| Marsupious
A hard-hitting power trio rocking the Southwest and beyond..
Prog rock outfit Marsupious hails from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The band’s sound, however, has no fixed destination. That’s because singer and lyricist Jeff Holland, bassist Joseph Michel and drummer Dave Barela are always in locomotion toward the next creative destination. Whether that means digging deeper into themselves, or logging more miles on tour, Marsupious is a band on the move.
With music that begins in friendship and ends in expression that defies categorization, Marsupious is a band that finds a comfortable home alongside almost any subset of rock, be it straight ahead, progressive, heavy, or otherwise. Like the personnel who make the band, Marsupious’s determination to leave everything on the stage, and in the studio, makes for a transcendence of genres and a group that is greater than the sum of its parts. Having previously paid their dues in a variety of hard-rocking, hard-living, Southwestern bands, the musicians in this bass-driven ensemble come together as a seamless unit whose message and biography is all about endurance and rebirth. Their thirteen-track release Stone Baby forms a sonic testament to all that it takes to live for art in Albuquerque and indeed elsewhere.
In 2003, the core of Marsupious was formed when Michel and Holland began writing songs while searching for a guitarist who could bring the same form of spontaneous inventiveness the bassist and vocalist were bringing to the fore. Soon it became evident that finding a guitarist who spoke “Marsupious-speak” was hard to find, not to mention personnel who could keep safe pace with the band’s creative intensity. Finally, in 2005, Barela brought his subtle fury, along with his elaborately arranged trap set to the group and Marsupious, with the bass now at the center of the sound, Marsupious&was born.
Previous Holland and Michel songs were rewritten and revamped now featuring Barela’s robust contributions. And Barela soon became part of the songwriting process as well, his expertise particularly present on tracks like “Healing”, written in three parts and showcased on Stone Baby.
No subjects are taboo for this group that can as effectively rage against the perils of drug addiction as it can about the evils of political power in incompetent hands. “We don’t want to send stuff out there that doesn’t have positive vibes,” says Holland. “But I do write with a duality in mind and often about the painful things going on here and around the world and which I’ve lived in the past,” he concludes.
Today, with the debut CD as proof, Marsupious is a complete power trio with all elements contributing equally, and passionately, to a sound resonating from Albuquerque, while winning fans throughout the U.S. The recent release of Stone Baby on the Fervid Recordings label along with a series of performances celebrating the debut confirms Marsupious’s place among Southwestern bands poised to make a national statement.
With Michel’s intensity and virtuosity on bass pushing compositions into the progressive rock zone, Barela’s inspired barrages of percussive power, and Holland singing the interior narrative of what it means to live, and sometimes to die, by the music, Marsupious is a band, and a live show, to reckon with. |
