The Big Disappointments

The Big Disappointments debut studio CD was co-produced by Thalia Zedek (Come, Uzi, and the current Thalia Zedek Band). It was mixed by Paul Kolderie. Mastered by Nick Zampiello at New Alliance East. And many thanks to KRM at Kissypig Studio for a great recording experience. Buy the album now using PayPal.
It is also available at all NEWBURY COMICS store locations and to buy from them online click this: NEWBURY COMICS
To buy individual songs or the entire CD from the ITUNES STORE click this: ITUNES STORE
"Your songs have this cool vibe to them that's sort of sinister, yet inviting. It's like they're inviting you along to get into some trouble, or cause some trouble, or something."
- Frank Aveni******************************************************* *****
A review from France roughly translated- http://nextclues.com/
The Big Disappointments - s/t 2007 Hot Cave
It is well known that trouble supports creativity. From Boston still emerges incredible groups and The Big Disappointments is one of those. This quartet has just signed an album really bluffant which draws with deepest musical roots ricaines, that is the delta blues, the swamp rock'n'roll and the white blues like with a certain sonic music. Right now traditional: I insist! Produced by Thalia Zedek (of Come, still should it be pointed out?), this album éponyme makes one think irremediably of the group préci(pi)té for these feverish environments. Here, returned is more immediate. The titles are shorter, almost not waste, that is listened of a draft. The group aligns the tubes in a disconcerting way. Incredible! The large strong point is the voice... Ah THIS VOICE! Classieuse, nervous, cynical and envoûtante. The dude which sings (and which plays of scrapes) controls its subject with wonder. I will repeat myself but one is in the presence of a very great group. To pass to the side would be a terrible error, that it is said! (9.5/10) - Nicko (2007)****************************************************** *******
A review from Boston zine The Noise:
THE BIG DISAPPOINTMENTS
Hot Cave Records
15-song CD
Screw any attempts at rock-crit hipness here—this is just fucking excellent. The hard part, however, is painting an accurate picture of the music, which reminds me of many bands, but not enough to actually name one. It’s a pretty stripped down sound that manages to be lush when it needs to be, it travels effortlessly from the haunted, medicated country of “Deathbed Country” to the desperate straight-ahead drive of “Like to Know” to the swampy “Crop Diamond Everglade,” but all while sounding like one band with one coherent musical vision. Eric Boomhower’s vocals are all miked in that sort of “distant radio station” style, which works perfectly without seeming like a gimmick, and the rest of the band demonstrates a focus on the requisites of the song, egos well in hand. Produced by the band and Thalia Zedek, mixed by Paul Kolderie and mastered by Nick Zampiello, this comes with some serious pedigree, and the whole thing shines like a piece of gold found on a lonesome fog-bound trail somewhere in the West. Damn near perfect. (Tim Emswiler)*************************************************** ************
"The Big Disappointments kill live, with a gut-quaking locomotive rumble of psych-rock riffs and rockabilly-voodoo beats. They are the sum of their four parts: a hurly-burly engine of desert-menace guitars, underlying bass trellis, and psychobilly stomp. They’re physically unassuming (aside from Tall Jon), with no visual agenda: two guitarists in plain T-shirts and jeans (Boomhower and Andy Abrahamson, both formerly of the In Out) and a cute, petite girl tucked behind the drum kit. But once Lisa Mullen (who happily tells me she likes playing music with guys because “I was once a boy!”) starts banging out that pomade swing, you’re confronted by a soul-bellowing body blast that makes you forget the beer you just bought or the stranger you just met or the taxi your ignorant ass just called. Instead you think about strung-out drifters speeding along cactus-lined highways, truck-stop death-panic scenes, the Gun Club, Lux Interior and his leather pants." - Camille Dodero of The Phoenix and Village Voice******************************************************* ************
"It’s a full-out rock ‘n’ roll assault that isn’t easy to pigeonhole or to dismiss. While there are never any guarantees on anyone’s perception of what they might hear in the band, The Big Disappointments have already cracked some of the most hardened skeptics." - Jeff Breeze, Metro******************************************************* ************
"We at P.A.'s Lounge would like to state unequivocally that we feel quite vindicated as we watch 'The Big Disappointments' mature into a Great Band as well as a group of 'Space Pirates' or whatever you want to call yourselves... We wouldn't want to be as un-classy as to say 'We Told You So', but the facts are clear. P.A.'s is the fifth member of the Big Disappointments. You'll Need a bigger tour bus." XOXO, -P.A.'s***************************************************** **************
A REVIEW FROM THE UK - www.subba-cultcha.com
'The Big Disappointments' Hot Cave Records
Booze spilling, rockabilly influenced, smutty dirt rock that reeks of 1980s class. The Big Disappointments are quite the opposite.
These boys and one girl, fashioned out of Boston bands The In Out and The Non-Famous, really do like their 1980's punk influences. Joining the dots in between the raw barbed wire delivery of The Gun Club and the sumptuous melodies of The Replacements, circa Let It Be, they have dispatched an album of bass soaked recordings, echoing fuzzy guitar and post-punk scrawling that all sound like they've been recorded in a tunnel with the pressure of oncoming bullet train.
Take for instance the arse slapping bass juggernaut on Dance Track Budokan that drives lo-fi opposing serrated guitars, and Eric Boomhower's scathing vocal, like a F1 car race around a moonlit M25. Or the high speed electric bread knife riffs and raging solos that set fire during Like To Know. These guys really have studied the book that Jeffery Lee Pierce (Gun Club) never wrote, and a fine book it would have been each page stained with the claret of experience.
This is not the refined sound of a band of young whipper snappy chaps. These boys have graduated from the early learnings of other bands and know exactly the sound they are tracking. If there were to be any complaints to be handed out they would be sent to the office of lack of variety. There are 15 songs here and only two noticeable styles - fast as fuck and slow like Mark E Smith's slurred sentences, but there are a lot worse things that could mount an assault on your hearing for just over 45 minutes.
By: David Samuel****************************************************** ***************
Cry(p)tical swamp writer Manuel Aubert text on The Big Disappointments:
TELEGRAPH – SAMBYMANUEL AUBERT a.k.a. BLACKBIRD MERLE LEONCE BONE:
"We were no longer expecting them. It blowed my mind away. To the point of getting hammered til the beginning of dawn. Red wine + Beers + Gin + whisky. The Big Disappointments.
You know : when the feeling of urge is mixed with relaxation. When relaxation is flirting with danger to be or not to be alive. And when it mingles with our senses.
Terribly urban when it deals with quintesence. From now on we will not only think about Basquiat, Coltrane or Warhol.
We’ll have to do with it. They teased me with their fucking sublime smell, filthy. « let’s GO Go to the Go-Go’s !! » From now on. Because they play like no one harmolodic rough. Don’t tell Grand Pa. There is no word getting out from the conch, leathal gliding slope, death of the Hype in its full ascent.
Let’s try to imagine that the sea could be the same everywhere.
Spread the buzzing word by all means, yell the rumor until death : Boston is the center of the World !! Boston is the center of the Earth and the supply of mineral water will definitely pass through the vicious umbilical cords, scary and marvellous strings belonging to Misters Boomhower and Abrahamson ‘s guitars. Let’s imagine that all the trees share the same roots.
You know : insolently sexy, not only are we thinking about Mark E. Smith, The Cramps, The Mad Daddys, Lady Scarface Lunch or Pussy Galore as incarnations with some dirt inside.
And then again, it’s much better that way since Boston is the center of the Earth, Lisa Mullen’s sticks rise in the sky while she keeps on battling with those skin boxes, her marvellous arms as lianas. Heavy sounds, Stubborn rythms and tribal sounds, powerly and elegantly pounded, while in the same time, nonchalantly, Brother John Littlefield, traces his own bass lines disguised under the swamp ‘nouvelle vague’ perfume, in the East ninjas caligraphers way.
Transform yourself into some shadow words, some pieces of rumors for some varanus agnostic preachers. Just yell the rest of your bloody stumps but don’t tell it to the grandfather who is the only shamefull one who doesn’t know it. Who doesn’t know that the Big Disappointment exist. Some jubilantly symphony, deadly, mocking and glamourous, that they throw on the waves during the Office, dislocating the contemporary bodies in a destroyed transcending dance, like possession. And not only think about Steve McQueen, John Lurie, James Dean or Buster Keaton ‘pour la géniale nonchalance’. To the point of getting hammered til dawn.
Let’s imagine our roads and sidewalks ripped open, drilled by force through the tarmac.
Do not wake up the Old Man. Through his skeletton’siesta, his body lays straight on the line separating Tijuana from some numerous no man’s land. He has already sent his daughter to the Fiesta de la Muerte, dressed suggestively to tantalize the recalcitrants. You can count on our guys and girls to blacken his rotten aureole with some flights of twang, some blasts of epileptic stomp, programmed ending under some definitive convulsions. Once again: swamp.
This is high flying popular art, embroided by hand.
Let’s imagine all this very strongly with application and strengh. Until the floor is filled with some humps made out of our dark souls. Until, us, passers-by changed into some relaxed dancers, possessed, swinging, twist and shoot, between the tumulus of the bodies, the fallow heaps, the sculpted-insects-skulls divided between the ‘sépia’ and the stridency-scream, the frozen depravity swing with some lipstick marks, strings and net stockings, ecstatic tibetean stupra, you know : the Big Disappointments.
It’s not just only a fucking hip but a furious and rushing buzz. Each sedentary person becomes a nomad of its own sediment. Each refugee becomes a sexy wall-drawing counterculture by becoming a local in its own exile. Each migrant, ashkenaze, Portorican, Cantonese has its own inner light within their hearts and on their walk-boat-man, « An absolute Farmer » booming, roaring, hymnic ‘en le dedans’.
Then, the passers-by on the streets gets electrified by those candid genius mercenaries from Boston, to travel, wander and waddle. And The Subtra-Ville- Maeström do no longer exits, ‘en-train-de-se-faire’, there are only some modulated dormitories for ectoplasmic arses, Ghost-Town : let’s be aware.
Some rare golden pearls are stuck on the holes from the sieve, they fell out from those stuffed garbage trucks. Holy crop, fucking harvest, I can tell you that it has blown my mind away and it’s going to last a while, at least until we ask for more, the Poney-Express ? The Singing Thread ? The Telegraph-Sam ? No dude, from now on: the Big Disappointments."
TOURS, LE LUNDI 9 AVRIL 2007,MANUEL AUBERT a.k.a. BLACKBIRD MERLE LEONCE BONE.******************************************************* *********************
A review from Boston zine The Noise:
THE BIG DISAPPOINTMENTS
Live at Studio-Eight
9-song CD
It’s obvious that Eric Boomhower (guitar, vocals) and Andy Abrahamson (guitar) have done time in Boston’s most underrated underground band—The In Out. There’s a similar uneasy feeling in the songwriting. Nagging, metallic guitars circle each other like wrestling opponents (think Gun Club, Birthday Party et al), stop starting, then tripped up by cryptic, annoyed lyrics. I like the lazy shuffle of “Is She a He”, the psychobilly stomp of “Only Here Only Now”, and the shift to double time drums and descending guitar part of “The Hunted Whale”. “Tall Jon” Littlefield (that early John Cale-looking dude you see at every rock show) plays bass, while Lisa Mullen's propulsive drumming is like a shot of adrenaline—relentless yet on point. The Big Disappointments come on strong and then linger like a mean hangover. Even The Weekly Dig likes them, and they rarely like anything. (Laura Markley)