I have a shit ton of 7"s. This is simply an excuse to get off my lazy 21st Century ass and make them more easily listened to as 1's & 0's. I then share. It's a symbiotic relationship. I may even toss in an occasional lp or something.
If it's your OOP record and you don't want it posted, Just let me know. I'll gladly take it down. I'm easy.
Hopefully wherever you are, dear reader, it's full on fucking Spring and you find yourself every day with the particular dilemma where you have to decide in the morning if you're going to dress for the early morning cold and sweat on the way home or if you're going to be chilly now to be appropriately dressed for later.
It's a nice problem to have.
I mean, it was supposed to be Opening Day for baseball around here just last week but it was postponed due to snow.
About the onlyconcrete information I could really find about Jumprope is that they were from Boston.
Indiepop with jazzy chords.
I don't know why, but there's something about this that always make me think of the Katamari Damacy soundtrack. (Maybe it's her voice.) But then again, I have a three disc set of all the music for the Katamari games.
It's a lo-fi project spearheaded by Mike Downey who had previously been in Wolfie along with the couple who would go on to make records as the Like Young until their divorce and who also had recorded under the moniker Busytoby whose two singles I've previously posted.
Mathlete then turned into the National Splits. (which may or may not follow up this post. I don't know yet.) and the rest is all ashes.
Mike Downey maintains an Audio Graveyard on Bandcamp for all his projects. Go and literally pay some respects.
Ok, We're getting a bit off course here, but it's bound to happen.
At one point this year I'd considered making another blog centering around all the indiepop stuff I'd been collecting and listening to. It didn't materialize, but by that time I'd already sequestered a large alternative folder of material for this potential other blog.
A big feature of the 90s/early 00s world of indiepop centered around compilations. There's thousands of them. Which means I have lots and now they're cluttering up things in a volume that the number of 13ths of the month cannot reasonably sustain.
The background in the reason this benefit compilation exists is to be found on Wikipedia.
the TL/DR was Indonesia annexed East Timor in 1975. In 1998 it was proposed that East Timor gain its independence which pissed off pro-Indonesia folks in East Timor and shit got violent which brought in the UN with Australia taking point.to keep peace. Meanwhile the people of East Timor were having some tough times because of the unrest.
Many names will be familiar here. It's a joint venture of Australian label Library Records and Drive In from Grand Rapids, Michigan. So bands from both stables are represented some of whom have been previously posted and others yet to come.
I really need to get back to doing seven inches again soon....
Mostly acoustic duo consisting of Peter Schaefer & Nora O'Conner recording painfully sweet little pop ditties that you could play for your grandmother if she wasn't more into Motorhead or something. (Well, you could probably still play it for her, but she'd just give you the finger behind your back for being such a wuss)
This was released unto the world by Sunday Records.
Google also tells me that Tokidoki is Japanese for "sometimes", so there, we both learned something today.
About a year ago I tracked down the dude who ran the label and completed the label discography. He also sent me a Cdr of the unreleased Going Stagg cd (he played guitar in the that band) which is fucking wonderful stuff that at some point blah blah blah...
Which is kind of besides the point of this single, but information is very slim about the origins of both of these bands. This being the only vinyl appearance for both. (though Test Pilot did release a number of cassettes)
Two more contenders for the Indiepop compilation...
And it's an accidentally Maryland post today.
It was unintentional, but it's nice when things come together like that.
If you've been following along at home I can tell you right now that it's somewhere around here in the Swinging Singles Club "To Post" folder that my vinyl collecting and listening pleasure turned to almost exclusively 90s - early 00s indiepop.
If I've survived the COVID-19, expect a lot of that shit in the coming months.
You're welcome or forewarned whichever fits.
Ok, released in 2000, but the recordings date to 1992, so there's that.
It's one of the hundreds of bands that Pam Berry was part of and as is the case with all of them, I like it enough that you get the insert. But by now you already know that. It also explains the origin of these particular recordings, so you get that too. Of note is the English spelling of "Coloured". So Continental.
Our American Cousins have a "Write to" address of Frederick, MD and named themselves after the play that Abraham Lincoln was watching at Ford's Theater the night he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. The band however make loud brash pop songs. I picked it up at Jigsaw Records when they were still in Seattle. Chris recommended it. He was not incorrect to do so. (though I'm not putting up the insert for this one)
I also didn't intend to post this now since I have another of their singles apparently and I should have waited until I had that ready and posted them together as a pair. This explains why this one's been languishing in the folder for a while.
If you like it then I suppose you have something to look forward to in a long while whence I finally get around to the other one.
Gary Panter is better known as an artist and illustrator who is long involved in the Residents/Ralph Records sphere. So it will come as little or no surprise that the Residents ably abet Mr. Panter in this particular seven inches of avant wonderment.
You, dear record enthusiast, may also recognize quite a bit of Panter's commercial album artwork
The other cool as fuck thing about it is that the sleeve is actually a large foldout poster.
(I couldn't find an online picture of the actual poster, but trust me.)
I have plans on getting myself a second copy someday to have one I can frame and hang proudly on my wall. It's of a robot playing a guitar.
I suppose if I hadn't wanted to class this place up with a bit of Duke Ellington I could have alternately named this post:
"Panter, Paul & Lara"
that's probably a much better play on words.
Oh Well.
Choices were made and we must live with them.
As it is, I'm simply biding my time while some bolognese simmers for an appropriate amount of delicious time and random play on the music player thinks this is a good night to sort through the terabytes of material to play multiple tracks by the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Wanda Jackson.
Oh yeah, this single. Hunger has me kind of mentally wandering off into the woods.
It's on Kitteridge records (1999-2006) which was label that I'm looking to pick up everything on because I haven't been disappointed yet. They've been gone so long all the links on the website point to Myspace. Sad. (though I may have to poke around and see if I can score some NOS titles on the cheap direct from them.)
I also actually have two copies of this because I found a cheap copy and had forgotten I already had one. But at least I have both the green and the blue unreadable covers now.
Apparently this sibling duo also released a full length as Layton.
My wantlist grows one full length compact disc longer.
Though if you, as a responsible dabbler in internet musical auditioning, are interested the band offers a "deluxe" version of this particular record on their Bandcamp page.
Be a pal and toddle off and get the extra tracks and make them a buck or two.
This handmade Cdr disc by sPrinG has been sitting by my desk for years gathering dust and had reached a point of familiarity that it barely registered in my vision any longer.
It was just a thing that was there.
I'm not even precisely sure I ever actually listened to it in its entirety.
Maybe.
It might have just been set down at one point and gotten moved around a few times before settling into the space it occupied until I picked it up and decided to look at it again just recently.
I am pretty sure that I may have received it from a member of the band probably at Sursumcorda in Minneapolis a couple of decades back. But that's hazy. Did they play? Were they just traveling through? I don't remember at all.
But I do think somebody handed it to me as occasionally happened when we played and they seemed to like what we were doing for some reason. But it's difficult to remember a short 30 second exchange from 20 years ago.
So it will remain somewhat a mystery. But I can't actually think of any other possible way it might have made it into my possession. For all I actually know it may have just suddenly materialized next to my desk without my noticing.
The gist of this rambling is:
I acquired this disc. It existed in the periphery for a long time and at some point reasserted itself into my consciousness. Now here it is.
And it's some nice dark lo-fi psychedelic weirdness just like you might have read about in the backpages of Ptolemaic Terrascope back in the day and a concept album.
I'm kind of puzzled as to why I never did check it out more than possibly once.
But we'll both be glad I did because it's something that ought not be consigned to oblivion.
I think okonomyaki is on the docket for today, but that won't be until much later.
Which means I have to see what's available to tide me over until then.
For fuck's sake, this one is almost twenty fucking years old. Where does the time go.
It's our good buddy, Stewart Anderson of Boyracer fame doing his solo thing as he did before moving to the States. This one is lots and lots of noisy staticky distorted lo-fi fuckery of the highest order. It's the lovely sound of gleefully not giving a fuck once the record button is pressed.
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Yeah, another band that named themselves after a famous person which while less confusing than the band that called themselves Courtney Love there's still plenty of room for confusion.
And so it was that at the start of this century two people decided to name their musical project Harper Lee. And here is a couple of examples of what they sounded like which is something that a decade earlier would have found a home on Sarah Records.
If you have an interest in the people involved here's an interview with Keris Howard and Laura Bridge which may or may not illuminate things for you. Sometimes interviews do that. Sometimes they just muddy the mental waters.
Otherwise just lay in your bed and relive a little bit of that long lost adolescent love that adulthood has beaten into a nostalgic haze. Then afterward you can do some laundry.
The only information I have is the insert, so best guess is that they're from Sun Valley, CA and released this record in the year of our Prince, 1999. Even their website is a dead end.
I have even less on this band. It's a shared release by Drive-In, a Michigan based label & Season, an Australian based label. Both now defunct. There's no indication of where the band is from or anything beyond first names.
I've probably said it before, but the Twin Cities had a pretty good but largely ignored music scene around the turn of the century. Even I had a band. (We played for literal dozens of people). But alas, not even the people in and around here paid much attention. So much lost potential.
Yeah, Lifter Puller existed all through the 90's and nobody paid attention until half of that band moved to Brooklyn in 2000 and started doing a different version of the same thing. Then the hipsters had a big nerdgasm. Personally, the Hold Steady don't quite do it for me in the same way though. They're like the Springsteen Big Anthem version of Lifter Puller. But to each his own.
This was some kind of Record Store Day release by them bought a few years after the fact as sealed old stock. I think I got my two dollar's worth.
I'm not a fan of Of Montreal. They're a little too precious even for me. I gave them one cd and a couple of live shows, but they ended up just annoying me. Their bass player at this time was quite attractive though, so they had that going for them. Ladybug Transistor put out a couple of rather entertaining albums and here do a cover of "Galveston" composed by the legendary Jimmy Webb and made famous by Glen Campbell. It does not suck.
Papas Fritas are well enough of a known entity now, but were still toiling in pop obscurity at this time. I don't know Masters of the Hemisphere from Adam. On either side of this the bands cover Fleetwood Mac to varying degrees of success.
And thus ends the Kindercore Singles of the Month collection until such time as the final two singles are made available somehow lo these many years later. I'm not holding my breath.
Another peripheral Elephant 6 band in which Apples in Stereo guitarist, John Hill also played. They're very adorable and a boy could have had quite a crush on Tammy Ealon. Their first cd "Pink Hearts Yellow Moons" is quite fun. (Unfortunately it seems like there seems to be much less emphasis in singing in tune on the follow up discs which kind of mars my personal enjoyment.) I have no idea who the Four Corners are. The do a cover of Spinal Tap's "Gimme Some Money"
