Photo by Zack Smith
If you’re a fan of Galactic’s early albums, sax player Ben Ellman thinks you’re going to like what you hear from the group’s latest album, Into The Deep.
“It’s a little more of a throwback for us, I guess, or a little more taking it back a bit,” Ellman said in a recent phone interview. “There’s a lot less sort of, I wouldn’t say production, but it’s definitely got more of an old-school vibe. So it’s fun for us. I think there are just some good things on it. I’m excited about it.”
Into The Deep, which was released last July, follows three albums that saw Galactic crafting music that fit distinct themes.
The 2007 album From the Corner to the Block brought a hip-hop flavor into Galactic’s funky R&B-rooted sound, as the band brought in several rappers to do vocals and worked extensively for the first time with programmed rhythms and loops.
The 2010 album Ya-Ka-May revolved around the concept of New Orleans, the group’s hometown. Then 2012’s Carnivale Electricos used Mardi Gras as its theme, and the album found the band exploring how the music of Brazil intersected with the music of New Orleans and Louisiana.
Creating music that fit those concepts just naturally caused the band to expand its stylistic range, and in the process, Galactic has started to be known for having a progressive attitude about its music.
Ironically, Galactic initially had a purposeful retro element to their R&B/funk sound when they formed in 1994. Not at all happy with the glossy production of many 1980s albums, the band consciously sought to evoke the more classic R&B/funk sounds of the 1960s and ’70s on their early work.
Interestingly, Hurricane Katrina played a role in pushing Galactic—which includes Ellman, drummer Stanton Moore, bassist Robert Mercurio, guitarist Jeff Raines and keyboardist Rich Vogel—toward a more studio-crafted and progressive sound on From the Corner to the Block.
“From the Corner to the Block, that started that whole studio thing because it was post-Katrina, and we couldn’t be in New Orleans,” Ellman said. They were in a studio in the Poconos, Ellman recalls, without their drummer, Moore. “The way we wrote music changed because we were using drum loops and we were making little percussion things or whatever,” Ellman says. “The way we wrote music changed. It was no longer like, ‘Let’s all get in a room and all write this song.’ It was a little bit of a Frankenstein thing we would do. Then we would sort of re-play the Frankenstein piece as a band.”
The group went on to build its own studio in New Orleans, and with no bills for outside studio time to worry about, this further encouraged Galactic to experiment and use studio technology.
After Carnivale Electricos, though, Galactic started to rethink how it wanted to release music. Ellman said originally the band thought it would release a series of singles before that plan changed.
“We put out a couple of singles, and then we had a bunch more that we were kind of going to release slowly,” Ellman said. “Then we started talking about an EP. Then it was like, you know, man, let’s just hold up, man. We’ve got a killer record here. That’s kind of what happened.”
Because Galactic was making singles, not an album, the idea of writing around a concept went out the window. And that just naturally led the band back closer to its original approach of jamming out song ideas in a practice space and recording them live as a band in the studio for In The Deep.
“We did do a lot more playing in the studio and just kind of seeing what came up instead of crafting these things in the studio, perfecting it, looking at it and trying sonically to enhance it,” Ellman said.
Galactic plays the Turner Hall Ballroom on Thursday, April 7 with Bombino at 8 p.m.
