The Old Ceremony, the orchestral-pop quintet Django Haskins has led since 2004, just released its fifth album, Fairy Tales And Other Forms Of Suicide. The band’s first LP for Yep Roc is also its first to receive a vinyl pressing, as well as its first to be released in Europe. In other words, it’s the perfect time for a provocative album title. Like many of the reinvented and rejuvenated performers the band now calls label mates (such as Robyn Hitchcock, Nick Lowe, John Doe and Paul Weller), the Old Ceremony makes music unencumbered by the ever-shifting demands of new and now. Haskins will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Old Ceremony feature.
Haskins: My great-grandparents survived the Titanic. This bit of trivia rarely came up until the past few years when I began researching the life of my great-grandfather, Karl Behr, in order to write a biography of his life and times, a project that still has a long way to go before making landfall. I’ve learned along the way that a large group of people has never stopped thinking and talking about the doomed ship. You thought the ’90s swing revival was intense? Check out the message boards of Encyclopedia Titanica sometime. This year marks the centennial of the nautical disaster, which has lifted this ‘Titania’ to a crescendo of morbid glee. And why not? To paraphrase Walter Sobchak, “100 years of glorious history from Bruce Ismay to James Cameron—you’re goddamn right I’m living in the past!”
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDlftw5yCL4
