Kings of Leon‘s new album Mechanical Bull hits the streets on Tuesday, Sept. 24, and The Record Exchange will have it on CD, deluxe CD and vinyl!
Mechanical Bull marks Kings of Leon’s return following an abrupt 2011 tour cancellation and subsequent hiatus. It’s the band’s first studio album (sixth overall) since 2010’s Come Around Sundown.
Pickwick will perform live at The Record Exchange (1105 W. Idaho St., Downtown Boise) at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 17. The band is opening for Neko Case at Knitting Factory later that evening and we have tickets for sale here at the store! As always, this Record Exchange in-store event is free and all ages!
ABOUT PICKWICK
Pickwick was formed in 2008 when singer Galen Disston began writing songs on his acoustic guitar while drummer Matt Emmett kept time in the background. The duo settled on the name as an homage to ‘The Ostrich,’ an obscure dance song written by Lou Reed and released by Pickwick Records in 1964. With the later additions of Emmett’s childhood friend Cassady Lillstrom on keys, Kory Kruckenberg on vibraphone, and brothers Garrett and Michael Parker on bass and guitar, the six-piece began playing shows in small clubs around Seattle.
By the beginning of 2010 the band was in a state of disarray. Frustrated by the direction the music was taking, the band began having discussions about throwing in the towel and going their separate ways. Up until that point, band members had little to do with the writing process and simply added color to Disston’s songs. Ultimately, the band decided to throw out all of their old material and start over from scratch with a new collaborative approach to songwriting. This rebirth allowed the band to take a new look at their individual and collective strengths, as well as look to new places for inspiration.
Raised on indie rock and a love for lo-fi garage bands, the members of Pickwick found themselves entrenched in underground gospel and blues recordings from the 1950s and 60s as well as popular northern soul artists. This new reference point combined with a renewed appreciation for UK bands like The Animals, Spencer Davis Group, and The Zombies helped the members of Pickwick cultivate their own unique take on garage rock, gospel, and 60s-era pop while interpreting those genres through a modern lens.
Along with a shift in musical aesthetic, Disston began exploring darker, more complicated themes in the lyrics of his songs. Contrasting stories of murder, mental illness, and confused sexual identity with major chords, three-part harmonies, and church organs. This unlikely pairing quickly became a mainstay of the band’s approach to songwriting. “I’ve always been drawn to music that seems a bit schizophrenic,” says Disston.
Inspired by a new burst of creative output, the band wasted little time to self-release their music. Instead of waiting to record a full-length record, the band decided to do things on their own terms, putting their music out exclusively on vinyl with three installments of a 7-inch series. Each 45 was accompanied by a record release show at a different club in Seattle. With the release shows under their belt and a series of DIY live videos gaining attention online, the band had cultivated a strong local following by the middle of 2011.
By late 2011, Seattle independent radio station KEXP caught wind of what the band was doing and began playing the band’s music on-air. By the end of the year Pickwick’s 7-inch series ‘Myths’ was voted the #9 record of the year by KEXP listeners alongside artists such as TV on the Radio, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Wilco, Adele and Radiohead.
The band released their first full-length album Can’t Talk Medicine in early 2013.
The Grahams will perform live at The Record Exchange (1105 W. Idaho St., Downtown Boise) at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 17. The band is playing Radio Boise Tuesday at Neurolux later that evening and we have tickets for sale here at the store! We’ll also have free Pie Hole pizza while it lasts! As always, this Record Exchange in-store event is free and all ages!
ABOUT THE GRAHAMS
The Grahams, the creative union of lifelong romantic partners Alyssa and Doug Graham, combine soulful bluegrass with hints of earthy Americana, adding colors from traditional folk and country blues, into an infectious blend of storytelling that results in songs of love, loss, yearning, and the view from rural American roads less traveled.
While the duo first met in grade school — a trait shared by previous musical trail-blazers from Lennon/McCartney to Jagger/Richards – the Grahams’ journey together began when they were teenagers in the shadow of New York City. There, Alyssa, the impassioned troubadour, and Doug, the guitarist extraordinaire, shared a mutual love for the music of the Woodstock era and the adventures of the great outdoors. Over the ensuing years many a campfire lit acoustic jam would include the best of roots renegades like Neil Young, The Band, Gram Parsons, Janis and Emmylou along with more than a few Jerry Garcia and Johnny Cash nuggets. Later, spending much of their time in the secluded Adirondack Mountains at the Graham family fold, Alyssa and Doug learned the time-honored craft of songwriting. Here, their ongoing interests in traditional country, mountain bluegrass and folk legends such as The Carter Family and Mississippi John Hurt would blossom. Hoping to share their stories on a wider stage, the couple eventually settled in New York City, where they performed, collaborated and recorded a variety of acclaimed material before adopting The Grahams moniker.
While the duo had written music together before, in the summer of 2012 new writing sessions yielded a different approach. Something magical was happening between Alyssa and Doug. A catalyst was born in the new song “Riverman’s Daughter,” a tale of love, loss, and hardship on the river that showcases Alyssa’s bountiful voice. Backed by her own rhythm guitar, along with the strong current of Doug’s cascading accompaniment on the six string, and traditional vocal harmonies, the track came in a lightning bolt of inspiration. A vision and calling to write more songs of its kind took hold.
Alyssa and Doug had an idea: What if they put their city lives on hold and, armed with just guitars and backpacks, traveled the 2,500 miles of highways and byways of the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Louisiana. Light out for the territory, so to speak, like Huck and Jim. There, the duo could follow the Great River Road (GRR) that parallels the waterway, meet the people, and hear first-hand where European folk music, brought to these shores generations ago, took root alongside rhythms and chants from Africa, and how these polarizing sounds formed the backbone of our 20th Century American musical heritage.
And so The Grahams did just that, and in the process created their debut album, Riverman’s Daughter. Along the way The Grahams played gigs at the various gin and juke joints that dotted the GRR, and met a colorful cast of characters and genuine music makers with whom the duo shared and exchanged stories through the common bond of song.
Eventually Alyssa and Doug ended up intentionally isolated on an old houseboat in rural Louisiana where the Mississippi spills into the Atchafalaya swamp. There, The Grahams prolifically stockpiled songs, enjoyed the simplicity of living off the grid, and for a spell, invited onboard friends and musicians including their longtime collaborator Bryan McCann, a wordsmith who aids with lyrical inspiration. Yet perhaps the biggest inspiration on Riverman’s Daughter was Doug’s own mother, Gigi, the matriarch of the Graham family clan, and a true fan of the duo who had been diagnosed with cancer earlier that year. As her condition worsened, the Grahams packed up their guitars and newly minted collection of songs to become Gigi’s “angel band,” and played by her side until she passed away.
As recording of the new album began, The Grahams found a true kindred spirit in Grammy-winning producer Malcolm Burn, who brought a magical touch and inspired ideas into the studio. It was Burn’s idea to record both Alyssa and Doug’s parts live to tape without the assistance of headphones or isolation — in the way they were written. This process gives the album a natural aura that harkens back to an era when this practice was commonplace. Along the same lines, The Grahams chose to record the album in Nashville, the longtime epicenter of country music. While the album’s foundation is simple and acoustic, The Grahams are backed on a few tracks by stellar accompaniment including the Grammy-nominated North Mississippi Allstars. Along with the title song the album is highlighted by the 70’s country rock flavored “Carrying The Torch,” the spirited traditional vibe of “The Piney River,” and the riveting upbeat barn dance playfulness of “Revival Time.”
Ultimately, the album is a winning culmination of The Grahams’ long journey into the heart of America, the inspiration they derived from immersion into classic American music, and the natural and honest talent they have for bringing forth a modern musical idiom steeped in tradition.
The Record Exchange will host an MGMT listening party and video screening at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 17 (immediately following The Grahams in-store at 6). Enjoy free Pie Hole pizza while you listen to MGMT’s new album MGMT and enter to win a rare MGMT vinyl test pressing!
The video, titled “The Optimizer,” is designed to be played simultaneously with the album, so join us for a trippy evening at the record store!
ABOUT MGMT’S NEW ALBUM
Had Andrew and Ben not agreed (probably with a smirk) long ago that, should their ever-evolving musical collaboration called MGMT reach the crucial Third Record Threshold, they’d make that milestone eponymous, MGMT (the album) might well have been called something like Step Into The Club — (“because it’s like a multi-level club inside of our brains”) — or Now, That’s What I Call Now! or just MGMT – NOW! (like the Rolling Stones’ third album), because MGMT has indeed made a very now record.
Songs for anyone who’s “going through daily life feeling like an alien,” MGMT draws seasoned fans and new initiates alike into the band’s eureka zone, a psychic oasis offering the opposite of dumbed-down (smarted-up?) as sympathetic counsel or support for something like chronic mis-aligned-multiple-reality syndrome, Deja Vu-DO or Modern malaise – whatever you want to call it. With their resplendent third album, Ben and Andrew finally open up the MGMT inner sanctum through a brand-new sound that’s about what it’s all about: “sinking in – and forgetting about time.”
With these ten irreducible new tracks, Andrew and Ben have significantly enhanced the MGMT catalog, definitively shattering any remnants of creative confines or stylistic pigeon holes, while continuing a pattern of naming a record years before new music exists (they’d christened their second album Congratulations before their first, Oracular Spectacular, had even been released). Both minimal and maximal, MGMT is the band’s most fully-realized, provocative and accessible collection to-date; a dense swirling force-field of musical energies, once again shoving open the perimeters of pop.
The 21st century is finally, literally, in its teen years and MGMT — labeled “futurist pop” in 2007, when their earliest songs “Kids,” “Time To Pretend” and “Electric Feel” were palpably feeding the youthful zeitgeist — are responding to our current times with a refined, focused celebration of liberated consciousness, reflecting and refracting the human experience and our intersecting, increasingly complicated relationship with nature, technology and each other. MGMT is prismatically post-political. “It’s not ironic,” says Ben. “It’s take-it-at-face-value, but these days face value is pretty crazy.”
MGMT fans got their first taste of the eponymous third album when “Alien Days” was released as a limited edition single for Record Store Day in April 2013. Opening with the pure voice of a nine-year-old boy and culminating in a blown out repeating tear, “Alien Days” serves as a thesis statement of sorts — suggesting that MGMT is both tangible and ineffable, otherworldly yet grounded somewhere very near and dear — effectively bridging the stream flowing through the first two albums and confidently opening a sonic portal to the budding worlds that follow.
Zip into “Cool Song No. 2” (Remote Sensing) and MGMT quickly settles into a meditative groove, breezing into infinity like cartoon train tracks converging on the horizon, always shadowed by some insidious paranoid zonk; a twisted branch of transcendence just out of reach.
Partially inspired by a close friend who’d contracted a near-fatal lung infection and woken up in the clutches of opiate dependency, “Mystery Disease” sees convergence through another lens — obscured, algorithmic and constantly shifting focus. The entrancing “Mystery Disease” may be life itself, or sentience, or some parasitic temptress hidden in the microbes of eternity.
The paradoxically confident “Introspection” is a cover of a long-buried 1968 nugget by Faine Jade, a flowery Long Island psychedelic garage band, proving remarkably prescient with a chorus that plaintively asks: “Why have all the prophets lied?”
“Astro-Mancy” was one of the last songs completed for MGMT and is one of the album’s musical tours de force. Drawing lyrical inspiration from a poem by the surrealist bard Phillip Lamantia and a spectacularly other-worldly Aurora Borealis display Andrew witnessed while alone in Iceland, its words are enveloped in a breathing, pulsating organic quilt of fuzz and digital birds.
The album concludes with the anachronistically-named “An Orphan of Fortune,” built around a crystalline chord progression mined from one of the many long improvisations recorded while at Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios. “We always felt it would make a good last song for the album,” says Andrew. “Once I finished the lyrics, something clicked and it felt like the whole album made more sense. Lyrically, that’s what I was trying to do with that one — reference the other songs on the album and summarize the major feelings throughout…being shot through life all the time and learning how to watch it all flow by…realizing that you’re an observer.”
MGMT was written, performed and produced entirely by Ben and Andrew (with the exception of the young boy’s vocals on “Alien Days”), the duo having returned for a third time to the familiar, humble wooded facilities of Tarbox Road Studios in Western New York state. With Dave Fridmann behind the console as co-producer/mixer/engineer and one-man support group, Ben and Andrew continuously experimented with new working processes, expanding on the creative chemistry they developed over the course of a decade of musical partnership. They struck a balance between control and abandon, allowing themselves the freedom to let the music tell them where it wanted to go. The initial writing period recalled the pair’s collegiate days of free form composition. “Just for fun, we started jamming a lot,” says Ben. “Just the two of us setting up synths and drum machines in the studio, sequencing things and going for hours on end. We were picking out sections of jams, editing them down in a way that resembled song structures, then doing overdubs on that. If there was some crazy thing that happened once, that often became part of the final song.”
Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden formed the first incarnation of MGMT (then called “the management”) as fellow students at Wesleyan University in 2001, taking root in the school’s fertile grassy hills as some improbable synthesis of Fugsian merry pranking and early 2000s Billboard pop wanking. Having toured twice with kindred spirits Of Montreal and released a 1000-copy EP on tiny indie label Cantora Records, MGMT miraculously signed with Columbia Records in November 2006, completing and recording their first album by the next spring, their first collaboration with producer Dave Fridmann.
With the wide release of Oracular Spectacular in January of 2008, MGMT’s reputation began snowballing, nay avalanching, on both sides of the Atlantic. The UK’s NME dubbed them “the best NY band about” in typical NME style, while Rolling Stone proclaimed them one of the “Top 10 Artists to Watch in 2008.”
Oracular Spectacular went on to hit #1 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart in the United States and proved especially popular with fans and critics in Europe and the UK, where it entered the charts at #12 in England and #5 in Ireland. Today, it is consistently ranked amongst the most celebrated pop albums of the 21st century.
Ben and Andrew brought on friends Will Berman (drums), James Richardson (guitar), and Matt Asti (bass) to tour major festivals and clubs all over the freaking place in 2008, sharing the stage and smudging the sage on successful tours with Beck, Yeasayer, Radiohead, Florence And The Machine and Tame Impala. Being on the road served as a true rock and roll immersion program that was a far cry from the tiny dorm room shows they were playing just three years prior; over the course of these 18 months, they transformed from a shaky rookie live act to a solid, well-respected psychedelic rock spectacle.
Without skipping a beat, the duo, along with the live band, began writing and recording their sophomore release in early 2009. Congratulations was released in April 2010, debuting at #2 on the Billboard 200. An inward-looking and softly-reflective 9-song folk-rock/post-punk suite co-produced by the legendary Pete Kember, the album initially threw some for a loop but eventually solidified a lasting core of MGMT devotees who lovingly gravitated toward the band’s honest and staunch reluctance to clone formulaic pop in the name of commercial success. The band performed “Flash Delirium” and “Brian Eno” on Saturday Night Live and toured extensively across the globe in support of the album, truly honing their show into a razor-sharp live experience.
After a fair bit of well-deserved down time in their home town of New York City, Ben and Andrew sat down in early 2012 and tried to pinpoint their mutual artistic goals for their third, self-titled LP. They wanted more space — more freedom — letting small ideas develop before self-consciously shutting them down; perhaps getting even further removed from that faintly lingering college mentality of intentionally making the listener uncomfortable.
“This album feels to us like coming down to earth in a way,” admits Ben. “We’re trying to be accessible but we’re trying to do something new within the realm of pop music. When we finally came close to finishing MGMT, everyone in the studio had the feeling that we’d made something really great.”
With this band, one can be pretty certain that many others will feel the very same way.