Between LPs

Cuttings (2020)
&
Off World (2025)

Viper keys and organist, Zack Brines, released a few excellent EPs with his garage rock band, Song Birds, by the end of 2020.

To kickoff the new year, our longtime friend and producer, Craig "Dub Fader" Welsch, remixed 2 tracks from Cuttings for our second Vipers 45.

We linked up with London-based Happy People Records, who pressed the single on seriously heavyweight vinyl.

The pre-cursor to Vipers, Destroy Babylon, were also in the studio around the same time we were working on Cuttings.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of DB's first gig, we released 2 new songs, "World's Straightest Line" and "Course Corrections."

This was the first new DB material since 2017's Shapeshifters.

Enter Kellee Webb.

A rare mid-pandemic gig, and our first Boston show with Kellee fronting Vipers, who recently moved back to Massachusetts after 5 years in Virginia. We had just written "Jackals" and were about to write a lot more together.

While down south, Kellee sang with local ska/reggae rockers EgoSapien, and appears on their EP Have No Fear.

Cue the Music ADD jingle  *TV static*

On 2.22.22, we surprised dropped a new project, Cryptophaser.

The term cryptopphasia is the dialogue spoken by twins before they learn an actual language. Gibberish, for two. These songs started taking shape at our Waltham studio in the wee-hours of the night after our other band rehearsals.

This was our first project as a duo (only took 25 years). It resulted in deeper explorations, focusing heavily on big riffs and chunky distortion. The opening melody was actually a riff we wrote as children after we inherited our grandma's keyboard, and loving the sound of the lowest note and a tritone up ("the devil's interval").

We also had fun exploiting our identical genes visually:

5 years after debuting, we finally issued the first two Viper tapes on wax, courtesy of Jump Up Records.

Another project was percolating during the Cuttings sessions, this one helmed by our longtime bandmate Rob Carmichael. He wrote a batch of hardcore tunes and asked if I would lay down the drum tracks (and create the art), which I happily obliged. That first EP was released in October 2020 as Minus Delta Vee.

Rob had another crop of songs by mid '22, and this time JBo came on board, bass in hand. The 3 of us tracked at Mad Oak in Allston MA with Benny Grotto, resulting in MDV EP #2, The Highest Bitter.

Cryptophaser EP #2 followed on 11.22.22.

Double the fuzz.

November '23 - Kotoko Brass

The Vipers hornsmen – Andy Bergman on sax and Brian Paulding on trombone – also play together in Kotoko Brass. The band began when Brian and his brother Ben (a performer, scholar, and educator of African drumming) joined forces. Ben fortified the percussion section with Attah Poku and Kwame Ofori, two master percussionists from Ghana, alongside a veteran supergroup rhythm section.

Described by the Boston Globe as “propulsive, infectious party music," the band is a genuine celebration of tradition, diversity, and unity.

February '24 - Tiger Witch

The entirety of 2023 was spent working on new material. What started as DB jams with Rob, JBo and myself, headed in a different direction when Kellee took the reigns vocally. Keeping the band in a trio format allowed us to write and record fresh ideas fast, and we all felt this batch of tunes deserved its own outlet.

After tossing around a minimum of 150 band names, my then-5-year-old daughter said we should call ourselves "Tiger Witch", a combination of her two Halloween costumes.

So we did. We intended to re-record almost everything, but enjoyed our demos enough and decided to release em as is.

June '24 - The Macrotones

The Macrotones, formed in '07, were already a tour-de-force before JBo and I joined on bass and percussion in 2011. The band remained instrumental for 10 years until Phil Desisto came along, mic in hand, to usher in the next era.

Yet another recording that started the same time as Cuttings, this one took much longer to complete (quarantine was not friendly to a 10-piece band). We rushed out an EP in 2020, and finally gave Phil his proper debut in the summer of '24 – From the Void, adding a new level of scorching soul and psychedelic funkiness.

The final release in this stretch serves as a fitting milestone, marking the beginning of the Vipers' next chapter– our first cut with Kellee, and our first single on a new label– Easy Star Records.

Our connection with ESR goes back to '05 when JBo was concert chair at the University of Hartford, where he booked Easy Star All-Stars for a show on campus. We were big fans of Dub Side of the Moon, but also loved their early compilation albums like Can't Stop Us Now. Destroy Babylon would eventually link up with them for a small tour in 2011, and would pick up more supporting gigs over the years with both DB and Vipers.

This of course led to sharing new tracks together, a strengthening of our relationship, and the eventual record contract.

The crew at Easy Star HQ have quickly made us feel at home, and we are all incredibly excited to be working together and share this music with new audiences.

Off World is coming April 11 - pre-order now.