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
We receive an incredible number of emails each week from bands or PR firms hoping for air time for their clients on TVD. And I say ‘air time’ because the blogs are doing the work that radio has performed in the past, that is introducing the readers/listeners to new music because, let’s face it, terrestrial radio is a Top 40 Garbage Heap at this point in the game.
So, the emails pour in and we do our best to listen to each and every one of them. Often times if a band’s up our alley, they end up in a ‘First Date’ feature or in some other capacity on the blog. But with the number of emails and Mp3s pouring in, there simply isn’t the time in the day or the manpower to feature everyone we think should merit ‘air play’ and there’s less time of course for those who are middling or not particularly within the blog’s niche—whatever that may be.
To remedy this conundrum, and perhaps as an homage to Dick Clark who was running this bit on American Bandstand for eons, we’ve got a new running feature whereby we post the tracks submitted to TVD and we let you be the judge along with us in what we’re calling ‘TVD’s Rate That Record.’
Thumbs up or thumbs down, it’s your call. Feel free to use foul language, rant or rave, and/or champion the little guys who’ve made that killer track you’ve been trying to turn your pals onto for ages who abruptly and finally find their one moment of downloadibility here on the blog. Or simply decimate the wannabes.
In the future we’ll post them as they come in (within reason) among our other running features, but this week, we’re gonna give you a taste of what’s come in over the past few weeks and what positions itself in the queue this week in real time.
Beautiful Supermachines - Oakland 2008 (Mp3) Davis Williams, “...the only person who could credibly write tracks for Terry Riley and Teddy Riley” introduces his Beautiful Supermachines."
Over a career that spans more than three decades, he’s been at the leading edge of various watershed moments of punk, post-punk, noise-rock, and hip-hop, rubbed elbows with Ice-T and Dr. Dre, played “the secret white dude” behind the scenes of The Jungle Brothers’ seminal J. Beez Wit The Remedy, and more recently settled into an in-demand role as a local producer.
The recordings for Almanac were crafted using an M Box and 3 mics in Asselin's Pocono Mountain basement, and over the course of time, acquisition of gear, and massive trial-and-error, the bunker blossomed into the One Forest Studio. An empty roller rink was even used to create reverb! “Island of Broken Glass” takes its name from Robert Smithson's sculptural work, recanting destruction and violence inherent in the relationships between nature and man. The lyrics from this song inspired the cover of the album, a spiraling double helix/DNA strand made of burning books. Smithson is responsible for creating the Spiral Jetty in Utah in 1970.
BYOB - Prescription (Videomix) (Mp3) "...this time, I am emailing you on behalf of an artist who I am very fond of, I have incredibly high hopes for. . . . BYOB is 21 years old, from South London, he writes, produces and performs all his own material. It a fusion of many different genres and I can't really decide where it fits. The closest I can compare him to is The Neptunes.
The New Loud - Don't Dance (Mp3) “Part weirdness of Sparks, part killer dance of The Bravery and part insistent hook craftsmanship of XTC.” —Amplifier
The New Loud is a three-piece electro/punk/new wave band from the blue collar city of Milwaukee, WI. Its debut EP, Can’t Stop Not Knowing consists of six tracks including an intense, frenetic cover of Radiohead’s “2 + 2 = 5.” The EP was produced by band member Shane Olivo and displays a tight mixture of electronic elements and natural sounds, layered obsessively with some songs using up to 80 tracks in the mix.
Our friend Ed Hamell likes to describe a bar he once worked at as if “Night of the Living Dead had a Cheers” and I like to describe Les Enfants as an Irish Bon Jovi. Both comparisons tend to elicit laughter – then a grimace.
But say what you want about this band and this LP, (yet another purchase from Yesterday and Today Records) it’s probably the MOST requested item for reposting here on the blog. I’m clueless as to why, but there you have it.
So, on this Thanksgiving Eve...from us, to you. (Now quit pestering me.)
Actually, this really isn’t even a good record. Well, maybe it was for a few brief moments in ‘85 after its purchase (again from the sorely missed Yesterday and Today Records.)
Yet when it crops up in rotation on iPod shuffle, I’m reminded of some very good times indeed. Clearly a case of the messenger over the message.
I AM a fan however of the manner in which Trouser Press dismissed it:
“The good news about this California-based Scottish-American trio is that they're not as pretentious or as distant as the name. The bad news is they're close to it. Utterly without personality or purpose, the eleven slickly produced tracks (with titles like "Heartache Feeds Heartache" and "Past Your Frame") blur into one another, with the smooth, modern sound of guitars and keyboards approximating an updated Moody Blues. Except for Dan Phillips' cloyingly over-emotional and gimmicky vocals, these sculptures are faultless to a fault.”
“Utterly without personality or purpose.” ...I’ve got a new catch phrase.
Chris Grier has been making brutal and beautiful music here and abroad since 1988, primarily with guitars and their assorted accoutrements, with results that skitter along that rarely glimpsed border where "wildly seductive" meets "what the hell?" He has publicly been called everything from "inscrutable" to an "inhuman guitar abuser," sometimes in reaction to the same performance.
He has collaborated, recorded and performed with some of the planet's most interesting and inventive musicians, including Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Andrew W.K., Tom Smith, Don Fleming, Matthew Wascovich, Hugh McElroy, Ian Wadley, Little Wings and Little Howlin' Wolf. Since 2004, he has been a member of the long-running avant-garde collective To Live And Shave In L.A., and he is also a member of the Cleveland-based art-punk ensemble Scarcity of Tanks. With Kohoutek's Scott Verrastro, he created the terrifying drums-and-guitar duo Ultimate VAG, which toured with legendary psych-rockers Ya Ho Wha 13 in 2009. He was also recently tapped to be the guitarist for punk legend Jayne County's new band.
With Thurston Moore, Grier curated the 2005 "Noise Against Fascism" festival in DC and recently, he played on Sean McArdle's debut solo LP, "Northern Charms," some of which can be heard, oddly enough, being piped through the ceiling speakers of every Starbucks outlet in North America. As a group and solo artist, he has appeared on bills with the likes of Faust, Bob Pollard, Dan Higgs, Max Ochs, Grey Daturas, Flower Travellin' Band, Ya Ho Wha 13, Wolf Eyes' Nate Young, Sightings, Magik Markers, Wooden Wand, Religious Knives, Six Organs of Admittance, MV+EE, and many other fellow adventurers in the world's rock and underground scenes. Recordings featuring his solo and group work have been released on a plethora of labels in the U.S., Europe, and Australia.
He is also a violent karaoke enthusiast.
Grier is currently writing and recorded a vinyl-only LP to be released in 2010 through the Sockets label.
Langhorne Slim and I have an interesting history. I first discovered him (him being Sean Scolnik) a couple years back and I enjoyed the folksy upbeatedness of the songs and singer Scolnik's interesting voice. Half a year after I started listening to the band, I was driving with a friend of mine and had Slim's self-titled album playing. My friend turned to me and suggested that if I enjoyed what was playing on the radio I should check out Langhorne Slim. After informing him that it was Langhorne Slim's new album my friend proceeded to tell me how he went to SUNY Purchase and his friend Lucas and Langhorne made some whacky music (one song he played me was all about water) together. Long story short, I always figured that if the few people I've met who knew Scolnik were awesome, then he must be too. And after seeing him in concert there definitely is a strong and honest connection between his on-stage persona and the first-hand accounts I've heard about him.
Now, I said I've always liked the music. Have I ever loved it to the point of screaming out the lyrics at his show? No. But I've enjoyed it. So, I was slightly anticipating Langhorne Slim's newest album, Be Set Free, which came out a month and a half ago. His first album came out 5 years ago and while his two LPs definitely exhibited a slowly evolving style, they weren't so different that I expected (not optimistically nor pessimistically, just expectantly) this latest one to be too far off par. While I've read reviews that have called it "cohesive work" this and praising it for its straightforward simplicity. I call bullshit, friends. It's just too simple. Too sappy. And frankly, too slow for my liking. Perhaps the only song on the album I actually enjoy is the piano-heavy call-and-response "Cinderella." I also rather like "Back to the Wild" as the kind of song you'd use as an accompaniment to a film's train-riding montage and "For a Little While" because it embodies that type of sound (a-la-Jeff Buckley) that makes me want to make out with someone for a few hours. I can't say I love, or even really like, the rest of the album. It feels as though he is going through the motions, trying to continue on with a sound that he began playing around with years ago.
I last saw Slim at Iota this spring. There was a pretty good sized crowd compared to other shows I'd seen at the venue, so I expected there to be a large number in attendance at his show at Rock & Roll Hotel this past Tuesday. In fact, the entire downstairs was packed to the exit with concertgoers. My boyfriend and I arrived for the Dawes in the last few songs of their set. I knew nothing about them going in and, although they clearly had a strong following at the show, their music wasn't really for me. At the last Langhorne Slim show there was no drummer- something was mentioned about how he was sick or hurt and wouldn't be playing, which for one lucky fan who got to accompany a few songs was probably a dream come true. On Tuesday there was not only a drummer but a pianist/banjoist and an upright bassist. Despite having just released an album, a good portion of the set list featured music from previous albums, which I was more than grateful for. I probably zoned out for any of the songs off of the new album, except for when they played "Cinderella," "For a Little While," "Blown Your Mind," and "Land of Dreams." The latter song I don't like and after reading a review comparing its lyrics to a Hallmark card, I like it even less.
Say what you will about Langhorne's music, but you can't really knock his stage presence. He and his band interact beautifully together and it's really refreshing to see everyone on stage clearly enjoying themselves. They played some of the more vigorous songs like "Honey Pie" and "Hello Sunshine" and "And If It's True" along with some other crowd pleasers like "Rebel Side of Heaven" and "Colette." It wasn't a bad show, and Scolnik really knows how to engage his audience (note- to the guy who shouted most of the lyrics and then during an interval where Scolnik was talking shouted "TESTIFYYYYY"- please, shut up. No matter how many times you apologize for screaming into the ears of the girl next to you, that doesn't give you carte blanche to continue doing so for the rest of the show, especially when it's things that make everyone around you feel completely awkward.).
All in all it was a pretty decent show, and if you've never seen Langhorne Slim in concert, you should the next time he rolls through before he gets picked up to play in a bigger venue and ticket prices double. As for me, I think I'll be setting my Tuesday night free.
Walking through downtown DC’s rush and push of office workers hitting the pavement on their commute home last week, I lingered a bit on the moon above, hung wistfully low and large in some forgiving November temperatures. If you ever care to feel truly big about yourself, remember that all who’ve ever lived or will live gaze upon the same luminous face above. It’s a familiar equalizer, I tell you.
Our pal Davy H found a vinyl gem by sheer happenstance last week and posted a few tracks in celebration of the find: The Lotus Eaters ‘No Sense of Sin,’ an LP I’ve had since ‘85 or so from one of my very first trips up Rockville Pike to Yesterday and Today Records (RIP).
‘No Sense of Sin’ has remained one of those odd constants ever since and its ‘well loved’ condition speaks to that. Yet it’s this sort of obscure gem that I too found and purchased by luck and happenstance—yet it’s familiar as can be all these years on.
It’s no secret either that as much the vinyl nerd I’ve become and stayed, I too have an iPod to keep me company on those walks to and from work AND to make it appear as if I’m totally oblivious to the numerous panhandlers who attempt to shake me down me daily.
With consistency and frequency, these obscure yet familiar gems make themselves known once more on shuffle—among the more common tracks from rather non-obscure bands. Sort of like the moon appearing yet again in the sky above, hung wistfully low; its relationship with me an oddly personal one. Just like your own with it.
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.
Oklahoma’s Evangelicals had one of our favorite LPs last year in ‘The Evening Descends,’ so with that we asked front man Josh Jones to DJ our Friday Ten this week. The bar was set pretty high last week with Nicole Atkins’ DJ turn, but Josh has come through with flying colors.
Rather inspired and diverse colors, I might add: "On our way to Kansas City from Denver earlier this evening, and while dj'ing from the passenger seat, I momentarily fell asleep and dreamt that it was me who was driving down the interstate. In this dream a hovering translucent vision of Dave Matthews head appeared in the road ahead of me and spoke in a booming voice, absent of Dave's trademark vocal inflections, saying...
"China gates, China gates... your quest is not a question". I wake with a start thinking that I'm really driving and hallucinating or falling asleep at the wheel and desperately grab at my laptop trying to steer the van while Crash Into Me overdrives the tape-adapter and distortedly blasts over the van's speakers."
Our week of Fall Vinyl Giveaways come to a close with a rather cool compilation of artists paying tribute to the scene that was Greenwich Village in the ‘60’s and early ‘70’s featuring Shelby Lynne, Lucinda Williams, Bruce Hornsby, Rachael Yamagata, Amos Lee, Sixpence None the Richer, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Marshall Crenshaw, Rocco Deluca, Cowboy Junkies, John Oates, The Duhks, Los Lobos, Cary Brothers, Jesse Malin, and Mikey Powell.
Says Susan Rotolo author of the recent bestseller “A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties” and writer of THE VILLAGE liner notes: “The performers from that time, and the songs they wrote, made a notable contribution not only to the legend of Greenwich Village but also to music in general. No one who is young, making music and hanging out, thinks in historical terms, but the passage of time allows for such a perspective. Cultural history was made.”
Read the rest on the LP here and start slugging it out in the comments to this post below to take home this special time capsule.
We’re choosing all of our winners tomorrow, Saturday 11/14!
