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viewing 1 To 9 of 9 items
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LP
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12XU 138LP
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"Rocket 808's self-titled debut album came out in late 2019, and luckily, absolutely nothing happened in 2020 to divert the world's attention away from the release. Combining the primitive analog drum machine of 1970s New York underground icons Suicide with the raw guitar of Link Wray, Rocket 808 blasted rock n' roll guitar into our new, weirder present. Now Rocket 808 returns with a new LP, House of Jackpots, taking up where the previous record left off while adding some new elements to juice things up. Still channeling Alan Vega, the Cramps, and Duane Eddy influences from the first LP, House of Jackpots further explores 1980's television cop show themes and Ry Cooder film scores. 'Punk rock Mike Post' might not be something you knew you needed, until you hear the first cut of the record. Slide guitar gives you your own personal screening of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas in your mind's eye, or imagine if instead of the Barry De Vorzon intro, 'Simon & Simon' opened with a trash-rock instrumental instead. Saturated in big-screen iconography whether it be surf tunes for 100-foot waves or David Lynch soundtracks for a grimy 1970s Las Vegas strip, House of Jackpots takes you out of a current reality that frankly, we all probably want to forget anyway. Covers of 1950s proto-goth Jody Reynolds and reviled eighties electro-rockers Sigue Sigue Sputnik give nods to the obscure rock n' roll weirdos of the past while dragging them into the future. Recorded by Grammy-winner Stuart Sikes and mastered by Crypt's Tim Warren, House of Jackpots takes electronic punk rock guitar noise into the 22nd century."
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12XU 141LP
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"Water Damage's follow-up to 2022's widely acclaimed Repeater is another minimal/maximal collision with two songs (hey!) clocking in at 19 and 22 minutes respectively. Hence, 'Fuck This' and 'Fuck That'. On Two Songs, the original septet of Nate Cross (USA/Mexico/Marriage), George Dishner (Spray Paint), Thor Harris, Travis Austin, Mike Kanin (Black Eyes), Greg Piwonka and Jeff Piwonka are joined by Mari Maurice (More Eaze)." "More Water! More Damage! The second proper LP by this Texan juggernaut is even more biggerer than the first, a head-drowning pair of new 'reels' (every Water Damage tracks generally take up a reel of tape, hence the 'reel ____' song titles) that makes you feel like you're swimming in a sun-drenched river of sound. Two drummers, two bassists, and tons of vibrating strings are once again a recipe for massive rocking-drone fires. Two Songs has two songs, and they're kind of the yin/yang of Water Damage: one toned very low, growling and roaring, groaning over a beat, while the other hums high, troubling the treble clef and ringing like a bunch of church bells that don't want to be in church. They're more alike than different though, divining momentum from repetition, flying forward by staying in place, climbing a mountain that they're building as they go. Enough ink has already been spilled about the previous-band pedigrees of the players in this hurtling collective, and by this point, the past seems way less relevant than the present when it comes to Water Damage's present-pounding sound. These people know what they're doing, sure. You don't need a resume in front of you to figure that out. It's there in every second of this gigantic, eternal music -- in all the strings being bowed, the skins being slammed, the rumbles being rumbled. You might notice that this time around, Water Damage haven't just given their tracks reel numbers. They're also called 'Fuck This' and 'Fuck That.' I take that as instructional. Whatever you're doing, whatever you're fretting about, whatever someone's trying to use to occupy your attention so you'll buy something or vote for something or ignore something: Fuck This. Fuck That. Listen to Water Damage." --Marc Masters
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12XU 142LP
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"First vinyl edition of NYC trio Weak Signal's second album, 2022's War&War, originally issued digitally by Colonel Records. Weak Signal is Sasha Vine, Tran and Mike Bones. Ryan Sawyer plays additional percussion throughout. Sarim Al-Rawi plays additional guitar throughout. Cass McCombs plays guitar on 'Spooky Feeling.' Produced and mixed by Jonathan Kreinik at Vito's Fall 2020 and Union Pool Spring 2021. Mastering and vinyl lacquers by Carl Saff." "crazily focused & powerful" --Jennifer Kelly, Dusted. "a slyly incendiary collection wracked with rippling tension" --Raven Sings The Blues. "a mesmerizingly morose journey, yet a scenic one too. Just don't whack it on the turntable when you're feeling at your most fragile." - JR Moores, The Quietus
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12XU 133LP
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"There is something really special about music based on drones. Whether it's the vocals of Pandit Pran Nath, the ARP 2500 of Eliane Radigue, or the nearly-blown amps of Sunn O))), by changing the listener's focus on details to one that favors flow, drones are uniquely capable of transporting our brains far far away. The debut LP, Repeater, by this loudly droning Austin septet is a goddamn splendid example of how the process works. Using the motto, 'Maximal Repetition Minimal Deviation,' Water Damage create glowing fields of post-rock lava that pretty much suck you right in and boil you alive. Water Damage, while technically a septet, actually operate in various configurations, with the proviso there should always be two drummers and two bass players on hand. They prefer if each of their sonic ideas takes up a whole reel of tape, and once they start they don't look back. Everything proceeds towards an imaginary end point that is only achieved when the tape starts flapping. What a way to run a railroad! But the folks in the band are all vets of various projects -- Spray Paint, USA/Mexico, Marriage, Black Eyes, Thor & Friends, among others -- so let's assume they know what they're doing. And why not? They sound fucking great. Their approach to the form is less front-loaded than most of their peers, and the surface of their sound is sometimes ruffled by aural events of an un-dronelike nature. But the main gush is usually a blend of harmonic tones and textures pointing towards a goal that is just out of ear-shot, just over the next bluff, and perhaps forever just beyond our reach. So remember to drink plenty of liquid while you spin this fine album. Nobody wants you to parch." --Byron Coley
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12XU 131LP
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2021 release. "Gram Parsons coined the phrase 'Cosmic American Music' to describe the synthesis of country, blues, rock and soul that he traded in. Sheridan Frances 'Francie' Medosch wouldn't be born for another 28 years after Parsons' 1973 death, but that Cosmic American sound was waiting for her all the same. On Big Fall, she embraces it like an old friend. Medosch grew up outside of Philadelphia in a family home that encompassed three cats, a dog and a pig. Her mom loved music; she played all kinds of stuff around the house, but mostly alt-country like Gillian Welch and Wilco. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the seminal 2002 album by the latter became formative to a young Francie's love of music -- 'I never really got into Sgt Pepper or anything, so I think that album kinda took the place of that.' She learned violin for a while, then she was a natural on piano, but that stuff bored her. Eventually, her mom bought her a guitar. 'I was actually very bummed out at first. I think I wanted an Xbox or something that year. But I came around to it very quickly,' she laughs. As a teenager she got into obscure underground rock and power pop, influences she channeled in the band she initially named Francie Cool, which would later transition into Florry (these days it's a solo project, in which she's backed by Jared Radichel on bass, John Murray on guitar and Joey Sullivan on drums). In 2018, at the age of 17, Medosch put out her debut Florry album Brown Bunny (Sister Polygon). The following year, she went out to Willow, New York -- a tiny hamlet outside of Woodstock -- and recorded a follow-up album with producer Paco Cathcart that she ended up shelving. Backed by Theo Woodward on drums and Pete Gill on bass, it was dark, and angsty, consisting of songs written between the ages of 16 and 18 and reflecting the depression that defined that time for her. During the pandemic, she began writing again. Her headspace had changed a lot. She was much happier and embraced 'absurdist existentialism' -- 'where you realize that nothing really has any meaning, and that it's pretty funny that we're here at all.' She was also bored of indie rock, and for her new songs she looked towards her upbringing among country and folk music, and her fascination with Parsons' Cosmic American Music. 'There's something about that kind of music that just makes me feel really good inside,' she says. Her main goal was just to write songs that felt good, that translated her newfound positivity. 'That was the biggest change for me, just writing and playing music when I'm feeling good, instead of when I'm feeling sad.' With six of those songs home-recorded with the early iteration of her new lineup, she pulled another four from the Willow sessions, a way of closing one chapter and opening a new one. There's a clear split between the old songs -- dark, sad, confused -- and the new -- self-assured, fun, free. Opening track 'You Don't Know' was the last one to be written, and the one that Medosch feels most accurately captured the spirit of Cosmic American Music. It's a Neil Young-indebted, pedal steel-adorned country tune, the melody of which was born from a dream Medosch had about the Staple Singers. She addresses a loved one who is 'fucking their life up': 'You don't know what you're doing / And you're hurting so many people'. Meanwhile, Medosch channels traditional country with the honky-tonk piano of 'Say Your Prayers' and the rollicking bassline of the title track 'Big Fall'. On both, she is full of optimism, claiming the idea of a joyful future with exuberance. These are the record's lightest moments; its heaviest are the Elliott Smith-esque 'Dream Diary/Growth' and the slowcore closing track 'Lovely', where Medosch conducts a bitter post-mortem on a toxic friendship, singing despairingly: 'When you tell me to quit being so loud, I will / When you tell me to quit being myself, I will'. It ends the album by 'collapsing in on itself', with a sudden compressed crunch followed by interlocking guitars that spiral towards the song's conclusion like they're circling a drain. Musically, Medosch comes all the way out of left field on the punky 'Older Girlfriend' and the dance track 'Everyone I Love You'; these feel like moments of total unbridled glee. Of the latter, which was influenced by both Philadelphia's club and rave scene and Neil Young's 1982 album Trans, Medosch says, 'For like a month, it was all me and my friends would listen to, 'cause everyone was so pumped up on it. Without a doubt, it's the weirdest track on the album. But I love that song.' The emotional heart of the album is arguably 'Jane', one of the Willow tracks, which recounts a major turning point for Medosch. In the lowest depths of depression, she watched Jane, the 2017 documentary on Jane Goodall. In the theater, she broke down in tears as she saw the passion and pride with which Goodall spoke about her work. In that instant, Medosch knew that was what she wanted for herself. To love herself; to be proud of who she was and what she had done. Now here she is, presenting Big Fall to the world, and she's proud." --Mia Hughes
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12XU 137LP
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"Sometimes change comes with big shocks, sometimes it comes with small steps. On In Your Hands, Lewsberg's new album, a bit of both seems to be happening. Take the second song, 'The Corner'. A remarkably discreet song: a violin plays a simple melody; a gentle drum loop keeps its finger on the pulse. 'This brick is a brick to build', it sounds, though a little later: 'This brick is a brick to throw'. A brick offers many possibilities, for those who want to see it. One time as a part of something bigger to come, the next time just as a simple stone, left on the ground. After all, most things are relative. Sometimes one can achieve more by breaking something than by building something. If you think you can determine which of the two is needed, you'd be fooling yourself. In Your Hands embodies the moment when all the bricks are there, but the wall has yet to be built. It's a moment with perspective, a moment where everything still seems possible, but caution is advised. The album sounds both smaller and more spacious than the previous albums. Guitar chords are plucked instead of fiercely struck, the bass guitar is given more room for melodic explorations, the drum kit is dismantled to just a tom and a tambourine. There is doubt in the lyrics, but it's a strong kind of doubt. A doubt that can stand in the way of a wrong decision but also invite for a good conversation. The old Lewsberg has been professionally demolished and the building blocks are on display. Ready for future applications and already finished at the same time. In Your Hands is therefore an ode to the potential and a call to carefully give way to it. Just what we need right now. But if I were to claim this so boldly, I wouldn't have learned much from Lewsberg." --Niek Hilkmann, October 2021
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12XU 134LP
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"Winged Wheel is made up of four musicians whose worlds have intersected for years without them ever all being in the same room. Cory Plump (Spray Paint, Expensive Shit), Whitney Johnson (Matchess, Damiana), Fred Thomas (Tyvek, Idle Ray), and Matthew Rolin (Powers/Rolin Duo, solo) have been longtime participants in various diy communities, crossing each other's paths through shared gigs, working on releases, or taking the stage at Cory's small upstate NY bar. Each player has developed their own personal practice of improvisation and home-recording, and Winged Wheel began by chance when Cory asked Fred to send over some rawly recorded drum loops to jam over. Cory tracked rangy guitar and bass parts over these repetitive loops and songs slowly started taking shape. Matthew's guitar layers took these foundations to a whole new level, and Whitney's submerged vocal tracks solidified everything, elevating the project from a soup of partially formed ideas into something intelligible. The entire album was written, recorded, and mixed in remote collaboration, eventually turning into a balancing act of precisely arranging sonic details and maintaining the formless excitement the music began as. This paradoxical process can be heard in the final form of the album, a continuous zone that manages to be strange and amorphous while still carving out space for four distinctive musical personalities. It's a sound that hovers and stumbles as often as it takes declarative turns in unexpected directions, the circles getting smaller the closer you zoom in."
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12XU 122LP
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2022 repress, 2021 release. "Chris Brokaw is the consummate underground rock musician. In a career spanning thirty-plus years he has been in countless bands (Come, Codeine and The Lemonheads, to name a few) has been a sideman with everyone from Thurston Moore to GG Allin, pounded countless stages on nonstop tours, and played on over seventy recordings. Puritan is his tenth solo album and it's a killer. From the hypnotic repetition on the extended instrumental outro of title-track opener 'Puritan', the wounded grace of 'Depending', to the fragile beauty of the Velvets-esque duet with Claudia Groom, 'I'm the Only One for You', and the ghost of Alex Chilton echoing through 'The Bragging Rights', onto the GBV-like firestorm of 'Periscope Kids', and ending with the On The Beach era Neil Young minimal strum of his cover of Karl Hendricks' 'The Night Has No Eyes', Brokaw has crafted an understated masterpiece. Puritan is an album that is all heartache and rebirth, resignation and joy, the kind of record that is so needed but all too rare these days. A classic from front to back." --Mark Lanegan, 2020
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12XU 132LP
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2021 release. "After a six-year absence, The Dead Space returns with Chlorine Sleep. Recorded days before their breakup in 2015, this album marks a turning point, both for its the trio of Quin Galavis, Garrett Haden and Jenny Arthur, as well as for their collective scene in Austin, Texas. The Dead Space never quite fit in since forming in 2008, and never really cared to. The trio quietly managed to craft their own brand of tightly wound art rock, equal parts bleak and brooding, but presented in stark tones. Whether their allergy to artifice was a roadblock, in keeping with their character or some combination of both, it's hard to say. Either way, the Dead Space were very much on the outside looking in prior to the release of their well-received first album, 2014's Faker. And when it finally seemed they could reach a broader audience, they did what any good band should do -- they broke up. Slightly before that, however, the band returned to Ian Rundell's Second Hand Tacos studio to record Chlorine Sleep. The record carries the band's history forward with arduous blasts of force, contrasting with stark, lean efficiency, and exposes a sense of fragility and vulnerability. With Garrett Hadden's return to Texas, preparation to return to the stage later this year and next with a renewed vision and sense of purpose, The Dead Space's ferocious sophomore effort that expands on previous themes while forging a new path all its own. It's great to have them back."
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