KID CONGO & THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS - 'GORILLA ROSE'

Formats

• ITR207 - LP

  759718520712

• ITR207CD - CD

  759718520729

Details

Gun Club co-founder. Gunslinger for The Cramps. Six-string stylist for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The legendary Kid Congo Powers named his new album Gorilla Rose after the artist / performer. As a teenage boy, Powers met Gorilla Rose in the emerging LA punk scene of the '70s through seminal weirdo band The Screamers. He recalls, "Gorilla was a close and constant presence and influence on The Screamers and me as a young pup. He was to The Screamers like Bobby Neuwirth was to Dylan-a jester of sorts, sparking many of their great lyric ideas. I still think Gorilla Rose is the most fabulous nom de plume in history. His unsung specter was in my mind a lot last year so I decided to title the album Gorilla Rose to honor his name and bring him into rock 'n' roll's ongoing conversation." While editing his fan club newsletters at a haunted Hollywood house, a teenage Powers was also exposed to the sounds of Neu, Nico, Billie Holiday and Goblin's soundtrack to the film Susperia, and along with Gorilla Rose, these past influences found their way into the Kid's new full-length. To record the album, Kid Congo and The Pink Monkey Birds grabbed producer Jason Ward and hightailed it back to the magik gymnasium at The Harveyville Project, a high school in Kansas and also the scene of the crime of their much acclaimed 2009 release Dracula Boots. Kiki "El Coyote" Solis on bass and Ron "The Cap'n" Miller on drums, along with new Pink Monkey Bird Jesse "The Candyman" Roberts (from Seattle's The Ruby Doe) on guitar, keys and vocals, firms up Kid Congo's squawking flock. Brandishing thirteen all-original, glam-tastic compositions, Gorilla Rose blasts off with the '60s Chicano rock influences of explosive dance anthem "Bo Bo Boogaloo." Shake it, don't break it! That's just the start of a wild ride through funky but chic decadence, slip sliding rockabilly, teenage punkdom, mystic krautrock, baby-making sleaze, the best bad peyote trip you ever took and even a velvety call from the beyond. Finding inspiration in the past is what Kid Congo and The Pink Monkey Birds do best. On this 2011 sonic trip, the Kid brings his past into the present and names it after someone flamboyant and inspired: Gorilla Rose.

Tracks

1. Bo Bo Boogaloo
2. Goldin Browne
3. Bunker Mentality
4. At the Ruin of Others
5. Bubble Trouble
6. Catsuit Fruit
7. Our Other World
8. Hills of Pills
9. Flypaper
10. Injun War Crimes
11. Lord Bloodbathington
12. Lullaby in Paradise
13. Gorilla Rose

Press

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DAMON & NAOMI - 'FALSE BEATS AND TRUE HEARTS'

Formats

• 20202012 - LP

  600197101315

Details

In 2011, Damon & Naomi celebrate their 25th year as performers together, and nothing displays that celebratory spirit more than False Beats and True Hearts, their first album of new recordings in four years. An record of lush possibility and depth, False Beats and True Hearts fuses the skill of music veterans with the fervor of artists continuing to create at the top of their craft. With the reissue of the first Damon & Naomi record (More Sad Hits), a retrospective of their mid-career highlights (The Sub Pop Years), and, perhaps most notably, rereleases of all three seminal Galaxie 500 albums, there's been a lot of looking back. It's therefore appropriate that the first song off False Beats and True Hearts is "Walking Backwards," an ode to the joy of nostalgia and warmth of reflection. The song, and indeed, much of the album, is cross-stitched by Michio Kurihara's elegant guitar playing-a thick and resonating psych sound that has been a part of Damon & Naomi's music since their collaboration with the Japanese band Ghost. The album is unexpectedly upbeat and strident; while lyrics portray true introspection, the melodies are ambitious and far-reaching. Naomi's new passion for piano playing circles the album like a starry night, capturing the vitality found in the finest Plastic Ono Band recordings. Like their best material, it's the sincerity and necessity of their expression that is the most striking. With False Beats and True Hearts, Damon & Naomi offer an essential document of what brings listeners to music in the first place: emotion, identification and beauty. LP ONLY FROM FORTE:

Tracks

1. Walking Backwards
2. How Do I Say Goodbye
3. Shadow Boxing
4. Ophelia
5. Nettles and Ivy
6. What She Brings
7. Embers
8. And You Are There
9. Helsinki

Press

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STARFUCKERS - 'METALLIC DISEASE'

Formats

• HOLY1981 - LP

  N/A

Details

Originally released 20 years ago, Metallic Diseases is the most intense blast of guitar squalling heat never to find its proper audience. Truly unhinged at times ("Cans"), sublimely dreamlike and understated at others ("Shake Off"), this debut album fuses the best lineage of droning, hardrocking sounds ("USA" makes a perfect amalgam of Suicide's "Rocket USA" and the Stooges' "1969") with a gestalt that pushes it right over the cliff, as "Western Man" is the kind of prophetic call to arms that Spacemen 3 tried to communicate through "Revolution" (itself a rewrite of "Black to Comm"). The few who heard this LP when it was released flipped out, as it deserved to be lauded along with its immediate precursors like Union Carbide Productions and Les Thugs-that rare blend of punk / noise / psych / groove that they just never made enough of to go around. Indeed, the LP was almost impossible to find Stateside at the time, leaving the few diehards to put it on want lists in MRR. Now, Holy Mountain and Tl?n Uqbar have made it easy for everyone to simply step up to the altar and take a sip of this precious fluid while it is in season-one more time.

Tracks

1. Love You
2. Cans
3. Shake Off
4. Western Man
5. Dead Metal City Blues
6. The Right Side
7. U.S.A.
8. Cold White Cancer
9. (I?m) Alive!
10. Flower Lover

Press

N/A

Audio & Video

AXEMEN - 'THREE VIRGINS'

Formats

• SB122/123 - 2xLPs

  655030112218

Details

Originally released on the inestimable Flying Nun label, Three Virgins came and went in the blink of an eye in the mid-'80s. After dormancy a mere quarter century in duration, this beguiling masterwork sees the light of day once again courtesy of Siltbreeze. Setting up shop in Christchurch's State Trinity Centre over Easter holidays 1985, Axemen went to work recording every sound and second they could capture during the legendary lost weekend. Fueled by enhanced adrenalin (Tiger Blood) and superhuman zeal (Adonis DNA), they chewed up dozens of reels of tape, assaulting all those who entered the erstwhile ecclesiastical chamber with a barrage of splendiferous blabber 'n' croak. The resultant 88 minutes sound like a mutant hybrid of Trout Mask Replica, Exile on Main Street and Tago Mago. Add to the pot one of the most eye-popping post-psychedelic full-color gatefold jackets ever designed in the brief history of time and you've got a dazzling, exultant combination that could only be described as winning! ? Vinyl-only edition of 600 (as was the original run) includes a free digital download coupon

Tracks

1. The Warhead of Love
2. The Dream
3. Effectively, My Baby
4. Grudge Hill
5. Something (The Wives of the President?s Men)
6. Johnny Cash?s Monster
7. Creaky Back Stairs
8. Spots of Glue? Telling
9. Pacific Ocean
10. Chant No. 9 Dub
11. Chant Number Nine
12. Talk With God
13. Womin of Love
14. Fred and Barney: (The Untouchables)
15. Artie Shepp?s Place
16. Think About Me
17. Mick?s Dance Floor
18. Reign o? Seeds
19. John Bonneroff?s Charmed Life
20. Here Is Your File
21. The Yeasty Mayor
22. Dolistermeiser

Press

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JESSE SPARHAWK/ERIC CARBONARA - 'SIXTY STRINGS'

Formats

• VHF129 - LP

  783881012910

• VHF129CD - CD

  783881012927

Details

Sixty Strings is an album of two epic duets by Eric Carbonara (22-string upright Chaturangui guitar) and Jesse Sparhawk (38-string lever harp). While Carbonara has studied Chaturangui extensively with Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya in Kolkata, and Sparhawk was classically trained by major figures of the harp world in his formative years, the music here is their own-not a mashup of quasi-orientalism and conservatory bloodlessness. Both side-long tracks lay out a spacious framework, with the two players supporting simple but elegant melodies that recall Br?der des Schattens-era Popol Vuh and various modal / devotional styles. While the sound of the Chaturangui's sympathetic strings provides a constant electric blanket of comfort, Carbonara's playing is concise and restrained, forgoing the kind of melismatic ornamentation that is a stylistic tic of much Indian- inspired music. Sparhawk, whose expert playing adds much to Fern Knight's complex orchestrations, steps out and extends his instrument using various techniques: fingerpicking guitarlike patterns that interlock with Carbonara, and using sharply struck attacks at the upper register for a piano-like effect. On "The Entwined Twin," the dry crack of a snare drum (played by Julius Masri) enters after a few minutes, ratcheting up the urgency and adding an unexpected texture to the proceedings. The excellent recording captures both instruments in detail with close-up, intimate feel.

Tracks

1. A Patient Promise
2. The Entwined Twin

Press

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RYAN GARBES - 'SWEET HASSLE'

Formats

• HS003 - LP

  N/A

Details

Sweet Hassle is the debut LP from Ryan Garbes (Wet Hair, Raccoo-oo-oon), fresh from his 7-inch on Arbor and his cassette on NNA. A man in a small college town hours away from the influences that foul a musician's mind, Garbes has a lot of time to hang, especially in the recording studio. On Sweet Hassle, he incorporates heavy Velvets live bootleg vibes straight from the bedroom soundboard, with a touch of melodic electronic drone and a Byrds dusting

Tracks

1. Relay
2. Boys Are Back
3. Whatever You Want
4. Thirst
5. Rain Song
6. Why
7. Slowing Down / The Walk
8. Perfume
9. Dream
10. Easily Influenced
11. 5D

Press

?... as if Lou Reed had done a record for Creation...?
?Raven Sings the Blues
?Garbes conjures boggling galactic plinking and trippy interlocking
organ tones that make the sound of some sort
of benevolent universal energy at work. When the vocals
emerge, it becomes an alien hymn, used for space travel
through the astral plane, of course.? ?Foxy Digitalis
?? garage rock that confuses the Velvets ?Ocean? and The
Doors ?When the Music?s Over? with early Sonic Boom
and second-album Suicide.?
?David Keenan (Volcanic Tongue)

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ALEXANDER TURNQUIST - 'HALLWAY OF MIRRORS'

Formats

• VHF126 - LP

  N/A

• VHF126CD - CD

  783881012613

Details

On Hallway of Mirrors, young New York-based guitarist / composer Alexander Turnquist continues to forge his own radical style: a resonant and enveloping acoustic sound, full of beautiful harmonic overtone interplay, all instruments sustained. Turnquist's guitar approach revolves around a prodigious right-hand technique and a minimalist slant on composition that separates him from the retro-styling endemic to most current acoustic guitar music. Hallway of Mirrors uses much of the tonal palate from its precursor As the Twilight Crane Dreams in Color-dense twelve-string finger-picking with vibraphone and piano carrying much of the melody. On Hallway, the pieces are more concise with the added sweep of Christopher Tignor's elegant violin punctuating Turnquist's harmonics-laden forward motion and Matthew O'Koren's immaculate vibraphone (played with both mallets and bow). The additional instrumentation, inspired in part by Steve Reich's "Music for Eighteen Musicians," provides an added focus in the music, signifying each change in tone and timbre. Recorded on analog tape using traditional automatic doubletracking stereo mix techniques by engineers Henry Hirsch and Bram Tobey, the sound has an elegant soft focus that highlights Turnquist's strong and sharp performance. The centerpiece of the album, the sixteen-minute "Waiting at the Departure Gate," makes a sly nod in tribute to fellow VHF artist Jack Rose, who all too briefly explored similar techniques on his classic "Black Pearls." A truly uplifting and emotional listening experience.

Tracks

1. Running Towards
2. Hallway of Mirrors
3. Spherical Aberrations
4. Waiting at the Departure Gate
5. Running From

Press

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NODZZZ - 'INNINGS'

Formats

• WOODSIST051 - LP

  655035017112

• WOODSIST051CD - CD

  655035017129

Details

Innings is the second full-length from garage-pop trio Nodzzz and their first for New York imprint Woodsist. Its simple title is a nod to their origin: songwriting core Anthony Atlas and Sean Paul Presley met playing baseball in Olympia, Washington, and started Nodzzz upon relocating to San Francisco. The album offers fourteen discretely memorable songs in the band's growing idiom-neurotic power-pop antics and jangly, shambolic post-punk-and follows a string of acclaimed records that began with their debut single in 2007, I Don't Wanna (Smoke Marijuana), which jumpstarted San Francisco cult-DIY label Make a Mess Records (subsequent home of similar debut records by Grass Widow, Brilliant Colors, White Fence and more), and was followed by a beloved, albeit short, seventeen-minute selftitled LP and the True to Life single, both on NYC's What's Your Rupture? label.

Tracks

1. Always Make Your Bed
2. I?m Not a Wanderer
3. Fear of Advice
4. Time (What?s It Going to Do?)
5. Ye Olde Indian Towne
6. Troubled Times
7. True to Life
8. Heyday Past Heyday Due
9. Old Clothes
10. Family Name
11. (Low) Energy
12. Love Is Code
13. Primitive
14. Spirit and Soul

Press

?Like the Feelies or Modern Lovers before them, [Nodzzz]
wears its quirkiness as a kind of badge of honor; it informs
both its music and how they present it... and the group commendably
manages a lot with a little.? ?Pitchfork

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