See also: Local Wizards: Songwriter Makes "Based Garagebandcore;" We Interview Via Twitter
The pre-release fanfare for highly anticipated albums has gotten particularly elaborate recently. Avant-industrial legends Swans have the entirety of their latest two-hour, triple-LP epic available to stream on NPR Music, including a track that runs more than 30 minutes. For the past month, Animal Collective has been engaged in a multi-media barnstorm for their latest long-player, Centipede Hz, that involves guest DJs on weekly podcasts and lots of shroom-tracer visuals.
However, those acts too meek and lowly to organize a cross-platform PR blitz have to be a little more resourceful. Kendall Humbert, the 19-year-old prolific tweeter and budding warlock behind eclectic Tempe project Local Wizards, revealed the drop date of his forthcoming new album, The Signal, earlier this week in a practical yet memorably peculiar YouTube video.
The clip shows a young guy (presumably Humbert, though that's unconfirmed) with a crappily strewn fake beard, holding up one of those old-ass notation tape decks available at any given Goodwill. The ad hoc Santa character treats the viewer to eight short snippets of different tracks from the new album with each push of the 'play' button. The first track revealed in the video sounds like a version of the previously-released "Sticks and Leaves," a dreamy whorl-pop number available to scope out online. However, the rest of the cuts are unfamiliar, showing brief peeks of mega-delayed guitar, washed-out vocal harmonies and even a snippet resembling some industrial synth angst.
I won't give away the video's expensive, eye-popping twist ending, but it does reveal that The Signal will arrive on October 1. Though it will certainly be available for download on the Local Wizards Bandcamp, there's sadly no word on a deluxe cassette edition that comes with an official Local Wizards Santa hat. Follow Humbert on Twitter for future updates and to see if he wises up to the promotional holiday goldmine he's sitting on.
