The Plastics Release Their Debut Album

Saturday the 31st of July sees THE PLASTICS release their highly anticipated debut full length album SHARK. Produced by award winning international producer Gordon Raphael, SHARK has been a year in the making and has seen The Plastics experimenting with their own creative processes and discover different sounds, styles and production and recording techniques.

“It’s come out as a collection of music that is difficult to place in any particular time period, but as a whole, it feels like music from an era gone by that’s breaking into the 21^st century.” says bassist Karl Rohloff.

In January 2010 The Plastics flew in Raphael from Berlin and recorded the album at Sound & Motion Studios in Cape Town: “We’ve been lucky enough to have the expertise and top-class environment of Sound and Motion Studios to make our ideas come to life.  Fuzzy and the guys have been really awesome and have contributed in a big way towards the end product.” says Rohloff.

The Plastics on working with Gordon Raphael:

“Working with Gordon was almost surreal.  The fact that he agreed to come all the way down to the bottom of the world and work with us, speaks hugely of Gordon’s desire for discovering new challenges.

One would think that it would be intimidating working with a guy of his caliber and experience, but his relaxed, joke-a-minute manner disarmed any nerves we had.  He brought in the old school mentality to our recording – if it sounds good, it is good and his favourite saying when asked to do something was “That’s easy… it’s only 2 buttons.”  The Gordotronic blueprint for unusual but beautiful sounds is all over SHARK.” Karl Rohloff.

Gordon Raphael on working with The Plastics:

“When I first landed in Cape Town, I was super happy to be away from the snow, ice and minus 15 degree weather in Berlin, but I really didn’t know what to expect from The Plastics when we actually hit the studio.

I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that they had plenty of great songs, and that the individual musicians were really talented. Good, rocking players always makes things faster and cooler in recording sessions, plus they were open to some suggestions I was having for certain tones and attitudes within their music. Sometimes they took on my ideas- even let me create some synthesizer collages here and there- but there were some things I would say, and they’d just laugh and say “no way!”, which is great because it shows they have their own strong ideas and are ready to defend them.

All in all, The Plastics showed me a great time in South Africa, my first time there, and to boot we made a really outstanding record in SHARK, which I have been telling everyone about. Even though we come from very different backgrounds, there was no problem at all in communicating, since we speak a very common language in guitars, vocals, bass and drums!”

– Gordon Raphael.

SHARK Track List:

1.     Jukebox

2.     Unusable Block

3.     Caves

4.     Look Out

5.     Caroline

6.     Late Night Scene

7.     Midnight Passion

8.     Stereo Kids

9.     Banks of the Breede

10.   By Hook or by Crook

11.   Those Three Words

12.   0.44

The first single from SHARK, entitled Caves, was released early July 2010 and has started to receive extensive campus radio airplay as well as being play listed on many commercial radio stations countrywide.

SHARK Album Launch

SHARK will be launched at The Assembly in Cape Town this Saturday, 31 July. The line-up includes Captain Stu, Holiday Murray, DJ Haasbroek and DJ Lapse. Doors open at 21h00 and tickets are R50 at the door, or R40 presold on http://www.webtickets.co.za.

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Press release sent to MusicReview.