Do you like it hard and heavy? Then come to The Record Exchange and visit The Headbanger’s Wall, a listening station devoted to some of today’s best bands pummeling you with raw power and raw emotion.
The Headbanger’s Wall currently features Caliban, Asphyx, Lacuna Coil, In Flames, Avatar, Dark New Day, Eluveitie, Napalm Death, Savage Messiah and The Dreaming. Come melt your face with us.
Purchase Headbanger’s Wall titles HERE.
Girls
Father, Son, Holy Ghost
Two years after their debut (Album) and one year after the follow-up EP (Broken Dreams Club), Father, Son, Holy Ghost is the natural third entry in Girls‘ recorded trinity and features their most accomplished recordings to date.
Album was a sketch of the life Christopher Owens and Chet “JR” White lived in San Francisco — a messy bedroom broadcast to the world. Broken Dreams Club blasted their home-studio ideas into widescreen projection and served as a crucial stepping stone to newfound studio fidelity. For Father, Son, Holy Ghost, the band holed up in a basement recording studio located in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district, deliberately choosing to avoid the sterile confines of a traditional studio.
Aided by a three-piece gospel choir, America’s best Britpop band is now taking its own trip down America’s mysterious back roads. These touches accentuate the band’s sweetly tortured soul, not to mention some occasionally fiery guitar work on songs like “Vomit” and “Die.” Whether it’s doo wop or death metal, Girls are focused on creating classics, and Father, Son, Holy Ghost proves they got what it takes. One of 2011’s best is still well worth your attention.
BUY THE CD HERE
BUY THE DELUXE CD HERE
Last year, Andrew Bird contributed a cover of the Kermit the Frog classic “Bein’ Green” to a Muppets tribute album. Elsewhere, he partnered with sculptor and instrument maker Ian Schneller on a performance and installation involving speakers made from recycled newspapers and dryer lint. He follows the same definition of “quirky” that people use for Wes Anderson movies — his interests are idiosyncratic, to be sure, but somehow the definition feels too overreaching, like using Instagram and “hipster” in the same breath. (Bird, this week, actually used Instagram to promote the album, so, there you go.)
Bird’s seventh solo album, Break It Yourself, will likely set itself up for those dreaded descriptors, from the titles onward. There are references to Greek mythology, to horrible international tragedies. There’s a fake palindrome (how meta!). There is, per usual, quite a fair amount of whistling. It is, however, a bit more reserved than the earlier Birds (groan). Long gone are the rapturous flourishes of “Fake Palindromes” and even further the weird but awesome swing revival phase in which he participated as a Squirrel Nut Zipper. What we’re left with is a guy, with a violin, an embouchure of pure steel, and a set of sweet, gentle (though occasionally a bit too much so) jams that will come to you with good intentions. Break It Yourself greets its listener like a friend-turned-lover making the first move: sitting on opposite ends of the couch, inching closer and putting its arm around you and by the end, you’re curled up together, sleepy but overall content. — Paste
OTHER NEW CD RECOMMENDATIONS:
Todd Snider Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables
The Magnetic Fields Love at the Bottom of the Sea
White Rabbits Milk Famous
Kaiser Chiefs Start the Revolution Without Me
Every Time I Die Ex Lives (deluxe edition also available)
Good Old War Come Back As Rain (Record Exchange in-store April 3!)
Micky and the Motorcars Live at Billy Bob’s Texas
Miniature Tigers Mia Pharaoh
Bowerbirds Clearing
Tim Fite Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t
Xiu Xiu Always
Rocco Deluca Drugs n’ Hymns
Memoryhouse will perform live at The Record Exchange (1105 W. Idaho St., Downtown Boise) at 5 p.m. Thursday, March 8. As always, this Record Exchange in-store performance is free and all ages. Memoryhouse is opening for Cloud Nothings at Neurolux later that night and we have tickets for sale at the store!
ABOUT MEMORYHOUSE
Memoryhouse formed some five years ago in the depths of Southern Ontario, Canada, in a mid-size town called Guelph as a collaborative project meant to serve as an artistic outlet for composer Evan Abeele and photographer Denise Nouvion. Evan, a dedicated student of classical music and a pop-music encyclopedist, intended Memoryhouse to be a multimedia art project, pairing his instrumental compositions with Denise’s photographs and short films. Testing ways to blur the boundaries between genres, to weave a synthesis of music and photography, they experimented with themes, lyrics and multiple layers of instrumentation. Nouvion’s soft, ethereal voice anchored the frozen textures of Abeele’s compositions with frank sentimentality—a unique approach towards humanizing the electro-pop compositions they were creating. The results, at once timeless and new, were impressive and in September 2011 Sub Pop released a fully re-recorded, remixed and remastered version of the band’s 2010 self-released, digital-only EP, The Years.
The new album is called The Slideshow Effect, and its title speaks to what hasn’t changed for Memoryhouse: their continuing interest in the synthesis of the aural and the visual. It refers to the photographic/cinematic technique of zooming and panning to animate still images, often used in documentary film making to give movement to archival photographs. The 10-track album, produced by Abeele, with assistance from friend, collaborator, and occasional Memoryhouse bassist Barzin Hassani Rad, finds Memoryhouse heading toward a new clarity in composition as well as sound; a more organic direction for artists who are, in their own words, transitioning from a “bedroom recording project” into a fully realized band. Nouvion’s voice has never been more present than on the new album, which finds her stepping away from Memoryhouse’s past reverbed sound in favor of a more upfront, and intimate vocal approach. They half-seriously refer to their new sound as “Taylor Swift with Built to Spill as her backing band.” However The Slideshow Effect might be described, we fully-seriously love it.
The Record Exchange (1105 W. Idaho St. in Downtown Boise) is proud to host the Hillfolk Noir Album Release/SXSW Sendoff Party at 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 6. As always, this Record Exchange in-store event is free and all ages.
The band’s new album Hillfolk Noir Radio Hour will be available for purchase at the party. Please join us for an evening of live music and a sendoff for the band, which is leaving on March 9 for a two-week national tour that includes an official showcase appearance at SXSW on March 14! Hillfolk Noir also is performing at Boise’s inaugural Treefort Music Fest on Saturday, March 24.
Archie’s Place will be here from 5 to 7 p.m. serving delicious soup and joes (vegan sloppy joe = awesome). There’s an Archie’s reference on the new Hillfolk record, so it’s a natural fit.
ABOUT HILLFOLK NOIR AND HILLFOLK NOIR RADIO HOUR
Fronted by singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Travis Ward, Hillfolk Noir‘s peculiar take on traditional acoustic mountain music is filtered through a half-century of folk, country and rock ‘n’ roll and fed by an affinity for medicine show culture and Depression-era string-band blues. The band calls it Junkerdash, which has multiple definitions up to and including “psychedelic swamp-shack rags.” However, if you’re looking for something neat and tidy to place in print or casual conversation, feel free to use current music-journalism parlance and call it “indie folk.”
Hillfolk Noir Radio Hour is a full-length studio recording sequenced like an old-timey radio program straight out of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, complete with commercial breaks plugging a bunch of fake products they made up. The album is available on CD, MP3 and limited-edition 10-inch vinyl packaged to resemble a 1920s-era 78 (but sounding much better).
Hillfolk’s performance lineup usually but not always consists of:
Travis Ward: Resonator guitar, vocals, harmonica, kazoo, words
Mike Waite: Stand-up bass
Jared Goodpastor: Snare, washboard, tambourine, harmonies
Alison Ward: Singing saw, washboard, banjo, harmonies
Shaun King: Banjo
Hillfolk Noir has performed with Built to Spill, James McMurtry, Neko Case, Justin Townes Earle, Deer Tick, Gourds, Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Gerald Collier, Heroes and Villains, Train, Jesse Dayton, The Dusty 45s, Neva Dinova and tons of other great acts that you may or may not have heard of. The good Junkerdash word also has been spread on countless American street corners because the Hillfolkers hold the busking tradition in high regard and, well, sometimes they need the gas money.