Album

Get ready for one of our best albums yet: The Spark.

NPR says, “For more than a decade, the members of The Builders And The Butchers have specialized in a kind of white-knuckle Americana: Their acoustic folk-rock sound is shot through with nervy, hellfire-and-brimstone intensity. The Portland-born band’s hometown brethren in The Decemberists provide a useful reference point — singer Ryan Sollee has a wide-open bellow and a gift for vivid imagery — but The Builders And The Butchers’ urgent music, as heard in the new single “Casket Lands,” is far more scuffed-up and fatalistic.  On May 19, The Builders And The Butchers will return with The Spark, which carries on in the group’s tradition of tightly wound roots music that never feels tethered to a single era. Via email, Sollee writes that the record came together slowly and deliberately.” – Stephen Thompson, NPR All Songs Considered

On The Builders and the Butchers’ new disc, Western Medicine, they set off to create an album that built layers around the already powerful electrified-folk sound they have honed over the years.  They spent nearly a full month in the studio with producer/engineer Dylan Magierek (STRFKR, Mark Kozelek, Lovers) to fully explore the dark and twisted terrain that became Western Medicine.  Influenced largely by the post-apocalyptic writing of Cormac McCarthy, the new album delves deep into epic sonic territory that The Builders had yet to venture.

1. Blood Runs Cold
2. Dirt in the Ground
3. No Roses
4. Desert is On Fire
5. Pennies in the Well
6. Watching the World Burn
7. Hell Fire Mountain
8. The Snow
9. Poison Water
10. Redemption Song
11. Ceceil
12. Take Me Home

The Builders went into the studio with the idea of peeling back layers to where the essence of the song lies, and to try and finally fully encapsulate their raucous, impassioned live show. Joining up with studio mates Adam Selzer (The Decemberists, M. Ward, She & Him), and Dylan Magierek (Mark Kozelek, Starf*cker, Thao Nguyen), the band created Dead Reckoning using the recording style of the 1950s and 1960s, where the magic of a song was captured by the band playing together live with minimal overdubbing.

A dead reckoning is an age-old method of sea navigation that involves using past position, speed, and drift to calculate current and future location. Dead Reckoning, with its timeless sound, is a measure of where the band and its music, as well as these times in which we live, have been, are now, and where it all might be going. “I thought it would be a perfect title for the album given its stripped down sound, and how most of these songs tell stories, many of which are set in the past, “ says singer Ryan Sollee.

Tracks

1. I Broke The Vein
2. Rotten To The Core
3. It Came From The Sea
4. Lullaby
5. Moon is on The March
6. All Away
7. Cradle On Fire
8. We All Know The Way
9. Out of The Mountain
10. Blood For You
11. Black Elevator
12. Family Tree

Tracks

1. The Wind Has Come
2. Bringin Home The Rain
3. Black Elevator / Black Dresses
4. It Came From The Sea
5. The Night / Red Hands
6. The Rain
7. Devil Town
8. Bottom of The Lake
9. Vampire Lake
10. In The Branches / Coal Mine Fall
11. The Gallows
12. Slowed Down Trip To Hell
13. When It Rains

Tracks

1. Golden and Green
2. Devil Town
3. Short Way Home
4. Barcelona
5. Down in this Hole
6. Raise Up
7. Vampire Lake
8. The Wind Has Come
9. In the Branches
10. The World is a Top

Tracks

1. The Night Pt. 1
2. Red Hands
3. Spanish Death Song
4. Black Dresses
5. Bottom Of The Lake
6. The Gallows
7. Bringin’ Home The Rain
8. The Coal Mine Fall
9. Slowed Down Trip To Hell
10. The Night Pt. 2
11. Ten Miles Wide
12. Find Me In The Air