asher] and I started in 2008.” McGuire, who is now back with Hooville Homebrew, was replaced by Eric Scullin. (You can see McGuire with Faulkner in this video interview for Sunset Sessions.) E-mails to the current edition of Faulkner have gone unanswered as of press time. Conspiracy? Coincidence? In the end, perhaps it really doesn’t matter as much as the music itself, and that’s something you can check out when Faulkner — singer, rhythm guitarist, and lyricist Asher, singer, lead guitarist, and producer Scullin, bassist and arranger Dimitri Farougias, and drummer Christian Hogan — makes its New York City debut with two shows this week, at the Bowery Electric on December 3 with Roto’s Magic Act, Merrily and the Poison Orchard, and Louise Aubrie and at Mercury Lounge on December 4 with HITS and Chainwave. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimension” is another recent Faulkner tweet. So who cares about the past?