Stalemate

Stalemate (sometimes referred to as "The[e] Stalemate," given there were so many Pennsylvanian nümetal bands with the same monicker) was a revolving quartet of high school friends from the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island, who made two zany, eclectic power pop albums in the 2000s, leveraging a new wave of home recording softwares and tools at their disposal.

True to their name, the band revolved around friends and the competing Lennon-McCartney-style songwriting team of Cory Waldron and Matt DeMello. The former specialized in a bubblegum zeitgeist approach to Warped Tour-adjacent love songs, often spicing them with a nümetal twist. The latter was a budding hipster and amateur music history nerd who embraced their garage-based humble beginnings and pushed the group into more psychedelic territory.

The result is a group that starts out sounding like Olivia Tremor Control by way of New Found Glory. It's a hell of a mix that sets the standard for their much more polished, road-tested tour-de-force, 2009's 'We Will Carry You Out to Sea'.

A few from the carousel of a lineup who recorded this double-LP would go on to become Providence math rock royalty, including Casey Belisle of the Rice Cakes and Bradford Krieger of Big Nice Studios and 14 Foot 1 fame.

For long-time fans of DeMello's offbeat fixations with Gershwin-style piano rhapsodies and existential melancholy, 'Grand Experiment' is ground zero for where his songwriting and damn-the-torpedoes production style begin to take on the gravity of adulthood.