Look Mexico vs. Look Mexico

It’s been a busy few months for us dudes here at the Look Mexico camp. If it seems like you haven’t heard a whole lot from us lately, that’s because we’ve been locked in a basement… literally… kind of.

We’ve dropped proverbial anchor in an old mattress shop below local 'za hot spot, Decent Pizza. It’s an amazing space; roomy, warm, and acoustically brilliant, especially after all the work Matt and Dave did on soundproofing it. We’re talking hours and hours of hard labor on sound panels, and some heavy-duty sound proof doors so we can practice late into the night. Usually until 1 a.m. before we start waking the dead. (The space conveniently backs up to a funeral home.) From the looks of it, the spot, which we’ve endearingly named “The Magic Cave,” will be our home for a while. After finishing up our tour last November, we’ve stayed static in the cave, meeting four to five times a week to write our next full length. You can catch a look at The Magic Cave in our video for the first track off our EP Gasp Asp, “You’re Not Afraid of the Dark, Are You?”

Prior to our move, we had already started working on the first track of what we hope will be a batch of about twelve songs, ten ultimately making it to the next LP. It’s the track “Just Like Old Times,” and you can see an early rendition of it here, documented by the folks at Bionic Ear in Orange County, California. Since that recording, we’ve made some serious instrumental additions and changes, and really spruced the song up. We’ll be playing “Just Like Old Times,” out on our next tour.

The second track we tried to write didn’t come so easily, and we entered into a bit of creative constipation.

It’s interesting being a band at this point; on a label, with a few releases, the ability to book healthy tours, a lot of great press, but still working steady jobs and a whole heck of a lot of collective band debt to boot. We’ve of late experienced a number of folks approaching us saying things to the effect of, “you guys are getting big.” Of course that’s a real nice thing to hear, but for us, it’s been close to five years of hard work, and everything comes so gradually. Ryan Slate has been delivering pizzas, while Ryan Smith puts in long hours at a pizza joint too. Dave and Matt work at Fusion Café in Tallahassee; Dave waiting tables, and Matt working in the kitchen. And I’ve been working hard to pay the bills with my design work at sharkguts design. Three nights of the week we write from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m and allot a few hours during in the afternoon on other days because that’s what our work schedules permit. And so, as we started writing more for the record we could feel the great weight of our hard work pressing down upon us. We found ourselves caught in the terrible mindset that everything we did from that moment on had to be golden, because WE HAD TO WRITE AND INCREDIBLE SOPHOMORE FULL LENGTH. (Cue lightening).



As anyone in music, writing, or art can attest, you don’t strike gold on the first go. Writing is tedious. It’s rewriting. And so we spent a long while slamming our heads against our instruments, getting stressed out about this second song- and then finally one day we stepped back and started writing the third song. And then the fourth. And things came easier, and we found a way to compromise and swallow our collective pride, and we wrote a fifth, sixth and seventh song. And it’s hands down our best stuff to date.

What can you expect? Well, it’s definitely smarter. Not smarter as in mathier, but smarter in the sense that we’ve found new weave, a new groove.. The give and take of the instrumental play is something that makes this latest batch of songs so exciting. We’re experimenting with dynamic and modesty, simple and chaotic. It’s certainly more mature. And the addition of our latest two members, Dave Pinkham and Ryan Smith (who, contrary to some reviews, have not been a part of the writing process up until now) have brought so much new material and life to the mix, that it’s hard to image we made due without them.

For a special behind the scenes look at the recording process, click here.
Okay, just kidding. That’s a video of Matt lighting Smith’s back hair on fire.

We demoed two of the tracks, laid down rough recordings of the rest, and we’ll hopefully be playing at least four of them on our upcoming tour. We’re playing the Harvest of Hope Fest on the 6th. After that we come back for about a week then head out to Texas for South By Southwest. Then we make our way to California, up to Portland, and then back home to begin recording this next record with our main man, Phil Martin in The Magic Cave. It’s an exciting time. We’ll see you out there.

Thanks for reading. Stay turned. More updates to come.
+joshua