Texas and Oklahoma-based band New Tribe’s new LP, “Health Camp,” a rock and soul-infused album that reflects and advances the band’s longtime eclecticism and genre-defying creativity. Led by the singing, musicianship, and songwriting of brothers Eric and Adam Sarmiento in close collaboration with keyboardist and composer Chris Gomez and guest appearances by keyboardist Ryan Jones and multi-instrumentalist Kyle Reid, the album presents 11 new songs and three interludes. Drawing on psych rock, old school R&B, country, and folk traditions, these songs take the band farther along the musical path they call Cosmic American Music. As with their previous work, Health Camp finds the New Tribe unconcerned with neat categorization. “We’re focused on the spirit of the music and the vibe of the record, rather than trying to fit into the latest sub-sub-genre,” notes band member Adam Sarmiento. His brother Eric adds, “We have always seen the music as a vehicle or a conduit for something bigger than us, whether that’s some sort of cosmic forces or expressing social currents and struggles of our time. A record or a live show is good for us to the extent that it feels vital, lively, and open to the new.”
The album’s title marks the music offered here as a place to seek health, resonance, and wellbeing, a space of stability amidst constant flux, an antidote to widespread alienation from the body, from the world around us, and from one another. These are songs drawn from the lives of their authors, outgrowths of those lives: “We do what Woody Guthrie advised — ‘write what you know’,” says Gomez. These are songs of laboring, yearning, caring, and seeking.
Sonically, the palette of Health Camp is both colorful and minimalistic: vintage electric pianos and steel guitars fill out the rhythmic ballad ‘What You Do,’ while the slow gospel funk of ‘Lost In Space’ relies on a grand piano, four-on-the-floor drums, and pulsing bass. Subtle synths lift the acoustic guitars and tight harmonies of ‘Material’ into spacey atmospheres, and the state motto of Oklahoma gets a reggae and Zydeco inflected R&B workout on ‘Labor Conquers All.’ While vocal harmonies have long been a feature of New Tribe music, this time around the band pushes the vocal boundaries, including lush harmony throughout the record, alongside moments of gospel shouts and blues hollers. This is an album of mostly three to four-minute, hook-laden songs, and in that sense it is a pop record. It is also a record that emphasizes space: spaces between the notes, the spatial relationships among instruments and voices, and the spaces in which the music was recorded.
The spaces in which the record was made range from legendary Oklahoma City listening room The Blue Door to various home studios and living rooms along the I-35 corridor that the band regularly traverses for their live performances in Austin, Oklahoma City, and points in between. “Each of those rooms has its own character,” says Adam, “and we tried to let that shine through on the record to give the listener a sense of moving through different aural spaces as part of the journey of the album.” Eric and Adam handled all of the recording, production, mixing, and mastering for the record, giving them complete creative control. “The goal was to create a warm, analog type sound, and to capture the vibe of live performance as much as possible,” explains Eric. This traditionalist approach coupled with the unique ‘cosmic roots music’ offered here gives the record a multi-temporal feel, as if it could be a release from 2070 or a lost album from the early 1970s.
Health Camp is the first of three album releases planned by New Tribe in 2020. The band is also releasing a serialized web mini-series entitled “Later Days,” a visual companion to the three LPs that further explores the albums’ themes of health, finitude, resilience, and being-in-common at a time of rampant chaos, creation, alienation, and possibility.