Small Leaks Sink Ships Sign With Lefse Records, Talk New Record

As of 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time today, Portland-based orchestral progressive post-rock quartet Small Leaks Sink Ships is part of the Lefse Records stable. They teased that they are working on a new record to follow their 2014 indie masterpiece Face Yourself and Remove Your Sandals and even revealed the name of their upcoming record Golden Calf. Due for an early 2017 release. With a swipe of the pen and an announcement from the band’s Facebook page, they have taken another huge step toward the national spotlight.

“It feels surreal and awesome and overdue,” said the group’s drummer and vocalist London Van Rooy (who is also a founding member of both Small Leaks Sink Ships and a previous project, Beyond Analogue).

Ten years ago, Small Leaks Sink Ships were living in Tempe, Arizona recording their debut full-length album Until The World Is Happy; Wake Up You Sleepyhead Sun. The actual recording process took place in a Florida studio with the backing of punk label No Sleep Records. The world was their oyster, and there was nowhere to go but up.

The record was a small success; the band was fortunate enough to sell at least one copy in every state and got the opportunity to play on the Vans Warped Tour. They weren’t overnight celebrities, but they were gaining ground fast and well on their way to national recognition.

To follow up Until The World, the group put together a 5-song EP affectionately dubbed The Oak Street Basement for the room in their house in Tempe where it was recorded. Things with the label didn’t work out, but SLSS had no problem selling out the release party for the record — even though they were the only band on the show. They were still not quite packing the national punch that they were looking for, but they were thriving and ready for the next step. Then Disaster Number One struck.

Small Leaks’ pianist Ryan Garner was involved in a near-fatal motorcycle accident that left the athletic U.S. Navy veteran functionally paralyzed for the better part of a year. All musical efforts ceased immediately as the band turned to taking care of their fallen comrade on his road to recovery.

It would be nearly a year before they would return to a stage following Garner’s accident. But a year away from music still seemed like a miracle to the band, considering that at the beginning of the ordeal they were told their friend might never walk again.

But Garner did, and he even managed to go on tour. He had a considerable amount of metal in his body from the laundry list of procedures done to it to keep him alive. He also had to wear a halo on his torso and neck to keep his spine in place, but he had made it out on the road with his bandmates to tour the Northwest when Disaster Number Two struck.

Lead singer, guitarist, and cellist Judd Hancock was simply pulling up his pants when he felt a horrible pain in his groin. He didn’t think much of it at first and continued touring as usual until one of his testicles began swelling to the point that it was almost too painful for him to execute everyday activities, let alone play a show every night. But the stalwart band pushed on, with Van Rooy, bass player Jim Mandel, and then-guitarist Rafael Macias picking up the slack for their incapacitated bandmates.

Upon completing the tour, Hancock went directly to a doctor where he was diagnosed with stage IV testicular cancer and told in no uncertain terms that he was going to die. Small Leaks was once again on the shelf and fighting together for the life of one of their members.

Another year went by without a new release from the band that had once looked so promising. Instead of a fanbase eagerly awaiting new music, there was a fanbase hoping and praying that their favorite band’s lead singer would survive another day.

Hancock did survive, and in many ways his brush with death would shape the sound of Face Yourself and Remove Your Sandals. Not long after his recovery, the band (minus Macias) packed up the house on Oak Street and left Phoenix for the rain-swollen city of Portland.

It’s against the backdrop of these ten years of chaos and catastrophe that Small Leaks is finally gaining a piece of the recognition they so richly deserve. It may have taken near-death experiences for two of their members, losing another to family commitments, and moving a thousand miles away from the city they called home, but the group is finally going in the direction that they knew they needed to be going in from the beginning.

“We had to make ourselves uncomfortable,” said Handcock about the band’s decision to depart Arizona. “With Until The World, we were all babies and our friend was our manager and a friend of that friend was our label and everything kind of just happened. We got on with No Sleep, and we were just getting started. We were like twenty-one and it was cool to see our music in magazines and things like that. But the difference now and with Lefse is that…everything IS different. We had to convince someone, a complete stranger, to believe in us. We’ve already gone further than what we expected before this record [Face Yourself and Remove Your Sandals], and all four of us are way more excited about the new record than anything before it.”

Small Leaks has only released small snippets of their new record to the public so far. But according to them it’s completely different from anything they’ve done in the past, and the samples they have been dropping have certainly lived up to that hype.

“For me anyway,” says Mandel, “I felt what changed in us was moving up here. Everything changed; we didn’t understand that we were starting over. But we had reached a point where we weren’t going to do anything else. We loved it enough to do it whether we were special or not.”