The Depreciation Guild

The Depreciation Guild is: Kurt, Christoph, Anton
Photo by: Josh Eustis

Kurt Feldman joined the mile high club last year. Oh, it’s not what you think. Well, not exactly.

“You know how airplane cabins have a drone to them?” asks the Depreciation Guild frontman. “Well, it’s like an A note, and I was singing melodies over it in the bathroom.”

One of those melodies—first captured on a cell phone, mind you—weaves its way through the opening scene of Spirit Youth, the album that rewrites just about every assumption about Brooklyn’s most promising dream-pop band.

For starters, the Depreciation Guild is not Slowdive’s second-coming. While Feldman and guitarist Christoph Hochheim also play in the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, they founded The Depreciation Guild two years prior to the Pains’ formation. The two bands complement one another, with Pains teetering on the twee side of things and The Depreciation Guild building its very own blend of 8-bit beats, clanging chords and heady hooks.

“This record is heavy but it’s not very shoegaze,” explains Feldman. “The influence is there, but if you hear a ’shoegaze record’, it doesn’t sound like us at all.”

“That’s because we put more of an emphasis on songs than textures,” adds guitarist Christoph Hochheim.

In other words, there’s more to a Depreciation Guild record than disembodied vocals and distorted guitars— three-dimensional details like the pinpoint percussion of Christoph’s twin brother Anton and the fluttering effects of the trio’s honorary ‘fourth member’, its vintage Famicom system.

The beginning stages of this speaker-panning approach can be found on the band’s self-released debut, 2007’s In Her Gentle Jaws, which Kanine reissued in remastered form last fall. The trio’s full-on sound (rounded out by Christoph’s twin brother Anton) took more than a year of tweaking, though, as Spirit Youth’s tracks were prepped for a proper session at the Chicago studio of Telefon Tel Aviv’s Joshua Eustis.

“I come from the Steely Dan school of production,” says Feldman. “I like things that sound good, not things that sound like they were just thrown together.”

Which explains why Spirit Youth demands to be heard on a decent stereo—loud—peeling away every last layer, from the clanging chords and sputtering drums of “Crucify You” to the shimmer and shake of “Dream About Me.”

“I appreciate anything that’s extreme,” says Christoph, “anyone who operates completely within their own realm. This record is our first step toward doing that with our own music, leaving us very excited for what’s next.”

- KEXP

“The Newgaze movement travels at a blistering speed…The Depreciation Guild is at the forefront of this revival with a fresh approach to the music and the courage to explore it”

- Pitchfork

“The Depreciation Guild first delivered us their surprisingly complementary combo of videogame blips and shoegaze ethereality on 2007’s self-released In Her Gentle Jaws”