Look what was waiting under the tree for Baby YHT! Santa must really like vinyl. Solid dude, that Santa.
I hope everyone reading this has been having similarly lucrative holidays. Keep the spirit alive all day with Sleepwalkers’ “Under The Christmas Tree,” which you can hear below and buy over at Bandcamp.
Merry Christmas, y’all!
Sleepwalkers — “Under The Christmas Tree” [Bandcamp]
Look at you. You’re exhausted! This week has taken its toll, hasn’t it? What’s that? You say you’re just going to pick up a six-pack on the way home and drink it in your pajamas while watching episodes of Pawn Stars you’ve probably already seen before? That you’re going to use the weekend to “recharge the ol’ batteries”?
That’s crap, and I have just the thing to wake you up from your weekday-weary stupor.
To mark the second anniversary of its first release, Negative Fun Records just released a Hoax Hunters bonus track titled “Manteeth” — an evolutionary version of the song that first got me listening to Hoax Hunters. It’s about as fast and direct a blast of energy as you can get without breaking the law or consuming 2000% of your daily recommended B6 intake.
Listen to “Manteeth” below and click here to snag Hoax Hunters’ full-length, Comfort & Safety.
Posting may suffer a bit as I work on year-end/top-10 stuff. I never used to be this interested in making lists (and the whole concept of ranking art is more than a little objectionable), but looking back at the songs and albums that stood out and why seems to be getting more fun and important to me with each passing year. Maybe because it gives me an excuse to go back and write about albums I already wrote about and would write about over and over if I didn’t think it would be annoying. Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe both.
It’s both.
ANYHOO, I thought I’d share some whistle-while-I-work music.
There are bands you appreciate, and then there are bands you root for. Not because they need the extra backing, but because there’s something that joins your experience with theirs. It could be that their music is so good that you feel passionately that it needs to be heard as widely as possible, and that passion acts like glue — their success is your fulfillment. It could also be the case that you meet the members of a band, and their approach to music aligns with some ideal you hold onto — a picture you’ve painted in your mind after hearing and dissecting an album you love.
All of the above applies to Sleepwalkers, who I had the chance to interview for River City Magazine/West End’s Best in early October. The highlights from that conversation just hit the interweb, and you can read them here (a slightly shorter printed version will hit newsstands any day now). There are two quick things I’d like to add:
My October had an auspicious start — on Wednesday the 1st, I got to sit down for an interview with Michael York and Alex De Jong of Sleepwalkers, who made what many (including me) consider one of the best albums released in 2014. I’ll have more to share about that conversation soon (the issue of River City Magazine they’re featured in will be out in early November), but there’s one detail I didn’t get to include in the magazine piece — the band’s love for holidays.
This feels like a moment — the kind worth acknowledging and consciously savoring as it goes by.
You look tense. How’s your week been? Cray? I feel ya. I think we all just need to relax a little bit.
I’ll tell you how I’m planning to relax tonight… William Bell. The Richmond Folk Festival. Just look at the album cover above — that dude is clearly qualified to help you find a more leisurely mindset.
In certain areas of life, you’re better off not seeing how the sausage is made. Unfortunately, pop music can be one of those areas. It’s not on the same level as legislation, or ya know, actual sausage, but what you find when you pull back the curtain and learn about how your favorite top-40 songs were made can be stomach-turning nonetheless. The corrective recording technology. The lists of songwriters that would reach the floor if published in scroll format. The contradictions between artists’ public personas and personal lives. It can get ugly. I’m not proud to admit it, but there are times I’d rather not know who was singing that radio hit I’ve grown attached to for fear it’ll turn out to be a star whose fame has crossed over into infamy. It’s judgy, I know, but who is doing the singing and how something is created matters. It just does.
That’s why seeing the “Bird Of Prey” video, which gives us a glimpse into Natalie Prass’ collaboration with the Spacebomb team, made my day yesterday.
I’ve written at length about Daniel Bachman before, but I’d like to mark the release of his new album Orange Co. Serenade by sharing a slightly different impression of his playing, along with a sample track off the new record.
I’m sure you’ve heard people who are confronted with an adorable baby or puppy say something to the effect of “Oh my god, [he/she/it] is so cute I just want to eat [him/her/it] right up!” Everyone knows they’re not cannibals or puppy eaters — it’s just an expression that spills out as a result of overflowing enthusiasm. (Then again, cuteness has been shown to activate the part of our brains that regulates aggression…) You hear similar language in book reviews. Prose is “gobbled up” when it’s particularly enjoyable. Some things are so good you just want them to be a part of you — to be absorbed, so you can go about your daily life with the elevated level of joy you felt when you first encountered them.
There’s a close cousin to this type of enthusiasm, and it’s another book review mainstay — “I just want to crawl inside it.” When a writer builds an especially vivid and inviting fictional universe, the words pull you in, and before you know it, you’re wishing you could cross the page’s divide and join the world the characters get to inhabit. (It happens in movies too — you might remember that a number of movie-goers were swept up in a wave of depression after seeing James Cameron’s Avatar because they couldn’t cope with the fact that the idyllic Pandora wasn’t a real planet they could emigrate to.)
That — minus the delusional depression bit — is how I feel when I listen to Daniel Bachman play the guitar.
One more Commonwealth of Notions Presents memory from last Friday — Lightfields covering Archers of Loaf’s “Web In Front,” with a vocal assist from festival organizer and Clair Morgan bassist Shannon Cleary.
This was fun.
Archers of Loaf — “Web In Front” [Spotify/iTunes]
You Hear That 