Callahan & Witscher - Sorry To Hear That Callahan & Witscher

Jack Callahan and Jeff Witscher were tired. They had each been toiling in the American underground experimental music scene since the turn of the millennium, under names you may or may not recognize: Rene Hell, Marble Sky, die Reihe, too many to name. Their first full length Think Differently was the result of a confluence of end points: the dissolution of their underground scene and, in no small part because of that, the abstract music they had made separately and together as long as they could remember was not hitting like it used to. Where else to go but to the other side of the horseshoe: pop music. So why not heed the writing on the wall? Make a turn-of-the-millennium guitar-driven pop rock anthem record about being aging underground musicians who don’t want to make noise music anymore.

Well, Sorry to Hear That is a record about Think Differently. If Think Differently was a meta-conceptual record, Sorry to Hear That is a meta-meta-conceptual record. Meta Meta+Hodos. It was recorded over the course of 9 months in the wake of the first record. It was a period of personal and professional disruption: their initial optimism from the attention Think Dif erently received quickly spiraled into zealotry, inevitably descending into fear, disappointment and fracture. The record they wound up making is a document of and a narrative about this time period.

Sorry to Hear That is a sequel that continues where the fi rst left off sonically and conceptually. Here we have more guitar, more breakbeats, more navel-gazing malaise, more humorous self-effacement. It captures perfectly what the duo had set out to convey from the onset; it is a blistering record filled with commentary from both sides of the aisle, the player and the played, amped up to infinity.

Sorry to Hear That features a number of guest appearances from old and new comrades in the trenches of independent music: Shed Theory ringleader Marlon DuBois, Dylan Baldi and Jayson Gerycz of Cloud Nothings, Flannery Silva aka F.G.S., Jazz Lambaux and others.