Album Notes

“I started writing the lyrics for most of the songs on War Dreams in 2006, after traveling to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia where I was shooting a documentary on the work of Doctors without Borders in African war zones. The lyrics were meant to capture the views and personalities of the doctors, patients, aid workers, prostitutes, child soldiers, and warlords I had met. Upon my return to the U.S., the band set out to write a record that would excavate the suppressed premise of our western existence: the daily fight for survival which consumes the majority of people on this planet, out of the view of the privileged minority to which
we, as educated middle-class Americans, belong.”– SI

War Dreams is a concept album detailing a journey through a 4th world dystopia in which man’s inhumanity towards man is always a looming possibility, and the fragility of the human self is perpetually assailed by overpowering forces. It also indulges our deep love of heavy afrobeat disco grooves, guitar noise freakouts, free-jazz horn ejaculations, throat-rending primal scream vocals, and continuous flailing towards transcendence through invocations of beauty and terror.