GOLD SPARKLE BAND: Live at the Silver Ceiling circa 1997. Photo by Steve Pomberg
Gold Sparkle Band, one of the most influential and far-reaching ensembles to emerge from Atlanta’s underground music scene of the early ’90s, is returning to headline an evening at Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery on Saturday, October 14. The group’s deft compositions, improvisations, and live performances defined a sophisticated era for Atlanta’s underground music scene, alongside contemporaries such as Smoke, Cat Power, and the Rock*A*Teens. Decades later, the energy the group has wielded since 1994 still resonates within the more adventurous realms of the city’s outsider music and arts scenes.
This show marks the first in a series of events geared toward raising awareness for Eyedrum’s two-night 25th anniversary party happening the weekend of Nov. 11 and 12.
Since August of 1998, two of Gold Sparkle Band’s co-founding members, alto saxophone and reeds player Charles Waters and percussionist Andrew Barker have resided in New York City, where they remain musically active under different iterations of the group’s moniker—mostly as the Gold Sparkle Trio.
For the evening of their Eyedrum performance, Waters and Barker are returning to play two full sets with fellow GSB co-founder and trumpet player Roger Ruzow and longtime bass player Chris Riggenbach.
Other co-founding members, bass players Andrew Burnes and Joe Jamerson are no longer performing with the group. Saxophonist and flautist Rob Mallard, who was also a founding member of GSB, died in 2018.
Gold Sparkle Band. Photo by Thomas Tulis
“Charles and I still communicate pretty much every day,” Ruzow says. “He sends me new music that he’s working on all of the time—any genre that you can imagine. I send him new material pretty much every day as well. We have been talking about getting together to play another show down here for quite some time. When Randy Castello and Will Lawless from Eyedrym contacted us about playing their anniversary, it felt as though the time was right.”
For this show, Waters, Barker, Ruzow, and Riggenbach will perform the first set as a quartet. After that, they’ll lead a second set performing as the Gold Sparkle Big Band, an expanded version of the group that will include tenor sax player Ben Davis (Purkinje Shift, Edgewood Sax Trio, Teardrinker Salts), oboe player Robbie Hunsinger, Jason Casanova (4th Ward Afro Klezmer Orchestra) playing euphonium, flautist Anne Richardson, and pianist Chris Case—nine players total.
“Stylistically speaking, what sets these two performances apart is the extremely high caliber of musicians that are joining in for the large ensemble performance,” Ruzow says. “They will make it an absolute blow out no matter what the hell we decide on playing.”
Throughout the years, improvisation based around deconstructing traditional musical forms while straddling the avant-garde and solid grooves to create an evocative atmosphere has remained at the heart of GSB’s sound. Gold Sparkle Band has long wielded the talents of a world-class jazz unit. Each number is built upon a structured composition—mostly written by Waters—that’s used as a vehicle to drive the melody and the musical ideas that are brought to the fore, while also creating a form and context for the music. Improvisation launches from there, and the music can glide along in a linear, blues-based progression, or it can go full-on primal scream. It all depends on the moment in which the music is created.
The group has collaborated with likeminded musicians ranging from free jazz double bassist and Cecil Taylor cohort William Parker to Chattanooga’s the Shaking Ray Levis. The group’s New York-based members have even collaborated with lauded Chicago free jazz veteran Ken Vandermark for the 2004 CD, Brooklyn Cantos.
The music often sidles up to a simmering middle ground, easing in at first, then skittering to life with muscular, horn-punctuated grooves that barrel through numbers such as “Zodiac Attack” from the Fugue & Flowers album, and “People’s Republic” from Brooklyn Cantos.
Songs from releases such as 1995’s Earth Mover, 1997’s Downsizing, and 1999’s Nu-Soul Zodiac build on an ethos that resembles something of a punk rock aesthetic, although far beit from anything that can be easily categorized.
“Punk is a good touchstone, but what we’re creating is more like a contemplated combustion,” Ruzow says. “In previous years, when we were experimenting with punk aesthetics, it was all about us learning to command a particular energy and direction. Now, we have a slightly better understanding of that energy and how to turn it into something that we drive, rather than it driving us,” he adds. “It incorporates aspects from each of our lives, which are all very different, but connected by a compulsion to play music.”
Gold Sparkle Band playing the Jump Fest at Eyedrum in 2002. Photo by Thomas Tulis
Waters adds: “All of us come from sone kinda analog punk background. Our first bassist Andrew Burnes—he was a superstar and super vital in my process of becoming a ‘composer’—has his hands in the middle of all you describe. Our frequent guitatist Jer Wilms, now back in Atlanta, who worked in a million ensembles and then brought his genius to the Nuzion Big Band, is amazing. We are a band of collaborators and saboteurs, poets, ghosts, and some special sauce that jazz mostly doesn’t have. That is because we are a BAND! We’re a fucking band, and we play each others mistakes, we love each other—sometimes each others others and many in between. Gold Sparkle is a band and thats why we rock and have a future.”
During GSB’s mid-to-late ’90s Atlanta heyday the group could be seen on most nights tearing up stages everywhere from Homage Cafe and Dottie’s to the Moreland Ave. Tavern, the Point, Cotton Club, and Frijoleros. Gold Sparkle Band even shared the stage at the Highlander with John Zorn’s Masada—an ensemble playing compositions inspired by radical Jewish culture. “It was a life-changing experience,” says Ruzow, who now leads the 4th Ward Afro Klezmer Orchestra.
All of the aforementioned venues are long gone—relics of an everychanging cityscape that no longer exists.
The Star Bar, MJQ, and Eyedrum were also regular haunts for the group. But as Waters says, the group still has a future.
For this show, the group will delve into material from their early aughts albums including 2002’s Thunder Reminded Me and Fugues & Flowers.
“During our whole trajectory in New York City, which is semi taking for granted, me and Barker have worked a million gigs and we still love doing it,” Waters says. “Barker leads his trips, and I play my wacky garden chamber music. We just keep on with it.”
Throughout the ‘90s, GSB emerged as a Southern counterpart to the post-rock, indie rock, and free jazz sounds created by Midwestern acts such as Slint, Tortoise, and the Vandermark 5. In a single musical moment, the group’s live performances would unfurl with all the flare of a conventional jazz outfit before drifting into psychedelic clusters of skronk and wail. Each number intimating a cerebral sense of immediacy that defined an innovative and iconoclastic era of Atlanta’s underground music scene, and dovetailed with what was happening with the world at large.
That sound and vision remains as potent as potent as ever, and the future remains wide open.
On Oct. 12, two days before playing Eyedrum, Gold Sparkle Band’s members are hosting a workshop from 6-8 p.m., discussing a hands-on approach to live improvisational musical styles.
TAV FALCO PANTHER BURNS (L to R): Walter Brunetti, Mario Monterosso, Giuseppe Sangirardi, and Tav Falco. Photo by Jamie Harmon
Singer, guitar slinger, filmmaker, and creative provocateur Tav Falco began his career in a Memphis cotton loft on the banks of the Mississippi River circa 1979, when he chain sawed a guitar into pieces. It was an act of performance art that has resonated across the globe ever since, taking shape amid a cabaret of the Southern rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, and the avant-garde. Over the years, Falco’s notoriously outsider musical outfit Panther Burns has included everyone from Big Star singer and guitarist Alex Chilton to Minutemen and fIREHOSE bass player Mike Watt, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds drummer Toby Dammit.
These days, Falco calls Bangkok home. In recent years, Panther Burns’ lineup has solidified around a powerful trio of Italian players, including guitar player Mario Monterosso, bass player Giuseppe Sangirardi, and percussionist Walter Brunetti.
On Tuesday, October 3, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns plays Smith’s Olde Bar, supporting the group’s latest album, Nashville Sessions: Live at Bridgestone Arena Studios. Monterosso, Sangirardi, and Brunetti set the night in motion with an instrumental set of cinematic surf and rockabilly numbers. Savannah-based post-punk outfit Twisty Cats performs as well.
While making his way from Paris to the United States., Falco took a few minutes to answer a few questions about his lifetime of cross-cultural voyages and gaining a deeper understanding of his origins.
I have been told that you are laser-focused on completing the Urania film trilogy. How is the work coming along, and can you talk a bit about how the idea behind the trilogy has evolved as you’ve been working on it? Also, why is this such an important work for you to complete?
Chad, delighted to speak with you again. After much travail, delays due to hardware and equipment issues, interventions of concert tours, and diversions with female interests, I have finished the complete Urania Trilogy of intrigue films. From February through August, I managed to chain myself to the editing bench, flogging it day and night. With the remote collaboration of Steff Galvan, an emerging photographer in Vienna, who proofed my edits and offered invaluable aesthetic suggestions, we brought this feature movie to its inevitable conclusion. I say inevitable because there is much of Fate involved – its long, reaching arm overriding any one’s efforts who dares create a narrative flow from nothing more than fragments and shards of a filmic idea.
The film begins on the banks of the Arkansas River, then swiftly decamps to the merry/sinister capital of old Vienna, onward to the alpine lake region of Austria on the mystic Traunsee – the Lake of Dreams. The final dénouement plays out in a hotel room on the Grand Canal of Venice. It seemed like those ghostlike fragments sitting in their film cans decomposed – as if they hardly existed. On the screen, the retrieved images appeared thin and spectral. Once I began to assemble those fragments into a kind of Orphic flow, the movie suddenly began to live… and to breathe. It is alive, I thought. And it was and is alive with a life of its own. A pale Frankenstein that once again exposed to light, took form and gesture larger than Fate. I began to realize that I was merely the servant of this film. I became its priest at the altar serving its rights of creation. The film has its own destiny and rituals to be honored. Each scene has a secret that had to be discovered lurking within the black and white tonalities, gestures, and movements. Inside each scene is an intelligence hidden and buried that I had to find. A riddle that only an oracle or a muse could unravel.
Soon I became an animal chained to the keyboard. I tutored myself technically, but no film theory or scholarly method could offer guidance. As Werner Herzog wrote, “Film is not the Art of scholars, but of illiterates.” I excavated this movie from chaos, from extinction. Now that the trauma of it is over – the trauma of revelation, I realize I’ve conjured a film that is living and breathing, yet it is a dead thing. That is the nature of anything photographic. Once the living image is captured, it is frozen in time. It dies. That is the dichotomy of film. Motion pictures are a living dead thing.
One can contextualize film, or any expression, and call it Art. But if it is contextualized again and again, context swallows art and eventually excretes it. Then what you are left with is excrement. Let’s not make art of my movie. It is a lyrical ribbon of images that lives and dies on the screen telling its own story on its own, however imperfect terms. My cabal of musical alchemists have created themes to serve this commanding filmic ghost that stalks across the screen like a corsair hurling deception, vengeance, and betrayal at the audience – while seducing the viewers’ senses with a vital elegance.
Is there any overlap with the work you’ve been pouring into the film trilogy and with what we hear on the Nashville Sessions: Live at Bridgestone Arena Studios LP? Is it difficult for you to mentally toggle between filmmaking and making music? Is there a difference for you? Do you feel like either one of these avenues helps you achieve a more mysterious version of yourself?
My intent is not to achieve a more mysterious version of myself. Either someone is mysterious, or they are not. Yet I am an enigma, even to myself. Somethings are meant to be a mystery. Why tamper with that, and shine flashlights up every nook and cranny of the human psyche attempting to make logical that which is ineffable? I don’t know what I am doing, and I don’t want to know. That I learned from Fellini. As I’ve said before, I have only one song to sing whether intoxicated within the imbroglio of film, or intoning music before the microphone, or writing with a pencil. The new live album of the Panther Burns stage show is a manifestation of that one song – that lone, subjective eye.
TAV FALCO: Photo by Jamie Harmon
How did you get involved with Sirius XM’s Outlaw Country station to record this latest release?
Like most of what we do, the project came about through a process of association. Over time we’ve been invited to appear on a number of SiriusXM Radio shows in their studios at Rockefeller Plaza when we were passing through New York. Outlaw Country was the most recent show where our incendiary impulses were recorded for their honky tonk, hillbilly listeners. Before that, it was truckers’ radio show. I asked if they were sure they wanted an esoteric band like Panther Burns for that road gang radio broadcasting. The programmers said, yup. We know who you are. Jeremy Tepper, the erudite producer of Outlaw Country, recorded us in Nashville for a Halloween special. When we heard the mixes, we sent them to our label ORG Music in LA who became stoked to release the broadcast as an LP.
Will you be performing with the same lineup that plays on the record?
The very same Panther Burns band of Italians will be on tour as appeared on our previous album Cabaret Of Daggers and on the new Nashville live album: Mario Monterosso, electric guitar; Giuseppe Sangirardi, electric bass; Walter Brunetti, drums, cow bell, and tambourine.
When you consider the song list on the new album, is there a song or songs that you think of as your favorite here, or is there a song that really resonates with you now, maybe more than the others?
“The Ballad Of The Rue De La Lune” is a kind of true romance story I never seem to tire of hearing. Probably the more meaningful of any on the record.
What is your favorite thing about playing music with Mario Monterosso?
Mario Monterosso has the mind and ears of a producer and an arranger. He has the soul of a volcano, and the poetic depth of the Gulf of Tirania in his guitar playing. He saw me on stage in Catania as a teenager. Mario is far more than a brilliant musician, and he understands my vision. What more can you ask for?
Over the years, you have lived in rural Arkansas, Memphis, Paris, Vienna, and now Bangkok Thailand. There’s an old expression that says: “No matter where you go, there you are!” As you have moved from city to city around the world, and experienced these vastly different cultures on a day-to-day basis, what have you learned about yourself? What have you learned since leaving Memphis?
Cross-cultural voyages firstly open a deeper understanding of where one comes from, where one has grown up. When one lives day to day in another culture different from the last, the senses also deepen. Perception of languages deepen. Language itself becomes abstractly wonderous – how sounds and utterances become attached to meaning; how each culture has divined its own languages, meanings, rituals, and of course, its music. It is true that music is a universal language; and even though it has elaborated harmonic structures, it is an abstract one. Another abstract mystery. From this vantage, I know Memphis better now than when I had lived there for 17 years. After a certain age it is not possible to fully adopt another culture; I will always be an American living wherever – I cannot change that nor intend to. Also, I have learned that contrary to what becomes instilled in the minds of many, i.e., borders, flags, war paint, and propaganda, betray cultural identity rather than protect it. —Tav Falco, Paris 2023
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HEX ERROR: David Lane (from left), Jason Hatcher, and Greg Stevens.
On June 19, 2003, bass player David Lane, drummer Greg Stevens, and singer and guitar player Jason Hatcher of Hex Error went into Zero Return Studios with Rob del Bueno, aka Coco the Electronic Monkey Wizard of Man? Or Astro-Man?.
The plan was to cut the instrumental tracks for six new songs the group had been working on since releasing their self-titled debut CD in 2001. Vocals were to be recorded during another session later on down the line. The rising noise rock three-piece was slashing its way through the local scene, playing shows at venues such as Lenny’s and the Earl, and landing spots at the day-long Corndogorama indie rock festival.
Alas, this fatal afternoon at Zero Return, now dubbed Maze Studios, was Hex Error’s last studio session. Hatcher, Stevens, and Lane broke up before vocals were recorded and the three never looked back.
Since then, Lane has long served as singer and guitar player with the band Skin Jobs, who released their debut album Def Bods in 2021. Stevens has spent time playing with various bands, and currently plays in the groups Uneven Lanes with Benjamin, as well as Total Peace Band. Lane and Stevens also currently play in the post-punk outfit Scratch Offs.
Hatcher died on February 20, 2022.
While doing some housekeeping during the pandemic, del Bueno discovered a 2-inch reel of the sessions and passed it along to Stevens.
The recordings offering a stark and compelling glimpse at what was a quickly evolving musical outfit. The crushing grooves that drive the opening number, “Death From Above,” and the dissonant energy of “Greed” capture a mastery of songwriting dynamics. “Social Leprosy” and the wide-eyed “Time” show off instincts that move far beyond the nascent, teeth-gnashing dirges of their self-titled 2001 debut. The instrumental recordings as they are rendered here capture Hex Error in gloriously muscular and sophisticated form.
Stevens took a few minutes to talk more about the recording.
Chad Radford: Where have these tapes been for the last 20 years?
Greg Stevens: The tapes had been in storage at Zero Return until the pandemic. During that time, Rob del Bueno let me know he had come across this 2-inch reel of tape from our final recording session. Jason passed away a year or so ago, so we figured it would be a fitting memorial to him to release this EP 20 years after the initial recording.
Did you alter the recordings in any way?
The initial recording wasn’t altered in any way. We had completed all of the basic tracking at the session on 6/29/03. That said, we broke up before we could complete the vocals, so these are instrumental tracks only. Given that Jason had passed, there wasn’t an opportunity to add vocals to anything. So we ended up putting the finishing touches on it, as is. We worked with David Barbe for the mixing of the 2-inch tape out at Chase Park in Athens and Carl Saff for the mastering.
Have you had any realizations about these songs or the band in general now that you have released this final recording?
David Lane and I have been playing music together off and on for the past 20 years. It has been interesting releasing these tracks from 20 years ago while at the same time we are putting the finishing touches on the upcoming Scratch Offs record. So from that perspective it’s interesting to see how much we have both grown as musicians over the past couple of decades. We’re really proud of how far we took the Hex Error sound all those years ago, and we’re excited about exploring different sonic territories with Scratch Offs.
What’s your favorite song from this session?
The opening track, “Death from Above,” really highlights what we could have accomplished had we not called it a day. We had started working within longer song structures and more intricate polyrhythms. That one was a crowd favorite, whether we were playing in Atlanta or out on the road.
Where there lyrics written and performed with these songs that are now just lost to the sands of time?
All of these songs had lyrics. We performed all of them live back in the day. So, yes, lost to the sands of time.
Any plans for a physical release with this one?
Not at this time. We decided to self-release this digitally mainly for archival purposes. But if a label was so inclined, we’d definitely be into it.
Do you have a release date in mind for the Scratch Offs LP? Does it have a title yet?
We just got the final master back from Carl Saff a couple of days ago. We’re aiming for a digital release in the next couple months, before we do our next batch of shows. We’re playing with Bass Drum of Death and Small at the Earl on September 7, and then headed to Florida for some dates shortly after that. So it would be good for people to have a frame of reference aside from the live experience. Right now, the consensus is to call the record Tidal Wave.
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The reviews are in, “Atlanta Record Stores: An Oral History” is a bonafide hit! Check out a list of interviews, reviews, and more. … And click below to get a signed copy of the book delivered to your door.
“The new book ‘Atlanta Record Stores: An Oral History’ shares stories of the influence these stores have had over the past half-century.”— “Record stores offer ‘singular take’ on a city’s history” by Peter Biello for Georgia Public Broadcasting/NPR’s All Things Considered
“While Atlanta often operates on the premise that anything not mega-famous must be outdated and worth mercy-killing for profit, Radford’s book is a reminder that—to paraphrase Faulkner—the past isn’t even past. The city’s counterculture is a DIY torch passed to each generation.” — “A new history of Atlanta and Athens record stores meets the subcultural moment” by John Ruch for Saporta Report
“Rather than a straight narrative, Radford let the owners, employees past and present, musicians, and shoppers tell the stories of the record stores in a series of oral histories. It’s a breezy, funny, nostalgic read.” — “New book chronicles the history of Atlanta’s record stores” with Collin Kelly for Rough Draft
Why write a book about Atlanta record stores? The truth is that you get a singularly unique perspective on a city’s history, its culture, and its personality when viewed through the lens of a record store’s front window. I have often said that if you want to understand a society or a culture, just take a look at its pop culture, and music has always remained right there on the frontlines.
Atlanta is world-renowned as a hip-hop mecca, but a rich underground rock scene has been thriving here for decades. The hub of that world is the city’s record stores. Featuring decades-old institutions to shops that existed just long enough to leave an impact, Atlanta Record Stores is a rock-centric take on a hip-hop town, unfurling the secret history of music underdogs—outliers living among outliers—telling their stories in their native tongue. From Jarboe of SWANS to William DuVall of Alice in Chains and Neon Christ to Kelly Hogan, Gentleman Jesse Smith, Atlanta Braves organist Matthew Kaminski, and those surly characters behind the counter at Wuxtry, Wax ‘n’ Facts, Criminal, Ella Guru, Fantasyland, and more, all were drawn by the irresistible lure of vinyl records—all found their communities and their own identities, leaving an indelible mark on the culture of Atlanta.
Click below to purchase a signed copy of Atlanta Record Stores: An Oral History. $25 (postage paid).
– Send payment via Venmo to @Chad-Radford-6 or click below to pay via Paypal.
Mr. Clit and the Pink Cigarettes have been a locomotive punk rock freak-out on the national DIY circuit since their 2010 inception in Indianapolis. In that time, The Pink Cigarettes have been defined by their love of all things DIY, their jubilant, unrepentant creativity, and the ferocity by which it is all held together.
Born out of a high school friendship, bassist Abby Hart and guitarist Davey Gravey originally formed a horror punk band going by the name Room 21, a reference to The Misfits’ song “Horror Hotel.” When that band ended in 2010, the friends readied their next project to play an already scheduled Halloween show. Ayesha Clarissa then joined and learned drums for the project. While the band started as a five-piece, two members quickly exited, and the trio of Clarissa, Gravey, and Hart continued to write, driven by their desire to share their music and play shows.
“Our reason for naming [the band] as flamboyantly as it is, is because we had been listening to The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and we thought about having just a whole troupe of people playing when we were writing the songs and that’s kind of like, where the crazy name came from,” says Hart. “Our friends would always be like, ‘Hey, let’s have a party, but… let’s make it formal.’ And then as we got more into the band, we wanted to show our inspirations aesthetically for the band, so like a ‘60s, ‘50s [-era] John Waters ‘Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.’ We wanted it to be colorful and fun.” Gravey notes, “We were watching all the John Waters movies when we recorded the first stuff that we were making.” Hart adds, “And [Richard Elfman’s film] ‘Forbidden Zone.’ We chose the name because it could be a band that was in a John Waters movie. He’d be like, ‘Yes, you can be in my movie, that’s a name that fits!’”
Live, Mr. Clit and the Pink Cigarettes are an utter spectacle. The musicians throw themselves about on stage in a thrall, somehow keeping the propulsive backbeat in the pocket as Hart and Gravey alternate singing into a single microphone at center stage. The performance is immediately captivating. Driven by the force of Clarissa’s percussion, the melodies of the songs are carried by the alternating vocals of Gravey and Hart, when they aren’t screaming at the top of their lungs. The band’s sound is akin to Pixies driving too fast for conditions, or a version of The Gories that grooves until they actually, truly bite you on the shoulder when you aren’t looking.
Key to the ongoing success of the band is their DIY mentality and love of DIY culture. Hart explains, “I care if a band is good. But, I care way less if a band is good if they’re shitty people. I would rather play a show where maybe it doesn’t make full sense but everyone is on the same page about community, and DIY.” Adds Gravey, “So much of this whole thing is friends, making connections…”
Hart continues, “The bands that aren’t signed to giant labels, and even some that are signed to smaller labels, we’re all using the same contacts, we’re all in this together, I guess. And it makes it way easier when everyone’s on the same page. We all just like doing this, whether it’s successful that night or not.”
Clarissa concludes, “Being in a band gives us an excuse to do all of the different parts of it. It gives us an excuse to make a video, it gives us an excuse to make a design for a T-shirt. It gives us an excuse to dress up, it gives us an excuse to paint your instrument or your new pedal. It gives us an excuse to do things that are fun.”
The band is now looking forward to the release of a new full-length, as well as a split 7-inch with NightFreak from Chicago, both on What’s for Breakfast? Records.
THE SPURS: Christopher March (from left), Buddy Weeks, Kelly Halliburton, and Jenny Connor.
Jenny Don’t and the Spurs are making their way across the country, playing songs from their brand new album, Lovesick Crawl, out now via Augusta, GA’s Missing Fink Records. Before hitting the road, the Portland, OR-based group’s founding members Jenny Connors and Kelly Halliburton took some time out of their day to talk about the Cramps, Dead Moon, Wipers, and the songs that make up Lovesick Crawl.
Catch Jenny Don’t and the Spurs when they play the Earl on Feb. 23, and Fink Fest in Savannah on Feb. 24.
Let’s talk about what you had in mind when you settled on the song and album title, Lovesick Crawl. It’s the word “crawl” that really grabs my attention.
Jenny Connors: We were listening to a lot of music by the Cramps. The cover art for the album is by Stephen Blickenstaff, who did the cover art for the Cramps’ Bad Music For Bad People, which is a really cool coincidence. We’d talked about doing something in the style of the Cramps, but nothing turned out sounding like the Cramps as it evolved. It’s essentially about being in love with someone—being infatuated—and you can imagine yourself crawling across the floor just to get their attention.
The song originally had an intro that was similar to the Cramps’ “Human Fly,” but we nixed that along the way. Then Johnny from Missing Fink Records approached us about releasing the record.
Kelly Halliburton: Stephen does a lot of the artwork for Missing Fink. Johnny contacted us less than six months before the record came out. We did the recording sessions in February 2022, and finished songwriting six months before that. The idea to channel the Cramps came to us before we knew that Johnny was working with Stephen so much. It added yet another layer to the strange coincidences surrounding this record.
How did the two of you meet and start making music together?
Jenny: I started stalking Kelly around 2008, until I finally whittled him down to date me. I was up front for a Pierced Arrows show and thought it was great. The drummer was super hot and I wanted to hang out with him, so I wrote to him on Myspace. That puts a date on it!
Kelly Halliburton and Jenny Connors
Kelly: Our relationship as a couple pre-dates the Spurs by about three-four years. It took a while because I was touring a lot with Pierced Arrows. The singer and guitar player Fred Cole started getting sick around 2012 or ‘13 so the band slowed down and eventually ground to a halt. Jenny and I had talked about doing something together. It wasn’t until Pierced Arrows wasn’t really a thing anymore that we had time to make it happen. Eventually all of our other bands broke up and this was the last one standing.
Jenny: Kelly and I have a pretty big age gap between us. I was just about to turn 22 when we met. He’s 16 years older than me and said, “I don’t want to date a 22 year-old.” But I said “Come on, I’m serious!” And here we are. We got married last year.
When we were talking about doing stuff together, Sam Henry and I started gigging around town playing a bunch of songs that I already had, which I used on the first album. Sam became the drummer for the Spurs.
Kelly: At first it was me and Jenny. I had an acoustic bass and she had an acoustic guitar. We wanted to keep it really stripped down, and not rely on anyone so that we could do this at any time, whether it’s on a street corner, in our backyard, wherever. It was purely acoustic and we sounded terrible. Something was missing. We didn’t have a ton of experience playing acoustically. All of our previous bands played amplified punk and garage rock. We wanted to keep it stripped down, but we asked Sam to play a snare with some brushes to keep time. Eventually there was a bass drum, then a high hat, and before we knew it, it was this loud, amplified thing with a full drum kit and electric instruments.
Jenny: Then we thought, “You know what’s really missing are guitar solos.”
Sam Henry was the original drummer for the classic Portland punk band Wipers.
Kelly: He played on the first three Wipers singles and the first album, Is This Real? They started in ‘77-‘78. He quit the Wipers in ‘80-‘81. I love everything [Wipers singer/guitarist] Greg Sage has done, but not everyone does. For most people, all you need are the first three LPs: Is This Real, Youth of America, and Over the Edge.
Sam quit the Wipers and joined Napalm Beach, which is kind of funny. Sam doesn’t play on the Wipers album Land of the Lost, but their singer and guitar player Chris Newman drew the dinosaur artwork, which is the weirdest cover, but they were all weirdos [laughs].
Jenny: When we were on tour, a lot of people would come up and say, “No way, Sam Henry from Napalm Death!” [laughs].
I was hanging around a record shop with a few older guys when the Wipers ‘96 album The Herd came out. They said, “Uh, this is gonna suck!” But I took the promo CD home, and even though it wasn’t cool to like The Herd, I loved it. The guitar playing is cosmic.
Kelly: Greg never deviated from his formula, so it’s not like anything on that record is all that different. He slowed it down, but it’s still dreamy, twangy, reverb-drenched guitar. He got more into the whole alien abduction thing. That album art has a fence around the world. That stuff follows Greg’s obsession with alien abduction. From what I understand, he firmly believes that he’s been abducted by aliens. If you look closely, that’s sort of a theme that runs throughout a lot of his stuff.
I’ll never hear “Alien Boy” the same way again.
[Laughs].
Sam died in February 2022, but he plays on Lovesick Crawl.
Jenny: Yes, Lovesick Crawl features the last recordings that he made. At the end of our January 2022 tour, he wasn’t feeling well. We were heading to Seattle to record. His doctor said, “You need some rest,” so Sam told us he couldn’t make it. A lot went into scheduling, though, so we planned to wing it and go anyway. He heard that we didn’t cancel so he changed his mind and came with us.
We finished the recordings and were supposed to have a show in Everett, but he was in really poor shape. We canceled the show and took him to the hospital, which was the beginning of the end for him, unfortunately.
Kelly: He was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I want to say the day after the recording session ended. They gave him three months to live but he didn’t make it three weeks.
Jenny: Obviously, no one saw what was coming. We were at the end of a tour. He was older and everyone feels like shit after a tour. The doctor said, “Maybe you drank too much on tour,” which he hadn’t. But he did great during those recording sessions. He didn’t complain. He felt uncomfortable, and every day it was getting a little worse. Something was seriously wrong. In the end, it makes these recordings extra special for us.
Is there a song on the record where his performance stands out?
Jenny: The session as a whole stands out for me. But “Lost Myself” stands out because I think about when we were writing the song. He would say, “How about we try this,” or “I’m going to hit the drum like this.” I have a lot of memories associated with that song.
Kelly: It’s hard not to think about how difficult it must’ve been for him to get through those sessions. There are a couple of songs from earlier sessions: His drums are great on “Right From the Start.” We recorded that song not too long after we wrote it. Later, we did the session where the album version came from. There’s the single version and the version on Lovesick Crawl. The later version was recorded after we’d played it for a while.
Jenny: “Black Cadillac” is a good example of his ability to go all out, or scale it back. He’s mainly playing snare and the rim and clicking the drum sticks together, and adds dynamics throughout that.
Not a lot of players can entertain without playing the whole kit. They get bored. There’s a video of Sam playing that, and there’s never a dull moment.
It’s kind of a beautiful thing that he did what he loved doing till the end.
Kelly: If we’d gone to Seattle without Sam we wouldn’t be able to listen to these songs. The fact that he rallied and did it is a testimony to his dedication. He was 64 and he had a ball every time we played. He was an amazing person to be in a band with. There will never be another Sam Henry.
Jenny: After he passed away, Kelly, our guitar player Christopher, and I asked, “What does this mean for us as a band?” Collectively, we acknowledged that Sam dedicated the last 10 years of his life to this band, and wouldn’t want us to end at this point. We were all on the same page, and having that camaraderie helped with the grieving process.
Kelly: Sam was such a gregarious personality, and such an outgoing, loving person. He was a good counterpoint to someone like me who’s kind of a crab and wants to be alone most of the time [laughs]. He made friends with people all over the world. Everywhere we went there were people who knew and loved Sam. So everywhere we take this stuff when we’re out on the road it’s cathartic for people who loved and cared about him. We see a lot of teary eyes out front. There are a lot of people who are connected with Sam through this music.
A lot of what we’re doing now is for Sam. Why stop now? What’s the point in creating something that he cared so much about and letting it fizzle out.
It has to be rough for your new drummer fitting in as you move forward.
Kelly: Sam’s shoes are impossible to fill. It would be unfair for us to have those expectations for anyone. Also, the band is more than a working relationship. We knew Sam before the band existed. It worked better than any other band that we’ve been in. For someone else to jump in, that has to be hard and we respect that.
Jenny Don’t and the Spurs
Jenny: For a new player, the songs have to fall into the structure they’ve been written in. But obviously if they bring other inspiration to it, it’s the band’s responsibility to respect everyone’s talents individually. Even though it’s called Jenny Don’t and the Spurs, we’re all equals.
Kelly: The band that came before Pierced Arrows was Dead Moon, which had an almost cult-like status. I stepped into an environment that was probably a lot like what anyone who’s playing with us is stepping into. The guy that I replaced with Fred and Toody was Andrew Loomis, who is universally loved. Everywhere we went for the first few years everyone was looking at me saying, “You’re not Andrew.”
Fred and Toody went out of their way to reassure me that I didn’t have to try to be like Andrew. I didn’t have to try to make my drumming style like his. Obviously I wasn’t going to do that anyway, but it felt good to be reassured. I want to extend that kind of welcoming courtesy to anyone who’s stepping into this band.
I joined Dead Moon in about 2007. They were on tour in the fall of 2006. They did a really long European tour and that was pretty much the end. They were all getting sick of each other. Initially Fred and Toody wanted to take a break, but Fred was always so restless. It didn’t take them long to form a new band. They called me out of the blue in March of 2007—maybe three months after Dead Moon played their last show.
I didn’t even play drums. I’m barely a bass player, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. With so many expectations, it was terrifying at first. Not only am I not a good drummer, I’m also stepping into this kind of high profile situation where I’m in front of all of these Andrew Loomis-Dead Moon fans.
People were brutal about it. I was at a bar in Portland shortly after Pierced Arrows got going. There were fliers wheat-pasted on the bathroom wall. There was a Pierced Arrows flier with a photo of us and someone had drawn an arrow pointing at my head and wrote, “Worst drummer in Portland” [laughs].
Honestly, I couldn’t argue, but that was the level of hostility that I faced in that band. People warmed up after a while. It was also funny, because people invented a feud between Andrew and I—like Andrew was pissed because I took his spot. But Andrew and I would get together and laugh about it. He was as sick of Fred and Toody as they were of him.
Jenny: Another layer to all of these weird coincidences that lined up to where we are now: When I moved to Portland in 2008, I randomly moved into a house where Andrew hung out a lot. He introduced me to Sam, and then we started playing together. Small world! I didn’t know anything about Dead Moon and Wipers before I moved to the big city of Portland from Acme, Washington.
Kelly: In a bizarre, round-about sort of way, the existence of this band owes something to Andrew Loomis, which is awesome.
You have a new drummer now?
Jenny: His name is Buddy Weeks and we’re enjoying his presence in the band. Hopefully, if he still likes all of us after this tour, we’ll have a long relationship together.
Kelly: Playing together is one thing, but we love being on tour. Luckily he’s had a lot of touring experience. That’s almost as important as being able to play, because it ain’t easy. Putting four people in a tin can and carting them around the country for six months out of the year … There are only so many masochistic personalities that can endure that.
Jenny: You’ve gotta be able to play well and you have to be a good hang. You have to be funny. You have to be able to connect on some things outside of music a little bit, so you enjoy each other’s time together. There’s one hour of playing and 23 hours of being around each other.
Kelly: Christopher March has been playing guitar with us for almost six years. We’ve got him wearing a lot of hats. He’ll have the lap steel set up on stage, then he’ll play a baritone guitar for a couple of songs. We don’t have him literally juggling on stage yet, but we’ll incorporate that at some point, just to make his life that much more difficult [laughs].
There are moments throughout Lovesick Crawl that remind me of Hank Williams Senior’s recordings. It’s also rooted in punk rock mingling with country music—stripped down and rough-and-tumble. You roll with the mistakes.
Jenny: We enjoy it more when it’s stripped down and not super polished. We like music that’s a little rough around the edges.
Kelly: That’s certainly the music that I’m drawn to. I still own every piece of music that Discharge ever pressed to vinyl. A lot of people say that punk and country music are coming from these disparate places, but I’m not so sure their worlds are all that different.
Jenny: If the crowd is really entertaining and you mess up while you’re jumping around on stage … Entertaining is a lot more fun than worrying about perfection.
Kelly: Dead Moon was genius in their own way. No one in the band was a virtuoso musician. It was a lot more emotive than technically flawless. That resonated with people a lot more than these bands that really try to be total shredders. There’s a place for that, but there’s also a place for raw, emotive expression that comes from a different place than musical virtuosity.
That’s what attracted me to music in the first place. When I heard Black Flag for the first time I thought, this is it!
Kelly: Exactly, it doesn’t get more raw than “Nervous Breakdown.” It’s just a few minutes of raw aggression and teenage frustration. That set the template for a lot of things that are still important to me now, and I’m in my 50s!
Some of my earliest studio experiences, going back to when I was 19 years old, the drummer for Poison Idea, Steve Hanford, “The Slayer Hippy,” was a renowned producer. He did a bunch of studio work with some of my old punk bands. I learned a lot about recording while working with him. One of the things he would put into practice was if you can’t do it in a couple of takes, just ditch it and move on. Maybe come back to it in a couple of takes, maybe not. He always felt that the energy would dissipate if you ran it into the ground. I don’t know if it’s true that Poison Idea did that, but he always maintained that Poison Ideas stuff was done in one or two takes. That’s kind of our approach.
Jenny: The magic will go away if you do a solo 50 times. When I do a vocal I’ll do it three times. One warmup and two runs through it. It’s how I sound and it’s not gonna sound better if I keep doing it. On any recording you can listen and think about how you should have done something differently. When you’re in the studio you can do something over and over, but you learn to be ok with imperfections. This isn’t for us. It’s for the listeners, and they’ll make it their own.”
THOUSANDAIRE: Andrew Wiggins (from left), Tom Bruno, and Chad LeBlanc. Photo by Mike White of Deadly Designs
Ideal Conditions is an indie rock album that’s rife with layers of sonic textures, all distilled to a point of perfection, or at least Andrew Wiggins’ vision of what perfection should be for Thousandaire’s sound. “I think it all comes back to consistency,” he says over the phone while traveling from Baltimore to Philadelphia to play a show just a few days before releasing Ideal Conditions, the group’s second full-length recording.
It’s the definitive statement so far of Thousandaire’s musical DNA and the vocational drive that Wiggins has spent a lifetime honing, while maintaining control over every aspect of the music.
Wiggins is the vocalist, guitar player, and principal songwriter for Thousandaire. He is also the majordomo overseeing all creative and technical facets of the band in pretty much every situation imaginable.
In conversation, he offers a recent revelation that he’s had about leading the group, which includes bass player Chad LeBlanc and drummer Tom Bruno, while traveling up the East Coast and Mid-Atlantic states for this latest round of touring.
“We play the same, we sound the same, and we have the same amount of fun no matter what,” he says. “We’ve played in front of a hundred people and we’ve played in front of five people on this tour. We’ve played with everything mic’d up, and we’ve played with the most minimal set up, from a vocal PA in a tiny dive bar to setting up in a record store with a portable PA, and we’ve played with the same intensity. Despite these variables, it sounds just as good in any situation. That is very intentional for us,” he adds. “I have worked really hard to make that, and I didn’t want the record to be any different.”
Of course, Wiggins is pulling from decades of experience that encapsulate everything from playing and touring with a range of bands, including math rock outfit Blame Game and noisy post-punk groups HAWKS and Wymyns Prysyn. He has also spent time composing noise with his solo project Caesium Mine. Wiggins has also spent years doing live sound and mixing touring bands in venues including the Earl and 529. He also spends most of his days building fuzz pedals and repairing vintage guitars and amps at his self-run Moreland Magnetics business. “All of that experience goes into making this worthwhile for the 30 minutes we’re playing music,” he says.
Press play on Ideal Conditions and the opening number “No Good” channels an intense live band vibe, taking cues from like minded ‘90s rock acts such as Silkworm, Chavez, Dinosaur Jr., and the Meat Puppets. Asymmetrical guitar solos and fugue-like moments in rhythm take shape amid songs such as “Promise” and “Coward,” and in an older number, titled “Sgt. Billy.” Throughout each one of these numbers, extended compositions blend layered walls of sound and lyrics that are often contemplative, self-conscious, and always heartfelt.
Even at their most melodic and briskly paced moments, Thousandaire’s songs feel haunted and disquieted. Much of the inspiration behind the group’s self-titled 2020 debut album was sparked by Wiggins embracing a freshly sober lifestyle after years of consumption. Ideal Conditions reaches beyond the previous album’s blueprint as Wiggins tightens his focus on the art of crafting the music itself.
“Thousandaire was probably the best creative outlet for me to get out a lot of what I was feeling at the time, whether that was intentional or not,” he says. “I don’t need to get really personal in my songs. I have a therapist,” he laughs. “I don’t really need to use music as therapy, and all of my lyrics are hypothetical. But it is a vibe that I can’t really avoid. On the new record, there’s a little bit less of that. Time has put some distance between me and those feelings.”
In more recent years, lyrics have moved closer to the forefront of Wiggins’ mind as he has continued writing songs. The strength of the sound, the songs, the performances that keep him truly and naturally motivated.
“I used to get really frustrated about writing lyrics until one day, I was talking about it with our old drummer Adam Weisberg, after he’d moved to New York,” Wiggins recalls. “Both of us are fans of Cass McCombs, and Adam said, ‘I bet that dude gets out of bed every morning and writes lyrics all day long, whereas you get up and make fuzz pedals all day. So don’t worry about it so much, you’ve got other stuff going,” Wiggins laughs.
The raw and serrated tones and distortion of songs such as “Bar Song,” “Your Gold Teeth III,” and Ideal Conditions’ title track are instantly arresting, drawing strength from each one of their respectively visceral and emotionally stirring melodies.
“I listen to a lot of records, and I think what’s best for what I want is both consistency and intimacy,” he says. “We recorded this record as live as possible, and I want to put the listener in the room with these songs, instead of putting the listener in a balcony seat in a huge 2000-person arena where there’s a symphony that has all kinds of bells and whistles going on. There’s something to be said about those kinds of records, but it’s just not Thousandaires’ vibe.”
Wiggins owns all of the gear the band uses. He’s worked closely with drummer Bruno and bass player LeBlanc to customize each of their instruments’ singularly abrasive snarls.
Damon Moon at Standard Electric Recorders in Avondale Estates also worked closely with Wiggins to summon and recreate the sounds that Wiggins had stuck in his head, and to carve them out into real-world songs.
In this process, it’s the ability to adapt that sets Thousandaire apart.
“It’s the way we set up the equipment, the way everything sounds, the way we interact with whoever is doing sound. To me, it’s all about eliminating variables and stuff that you can’t control. If you get used to not having all the bells and whistles, like if all we did was play Terminal West where we have a huge production and a top line sound system, and then go play some record store, dive bar, or something where everything isn’t necessarily up to spec. If you can’t play your songs the same way that you play them on a big stage, then you fail.”
This extends to capturing the group’s sound on vinyl, or in the case of their latest offering, it’s on cassette. And what you hear is the culmination of Thousandaire playing under ideal conditions.
What at first feels like irony quickly fades as Upchuck’s vocalist and frontwoman KT and guitar player Mikey, laugh while explaining how spending time on the road with Melbourne’s garage punk provocateurs Amyl & the Sniffers instilled in them a sense of discipline.
“It’s true,” Mikey says. “We learned a lot from them in terms of professionalism and staying on point just by watching how they put on shows from the business end of things. We learned what it’s like playing bigger venues, how production goes, and how important it is that we show up on time.”
KT agrees, adding, “It really is a whole different game. You have to make some serious decisions if you’re going to keep stepping it up. How far do you want to take this? I learned there’s a balance between how lit do you want to get each night before you go on stage and how much do you want to deliver. I learned that there can be a natural, kinetic energy between peeps when you are on tour together, and that we can learn from each other.”
Both Mikey and KT’s voices collide, clipping each other out during a Zoom interview. Shaky connections stutter, freeze, and leap back to life—Mikey is in his car, holding his phone in his lap while driving home after a day spent working on the set of a new Exorcist film. KT keeps her phone in her hand while wandering in and out of darkened rooms in her home. For brief, fleeting moments the image of her face emerges from the glowing contrasts of the computer screen only to disappear again back into the inky darkness for the duration of our conversation. But she never misses a beat while talking, cracking herself up, laughing at her own answers, despite her sincerity. Then, a chime and another voice joins the Zoom, second guitar player Hoff announces his presence, by explaining that he’s dialing into our Zoom chat from work. “I’m listening, and I’ll might have some input here and there, but I’m running up and down stairs,” he says.
Chaos rules Upchuck—at least when viewed from the outside—following the example of their outrageous Aussie compatriots Amyl and the Sniffers, who’s early single “Some Mutts (Can’t Be Muzzled)” barked the song’s title as a primordial battle cry. Later, the same group closed out their second and most recent album, 2021’s Comfort To Me, with a song titled “Snakes,” in which singer Amy Taylor declares in her banshee howl, “Worked at the IGA, now I’mma famous cunt.”
For now, though, Upchuck’s members still punch a clock. All of this comes into perspective when parsing out the group’s hard, fast rise amid Atlanta’s disjointed, pre-pandemic local music scene.
The group came out of the gate strong in 2018, packing out DIY venues such as the Bakery’s original Warner Street location near the Adair Park and Oakland City neighborhoods, and the Drunken Unicorn on Ponce de Leon Avenue, with wall-to-wall mosh pits that sent bodies flying through the air like missiles.
KT of Upchuck on the cover of “Sense Yourself.” Photo by Nathan Davenport.
The album was two years in the making, and arrived bearing a vibrant image of KT, screaming into a microphone with blood oozing down the sides of her face and hands. It is an instantly arresting image, captured by photographer Nathan Davenport, and shot only seconds apart from Marlon Garcia’s image on the cover of the group’s “Upchuck” b/w “In Your Mind” 7-inch single. It’s a pic that has become synonymous with the group’s fun and feral energy. The whirlwind of fury kicked up during their live shows as the group tore through early songs bearing titles such as “Shakin,’” “Wage of War,” and Upchuck’s fiery self-titled anthem captured the attention of everyone from the local hardcore scene to dispassionate indie rockers and beer-swilling college kids from all walks of life.
Sense Yourself is an album that’s teeming with the sounds of swaggering danger and youthful abandon, all embodying a deeply ingrained sense of innocence. It’s a celebration of intensity that reaches a fever pitch while traversing a shared, collective experience for listeners, a seemingly insurmountable task in the modern era.
Other songs such as “Boss Up,” “In Your Mind,” “Our Skin,” and “Facecard” coalesce around a forward-leaning momentum that has kept the group forging confidently ahead this year, all the while bolstering the spirit of Atlanta’s young, underground rock music scene onto the national and international radar. If ever there was a candidate for Atlanta’s 2022 album of the year, Sense Yourself is it, its thunderous rhythms reaching larger crowds from coast to coast nearly every day since it arrived. The album’s searing energy is matched only by its bounding urgency fueled by equal parts contempt for a broken society and camaraderie within the band’s ranks.
“These boys are my family, and Mikey is literally like my big bro,” KT laughs. “We all love each other unconditionally, and my POV is that this will never change. Someone would literally have to do something crazy to bring that to an end, but that will never happen because we’re all cool beings and we value each other so much.”
Aesthetically speaking, there is no realm that Upchuck does not touch. KT (Kaila Thompson), Mikey (“Spuzz Dangus”), Hoff, bass player Armando Arrieta, and drummer Chris Salado’ songs are driven by a defiantly creative blend of post-punk, hip-hop, and indie rock energy that’s channeled through a haze of distortion.
They prefer to identify themselves only by their first names, and to the ire of promoters around the country, the group’s social media presence is kept to a bare minimum. Upchuck has no Facebook page. No Twitter, and no Tik Tok. Just an Instagram account that allows them to project just enough about themselves to remain compelling to those who are genuinely interested in the music, and their numbers are growing.
“The songs are always changing when we play them live,” Mikey says. “Maybe it’s that the rhythm is different, or we’ll cut it short in a certain way. Change up the lyrics. Even the old songs we change up to keep things fresh—keep things from getting boring.”
KT continues his thought, adding that the changes are always unspoken. “Communication with us all has literally come down to just a look. We’ll all look at each other, and it’s like, ‘Aight, I know exactly what you’re saying.’ We all know what to do.”
“Hoff adds that he and Mikey have been jamming together since pre-Upchuck days, and developed the group’s shared musical instincts together. “We practiced the songs that we had for six months before we even played a show with them, so we kind of already know what to anticipate when we go into a song.”
This kind of interaction between band members during practice is one thing, but expounding upon that in front of a crowd of hundreds of people or more is something different. But it’s an instinct that the group’s members have continuously honed. “I feel like if that kind of energy and communication doesn’t happen during practice, it definitely won’t happen on stage.”
That energy translates across the board. “Perdido,” is sung entirely in Spanish by drummer Chris, and builds energy around the phrase: “Hago lo que quiero”—”I do what I want.”
The album’s title track also carries the explosive energy to a new level. The quick intro catches audiences off guard, as the rooms they play visibly come alive based on the riff alone. “That’s definitely by design,” Hoff says.
Photo by Alec Pugliese.
One of the album’s more introspective numbers, “Facecard,” finds KT taking on the superficiality of modern America: “The trifling yuppie fuck, comes out beyond the cut to try and low ball, low ball,” KT sings.
“It’s always on the setlist and it’s definitely a breather for me,” she adds. “It’s also one of those tracks where people hear the riff and start reacting immediately.”
The connection with Amyl and the Sniffers was born in July of 2019. The group was coming to the States and had booked a show at The Earl. Upchuck’s manager Randy Castello of the Tight Bros. Network seized the opportunity to lobby for them to open the show. He sent over a link to Upchuck’s demo tape on Bandcamp. “Amy Taylor responded almost immediately,” Castello says. “She was like, ‘Yes, definitely add them to the show!’”
Afterward, Taylor and her bandmates approached Upchuck, asking them if they wanted to play just a few more shows together. “It actually turned out to be a lot more shows together,” Mikey says,” and we both played the biggest show that either of our bands have played to date, at Brooklyn Steel in May.”
The show pushed the 1,800-capacity venue nearly to the breaking point, and opened up a whole new audience for Upchuck.
As 2023 approaches, the group is preparing to record its sophomore album for Famous Class. While the exact details as to where and with whom they’re recording remain a closely guarded secret for the time being, they’re heading to California in February to capture it all on tape.
“We’re definitely gonna keep working with Famous Class, regardless,” Hoff says. “Cyrus [Lubin] at Famous Class has given us so much creative freedom and trust, and aside from a few minor tweaks here and there, doesn’t mess with what we do at all.”
Mikey adds, “The songs that we’re recording are songs that we’ve been playing pretty much just as long as everything that’s on the first record, so the two should fit together really well.”
Teetering on the axis of punk, hip-hop, and indie rock, a sense of discovery, and the power of youthful energy, the new music contained within these songs—either live and in the moment or on record—is intoxicating to the end.
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In Greek mythology, dryads appear as tree-dwelling spirits who lure men to their deaths by seducing them into a shadowy realm of the unknown, sometimes replacing them with a doppelgänger—a sinister look alike. It’s a dark and mysterious tale that’s been repurposed in everything from David Lynch’s surreal T.V. saga “Twin Peaks” to Jordan Peele’s paranoid horror film Us. It’s a puzzling metaphor about there being more to the natural world than meets the eye. It’s also a bewitching entry point into The Book of Flowers’ debut cassette tape, Pastels.
Press play on the opening three numbers, “Foxfire & Clover,” “The Housewitch,” and “The Dryad,” and dreamlike imagery takes shape amid swathes of murky country crooning, mellotrons, and British folk-style songwriting.
“I was thinking a lot about impressionist painting and things that use a lot of pastels,” says songwriter James Andrew Ford. “I wanted the songs to have a pastoral feeling to them, with a kind of a dark feeling as well, like watching the sun set over an empty field.”
Ford is a co-founder of Atlanta’s industrial, EBM, and dark wave label DKA Records. The lingering earthly and ethereal tones that he conjures in the songs on Pastels are a far cry from the digital crunch and urgency of much of the label’s output, including that of his own former project Tifaret. But from the soft dissonance of the cover art’s pink and green colors to the balance of electronic and organic textures over Krautrock rhythms of “The White Dress” and “Watch the Stars,” Ford’s shift in style emerges quite naturally.
“During the latter part of Tifaret, I was banging my head against the wall because I was having a lot of issues trying to do a full-length,” Ford says. “I was trying to figure out how to do something that felt satisfying and cohesive, but wasn’t just eight tracks of Front 242 or whatever. How do you create a sad song using synthesizers that doesn’t just sound like old synth pop? How did somebody like Trent Reznor or Depeche Mode get around the monotony of synthesizers?” he asks. “Well, In Depeche Mode, Martin Gore wrote a lot of songs on an acoustic guitar. Trent Reznor writes everything on a piano, or at least he used to. So I thought maybe I need to start writing on acoustic guitar.”
But Ford had never played acoustic before. He hadn’t played an electric guitar in nearly a decade. So he spent much of the pandemic learning how to play an acoustic guitar. The process was a period of discovery, planting the seeds for the songs on Pastels.
“It basically taught me how to have a song there before you have any music,” he says. “With Tifaret, I always wrote the lyrics last. So I was trying to cram in syllables, melody lines, and whatever else into what was already there. Versus if you start with an acoustic guitar, you’ve got your melody, you’ve got your lines written out. You don’t have to cram everything in.”
Book of Flowers
Previously, Ford was a religious studies major at Georgia State University. With The Book of Flowers he took a deep dive into British folklore. The first two songs to emerge were “Golden Lily” and “Housewitch,” both illustrate a reciprocal harmony that finds his slow and sweeping baritone voice shape the guitar tones, while the natural resonance of the acoustic guitar guides his rich, warm voice.
The lyrics call an epic range of images to mind, from rustic to quite horrific, in one musical motion.
In “The Dryad” he sings: “There in the bed she laid me to rest and slit my throat with a willow rod. She threw me to the raven. She threw me to the hound. She cleaned my skull for her god.”
“With that song, I always thought that I was basically writing an old fashioned murder ballad, but with the positions reversed.”
It’s a scene of pagan carnage that could have been pulled straight from films such as Robin Hardy’s “The Wickerman” or Ari Aster’s “Midsommar”—channeled through a palette of dark and apocalyptic musical inflections ranging from influences such as Current 93 and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It’s quiet, it’s intense, and it’s not for the faint of heart, despite the music’s idyllic presence.
A version of this story originally appeared in the November issue of Record Plug Magazine.
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