Dark Horizons

There’s been a slight change in the past year for New Orleans transplants Here Comes a Big Black Cloud. For a band whose live performance have been characterized by sci-fi costumes and choreographed dancing, to find it focusing on songwriting and recording is a bit strange.

“It kind of became that thing,” drummer Travis Wainwright says. “Like, ‘You’re that band with the theremin and the dancers.'”

While its onstage antics were getting it attention, the band was ready to focus on more elemental matters of its music.

“It was never my thing,” singer/guitarist Nick Capello says of the more theatrical days of their shows. “It was like, ‘Man we could be writing songs or getting better at shit, rather than playing the same eight mediocre songs over and over again so dancers can learn them.'”

The energy once given to onstage theatrics has since been focused elsewhere.

“We used to play like nine shows a month,” singer Soo Koelbli says. “We were popping a lot of Adderall and not sleeping, eating like every two or three days. Now we don’t play nearly as many shows. We focus way more on the music and the albums.”

The result is a handful of releases on a record label they’ve started, Stankhouse Records. With two Big Black Cloud vinyl releases already pressed, a Don Hellions record on its way and other projects coming, they’ve gotten off to a good start.

“We had maybe like 15 songs,” Capello says of the band’s earlier inception. “Since then we’ve written maybe like four albums of material in a year and a half. We can actually just play music now.”

The attention to songwriting has been good for their sound, elevating their nasty garage tendencies to epic, demonic proportions.

“We made a switch a little while ago and the material was kind of changing a little bit,” Koelbli says. “Dain [Marx] went onto the noise guitar instead of bass which he was playing before and the band got way louder.”

Along with their unique sinister noise aesthetic, it follows suit that their records, equipped with 3-D glasses and violent watercolor artwork, would be better suited to their own label.

“We knew we just wanted to go ahead and start our own record label other than trying to find someone else to put it out for us, so we just went for it,” guitarist Dain Marx says. “Maybe like a couple days after we put the order in for the 7-inch, Tim Janchar from Hovercraft Records contacted us and said he wanted to put out a record for us, and he agreed to make it a split release between our labels to help ours get off the ground a little bit.”

Their ambition is to release only on vinyl, a smart choice for music that sounds like a psychedelic abscess in rock history.

“When you put something on vinyl it can really last for an awfully long time,” Koelbli says. “It’s kind of nice to imagine where all the Stankhouse records will be in 50 years. They’ll be past the dollar bin by then.”