I Blame You

Obits are Rick Froberg, Sohrab Habibion, Greg Simpson, and Scott Gursky. They reside in Brooklyn, NY. There is a bootleg of their first live show from Jan. ‘08 at the Cake Shop in NY somewhere on the internet. As with most of these sorts of things, the sound quality of that recording is pretty poor. The songs though… The songs are really great. Obits like a lot of music—Television, Wipers, Michael Yonkers, 13th Floor Elevators, Neu!, The Shangri-Las, African psych, punk rock. They don’t really sound that much like Creedence, maybe a little. Since that first show, we somehow convinced them that releasing some records on Sub Pop would be a good idea. Obits came out to Seattle in July of 2008 and played our 20th anniversary festival. In December of 2008, they released their first single, “One Cross Apiece” b/w “Put It in Writing” on their own Stint Records label and did some touring with the Constantines and The Night Marchers.

“We’re not into innovation as a band,” says Froberg, who’s already done his fair share of innovating with Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes. “I think innovation is overrated and an overestimated quality. Anything that’s going to be original is going to happen without your control. Things that make your band sound like you, are things you wouldn’t be able to change anyway. We just go ahead and play the stuff we like, and we don’t worry about originality per se, because that takes care of itself.”

Produced by Geoff Sanoff, Eli Janney and Obits, I Blame You is the band’s debut full-length album.