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News and Album Releases
Graham Hunt 'If You Knew Would You Believe It' LP available for pre-order and ships November 4th!
Graham Hunt 'If You Knew Would You Believe It' LP available for pre-order and ships November 4th!
Limited to 200 copies on black wax
Graham Hunt is a Wisconsin based guitarist and songwriter. His compositions have been associated with many bands throughout his decades plus career, including Milwaukee’s Midnight Reruns and Sundial Mottos, but lately he’s been focused on releasing them under his own name. His latest effort “If You Knew Would You Believe It? is a journey—Hunt confidently delivers a collection of music that tackles power pop from every possible sonic angle. Occasionally it leans into a distinctly Manchester aesthetic, from the whispering, neo-psychedelic chug of “Speeding Towards A Wall” to the strung out lo fi hang “Stripes,” and at other times Hunt finds comfort in a quieter Elliott smith influenced style. Hunt’s penchant for memorable riffs as well as impressive lyrical work remain at the forefront of his music, nicely complementing an increasingly refined incorporation of lightly nostalgic late ’90s and early ’00s alt-rock touchstones. Through all of the familiarity, Hunt has managed to develop a style that feels authentically singular, an honest extension of his own tastes, preferences, and experiences.
Meat Wave 'Malign Hex" TAPE/ CD and Matt Bohannon ' Please Hold For No One' LP both have PRE-Orders that are now LIVE!
MEAT WAVE ‘MALIGN HEX’ TAPE/CD AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!
ALL ORDERS SHIP 10/24
ONLY 100 TAPES AND 200 CD’S PRESSED
Meat Wave - the Chicago punk band of Ryan Wizniak (drums), Joe Gac (bass) and Chris Sutter (vocals, guitar) will release their fourth album Malign Hex on October 14, 2022.
The 10-track record, which features ‘What Would You Like Me To Do’ as well as previously released singles ‘Ridiculous Car’ and ‘Honest Living’, was recorded by bassist Joe Gac in 2019 at the band’s rehearsal space and respective apartments. Following 2017’s The Incessant, Malign Hex is the band’s most cohesive, dynamic and ambitious work to date – “a culmination of what we’ve been doing for 11 years. We’ve been working towards this,” as Sutter deftly summarises. “Our sound in the beginning was consistently very driving,” recalls Gac. “Now, that characteristic is merely a tool we can reach for. I don’t think it completely defines what we’re doing.”
The band spent the last half of 2019 chipping away at the record, choosing to work on it slowly in spurts, as opposed to their last album The Incessant, which was recorded and mixed in just four days. If that feels like an odd move – to veer away from a formula that worked so successfully on The Incessant, which received near-unanimous critical acclaim on release and was dubbed “an album meant for breathless angst, fists in the air, spit in your hair” by The Guardian – it’s one that pays off dividends on Malign Hex: a set of songs that finds Meat Wave at both their most gentle and abrasive, creating urgent and vital punk music that’s unafraid to dial things back and experiment, ready and willing to take a breath amidst the mayhem. Suffice to say, it’s a record of contrasts and juxtapositions.
“We recorded [Malign Hex] the same way we always have— live in a room together,” says Wizniak. “But we allowed ourselves to embellish more and take more chances with extra instrumentation.” And while the band did indeed incorporate more synths, organs and walls of guitar, it provides only nuance and atmosphere, not distraction from what Meat Wave does best. “We moved further away from the principle that we need to recreate every element on the album live,” Gac adds. “There was no shame in adding extra overdubs and different sounds.”
The album’s lyrics centre around themes of lineage; where we come from, and where we’re going. Malign Hex explores a litany of subjects and circumstances – addiction, greed, unreliable memory, obedience – through a surrealist, collage-like lens.
“A malign hex is something that is pertinent only to you, that is handed down to you, or was raised in you through time: depression, addiction, greed, envy. Everyone wears a backpack full of hexes. It’s heavy and familial. And it’s yours,” Sutter offers. “The meaning of malign is evil or malignant in nature. So, the idea was picking apart what my hexes are. Ironically, being in this band and making this band my life for so long has proved to be one of the hexes, but it’s also tied to more systemic hexes. It’s the evil algorithm that is you.”
In keeping with the way these malign hexes can gestate over a lifetime, the album loosely follows a birth-to-death arc across its ten tracks. Where its incendiary opening one-two punch of ‘Disney’ and ‘Honest Living’ deal in the nascent realisations you make as you grow into a fully-formed person and the experiences that shape them – being a child, getting older, having to work, navigating through life, complaining – its second side is more reflective, if not world-weary then at the very least world-wise. The menacing surf guitar of ‘Waveless’ is struck through with millennial ennui – “partying is surfing in a waveless tide,” as Sutter puts it – while the tumultuous ‘10k’, which opens on Sutter declaring “it’s been 10,000 days since the hex,” might as well be the album’s title track. “The 10k is referring to being alive for 10,000 days [at the time of writing it]. I was 28 at the time, and still not really knowing anything. It’s about acknowledging the hex – a hex of insecurity or unknowing. It’s about how life is so simultaneously surprising and boring. How I know so much and yet so little. 10,000 days feels like both a long time and a short time.”
The album’s penultimate track, ‘Jim’s Teeth’, meanwhile, crushes together two different narratives – one involving a friend who thought they’d lost their false teeth in Sutter’s car one night, the other relating to another friend’s experience of a childhood exorcism – into a miniature epic that builds from a hypnotic opening section into a whirring haze of interlocking guitars, harking back to a lineage of great Chicagoan bands in the process. Somehow, Meat Wave pull off its divergent plotlines seamlessly. It’s something they do, on a larger scale, across the album, charting a series of hexes through the innocence of youth and the wisdom of age, through gentler grooves and bright explosions of sound.
For all its contrasts though, if there’s a throughline to Malign Hex, it’s that it’s ultimately a record about reflection and figuring yourself – and your hexes – out. “My Dad came to visit us when we were making this album, on the top floor of our rehearsal space in a really shitty warehouse,” Sutter explains. “Ironically, this record is tied to him because I am a product of him. He’s handed me down some of his hexes. And ultimately, he passed away in November of last year and never got to hear it. It’s very cosmic and deep to me, and I’m still figuring the record out as a result. So, after all that, I’m not sure what it’s even about yet.”
It’s an apt summation of the impermanence of life, of how the meanings of things shift but our hexes largely remain. Perhaps in another 10,000 days, Sutter may have the answers he’s looking for.
MATT BOHAHHON ‘PLEASE HOLD FOR NO ONE’ LP AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!
SHIPS 9/2
ONLY 200 LP’S PRESSED ON BLACK VINYL
Music is what I do. I write songs, play shows, record albums, and host my friends’ bands from all over any chance I get. Rock and roll is good for the soul and I do my best to keep it alive and well.
Please Hold For No One is an album that I’ve wanted to make for a very long time. With a dreamcast of players, these new and old originals sound just as they should… deep, imaginative, psychedelic, and rockin. It was an honor to track at As Elyzum and to have one out on Let’s Pretend. Let’s boogie!
Tetnis 'Moving Quickly to Prevent a /hater From Detonating the Vest' TAPE OUT NOW!
Tetnis 'Moving Quickly to Prevent a /hater From Detonating the Vest'
Limited to 100 tapes pressed on silver shells
OUT NOW!
Tetnis revs the garage-punk engine of Columbus Ohio’s local music scene, releasing their first full length in 2019. Energetic guitars akin to burning rubber on the provincial Highway to Hell.
Their newest release, Moving Quickly to Prevent a Hater From Detonating the Vest, is chock full of driving pop hooks on a joy ride to that familiar chaos. With more material already in the works and plans to tour the Midwest this Summer, they are making their place known in Ohio’s ever growing DIY machine.
Pre-Order SERVICE 'DRAG ME' LP OUT 4/6!
SERVICE ‘DRAG ME’ LP
Pre-order HERE
Limited to 300 copies on black vinyl w/ download code. All orders ship March 6th 2022
SERVICE is an urgent, howling, earnest rock and roll band, steadily cementing their reputation as a great live act, ahead of releasing their debut record, Drag Me (Let's Pretend). Started in the Manhattan apartment of renowned drummer Russell Simins, SERVICE now lives in Indianapolis, home of the other two core members, Jilly Weiss and Mitch Geisinger. The band sums up their sound with the quip, “post-punk then punk again,” which reflects their smart, self-deprecating lyrics as much as the music.
Jilly is an iconic front person with the boastful confidence of Nick Cave or Mark E. Smith (the Fall), combined with the sort of confessional sincerity of PJ Harvey. Mitch’s wild guitar manipulations recount the Birthday Party and Butthole Surfers with an array of effects the Liars would admire. At the helm from behind the kit is Russell Simins, best known best for his tenure in NYC staple rock outfit, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Simins’s uniquely hard-driving, powerful beats give SERVICE a huge sound. Glide Magazine called the band, “the most authentic expression of vulnerability and self-awareness, with wildly impactful vocals set against roaring guitars and a giant beat.” They are ready to play bigger rooms.
SERVICE will release their debut album Drag Me, on Let’s Pretend Records on May 6, 2022. This is very much a guitar record, a two-guitar assault really, but the hard-grooving beats keep it almost danceably post-punk. Drag Me is certainly unorthodox, but has choruses that will have you yelling along. Magnet Magazine called “Hey,” the first single," a caterwauling assault of a post-punk song that will help you end your bummer summer on a high note." Drag Me is an audacious, swaggering rock and roll record that is about to put SERVICE on the map.
Posmic TAPE, OUT 3/11
Posmic ‘Sun Hymns’ TAPE
Out and Ships 03/11/2022
Rising from the fertile soils of the Baltimore and DC music scenes, lands the hazy gem that is Posmic. The band was formed by David Van and Emily Ferrara (both of Post Pink) with Zach Inscho (Wildhoney) and DC native Luke Reddick (Ultra Beauty) in late 2019 as an explorative pop project and vehicle for the more personal songwriting of Van and Ferrara. Influenced by both mainstream and underground groups of the 90's and inspired by the vision and production of the 60's, Posmic is an ever-evolving, freaky foray into art rock songwriting.
The group began playing live in early 2020 only to be delayed by the global pandemic, but managed to continue on as the world turned inside out. The upside-down time resulted in a series of home recording sessions that would become Sun Hymns, a collection of eight bite sized songs that float along in under twenty minutes. The themes range from subtly psychedelic and meditative pop to jangly and introspective rock mantras — all just passing through.
Posmic returned to playing live in 2021 and welcomed DC punk renaissance man Brendan Reichhardt as a fifth member of the band.
PRE-ORDER Kait Eldridge 'The Dark Tower' LP
Kait Eldridge ‘The Dark Tower’ LP
OUT AND SHIPS FRI. JAN. 29TH
Limited to 200 copies on black vinyl w/ black dust sleeves and full color inserts. Download codes included.
In the midst of the 2020 lockdown, Kait Eldridge, the songwriter behind the hard-rocking power-pop project Big Eyes, found herself with an overabundance of free time and solitude. Neglected half-read books were finished, closets were cleaned, and puzzles were pieced together, but eventually the sedentary life wore out it’s welcome. Craving a new focus, Eldridge relocated her gear from the band’s practice space into her small Brooklyn apartment, and got to work on a peculiar musical endeavor: a concept album based on Stephen King’s "The Dark Tower'' series. Supplemental equipment was ordered; countless hours were spent tinkering with new instruments and learning the rudiments of home recording, and songs were written, recorded and mixed all in her bedroom. The resulting project not only condensed the storyline of 7+ books into an LP's worth of tunes, but also musically incorporated the series' motley grouped literary genres: western, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. A direct homage to the series in name, Kait Eldridge's "The Dark Tower," is chock-full of lyrical references to the books’ unforgettable characters, evocative locales, and heart-wrenching plot points. King’s mystical number, 19, crowns the album as the total track listing. Sonically, it’s a charmingly rough around the edges home-recorded project, consisting of alternating tracks of synth-heavy brooding tunes, 70's country influenced ballads, and atmospheric interludes. Eldridge has woven an enchanting, artful album with resonations of Glen Campbell’s sorrowfully gliding pop songs, ethereal guitar and synth textures à la Michael Rother, and the ambience of a tenebrous science fiction movie scored by Tangerine Dream or John Carpenter. Underneath it all, her power pop songwriting background, attention to detail, and dedication to the art of timeless songwriting continues to shine through the refreshingly new multitude of layers of her debut solo record.
PRE-ORDER The Mimes' "Plastic Pompeii"
The debut LP from Cincinnati’s The Mimes is available on October 1st, 2021 via Let’s Pretend Records. Pre-orders are available on 9/24/2021.
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