Release of the Day: Yellow Tears - Golden Showers May Bring Flowers

"Box set comes with key chain flash drive in a jewelry box, VHS, T-shirt, track listing insert, lifeguard card." It's a bit of an audiovisual-tactile-wearable album centered around a mythical freak water park and a lot of urine references. At some points, it's juvenile kicks, but that's part of the charm. This album has a lot going on in it. Obvious Musique concrète as a starting point, but there's a clear reverence for mood and technique. The juvenilia of something like "Wanna Watch my Favorite TV Show" will juxtapose the strange beauty of the track "Fountains' Song." This is a recurring motif in Golden Showers May Bring Flowers and it's indicative of a probing interest in sound and the way that human beings connect.

I haven't yet seen the VHS tape. In all honesty, I don't even have a VCR, but I think I need to get one for this. A lot of my friends who have seen it are saying that it's the best part.

Yellow Tears just played a Nothing Changes event in New York. I saw some pictures, which included some kind of water-park-like rig. One of the dudes was in a snorkling mask in like a mobile showering unit. I wonder what the liquid was. It was probably not clean. It was probably awesome. I really hope I get to see them soon - if they don't tour around the country, a trip to NYC may be in my future.

You can learn more about the filthy fucks on the Septic World Facebook Page and their Website. Warning: the website is an incredible Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole into the world of Hosetown. Like alternative reality. 

Release of the Day: The People's Temple Choir - He's Able

The story of the mass suicide at Jonestown is something like a nightmare bedtime story. A highly charismatic religious figure named Jim Jones, over the course of many years, accrued a fanatic following from people in the mainland states (including over a dozen locations in california!) before he moved his church to what was called the “People’s Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana. His church was called The People’s Temple of the Disciples of Christ. To make a long story short, Jones eventually gets his entire population of followers in Jonestown to “drink the kook-aid” and commit suicide with him and for him. Around 920 people died.

But there’s this uncanny lighter side to the People’s Temple as well. The music for instance. Jim Jones was obsessed with gospel music. And his church made some great gospel music. A lot of it sounds like what you might hear in a Southern Baptist church on any given Sunday, but there’s this creeping dread that I get when I hear words like “the Lord,” “Him” with a capital H, “God,” and more. Are they referring to an actual cosmic entity or are they talking about Jones?

He’s Able is a long out-of-print LP with songs from The People’s Temple Choir with many of these gospel songs. It would be an uplifting, pleasant listen without the backstory, but the backstory makes it that much more interesting. A new cassette reissue has Jim Jones’ final speech during the murder/suicide at Jonestown on November 18, 1978. Not something for the faint of heart, but a very interesting historical time capsule and something that will stay with me for a long time.

Release of the Day: Masonna - Spectrum Ripper

Your stomach is mad at you because you decided to take a dare and eat steel nails, washers, widgets, and wingnuts in a bowl of skim milk. Don't ask me why you did - I'm not a doctor, but it was that ne'erdowell Leon (the one who sits in the back of the class and sighs out "big deal" every time someone gets a multiplication problem right) who triple-dog-does-the-backflip dared you to do it. And let's face it, you're no one's punk bitch, so you ate all of that metal.

Only problem is it's making an awful ruckus as you're walking around and even Mrs. Gertrudestein, who drives the school bus, said something about it - "shut your fucking stomach up." What Mrs. Gertrudestein doesn't understand is that when you needed to get a stomach transplant, your family couldn't afford something with an organic(ish) membrane, so they opted for the more financially friendly model that was made entirely out of copper. These steel machinery parts are rolling around your copper stomach making a hell of a lot of noise.

And then at recess, Troublemaker Tommy pushes you into a wall asking why the hell you were looking at Suzy Jenkins ("that's my girl, man!") and he's shouting and starting to rev his foot on the ground like a bull aiming for the matador. Toro! Toro! He's leaning into it, careening towards you. Head lowered. Not so elegantly sloped shoulders. A huff. A wheeze. His head plows into you and you gasp, gawk, and grunt. The impact dislodges a lingering wingnut from your esophagus while he holds you pinned there against the brick wall by the jungle gym. He yells into your navel with indistinguishable jargon.

And that's when you think that Tommy's undefined yelling, combined with the racket in your stomach, sounds exactly like that Masonna album Spectrum Ripper that you were listening to last night.

Release of the Day: Lust for Youth - Sickness + Demo

Lust for Youth began as the solo project of Hannes Norrvide. His early work is characterized by meditative synthesizer and noise amalgamation. There were only very minor hints of the techno-pop that Lust for Youth would become. By that I mean that there is limited vocal usage and the words are hard to discern other than what I believe is one passage of a female vocal sample. The things that appear on this release are more sonic paintings than songs as they are typically thought. There are sections of ambience here - strung out orchestrations of electronic musicianship. A curiosity. A probing finger or two. A blindfolded minor odyssey.

The project is now a three-piece with Loke Rahbek (of Croation Amor, Sexdrome, and more) and Malthe Fischer (of Oh No Ono) with pop songs - really great pop songs. But this early synthesizer work is important. The instrumental experimentation informs the eventual output in addition to being noise(ish) work that can stand on its own. I’m unsure if there are any links to songs on YouTube, but copies sometimes appear on Discogs. Definitely worth a search and listen.

Release of the Day: Ty Segall - Manipulator

Ty Segall’s Melted was one of the records that changed my life. I remember the day very well. It was when Bull City Records was still next to Cosmic Cantina, above the Avid video near Ninth Street. I had been dabbling around in 90s indie rock like Sebadoh, Dinosaur jr., Pixies, and Ween, but really hadn’t gotten into anything that underground. One day, and I still don’t remember exactly what happened, but I had just started my junior year in college, which was the first year I brought my turntable to college, and Chaz did the usual “listen to these records that you should like.” But he didn’t put on the typical indie stuff I had been listening to. He started out by playing King Khan & the BBQ Show’s Invisible Girl. One thing led to another and I walked out of the store with four records that basically made me love garage rock. Jay Reatard’s 2008 Matador Singles, King Khan & The BBQ Show’s Invisible Girl, Nobunny’s First Blood, and Ty Segall’s Melted, which he said I’d like because it had a lot of grunge elements (and to this day, Nirvana is still my favorite band, even though I think it’s hip to hate on them now).

Four years later, and seven or eight full-lengths with Segall’s fingers in them, Ty still manages to wow me. Manipulator, his new 2 x LP on indie powerhouse label Drag City, is all-killer-no-filler. It’s the kind of record that can get an indie kid into T. Rex, Hawkwind, The Zombies, David Bowie, and a fuckton more good bands. “Where do these influences come from?” someone new might ask. The answer? In the fuckin’ bins, dog. Dig yourself, Lazarus, dig! This release has seventeen songs from all sorts of rock n’ roll lineage and it tore off the influences from its arm patch and decided to iron them onto its face like a Mike Tyson tattoo. Did you see that teaser video? The one where Ty’s like straight rollin’ around in a limo with makeup and rhinestone teardrops? That shit is awesome. This shit is awesome.

I could say something profound about genre and music culture as a whole, cause that’s what muddatruckin’ professional reviews do but let’s be honest. Music criticism is lame and filled with creative jealousy. Fuck it. This record is great. Long live rock n’ roll. Long live Ty Segall! Long live the Manipulator!

Release of the Day: Running - Frizzled 7"

I'm still pretty happy that I have one of the only interviews with Running available to see - I saw those cats with Gary War back in 2012 just as I had moved to Chicago and it made a big impression. I don't know how many times I've seen them since, but not enough that's for sure. Side note: I would like to make an Alejandro Morales tribute band, but I need someone to play with me because I suck at Kazoo. Also, it would be called Cholo and the Cholos.

Last year, Running put out their tour de force Vaguely Ethnic on Castle Face records. It's a quick, nine-song blast into the tripped-out fuzz of these Chicago weirdo punk rockers. This year, they put out a three-song 7" on Drag City called "Frizzled." Music writers are supposed to avoid vague words like "good" or "awesome" or "cocaine," but that's exactly what this record is. It's fucking awesome. I listen to it before I run a lot - I'm straight edge, so this is as close to drugs as I get, for better or for worse.

That song "Totally Fired" on the b-side of this record is one of their better songs. It also has this weird scratchy sound that comes in a few times towards the end. And I thought my copy was busted for a while, but I heard it on soundcloud too so I know that these cats are just fucking with me. See if I care. Am I pretty yet?

Release of the Day: Various Adversaries - Around the Dragon's Broken Neck Hangs The Medal of Saint Lazarus

ATDBNHTMOSL was the first thing I bought from Hospital Productions, Dominick Fernow’s excellent label that releases everything on the darker wavelength of the music spectrum. I bought this cassette because of the Contrepoison songs - “I Keep on Searching” was something of a transformative song for me. A lot of the beauty lies in the simplicity, but it was also hearing that someone could make such a powerful song without a ton of resources. It probably changed the way I approached music on the whole.

This was my first foray into power electronics and industrial noise. I never really looked at the track list on this 2 x CS until recently. And my friend Erik is on there as Kama Rupa. This sounds totally ignorant, but I just had no idea. It’s funny how after a few years sometimes you become more acquainted with surrounding details that can make a piece of work more meaningful. I bought the 2 x CS because of the poppy song “I Keep on Searching,” and while that had a lot of impact, I’m equally impressed by the noise and electronic work of some of the other artists on here. Alberich, Blus De La Lum, FFH, Kama Rupa, Lussuria, Prurient, and Vatican Shadow all make appearances. It’s a great opening to the Hospital Productions roster.

Surprisingly, it's on Spotify too so you can listen to it Here