Just shipped! Hop Along‘s Get Disowned — available everywhere on May 5!
Hit up Hot Green Records (formed by members of Algernon Cadwallader) to pre-order the album today! The first 50 to order receive an old, beloved B-side, on cassette. Get it while the tape’s hot!!
Also, the June 1 Philadelphia record release show date is now up!
Already Gone is the second full length album from West Coast dream-drone unit En, the duo of Maxwell August Croy and James Devane, following their well-received debut album The Absent Coast (released in 2010 on Root Strata, which Croy runs alongside Jefre Cantu-Ledesma). For their sophomore release, the pair have opened up their tonal palette considerably. While the comparisons that critics made of their first album to the work of Tim Hecker and Stars of the Lid still hold true, Already Gone finds Croy and Devane mining even richer sonic climes. Here, the duo pull back the curtain on some of their source material, a move that allows the diversity of their instrumentation to resonate. On The Sea Saw Swell, Croy’s acoustic koto pings across the stereo spectrum as a looping guitar figure from Devane apparates from the haze of a beautiful, slowly shifting drone. The side-long closer Elysia is likely the duo’s defining recording to date, an epic slow-burner that reaches heights both angelic and cacophonous. Ultimately, it is the harmonious marriage of the organic and the obscured that recurs throughout the album that proves its defining trait, and it is precisely what makes En stand out in the ever-growing field of contemporary drone/ambient musics.
En tour Japan with Grouper in late April.
Available from Experimedia, the vinyl edition consists of 500 copies total (100 clear, 400 black), and includes digital download coupons.
Available today (03.06.12)! Lovedrug‘s fourth studio album – Wild Blood.
We really had fun putting this one together with the artist and label – one of the most elaborate packages we have worked on to date. Includes a fold-out poster insert, and die cut jacket with a window revealing beautiful black-and-white photography. Not to mention, 10 new tracks and an alternate take on an older song. Hit up the band’s website for a variety of ways to purchase the record today – including two extremely limited edition color variants available only through American Dream Records.
Earlier this fall, we were approached to press a bonus 7 inch to be housed in the new full color edition of the book by Dave Tompkins – How To Wreck A Nice Beach. The book, a history of the Vocoder, is published by Chicago-based Stop Smiling Books.
From the publisher:
The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from codebreakers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it had been repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians and soon became the ubiquitous voice of popular music.
In How to Wreck a Nice Beach—from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase “how to recognize speech”—music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune.
We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, JFK, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, the Cylons, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on the morning before V-E Day, “We must go off!” And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard, allowing a digital replica of your voice to sound human.
From T-Mobile to T-Pain, How to Wreck a Nice Beach is a riveting saga of technology and culture, illuminating the work of some of music’s most provocative innovators.
Thanks to How Soon Is Now Records, You & I’s 1998 gem Saturday’s Cab Ride Home (originally released by Spiritfall Records) is available on wax again, this time with a printed jacket, updated insert, and colored vinyl! If you didn’t grab a copy at RTF Fest last week, you still have [limited] time to grab a copy while they last. Hit up How Soon Is Now Records!
Thank you Art Fraud Records for sending us two new 7″ projects — Confidence Men and Broken Neck. You can purchase copies directly from Art Fraud here!
Broken Neck — Paranoid 7″ — 6 song EP of rocking Pittsburgh hardcore. Think of a cross between DEATH WISH KIDS and THE SUICIDE FILE.
Confidence Men — Funnypapers 7″ — Debut single from this Pittsburgh band. Dark sounding mid-tempo punk with nods to TSOL, RUDIMENTARY PENI, and POISON IDEA.
From the hot-boxed catacombs of mathcore-meets-stoner-metal, comes the heaviest 3-way split this year from Missouri’s Canyons and Foreign Theaters, and the Bay Area’s Tigon. Sharing influences that range from Coalesce and Kylesa to Black Sabbath and The Melvins, these three “math-sludge” virtuosos deliver a formidable testament to how grimey, raw, and technical the recesses of hardcore can go.
This limited edition pressing of 500 copies is a result of the collaboration between Melotov Records and Mayfly Records. Grab a copy today!
Blood Warrior is the culmination of a life long collaborative desire between Greg Jamie (O’Death), Joey Weiss (Super Monster), Kristin Kellas and Rubin Berger (Musee Mecanique, Laura Gibson, Mirah). Based in New York but made up of members who spend most of their time on the road internationally, Blood Warrior is a unique take on indie-folk and more traditional music of the Americas. Started as a recording project at Greg Jamie’s childhood home and finished at a home studio in Portland, OR, the band has now realized their music in a live setting. Blood Warrior’s distinct sound, consisting of guitars, casios, chord organs, autoharp, marching drums, lots of percussion and four part vocal harmonies, is ripe with unexpected hooks while nodding to roots in folk, gospel and psychedelia.
Our friends over at Safety Meeting Records made this great record come to market, and we are proud to have pressed all 300 limited edition LPs (hand numbered, and including a CD version of the album). The record is available through independent retailers nationally, or directly from the band at one of their live shows!
Thanks to Dreamover Records for having GGR press their Kickstarter-funded vinyl project for Brandston‘s Send Us A Signal LP.
Cleveland Ohio’s BRANDTSON recorded several ground breaking and influential albums for Deep Elm records in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. In 2004, BRANDTSON and Deep Elm parted ways, when they found a new home with The Militia Group. Then came “SEND US A SIGNAL”, which many consider to be their finest work.
This special limited edition pressing is available on a variety of short-run color wax. Hit up Dreamover to grab a copy!
Check out one of the latest vinyl releases from the prolific Paper & Plastick Records — The Seven Degrees of Stephen Egerton. Egerton is best known for his work with The Descendents and All, but since both bands announced hiatuses, he has still been hard at work and is very much involved in the punk community. This record is available in limited runs of 3 different colors — you can grab them at select indie record stores, and from Paper & Plastick direct.
