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LOVE TRACTOR (FEATURING BILL BERRY) TO RELEASE A NEW STUDIO ALBUM

The Athens Ga. band Love Tractor, featuring none other than Bill Berry on percussion (on one track) are set to release a new album for the first time in twelve years! An mp3 clip of the title track from the new album "The Sky At Night" can be downloaded here. An mp3 clip of the single "Party Train" from the Love Tractor album "This Ain't No Outer Space Ship" here.

Check out the Love Tractor biography below to find out all about the band of which Bill Berry was a founding member.

Don't tell anyone in Love Tractor that you heard they broke up. Even though it's been over 10 years since their last album, the band never disbanded and has kept making music for most of the '90's, just out of the scrutiny of the public eye. Their long-awaited new release, The Sky At Night, is the culmination of over a decade of reflection, collaboration and art.

The Sky At Night marks the commercial return of one of the most influential bands of the 1980s. Along with REM, the B-52s, Pylon, Widespread Panic, and more recently, Olivia Tremor Control, Love Tractor has been widely recognized as integral to the development of the influential "Athens sound." Beginning as an instrumental group, Love Tractor evolved into a beat-driven sound that blended pop melodies with their trademark soundscapes. The years between Themes from Venus (1989) and the creation of The Sky at Night, the band has been honing and polishing the sound that gave them their reputation in the 1980s as a groundbreaking art-rock band.

In 1992, exhausted by years of constant touring with contemporaries such as New Order, B-52s, 10,000 Maniacs, REM, Psychedlic Furs, Husker Du and The Replacements, members Mark Cline, Mike Richmond, and Armistead Wellford decided to take a much needed hiatus from road work. "Love Tractor never envisioned itself as an arena rock band, but rather as a freakish art band. We were on the road so much that we lost sight of our musical goals," explains Mark Cline. In order to rediscover the musical vision that originally brought them together, the members decided to change their focus, at least for the time being, on more individual artistic pursuits. "It was like cleaning our heads of bad musical habits and industry dreck," adds Cline.

The break turned from months into years and each member went his own way for a little while. Bassist Armistead Wellford returned to oil painting in addition to touring and recording with groups such as Gutterball, Steve Wynn, and Sparklehorse. Mike Richmond immersed himself in literature and art history, while Mark Cline traveled the world studying ancient languages and Italian opera. Spending the better part of the last decade at a distance from the music industry, they met every couple of years to hole-up in their Athens, GA music lab, to write, record, gossip and collectively chuckle at rumors of their own demise.

It was during this time that The Sky At Night began to emerge. They recorded and eventually discarded the equivalent of 3 albums in 1990, 1993, and 1995, all part of the process in the creation of The Sky At Night. It doesn't take long to realize that The Sky At Night is not a nostalgic comeback attempt but the sound of a band pushing the boundaries of rock/pop music to its outer limits. Without the pressures of the music industry and life on the road, the band finally had a chance to settle down and make exactly the kind of album that they strived to produce, fueled by creative impulses and nothing more. Each song has been worked over and examined with great care. To Love Tractor, the false starts and never released recordings are simply mile-markers on the road for a band that is obsessed with constant reinvention its writing and recording process?a reinvention which has allowed them to finally complete what is by far the best work of its career.

The Sky At Night opens with "Tree," a jangly, wistful sentiment that sets the stage for the rest of the album. Mark Cline explains that the song was born "with Dave Spalding from Pell Mell on guitar. He started playing this sort of springing sound with his whammy bar, and then Doug's lap steel sent it over the edge. The song is very simple, musically to me, it's about space, pale color and legato. I love Mike's lyric 'in Babylon administrators sing the same song.' It feels like Martian country music."

The album then sends us off to "Christ Among Children," a rollicking sweet sound with minimal vocals (there's one line in the entire song) that is quintessential Love Tractor. It is a perfect example of how Love Tractor works to shape and hone their work. Armistead Wellford says, "This is a typical Love Tractor instrumental where even the voice acts as an instrument. Originally this song was a jam that followed a more up-tempo driving pop song called "The Count," which always felt labored and a bit jerky as opposed to the second part which sounded effortless and free. Eventually we decided to focus on this section and make it a song unto itself."

The title track, "The Sky At Night" is one of the surviving tracks from earlier recording sessions. Over the years, the band has honed and shaped every facet of the tune. Armistead Wellford notes that the song was originally a descendant of Themes from Venus called "Extravaganza." But the band was never satisfied with how it came out in recording and allowed it to evolve over the years from a tune that was more keyboard dominated to a more guitar heavy song. The version that finally got the band's stamp of approval and made it onto The Sky At Night (as the title track, no less) combines the two elements into what Wellford calls "a more subtle and, for a rock song, more delicate sound with a new ending that resolves the song perfectly."

One of the many bright points on the album comes with "Balthus (The Old Clothesline)," which Mike Richmond calls "an emotional result of viewing a painting by Balthus." Cline describes the song as "a conversation between two extremely repetitive instruments (bass and guitar) with the edgy monotony being relieved by intentionally sissified orchestration and minimal synthesizer sounds. The chorus is a big break and it actually reminds me of Roxy Music circa 1973 with the Eno-esque whooshing synth sound."

The song that follows the lighthearted "Balthus (The Old Clothesline)" is the oddly complementary instrumental "Antarctica (Widespread Panic)." The song was created almost by chance when Mark Cline inadvertently pressed play on an old sequencer at practice and a repetitive 5-note pattern that had been programmed years before started to play. They added some bass and threw in tons of vintage synth sounds (Cline says they had a lot of fun describing the sounds like: the drill, the crybaby, etc.) to create this sweeping soundscape. Cline explains the parenthetical notation in the title: "Our friends in Widespread Panic had years ago titled one of their songs Love Tractor . . . a very sweet gesture from a terrific group of guys. We decided to return the complement and name a song after them."

Joining Love Tractor on The Sky at Night are Thomas King on drums, Doug Stanley on guitar and keyboards, "retired" REM drummer and founding Love Tractor drummer Bill Berry on percussion, Dave Spalding of Pell Mell on guitar, and Phil Costello of Daytona contributing string arrangements.

While grunge has come and gone and music has seen the advent of bubblegum pop and the fusion of rap and metal, this Athens group has been quietly working away at their masterpiece, The Sky At Night. A progenitor of the Athens sound and a forerunner the contemporary art rock revival, Love Tractor continues to keep the unadulterated creation of their art as their highest priority. Together, they have carefully crafted an album of gems that is well worth the wait.

Discography
Love Tractor (DB, 1982)
Around the Bend (DB, 1983)
Til The Cows Come Home (DB, 1984)
Wheels of Pleasure (DB, 1985)
This Ain't No Outer Space Ship (Big Times, 1987)
Themes from Venus (DB, 1989)
The Sky At Night (Razor & Tie, 2001).

By Matt Kerr - 14th February 2001

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