Directed by Jeff Kuykendall and Jimmy Hughes. From Artificial Countrysides, out now on Yep Roc.
I like it when bands spread out the promotion of an album. Like, why do most bands dump a new single every few weeks for a couple months leading up to the release date and then maybe one more singles and then nada for two years? It’s annoying. Stop bugging me. Chill, bro. Let that last one sink in a little.
Elf Power doesn’t play that game. Artificial Countrysides came out nine months ago, and check it out: They just released a new video from it. Good for them. Take your time. We’ll still be here.
Directed by Rick White. From Colder Streams, out now on Yep Roc.
Dallas Good was 48 years old when he died last year. He left behind a legacy that includes twenty albums with the Sadies. This video features footage from his last show, just a couple of weeks before he died.
The band says, “Our dear friend and collaborator Rick White made this video tribute for ‘More Alone’ shortly after Dallas left us, for a song Dallas wrote shortly after Justin Townes Earle passed. It’s beautiful how art can help us heal and how it connects us. We are grateful to share this with all of you. The live footage was taken from our last live performance together at Hillside Inside on Feb. 5, 2022.”
Filmed by Alex Pfannkuche at the Orange Twin Conservation Community stage. From Artificial Countrysides, out July 15 on Yep Roc.
A classic chugging, fuzzy pop song from Elephant 6 pillars, Elf Power. It’s psychedelic, it’s a little dreamy, and the video features Robert Schneider as a wizard in Swatch Shield sunglasses!
Artificial Countrysides will be the Athens band’s first album on Yep Roc and their first new album since 2017’s Twitching in Time.
Amalgamations of everything left behind
Enclosed the area, kept all of it inside
Spitting out fragments all the undigested parts
Vague simulations in a mirror in the dark.
That might sound like hippie mumbo jumbo but Andrew Rieger says it’s “about the way that unprocessed events and emotions can erupt at unexpected times.” So barf as a metaphor for intermittent explosive disorder, basically. Cool.
“Let’s do the world a favor, yeah, let’s all go extinct.”
Can’t argue with that! In the meantime, though, we’re all going to have to keep on keeping on and there’s no better soundtrack to that the choogling groove of Blitzen Trapper.
Eric Earley says, “This song is about American apathy and the nihilism that emerges from the bogus idea that complete personal freedom should be man’s ultimate goal, when in fact man’s ultimate goal should be ecological balance, all things follow from this. Comedy and horror combine on this track, teenagers dropping acid in a masonic temple at the end of the empire, the American consumptive death-drive laid bare as a desire for extinction.”
There’s a long history of bands paying homage to each other. The Animals made a minor cottage industry out of it with “The Story of Bo Diddley” and “Monterrey,” but it’s nice to see the kids continuing a tradition. “Do You Remember” has not-so-subtle nods to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and explicit call-outs to “the bands in the plaza/playing at noon.” It’s important to remember the good times, and the bands that provided your own private soundtrack to those good times. The Rubinoos implore you to not forget. Not ever.
And who says you can’t make a video on the cheap? Well, probably nobody anymore now that we all have a capable video camera in our pockets, but The Rubinoos cut away all the fat to focus on the fun: A pal dancing her ass off in front of a curtain in what looks like your parents’ foyer. That’s a good time.
There was a cinder block cube of a bar on the west side of Grand Rapids called Putt Putt’s. My uncle tells me that when I was little he used to take me there and set me up on the ice machine while he played pool. He bought me Shirley Temples and taught me to make noise when the other guy was about to shoot. You can’t get mad at a little kid for wrecking your shot, right? This was the 70s, so who knows?
My other childhood story of Putt Putt’s involves my dad getting arrested there after getting into a bar fight. I’m not sure whether this is an actual memory or that the story is so vivid that my brain concocted a visualization, but I can picture myself looking through the back window of a car as my dad is hauled out of the bar in handcuffs, struggling, and the cops macing him in the face before they shoved him into a patrol car. The unfairness of getting maced while cuffed still infuriates me, forty year later.
Why was I there? Who’s car was I in? My mom’s? Did somebody call her from a payphone to come pick him up? No idea.
But since then I’ve never really hung out in pool halls. Dressy Bessy makes it look like a lot of fun though!
Putt Putt’s is still there, by the way, but it’s been overhauled. It now has windows and food and outdoor seating. It looks respectable. Their burgers get good reviews online.
But I’m never going there. I know there are ghosts.
Dressy Bessy is back with their first single off their upcoming Yep Roc album, Fast Faster Disaster. All the charm that brought this band national attention in 2005 with Electrified is present in “Tiny Lil Robots,” an ode to parenting complete with a “Little Miss Fucking Sunshine” shirt.
Wah-oooooooo!
And I’d still rather listen to Dressy Bessy than Coldplay.
Directed by Hugh Hales-Tooke. From Robyn Hitchcock, out now on Yep Roc.
Everybody knows that he’s been obsessed with Syd Barrett but it’s weird when Robyn Hitchcock sounds like post-Barrett Pink Floyd. This could almost be an outtake from The Wall.
Losing my face, losing my friends, losing my temper
Losing my place on the map, losing my home
“I first saw Robyn Hitchcock in my hometown, Cambridge, in 1976,” director by Hugh Hales-Tooke told Rolling Stone. “He was playing with a fairly early incarnation of the Soft Boys. It seemed fitting for Cambridge to be the place for Robyn Hitchcock to emerge. He was doing something strong and unique but with a strong connection to Cambridge, the home of Syd Barrett and early Pink Floyd psychedelia.”
Part of the problem when a band like Gang of Four releases a record as life changing as 1979’s Entertainment! is that everything that follows in its wake runs a greater risk of disappointment.
Keeping that in mind, it’s not hard to balance the time and distance between a new Gang of Four record and that acknowledged classic. In the three decades since, we’ve seen the band fall out of fashion somewhat, while giving birth to a few, easily identifiable youngsters who replace communist Cliffs Notes ideals with tailored suits and Xbox deals.
