Monthly Archives: May 2016

The Vinyl Guide is a weekly podcast for fans and collectors of vinyl records. Each week is an audio-documentary on your favourite records, often including interviews with band members and people who were part of the project.

It’s hosted by Nate Goyer, a self-described vinyl maniac who enjoys listening to records and sharing the stories behind them. Despite his Yankee accent, Nate lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife, 2 kids, and about 1,500 records. (But only about 1,000 of them his wife knows about.)

The Vinyl Guide takes records one by one, telling the tale of how they came to be, why the work is important, and then shares how collectors can tell one pressing from another. Learn more at the TheVinylGuide.com or simply subscribe via iTunes or RSS feed.

The Amen Break is the most popular, most used, most sampled drum beat in history, and it’s appeared on over 2,000 separate recordings and spawned new music genres. Hear the story of the song, the track, the sample, and the man behind it. We speak to Richard L. Spencer, owner of the song “Amen Brother” and the Amen Break.

The promotional synopsis for Jackie Lynn reads like the young Jim Jarmusch filming a screenplay by Barry Gifford. Gritty and lurid but tangibly stylish, Thrill Jockey’s blurb is a fictional construct; the straight scoop on the album is that it’s the latest from Haley Fohr, the distinctive singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist best known for a handful of recordings as Circuit des Yeux. This concise LP intriguingly and highly effectively spins off from her past achievements and underlines Fohr as a major artist. It’s out on vinyl and compact disc June 10.

In addition to Circuit des Yeux, Haley Fohr was once part of the duo Cromagnon, but given her desire to create a fictive yarn and then write and record this album around it, extensive background info (such as Cooper Crain and Dan Quinlivan of Bitchin’ Bajas reportedly lending their musical expertise) can seem somewhat superfluous.

The tale: the titular country girl (born in 1990 in Franklin, TN) hops a Greyhound bus for Chicago in 2010 and quickly meets up with Tom Strong (not his real name). Cocaine is dealt, money is made, and parties are thrown in an apartment on Sacramento and 26th street; the cops are on their trail, but without probable cause, they can’t make an arrest. Summoned to the apartment in February of 2015 in response to a domestic dispute, the fuzz finds it empty. A red and gold LP jacket was left behind; along with traces of cocaine, this recording was enclosed.

It’s a narrative that could’ve been banged out on a manual typewriter in a fleabag hotel by a down on his luck writer trying to procure a few bucks for bottles of booze by selling a manuscript to the pulp paperback market (the makings of another story, perhaps), and at just over 21 minutes, the length of Jackie Lynn can give the impression of a fleeting moment of inspiration captured in a studio and then grooved into vinyl; an impulsive act unlikely to be repeated.

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Auditorium – Mt. Moriah
yllwshrk – Pull Me Under (In Memory Of Jeff Buckley)
ODDITY – Settle Down
The Julie Ruin – I’m Done
Glimmermen – Bang
Jack Ellis – Pocket Of Lint
Scientist – The Lighthouse
C A R A L I S – Parting Shots
Iconique – Sitting Pretty
Jon Kennedy – Free

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Wesley Fuller – Runaway Renee

Cantina – Bulletproof
American Monoxide – Get Into My Way
Jackson Whalan – Cradle feat. Qwill
Tiger Love – Space in Space
Holy Balm – Fashion
Cafe Disko – One Dance (Drake Cover)
Neal Infinity – Highin’
KRYCHEK – My Limit
Elonious X Alexa Lusader X The Vizzion – BLVRD
Damien N-Drix – Stacks

We’ve closed up the shop for the Memorial 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, thank those who’ve served, and we’ll see you back here on Tuesday, May 31.

“I grew up in Foster City, California. It’s kind of like Legoland there—an aggressively suburban neighborhood built around the San Francisco Bay.”

“My parents ran a tight ship. There was always smooth jazz playing. David Benoit. John Tesh. Our white carpet remained white for years. There wasn’t really any recorded music around. My parents weren’t ‘cool.’ They just had KOIT on all the time. Lite rock, less talk.

I think for this reason I didn’t really encounter vinyl until I was about 13, when I bought a limited run Starchildren 7” at Tower Records in San Mateo. Starchildren was Billy Corgan’s side project. There was a Joy Division cover on the B-side, which is probably how I ever heard of Joy Division. I was the biggest Smashing Pumpkins fan ever. I didn’t even have a record player and that thing sat on my shelf until I sold it on Ebay for $70 sometime during the early 2000s.

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They come, they go—every 6 months or so it seems, leaving an indelible mark at TVD and on their own careers. Some depart to labels. Some are drafted by PR firms. Hell, some even stay on as TVD editors from their own home city—they’re just that good.

We’re seeking bright, self motivated, articulate future music industry professionals to join our team on the content side as well as the marketing and social media outreach that informs the day to day at TVD. Candidates need not be in Washington, DC where we’re based to be considered—just be awake when we are.

Interested? Drop us an email introducing yourself.

Swansea, Wales’ Pooh Sticks are one of my favorite bands, this despite the fact that they’re not really a band at all. They’re a collaborative enterprise between producer/svengali Steve Gregory and singer and instrumentalist Hue (or Huw) Williams aka, Hue Pooh-Stick, along with some “members” the duo invented (Trudi Tangerine, Paul, Stephanie Bass-Drum, and Alison) out of whole cloth. Together, the Pooh Sticks—with some real life vocal assistance from Amelia Fletcher of Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, etc.—started out as a lo-fi outfit but went power pop big time on 1991’s brilliant The Great White Wonder.

But it’s worth going back to 1988 and their “Alan McGee” EP, both because it’s a lo-fi lark and includes some great numbers besides. On “Alan McGee” Gregory and Williams—who have made a career of appropriating other peoples’ songs, song titles, album titles, you name it, filching whatever they find shiny in rock’s past like so many musical magpies—send up twee pop and its fanatical fans, bands, and producers, but it’s all in good, non-snarky fun.

“Indiepop Ain’t Noise Pollution” is typical, as are the hilarious female fans out to get their paws on Hue that open and close the EP. As for the Alan McGee of the title, he founded Creation Records and the Poptones label, and the winsome “I Know Someone Who Knows Someone Who Knows Alan McGee Quite Well” is the perfect parody of twee Scottish bands looking for a chance to finagle their way into the legendary career maker’s good graces.

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“My dad got a record player in ’71, when I was fourteen.”

“I remember The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and Buddy Holly. But with my pocket money I bought ‘Jeepster’ by T Rex, Sly & the Family Stone’s ‘Family Affair’ and others. As unhip as it was, the first piece of vinyl I remember was my dad’s copy of America’s attempt to write a Neil Young song, ‘A Horse With No Name.’ It was played a lot around the house.

Interestingly, it was a massive influence on Mark E Smith, the lead singer of my first real band, The Fall. You can hear its impact in the sprechstimme style of Mark’s voice. He doesn’t really sing or hold a melody. A lot of what he does comes out like that one long line—’in the desert you can remember your name, ‘cause they’re ain’t no one for to give you no pain,’ which barely has any melody. It’s perfect for the tone-deaf, I think that’s why it was a hit. I still hear America’s nearly tuneless ‘la la la la la la…’ in nearly every Fall song.

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