Here at THE VINYL DISTRICTwe're good consumers. All Mp3's are posted to promote and give exposure to the music and are linked for a limited time. Please download to preview, then head promptly to your local vinyl vendor (or - OK, CD store too) and fork over your hard earned cash. You'll appreciate the piece of mind.
Got something you think we should be listening to or reading? thevinyldistrict (at) gmail.com
Lest any of you think my pining away this week for a real brick and mortar version of The Vinyl District was some Yoko Ono-like 'wish poem'...well, you’re only partly right. Some interesting offers did come our way, although all best seized upon when the thing actually exists.
But I don’t need this to happen today or tomorrow. Or next week or next month. Longer range is fine.
In September we tipped you to the alcohol infused Saturday brunch that was Paul Michel's video shoot for the track 'Surround Me' and today TVD's proud to premiere the finished gem:
Our friends at All Our Noise shot some behind the scenes footage and also chatted with Paul before the cameras rolled. Check that here.
My mom used to run that old line on me all the time, “Well, mister – if EVERYone jumped off a bridge, would YOU?” To which the answer was always no, I guess.
But if EVERYone was talking about a new band you HAVE to hear...would you? To which the answer is well, ...sometimes.
So, let’s get you ahead of the curve and introduce you to Little Fish — before they make their big splash:
"Great to see a rock band focusing on melody rather than senseless riffery….they certainly pack a punch." —London Daily Star
"Everybody's new favourite band Little Fish." —Oxford Mail
"My new Patti Smith. Juju has an amazing voice" —Gaz Coombes, Supergrass
"Twice as good as the best unsigned act you've ever heard... and then some." —Tim Bearder, BBC Radio Oxford
"When it comes to hearing good new bands for the first time, there's sit-up-and- take-notice music and there's jump-up-and-accidentally-bang-your-head-on-the- ceiling music. Little Fish are the first, immediately transposed by the second." —Dave, BBC Radio Oxford
"Little Fish are destined to rule the airwaves." —BBC Radio Oxford
"It took Juju 6.9 seconds, wearing a wife-beater suggestively perked in two places, her brilliant vocals, wicked guitar playing and hard accompanying drums to turn us all into a Sex Pistol. Little Fish is music's missionary position and why they're NOT on NME's list of New Bands to watch in 2008 is beyond me. I would definitely make space for Little Fish." —Hugh Tomasz, Tavern Times
Little Fish is a duo; one half is guitarist, singer, and songwriter Juju, the other half is Nez, powerhouse drummer. They release their Linda Perry-produced LP ‘Baffled & Beat’ in 2010, but we’ve got the advance single for one savvy commenter to this post who’s 180-degrees ahead of the curve.
Download the single below and shoot us your raves about that band in this post’s comments (with contact info—IMPORTANT!) and we’ll award the single to the most insightful of the bunch. You’ve got ‘til Friday at noon...
I receive links to articles of this type almost daily, but it’s important to reiterate some facts when considering just what star to hitch your retirement wagon onto.
From an ABC News article from this past April, “Though vinyl sales account for less than 1 percent of sales, Rollingstone.com reports that the number of records sold last year jumped to 1.88 million from 988,000 in 2007.
The Recording Industry Association of America officially acknowledged a resurgence of vinyl records when statistics proved it in 2007. That year, the American music industry saw a 46.2 percent revenue increase for vinyl sales. By comparison, CD revenue sales dropped 20.5 percent in the same period.”
So, I don’t come to the record store thing just out of the blue. To be fair, I’ve worked in TWO record stores to date. Both were Record Worlds—the corporate variety—where it was mandated that all of the employees, except for the managers, sport blue polyester vests. Y’know – to differentiate you from the other riff raff browsing through the import bins or what have you.
Record World, both based in malls at the time, wasn’t the type of place that would buy used LPs however—it was purely new stuff and catalog items. Which didn’t bother me so much at the time...hell, half my collection was ‘new’ THEN. Now it’s vintage.
But even with the vests and the mall location, the Record World was the place to BE and oddly at the time I found my self at the dawn of the new ‘superior’ format, or so it seemed.
Back in ‘88 at the Georgetown Park Mall location of Record World (ground floor next to the Mrs. Fields) we were dispatched one morning to pack up all of the vinyl records from the bins to make room for (...gasp!) the CDs.
I laughed with my coworker Wishbone at the time, “These’ll never catch on...”
Brandon from We Fought The Big One! returns with his second installment of all things left of field:
Low Red Center S/T 10” Mini-LP Too often when it comes time to review a record, so much brain-time is spent putting a record in context when context is ugly and unproductive. For those who want to dance about architecture and shit about medium. Even worse for those who call themselves critics who only, in the end, wish to share their childhood influences with their reader. Sometimes a record would be better served by the reviewer by exclusively taking it out of context and placing it among things it’s not. This 10” mini LP from Austin Texas’s Low Red Center is one of those.
In a way it might be easy to pin on this dark-haired child the easy appellation of “minimal synth,” but for Low Red Center’s first vinyl offering, this would be a bad way to go.
For one, stridency takes a back seat to a hazy and uneasy romance. God help me but it reminds me more of Conrad Schnitzler or the first generation of electronic auteurs. But I suppose that wouldn’t be fair, really. Here we replace Cold War paranoia, intellectual rigidity, and adolescent dissatisfaction with a narcotic throb and a near obsessive attention to detail. There isn’t a single sound out of place. A single vocal that doesn’t loop in and out of the canvas that perhaps reminds you of Berlin, but in reality, shouldn’t.
This is not a band that has buried itself in the near-mythological history of the early electronic 20th. A song like 'Tropicalize' is far more buoyant. 'Crepe Suzette' is far too lovely. And the beautiful but daunting 'Watching the Planes' is too supremely fucked-human to be anything other than the work of a band that is grounded in the art of making music for people. It's not angry. It’s not ideology. A few listens in and it will impress you with it’s singularity. It’s my favorite record of the year.
I’ll clue you in to a little known TVD secret—see all those ads over there to the left? (Go ahead, scroll. I’ll wait...) We haven’t been paid a dime for any of them. On purpose.
I kinda like having that bulletin board of sorts that most good record stores have—the spot for the bands, the fanzines, or the record collectors to staple up their flier announcing something of interest to like minds.
I mention this to underscore the feeling of community that I’ve tried to establish here at ol’ TVD which tends to develop between those like minds—you guys who come here each day or the coterie of DC’s bloggers (and beyond) who genuinely seek to create and distribute ideas, or style, or music. At the heart of those communities in my opinion are record stores.
The web has made it easy to some degree to replicate an iota of that notion here while many of you toil away in your cubes. But I’m wary of those cubes becoming the club houses that used to be record stores.
Because we need these independent shops. Many of them. And happily there are four (or maybe five or six) great ones within DC’s confines that do engender that sense of community. Hell, you can make a short hike of it and hit all of them in one afternoon. I often do.
So, this is my Jerry Lewis Telethon-like pitch for investors to subsidize the brick-and-mortar version of The Vinyl District, except there’s no 7-11, or Walmart, or Organization of Fire Chiefs stepping up with oversized checks for to me to blubber over.
But we can get creative.
Have a store front you’d lease for cheap? Can you work free of charge for a while as things ramp up? Have a band that’ll play a benefit?
Because I know this blog that’d be a fantastic marketing tool.
My dad worked for years after his retirement. In fact, when I think about it, I don’t believe he ever really ‘retired’ at all. He and my mom were on a fixed income, so my pop took a job with a local pharmacy delivering medications to seniors who were home bound to supplement his tiny Social Security check each month.
To make matters worse, my dad’s bosses at the drug store were the worst of the worst. I won’t mention the business’ name—Butler’s Drug Store in Point Pleasant, NJ—but suffice it to say the drudgery of having to continue to work in one’s golden years was made even more taxing by the powers that be who my dad answered to day in and out.
I pleaded with him for years to move on, OR if he felt that he needed to continue working, at LEAST find something he genuinely enjoyed. But he remained at the pharmacy until the end of his life. He once explained to me that the position allowed him some time between deliveries to check in on my mom who was beginning to show the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease although we didn’t have a diagnosis at that point.
So, yea—right. My dad was a gem.
To think if I’m afforded the 76 years of life he had, I’m long overdue for a mid-life crisis. Or better yet, the economy being what it is these days, I better begin to supplement my plan for retirement in some manner.
Remember my epiphany I had a few weeks back? Well, I’m accepting applications from savvy investors. With exceptional taste in music.
