The Range Mercury

The Range announces new album 'Mercury' & Brooklyn show (watch "Ricercar" video)

The Range at Cheer Up Charlies for Lost Weekend 4 day 2
photo by Tim Griffin

James Hinton is back with Mercury, his first album as The Range in six years, that will be out June 10 via Domino. The album includes his recent single “Bicameral,” which opens the album, and he’s just shared a new single, “Ricercar.”

“A Ricercar in a musical context is a prelude fugue that kind of sets the tableau of a piece to follow,” says Hinton. “I first heard about the concept of a Ricercar in a biography of Bach, who famously encoded his own name in a piece (H having been interchangeable as the name for B-flat at the time). At the time I wrote this song I was listening to a lot of rap from the 90s, specifically DJ Premier beats. As such I was rapidly collecting breaks and had just stumbled upon the Chief Kamanawanalea break by the Turtles and found that if I reordered the sections I could make this kind of palindromic composite break that seemed to propel the song along.”

Hinton adds, “This song features a vocal sample from Instagram of a singer covering Tamar Braxton’s ‘My Man.’ The lyrics are quite personal to me and are a good example of what I try to do in a lot of my songs. I tend to try to find a way to say something that I would never be able to say out loud. I think of my editing of lyrics as a pressure release.”

The video for “Ricercar” was co-directed by Stevie Gee and Essy May, who did the illustrations for Mercury. You can watch that below.

The Range will play a release show for Mercury at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere Zone One on June 11. Tickets will be on sale soon.

Hinton played a few of Mercury‘s new songs during The Range’s set at our Lost Weekend SXSW day party on Friday (3/18), which included him playing live drums on a few tracks. Check out a few pictures from his Lost Weekend set by Tim Griffin in this post.

attachment-The Range - Mercury_3000

Mercury tracklist:
1. Bicameral
2. 1995
3. Urethane
4. Ricercar
5. Not For Me
6. Relegate
7. A Tree Day
8. Balm
9. Cantor
10. Every Good Thing
11. Violet