The first 35 seconds of “First Step,” the lead cut on Fatal Film’s latest album Thrill’r, shocks your heart into action.
A snarling built-in Detroit garage-rocker, “First Step” grumbles to a start, then careens along with the get-the-hell-out-of-my-way confidence of a boy racer in a 1970 Dodge Challenger with a rumble pack and full tank of leaded, tree-killing gas.
As much as it is a thrill-ride start to Thrill’r, the song is a reminder to both New London and, now the world, that Fatal Film is alive and well.
The band—Matt Potter, vocals/guitar; Dave Freeburg, bass; Sebastian Coppotelli, guitar; and drummer Michael Winslow—has been through several lineup changes since forming in 2004.
“We’ve been a two-piece, a five-piece, a trio,” Potter said. “Now it’s a four-piece and it’s been going well.”
The often mirthful Potter, the main songwriter and only constant member of the band, jokingly called the changes in personnel, “editing.”
While the band’s former members read like a Who’s Who of the area’s indie rockers, this incarnation of Fatal Film has been stable for about a year.
It was this lineup that recorded Thrill’r, which was released on the local label, Cosmodemonic Telegraph. Recorded earlier in the year by Scott Amore at Innerspace Sounds in New Haven, the record is the band’s serious push to extend its reach beyond New London and environs.
For local fans of Fatal Film, Thrill’r is something of a greatest hits, of songs on the band’s various CD-Rs and EPs, such as last year’s Sisterwife.
For instance, the band’s signature “Rocks,” a death-march of Gang of Four-style agit-pop, makes an appearance on the full length, despite the fact the band has played it live for years.
But Thrill’r, the band’s first full length, is not meant strictly for the merch tables at The Oasis and the Bank Street Café.
“We’re looking to venture out,” Freeburg said.
And that means a concerted effort to get the record to both satellite and terrestrial radio, and to influential publications, both in print and online.
Last month, the band scored a coup by getting a favorable review in the indie-journal, The Big Takeover, which called Thrill’r, “confident, boisterous wild music…shot full of adrenaline.”
Fatal Film also realize that they need to get out on the road in the wake of the record. But the band has run into that constant stumbling block for many of the local combos.
“We all have day jobs,” Freeburg said.
That said, Freeburg noted that the band hopes to head out on long weekends in the coming months.
The band provided further evidence that it is hoping to break out of New London by playing a residency at Piano’s, a trendy bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Fatal Film headlined every Sunday night there in August, with audiences growing in number at each successive show.
“Great shows, great shows,” Potter said. “It got progressively better and better.”
Potter said at the fourth and final show, the band was besieged by rather zealous Christians.
“We’ve now become vessels for the Lord,” he said, drily.
Fatal Film also wrapped one of the Piano’s dates around a short tour of the Midwest, hitting indie-friendly cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago.
Touring also offers Fatal Film the opportunity to play Bank Street-tested songs for entirely new audiences.
“For them, those songs are not old,” Freeburg said. “It’s not like here where people have heard ‘Rocks’ 100 times.”
In the coming months, Freeburg said that the band will be hitting cities along the eastern seaboard, such as Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and points south.
They are also hoping for another excursion to the Midwest in the new year.
As much as they like getting out on the road, they continue to call New London home and arrive back here under sometimes bizarre circumstances.
“Well, the last time we came back,” Coppotelli said, “we blew a tire right underneath the Frontage Road sign off of I-95.”
The lesson then: Maybe they shouldn’t have come home. After all, as newly minted “vessels of the Lord,” they’ve got some proselytizing to do.