Chop Suey Presents: Jail Weddings

It's now six years into something that wasn’t expected to last six months — this “thing” called Jail Weddings. While the songs have always been timeless and top notch, they're also a band whose initial popularity often hinged on the fact that it could all fall apart at any given moment — with frequent dagger eyes or fistfights both onstage and off — where it was always clear to the audience that the high-drama of the songs often spilled into the band members' own precarious lives. They are a group that audiences could live through vicariously, a band capable of not just inspiring listeners' ugly catharsis, but often enacting its own in public. One of few that could claim they are not just a band, but a lifestyle all their own.

It was late 2012 when we had last checked in with frontman Gabriel Hart, who explained that last year’s Four Future Standards EP (described by VICE Magazine as “music to have knife sex to”) was also the gradual bridge to their more grandiose work-in-progress second full-length. Hart ensured that anyone who thought they were any sort of “party band” would be gravely mistaken upon hearing what they had been stirring up in their charred cauldron. Little did he know it would take well over 365 days to finish what he had started, where the stakes were raised, bank accounts drained, sanity/sobriety and sleep compromised, and their longtime rhythm section and one of their back-up singers lost…where towards the end it would cause him and his eight-headed collective to treat it with all the intensity a band would as if it was the last record they would ever record, even though their present locomotive momentum will prove at least that part otherwise.