- Matthew Joel Schwerin
- Brontosaurus
It’s been almost four years since local art-pop group Brontosaurus put out their first record, but they can hardly say they’ve been on hiatus. The band never stopped—instead, Nicholas Kelley and Nicholas Papaleo spent that time tightening their grip on the jagged, math-rocky chamber pop they’ve crafted together since 2010. After the release of their debut, 2011’s minialbum Cold Comes to Claim, the pair pushed themselves to new levels of perfectionism, running over their songs until each and every piece locked into place. Last week, they released four new tracks from an album due out in 2015, the second batch of recorded songs they’ve ever made public. EP2014, the simply titled release that’s now available as a pay-what-you-can download on Bandcamp, comprises the first four tracks from the still unreleased full-length Foundations Shake. It’s an ambitious record, full of sharp turns and grand sweeps that the duo only started to trace on that early recording.
Brontosaurus have been a two-piece for the majority of the past four years, but after Cold Comes to Claim, they stopped writing like one. “The music I hear in my head is not Nick and I playing my instruments live,” says Papaleo. “It probably would take five or six people to pull off exactly what I was hearing. I think adding Josh to the live show made all of the difference as far as performance goes, too. It was feeling a little empty as the two of us. As soon as we brought in that low end, it transformed and became much closer to what I hear.”
“He looked so tense,” interjects Palelo.
EP2014 by brontosaurus
