Riot on the Plaza
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Golden Sound gives new Baby Teardrops the vinyl treatment
Kansas City upstart label Golden Sound Records has been building a steady reputation recently with some fantastic releases from Everyday/Everynight, The Empty Spaces, the Fullbloods, and ED/EN & TES frontman Mat Shoare. The label recently announced plans to release the debut vinyl full-length from Matt Dunehoo (Proudentall)’s NYC-based Baby Teardrops. X is For Love can be expected to be available for purchase on vinyl, CD or in digital form by November 15th. In the meantime, the album in its entirety can be found for free on their bandcamp page here.
Matt Dunehoo fronted Kansas City’s Doris Henson, a band once poised for greatness according to anyone who was aware of their existence. Dunehoo formed DH with Giants Chair bassist Byron Collum, multi-instrumentalist Michael Walker (Olympic Size, so many others), Jamie Zoeller from Chicago’s Nymb, and drummer Wes Gartner. The band was well received across nationwide tours, not the least of which was an opening spot on a 2005 Smashing Pumpkins tour. After the band dissolved, Dunehoo packed up and moved to NYC, where he formed the still up-and-coming Baby Teardrops, though the band has already received various online praise.
I leave you with this, a taste of some of Dunehoo’s genre-bending vocal and composition work:
High Diving Ponies’ Pain Pills 7 inch download
There are few active bands in the region that have committed to churning out a respectably sized discography in the shortest amount of time possible as much as the High Diving Ponies. The band, in its current incarnation, caught my attention early last year by announcing their plans to release not one, or two, but three albums in the year of 2010. Their agenda was pushed into motion with the release of the 10-track Fractals in Heat, a fuzzed out, reverb heavy and, yes, probably substance-enhanced work that was equal parts grunge and shoegaze, a comfort zone giving just as much credence to Sonic Youth’s Evol as the pure wall-of-noise segments present in My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.
The counterpart release to Fractals proper was the same album, mixed by Tim Goodwillie (GOODWILLIES), skewing the levels and creating a feeling the album is either being listened to through a slow-running blender, or the sound is vibrating off the walls of a steel grain bin. Listening to either release, you would expect that the currently played album is how it was meant to be heard, the preference is really in the hands of the audience. As quickly as the first two were made public, a third album was released. This one, titled Casino Economy, showed temperament on the band’s part, demonstrating a much more restrained approach to what was once just an onslaught of reverb. What could easily have been confused as an attempt to cover up a lack of songwriting skills in previous releases, was now stripped down just a little to reveal that underneath all of the noise there was real talent present.
Frontman Josh Thomas is no stranger to the use of reverb and noise as an artificial instrument. Prior to the existence of HDP, Thomas fronted Spidermums, a band similar not only in sound, but in the delivery of their physical product, using stenciled black sleeves to house each of their two CD-R releases (the last of which featured drumming from Gaurav Bashyaklarla of CVLTS), a trend that continued on with the Ponies. You could say that the change was more in name only than in sound, but with a new name came a new lineup, eliminating a cast that had largely been a part of Thomas’ endeavor previous to the ‘Mums, the straight ahead grunge outfit Bodisartha. The band garnered a bit of attention in the mid ‘oughts, and could be frequently found on the lineup at one of midtown KC’s shortest-lived but most documented haunts, The Sleeper Cellar.
Back to the present, and not to be outdone by… themselves, the self-described “danger pop” band released yet another album in November of 2010. Broken Sunbather would prove to be both a continuation of Thomas’ decision to focus on more of the intricacies that were often overlooked in some of his previous work, and a harkening back to the raw, out-of-tune fuzz rock they had built their reputation upon. Many of the nine tracks present on Sunbather had been tossed around in demo form by the band for most of the year, a few even appearing on a live recording the band posted online from a Recordbar show they played earlier that spring.
Little was heard from HDP for a few months. Their Twitter account was updated frequently, but mostly either updated the followers on what ever band Josh was recording/mastering (the previously mentioned CVLTS, as well as Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk) or was limited to a one-line anecdote about drugs or a cryptic allusion to the thoughts taking place in his head at that particular moment. The occasional live performance announcement or a passing remark about a 7 inch would be made from time to time, vinyl had been mentioned as a possible format since the band’s conception, though cassettes were a frequent medium as well. As spring arrived, the discussion of a new analog release was steadily increasing, when last week, the news was out. The band plans to release the lathe-cut Pain Pills 7 inch in mid-June, and its run is limited to a mere 33 copies. They have posted a link where the EP can be downloaded for free. As far as getting your hands on a copy of the 7 inch, well I guess you’ll just have to check back in here after the band announces a release show.
Bonus: download Spidermums’ fantastic cover of The Amps’ “Bragging Party” right here.
Casey Burge’s Triumph stream & pre-order
Kansas City musician Casey Burge has been more than a continual blip on my music radar since I was but a teenager. From his work in the late, lamented Lawrence indie rock band Kelpie, who boasted an arsenal of musicians from other area favorites like The Appleseed Cast, Buffalo Saints and Larryville expats Cavaliers, to his collaboration with Jim Button in the Button Band, Burge’s musical craft has matured in the public eye for nearly a decade. I had all but forgotten about the man when he re-emerged recently in Minden, a quartet being billed as some sort of indie rock supergroup, whether by the band’s consent or not. Having gotten a chance to see the band perform their style of multiple decade-spanning indie-pop live at Riot Room as part of the Middle of the Map Fest, I can attest to their larger than life sound and eagerly look forward to their output in the future. But I digress, this post is about the man, not the band.
Unbeknownst to myself, Burge was still recording pop gems in his bedroom throughout the late ‘oughts, and they were not made public until early this year when local cassette label Overland Shark released a limited run, 20-track tape of his work from late 2007-early 2008, titled Universal Fun. Though simply recorded through a computer microphone, the heart of every song is encased in soaring bittersweet pop melodies, most of which last under 90 seconds and either fade out without a real conclusion or end in an odd, almost saddening guitar strum, a scrapped demo track of a fully fleshed song that will probably never exist. And yet, as the bright yellow cover would subtly suggest, the sunny simplicities of those songs gave new and old listeners a view into what Burge was shifting toward, a sound that would soon break out into the aforementioned Minden, and yet another solo release.
Triumph was recorded between February and May of 2011, and shows a decidedly more coherent creation process in the instrumentation and recording, gaining that much more stability from the drum machine Burge employed for the release. Instead of an assorted spread of minimalistic acoustic pop, the nine track release is as robust as a lo-fi album can be, giving nods to the annals of pop anti-heroes from the last four plus decades. Two of the tracks from this release were re-recorded as Minden for their upcoming 7″ on The Record Machine, and plans are for a coinciding release week with the cassette I currently speak of. In the meantime, go check it out for yourself right here, and pre-order the cassette while you’re at it.
Riot on the Plaza 