New Music from The Maytags - now in 360

The Maytags, the rollicking blues and soul outfit from Des Moines, dropped their first new LP in 3 years late last month. Meriweather is 13 tracks and 42 minutes of blue eyed soul that is at once familiar and different, the shared DNA with Love Lines and the Nova EP evident even as this album swerves into sonically unfamiliar territory. The silky smooth intro of the opening track, "Pt. 1", indicates that this is a late night album, the soundtrack to a private après party, the cooldown to the blistering soul for which Nathaniel Rateliff and (St.) Paul Janeway are known. Turn the lights down low, pour yourself and your companion of choice a nice whiskey, and let the feeling wash over you.  

Bandleader Dustin Smith wanted to approach this album in a different fashion from the band's prior releases. Smith and his collaborators—Dan Kreipke, Sam Mogerman, Aaron Ehrlich, Andy Poppen, and Nick Vasquez—put a new spin on the whole process of putting together the album, from songwriting to playing to recording and engineering the songs. The guys holed up in a cabin in western Iowa to throw their ideas on the table and flesh out the lyrics, and then cut 25 songs with engineers in Minneapolis and Des Moines. Jon Locker of Sonic Factory Studio, their Des Moines engineer, helped the band shape their sound and pare the album down to the 13 tracks here.

As an added bonus, the video for "Cities" was recorded with in 360 of immersive video. I hope you're as eager as I am to get these guys on an East Coast tour before they're as old as they look in their FaceApp photo.

Photo courtesy of the band (and FaceApp)