We’ve closed up the shop today for the President’s Day holiday. While we’re away, why not fire up our FREE Record Store Locator app and visit one of your local indie record stores?
Perhaps there’s an interview, review, or feature you might have missed? Catch up and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.
Greetings from Laurel Canyon!
On a clear day / Rise and look around you / And you see who you are / On a clear day / How it will astound you / That the glow of your being / Outshines every star /You’ll feel part of / Every mountain, sea, and shore / You can hear from far and near / A world you’ve never, never heard before / And on a clear day / On that clear day / You can see forever, and ever, and ever / And ever more
As my rock ‘n’ roll journey continues into 2016, it’s become a habit to look for what I call “road signs.” Often these signs are literally as clear as day. Come to think of it, this week the view from Mulholland Drive has been as clear as I can remember. Where is that winter rain we were promised? “Well, ya’ just never know.”
For this week in leap February, instead of Grammy hits and love songs, I’m listening to Scottish songwriters and long gone singers from Muscles Shoals.
Parlour Tricks finds beauty in the mundane with pop-driven gem, “Broken Hearts/Bone.”
There is a lot that can go down within a 5-minute run to the local quickie mart, especially if there’s luxurious indie pop playing over the loudspeaker. And if the airwaves belong to the NY-based Parlour Tricks, things are bound to get messy.
If you’re thinking a bass grinding soundtrack might behoove acting on your animal urges in the popcorn aisle, think again. Parlour Tricks need only to lay down their honey dipped harmonies over finger snaps and twinkling piano for these Sunday shoppers to lose their minds.
The band is on tour throughout March.
PHOTO: ANNA WEBBER | Herlin Riley is a drummer who makes his instrument sing. His resume is vast and long—and here comes another great collection of tunes solidifying his status as not just one of the greatest sidemen of his generation, but as an outstanding bandleader and composer.
For the new album, Riley has surrounded himself with a band of young musicians who will undoubtedly go on the spread the gospel of New Orleans-centric jazz. Russell Hall, a bassist from Jamaica, more than holds his own in anchoring the rhythm section echoing Riley’s syncopated beats and providing sonic depth to the music.
Trumpeter Bruce Harris and Haitian saxophonist Godwin Louis are the drummer’s secret weapons. I spent the better part of the recent Carnival season listening to the album without the benefit of the liner notes while riding around in my car. My ear was constantly pulled to their melodic gifts and exuberant solos while trying to figure out who was playing.
“My first real experience with a record/record player was Christmas one year when my brother rolled out this towering stereo system along with the album Go Bo Diddley and a Pittsburgh Pirates hat. We stood there listening to the guitar intro to “Crackin’ Up” and the first snare hit on the next track “I’m Sorry” over and over again. It just sounded so good. Later in the evening he (my brother) gave me a chest wall contusion as well… ’twas a great Christmas and one of the best.
“I think the coolest record I own is Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s Safe as Milk. I also received this one as a gift, and I love it not just because of the magical music, but because came on white vinyl. What a great lookin’ package…
I remember buying a lot of albums and CDs as a young boy because of the covers. Albums like Meat Puppets II, Captain Beefheart’s Doc at the Radar Station. I don’t do that so much anymore, but it served me well. Most were bought at Louisville’s flagship store Ear X-Tacy RIP. The first vinyl record I bought in a store might have to have been Suicide. I heard “Cheree” and had to have it. “Keep Your Dreams” is a blessing as well.
Mark Eitzel, American music’s poet laureate of the alcoholic undertow, has never gotten his props. During his time with his band American Music Club he put out a number of great albums, each one more besotted than the last, and managed to write what I consider the best song (by far!) of the nineties, “Johnny Mathis’ Feet.”
So what if he brutalized me in comments following a review I wrote of a show at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C. What really hurt was his saying, “If I’m as down as you say I am – then what gives you the right to kick me?” I wasn’t kicking you, Mark, I love you man—I was just unhappy that you were moving in the direction of stripped down torch songs, which have never been my cup of meat.
Ah, but that’s bourbon under the bridge. I will always consider Eitzel a genius, what with his way of both bumming you out and making you laugh with his songs about himself and his burned-out friends. He can turn a phrase and has a surgeon’s eye for just where to put the scalpel in, and these gifts are, I think, on best display on 1991’s Everclear. It led Rolling Stone magazine to declare Eitzel the Songwriter of the Year in 1991, but didn’t up his band’s exposure any; as Eitzel sadly noted later, “The next show there were about 20 people in the audience. And they were army guys and they thought American Music Club were some righteous American freedom-fighting, cool ass Springsteen-influenced Guns N’ Roses kind of guys. And we did not rock.”
And we did not rock. Sad words, those. And inaccurate to boot, because on Everclear American Music Club does intermittently rock, in a way that brings to mind another great underrated indie band, Lambchop. Take “Crabwalk,” a herky-jerky revel that opens with the great lines, “He reels around the nightclub/Like the hubcaps off of a car/That just crashed into a sign that said/‘This way to the nightclub’” and proceeds to compare said nightclub, due to alcoholic lack of equilibrium, to the rolling deck of a ship at sea. There’s also some stuff about fishing for tires and staring down jukeboxes, if they float your boat.
Vinyl showrunner Terence Winter picks his favorite vinyl record: “The first album I ever bought was Goat’s Head Soup,” he says. “It all started there. It came out in 1973, the year the show takes place. I think I bought it with my birthday money for my thirteenth birthday. I’d been buying 45s up to that point. I went to a live show of theirs [recently] and it was so cool that they pulled ‘Silver Train’ out.”
LA store unearths 8,000 record haul of rare soundtrack vinyl: Pre-digital entertainment mecca The Record Parlour has uncovered an unprecedented, lifetime collection of OST vinyl. It’s the largest collection of vinyl soundtracks they’ve ever encountered and likely one of the biggest of its kind in the States. The “world class” collection was acquired from a Long Beach sheriff who was recently diagnosed with leukemia.
Ryerson makes moves to restore Sam the Record Man sign to public view: Years after Sam the Record Man’s neon vinyl was dismantled and stored out of view, the sign’s keepers at Ryerson University are now starting the process of restoring it in earnest…When Ryerson purchased the prominent Yonge St. location — now home to the university’s new Student Learning Centre — council quickly moved to designate the late Sam Sniderman’s sign as city heritage.
Vintage and vinyl reign in Salisbury antique shop: The most notable example of the “sell well” category is the shop’s collection of 1,200 vinyl records, highlighting 1970s-era rock music. “We try to stay with the trends,” Bill said. “It’s a huge trend now people are buying records and record players again.”
Shoals record store could be on its final spin: After nearly 40 years in business, Pegasus Records in Florence plans to close its doors if they can not find a buyer by the end of next month. “Pegasus is just an institution,” said Luke Hunter, local musician and regular at Pegasus Records. “The possibility that it wouldn’t be here is just kind of shocking more than anything.” From records to comic books and everything in between, if you name it, chances are Pegasus has it.
When UK new wavers Japan broke up in 1982, the members predictably splintered off into various directions, and the highest profiles belonged to Mick Karn and David Sylvian. Over the decades the latter has amassed a solo and collaborative discography of unlikely reach and impressiveness; however, giving a fresh listen to ‘84’s Brilliant Trees makes abundantly clear Sylvian’s career trajectory isn’t as surprising as it might initially seem.
Upon consideration, very few musicians who made their name in the pop sphere have aged as well as David Sylvian. Of course, this is mainly due to his choice after Japan’s dissolution (they briefly reunited for one self-titled ’91 album under the name Rain Tree Crow) to gradually leave the milieu that fostered his initial reputation. The subsequent journey led him into the outlying territories of experimentation and the avant-garde, though this shouldn’t give the false impression that Sylvian’s post-Japan oeuvre is devoid of pop elements.
As a youngster of the ‘80s, I knew little of Japan, my discovery of Sylvian supplied by his ’87 collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Secrets of the Beehive. The introduction was made through the frequent play and promotion of said disc by my hometown Mom & Pop record mart, an enterprise also involved in the sale of high end stereo equipment.
To my teen mind any system comprised of separate components was high end, and at the time Secrets of the Beehive basically eluded me, as did much “deep-listening” material attached to ambient, new age, minimalism, art-pop etc. Reengaging with Sylvian as a mature adult provided, if not an epiphany than another instance aiding the realization that artistic assessments work in tandem with personal growth, therefore flouting finality.
The life of a repo man is always intense. I know this because I have, at last count, watched Alex Cox’ 1984 film Repo Man 123 times. Its storyline—shiftless punk finds himself part of a motley crew of repo men, while a mad scientist roams LA in a car with some highly dangerous nuclear materials in the back—is both whacked and hilarious, and it’s as full of classic lines (“I don’t want no commies in my car. No Christians either” says jaded repo man Bud [Harry Dean Stanton] to young acolyte Otto [Emilio Estevez]) as Apocalypse Now. What’s more, it boasts a better soundtrack, thanks to the contributions of Iggy Pop, Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Fear, and The Plugz.
The film does a wonderful job of capturing the aimlessness of LA’s hardcore youth, and is so full of catch phrases (Bud: “Look at those assholes, ordinary fucking people. I hate ’em.”) you could spend the rest of your life, or at least a day or two, speaking only lines from the movie, and never repeat yourself. It’s not impossible, either. I have a friend who took a whole lotta acid and spent the next four days speaking only in song lyrics. Seriously. You might ask him how his day was going and he’d reply, “I’m easy, easy like Sunday morning” or “I feel like a bullet in the gun of Robert Ford.” I didn’t witness this, but I believe him. He’s not a pathological liar like yours truly, of whom Mary McCarthy once said, “Every word he writes is a lie, including and and the.” Come to think of it I’m lying again, because McCarthy was actually referring to Lillian Hellman.
Anyway, the soundtrack (and the movie) open with Iggy Pop’s “Repo Man.” He recorded the song with Blondie’s former rhythm section (Clem Burke on drums and Nigel Harrison on bass) and ex-Sex Pistol Steve Jones on guitar after hurriedly scribbling some lines in his notebook. Jones’ opening guitar riff is titanic, oceanic, and BIG, and the rhythm section is spot on. Jones then plays a sorta secret agent man riff while Iggy sings one of his greatest couplets: “I’m looking for the joke/With a microscope.” Okay, so it’s not as good as 1969’s “Now I’m gonna be 22/I say oh my and a boo hoo,” but that line’s one in a million.
Acme Feed & Seed, in partnership with TuneIn, is pleased to announce the launch of Acme Radio. Listeners worldwide will be able to experience the variety and excellence of all things Nashville thanks to TuneIn’s unique platform—an app that provides listeners access to more than four million radio stations streaming from every continent. Tom Morales, owner of Acme Feed & Seed, reopened the doors of the historic, century-old building to bring locals back to downtown Nashville. He succeeded by renovating a building rich with local history and by inviting Nashville’s best players to the stage.
“If you are one of the best musicians in Nashville, you are one of the best in the world. Acme’s stage gives this talent a live, local platform and Acme Radio will give them an international one. We are creating the opportunity for these artists to be discovered regardless of the genre,” said Morales.
https://youtu.be/Lq5hzixLQTg
Readers of The Vinyl District may recall that TVD contributor and Nashville editor Tim Hibbs began hosting Tuesday and Thursday lunchtime vinyl sessions on Acme’s ground floor stage in August 2014. The popularity of those sessions led Acme to expand them to five days a week and to feature The Vinyl Lunch as the midday program on Acme Radio. Running Monday through Friday, 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM (CST), Tim spins an eclectic music mix . Old and new, all genres are fair game for The Vinyl Lunch.
Hailing from Mexico, Low Flying Hawks specialize in a dark-toned, art-imbued, and indisputably heavy style of contempo metal, and it’s fair to add enigmatic to the description; composed of two dudes sporting the handles EHA and AAL, they share guitar, bass, and vocal duties and fill out their sound with contributions from Trevor Dunn on bass and Melvin Dale Crover on drums. Produced by Toshi Kasai, formerly of Seattle sludge maulers Big Business, Kōfuku is an unusually confident debut album, and it’s available February 12 on Magnetic Eye Records.
As they emerge, some outfits tend to go a smidge overboard in the biographical department. Low Flying Hawks, or as the name is occasionally stylized, Lowflyinghawks, fall on the opposite side, obviously preferring the air of mystery. As stated above, they are from Mexico, which the last time I checked was a rather sizable slab of real estate, and I’ve unturned no further geographical enlightenment. Moreover, the use of what seem to be initials helps to cultivate anonymity, though the duo isn’t averse to credit (or for that matter, photos); EHA is the songwriter and primary vocalist.
They’re also not shy about detailing a batch of wide-ranging influences, name-checking Richard D James (a.k.a. Aphex Twin), Black Sabbath, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, and My Bloody Valentine and citing the impact of drone, noise-rock, psych, shoegaze, post-rock, and least surprisingly metal as part of Kōfuku’s overall equation.
Considering the breadth of that list, Low Flying Hawks have cultivated a cohesive, disciplined attack right out of the gate. Those not smitten with the doom subgenre aren’t likely to be goosed by the contents here, as the disparate interests are best described as seasoning on an assured, and based on the ambiguous narrative of the song titles, possibly conceptual first outing.
Leading independent record shop shuns Record Store Day: Having played along in recent years, OYE partner Markus Lindner announced today that OYE stores would not take part in 2016, explaining that although responsible for many good things – including increasing awareness of independent shops – RSD has developed in a way that no longer sits comfortably with OYE’s objectives.
Famed California record store may soon sell weed instead: Berkeley residents may be able to pick up hi-fi vinyl, and high-potency OG Kush in one stop this year. The legendary Berkeley record store Amoeba Records is close to securing a new lease on life, as sales of physically recorded music continue to decline. Amoeba is one of three finalists for the city’s fifth medical marijuana dispensary license. Thursday evening, the Berkeley Medical Cannabis Commission selected Amoeba to forward to the Berkeley City Council for final selection.
From broken roofs to broken marriages: meeting some of the most obsessive vinyl hoarders: Like most people, music was always on in my house as a child, but with a small difference: My father was a vinyl collector. Not in the “I buy two or three records a week” way, more in the “I have 13 fucked turntables piled up at my backdoor and you can’t get upstairs” way.
Rush Hour store gets new location, to host opening weekender: Amsterdam’s key record store and eclectic electronic music imprint Rush Hour announced today that it is getting a new location. To celebrate its new home, which will be on the same street as it now is, RH is throwing a three-day weekender in April. After being its home for more than 17 years now, the well-known location on Spuistraat 98, the record store is now moving to a bigger space in the same street, on number 116 to be exact.
Metallica is arguably the biggest metal band on the planet, maybe of all time. When rumors began swirling that the band could be considered for the coveted Super Bowl Halftime show, it made a hell of a lot of sense to most music fans. But the NFL continues to play it safe after the Janet Jackson incident, so they opted for the light sounds of Coldplay—and we all saw how truly awful that performance ended up being.
But that wasn’t the end of the story for the legendary Bay Area natives. This gave birth to a new mantra for the band, “Too Heavy for Halftime” and it caught on. Frontman James Hetfield fired back a bit when asked about the snub by the Associated Press, “We’re not a variety show. We’re not pop. We’re not sparkly and all that kind of stuff that I think seems to be what is needed for that.”
Metallica would represent San Francisco during SuperBowl weekend, but they would do it their way. Say hello to a headlining gig for CBS Radio’s “The Night Before” concert at the glorious AT&T Park, home to the three-time World Series champions San Francisco Giants and a fitting stage for a full on metal performance.
Poor Eric Clapton. Having been through the supergroup wringer with Cream and Blind Faith, there was nothing he craved more than a little anonymity. No more “Clapton is God”; all he wanted to be was a player in a band that wasn’t being hyped to the stars, and where he could perform his six-string pyrotechnics in the background, as it were. Those are rich man problems, for sure, but Clapton was truly burnt out, and given the opportunity to tour with the American soul/rock/blues band Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, he happily said yes. It was a respite and it paid off, as his guitar playing on the resulting LP, 1970’s On Tour with Eric Clapton, testified.
During the early seventies the Bramletts fronted a musical family that saw them taking in lots of famous orphans, including Duane Allman, George Harrison, Rita Coolidge, Dave Mason, and King Curtis. Despite a host of studio LPs Delaney and Bonnie were best regarded as an incendiary live act, one that led Clapton to not only say, “Delaney taught me everything I know about singing,” but “For me, going on [with Blind Faith] after Delaney and Bonnie was really, really tough, because I thought they were miles better than us.” In any event his time spent with Delaney and Bonnie was a happy one for the troubled musician.
On Tour with Eric Clapton didn’t just feature Clapton. In fact it was populated by a veritable who’s who of the best of rock’s supporting musicians, many of whom also played on that same year’s LP Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs by Clapton’s next project, Derek and the Dominos. You’ve got Dave Mason on guitar, Bobby Whitlock on organ and keyboards, Carl Radle on bass, Jim Gordon on drums, Bobby Keys on saxophone, Jim Price on trombone and trumpet, and Rita Coolidge on backing vocals; the folks who saw this iteration of the band live were lucky indeed.
As Pitchfork recently commissioned select retrospective reviews of David Bowie’s catalog after his passing, here in the office we looked at each other and thought, “Well, way to catch up with what we’ve been up to lo these 9 years.”
Not lost on us is that record reviews—new releases—serve their purpose, but if you stop by TVD with any regularity or fire up our (free) Record Store Locator App, you’re bound to uncover both old and new records in record shops that should (or shouldn’t–let’s face it) be in your collection.
Our recurring job henceforth, tipped to you via that nifty icon lower left, is to inform your crate digging via our archives. Go forth, buy records, and be nice to people. —Ed.
Released a quarter century ago by the Def Jam label, Brooklyn trio 3rd Bass’ The Cactus Album stands as a hip-hop classic. Due to this stature one might assume the full story behind its creation has long resided in the historical record, but that’s not the case. To get the complete scoop on this and assorted other hip-hop achievements one needs seek out the books of Brian Coleman. Aptly subtitled “more liner notes for hip-hop junkies,” Check the Technique Vol. 2 is freshly available from Wax Facts Press.
Anybody having spent hours inspecting the treasures in a jazz-centric record shop knows LPs in the multifaceted style regularly came adorned with notes (Hentoff! Williams! Jones!) on the back of the sleeve. And folks devoting time, energy and dollars to keeping up with deluxe reissues and box sets in multiple genres understand that extensive annotation of and commentary upon background specifics was/is an expected component in the retail price.
As a relatively young art form, hip-hop has suffered from experiencing its burgeoning stylistic era(s) in a business setting that wrongly assumed buyers of contemporary music (as opposed to those dropping cash on older material) cared about little more than the sounds, the labels mostly throwing context and packaging to the wayside.
This was an easy assumption to arrive at if one’s only concern was making money. But those spending it were reliably left at mysterious loose ends. Producer credits, thank you lists, and cleared samples were a start, and interviews and articles in Spin, Vibe and The Source brought a modicum of enlightenment, but the deep investigation, which often simply entails sincere interest and respect for the subject, becoming comfortable with the artists and then asking the right questions, was lacking for years.
