Monthly Archives: March 2019

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Room 37: The Mysterious Death Of Johnny Thunders is inspired by true life events surrounding the mysterious death of the legendary guitarist Johnny Thunders.

Johnny Thunders arrives to New Orleans to begin a new chapter of his life by following a new musical sound, and staying clean from drugs in order to see his kids again. After he settles into the St. Peter’s Guest House Hotel, things go awry. His room is robbed which contained the last of his money and his only methadone supply. Johnny’s journey to recovery quickly turns dark when he takes desperate measures to get better, all which propel Johnny deeper in chaos that ultimately leads to his unexplained mysterious final hours.

Madrid Memory features a long-lost live concert performance from The Heartbreakers explosive 1984 reunion world tour that included fellow Dolls Sylvain Sylvain and Jerry Nolan plus Billy Rath. Filmed for TV broadcast at La Edad De Oro in Madrid, Spain, this concert captures powerful performances of songs from throughout Thunders’s amazing career including “Personality Crisis,” “Too Much Junkie Business,” and “Born Too Lose.”

“I’m lucky to come from a family of multi-generational music lovers and musicians. From my grandfather’s jazz and classical 78s to my uncle’s Elvis Costello records, vinyl was always there growing up. My earliest memories are the sound of Willie Nelson’s voice spinning out of a massive sound system and the smell of marijuana smoke filling up our old New Orleans home. Everyone seemed happy and the world was a mystery.”

“Barely old enough to walk, I had a yellow plastic portable record player and would listen to a lot of Carol King’s Really Rosie and Sgt. Pepper. (Later I realized that I had the stereo mix of Pepper and the record player only played mono—blew my little mind when I finally heard the full thing.)

The first vinyl record I remember asking for was Tattoo You by The Rolling Stones. I would take it to school and stare at it. Of course I was ostracized. I didn’t care, I was proud and felt grown up to own it.

I’ve never not had vinyl records but I’m not much of an audiophile. I still don’t own a very nice hi-fi set up. It’s a tactile experience. Big art. The way they look while they spin—like the most elemental of dances. The potential of the waiting disc on a still plate. On your mark, get set and go cat go. Plus it’s just really cool and elegant technology.

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Four English song-smithies who couldn’t figure out if they wanted to be guitar heroes or fey sylvan Medievalists playing music to seduce water sprites by, Wishbone Ash really gets my goat–wowing me one minute, and making me want to scream the next.

Take 1972’s Argus, Wishbone Ash’s most successful outing. This baby totally befuddled me as a kid; I loved the groovy guitar interplay between Andy Powell and Ted Turner, but got thrown every time by all the King Arthur’s-in-the-house horseshit. The damn thing sounded like a cross between a Renaissance Faire and Lou Reed’s Rock n Roll Animal, and I simply couldn’t wrap my poor teen mind around it.

You got, for instance, “Sometime World,” which begins life as a moody evocation of England’s green and pleasant land and ends it as a guitar rampage for the ages. “Throw Down the Sword,” similar deal. It opens with a drum tattoo like you might have heard at the beheading of Anne Boleyn before going all Alfred, Lord Tennyson–or Styx–on your ass. But just when you’re ready to dismiss it as a piece of pretentious prog wankery, it goes out blazing in a fiery fandango of guitars that’ll set your hair on fire. It’s furious-making.

Why, oh why, couldn’t these princes of pettifoggery just throw away their suits of armor and kick out the jams like righteous 20th Century motherfuckers? “Warrior” comes on like a case of 21st Century schizophrenia, man, it’s all blistering guitars and cymbal smash and you think “Yes! Finally!” Only to then collapse like Percy Bysshe Shelley in a poetic swoon!

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The story of lyrical genius, Martin Phillipps and his band, The Chills, is a cautionary tale, a triumph over tragedy, and a statement about the meaning of music in our lives.

Martin Phillipps came tantalizingly close to conquering the international music scene with his band The Chills, but instead fell into decades of debt and addiction in his hometown of Dunedin, New Zealand. At 54, he’s been given a dire medical prognosis, forcing him to face his demons and realise his musical ambitions before it’s too late. This intimate portrait follows the eccentric Martin as he reconciles a lifetime’s worth of curious collections, looks back on a catalogue of heavenly pop hits and reclaims his place in the iconic Flying Nun and Dunedin Sound. With a startling sense of humour even in the blackest moments, we bear witness to one man’s universal battle with the fear of failure and the jarring reality of his own mortality.

Listen to the rock music that personifies 1980s New Zealand, when people loved their leather jackets, and lived through the doldrums. Discover one of New Zealand’s most important songwriters and the groundbreaking era that changed the way the world appreciated New Zealand music.

We remember Scott Walker who passed away Monday, March 25, with a look back from our archives. —Ed.

From his beginnings as a pop idol working in the mode of The Righteous Brothers to his period as a smooth student of Jacques Brel to his unprecedented re-flowering as a restless, challenging avant-garde artist, there is no doubt that Scott Walker’s career has been a long and fascinatingly strange trip. And Bish Bosch, his latest record for 4AD, continues that progression, being his most extreme and often baffling statement to date. Opinions will most certainly be divided, but one thing is certain; there’s nothing else like it.

My introduction to the name Scott Walker occurred shortly before the release of his 1995 release Tilt, but I’d already been exposed to him for years without knowing it due to his membership in The Walker Brothers. That duo’s “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” hit #1 in the UK and #13 in the US in 1966, and it’s a beautiful song that remains on the radar to this very day in large part through consistent rotation on oldies radio. That’s where I first heard it as a youngster, but from within that context it was just one fine song amongst many, and my memory is quite foggy regarding exactly when and how I connected the dots between Walker’s early pop stardom and his slowly realized total about-face as an enigmatic experimental musician.

Walker’s unusual career path has been described by some as being completely his own. And essentially that’s true. Sure, there are numerous examples of creators from across the artistic spectrum who successfully emerged from the realms of the conventional, only to end up in the deep weeds of uncompromising experimentalism; film director Nicholas Ray and writer James Joyce both spring to mind. But nobody seems able to come up with an instance of a pop icon so completely abandoning their commercial sensibility for an environment of success so blatantly the opposite.

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SoCal based singer-songwriter William Russell Wallace crafts the kind of hard-hitting, poetically nuanced songs that immediately invite you into his world. The man we encounter in this place is in a reflective state, looking back at his young adult life with a sense of compassion and a tinge of regret.

Wallace fronted several other bands before striking out on his own, and lived the kind of life that revolved around drinking, drugs, and chasing women. This culminated in a car crash and, eventually, a stint in rehab, which is where he tracked the bones of “Understanding.”

The song is flush with beauty and pain, with a tasteful harmony to drive the heart-wrenching chorus home.

The official debut album from Wallace, Dirty Soul, arrives in stores on April 8th.

“The first album I ever bought was Janis Ian’s Between the Lines.”

“I had just moved to Maine and we bought a record player for our tiny apartment in Portland. I was so excited to start my collection with that album. Later, I learned that it was also my late father’s favorite album in college and that made it even sweeter. It’s still one that I return to every year.

One of my earliest memories of my Dad is being a toddler running around the living room, galloping with my wooden horse while he played Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” and teaching me to gallop lightly so that the album didn’t skip. He was always putting on records and teaching me the words to his favorite songs. Thus began my musical education.

When I moved to Maine in my late twenties, I spent almost every weekend at a farm house in Vassalboro. There was no TV or internet, no smart phones. Just a record player and an amazing collection of records. We’d spend all day outside and then come in and listen to records for hours on end. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin, Sly and the Family Stone, Jim Croce.

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Remember that scene in Halloween where Donald Pleasance is lurking in the bushes by Michael Myers’ empty house and this little punk named Lonnie’s getting ready to go up the walk and Pleasance cups his hands around his mouth and stage whispers, “Hey! Hey Lonnie! Get your ass away from there!”?

Well, all I got to say about Thumb Days is “Hey! Hey you! Get your ass away from this record!” Because there’s something serious amiss in the mental department with Shorty, the Chi-Town post-rockers who put it out, and the contents of said record are far scarier than anything Lonnie might have come across in Michael Myers’ house.

The five dudes in Shorty may look like a harmless bunch, guys you wouldn’t look twice at at a house party, but they have a positively inspiring knack for making your skin crawl. Needless to say, I love ‘em to death.

On 1993’s Thumb Days Shorty established its bona fides as the creepiest practitioners of Midwestern Noise Rock, an honor I bestow upon them in large part due to the unique vocal stylings of the great Al Johnson, who sounds like your basic pedophile with a bad case of laryngitis. He has this way of hissing like the snake that seduced Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and gives off this real perv-o vibe that makes you think here’s a fellow you don’t want near your person because he just might start licking you. The album gives off the same vibe.

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Formed in 2014 in McAllen, TX by songwriter Andy Peña with bassist Devin Garcia, Quiet Kids have an innate knack for hallucinogenic indie pop. Their artfully crafted sound found resonance with other artists such as Angel Olsen, Mitski, and Miniature Tigers, who handed the newcomers support slots on their tours.

The Vinyl District is pleased to be premiering the band’s new, self-titled EP which is chock full of synth drenched, intelligently conceived indie rock. Their smart lyrics and tight-knit hooks make for an alluring listen that is both pleasurably broad in its strokes yet intensely personal.

Peña details, “People, places and things pull you in every direction, and it’s easy to please any and everyone. If we all just said what was on our minds we’d have much more of an understanding of who we are, and what we’re looking for… It’s only in the stability of my relationships that I realized I can write about whatever I feel. My art is me, and my family, and friends.”

“Quiet Kids” arrives in stores on March 29th.