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HEJ&TK
I t's been but a scant five months since Yo
Soybean's sophomore effort, The Townie
Sessions, and yet they've already found
time to record a killer third release. With
Manifest Blasphemy, frontman/guitarist
Nicholas Mallis and company further a fast
growing career in the Athens music scene with
their extremely personal brand of dance folk.
"We've been living in Athens since March,"
Mallis begins. "Before that we were living in
Atlanta. We played in Athens about once a
month at Go Bar, and the shows were always
a great time. I'd always loved Athens when
I was younger, but it really started to make
sense to me in the last couple of years."
Yo Soybean's lineup is somewhat dynamic,
changing form as the group performs. "When
we to» *t's just the trio: Andrew Klein on
banjo, Ryan Sedgwick on djembe, and myself,"
says Mallis. "There are a lot of different
instrumentalists who sit in with us around the
Southeast, though. We have a new bass player
who lives in Athens; his name is Matt Kabus.
Stephanie Jean Davis is still our violinist.
Chris Barnett is playing electric guitar with us
now, and he just moved here from Charlotte.
We try to get as many people in on the live
show as possible. When I started the band
down in Tallahassee a couple years ago, that
idea of community music was always the gen
eral mentality."
Though the new album is entitled Manifest
Blasphemy, the song with that title appears
on Yo Soybean's first album, Feath^-s of
Aluminum. Explaining the connection, Mallis
says, "That song was kind of this philosophical
rambling. I was in school at Florida State, and
I wrote it as I was watching a street preacher
yell at everybody in the middle of campus and
saw everybody yell back at him. It was just
like a rambling about wanting to get out and
travel in response to this philosophical crisis.
And this new 'Manifest Blasphemy Part II' was
kind of a travel anthem—answering the call of
the first song."
Throughout his songwriting career, Mallis
has often displayed a strong voice of dissent
against organized religion. "I guess with a lot
of the music that I write and a lot of the lyr
ics, part of it kinda haunts back to growing up
in Georgia. I wasn't raised in a super-intense
religious family or anything, but a lot of what
was around me was very much like that, and
the more you grow up, the more you realize
that there's so much more out there. I wrote
"Revelations," from The Townie Sessions, for
example, when I was biking around my home
town and stumbled into an old church that
my family used to attend when I was a teen
ager. It got me thinking about a whole wave
of bullshit I encountered from the church at
a young age... There was this one Sunday
school teacher who would always want to talk
about the book of Revelation and the end
times. Crazy, I know. A 50-year-old man tell
ing a bunch of kids that the sky is going to
open up. I just think about that stuff holding
humans back from reaching their full poten
tial. I mean, in many ways it does promote
love, but there's so much baggage to it, too."
Despite making the switch from home
recording to the palatial accommodations of
Chase Park Transduction, Mallis claims the
band still aimed for a warm, intimate feel with
its new release. "We actually kinda went for
lo-fi at Chase Park, and we recorded a lot of
it live. There's only one song on the record
when T'm not playing my guitar and vocals
live—just in front of a few mics. It was a
really different experience. I'm glad we did it,
and I think we got a really cool live sound out
of it. Working with Drew [Vandenberg] was
great, too. He kind of specializes in that type
of recording, and he knew how to get what we
wanted out of it."
As for the future, it sounds like Yo Soybean
will be keeping to its busy schedule. "We've
got about 20 shows booked for right after the
CD comes out, all across the Southeast... We
have another project called Sam Sniper that
involves a lot of the same people, and we're
doing Sam Sniper shows on this tour, too.
We're basically just trying to tour as much as
we can and get this album out. It'll be avail
able on Bandcamp for a pay-what-you-want
fee, and we'll be selling CDs at the shows for
like $2—-something really cheap. We basically
just want as many people to walk away with
copies of the music as possible."
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