Lukas Frank has announced a new album as Storefront Church, Ink & Oil, due out on June 28. He wrote, performed, and produced all 12 tracks, which were recorded with a live orchestra and co-arranged by Frank and Travis Warner. Here’s most about the origins of the album from the press release:
Ink & Oil was conceived quite insidiously after years of Lukas deciphering the familial lore of his great uncle Roger. After receiving a five year prison sentence for a desertion charge of the Army in 1993, Roger Frank mysteriously vanished from his cell, leaving nothing but an orange behind. Roger’s body was never found. When he was just 5 years old, Lukas began receiving visitations from his elusive uncle through vivid, recurring nightmares. Roger would come to Lukas in his room and try to speak with him, but Roger’s mouth wasn’t working; like it was glued shut. In his hands was a large orange, the skin peeled back, and written in the rind were words in black ink.
The subsequent years of his life spent between LA, with family on the East Coast and a solitary sabbatical in Connecticut, have been inexplicably haunted by sensory “manifestations” seemingly tied to his uncle’s presence. Images of a black rope hanging in the sky, a flock of black birds swarming inside the supermarket, and phone calls from unknown numbers asking him unnervingly prescient questions have all struck Lukas at various points. Stuck in limbo between walking nightmares and existential visions, Lukas’ perspective shifted with his return to Los Angeles while working on this body of work. Instead of feeling like the visions and dreams were intruders in the night, they became visitors – not always welcome or understood – but accepted as integral pieces of the narrative of Ink & Oil.
While all of the stories told in Ink & Oil speak to experiences from Lukas’s past, there is genuine mystery as to what’s factually real and what’s emotionally real. Lukas finds his inspiration in the tension between the two; the gray area where memory and belief overtake accepted truth and certainty to reform into something deeper; something that Lukas feels can be described simply as Faith.
Ink & Oil includes recent single “The High Room,” and Frank has shared a new single, the menacing “Coal.” Watch a live video of that one below.
Storefront Church plays a Los Angeles release show for Ink & Oil at The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever on June 28 with Maria BC. It’s his only upcoming show at the moment, and tickets are on sale now.
STOREFRONT CHURCH – INK & OIL TRACKLIST
1. The High Room
2. Faith In Oil
3. Melting Mirror
4. King of the Lobby
5. Burn The Roses
6. Words in the Rind
7. Coal
8. Manhattan Project
9. Orange Grove
10. Divine Distraction
11. Shadowboxing
12. Tapping on the Glass
