Girlfriends :: Gov't Seizure 7" Single

“Smart, decade bending, sarcaso surf-creeps”

Coming off their freshly awarded medal of honor from the Boston Phoenix as best garage act, Girlfriends have released the 7” single Gov’t Seizure.

The single song is a speedy side-winding cobweb drawl that groovily drags its feet at the end.  The B-Side “Creep Stuff” is just as much fun as a lazy tempo experiment. The way the band records themselves is really key to the sound. It wouldn't be the same if it was cleaner. Just like their self-titled cassette, the overdriven vocals and white noise splashes from cymbals and amps punctuate both the sound and the lyrics, recalling some older decades. The production also has a few interesting subtle touches, like spontaneous laughter, coughing and rhythmic gargling.

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MANNERS : White Wool Fog or the Cave of Light Within LP

MANNERS :: 'Cave Pt. 1'

"A woolly mammoth meditating"

The thing that gets your attention about MANNERS' White Wool Fog or The Cave of Light Within is the fact that it's a cassette and a tuft of dirty wool tied together with orange yarn. When asked about it, songwriter Greg Beson said, "It's just stuff that I like," which makes sense if you know the naturalist, farmer, botanist, stone skipper of Portland, Maine.

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The Needy Visions

The Needy Visions : Weymouth

“Just down the street from here”

At the release show, Needy Visions singer Dan Shea was hanging with the crowd, sipping a 22oz. fin du monde, and wearing the same shirt he is in the photo on the back cover of their new vinyl LP. When he offered me a sip and asked where I was from I told him “just down the street from here.” Apparently he’d talked to a lot of “just down the street from here”s that night and told me that’s what it was all about. Everybody just needed a place to get together and hang out.

That’s really the essence of The Needy Visions. The first line of ‘Weymouth’ and also the opening to the record is “we are just a bunch of losers, hanging out in empty buildings. Jumping right into the ocean, full of shit, full of devotion, For our town and for our friends, at least the ones that keep on living. Getting drunk and getting stoned.” Locally, they’re everyone’s favorite band. The shows bring everybody out, because they are notoriously good times. These guys make a lot of noise with simple, fun lyrics that you can move to. Shea’s unexpected sometimes unbelievably high reaching vocals are infectiously catchy and have an inherent humor to them, such as the chorus of ‘Wey-ey-eh-ey-eheh-muuuuuth’ or ‘Endless Possibilities.’

In the past, the group has been a grooving acoustic four piece, tumbling along to a pounding djembe drum with beatkeeper Elliott Chaffe as a second guitarist. However, the new album sees the guys in the garage fuzz glory. The recording has a live sound, emulating their performances perfectly and sounding like it was done by a bunch of dudes hanging out in warehouse with recording equipment. The buzzfeast climaxes in the second to last track ‘Number of the Beast’ that dives right into you from the first shout and ends with a soloing rampage.

Besides just playing music as a means to gather the wayward, Both Shea and bassist Sam Potrykus are local music promoters. They book the new venue in Jamaica Plain called The Temple, work with local record label the Whitehaus Family Record, and help out with the Boston Counter Cultural Compass (look for these brightly colored fliers of local events stitched together by photocopy all around town).

The back cover features everyone involved in the recording process and all their families.

Pick up this 12” record and you can have everybody’s favorite local heroes in your very own living room. (Bodies of Water Arts and Crafts + Motorcycleface Records)

//Jamaica Plain, MA//

//May, 2010//

//Recorded at the Cottage in Dorchester, MA by Elliott Chaffee//

//Mastered by Jim Demain//

//Mixed by Elliott Chaffee//

myspace.com/theneedyvisions

Published in Performer Magazine, August 2010 issue.

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Quilt :: Agents of Play

Quilt :: Pick N' Save

"Questing underground into lulling trances"

You’re wandering deep into some catacombs, ossuaries lined with brightly painted skulls, following some faint noise. You don’t know how you got there, but you just have to know what those sounds are and what or who is making them. The deeper you go, the darker it gets, but the louder and more entrancing the chanting and noises become. Just when you think you’re hopelessly lost and the music is the only thing that could possibly be left in the universe and it’s all you will ever really need if you could just find it, a light cracks in from some corner revealing the source: tacos.

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Breakfast of Champs Records

Syrup slides down the fretboard of a guitar and fills in the crannies of the waffle resting in the acoustic's sound hole. Pancakes are impaled on a high hat, hash browns bounce on a snare drum, and bacon and sausage are lined up along the keys of his synthesizer. Or, at least that's one way of imagining how Breakfast of Champs began.

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Greg Mullen :: The Hungry Ocean

"Like Dante climbing out of hell, if his guides were Bob Dylan and Bukowski"

MP3: "Greg Mullen - Ten Thousand Years"

The Hungry Ocean has all the charm of a folk singer, kicking stones down a dusty road with a harmonica ‘round his neck and guitar strapped to his back, traveling to play his soulful tunes about everyday things. Yet at times, Greg Mullen’s voice quivers strangely supernatural and the words he sings veil some otherworldly pseudo-apocalyptic occurrence. It’s something like Dante climbing the wrong way out of hell if his guides were Bob Dylan and Bukowski, instead of Virgil. All of it is decorated with a whirlpool of beauteous piano, horns and lovely female harmonies.

The theme of wishing to be a ship and failing to float in a vast, all-consuming ocean is strongly present on the album. There's two bummed out Narwhals on the cover and even the 12" vinyl is cleverly pressed a transparent green. In ‘Ten Thousand Years,’ Mullen sings, “We both had a hard time trying to decide what to be for Halloween. Said, ‘I'll be a ship, you be a flying machine.’” In the same song he also mentions that he’s been dead for ten thousand years.

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Japandroids, Love is All, Girlfriends Live at the Middle East Downstairs 3/31/10

Both drummer David Prowse's kit and guitarist Brian King's microphone were tucked into the corners of the Middle East Downstairs. Center stage belonged to the three biggest fender amps known to man, gleaming like a silver event horizon. When the duo took the stage only one thing was certain: something was probably going to spontaneously burst into flames.

King immediately began conjuring fond drunken memories of past Boston shows. Throughout their set, he kept complimenting the place so profusely that you could actually believe he didn't say it in every city.

The concert had a solid line up, opened by the local noise enthusiasts: Girlfriends. The trio's riotously goofy tunes like the live only "Cave Kids of Boston" were a fitting pair with the Droids. The second band, Love is All was a five piece ethereal pop band with some crazy, eerie, tremolo picked guitar and a little saxophone. The female lead in a beige windbreaker and shaking a blue toy maraca when she wasn't jamming on her little Casio keyboard covered with patches of red gig tape.

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Blastfest 3!!!

Anyone who has been to the Whitehaus has probably spent some time staring into the wall collage of knick knacks, toys, broken instruments and other assorted randomness like an ISpy book you read as a kid. Each year on the vernal equinox, all the most interesting sculptures adorning the walls, ceilings and all the spaces in between the haus are dragged from Jamaica Plain to Cambridge in order to decorate the stage and concert hall of the Central Square YMCA. A similar collage of sounds was assembled from the Whitehaus Family Record’s artists and friends, for the all day, 22 band talent showcase that was the third Blastfest.

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Just Married :: Live Nation and Ticketmaster

You’re in a band. You want to get your tickets to your fans so they can see you’re show. Simple, right? With online ticketing, for the past year or so you’ve basically had two options: Ticketmaster or Live Nation. The above photo is an actual plot for world domination made up by Live Nation in 2007.

With these conglomerated ticketing corporations, fans will often sit in front of a computer, refreshing the page since an hour before the sale time, only to find that not even ten seconds after they’re released, they’re sold out. Ticketmaster and Live Nation have long been suspected of payola. Essentially meaning that tickets are given out to everyone and anyone they see fit, in exchange for promotion or payment, ensuring that the general ticket consuming public does not get their tickets. If by the grace of the ticketing deities a fan does somehow make it to the payment page, they then have to face a slew of fees. Venue fees, ticketing fees and even charity fees (which defies the meaning of ‘charity’). In addition to these issues, most contractually obligated bands selling through these companies are barred from playing any venues that aren’t hosted by the ticketing agencies.

It’s about to get more complicated.

With the musical landscape changing and becoming more and more fragmented due to digital mediums, fewer bands can fill up entire stadiums. The result, Ticketmaster and Live Nation are merging. If you’re worried about it being more monopolistic than it already is, the Department of Justice has your back. They’ve allowed the merger, but on the condition that they license their ticket selling software and sell a division of Ticketmaster, essentially creating two competitors, AEG and Comcast-Spectator. The latter will deal mostly with college sports. If Live Nation Entertainment controls all those arrows in the middle of that photo up there...I wonder if ticket prices will go up? And because smaller venues and shows have smaller fees, the new company, called Live Nation Entertainment Inc., is focusing on large arena concerts, which will most likely leave those smaller acts and venues behind.

But what are you going to do? It’s not like you have any other options.

An interesting alternative to this system might be found with a company called Brown Paper Tickets. They call themselves ‘the first and only fair trade ticketing company’ and profess that they are a ‘not-just-for-profit’ group. Any artist or venue can sell tickets through the website for free and buyers will always pay a flat fee. Under ten bucks is .99 cents and over ten bucks is $1.99. And they donate 5% of their profits to charity. The tickets are secure, complete with holographic foils, black light imaging and bar codes, and they even have a print at home option. There’s no contract, so you’re not bound to anything. The company will even print you extra tickets if you decide you want to sell them through your website or another service. There’s also a bunch of services available to every artist or event producer, including marketing.

If more bands and venues start working with Brown Paper, the ticketing world could have its first fair trade rival.

brownpapertickets.com

Published in Performer Magazine, April 2010 issue.

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The Whitehaus Family Record Family Record

"A hootenanny captured in vinyl"

The artists of Jamaica Plain collective, The Whitehaus Family Record, present an onslaught of the best tracks from label artists and friends. This sampler reflects their shows called ‘hootenannies,’ which feature a wide spectrum of audible enjoyables, from slam poetry to acoustics to psychedelics. It’s a little ‘hoot’ captured in the grooves of this vinyl only double LP.

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Spitzer Space Telescope

“A folkloric renaissance folk bard”

Download "Spitzer Space Telescope - Graknils and Gerkins" (right click, save link as)

Gather round the crackle of the fire for Dan MacDonald to tell stories from a time long ago about incredible voyages to the edge of the world and deep into the netherworld. Tales of unicorns and phoenixes and a slew of other fantastic creatures like Graknils, Gerkins and Mynocks. This modern day minstrel masquerades under the name Spitzer Space Telescope and he’s released a full length self-titled vinyl LP.

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The Whitehaus Family Record

On any given weekend night in Jamaica Plain, by some fleeting word of mouth from friends of friends of friends you might wander up the dim wooden porch that is decorated with polaroids or a gutted antique radio or other found art projects. Upon entering this house you’ll realize that it might be the strangest and most interesting place you could’ve gone tonight. Creativity is strung from the ceilings and walls as a dumpster diving collage of broken instruments and equipment, random knick knacks and toys. The house itself buzzes and croons, becoming an amplifier for anything from sloppy, silly, sensitive folk to psyche piercing digital experiments. Its white rooms transform into a stage, a screen and willing host to various performance and projection anomalies. It’s more than just a living art project, a venue, a DIY record label or an art collective; it’s the Whitehaus Family Record.

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Girlfriends :: Our Very First Cassette!

"Like getting your ass kicked by an 8 year old!"

Download "Girlfriends - Sucking Rare Meat off the Bone China!" (right click, save link as)

Once you pop this radioactive green cassette into your tape deck, you'll get three new girlfriends who like to hang out in dusty basements, make noise and yell at you. Oh, and two of them are guys. Maybe not the ideal romantic situation, but it makes for an excellent bopping, in your face, giddy garage punk trio. The menage a trios is a coalition of other local bands. Singer and guitarist Ben Portrykus' fronted the folk philosophers Christians & Lions and the digi-tape-loop project BAXIA, bassist Jen Dowty is formerly from Mmoss, and drummer Andrew Sadoway played with Mean Creek and also backs up Spirit Kid.

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