Stream: Apex Manor, ‘Asked & Answered’

Kevin Bronson on March 26th, 2019

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There’s a longer story to be told, but the short version is this: Apex Manor is back, today unveiling their first new music in eight years and announcing that the new album “Heartbreak City” will be out via Merge Records on May 31.

It’s just past eight years since Apex Manor’s Ross Flournoy, who paid his dues with bands like the Broken West in the late-2000s Silver Lake scene, released “The Year of Magical Drinking,” an album whose light-hearted title augured bigger problems for the singer-songwriter. Life inflicted its bumps and bruises, and Flournoy eventually moved away from Los Angeles, got sober, immersed himself in songwriting again and moved back to L.A.

“I didn’t want to try to track the journey verbatim,” he told Paste magazine, where the new song premiered. “Rehab, the pimento cheese business, living life without alcohol — all those things were means that allowed me to get to the end result of being in a place where I could write songs again. This thing that I feared might be gone forever finally re-emerged, and I feel profoundly lucky.”

“Asked & Answered,” then, feels like a rallying cry, a magnificently noisy rocker (recalling Dinosaur Jr.) that sounds like a boxing match between distorted guitar and brute drumming. Recorded live and sounding like it, the song features Flournoy on guitar and vocals, Dan Allaire (The Brian Jonestown Massacre) on drums and Rob Barbato (Kevin Morby, Girlpool, Cass McCombs) on bass and production. Courtney Jaye and Meg Duffy guest on the album as well. “Rob had this weird, old-school approach where there was no punching in, so if we were seven-eighths of the way through a song and something fucked up, we did the whole thing again from the top,” Flournoy says. “Pretty much everything you hear on the record is one take.”

||| Stream: “Asked & Answered”