The miraculous and legendary Miracle Sweepstakes; press photo courtesy of the artists.

Toward the close of the chaotic and traumatic year that was 2020, New York’s adventurous wide-eyed pop voyagers Miracle Sweepstakes blessed us with the beauty of Rorschached that brought an abundance of endearing and eccentric light into our hearts and quarantined homes. Through the turbulence of the past 3 years, the Sweepstakes team of Craig Heed, Ian Miniero, Justin Mayfield and Doug Bleek endured the upheavals and tragedies of personal loss that lead them to largely record their massive new album by themselves. With the passing of Ian's father, the group took to his basement in Valley Stream, NY where they recorded with gear that his dad left behind in the home where the band used to practice back during the formidable years of their youth. Through experiments, trials, errors, breakthroughs and more — we are proud to present the band’s mighty testament to perseverance and prog pop prognostications with the world debut of Last Licks.

The record opens sincerely and starts slowly with the title track "Last Licks": a western cinema stepping prologue that moves forward gently before expanding into a warped and slightly psyched-out full bloom. Miracle Sweepstakes have the uncanny ability and increasingly more so with their fully creative self-recorded control to orchestrate tracks with a silver screen grandeur that allows them to tweak the recipe to include odd effect treatments and multiple movements that are designed and destined to surprise and stun their audience. The band's experimental approaches fire on all cylinders with the whirlwind wonder that is "O-Pine", a track that gradually spins out at a breakneck speed. Replete with sludgy rock riffs, it morphs into a whirling dervish styled cyclone rotating nearly off its axis in a carousel cavalcade of barely controllable compositions that turn, turn, turn, way past the legal speed limit.

Craig and the crew's passion for power pop perfection shines delightfully on "Ooh Ahh" that is appropriately titled with its chorus sections dedicated to the onomatopoeia of its namesake. "Green Candle" flickers with a solemn heart, a testament to grief that casts an uplifting light toward brighter days that blends the band's astounding prowess for expansive compositions that manages to keep in some of that home recorded cadence as heard at the very end of the song. The meditative and reflective mood carries forth on "Rectangular Eclipse" that rises like a strangely shaped planetary obfuscation that blazes in full Miracle Sweepstakes fashion with an astounding absurdity and unmistakable beauty found in the refrain of, oh what to do, heart has it's mind in the gutter.

The raging rough rocker of "Bad Bee" turns up the volume and cranks up the fuzz pedals to the point of no return that buzzes, blares and blasts in a nectar fueled frenzy. The dreamy balladry of "Let Something Happen" goes full Broadway with a post-pandemic plea for something, anything of note in the face of restrictive circumstances, lockdowns and the stalemates in a world ran by wannabe authoritarians and lame ducks. "How True" is an exercise in balancing melodicism and dissonance in equal measure, as "Aah Ooh" does a reversal reprise in a radical and rollicking rendering of "Ooh Aah" that summons up the specter of a certain Sgt. Pepper and his ragtag band of lonely hearted ones.

The Sweepstakes send up a nearly 7 minute valiant ode to the storms and tempests weathered by the band and our surrounding world in the beautiful "Nor'easter" that tugs at the heart strings before exploding like a pétillant naturel supernova in the autumnal, auburn streaked sky. Keeping the hits consistently rolling all the way up to the very end, Last Licks concludes with "All This Way to Come Back Now" that rides high up to the pearly gates in the metaphor of barreling toward a fabled destination only to turn the car right around upon arrival. And despite the implied and stated futility, Miracle Sweepstakes delivers in big tones, gigantic hooks, blazing progressions in a full on carnival of fiery light that solidifies the band as one of the world's greatest and most beloved treasures in the contemporary pantheon of contemporary pop purveyors and modern day DIY musical progenitors.

Miracle Sweepstakes’ Craig Heed introduces the world to *Last Licks*; press photo courtesy of the artist.

Craig Heed of Miracle Sweepstakes presents an exclusive behind the scenes look at the band’s latest album of epic proportions:

Last Licks is the first album we've recorded entirely ourselves. While Doug and Justin are seasoned engineers, Ian and I did most of the basic live tracks in his basement on Long Island, and we're total novices. We used Logic (which I've recorded demos in for a while) and a bunch of equipment Ian's dad left him, and at first we couldn't figure out how to make it all work together — we couldn't even get a mic signal. Slowly but surely (and with Doug and Justin's coaching) we started figuring things out. There would be occasional setbacks, like maybe a take was good, but it'd turn out the mics were picking up too much hi-hat, and we'd have to redo it. A big lesson learned was that putting a mic under the snare in addition to one over the snare solved a lot of problems. But the biggest thing for us was the freedom home recording afforded us. We could meet for a session whenever we wanted, for however long, and if we revisited the takes a week later and weren't happy with them, we could just try again. Plus, we saved a lot of money.
On Rorschached, we started doing songs that were more products of the studio than live performance. A song like "Signs Up and Down" was recorded in I think four separate segments, and we've never played it live. For Last Licks, we took "playing the studio" (or really, playing the basement) further. For "Let Something Happen" and "Rectangular Eclipse," we made loops of Ian playing on his electronic kit and sampling pad, respectively, and combined those with live takes on his acoustic kit. We knew we wanted the drums on "Green Candle" to come in near the end of the song, so we just tracked that portion of it, then added the first half of the song after the fact. As a band, we had never played that song from beginning to end until it was already recorded. "How True" is the most extreme example, where most of the song is built on a sample of a piece from Ian's ambient solo album, and a lot of the instrumentation was made in MIDI. We only just learned how to play the song last night so that we can perform it at the record release show; initially it had never even crossed my mind that we'd try to recreate it live.

My general hypothesis going into this album was that if you record the raw tracks halfway decently, someone who's really good at mixing can work their magic and make everything sound cool. Justin proved that by making these songs sound better than I could've ever imagined something recorded in Ian's basement sounding. The basement was the site of Ian and I's first ever practices as kids, many extremely (and pain-inducing) lo-fi recordings, and even a house show one time, so to track an entire record down there that actually sounds good felt like a real culminating moment. Unfortunately Ian doesn't have the basement anymore, which maybe makes it more poetic that we got this album in at the buzzer. But I'm grateful we did, and look forward to applying our now-intermediate home recording skills to the next one, wherever that may be.
Miracle Sweepstakes' Last Licks will be available October 27 via One Weird Trick.

PREMIERE | Miracle Sweepstakes, 'Last Licks'