With this album, Soup dives into a more jam oriented landscape, experimenting with 1970's prog elements, mixing it with the established soup sound: dynamic, melancholic and melodic. Produced by Paul Savage. Layout by Lasse Hoile. Cover artwork and photography: Lasse Hoile Remedies is our seventh studio album, and has been a musical journey a bit different from the previous ones. Remedies has in many ways allowed for the band to contribute collectively with the songwriting, resulting in a more jam based and celestial record. Exceptions will be found, like on the opener Going Somewhere, which is a tightly arranged eight minute track with the characteristic songwriting fingerprint of the bands founder Erlend Viken. Still, with tracks like The Boy And The Snow and Sleepers it becomes clear that the album is a joint effort. Also it shows that its vision of becoming a dive into the jam based- and psychedelic parts of 1970’s prog scene rings true. It is pretty cool too, when Paul Savage, our producer and engineer, managed to connect with this vision and put an emphasis to it. Working with a variety of bands, like Mogwai and Franz Ferdinand, Savage obviously has an adaptive ear, and was able to join in also on songs of the more «traditional» soup sounding character. All in all we brought around ten songs to the studio, but as it turned out only five of them were meant to sit together on the album. A few were put aside for an EP, whilst some were trashed. Making a product that sounds consistent is always a challenge, but like with the previous soup albums Remedies is also a solid piece of work. No loose ends and no fillers. Some would say that Remedies is a dark album, and in many ways they would be right. It is not a happy clapper, and -with it’s references to the gloomy corners of the human psyche- its lyrics brings further support to that . You could argue that the album has been a therapeutic journey, serving as an outlet for more than one interpersonal (and personal) issue. Still there is a sense of hope to it, like with the album’s final track Something Like Home, communicating strongly, especially in its melodies, about the melancholic, yet hopeful nature of the human mind. Remedies has become an interesting piece of the puzzle with regards to Soup’s development as a band, and is surely an album we are proud of. As for the visual part, our loyal friend over the last ten years -Lasse Hoile got to work his magic. Like he’s done with artists like Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree, Hoile set to strengthen the audio visual bond, making the album more of an «experience». We are thrilled to be working with him once again, and must say that his efforts this time were extraordinary. He will also be making a one-off signed photo print to go with parts of our album release, and we are really looking forward to that. All in all we are psyched to be sharing our new record with the world, seing it off after years in the making. Now it is out of our hands.
