About Federale
Federale has always told stories through music, of course, but fans hadn’t
much opportunity to parse lyrics
within the band’s
first two albums.
La Rayar: A
Tale of Revenge (2008) and Devil in a Boot (2009)
spun blood-soaked yarns through music alone – concertedly-cinematic soundscapes
of rumbling
riffs, plaintive whistling, and soaring soprano vocals soundtracked the most
captivating spaghetti westerns that never were. Hegna, already entrenched within the Brian Jonestown
Massacre and soon to become
longest-tenured bassist of Anton Newcombe’s famously-troubled psych-rock revue, made clear from the start that Federale existed purely as an instrumental project. Still, certain projects defy even the strictest of boundaries.
Three years later,
The Blood Flowed Like Wine (2012) brought along guest appearances from frontmen KP (Spindrift) Thomas and Alex (Black Angels) Maas. After a string of notable shows -- The Fillmore, Crystal Ballroom, Henry Fonda Theater -- they earned a reputation for live performance, and Hegna took to the mic himself for much of 2016’s All The Colours Of The Dark. By now, learning that No Justice contains only a pair of vocal-less tunes shouldn’t seem any more surprising than news that its release
has been scheduled
for Mexico City – first
stop along a summer filled
with festival appearances up the west coast
from Austin to Seattle. (The Portland, OR hometown faithful
must wait til November 23rd for Portland’s No Justice show at
Mississippi Studios.)
Embracing the enormous scope of orchestral cinematic production courtesy of members of the Oregon Symphony, Federale has honed a taut, gleaming
precision from their signature sound. When Collin Hegna’s honeyed baritone waltzes with the operatic wizardry of bandmate Maria Karlin,
the
finely-etched lyrical depths fortify Federale’s cinematic sway. Spare yet sumptuous, distilling the lean, gritty essence of grindhouse anomie and
wielding orchestral flourishes of widescreen delicacy, No Justice feels like the defining statement of a band fully-realized – a sultry,
restless stormcloud arising
from the darkness
at the edge of town to draw forth the fated reckoning. With ‘Trouble’, the album’s single,
Hegna imagined a Lee Hazelwood
and Nancy Sinatra
song put together
with a Serge Gainsbourg duet. I just started playing
around with these two concepts,
and this weirdly
interesting mix came out – as if Lee Hazelwood was singing with Jane Birkin. The song fully switches from 70s cowboyish into full-on Gainsbourg. The femme fatale,
Maria, even sings
the lyrics in French – I went that far.”
“A
lot of the songs are about things
that could be perceived as unjust or unfair,” explains
Hegna. “It’s not commentary so much as observing inequality as it happens to be and telling stories about that through the
lens of frontier justice. There are always parts of life that are out of one’s
control. Look at the album cover.
That’s definitely a metaphor, but I wouldn’t say it’s about me so much as the world. Lord knows, enough
folks are getting
fucked way worse than me. I'm purely observing things as they have always happened. In nature, sometimes you’re
a hawk and sometimes you’re
a cute bunny that gets turned into hawkshit. It ain't fair, but that's
life. Just because
things feel fucked
doesn’t mean you can’t make something pretty
at the same time.”
A forthcoming video for
‘Trouble’, shot by veteran Pickathon chronicler Melissa Walther, captures the
band performing in concert at Portland’s Doug
Fir. Soon after, they’ll release a ‘Fire On The Hill’ clip by director
Brett Fallentine featuring footage from his film of the same name – a recent
Los Angeles Film Festival
award-winning documentary about the Black cowboy community that’s grown up
around a century-old Compton horse stable. For
a band that set out to score non-existent movies, it stands to reason that
actual directors would come calling, and a steady stream of inquiries followed Hegna’s bravura collaborations
with tastemaker darling Ana Lily Amirpour on 2014 indie smash A Girl Walks Home
Alone At Night and 2016 Keanu Reeves/Jason Momoa cannibal romp The Bad Batch. (At least one track’s already
been completed for her 2020 release Kate Hudson/Zac Efron fantasy-adventure Blood Moon.)
- Website:
- http://federalepdx.com/
