The Comas

Conductor started as a collection of songs written in the winter of 2003 at house on the North Carolina coast. Cold winds blowing in from the Atlantic would often rustle palms and wind chimes on the porches of of empty beach houses. The steady noise made it a little easier for a string of break-ins to continue.
Baffling local authorities.
Although most of the houses were boarded up that winter, a few remained occupied. One of these, lit almost exclusively by candle light in the evening, housed a 4 track recorder, an acoustic guitar, a small city of wine bottles (both full and empty), and Andy Herod.
At the end of a 2 year relationship and faced with having to find a new place to live in 6 weeks, the songs began to come out. Loss of love and identity and all that.
Eventually each night he ended up on the couch watching the only movie that made sense or mattered, Dark City. Upon each viewing finding new meaning, symbolism and hope that seemed to apply directly to his own life.
Some felt that this period may have gone on a bit long...
At the end of the winter several cassette tapes where passed along to band mate Nicole Gehweiler as well as friend and producer Alan Weatherhead. A record was soon underway. Recorded at the Sound of Music studios in Richmond VA, Conductor ended up a swampy mix of pop and fuzzed-out rock songs. But when it came time to sequence the record, the band was stumped. Finally one smoky evening in the studio around 4 am, a story line began to reveal itself in the music they were hearing.
Almost instantly, the track order fell into place and plans to animate the story began.
Six weird months later came Conductor, a monument to the suicide of love erected by robots against a wintry sci-fi back drop of dark towers, moonlit skies and a cast of lost characters. Or perhaps it is just a break-up record. It is not yet known. What is known is that it's here, and it's massive.

Chapel Hill, NC's The Comas originally came together in 1998 as a project - "a take" on all the alt-country bands that were hitting the SE scene... but ended up realizing that they had something a lot more original. Their 1999 debut recording, A WAVE TO MAKE FRIENDS (Plastique Recording Co.) with it's sly hooks and mesmerizing, lazy indie-pop quickly established the band at the forefront of all the "promising" young bands in the SE. The album even received critical acclaim from The New York Times where critic Neil Strauss called it "Proof that the underground continues to thrive in Chapel Hil..." and picked it as one of his "Favorite CD's You Nearly Missed" of 1999 in The Pop Life.

A DEF NEEDLE IN TOMORROW takes the band's somnambulistic pop to new depths of exploration and expertise. Tuneful, soulful, and witty yet serenely naïve, A DEF NEEDLE IN TOMORROW showcases the amazing songwriting skills of this inventive young band whose music is honestly quite difficult to describe, and just as hard to forget. Recorded at Sound of Music studios in Richmond and at a friend's home studio in Chapel Hill, the band worked with producer/engineer Brian Paulson (Wilco, Slint, Superchunk, Son Volt), to create this head trip of an album. Ranging from the noisy, amphetamine-fueled punk pop of "Wicked Elm" to the sing-song deconstructionist hypno-epic "Tired," this album is textural - comprised of layers of sound, guitars, drum machines, guy/girl vocals and samples that mesh and move together. Rich. Immediate. Powerful. Intimate. Unpredictable but surprisingly accomplished, A DEF NEEDLE IN TOMORROW delivers on the band's early promise, and sets the stage for the future.