Being Dead dive into their eclectic, energetic second album EELS
Moments after Falcon Bitch opens Zoom on her phone for our interview, she rescues a cat.
While she was simultaneously dialing in on time and heading outside to search for an outlet before her phone “diddly-died,” a cat ran out of the house. The big one.
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“They were not supposed to get out,” Falcon Bitch tells me. She places the phone down, screen facing up, leaving the view of the blue, cloud-spotted sky of Richmond, Virginia, in view. Moments later, I hear “I got the cat! I got the cat!” and see her skip across the static frame with the feline in her arms. Mission accomplished. The cat is back inside, as Shmoofy, her partner in the whimsical alt/surf/psych rock band, Being Dead, joins her outside for a cigarette.
Both of the band’s album titles reference animals – When Horses Would Run (2023) and EELS (2024) – so there was obviously no way they were going to risk the cat’s safety.
“I work in wildlife outside of music,” Falcon Bitch tells me. “We love animals. We love critters. We love creatures. We’re fascinated by nature, and honestly, eels. We love eels.”
Had Falcon Bitch not sprung into action so fast to rescue the big cat, there was no way I could be sure if they indeed do love animals – despite naming their sophomore album after the ray-finned fishes that are often electric.
Image: Athen Smith
Falcon Bitch and Shmoofy have devised a narrative thicket around the band. Apparently they’re animal lovers, but not much else is known. For example, no one truly knows how the band started.
When I ask, they tell me they met because they both worked at a traveling circus. Shmoofy was the carousel mechanic and Falcon Bitch was doing back-breaking labor setting up the carousel. She was also British at the time, but not anymore.
“I kinda took her in and taught her the rules. The American rules, and through that the band formed,” Shmoofy says.
In another interview, they said they met at Yale. In yet another they said they met as Cinnabon workers. And in yet another, they said both were true because you need a degree from Yale to work at Cinnabon.
It’s an interesting relationship with obscurity. They don’t hide their faces behind masks, and they’re not creating one, long-standing mystery to be solved by leaving a trail of clues like breadcrumbs falling off a piece of white bread from Franklin’s Barbecue in Austin, Texas (one known fact about the band is that’s the city where they cut their teeth).
Their ability to devise new myths of their origin on the spot stems from their talent for storytelling. They use this talent to make their songs fascinating listens, rejecting any sort of standard verse/chorus form while integrating numerous musical ideas.
The song Van Goes opens with a short-lived moment of cacophony then launches into forward-moving strumming of the Danelectro baritone guitar (which they used most throughout the album).
Falcon Bitch and Shmoofy trade vocal moments like volleys from tennis opponents during a friendly match. Then they slowly overlap one another. Their tones unite them in harmony, but they say different words, creating this intriguing mix of consonance and dissonance until they conjoin the words as well, combining their voices to create a soft, warm sound greater than the sum of its parts.
Adjacent to this vocal maneuvering, they insert quick electric-picking breaks between the on-beat strums, and at the end, there is a brief and loud jam section before the fade out. So much happens in the song, yet it all exists within a defined perimeter.
“We don’t want to make it boring, so maybe we go a little overboard, but it works out,” Shmoofy says.
“We go down every route and say, ‘Let’s try this idea. Let’s try this idea. Let’s try this idea.’ If one of them doesn’t work out then we try to circle back and say ‘How can we make it work in a different way in a different part of the song, or in a different part of the album?’,” Falcon Bitch continues.
Image: Athen Smith
They apply the same sense of storytelling and experimentation to their albums in a macro way. Each track is a hearty jam with its own beginning, middle, and end, but the albums are entire sagas as well. The songs transition seamlessly between one another using a plethora of methods including the lingering reverb that sustains Big Bovine into Storybook Bay and hard cuts in volume like when Rock ‘n Roll Hurts leads into Love Machine.
“[We] definitely want the album to be more of a piece and less like singles,” Shmoofy says.
“Definitely one cohesive, consistent body that feels like it’s its own thing – has its own themes and world,” Falcon Bitch continues.
When it was time for the songs to be produced, Falcon Bitch and Shmoofy traveled to a new world called Los Angeles. They were there to work with the legendary producer John Congleton. They only had two weeks for him to lend his magic touch to EELS as he had to fellow left-of-center artists like St. Vincent, AJJ, and Nilüfer Yanya.
But this short timeframe was good for Being Dead because they took years to make their first record. Congleton was the exact right producer to guide them as they expedited their process (he also had a couple nice acoustics they used to record).
“[John’s] a tycoon in the industry. He knew how to get from A to B faster than we did. He was always a step ahead,” Falcon Bitch says.
“We’d be like ‘We like this demo,’ and he’d be like, ‘I don’t want to hear about the fucking demo anymore,’” Shmoofy continues.
Now that they’ve gone through an intense production process and an incredibly slow production process, they intend to produce their next record themselves, at their own pace.
To fuel inspiration for new songs, they’ve been listening to the soundtrack for the 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables. They want to write something with that classic sense of narrative but also experiment with noises and tape machine effects.
Given their knack for telling stories, it wouldn’t be surprising if the next Being Dead album is as celebrated as Les Mis. Perhaps one day the names Falcon Bitch and Shmoofy will be taught right after Victor Hugo in creative writing courses. In their world, anything and everything is possible.
Being Dead’s sophomore album EELS is out now.
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