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LP
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MEX 150LP
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"Freewheeling Brattleboro, VT rock/folk wonderments the Happy Jawbone Family Band bring their latest full-length to Mexican Summer. What they've entrusted us to give to you represents their finest and most directly fulfilling effort to date. The energy and humor of early releases remains; that band you may have loved before has grown even stronger and more potent, its songs now monuments to individualism, to longing, to happier endings resulting from imperfect circumstances. Binding folk, indie rock and pop forms together is easy enough; it's what this band does with them, how it builds its sentiments and bursts preconceptions, that put them in a place where these musicians can rest, comfortably above and apart from almost every band working in this same terrain today. We're hearing the trippiest moments of the Beatles, Lindsey Buckingham at the peaks he reached on Tusk, and both poles of American post-punk songwriting royalty, Camper Van Beethoven at one end and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 at the other."
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2LP
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FTR 084LP
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Released in foreshortened single LP format back in 2010, the new edition of this masterpiece of Brattleboro form manipulation is allowed to breathe across two full long-players, and we're all a lot better off for it. Allowed to sprawl across a couple of albums, a booklet of text and a download card of yet another album, Happy Jawbone Family Band achieve a rare freedom here, assembling a complete imaginary universe that combines surrealist wordplay with woozy Dunedin-style form-grabs. Composed of seven (or so) people (it changes with the weather), the band seems capable of almost anything. At one moment they can be doing what sounds to be a flamenco version of the Germs' "Lexicon Devil" then turn on a dime and resemble the Terminals doing one of their death-chug-sea chanteys. It's weird, this Brattleboro thing. All the bands there sound pretty different from one another, but they all sound like they smoke cheeb as though it were legal. There is a stoner logic to Complete Hotel that's so damn wonderful it'll just about suck yr clothes off. As was demonstrated to the world on their Mexican Summer comp (which was in print for what? three hours?) HJFB put songs together in a way that pleases them, and damn the torpedoes. You can hear traces of absolutely anything inside their sound -- Four Seasons, Van Dyke Parks, Dave Davies, Plagal Grind -- but their mutational heat is so heavy, after you've dug a few notes you realize it could never be anyone but them. Complete Hotel Double Tragedy is the first time HJFB have gotten a chance to expand in all directions at the same time. And it is so cool, you'll grow a new tit. We promise! Edition of 600. Housed in a gatefold sleeve with a 32-page booklet.
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CD
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FTR 063CD
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The second LP (fifth album) by this Vermont/Colorado quintet finds them traipsing ever deeper into the kind of mythic American territory we usually associate with bands who view our landscape from far outside its windows. Think of Australia's Triffids or New Zealand's Renderers and cross their brilliant Southern Hemisphere inventions with truths only wrenchable from the heart of the beast. There's a genuine ruralist hoot factor here so smooth that it hits like a ton of silk, but there's enough killbilly undertow to keep everyone standing nervously around that jug of magic moonshine.
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LP
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FTR 063LP
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