CASSIE RAMONE - 'SWEETHEART'

Formats

• CDR001 - LP

Details

Sweetheart is the first Cassie Ramone album in ten years, a crowning glory for a singular artist who has forged a unique path through the underground. Breaking out in the late 00s with the revered Vivian Girls, to her current status as a traveler on the heartworn highway, Cassie Ramone has survived and thrived. Sweetheart is Ramone’s greatest recorded statement to date: focused songwriting shot through with American tragedies, distorted guitars and tear-stained fretboards. Recorded with collaborator Dylan White in Richmond, VA in the latter’s Valley Structures barn studio between December 2023 and March 2024, Sweetheart is Ramone’s songwriting rendered direct but with a sweeping cinematic quality. Smeared with reverb and scintillating like stars in the pitch black night, these songs fulfill the promise of Ramone’s songwriting prowess. Ranging from heart-stealers like I’m Going Home or Joy to the World to the riotous guitar scree of the titular Sweetheart, Ramone’s songwriting here is raw and direct, bolstered by White’s perfectly balanced instrumentation. White’s work on Sweetheart blows up Ramone’s songs to epic proportions, with waves of shoegazed guitars crashing and cresting with emotion. As a result, Sweetheart fits effortlessly in with the best of Ramone’s work with Vivian Girls and The Babies. With the emotional vulnerability at its core, Sweetheart is Cassie Ramone emerging as one of the most honest and vital songwriters of the underground. Sweetheart, released on White and Ramone’s new CD-R Records, builds on Cassie Ramone’s legacy as a DIY pioneer. With Vivian Girls, Ramone and her bandmates forged a distinctive sound from 80s Punk, Shoegaze and 60s Girl Groups, delivering it with a dedication to world-building and Do It Yourself pragmatism. CD-Records and this first release are a continuation of Ramone’s mission to maintain creative and aesthetic control over her art, communicating directly and honestly. Sweetheart may also be the best record of her career. Released on Cassie Ramone and Dylan White’s label CD-R Records, Sweetheart will be available digitally on Sept 17th, with vinyl shipping on Sept 20th.

Tracks

I'm Going Home
Joy To The World
He's Still On My Mind
They Hide Their Eyes
Together
///
Sweetheart
Running Dry
The Only Way I Know How (feat. Mac DeMarco)
Dilly Dally
Wait A Minute

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Audio & Video

CHILDREN'S CRUSADE - 'A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH'

Formats

• SR-2LP - LP

  657628448310

• SR-2CD - CD

  657628448327

Details

Second release on Robert Pollard's new Splendid Research label is a vinyl & CD reissue of a 1984 demo cassette by Children's Crusade, post-punk teenage band of Guided By Voices' Doug Gillard. The Cleveland guitarist went on to record for Scat, Homestead and Restless Records with the bands Death of Samantha, Cobra Verde, My Dad Is Dead, and Gem, before joining GBV (1996-2004), then Nada Surf (2010-2016), then rejoining GBV (2016-present), as well as playing on albums by Richard Buckner, Neko Case and others. 1980s Cleveland was a hotbed for indie rock, following in the Northern Ohio footsteps of Pere Ubu, The Dead Boys, The Styrenes, Mirrors and Devo. "Children’s Crusade was a fleeting blotch on the wild, mid-80s Cleveland underground music scene, slowly seeping through like a drop of oil on the uniformly black jeans of that era – noticeable only after it settles, spreads, and you realize it won’t come out in the wash."

Tracks

#1 The Guardian
#2 Man-Gun
#3 Lurker On The Threshold
#4 Bleak Outpost
#5 Operate / Art Student
#6 Decade Of The Worm
#7 Hunger (The Hunger Artist)
#8 Betrayal In Three Acts

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Audio & Video

AVA MENDOZA - 'THE CIRCULAR TRAIN'

Formats

• PAL087 - LP

  843563180945

• PAL087CD - CD

  195269320676

Details

Ava Mendoza has never made an album quite as personal as her second solo full-length, The Circular Train. Through her decades of collaborations with Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, William Parker, Fred Frith, Matana Roberts, and Mick Barr—plus years leading her power trio Unnatural Ways and playing in Bill Orcutt’s quartet—the guitarist’s name has become synonymous with virtuoso technique, raw passion, and visceral resonance, a player pushing the edges of the guitar’s possibilities. Along the way, from 2007 to 2023, Mendoza was writing these slow-burning, incandescent songs. The Circular Train is comprised solely of her single-tracked guitar playing and, on two songs, her corporeal singing. Her first solo LP of original material since relocating from California to New York City a decade ago, much of The Circular Train was honed amid pandemic years that clarified the virtues of slowing down. This expressive avant-rock is a definitive introduction to one of the most uncompromising and inquisitive visions in creative music. Mendoza’s thrilling melange of free jazz, blues, noise, classical training, and blazing experimental rock’n’roll all coheres with ecstatic feedback, with picking and solos that crest with shimmer. Sometimes she sounds like a one-woman Sonic Youth with guttural and poised vocals that equally evoke Patti Smith and blues greats like Jessie Mae Hemphill. Conceptually, The Circular Train is presented as a psychogeographical train ride through certain of Mendoza’s musical homelands. The songs draw on ancestral and recent familial memories, notably of her parents’ roots in mining towns—in her father’s home country of Bolivia and mother’s hometown of Butte, Montana, each country with its own history of colonialism, racism, forced labor, the eradication of culture and the subsequent excavation of it. These adventurous songs were composed in cars and planes, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, in Los Angeles and upstate New York—which is to say in motion. “Ride to Cerro Rico,” named for the mountain and silver mine at the center of Potosi, Bolivia, was inspired by Mendoza’s great grandmother’s life there in a Quechua mining family. “Dust From the Mines” drew from that history as well as Mendoza’s familial lineage of miners in Montana, building up to stunning swaths of shredded iridescence. “Pink River Dolphins” was inspired by a visit to the Amazon rainforest, swimming with dolphins alongside her father—the pink bufeos that inhabit both Bolivia and Columbia—and the song is dedicated to the memory of Mendoza’s late friend, the Colombian-American trumpeter jaimie branch. They shared a fascination with those intelligent and agile creatures who often communicate by echolocation. “Make a sound, it comes back around,” Mendoza sings, and later, “Echo, echo/The answer in a sound,” evoking what branch knew well: through music we navigate life. The Circular Train contains one cover, “Irene, Goodnight,” composed by Gussie Lord Davis and popularized by Leadbelly; Mendoza has been performing it for over 20 years. Almost as deeply embedded in her repertoire is the penultimate track, “The Shadow Song.” “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you good,” Mendoza sings on this song that she’s been reworking for over a decade, an emblem of devotion. “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you right,” she repeats, becoming a blues mantra. What is a shadow self if not one’s secret world, which, once laid bare, awaits an echo, a return?

Tracks

1. Cypress Crossing 2. Pink River Dolphins 3. Ride to Cerro Rico 4. Dust from the Mines 5. The Shadow Song 6. Irene, Goodnight

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Audio & Video

ROBERT POLLARD - 'EAT20'

Formats

• GBVIEAT20 - BOOK

  657628446835

Details

INSTOCK NOW Robert Pollard’s amazing collages in a full-color 238-page book

Tracks

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