Marinara Announces Debut Album I FEEL LIKE DOG

Members of beloved indie projects Active Bird Community, Your Dog, Future Teens and Double Cuff have come together to form a slacker rock super group playfully called Marinara. Today, the band announces their debut album I Feel Like Dog to be released on November 8, produced by Chris Daly (Diet Cig, Vagabon, Quarterbacks). Masters of a delectable, easygoing grit, Marinara created a record infectiously reckless in one moment, intensely tight the next. Their 90s-leaning guitar and merrily boisterous melodies strike easy comparisons to gems both nostalgic and contemporary - Spoon, JEFF The Brotherhood, LVL UP, Diet Cig, TV On The Radio.

Lead single "Adult Body" - out today - is a poignant confrontation with the darkly inevitable process of aging. Nick Cortezi wrote it upon a diagnosis with GERD, a treatable but nonetheless irksome gastro-intestinal condition he says "transforms the belly into a veritable battlefield at any given time." He continues, "as a smoker at the time and one who enjoyed his nachos with a tall cool glass of Bud, I wasn't doing myself any favors. So this song explores that tension. Wondering how come I can't feel comfortable in a body that I'm not really giving due credence to in terms of actually caring for it."

Though the song's inspiration is specific, its message is a widely resonant portrayal of our human struggle to properly balance mental, emotional and physical needs - particularly in the entrance into adulthood - So I'll try to learn to be / An adult in this Body / Its always changing / Its always changing for the worse. Cortezi's delightfully reckless conclusion to the matter feels too familiar - We'll never leave your apartment / The fun will never end.

Marinara's primary songwriter Nick Cortezi is writing about himself, but he's not writing alone - in fact, he couldn't. The serendipitous coming-together of the band's four members happened almost immediately; he moved into a loft in Brooklyn with his cousin, Quinn McGovern, who agreed to play drums for the band. Yuta Shimmi, McGovern's childhood friend from Arizona, randomly resurfaced looking for a room in New York becoming their third roommate and eventual guitarist. The lineup was rounded out by Julius Unger Bowditch on bass, Cortezi 's "consiglieri" as both were coming out of support roles in successful bands at around the same time, ready to strike out on their own.

Their debut full-length I Feel Like Dog, rarely lacking for courage, finds Cortezi's songs and lyrics all of a sudden at the center of something bigger and wilder. In a few seconds out of any given song, you'll find the band members trading fills, finding just a moment to let off steam before making the space for another member to interject a surge of energy. McGovern describes drumming in the band as "trying to join the fray." Cortezi at one point refers to his band as "three hounds who just need to be let off their leash." But despite all this there's never a sense of the band fighting for space, never a lack of clarity. Laying softly under the surface of tiny explosions of energy is a web of perfect communication, where each member is making room to hear what the others are doing and providing them a pocket to do it.

Cortezi describes Dog as "the first chapter in an extended narrative of how I approach my mental health," which, in its beginning, "is very much, like, head in the sand... the speaker in this album is very much struggling with both the lamentation of this lonely existence trapped in their own head, and also a deep cynicism and a suspicion of what other people can really offer to them."

The album, as such, populates and inhabits a world filled with mental traps and coping mechanisms, while still taking a wide enough angle on the scene to show the danger. Opener Regine 1 begins "suffering my friend / I'm in the static again." Lead single "Adult Body" describes a fantasy of seclusion, where in the face of a body that's "always changing for the worst," the narrator can "never leave your apartment / the fun will never end / nothing has to end." Throughout the album's ten tracks, Cortezi, McGovern, Bowditch, and Shimmi illustrate the desperation and occasionally the light at the end of the tunnel in these cycles of self-imprisonment.

"I don't want to be dour about it," Cortezi notes, "and that's where the music itself comes in." The joy the band brings to the table has an effect of externalizing and exorcising negative feelings, being careful to present pervasive thoughts with a level of sympathetic irony without undermining the experience. McGovern, in playing these songs, hears the music in conversation with the lyrics, finding that while the words demand gravity, the revelatory energy of the music responds by saying, "this is just a fleeting thought that passes through your brain. And the next song will be another one."

The result is a journey through the thorny parts of the mind that is nonetheless determined to be welcoming and inviting, a transformation of intimate solo songs into a communal space. It's group exorcism, it's a mantric (or manic) sharing. Salvation comes sometimes from within but often from without, and sometimes not at all. On I Feel Like Dog, Marinara orchestrate these possibilities alongside the absolute necessity in the search for it.

TOUR

November 7 | Somerville, MA @ ONCE Lounge

November 8 | Hartford, CT @ Wherehouse

November 9 | Brooklyn, New York @ The Footlight

Photo Credit: Nick D'Agostino