We are very proud to say this album is Exotic Fever #023.
Exoticfever.com
Written in 2000 and 2001 after the release of "The Wind Blew All The Fires Out", recorded posthumously in 2003 in Boston, MA. and New York City.

The band with the intentionally obtuse name?
Hope and Songs To Sing is an album that was admittedly put together after the band had ended, playing it's last few shows around Boston with Fugazi and Q and Not U seemed a fitting ending for a DC influenced band that hopefully tried to add its own language to the conversation.
After their rather abstract album, "The Wind Blew All The Fires Out" received a huge amount of peer praise and a lot of reviews along the lines of "It's a shame that not many people will understand what is going on here because this band is so talented and wonderful" (Hanging Like a Hex Magazine, 2000) the band, while touring extensively, put together quite a few new songs quickly for it's next album.
Wanting at first to go even more abstract Mike Law tried to write a few "modern folk songs", which in his mind were protest songs without any melodic chords, as heard in the albums opening song, a tribute to Ida B. Wells, "The People's Grocery Company." If you listen closely it goes until the bridge before the guitar plays two notes that actually create melody together. As more songs were added the band slowly gave up on the conceptual and drifted toward reigning in some of the abstract of its previous album. Songs like "The Cost Of Profit" and "Clip" seemed the perfect combination of Law's goal of being called what he coined an "Off Rock" band, strange chords and dissident sounds that found melody within them. "Two People Holding Hands" another early song written for the album barely has a single guitar part that relies on anything more than ways of manipulating string noise, all held together by the spider web bass playing of Raiche as is most of the EULCID catalog.
By the time the band had a temporarily acrimonious split in 2002 after a nearly five year run that started as teenagers and a few hundred shows it was left with about 2/3s of a complete album.
Cooler heads eventually prevailed and Law met with drummer Matt Redmond about a year later to begin rehearsing to document the songs they had walked away from. Law added a few new compositions like "(I Heard It On) the Radio" "Word Of Mouth" "Big Heart" and "Checkbook" initially intended for his new band New Idea Society to round off the album and make it more cohesive.
Law: "Even at the time I was kind of aware I would lose a song like "(I Heard It) On the Radio" to a band that was now dead, but EULCID had meant so much to me that I felt the need to make Hope: And Songs To Sing be able to stand near equal in quality to the "Wind" album as best I could. Conversely I also felt I really needed songs like "Cost of Profit" and "Clip" to be heard because they were some of my favorite EULCID songs and I knew they could only be played with Matt and Chris. So the new and old songs became a vehicle for each other. It also should be mentioned that at the time Matt had reached a near perfect balance of creativity as a drummer who could play like a crazy person and yet not as often over play and I really wanted to document that as well. When I listen to the drums in No Vocals #3 they are so good it makes me laugh"
Eventually Chris Raiche was cajoled from his busy schedule into the studio to put down his bass parts and finish the album. Exotic Fever brought the full length to see the light of day a few years later and The Wind Blew All The Fires out finally had a companion album the band was proud of and to illuminate where the off-rock might have gone.