Listen: Crooked Fingers – “Bad Blood (acoustic)” premiere

Crooked Fingers’ Breaks in the Armor was one of my favorite records released last year — Eric Bachmann’s best since Red Devil Dawn, I’d argue. If you pre-ordered the album through the Merge store, you also got a bonus download with acoustic versions of the songs. Now Breaks in the Armor: Acoustic Demo Version is getting an official release on iTunes and the Merge store. Give a listen to the beautifully stripped-down “Bad Blood” below:

Bachmann said of the demos, “Recording a stripped-down version of a song reveals its flaws. It also lets you hear the space you have to work with before you crowd it with ideas that can muddle the point. I don’t like to add drums or arrange songs with Crooked Fingers until I feel like the writing itself has reached a point. That’s why I record demos as stripped-down versions…

“These Breaks in the Armor demos were recorded with Andy Baker in Athens, GA. There were earlier versions that I had recorded in Taiwan and Athens, but they were on a hard drive that was “misplaced” at the Sasquatch Festival of 2011. In some ways these versions are an unnecessary re-do. But in other ways they represent so much more. They are a living symbol; a metaphor for strength; and perhaps even an allegory to the Great Sasquatch herself:

So listen to these demos… And just as the Yeti-Mother’s Spirit drapes her protective arms around her fragile cub, there will echo a howling: a tender asylum to the wild and a blood-curdling scream to the urbane. I can hear the sound now. And if you listen closely you can hear it, too. And perhaps this sound that we can hear together is the sound of the Big Foot and her demon cub smashing the shit out of my lost hard drive against some rock in the Columbia River Gorge.”

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