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LP
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FTR 222LP
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"As the Lentils shift their lip-movements to the land of the rising sun (Cali), they have prepared a final kiss for the New England-based fans who have loved Luke Csehak through the many pangs of his early iterations. Half of the record is a studio recording, continuing the emotional saga begun on the Lentils' 2014 debut LP (FTR 150LP). The music is a bit more scrambled and broken this time. The riffs are sometimes buried under more outsider confabulation than we're used to, as though everyone is wearing big rubber boots that have just come from mucking out the stalls. It's what you'd have to call a real Crackabaggy Sound, with all the sweat and smoke and stink that implies. It's the sort of music that goes through your head when you're looking at a big field you have to plow, and you can only think about the rocks. The tunes themselves have a truly heroic glow, but the bridges between them are haunted by winter's brute strength. The second side was recorded live on a cold January night in Turners Falls. This is the Lentils in their finest proletarian mode -- playing loose angular pop like a friendly cross between The Strapping Fieldhands and Great Plains. There are sleeper-pop moves on here so heavy you're bound to become a believer. And you'll miss them already. Even if you never heard 'em before. S'long!" --Byron Coley, 2016. Edition of 400.
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LP
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FTR 215LP
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"Luke Csehak sounds like a man who has had some troubles. But like the weird alchemy that made Todd Rundgren's early '70s sides so crucial, this new Lentils album manages to work as a damn-near-joyful explosion of (or maybe from) pent-up emotion. And it sounds beautiful. As he demonstrated ably with his former band, Happy Jawbone, Luke's creative engine is a weirdly canted turbine of distemper. His best songs are always moving along and falling apart at the same time, and so it is here. Like all top-rated generators of skew-assed roots-pop, the Lentils never neglect hooks no matter how wiggly the music gets. Just when you start to figure everything's gone to total chaos, a melody rises from the urk to grab your aural worm and dive for the bottom. There are moments here that recall everyone from Big Star to the Grifters to some drunk guy who really likes Dion. It manages to have a continuously riveting folk-rock center no matter which direction it turns. And man, it turns plenty. We suggest you do the same" --Byron Coley, 2015. Edition of 300. Co-released with BUFU Records.
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LP
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FTR 150LP
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First physical evidence of the "band" that entered the room when Happy Jawbone departed. And it's a beaut. Pressed on clear vinyl with a silkscreen on the blank side (a la Albert Ayler's Bells on ESP), packed with a 16-page book of Luke Csehak's notebook fragments, the record is a compendium of ideas that were once lost but are now found. For live performance, The Lentils have now assumed some sort of physical presence worthy of their sound's wide hips. But at the time of this recording, the project was solo Luke. He did the art for the vinyl, played all the music (apart from some Chris Weisman support on one track and some tootling from hippie prepsters from Putney) and poured a lot of weird soul into the effort. It is a goddamn stellar production. The music ranges from "The Wrong Song," perhaps the most blasted evidence yet of the mythical border that separate Brattleboro and Dunedin (a spectacular crevice filled with broken glass), to "The Wrong Wings," which has a jug band sound that would make Norman Greenbaum beam with pride. "Wings" even has some little psych guitar filigree that is pure Petaluma '72. Genius. There's also the strange-strings attack of "Roaring Milk" and the strangled Wooden Wand approach of "A Pocket Full of Blood," which has the best Beck lyrics not written by Beck since "MTV Makes me Want to Smoke Crack." With My Pillow Lava Part One: My Deaf Son, Luke has created a kind of new lonesome stranger archetype that is both more lonesome and far, far stranger than any archetype that precedes it. What a treat for you. Edition of 200 copies.
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