Vessel, the new HOT single from CoT, is now available EVERYWHERE

Hey there!  We have a new single out.  Vessel is a departure from our normal genres, bending electronic and acoustic instrumentation, with some really fun vocal treatments.  Please check it out on any streaming service here:

Champion Of Tribes - Vessel

Listen to Vessel by Champion Of Tribes.

Vessel

Hello Champions!

We hope your quarantine was as productive as ours - Hot off the presses, we have a new EP for your listening pleasure.

Listen:

Apple Music | Spotify | Bandcamp | Soundcloud

About Untopia

A slight departure from our previous works, astute listeners may notice that Untopia is NOT a concept album - there is no cohesive story to be picked up on here, just a collection of kickass songs written and recorded from the comfort of the couch in our skivvies.

Track List

1. Parliaments
2. Moneyman
3. The Edge
4. Let Lead Fly
5. Surreal
6. Call Me A Fool

Untopia Liner Notes

Music:: Colby Strangi, Geoff Goss, Jeffrey Starker and Connor Paglia
Lyrics: Colby Strangi, Geoff Goss, and Jeffrey Starker
Recorded by: Colby Strangi, Geoff Goss, and Jeffrey Starker
Recorded at: Champion Studios, SOMA, San Francisco, CA and also at home
Produced by: Champion of Tribes
Album Art: Connor Paglia

Champion of Tribes is:
Colby Strangi - Lead Vocals, Background Vocals
Jeff Starker - Basses, Keys, Background Vocals
Geoff Goss - Lead and Rhythm Guitars, Keys
Connor Paglia - Drummer, Keys

Welcome back, Champions!

How are you? It's been a while. We've been hard-at-work for the past couple of years recording, overdubbing, and mixing and now we're finally able to give YOU the latest Champion of Tribes album "Into the Stars" - now released everywhere you stream music! Check out the links below:

Spotify | Apple Music/iTunes | YouTube | Soundcloud | Deezer | Tidal

The Story of Into the Stars:
In 2129 AD, 13 years after the devastation caused by the entity known as The Lightning Glove, mankind gathered their remaining resources and assembled in the barren wastelands of Australia. Leaving the Earth behind, they traveled Into the Stars to seek revenge on the one who destroyed their home and their pride. Advances in Hyper-Lightspeed technology allowed them to travel great distances in pursuit of their foe. Their mission: To Destroy The Lightning Glove.

Over time, humanity’s Dark Side was revealed; They began to harvest planets, depleting them of their resources, in order to maintain the fleet. All who stood against them were destroyed.

Decades later, An executive officer succumbs to mind control by a sentient planet. The planet sows doubt in him, until he can say "yes, sir!" no more, and murders his captain. This officer soon finds himself in a cell, being served his last meal. He contemplates his apparent guilt, and fantasizes that some turn of good fortune will stay the executioner’s hand.

Months later, Dr. Kevlar - a leading mind in the field of Cybernetics - requests a human test-subject for an experiment he has concocted. Through augmentation, he intends to smooth out man’s imperfections and create the perfect soldier. His request is denied, and he’s forced to contemplate alternative methods for obtaining a volunteer. He remembers the recent execution of the XO, and realizes - a doomed man would have no choice.

A few days later, the engines of a ship have gone mysteriously haywire. Calls over the radio are saying: Mayday! Mayday! Spaceship Down! Through great peril, the Captain enters the core and is able to reset the engine and save the crew, but is lethally injured in the process.

Having found his vict- I mean - “Volunteer”, the good doctor proceeds with his experiment, and following 96 hours of intense-augmentation, finds that his patient is finally awake. He calmly explains the situation, and a litany of new “features” he’s installed in the man - including lasers, missiles, and the ability to fly through the vacuum of space. With the command, "Arise, Cyborg!", he brings his creation to its feet.

Galaxies away, a scout ship from The Vanguard fleet chases madly after its target, unable to reach the command ship via radio. They’ve found the lightning glove - and are transmitting their coordinates on all frequencies.

Picking up on their signal, the Command Ship jumps to their position and finds the broken remains of their scout floating in space. Standing on the planet beneath them, they see the Lightning Glove, raining destruction as he once did on Earth. This is it - Now it’s time to do what must be done. They engage the creature in combat, and when all seems lost, the order is given to allow Dr. Kevlar to unleash his creation upon their foe. The cyborg squares off against the beast, playing David to its Goliath, and is able to find its weak point and destroy the Lightning Glove.

The creature’s body burns away, opening a portal before them. Through it, the humans find a beautiful planet - a rock in space on which they can finally cease their decades-long path of destruction. They settle in and begin a new society, but the question remains - Will they be able to atone for their sins?

Into the Stars Liner Notes

Music: Colby Strangi, Geoff Goss, and Jeffrey Starker
Lyrics: Colby Strangi, Geoff Goss, and Jeffrey Starker
Recorded by: Colby Strangi, Geoff Goss, and Jeffrey Starker
Recorded at: Champion Studios, SOMA, San Francisco, CA
Produced by: Champion of Tribes
Album Art: Connor Paglia

Champion of Tribes is:
Colby Strangi - Lead Vocals, Background Vocals, Rhythm Guitar, drums on "Rock in Space"
Jeff Starker - Basses, Guitars, Background Vocals, Cowbell
Geoff Goss - Lead and Rhythm Guitars, Basses, Keys, Background Vocals, Drums on “Arise, Cyborg!”, “The Vanguard”, and “What Must Be Done”
Connor Paglia - New Drummer! (Not yet featured)
Andrew Glaser - Drums on “2129 A.D.”, “Dark Side”, and “Yes Sir”
Kevin Ian Common - Drums on “Into the Stars”, “Last Meal”, and “Spaceship Down”

We are pleased to announce that we have released our new single: Rhythm in my Head. This is our first song to utilize our new studio and to incorporate our new drumming setup. The song features Geoff on drums and is our first foray with mixing real drums.

You can find the song on all of the various services:

• Apple Music
• Spotify
• Google Play
• YouTube
• Bandcamp

This is sure to be your party hit of the Summer :D

Personnel

Written, recorded and produced by Champion of Tribes.

• Colby Strangi - Lead Vocals, Rhythm Guitar
• Geoff Goss - Lead Guitar, Drums, Vocals
• Jeff Starker - Bass, Vocals

Hello Champions!

Since we released The Master of the Earth a couple of weeks ago, I've spent a lot of time thinking about how far the album has come in the time we've spent working on it. And because we're all huge nerds with a firm belief in documentation and version control, we have fairly well-organized archives of the various versions of these songs. So I thought it might be fun to explore one of them in a blog post. So without further ado, I present to you the evolution of our song, "Mouse Trap".

But first, I'll need to take you back a bit. This album really started when we wrote the song "Easier". We wrote most of the lyrics to that song, and we each became attached to the idea of a main character who grows up with a power he can't control, and the story of his life. At that point, we decided that this was going to be a concept album, and that all or most of the songs would be from that person (lovingly dubbed Gary)'s point of view. And frankly, I find it much easier to write lyrics for a bunch of songs against a central theme, because I'm not enough of a poet to write songs about real life while keeping a straight face, so this worked out great for me!

Now that we had a concept for our album, it was time to write more songs. We were playing once a week at that time, usually in mine or Jeff's apartment. We're good neighbors, so most of the time we played acoustic instruments. We'd get together, make some drinks, and the (G|J)e(o)ffs would take turns playing any new riffs they had been working on to the rest of the group. If we heard something we liked, we'd have him continue playing while the rest of us attempted to jam out parts of our own on top of it (protip: This is how ~ 90% of our songs are written). So on June 6th of 2016, we got together at Jeff's place and he brought to the table a chord progression that he had been working on:

You can hear in the first recording how Geoff took that line and built his own part around it. He starts by figuring out the chord progression, develops a sweet finger-picked tone that follows the progression, but adds a lot of character to it. By the end of a minute and a half, he's almost put together what would end up being our final verse. You can also hear me attempting to come up with a vocal melody on-the-fly. This tends to work better when the guitar parts are fully fleshed-out, but sometimes I'll get brave and jump in on the first round. Lyrics at this stage are usually ad-libbed and rarely make it into the final version.

In the second recording, you can still hear the guys working through their parts, but with much more confidence. A week later, we got back together and played through it a couple more times. I started ad-libbing lyrics from the boy's mother to the boy about how special he was. Jeff thereby dubbed it "The mom song":

Weeks passed. We wrote a couple of other songs in the interim, and a few jam sessions later, I had finally written lyrics for "The Mom Song". Even at that time, I didn't really like the lyrics I had written. I felt they took a really good song, and turned it into a cheap knock-off of "Simple Man" by Skynyrd. Apologies for the poor quality. When we forget to bring recorders, we record on our phones... Anyway, here's our first shot at playing with the vocal melody and lyrics.

A month later, we put the first version into Garage Band, where we would each be able to work on our own parts separately from home and upload to a shared drive. For this cut, Goss traded in his acoustic for an Electric, and started zeroing in on how he wanted the ending to work out:

Goss got married in October, so we had a busy couple of months where we weren't working on music too much, but everyone pushed their own parts into the shared file, and in November, we were able to get a rough cut of this song produced with a drum track and some clap-percussion reminiscent of something my Mumford and Sons :-P. These still exist in the final cut, but they're much less prominent:

When I heard this version, it became clear to me that I really didn't like the vocal melody or the lyrics at all. It sucks when you have to go back to the drawing board on a part, especially when the song in question seems like it's nearing completion. Fortunately, the guys agreed with me and Starker even had some different ideas about how the vocal melody could go. He and I sat in a bar after work one evening and he helped me nail the new melody. Then I started <a href = https://www.dropbox.com/s/8jv9dww68p970gl/Mouse%20Trap%20Notebook.jpg?dl=0> writing new lyrics in my notebook while he played a board game with our friends (shoutout to Will K and Niklos!). By this point, most of The Master of the Earth was written, so I had a lot better idea of how I wanted this song to fit into the narrative. We already knew that track two was about the kid feeling like an outsider. And track 4 was about him losing control of his power... So it seemed natural that track 3 would be about his self-discovery. So I wrote lyrics about the kid being left by himself and encountering a small creature, which inexplicably did as he willed it to. We gave this new incarnation of the song the title "Mouse Trap" because of the somewhat-dark turn of events with which the song concludes. We already had the garageband file ready to go, so we deleted my old vocal track and laid a fresh one in, and this is how it sounded:

As you can tell, this version was more or less what we ended up shipping. I punched in later to take care of a couple of vocal flubs, and Goss spent a LOT of time working on the compression, bringing all of the levels in-sync with one another, and bouncing the track repeatedly through LANDR for mastering until eventually in early July, we had our final version:

When this album started coming together, "A Mother's Assurance" was easily my least-favorite song. The music was beautiful, but I could not get past how much I disliked my parts. Taking the time to go back and re-do the vocals and lyrics not only improved the quality of the album as a whole by better defining the narrative - It also taught me that while we may never achieve "perfection" in our artistic endeavors, we should never settle for work that we're not proud of.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun writing this deep dive, and listening through all of the history of "Mouse Trap"! This was an interesting first choice to me, because it went through a full lyrical overhaul, but some of our other songs have a much more rich history insofar as their instrumental parts go, so I'll try to tackle one of those next. Thanks for reading! Have an awesome day.

Colby

Here's a Demo Update. These are the latest (VERY ROUGH) mixes of most of the new album. There's still one track we need to record, and there are most likely some changes in some of the tracks still to be made, but this represents the work we've done over the last few months.

Enjoy, and Thanks!

I've been writing, recording and putting music out into the world for nearly 30 years at this point, and with the Champion of Tribe project the work flow for this process has never been easier, thanks to a ton of new technology out there!

When we as a group decided to start working on writing and recording our new album, tentatively called The Master of the Earth Saga we were without a drummer or a rehearsal studio to work on the songs. So we did what musicians have been doing for ages, we jammed in each other's living rooms with acoustic guitars. One of the first pieces of technology that helped with the writing process is my 'handy' Zoom H2N. This has allowed us to easily demo songs while we perform and write in the room, and then upload to a file sharing service (we use Dropbox), and then later easily listen to the track and make notes/changes/work on lyrics/etc. Most, if not all, of this album was written in Jeff and Colby's houses on two acoustic guitars (some times an electric bass) and with Colby improvising lyrics.

Once we had a pretty good idea of the album's concept, which we'll post about at a later date, and had written a fair amount of songs, it was time to start putting them down. Again the issue of no drummer or space reared it's head. But! Technology to the rescue! We started experimenting with using some of the newer cool features of GarageBand, and used the built in amp modeling and effects. GarageBand allowed us to do a few things. We could record easily and directly into the mac using a Digital Audio Interface (I have a few of them). We could also use the auto-drummer that comes with GarageBand. After some fiddling with it some, we were actually able to get some solid drum sounds and beats.

The last part which is going to allow us to go from rough demos, to polished masterpieces is some new technology around music production: Cloud Sharing. A new service call Splice has allowed us to record on one computer, upload the GarageBand file (with version history!) and then download the file on another computer and keep recording. In this way we can work on perfecting our guitar, bass, and vocals in our own homes, and on our own time, without boring the hell out of the rest of the band while I try to get that killer lick correct.

With all these tools, we're able to seamlessly write, develop, record, and eventually publish (via this very blog!) our new album!

Hey there!

So the band got together on Saturday at Goss' place and spent about 5 hours in his "office" (a spare bedroom containing more equipment than you can shake a stick at) recording demos of songs from the new album. We've been working on this album for the better part of 3 months now, and it's coming together pretty solidly. At it's core, this album (tentatively coined "The Master of the Earth Saga") follows a protagonist named Gary who is born with abilities that set him apart from other children. The story that unfolds focuses on his journey, and how he decides to use those abilities.

While the demos we recorded on Saturday are super-rough (a couple of the songs just got a single run-through) and will definitely undergo major changes between now and their completion, we thought it would be cool to document our iterative progress here on our site. So in that spirit of transparency, here's what we've got so far. Enjoy!

Thanks for listening! We'll post more soon. :-)

Master of the Earth Saga