I got an email today from someone at Temporary Residence Limited about a new video from Grails promoting their new DVD, due out in April. I had been planning on posting the new-ish live videos of Dan Deacon - w/ ensemble - from Pitchfork, but this is probably more useful for me to post. Grails have the whole visual and sonic art combination down quite well (see this post), so their videos are usually a joy to watch. The 'commercial' for Doomsdayer's Holiday was a great idea - though I'd love to see the television channel that interrupted its programming for a Grails video - and this is the same concept, except for a DVD rather than an album:
"Grails - Acid Rain DVD [due out April 7th]
Following up their widely acclaimed and most successful album, Doomsdayer’s Holiday, Grails unleash their first-ever DVD, the career-spanning Acid Rain. Centered around a half dozen mind-altering music videos from their last few albums, Acid Rain also features nearly two hours of live shows from the past several years. Packed full of bonus material and special treats, Acid Rain is as bizarre, eclectic and otherworldly as their albums, with the added spectacle of debaucherous activities, vicarious cult obsessions, and street preachers on rollerskates."
'Acid Rain' happens to be my favourite track from Doomsdayer's Holiday, the epic, surf-drenched and slow-moving finale. It's a good title for a "career-spanning" DVD; as it is a culmination of the varied and progressive post-rock styles of Grails, and also distinctly different from most of the rest of the album. It's impossible to predict where Grails will take their sound next, which is great for a band in an otherwise often repetitive genre.
Since another TRL band, also broadly in the post-rock genre, Envy, produced an excellent DVD - Transfovista - not too long ago, I'm assuming this release will live up to a similarly high standard.
An updated and more refined version of this graph.
Left to right, the ratio of visits on Hardcore for Nerds received from each state (August-November 2008) to its share of US population (adjusted for broadband penetration). And on the vertical axis, the positive or negative vote-margin in each state for Obama-Biden (Delaware, Hawaii and Illinois have been re-adjusted to 2004 levels). The trend (regression) line has an r-squared value of just under 0.55, which is an expression of how well the date points conform to a linear trend (answer: moderately well).
For example: Pennsylvania (PA) had 1.54 times the number of visits that would be expected from its population size (against the number of readers from the US overall) and broadband penetration, and went for Obama by a margin of 10.37%. It's also quite close to the trend line, meaning it's not an outlier...
Alaska, what's up?
D.C., rock top!
Mississippi, you need more punk...
Addendum: same graph with the readership expressed as visits per 100,000 population (adjusted for broadband penetration) here.
A nice summery video from Foals, the best popular math-rock band of 2008 and one of my records of the year with Antidotes. The sound seems (intentionally?) muffled at first, but it's a beautifully shot video of one of the most thrilling, trilling quiet-ish songs on the album, and a great display of youth shenanigans. Which brings me to the point that, after their performance of 'Hummer' on the popular TV show Skins which gained them a large and youthful fanbase, they proved to be a tremendously interesting and worthy post-punk band. Antidotes is a crystalline, energetic post-rock album, filled with sweet hooks and a pulsing beat that keeps it going through eleven tracks of desultory experimentation. And no guitar chords.
Anyway, I'm sooo over Skins... At first, I thought getting rid of all the old characters mightn't be too bad an idea, given that the show isn't Saved By The Bell and youth is a transient phase, but now it seems that the new cast is allowing them to regress the central attitude and vision of the show. Parts of the second series were actually really classy television, and the first season had novelty and daring behind its shock! hedonism! aspects - this season appears to have neither quality.
The trailer looks exciting enough; of course, neither of the two previous elaborately shot sequences was meant to bear more than a figurative resemblance to the events of the series itself. So in this case, it's what the creators of Street Wars would have you believe the average Friday night out in Britain is like. Dubiously aged drinkers in a stereotypical English pub suddenly turn to ransacking the place, beginning with lighting distress flares indoors. The opening sequence of the series - "this day has potential. It's pregnant" - introduces: a cocky skater kid who cheats death and serious traffic accidents; a semi-Chav-like guy who drinks lager in the morning; and a semi-autistic nerd who counts calories. Eventually, Harry Enfield gets nutted in the face. Oh dear.
Nobody expects Skins to be realistic, but we do expect the comedy to have a point. So far, this series seems as aimless as the tabloid idea of drunken teens it was supposed to lampoon. Nevertheless, I'll probably still watch it - the first episode at least - to see if the jokes or the characters get any better.
First of all, here's a set of unreleased demo tracks from the Crownhate Ruin with Alex Dunham that were temporarily lost from the internet - Joe McRedmond still has them on tape - but which have resurfaced recently. This is what the man himself said about them on his Facebook page, apparently:
"Some unreleased not very good, poorly recorded The Crownhate Ruin songs with Alex joining us, and David Titus Batista on drums. I’ll be surprised if you enjoy it."
True, they're not great sound quality, but they're still a fascinating - and enjoyable - listen if you want to hear the sound of the Crownhate Ruin paired with some of the extra guitar/vocal pyrotechnics of Regulator Watts. Essentially an album's worth of new songs - tracklisting at the bottom of the post - plus a great version of 'Blood Relative' from Until the Eagle Grins:
Secondly, here's an interview I did in the last couple of days with Joe McRedmond - the guitarist for Hoover and the Crownhate Ruin, as well as many other Hoover-related projects (see below).
If you want to hear what he's doing now - and I definitely recommend this - check out Saggiatore.
Tell us about yourself:
My name is Joseph P. McRedmond, I am a half Irish half Sicilian male born and I am considered tall.
Of the various bands you played with after Crownhate, i.e. The Boom, The Sorts, Sea Tiger, etc., which albums/singles did you record on?
I remember recording on a couple of songs with Sea Tiger, The Sorts last record "Six Plus", touring with the Boom, recording on the Him record "New Features", playing bass on two Michael Nace LP's, recording demos with The Perfect Souvenir with Vin, and many practice tapes and live recordings of Rancho Notorious, and unheard demos playing bass with Gun, and a couple of singles with Admiral before all of this. [Edit - and my short lived project with James Brady from Trusty called "The Velvet Kid"; there is 1 limited edition single out there somewhere. I think Tanzania.]
Of those groups, were there any experiences that were especially memorable, or groups that you enjoyed playing with the most?
I remember them being all memorable at the time it was happening.
Within Hoover - e.g. 'Electrolux', and 'Relectrolux/Electrodub' - and in later groups like the Sorts, and in Regulator Watts as well, there's a lot of dub influence: I know that's common with a lot of Dischord and related bands, but was there anything or anyone specific it came from in Hoover? Or was everybody into it equally?
Everybody turned each other on to different musics, we would all bring mix tapes and would request things when necessary...and Jamaican music is the best music, as you can see in its influence on the world...there'd be no hip hop without Jamaica...it's deep late night party music with your friends usually with a message.
Until the Eagle Grins is usually the first record people get into after The Lurid Traversal. When you started up The Crownhate Ruin with Fred Erskine, what was the musical idea behind it? Where did you want to go from Hoover?
To keep playing and touring and recording and find a good drummer. and that's just what we did. And then we would jam forever and take our time putting music together and mostly just play as much as possible. We did a lot of quick out of town trips those two years.
What was the origin of the name Crownhate Ruin?
On the way home from rehearsal one night we passed a Crown Gas Station and Fred said "What do you think of the name The Crown Ruins? and I said what about the Crownhate Ruin? and then it was the name.
Kerosene 454 are listed in the thanks for Until the Eagle Grins, and I heard that you jammed with the Wall brothers for a while. Apart from the label (Slowdime Records), what was the connection with that band?
I originally met Alex in the summer of 1989 in Pittsburgh when Admiral played a show with Wind of Change which also featured Jim and John Wall. When Alex moved to DC he moved in with me, and I was already playing with Fred and Chris after Chris and my band with Geoff Farina of Karate, (our band was called Victor Deluxe) broke up after two shows as Geoff decided to move back to Boston. Alex started playing with us of course. On our first tour we played some shows with Kerosene, and then they moved from LA to DC. Hung out together at parties and more and more people move out here. In the middle of The Crownhate Ruin times, Fred and I moved into a house directly behind Kerosene's house, so we put two ladders up and climbed the chain link fence. After Crownhate and Kerosene broke up we had a little band called Vita Bruno with Jim, John, Vin, and myself. Rehearsed for a year and never got anywhere. Then Fred asked me to join The Boom, with a little prodding by myself, to go on a tour of Europe. John Wall was in the band at the time. We would practice in the Kerosene house. While we were gone, Vin replaced us with Mike Markarian who I lived with and Brandon Butler. They played as Vita Bruno til Brandon replace everybody and started an earlier version of Canyon.
The unreleased Crownhate demos with Alex Dunham are pretty much all new songs, apart from 'Blood Relative'. How likely was a second Crownhate Ruin album?
It was very likely, but we just couldn't play together anymore... Fred was busier with June of 44, Alex with Regulator and Vin with school. So David and I continued playing together off and on.
What do you think about the term 'emo' (or its sister codeword, '90s post-hardcore')?
I don't think about shit like that.
Anything in current punk or hardcore, or post-hardcore that you still listen to or enjoy?
The Eternals. The Good, The Bad, and The Queen, the more funky stuff.
Favourite record (new or old, I guess) of 2008?
Kutiman's "Kutiman" or the Jackson Conti record.
Favourite record in the Hoover family tree (that you didn't play on?)
The Him record "Universe Peoples" or "Many in High Places Are Not Well" or The 2nd Boom record "Any Day of The Night", or The Sorts "Contemporary Music" or most of the Sea Tiger LP.
Favourite record in the Hoover family tree (that you did play on?)
The 3rd Boom LP that never got released, but I have on soulseek.
Thanks
No sweat.
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Demo tracklisting:
10. An Open Bottle
11. The Two Fuckers
12. Trapped Like A Mime
13. As Your Hatred Grows
14. Baby Blue and Black
15. Blood Relative
16. Dismantling Hell
17. Success
(6- An alternate version of 'Open Bottle', from this four-song, 8-track recorded first demo by the band, from 1995 - thanks to Matt)
(The picture above is a hand redrawing - by me - of the actual cover, which isn't available in any significant size on the internet [actually, go here]. A much smaller, but more accurate thumbnail, is below...)
Wolves - '16'
Sinaloa - 'New Teen Craze' & 'Strike Aloud'
From 2004, this split 7" - long out of print - features one of the very last songs by Wolves (who never had any songnames, just numbers - high-concept hardcore) and a pair of comparatively early songs from Sinaloa, who released their third full-length in 2008, Oceans and Islands.
Wolves were a post-Orchid band: the guitarist and singer Brad Wallace was the bassist for Orchid, and went on to play in Bucket Full of Teeth; the drummer went on to play in Ampere; and this split was released on Will Killingsworth's label Clean Plate Records. Quite apart from that - and I'm not the hugest Orchid fan - Wolves were an awesome frantic emo band for the time they were together. Essentially, they were the closest the 21st century has gotten so far to reproducing the combined energy and melody of the Swing Kids.
Like last week's post on Loma Prieta, both these bands recreate different elements of the 90s emo sound in modern fashions; Sinaloa, in turn, sound like a more muscular Moss Icon. Previously I posted the split LP by Ampere and Sinaloa - there's also a Wolves/Ampere split, and a Wolves/Transistor Transistor split, both on 7". However, this is possibly the best, and certainly ultimate, Wolves song, and out of all those other bands Sinaloa are definitely my favourite.
Here's good review of the split from Andy Malcolm of the excellent Collective Zine:
"I think this 7" has been hotly anticipated by certain folks. Luckily, it doesn't disappoint, as both bands contribute some fine songs. Wolves have split up, but they go out on a high note with a quality slice of their emotive hardcore. Garbled vocals and excitable guitars fire off rapidly for the duration. One guitar keeps the melody going at a torrid rate whilst the others and drums blast a tight rhythm. Sound.
Sinaloa then blow me away every time with 2 stunning songs on the b-side. They are a Moss Icon for the 21st century! Heh. I'm sorry. Anyway, this is amazing music, full of so much passion and sincerity and all the other things which I get out of my favourite records. The varied vocals by times spoken and cried spill out over the repetitious guitar and rhythm, inducing much swaying back and forth in my little wooden chair. The guitars roll and twinkle, the drumming marches on and it's all so perfect. As an added bonus they explain their songs. I personally couldn't ask for more. My favourite style of music played by kids that care. Wonderful. Apologies to the band, but it's your own fault for being so fucking good."
The wisdom of dead Germans
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First as tragedy, then as farce? There's nothing to be found in Victorian
ideologies.
Are there self-identified "farces" I should view that meet the criter...
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Hey! I entered a tee shirt for submission at Threadless.
If you like it, please take a moment and click the above image to go vote.
VOTE HARD!
If it wins...
Murder By Death/O'Death Split 7"
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"Murder By Death are releasing the first of 7 records in a 7" series where
they trade covering songs with other bands they know. The second 7" will
featu...
