Louis XIV Bridge the 'Distance' Between Albums

While Louis XIV don't release the follow-up to their much-buzzed about 2005 album, 'The Best Little Secrets Are Kept,' until January, the San Diego rockers are offering up an appetizer of sorts with the just-released digital EP, 'The Distances From Everyone to You.' "It's partly lust, betrayal, guilt, exhaustion and excitement," frontman Jason Hill tells Spinner, "all blanketed in cellos and loud guitars."

The EP offers a bit of a preview of the forthcoming album, with the opening track 'There's a Traitor in This Room' -- also slated to appear on the new effort -- but also dates back a way. "The title track was actually written in the weeks before finishing 'The Best Little Secrets are Kept,' but we were rushed to finish the record," Hill says. "It had been almost forgotten until we uncovered it about a week before deciding on what to include on the EP. It seemed to sum up what it was that we had gone through over the last two years in our most exhausted and numb moments. But since it was written prior to most of the whirlwind, it feels somehow prolific."

Also included on the collection is a cover of Queen's 'Flash's Theme,' from the 1980 movie version of 'Flash Gordon.' "We did it in a night on a lark mostly to see if we could pull off the guitars," Hill says. "The vocals were the trickiest to pull off, so Brian [Karscig] ended up doing them mostly -- having a higher voice and wearing much tighter pants."