If new-tone ska has a periodic table, Flying Raccoon Suit’s latest record Afterglow hits a ton of elements straight away.
In the first minute of the title track “Afterglow,” they’ve checked boxes—some metal, some nonmetal, post transition metals (that sounds punk)— a box that reads “FRS,” their own unique element in the ska community.
The record, crowd funded on Kickstarter, is ska held down by a double-bass back beat, but that’s just the beginning, and the journey to the closer “Toss and Turn” is a vast and sonic exploration of happy, sad, and hopeful feelings.
“The way we sort of bookended the album is very on-purpose with “Afterglow” and “Toss and Turn” being two sides of that coin,” says guitarist and vocalist Andrew Heaton. “What we’re talking about with Afterglow, we wanted to always shine a light on the fact that there can be hope after these things it’s natural to feel, and “Toss and Turn” really embodies that, too, because you know, the last line in the whole album is, ‘If we knew what lies ahead, would we still toss and turn?’ So that, that is a big part of it.”
They write what they want to write, from surf to screamo and beyond. There’s notes of Kill Lincoln and hints of We Are The Union, steps back to earlier waves of ska and steps beyond this new wave.
“It started out like as, you know, our own kind of journal,” says vocalist Jessica Jeansonne. “We wrote it before quarantine, oddly enough, and it started to take a new meaning for everybody. Hopefully, when [people] hear it, you know, they realize, we’re all in this thing, and we’re all gonna get out of it together.”
A strong kinship to new tone, it’s an album full of heavy feelings, but they keep their spirits as light as the upbeat and their perspective has a mildly self-deprecating sense of humor.
“You know, sometimes you want to play a metal song, but you don’t want to go through the hassle of putting a metal band together,” says bassist Joshawa Billiot.
“We’ve had shows where we asked the crowd, ‘Do you want to hear a reggae song or a country song?’ It’s your choice,” adds Tenor sax player Guillermo Gibson, further proving the depth they draw music knowledge and inspiration from.
Their fearlessness to defy previous waves of ska and push this wave forward is apparent from the first 15 seconds of the album. Is it double-bass, metalcore to 30 seconds in or a deep felt call for wellness? By 45 seconds, the answer is “yes.”
“It’s sort of looking ahead and even knowing that you can experience those things that more can come after” says Heaton. “Cautiously optimistic, maybe understandably frustrated,” says Gibson. “It’s multi-faceted, you know; we’re multi-faceted; people are multi-faceted, so it’s all that.”
While they credit a lot of musical contribution to Heaton, the key to Flying Raccoon Suit is no one person is the nucleus; they’re all protons flying around a vast musical nucleus, and they cherry-pick ideas depending on the day.
“I will say “Driftwood,” that was one of those songs that just organically happened in about a day. We were just hanging out, and Jessica says she wanted to, she wanted to play a surf song. So we were like, ‘OK,’” recalls Billiot. “And we played a surf song, and it’s just nice that we looked at each other like, ‘That’s pretty good.’”
They have nearly a decade of chemistry dating back to high school. That gives a lot of room in this rather large outfit for everyone to contribute equally.
“We were basically friends who wanted to hang out. I think it was the first and foremost just a bunch of high schoolers in marching band who were into ska and thought, ‘Oh yeah, we could totally be legit,’” says Billiot. “We knew a little bit about music, and we had some cheap guitars. You know, there’s not enough room in most traditional, just the rock bands for you and your 12 band friends. I mean, we also love ska. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely adored it, and it seemed like a convenient thing. ‘Hey! Me, you and our 10 buddies could all hang out and play ska—that’d be great.’”
“At one point, I think around we had, no joke, 12 members. The horn line, at its biggest, was bigger than the current band lineup,” says Gibson, emphasizing the bands growth, through subtraction and addition, as musicians and lineup .
No matter the influences they tap on any track, the album as a whole is uniquely their own view of ska through the eyes of these Mississippi musicians and a discussion of mental health and wellness. It doesn’t hurt that Derek Kerley, the band’s drummer, also does their production.
“We finished up the last of the tracking kind of during [lockdown]. So it would be like, we’d have a day where two people would get together and hash out the last of the horn parts or the last of the vocals,” says Heaton. “The fact that our drummer is the engineer really helped us a lot in that sense because, you know, he wasn’t able to go to his job for a long time. It kept him sane having something, a creative outlet to work on during that time.”
In Flying Raccoon Suit’s carbon life form, they provide the tools in their songs to navigate a terrestrial reality. It’s a long path through this existence, in our somewhat unstable and negative world, and people are searching to overcome without a controller or joystick. FRS may not be Tanooki Mario in an 8-bit adventure, smashing boxes looking for wealth. They’re not using their horns to rearrange the table of ska either.
They have found a formula to make complicated emotions feel valuable, universal and simple. They’re searching for wellness and mindfulness by making some great music like the single “Hive Mind.” It’s not earth science or computer programming; They get to the heart of this fully analog life, and that’s leveling up too.
“It’s crazy where life will take you. I think I’ve known Josh since kindergarten. So it was just, we’re still going strong. And Andy is a good friend I met in high school,” says Gibson. “So I’ve been happy that my friends are still my friends and that it’s not even just one of those, ‘Oh, I’ll see you like maybe a couple of years from now.’ I just love these guys. They’re like, you pass them on the street. Like, oh, we should hang out. Like, oh yeah, we should totally hang out. Like, I’ll see you online.”
They don’t just see each other online; while COVID has made challenges, they’re still close and hoping to safely play music together again soon—everyone’s covering their faces and crossing their fingers for FEST 19. In the meantime, they’re online on just about every social media.
“The one thing I love about it, we’ve all been in a bunch of bands, but so many bands, as you know, can implode from disagreements and fights and arguments over creative direction,” says Heaton. “It is hard to imagine that with us, because we started as, you know, not really a professional band by any means. The way we started was as just a group of friends hanging out. So now that we’ve gotten good, but stayed in that format and that comfort zone, it’s the best of both worlds.”
