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Abnormal Cattle Performs at Door County’s Husby’s to Celebrate Release of “Figure 1”

Photo courtesy of Rabbit Fire Records.

If you’ve been looking for a new record to buy, you’ll want to be at Husby’s on January 7 as Abnormal Cattle releases their new 12” LP on 150-gram vinyl (with accompanying CD version) titled Figure 1.

“The moment you give up looking for your car keys, sit on the couch and find them that’s what this band is,” said drummer Dan Smrz. It seems that is also how the band got its name. “How we got the name is up to debate because [the name] came out on a completely different level.”

“We were going to name the band Switters after a Tom Robbins novel but never played a show with it,” said guitarist and vocalist Rick Wood. “I thought of [Abnormal Cattle] as a simile or metaphor for people, said it as a phrase while turning a corner in Fish Creek, and Dan said it should be the name of the band.”

That name has led them to play with the Wisconsin Beef Commission, a crazy cow punk band. They have also been playing shows throughout Milwaukee and Chicago.

The new album was made for vinyl because it is dense in lower and mid-range sound, which wasn’t changed for the CD.

Expanding their experience is one of the reasons that they chose to release their first album on vinyl. “We could have done it on the computer but instead did what we were interested in,” bassist Nate Lang said.

Smrz added that vinyl retains its value and collectability and isn’t as disposable as a CD.

“People who think of music as an investment will buy it. [Vinyl is] a different culture,” Wood said.

When they starting playing together, Wood and Smrz got Lang to play with them by saying they would do a million Tom Petty cover songs over the summer. It turned out they didn’t know that many Petty songs and ended up playing their current style – loud garage rock.

“We never really had a rudimentary style, and that’s how we got loud garage rock,” Wood said, and it’s a sound that comes through on the album, which took about 20 hours to produce.

“We were really prepared, and the record is more like a document than a production [because] only a couple of songs took more than four takes, and most were recorded the first time,” Wood said.

Photo courtesy of Rabbit Fire Records.

Lang agreed, stating, “I was proud that we got a song in one take. There was no fakeness, and we did it like bands did before the digital age to prove we could.”

With the help of Rabbit Fire Records, they were able to record this album the way that they wanted to and produce it as they intended.

While one might think that track one, “Fishbowl,” is about Door County, it is really more of a general statement about small town life.“There are a lot of places like Door County,” Lang said.

“Not too many songs that I write are pinpointed to one thing,” Wood said. “‘Fishbowl’ is a mockery [telling musicians] to stop trying to pretend to be a rock star and play music, when you are famous you live in a fishbowl where society stares at you. [But really] we’re being vague, nothing is an attack on anyone in particular.”

While it is not an attack, the exception to this vagueness is their song title “This Song Is So Trite I’ll Never Get Laid.” According to Wood the title for this song, “came from Matthew Fisher’s intro to any song he played.”

Lang explained, “That’s how we’re all connected; we’ve all played with Fisher.”

While Fisher might have made a connection among these musicians, Wood, Lang, and Smrz have been playing together as Abnormal Cattle for almost a year. With the release of their first album comes the addition of even more original songs to their repertoire – enough for an entire second album.

So dust off your record player and pick-up your copy of Figure 1 during Abnormal Cattle’s album release party at Husby’s on January 7, show starts at 10 pm with no cover.

Order your copy of Figure 1 at http://www.rabbitfirerecords.com.

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