HoZac Hookup Klub

Like 2008, 2009 looks to be a good year for 7 inchers. HoZac Records recently announced a singles club. $65 (US residents) gets you ten singles mailed over the course of the year. The pressings are limited to 500 and won't be available anywhere else.

The bands will be:

DUM DUM GIRLS
http://www.myspace.com/dumdumgirls

IDLE TIMES
http://www.myspace.com/idletimesband

WOVEN BONES
http://www.myspace.com/wovenbones

ART THIEVES
http://www.myspace.com/wearetheartthieves

FLIGHT
http://www.myspace.com/inflighttunes

WHITE MYSTERY
http://www.myspace.com/whitemysteryband

TEEPEE
http://www.myspace.com/teepeeasel

MOTHER OF TEARS
http://www.myspace.com/motheroftears

BOX ELDERS
http://www.myspace.com/boxelders

TEETH (side project of BLANK DOGS and SPIDER)
http://www.myspace.com/teethareforeating

Just the Dum Dum Girls, Box Elders, and Teeth stuff warrants signing up for the club. And knowing HoZac the rest of the groups will be great (the last three 7"s were killer).

Head over to HoZac's MySpace and sign up for the newsletter for ordering info.

Blog posts worth checking out

I try to keep the content here fairly original and not repost stuff readily available on more popular blogs. So I'm going to link to some of the best posts I've seen recently.

Singles of the year (2008) at The Finest Kiss - I've heard most of the releases on this list and agree with all of them. Definitely give Catwalk, Sexy Kids, Twig, and The Tartans a listen. A few of the mentioned singles can be found on my blog as well (Nodzzz and Moscow Olympics).

Metro Trinity's Die Young at Take the Pills - I listened to Just Go over and over last week. It's an excellent song.

Just Waiting For a Friend at Another Day On Earth - This guy sent me a random friend request on MySpace last week. Apparently he is writing, recording, and posting songs every day of the year. As with any other incredibly prolific band you have to dig around to find the good songs. This is my favorite so far.

Dum Dum Girls on Skatterbrain - Another noisy pop band from California. Yay!

Real Estate at Cum Horizon - "Breezy lo-fi beach pop that'll make you forget about the harsh winter months" is a good description of this 7".

A Manchester Collection at Last Days of Man on Earth - An awesome compilation LP featuring a bunch of Manchester punk/post-punk bands. The first Grow Up song is excellent (and they have a CD out on the great LTM label) as is the Manchester Mekon's track (if the melody sounds familiar it's because Joy Divison borrowed it for Love Will Tear Us Apart).

Unreleased McCarthy track

While I was looking through the excellent McCarthy lyrics archive I saw that lyrics were posted for an unreleased song called Who Will Rid Me Of These Turbulent Proles. The site said the track was "Recorded during the same time as Banking... but never mixed, this unreleased and previously unheard track is said to be one of Malcolm's favorites. Unfortunately, band mates Tim and John didn't agree."

It's a great song and would fit well on I Am A Wallet. Malcolm Eden passed it around the internet a few years ago and you can listen to the song here. Right click and "save as" to download.

Meat Whiplash - Don't Slip Up b/w Here It Comes 7"

Meat Whiplash were blatant Jesus and Mary Chain knockoffs but I like the A-side of this single enough to forgive them. This band was around for a very short time and these songs were the only two they ever recorded. They are most famous for being the opening act for the JAMC at North London Polytechnic in 1985. A member of Meat Whiplash tossed a bottle back into the crowd that had been thrown onstage and a riot ensued, resulting in four hospitalizations and a wrecked venue.

Don't Slip Up is a great song filled end to end with a buzzing guitar. It has deservedly been comped a ton. I don't like the B-side too much but it isn't as easy to find online as the A so here you go.

Don't Slip Up mp3
Here It Comes mp3
Download

Lung Overcoat

Lung Overcoat were a post-punk band from San Antonio, Texas that formed in the early 80s. At a time when hardcore punk was springing up in Texas the band took up a style of music that very few in the US played. Their biggest influences were English gothic bands such as Bauhaus. This (unofficial?) MySpace page has a detailed biography of Lung Overcoat.

I pulled two songs from the MySpace and found the rest on Soulseek. Tracks 1&2 are from the first 7", 5-8 from the Climbing Up The Hill 12" EP and the last track is from a compilation. I guess the others come from a Peel session, but I'm not sure.

Internal Silence mp3
Find the Time mp3
Download

Pens

Pens is a three piece punk band from England. They have released a split cassette (sold out) and a split 7" (buy it at Rough Trade if you're in the UK or can stomach paying $8 + shipping for a single). Pete did the best job of describing the trio on the Slumberland records blog.

The above band are called Pens. They’re three girls from London, making what can only be described as Shambolic Pop.
They used to be in the (better named, but worse musically) Look Look Dancing Boys. I haven’t seen Pens yet, but i have seen LLDB. they were, without a doubt, the most untogether band i had seen in years.

There was something refreshing about that. The lack of ego in their playing, the thrill of discovery, the getting to the end of a song as a major accomplishment. This is even more evident in Pens.

Freddie (yes, their myspace picture page confirms it’s about mr Kruger) is everything that a shambling band should be; constantly on the verge of falling apart, it’s held together by the sheer ‘i can’t believe we’re doing this’ forward motion of the song. The vocals are distorted. Everything’s distorted. They obviously just plugged everything into a pedal, thought it sounded punk, and went for it. Fantastic. There’s crosstalk, and stick clicks; it was obviously recorded live on some antiquated four track- not in a Toerag/Daptone posing way, but it’s genuinely all they had to work with.

Pens have an LP coming in February on De Stijl. Here is a zip file with the mp3s Slumberland posted along with the songs on Pens' MySpace.

Freddie mp3
High in the Cinema mp3
Download

Culturcide - Tacky Souvenirs of a Pre-Revolutionary America

Culturcide is an experimental punk band started in the early 80s by Perry Webb and Jim Craine. The band takes popular songs and dubs over them with their own vocals and instruments. It's very poor; you can hear the original lyrics behind what Webb is shouting unless its covered up with a loud guitar riff. But I think this has a positive effect overall.

Tacky Souvenirs is Culturcide's most well-known album and it earned them a few legal threats (though they didn't catch it as bad as Negativland). My favorite songs are Bruce, a comedic critique of "The Boss," and Industrial Band which mocks the industrial genre.

Check out this site for a complete discography and more info on Culturcide. The CD rereleases of the band's catalogue can be found on eBay, Amazon, etc.

Bruce mp3
Industrial Band mp3
Download

Streamable songs on Last.fm

There are tons of little known artists who have uploaded their music to Last.fm. Here are a few surprising finds along with recommended songs. Check them out.

The Room - An early 80s post-punk band that really sounds more like C86 than Joy Division, but they put out records long before the rise of indie pop. Listen to Things Have Learnt To Walk That Ought To Crawl

Valley of Kings - A post-punk band from Connecticut. Listen to Happy Hour

Nasty Facts - An English punk band. Listen to Drive My Car

Dreams So Real - REM-ish band from Athens. Listen to Love Fall Down

This Poison! - Short lived indie pop band from Scotland. Listen to Driving Skills

The Servants - English indie pop band. Listen to The Sun A Small Star

McCarthy - Anarcho-pop. Just fantastic. Listen to anything, though I Am A Wallet is my favorite album.

Creepy sounds from Saturn

Saturn is a source of intense radio emissions, which have been monitored by the Cassini spacecraft. The radio waves are closely related to the auroras near the poles of the planet. These auroras are similar to Earth's northern and southern lights. This is an audio file of radio emissions from Saturn.

The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these radio emissions in April 2002, when Cassini was 374 million kilometers (234 million miles) from the planet, using the Cassini radio and plasma wave science instrument. The radio and plasma wave instrument has now provided the first high resolution observations of these emissions, showing an amazing array of variations in frequency and time. The complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones, is very similar to Earth's auroral radio emissions. These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.

Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

from NASA

Listen to Saturn's radio emissions

Sounds like background music from an old science fiction movie. Well, there's your science lesson for the day.

I want to believe! Haha

I Was A King - Losing Something Good For Something Better

I first heard these guys on a free compilation from Eardrums which features their song "Norman Bleik." It instantly reminded me of JAMC so I searched around and found I Was A King had a CD out.

Losing Something Good is the band's first effort and though the album sounds more minimal and lo-fi than Norman Bleik it is still great. It only lasts for 17 minutes but that short time is filled with noisy pop songs mixed with lovably lo-fi, warm tracks that don't take more than a minute.

I Was A King have a self titled album coming out later this month in Norway, their home country. They also found a US label which will be releasing a 7" in late january and the s/t album sometime in April. You can find more info about the band and its upcoming releases on MySpace. Losing Something Good For Something Better can be purchased through CDBaby.

Best Wishes mp3
Break Away mp3
Download album

Mix #3 - Celebrity Music Party

Songs about famous people sung by not-so-famous people.

1. Felt - Penelope Tree
2. The Go-Betweens - Lee Remick
3. James Dean Driving Experience - Sean Connery
4. The Bodines - William Shatner
5. Television Personalities - Where's Bill Grundy Now
6. Angst - Neil Armstrong
7. The Briefs - Silver Bullet
8. Minutemen - Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs
   

Dead Leaf Echo - Pale Fire

Well this is cool. I never expected much to come out of this blog. I started it because I had way too much free time and figured I could spend some of that time introducing others to the bands I like. But last week I was contacted by the promoter for a group called Dead Leaf Echo. He offered to send me a copy of Pale Fire, the band's second EP, and after listening to some songs on MySpace I accepted.

Dead Leaf Echo come from New York and play shoegaze/dream pop with a tint of new wave. Think if Slowdive were from Manchester. Pale Fire starts off a bit rough with Warm Body which sounds out of place among the five tracks that follow. The second song, Thought Talk, is a better representation of the rest of Pale Fire with its male/female vocals and transition from soft and dreamy to noisy guitar sound about 3/4ths through. Other standout tracks are Tears and Cry The Sea.

You can listen to some tracks from Pale Fire as well as order the CD on Dead Leaf Echo's MySpace page.