new Lemuria track is radcakes / old Aye Nako track remains radcakes

Hey sorry but it's another one of these dinky 'new shit' plug posts. I'm working on a couple bigger ones as we speak, so... or "you speak", presumably. See, I'm dying of lung cancer, so it's been sorta hard to talk for the past couple days. All this coughing up chunks of my pulmonary alveoli takes a lot out of you. I think that's how lung cancer works.
Alright no but I actually am sick.
SICK OF BLOGGING THAT IS HA HAAAKkh  qw

I am xHxCx excited about this. Ever since they opened for P.S. Eliot's last show in 2011 (the emotional moment of my life thus far), I've been actively watching the kettle, waiting for new material to drop. Aye Nako's 2010 demo's been covered somewhere in the dimmer beginnings of this blog, but if you don't want to backtrack as bad as I don't, imagine a pop-punkier Superchunk with Go Sailor-esque vocals and the kind of hooks that bury themselves in your subconscious like emotional trauma in your formative years. When I saw just now that they'd released a new track from their upcoming LP due out next month, I uncontrollably peed everywhere in excitement (as my nature dictates), but promptly clammed up urethra-wise 'cause it was just a re-recording of "Molasses". Come on you jerks, we've all listened to "Molasses" a jillion times already. That said, the track sounds fantastic, and while there's no real overhaul in it's performance (aside an acoustic guitar augmentation), the production sounds thick 'n' clean and perfectly suited to the band's style.
If you're an established fan, click here for a great mix of glee and mild disappointment. On Pitchfork's site, weirdly enough. I guess they are stationed in Bwooklyn, tho.

Slightly less exciting (but not by much) is Lemuria's first single from their upcoming LP, The Distance Is So Big. I also wrote about Lemuria before here, but to sum it up, I pretty much loved everything the band released up to and (somewhat) including Get Better (emphasis on their split with Kind Of Like Spitting) but was really disappointed by Pebble. I don't really wanna get into that album here, but shrimply putt, it's kind of an overlong mess with some really, really shitty hooks, muffly production, and the feeling the band recently came out of a K-hole. This track seems to dispel all of deepest, Lemuria-related fears, though, and sees the band return to the crispy production that suits them and get hella sad-pumped while pushing their sound into new territory. The sweet pop hooks blending with the jaunty, proggy angularity of the riffz and structure remind me why I sweated these guys so hard in the first place. Can't wait to hear the whole thing.

Also, did anyone else notice that the artwork for Pebble is now a total trendbreaker? Was that album a diversion or what?

new Laura Stevenson streaming

YESSSSSSSssssssuhhhh.

I wrote about this briefly a few weeks ago (right here, in fact), but I come bearing good nudes: the album's been graciously released in a stream for the whole interbutt to hear. Unfortunately, it's only on Spotify right now, so you'll have to download the program first, but that wasn't much of an obstacle for my voracious, diseased need to listen to this. That said, because I hate sitting in front of the computer for long stretches, I've not really flogged it enough to formulate an opinion on it yet, so the write-up will have to wait until the two of us can be alone in candlelight. All I can say is that it sounds fantastic so far, and I get the inkling that this one will be my favorite item in Laura Stevenson's already awesome catalogue by the end of the year.

Check it out here

&

Pre-order a copy here

In conclusion, the word "here" is a magical portal into the Laura Stevenson dimension.

things that are better than I thought part 1

Man, does life suck a lot less when your chipped molar isn't in the death throes of infection and ready to pop like a corn kernel ;) #rootcanals #ada #dentist #conebeamcomputerizedtomography #smh

If the jump in page views and traffic is any indication, covering current stuff is a lot more lucrative (in the pat-on-the-back sense) than being another 24 year old conveying the "Jawbreaker ROOLZ" message to a supersaturated interbutt-browsing populous. I'm not saying that I'm done plugging non-current shit just for the attention, it's just that I've been feeling way more into THE NAO lately, which has never really been the case. Checking out new music has proven to be way more opportunistic and fun in a lot of ways, seeing as they still play and produce new tuneage, and for the moment, I am all about that shit. Moreover, every time I think about the fact that I'll probably never get to see Discount, The Broadways, and Boris The Sprinkler play in my lifetime it makes me very upset.
SO COME, JOIN ME AS WE MARCH INTO THE POP P0NX FUTURE:

I really, really like Joyce Manor. I unashamedly believe the hype, and I would kiss all up on their faces and shit to display the deep bond I've formed with their creative execration. In figgety-fact, their self-titled LP - despite dropping less than 2 years ago - has quickly crawled way up on my Favorite Album Totem Pole, and sits pretty comfortably alongside such lusty entities as The Weakerthans' Fallow, Common Rider's Last Wave Rockers, and American Steel's s/t in terms of pure enjoyability. It's especially satisfying considering I only picked them up on a whim, and while it's not a mInDbLoWiNg reinvention of the pop-punk wheel, it IS a crazy solid, nearly flawless bit of eyewatering angstmagic I could easily spin til' infinity. If songs like "Beach Community" and "Famous Friend" wanna remain anchored to my psyche like cathartic, fist-pumping tumors forever, I think I'll be alright with that.
But this post isn't about the seepia tinted olden days of the self-titled (seeing as I've always thought it was radcakes), although maybe it should be. See, I came into this post thinking you'd be fully aware of my rabid fandom already, but as it turns out, I never even finished that earlier Joyce Manor post or have ever had any readers. Regardless, frowns were frowned and harsh words were exchanged betwixt me and last year's followup LP, Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired. I'm not gonna quote any of it (because it seems sorta dumb and buttmad), but essentially I was like: "shit's underwhelming, brah. it's too short and unlike the s/t". I stood by this after a few dozen listens following this un-posted post, too, but time has a way of making stools of us all. And well, yeah, it is way too short for a "full length" - like, "come on, you assholes" short - and pretty unlike the s/t, but you could generally do a lot worse than not repeating yourself and only writing 11 minutes of new material.

While the self-titled was a fairly straightforward, smoothly flowing set of 9 songs in 18 minutes, OATIWSGT is a pretty big overhaul, and a gutsy one at that. Here, the distortion's been turned down from "BZZZZ" to "bzzz", the hooks are floating on the surface like they're suffering from nutrient malabsorbtion, and the variation from track to track hits me more like a punked-out Guided By Voices than a fresh spin on Bay Area fare. Looking at it critically, it's not really any wonder this put a lot of people (including me) off so hard; there's very little grit here comparatively, but in it's place, some fuzzed out acoustic numbers, a lot of crooning by way of a prevalent Smiths/New Order bend, and a fucking cover of "Video Killed The Radio Star". Yeah. I know it sounds gnarly, but somehow, despite all this, the songwriting here is still impossibly addictive and listenable as it was on Joyce Manor. Seriously. I have no idea if this was a calculated risk or a genuine, collective "I don't give a fuck", but it really doesn't matter when all of it grows on you like athlete's foot in the locker dimension. Pretend that wasn't stupid plox.
To assure yew, this still sounds unmistakably like Joyce Manor. Yeah, Barry Johnson's cut most of the shrieking desperation from his voice to become a less hilarious Morrissey, and there's a song performed with an 80's 2 THE MAX drum machine and little else, but beneath it all is still that creamy Jawbreaker-ish center the lot of us will spank it to ad infinitum. Tracks like "Violent Inside" and "If I Needed You There" simultaneously rekindle olde p0nx magick while pushing the band's boundaries, but the utterly skeletal brevity of "Drainage" and "I'm Always Tired" are what make me really drool over this. Clocking in a little under/over a minute each, the pair remind me of all those moments where I'd find a beautiful, gutwrenching little chunk of music plaguing my subconscious and later (usually much later) find it to be a 30 second, recorded-under-a-snowbank quality Guided By Voices song I'd previously thought nothing of. While "Drainage" brings the somber, bottom lip biting goodness with just a ragged acoustic guitar and a few piano plunks, it's "I'm Always Tired" that really, really gets me. I feel like I've written these lyrics a zillion times:


I’m always tired.
I’m always at least half asleep.
Blemish and state how I don’t feel great now.
I don’t hang out in her hair.
I don’t wonder if she cares.
I lay awake now, I entertain my plans
To one day miraculously be talkative and likable,
To wake up as someone else, someone I know is inside of me,
Just waiting to be put to use by something much more sharp than us.
They pry out every fucking piece and still they’re coming around again.

To close: Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired turned out to be a hugely satisfying release, especially considering how disappointed I was by it at first. This is a fucking awesome album, and a great addition to their catalog. I don't think it could stand alone as well as their self-titled by any means, but it's at least on par with that album's "compulsive listenability", as some rock critic dude probably said. I know that's not an original thought. I don't know if I could recommend you pay LP prices for 7" length album, but if flipping over the record every five minutes floats your salad, you couldn't do much better than this.
The sole complaint I have still floats around the "waaah it's too short" universe, but lettuce be specific: the "Video Killed The Radio Star" cover is over 2 minutes long. I realize the original is only about 45 seconds longer, but context is important here. While the band completely DID make the song their own (much like their awesome cover of "Midnight Service At The Mutter Museum"), and I totally applaud their unfuckgiveable attitude, maybe it wasn't such a hot idea to waste 1/6th of a 13 minute "album" on a cover of the worst song in the entire universe.

Oh, and while I can't embed this for some reason, totally give this a look.