Back in 2013, Chicago-based post-punk act Disappears — founding member Brian Case (vocals, guitar) along with Noah Leger (drums), Jonathan van Herirk (guitar) and Damon Carruesco (bass) — released two related yet very different efforts that are among some of my favorite albums of the past decade or so — the atmospheric and tempestuous Kone EP and the tense, raging Era.
In 2017, Carruesco left the band. Disappears’ remaining members — Case, Lager and van Herrik — eventually decided to continue onward, but under a new name, and new sonic direction and songwriting approach as FACS. With 2018’s full-length debut as FACS, Negative Houses, the trio quickly established an intense, cathartic and heavy sound, although it’s not always obvious.
The Chicago-based outfit’s fifth album, last year’s Still Life in Decay was a decidedly focused that saw the band at what may arguably be their most solidified. The apocalyptic chaos of their previous album was pushed away in favor of examination with a remarkable and uneasy clarity, while being a sort of addendum to 2021’s Present Tense. Although Alianna Kalaba made an amicable last stand with the band on the album’s material, the album saw the band’s incredibly tight rhythm section dancing and twisting around each other like a double helix rather than inside it, creating a lattice, in which Case wove his guitar lines in and around, much like creeping vines as you’d hear on album tracks “When You Say” and “Slogan.”
The JOVM mainstays — currently Case, Van Herik and Leger — will be releasing the “North America Endless”/”Take Me to Your Heart” single through Sub Pop. The limited release will be on white vinyl and limited to 1,000 copies, and features the original A-side “North America Endless” and on the B-side, a cover of Eurythmics “Take Me to Your Heart.”
“North America Endless” sees the trio at their most forceful yet melodic. Anchored around a shimmering and reverb-soaked, sustain-driven guitar line, thunderous and angular drumming paired with Case’s delivery, which evokes and expresses the anxiety, despair, cognitive dissonance and dissociation of modern American life.
“We had been talking a lot about how to incorporate melody in a new way with the material we were starting to write after Still Life in Decay, and this was one of the first experiments with that,” FACS’ Brian Case says of the new single. “I had this inverted Polvo thing I had been playing around with that Jonathan married to a really nice Frippy sustained lead, and it kind of just wrote itself. Lyrically, it’s about the dissociation needed to live in this country and the powerlessness that can bring. Noah’s beat at the end of the song is one of my favorites from him.”
Regarding the cover of Eurythmics’ “Take Me to Your Heart,” Case says the song is “A band favorite, we’ve been kicking around a version of this since we first started FACS, but for some reason just got around to completing it now. This song has a lot of elements we keep in focus when we write – repetition, space, off-the-grid melodies, and mantra-like lyrics that can be construed in a few ways based on what perspective you view them from.”
The tense Joshua Ford-directed accompanying video for “North America Endless” follows a woman through the slow-burn descent into numbing dissociation and madness.
