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Miracle Sweepstakes premiered Rorschached on Week in Pop; album now available everywhere

Week in Pop premiered Miracle Sweepstakes’ second full-length Rorschached Wednesday, which they called, “near-perfection pop that many have waited their entire existence to behold.” A limited edition run of CDs can be purchased via the OWT web store, and streamed via Spotify, Apple Music, and wherever else you get your digital music.

A Pessimist is Never Disappointed called Rorschached “not only clever and well-constructed, but wildly tuneful.” Get your copy and see for yourself.

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Miracle Sweepstakes share “Relative Mind” video, announce second LP Rorschached

Miracle Sweepstakes debuted the video for “Relative Mind,” the lead single off their forthcoming sophomore album, Rorschached, on Treble Zine this week.

Rorschached is out November 22nd. Stream “Relative Mind”:

Spotify

Apple Music

Press release and track listing below:

Miracle Sweepstakes singer and guitarist Craig Heed wrote and demoed over two dozen songs in 2016. Then he demoed them again, and again once more for good measure. From this batch — shared among bandmates and friends in a .zip folder named “25 Big Ones” — emerged the songs that comprise Rorschached, the New York group’s second full-length album, due November 22nd on One Weird Trick. After attempts to record the album themselves in drummer Ian Miniero’s basement failed, the band linked up with engineer Charles Burst (New Pornographers, Paul Banks, Sunwatchers), founder of the Seaside Lounge recording studio, a beloved local institution in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The band was aiming for a particular sound, bigger and more effervescent than their debut, Turn Heel, yet roughly hewn in the vein of Chad VanGaalen’s warmly crackling productions. They first tracked the garage stomper “Forcefield,” its odd chromatic changes and through-composed structure reaching beyond the bounds of modern day revivalism. The record’s cavernous barrage of guitars and into-the-red rhythm section matched the sound Heed heard in his head, and a dozen songs would follow. Through a snowstorm that caused mid-take power outages, Heed, Miniero and bassist Doug Bleek tracked the basics of Rorschached live to tape in a couple of days. From there, Heed layered the arrangements he fine-tuned in his exhaustive demoing, adding everything from three-part vocal harmonies and (fake) harpsichord, to (real) vibraphone and Mel9 strings, brass and flute. Guitarist Justin Mayfield joined along the way, his interest piqued by an ad namedropping both the Zombies and Brainiac. Besides the constraints of working and going to school full time, the obsessive streak that fueled Heed’s prolific workflow grew to be an impediment. Sleep-deprived nights were spent listening to several second-long segments on loop, compulsively checking for impurities. First, parts were redone, and eventually entire songs were re-tracked. Adding insult to injury was a dubious zoning violation that put Seaside out of commission indefinitely. The logistical uncertainty of finishing without the studio mirrored the internal roadblocks. A made-up word from one of the songs came to encapsulate the entire process: everything dissolves into inky atoms the longer you stare. Despite it all, the songs won out. The bossanova verses of “Memory Grain” give way to psych pop catharsis. “Boomerang” is an intimate AM gold ballad, its darkly Rundgrenesque undercurrent the product of a guitar tuning Heed devised as a noise rock loving teen. The pleasingly meandering guitar arpeggios of “Black Bouquet” recall the fretwork of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, while album closer “I Try” trades the six string for bedroom-baroque adornments. “All along I kept believing it,” Heed sings through the album’s final fade, his voice varisped slightly to accentuate the tune’s wide-eyed naïveté. Rorschached is a testament to creative will outlasting psychic turbulence. 

Rorschached tracklist:

1. Forcefield

2. Flyer Lie

3. Shoot the Blue

4. Boomerang

5. Memory Grain

6. Black Bouquet

7. Oh My

8. Relative Mind

9. Signs Up and Down

10. Mary, Where Are You?

11. I Try

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1WT BLACK FRIDAY CYBER DEAL -- order your copy of Turn Heel on cassette and get a FREE limited edition Miracle Sweepstakes Fun ‘N Color activity booklet. What’s more, you can submit a picture of yourself to oneweirdtrickrecs@gmail.com to receive a FREE portrait of you wearing a Miracle Sweepstakes t-shirt, hand drawn by MS guitarist/singer Craig Heed. Click on our online store above to own 2016′s best rock album, a future collector’s item, and a one-of-a-kind piece of original, personalized artwork, all for the low price of $5.

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Austin Town Hall picked up on “Rapture” yesterday. ATH’s Nicole Baumann says:

Miracle Sweepstakes, out of New York, are gaining attention from their latest single, “Rapture.” Rightly so– this track shows the band drawing together a wide base of sub-genres and uniting them into a tight package of bright indie rock. The song starts out and you pick up on the slightly fuzzy, slightly psych -y guitars, and then, about 45 seconds in, the band launches into grunge mode, with heavy, wall-of-sound noise rock.All the while, the vocals deal out a bit of attitude and balance out the heavier moments quite nicely. Take a listen below.

Turn Heel, their newest cassette release is out now via One Weird Trick. Go pick it up, or listen on their soundcloud page.

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“Rapture” was featured on Indie Shuffle yesterday. Here’s Carolyn Hanson’s review:

Who doesn't love a good doomsday song, particularly after the week America's had? Luckily, Miracle Sweepstakes' recently released LP, Turn Heel, contains a song entitled "Rapture," which will either absorb or exacerbate all of your anxieties–whichever you prefer, really. Either way, it'll make you feel slightly less alone.

On "Rapture," Miracle Sweepstakes take an amalgam of sounds and influences and combine them in a way that makes the song totally their own–something musicians often fall short of doing. The group manages to keep their sound familiar without being a copycat of any one particular band or style. This is something much older groups and artists struggle with, so to see such a well-crafted song come out of artists so young is incredibly impressive.

Of course, the subject matter is both timely and comforting; it's full of an inherently millennial angst while still being at minimum relatable to other generations. But it is, at its heart, a millennial, coming-of-age song, and it's a damn good one at that.

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Turn Heel is now available on limited edition cassette. Click ‘Store’ above or click here to get your copy. For international shipping, please email oneweirdtrickrecs@gmail.com.

The album is also available on Spotify, iTunes and Amazon.

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Turn Heel is now streaming over at Post-Trash. Click over to give it a listen, and if you’re in the NY area, be sure to head to Cake Shop tomorrow night for the record release show, where we’ll have copies of the album available on cassette.

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The latest single from Turn Heel, “Ha Ha Ha,” premiered yesterday on CoolDadMusic. Check out what they had to say below, and if you’re in the NY area, catch Miracle Sweepstakes with Personal Space, Steady Sun and Dead Elect this Friday (11/4) at The Gateway in Brooklyn

Miracle Sweepstakes trace their beginnings to a blind MySpace meetup at a Long Island diner while the founding members were all (they were thankful to discover) still in high school. Following a few years of playing together and then not playing together, Craig Heed (guitar / vocals), Doug Bleek (bass), and Ian Miniero (drums) eventually joined up again to begin recording what would become their debut album, Turn Heel.

The band went into Brooklyn's Strange Weather to work with Daniel Schlett (Here We Go Magic / DIIV) and Yale Yng-Wong (Chairlift / Grizzly Bear). They spent nine days over the course of a full year to set almost a decade's worth of musical collaboration to tape. Today, they give us single "Ha Ha Ha."

The song showcases Miracle Sweepstakes' influences -- from Lou Reed to the jangle of 80s alternative rock to prog rock -- and how they blend those in the service of creating progressive yet accessible pop. "Ha Ha Ha," like much of Turn Heel, is more complex and swirling than typical guitar-based pop; so the band have added guitarist Carlos Parreno to help them realize some of these recorded arrangements in a live setting.

Listen to "Ha Ha Ha" below, and look for Turn Heel, which is due digitally and on cassette from One Weird Trick, on November 11th.

Miracle Sweepstakes play Brooklyn's Gateway this Friday, November 4th, with Steady Sun, Dead Elect, and Personal Space. They'll also be at Cake Shop in NYC on release day, November 11th.

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The first single from Turn Heel, “Maranatha,” premiered earlier today on GoldFlakePaint. Check out Alex Wexelman’s review below:

Lyrically, Miracle Sweepstakes’ first single is a journey. As the New York band’s singer and guitarist Craig Heed put it in an email: “Maranatha is about imagining what it’d be like to find religion, cycle through different beliefs, and eventually become cynical, from my own standpoint as a not-so-religious person.”

Musically, the song invokes the band’s core influences—Johnny Marr, The Zombies and ‘80s King Crimson —all before the chorus hits. There’s the jangly guitar of the intro, the psychedelic chord phrasing refracted through Kevin Barne’s kaleidoscopic songbook and then the angular repetitive phrasing that recalls Adrian Belew’s tenure in the prog outfit. ‘Maranatha’ shifts through styles seamlessly creating an aural journey whose mood reflects its message.

In its three-and-a-half minutes ‘Maranatha,’ which is the first offering from forthcoming record “Turn Heel” – released via One Weird Trick on November 11th – marries psychedelic and prog rock with elements of post-punk to create a perfect piece of pop that is both challenging and easily digested. The track is premiering below from today, and you can listen to it right here:

Click here to hear the track on GFP. More details coming soon.

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Miracle Sweepstakes - Turn Heel 

11/11/16

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Miracle Sweepstakes, 9/26/16

Photos by Alexa Agathos