The scene reels still from last week’s revelation that Art & Architecture are breaking up (shoddy architecture!) just as their debut album is set to be released on a major label. A&A is one of the few area bands to score such a career-making deal in years, and the only one of those to emerge from our own beloved Bullfinch/Hamilton’s subscene. (Other noted signees were bands which erupted from well-appointed suburban studio basements without ever playing live, or otherwise existing outside our scrappy clicque.)
We could digest the Art & Arch newsflash more readily if we could fathom the reasoning behind it. All four bands members have told us there’s no rancor, no “creative differences.” They can’t all be lying, because at least two of them were drunk enough to be exceedingly truthful when they told us.
The official, and so uncontested, explanation is that songwriter Pierce Lab has been accepted to grad school. Understandable—this is a college band, after all, and it’s as hard to get academia out of your system as it is music. But what Pierce pursued as an undergrad was Electrical Engineering. What he will be studying now, in Massachusetts, is… Music.
Do you really need a master’s when you have a signed band? Isn’t having a signed band the same as a diploma?
Know who’s hopping mad about this? Oh, of course you know. Ick, long-in-the-tooth frontman for The Deadaloos. Ick’s been this close to getting signed so many times that it’s all he thinks about, the only reason he says he’s still in the rock racket at all. The proud townie rails against ivory tower bands who think the real world spins around them. “They just don’t get it,” he sniffs. “They just don’t get it.” Not that he liked the band. But according to Ick, even the undeserving should be more grateful.
An Art & Architecture album, remastered from singles and demos the band made at Homer Studios, whose engineer Eddie Berens amy be the only one who can turn this situation into a resume-builder. Always looks good when your clients get signed off of work you did. But odds are that the album won’t go anywhere. It’s got a release date, but no major press (and, obviously, no tour) are being scheduled. It’ll just get burned off with a stack of other bands who got signed by mistake or misfortune. Albums like that clog our mailbox every spring, and we always wonder what the backstory of the burn-off was. This is the first one we’ve witnessed personally.

Chaste Adventures of Joseph and Piece of Foolishness, ideally matched wordy songwriters, at the Bullfinch… A Tragic Fantasy (aka Long Time Ago) and Poor Harold at Hamilton’s… Rim of the World, the unfortunately named European folk act, at D’ollaires with Angel Intrudes…