Announcing Infinity’s Bottom, a new album by Vancouver indie rock band Lieutenant-Colonel David Davis

We are Lieutenant-Colonel David Davis, an indie rock band from Vancouver, British Columbia and we are excited to announce that our second album Infinity’s Bottom will be released on Friday, June 7.

Infinity’s Bottom contains nine songs, two of which oddly enough contain iterations of the word “infinity” in the title so the imbricated themes kind of thrust themselves upon us: eternity, ending as beginning, the role artificial intelligence plays in human erasure, loneliness, loss and grief and the way the latter seems to go on forever. 

Our first album, Your First Blockade was released in September 2022 and remains available on all the usual streaming platforms as well as Bandcamp. We would have promoted Your First Blockade more diligently (or at all) only we were kind of caught off guard by how well and how quickly the record came together, and by having accidentally entered into a venture of such intellectual depth and artistic merit. We are still deeply uncomfortable writing self-promotional sentences such as the rather long run-on one that precedes this one. But we realize we didn’t do Your First Blockade justice, and are therefore and hereby tackling as emphatically as we can our tendency to default to modesty in an attempt to make sure Infinity’s Bottom receives the attention that we feel certain it deserves. 

Although Infinity’s Bottom is our second record it is our first opportunity to introduce ourselves, and so it would seem to behoove us to go back to the beginning. Naturally, when discussing an album called Infinity’s Bottom the beginning will be difficult to pinpoint. So, let’s move on from the beginning of time, space, matter and conscious life, and start in 2022, the year Colin Snowsell heretofore a published novelist (The Frollett Homestead), short story writer (published in The Malahat Review, The Danforth Review, Event Magazine, Prairie Fire and others), and academic (the book chapter “Fanatics, Apostles and NMEs” in the Intellect Books/University of Chicago publication Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities, has been particularly well-received) realized he was hopelessly bored writing prose and needed a new artistic outlet. When he first contacted Cole Friesen, his musician neighbour in an East Vancouver apartment building, the idea was to record covers of Trembling Blue Stars songs. 

Friesen listened to Snowsell’s cover demos. He dove into the deep end of the Trembling Blue Stars. He then proceeded to explain to Snowsell that his voice was nothing like Bobby Wratten’s and the whole thing was a terrible idea. They decided to work together anyway, mostly out of mutual embarrassment. Snowsell began teaching himself to write songs because it seemed less painful than learning other people’s songs only for Friesen to later tell him that he could not sing them well at all.

Infinity’s Bottom is, if we do say so ourselves, an exciting new progression for us—nine songs that sound uniquely like us and us alone but also earn us comparisons to: The Magnetic Fields, Joy Division, Jens Lekman, R.E.M., The Dandy Warhols, The House of Love, Elastica and Depeche Mode. If Stephin Merritt fronted Joy Division…was the comment we heard most after Your First Blockade. We, we would hasten to add, do not claim we sound like ANY of these bands—we are just relaying the information we’ve received!

Cole Friesen, who produced and mixed both of our records, is also the bass player in the L.A. band The Matchstick Skeletons. Before that, he found himself in sudden possession of (by our very humble East Van standards) an obscene amount of money for winning a jingle contest for Folger’s Coffee. You probably do not drink Folger’s Coffee (because why would you?) but chances are you have hummed along to Friesen’s composition in an ad spot that got heavy play on Canadian television. Friesen immediately squandered a large portion of his winnings flying to Manchester to see Radiohead live. Think about that the next time you (don’t) drink Folger’s.

Friesen plays all the instruments on all the songs except for an astonishingly beautiful feature trumpet appearance on the song “Pablo vs Pilar” by the Montreal/Salt Spring Island jazz composer and trumpeter Simon Millerd. Millerd’s trumpet also features on “Give Your Head a Shake” a song on debut album Your First Blockade. Snowsell, who was born in Vancouver (and has lived in Montreal, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Toronto, Vernon and Kelowna), but grew up in Latin America, sings in Spanish and English in this New Order-esque ballad about lost love and the poetry of Neruda. 

Words by Colin Snowsell

Music by Colin Snowsell and Cole Friesen

Produced, Engineered, and Mixed by Cole Friesen

Trumpet on “Pablo vs Pilar” by Simon Millerd