Unreleased Wooden Shjips Holiday Tracks Posted.

Those Wooden Shjips guys are always thinking.... Just for fun the band recorded a couple holiday-themed stompers to send out as a limited cassingle to their friends. For a short period of time the band has graciously posted the two tracks on their website. Check it here. Hjo Hjo Hjo!

Cobra Verde Reviewed On Dusted.

Dusted Reviews
Artist: Cobra Verde
Album: Haven’t Slept All Year
Label: Scat
Review date: Dec. 5, 2008

Ostensibly nothing more than a solid mid-western rock band from the indie underground, Cobra Verde has always been about much more than the sum of its deceptively simple parts. Rising from the ashes of Cleveland’s Death of Samantha in the early 1990s, Cobra Verde puts an arty, glam-tinged spin on bad-ass bar rock. And quite frankly, no one does it better.

The group’s latest, Haven’t Slept All Year, works as an interesting companion piece to its previous release, 2005’s Copycat Killers. The latter album is a strangely brilliant collection of covers that runs the gamut from the Easter Monkeys’ “Underpants” to a deliciously menacing recasting of Pink’s dance-pop anthem “Get This Party Started.” Haven’t Slept All Year is all new original material, yet it exhibits the same willingness to tackle any genre with both a dead-on stare and an arched eyebrow that made Copycat Killers so much twisted fun.

Establishing the album’s carefree romanticism is the opener "Riot in the Food Court, " which features a gargantuan hook for a chorus and plays like a lost track from the soundtrack to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. This may seem like an unlikely pose for a bunch of middle-aged rust belters to strike, yet not only does it works, it’s quite contagious. Frontman John Petkovic croons like he’s getting ready for the prom on the synth-poppy “Something About the Bedroom” and contemplates being stuck “between a boy and a man” on “Freeride,” evoking a genuine sweetness that should play well with any post-OC fans the band may have made.

Cobra Verde have always been stylistically restless and unpredictable, but never to such a degree over the course of a single album. While this is a rock album first and foremost (see “World Can’t Have Her”), there are touches of country (the aforementioned “Freeride”), debauched beat cabaret (“Wasted Again”), synth anthems (“Run Away”) and subtly swingin’ acoustic numbers (“Together Alone”).

The only thing more surprising than Cobra Verde’s existence this far into the new millennium is the quality of its recordings. Fifteen years since Viva La Muerte, their debut on Scat Records, Petkovic and Co. continue to rock hard in the face of the impending cultural apocalypse. With that in mind, Haven’t Slept All Year is an ideal soundtrack for the current trash heap that is our society. Cobra Verde cast their net wide and work with whatever comes slithering back, compressing it all into a weighty chunk of glittering pop-rock smite to be hurdled at whoever needs a knock on the head.

By Nate Knaebel

Tiny Mix Tapes Gives A HEAVVVY Review Of Pussygutt.

Pussygutt
She Hid Behind Her Veil
[20 Buck Spin; 2008]
Styles: doom-noise
Others: Hammers of Misfortune, Samothrace, Rakhim
Original review

Even in an era when a huge strain of sub-guitar noiseniks are doing anything they can to sound as dark and ominous as possible, the bands of the 20 Buck Spin label sound, well, just a little extra dark and ominous. It’s at least the case with Rakhim, a positively grimy duo with an excellent doom-noise album to their credit, and now with Pussygutt, who vomit out 45 minutes of impending wrath like vengeful gods with She Hid Behind Her Veil. It makes all the sense in the world that they hale from the methland that is Idaho, as they can’t seem to put together a collage that doesn’t sound dipped in drugs.

A single-track, sitting-on-a-cloud drone excursion that plays like a deathly, wordless after-school special minus the commercials, the cliché images you’d expect march through your mind as Veil unfolds: red, fiery timpanis larger than the earth itself banging out a sparse rhythm; an orchestra of skeletons playing strings atop a floating piece of ice, just drifting to nowhere; decapitated bunnies — you get the idea. It has a dank-dungeon feel and smell, the sound of six-foot nails being driven into the earth, with a downpour of fuzz that doesn’t relent until it’s time to neatly tie it all up with the aforementioned string of strings.

There are more complex thrills out there if you’re looking for obscure product, but Pussygutt is what they is. Don’t begrudge them for that.

1. She Hid Behind Her Veil

by Gumshoe

Listen To What's Upcoming On DFA.

Give a hoot about DFA? Check out the following links for upcoming release promo players.

Capracara
Cage & Aviary
Woolfy (In Flagranti Mixes)
Woolfy (Whatever/Whatever Mixes)

Restiform Bodies 7.1 Review On Pitchfork Today.

Restiform Bodies:
TV Loves You Back
[Anticon; 2008]
Rating: 7.1
Original Review

California is a big state. And hip-hop aficionados, with their firm sense of place, tie Oakland to a unique style of rap that bears little resemblance to its famous counterpart in Los Angeles. The brightest lights of the Bay Area, E-40 and Too $hort, never fully bought into the dark, trigger-happy sensationalism of the Death Row artists: Guns simply weren't part of their vision of, or path to, the good life. Emphasizing the joy of letting loose, the hyphy movement that sprang up a few years ago only cemented the scene's drama-free outlook.

But Oakland's Restiform Bodies are agitators. And what better place for this hall of modest fame-- the indie-rap supergroup of Passage, Bomarr Monk, and Telephone Jim Jesus-- than Anticon? Their debut on the label, TV Loves You Back, presents a furious, righteous, and not entirely subtle dissatisfaction with capitalism. Thanks to the recent tumult in the world's markets, the album, like the DNC platform, has an added punch of timeliness. To be fair, mindless consumerism is more the target here than, say, overly leveraged banks. In short, the rappers mount their attack on low culture, not high finance.

"Consumer Culture Wave" suggests a fight-the-Man mission with its title. Luckily, the song is better than that, too gloriously strange and oblique to be pressed into the service of jam-band leftism. (Love and gender seem to be the real subject, anyway.) Better to revel in the fluorescent textures and spastic rhythms, an accurate evocation of life in the attention-deficient multimedia slipstream, than to grope for political provocations in the lyrics. After all, it would have sufficed to attack QVC in only one song, you'd think. Docking too many points here isn't fair, anyway: Laid out on the page, even the best songs forfeit their essence. But when you spit nonsense with the apocalyptic ferocity of El-P, in many ways the hyperpolitical white rapper's template, that nonsense may as well be scripture.

Ever eager to disquiet, the Bodies even stoke the listener's anxieties about machines (on the sludgy, horror-string-laced "Pick It Up, Drop It") and modern medicine ("Ameriscan"). If there's a paranoid style in American hip-hop, this may be its purest expression. Nodding to the post-Thanksgiving virus that turns the lanes of Wal-Mart into the Ben-Hur chariot race, "Black Friday" bounces between drum'n'bass speed and trip-hop languor to manic-depressively link consumerism and domestic life. That the Bodies lean on everything from the New Romantics to crunk to post-rock to ghettotech to paint this cultural self-portrait only amplifies the strangeness-- and accuracy-- of TV Loves You Back.

"Movies are for entertainment," Louis B. Mayer famously stated. "If you want to send a message, send a telegram." The role of art isn't quite that narrow, of course, but the legendary producer knew that audiences didn't want to be lectured. And sadly that's what a lot of independent rap does. The Restiform Bodies avoid this. As Passage put it: "All the information on TV Loves You Back is stuff I'm trying to make peace with as a person, and that I think we all have to make peace with as a society." That sums up why the record is not only digestible, but outright luscious. We're not watching a presentation or reading a complaint. We're not being condemned for watching "The Hills". We're living, for a YouTube minute, inside three minds warped and wracked by our national addiction to the screen. It's equal parts unsightly and arresting in the way that most pathologies are.

- Roque Strew, December 10, 2008

Tour plans for next year:
02/19/09 Portland, OR @ Backspace (w/ EGADZ)
02/21/09 Boise, ID @ he Bouquet (w/ EGADZ)
02/22/09 Salt Lake City, UT @ Uprock Records (w/ EGADZ)
02/24/09 Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive (w/ EGADZ)
02/27/09 Winterhaven, CA @ Open Aired (w/ EGADZ)
03/03/09 Las Vegas, NV @ The Bunkhouse (w/ EGADZ)
03/05/09 San Francisco, CA @ Underground SF (w/ EGADZ)

Lakin Grimm In Time Out New York.

Time Out New York / Issue 688 : Dec 4–10, 2008
By Jay Ruttenberg
Photo: Ports Bishop
GRIMM TIDINGS Singer-songwriter Larkin Grimm chronicles a berserk American experience on her new album, Parplar.

The itinerant folksinger Larkin Grimm has come downtown from her current home in Spanish Harlem—length of residence: one week—to grab breakfast on her way out of town. Rain tumbles down with a ferocity generally seen in movies about shipwrecks, yet she dines outside, beneath the restaurant’s modest canopy, remaining miraculously dry as the city soaks. To the musician’s right sits a drunk, welcomed to Grimm’s table after he drifted by requesting money. “Arggh!” he mumbles. “No mucho English.” The aromatic stranger drifts in and out of consciousness, missing the fantastic, at times unbelievable life story that the singer recounts with a monologuist’s poise.

Grimm is 27, the colorful tattoos of her generation splayed across her arms. Her riveting new album, Parplar, is her third full-length, yet the first to feature nonimprovised material and gain wider distribution, courtesy of Young God Records. Her songs are at once witchy, funny and intensely sexual—as befits an album that she claims to be “about Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and the battle between male and female energies in the world.”

Like many eccentric young artists, Grimm is a child of hippies. “There are a lot of us making psychedelic folk music, and we’re not freaky or fakes,” she contends. “We’re just our parents’ children—this is our culture.” Parplar was recorded earlier this year, but its roots lie in the late ’60s, when Grimm’s mother dropped acid on a family sailing trip, “realized that everything was messed up” and ran away from home. The future Mother Grimm hitchhiked to Haight-Ashbury, where she minded children of the Grateful Dead and enlisted in the Holy Order of MANS, a religious commune into which Larkin was born.

The singer’s parents left the Order when she was six. “In the ’80s, the utopian communities that thrived in the ’60s started transforming into the weird cults that we have now,” explains Grimm, who continues to dabble in various factions “because they remind me of home.” The family moved to the Appalachian Mountains so that her fiddler father could immerse himself in hillbilly music. The young singer, accustomed to socializing with pacifists, reacted to the rednecks she suddenly encountered in predictable fashion: When her parents found Grimm throwing knives, they enrolled her in a liberal boarding school. “No longer was I the delinquent bad kid,” she says. “Now, I was class president.”And so, a decade after leaving the Holy Order of MANS, Grimm matriculated at Yale, where she soon befriended the scion of a far more demented American sect: presidential daughter Barbara Bush. “She was interesting,” Grimm claims. “Her best friend was a black gay guy—the gayest man on campus. She was in love with a radical environmentalist, who broke up with her because he didn’t want the Secret Service snooping around. She drank a lot and had problems with boys. There was this very mean plan to get her pregnant and then follow her when she got her abortion. Guys were trying to sleep with her and they were planning to poke a hole in the condom.”

“Hech hech!” the homeless man murmurs. “Acapulco mucho bueno.”

“You can’t blame people for who their parents are,” Grimm adds.

The singer had her own plans for the President’s daughter: She hoped to involve Bush in a performance-art piece, “turning her into a fabulous Paris Hilton character.” Before this could unfold, however, an unpleasant drug experience caused Grimm to cease talking for months and flee to Alaska, where she fasted on a mountaintop. She was discovered there by a kindhearted shaman—named Jezebel Crowe!—who taught her the ways of the medicine woman…and encouraged her to return to Yale. (These days, even witches harbor Ivy League ambitions.)

Returning to school, Grimm broke her silence. She began playing music both as a member of the Dirty Projectors—a band she has since left—and solo. “I realized that when you’re singing, all your emotional truth comes through,” she says. It’s these voices from Grimm’s life that aggregate on her broad, bizarre, uniquely American record, with its collegiate folk and Appalachian howls, ’60s spirituality and contemporary pop culture, chaste hymns and sexual deviance.Her story drawn to the present, the singer rises from the table, gives a piece of corn bread to the homeless man and walks alongside Tompkins Square Park. The rain has cleared, casting the city in a luminous glow. “That Mexican guy totally just felt me up,” she says. “I’m probably the only woman he’s touched in ten years, which is so sad. I’m okay giving him a little bit of sexual healing.”

Larkin Grimm plays the Charleston Fri 5, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine Sat 6 and Housing Works Bookstore Café Wed 10.

SHUT UP, LITTLE MAN! The Complete Recordings now on iTunes!

Paraphrased from the (NEWLY RELAUNCHED!) SHUT UP LITTLE MAN! website:

The long-awaited, much-requested Complete Recordings of Shut Up Little Man! are now available digitally in seven separate volumes. The original recordings have been carefully edited and sound engineered for higher fidelity and clarity, so that every moment of audio savagery and drunken hilarity of Peter and Raymond has been preserved and represented. Unlike the short snippets on the popular "Best Of" album, the new Complete Recordings feature mostly unexpurgated dialogues, enabling the listener to get a truer sense of the putrid flow of an evening with the infamous duo-- the absurd barbs back and forth, the snowballing aggression, and the booze-laden verbal and physical exchanges. Each volume of the Complete Recordings is different and jammed with 74 minutes of Pete & Ray rants with disturbing and humorous one-liners not found on the "Best Of" CD.

iTunes is exclusively selling digital downloads of these titles between now and December 23rd. Own all seven!

Complete Recordings, Volume 1: "I Can Kill You From a Sitting Position"

Complete Recordings, Volume 2: "I Was A Mean Motherfucker in My Time"

Complete Recordings, Volume 3:"You Think Your Mother and Father Were a Couple of Boys?"

Complete Recordings, Volume 4: "A Night in the Stony Lonesome"

Complete Recordings, Volume 5: "I Don't Like All This Cuteness"

Complete Recordings, Volume 6: "Stop Stealing My Vokda!"

Complete Recordings, Volume 7: "The Peter and Tony Interview"

Stereogum Announces Upcoming MV & EE Release.

MV & EE sneak preview song download and feature on Stereogum today.

Prolific deepwoods Vermonters Matt Valentine (who played in the excellently ramshackle Tower Recordings) and Erika Elder are back with Drone Trailer. They're not shy about releasing recordings (together and apart), but the collections often show up in limited runs or on smaller labels. The forthcoming six-song collection Drone is out via the (slightly) easier to locate DiCristina. On it, the duo's backed by three-dude strong Golden Road, as you should be able to deduce after listening to the dense, full-band psych of cathartic opener "Anyway." We asked Valentine to unpack the lyrics. Let us know if it helps.

What inspired "Anyway"'s "anyway I can" theme? Y'know "space" was once the end all for the conqueroo ... Now that scene is a mere blip on the sonar of Spit James. We hinted at it sometime back with our "Meditations On Payday," that rub was as much Mississippi John Hurt as it was Rip Torn. Now we gotta go beyond nomenclature into some sorta '"any" "way" -- the "many are one" philosophy, you'd be as grateful as we if your "many" were a true singular "one," or one within a pair. It all gets in there anyway.

And, what was the spaceman's master plan? The spaceman could be Bill Lee. In his "space" the main aim to the end of the game is not allow anyone "on" base. That's the key, like salts to alchemists and the Masonic depth to baseball, turning "on" has always been where it is at. Tesla, the energy monopolies ... dig the idea of standing tall, as in the indian chief, or the inverse of laying low. You "can't stand" can be many rooms, mebbe the Velvets said it best ..."I Can't Stand It Anymore." Dig their castle, we are just a mere moat in this thing, swimming as best we can. This song is about a river and a life raft.

Drone Trailer is out 1/20 on DiCristina.

The Week That Was On Uncut's Year End Best Of List.

Larkin Grimm New York Times Review Yesterday (Sunday 11/30/08).

Larkin Grimm
Original Post

Combing through the singer-songwriter Larkin Grimm’s strange and deeply original new record, “Parplar” (Young God), you keep picking up rude shocks, some of them sung in a pleasant, cooing voice, over original and hypnotic combinations of different kinds of folk music. “Oh Mama, I’m a bad spirit, be my host,” she sings. And: “My hooks are sharp, my heart is cold.” And: “Damn the man in you.” And: “Who told you you’re going to be all right? Well, they were wrong.”

A lot of her lyrical images (and the arrangement ideas, like mariachi brass with fingerpicked guitar and synthesizer) seem to come from dreams. But her dreams aren’t utopian; they’re as complicated as real life.

Upcoming Grimm shows:
12/10 New York @ NY Housing Works Bookstore Café (w/ Michael Gira)
12/12 Richmond, VA @ Thanky Space
12/13 Greensboro, NC @ Green Bean
12/14 Greenville, SC @ Reverb
12/15 Athens, GA @ Tasty World
12/16 Atlanta, GA @ E.A.R.L.

Revolver USA Podcast #13 Is Posted And Raging!

Podcast # 13 : This week you can here the delightful sounds of: Restiform Bodies, Absentee, Apache, Roots Manuva, Vivian Girls, and Zomes. Whole Lotta Love.

Sweet 'Enhanced' AAC Version: Here

Killer Mp3 version: Here

PODCAST UPDATES:
How to subscribe:

Paste the following feed into your favorite podcast aggregator: http://www.midheaven.com/audio/podcast/podcast.xml

Or, if you have iTunes installed on your computer click "subscribe"
here : http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=281174094

Or check out the new Revolver USA podcasts on our new podcast page : http://www.midheaven.com/audio/podcast/

TWTW #8 On Mojo's Top 50 Albums of 2008 List.

Mojo gives a top notch position to The Week That Was on their Top 50 albums of the year list.