New Music, Emerging from your Local Scene
Coming from Bethesda MD is the experimental indie-pop duo The Raised By Wolves who’s incredible album Sadie Hawkins debuted this past summer. Check it out below, and you’ll hear why their fans pushed for them to be our Band of the Month. We got a hold of Dusty Durston and Ben Eskin to find out more about them. Here they tell us about collaborating via Skype, shorty story inspiration, and future plans. Now onto the interview…
The dirty rock band Stepfather Gets Mohawk has released a video for their track "Burn Your Blood". The track comes from their debut full-length album Come On, Super Devil which was released back in April.
You can catch Stepfather Gets Mohawk at Ultra Lounge on Oct. 23rd.
This is one of the many reasons why we love rjd2. Get into the mind of producer/DJ/label owner/multi-istrumentalist Ramble John Krohn as he talks about vinyl collecting in Fuse TV’s Crate Diggers! And yes, we are very effin’ jealous of his collection.
Appendixes have the uncanny ability to make me question my consciousness whenever I listen to them. The trio’s take on the shoegaze genre is filled with swells of surreal tones offset by calm, reverberating vocals that bring on dream-like sensations as they flow through atmospheric compositions. Their latest release, a 7” record titled Neon Green Fear, features two tracks that showcase their style through bright guitar leads and pulses of feedback. Minimal rhythms created by a drum machine provide moments of foundation between flights into a more ambient territory. Appendixes will be celebrating the release of Neon Green Fear at Mississippi Studios this Sunday, October 20th with The Comets, Vice Device and Industrial Park. You can also watch brand new the video for title track below. – Benjamin Toledo
Locals Psychic Teens are the kind of band that made stereotypical 1950’s housewives faint. Fresh off their sophomore release COME (SRA Records), the group’s music is an application of the most self-aware sort of psychedelic post-punk drenched in the reckless abandon of 80’s metal – specifically, imagine Bauhaus and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet in a blender. Psychic Teens are bringing their uniquely grungy, wry and downright furious brand of prog-punk to Yarga’s Basement, nestled in our favorite Penn fraternity, in what is sure to be an all-out blitzkrieg on your ability to hear the next day. They’ll be joined by Michigan’s Brief Candles, the recently re-formed Oh, Adeona, and You’re Fired, a brand new endeavor born from Philly noise-rock specialists Heavy Medical. BTW: If this lineup doesn’t get you there promptly on time, there has also been a promise of something special for the first 30 people in the door. Yarga’s Basement, (Please contact yargaproductions@gmail.com for more info.), 9pm, All Ages – Daniel Ludwig
Travis Lee Wiggins & Sarah Sterling (Videotape) (aka Nervous Cloud) have released their second album together. The new album is called Nimbus and feature nine outstanding new tracks. You can stream the entire album here.
Morphine Records is planning to release a trilogy of works from avant-garde electronic composer Charles Cohen. The first will be his album The Middle Distance (which was recorded between 1979 and 1988), then Group Motion (a live recording of a collaboration with a Philadelphia dance troupe using two of the rarest synthesizers in the world, the Buchla Music Easel and the Buchla 700 series), and finally the double LP Music for Dance and Theater (which was also recorded between 1979 and 1988). Below is the opening track from The Middle Distance called "Club Revival Performance."
Los Angeles-via Tempe duo Dead Times follow the current renaissance of eighties R&B with an ethereal, minimal take on the genre, splicing sultry snippets of sound and converting them into the smoothest riddims this side of Prince. After introducing themselves with sweltering slow jam "Inner Gold" a couple of months ago, they’ve just released a spacious, mutated version of Donnie & Joe Emerson’s downtempo cult classic "Baby". It’s as intriguing as it is bemusing, since it has a groove that’s easy to like but still mysterious enough to keeps us guessing about their next singles. Perhaps some of these questions will be answered this coming November, with two live performances at Galleria Obscura on the 7th and Goldroom on the 8th.
You’re out of scotch. You open all your windows and a slight trickle of the afternoon’s rain drips into the spongy grass outside. The perfect stillness of the night makes you wonder if you’ve come untethered from the world, a blip in a timeline that has already forgotten you. This trancelike moment, when others with weaker constitutions have abandoned hope, is precisely when the three members of Yum picked up their instruments and recorded their hushed bossa novas and fragile music box melodies. They did it to save you.
Imagine "The Girl from Ipanema" shipwrecked on an island made of tinfoil where it is perpetually five minutes before sunrise. Samantha Skinner’s breathy voice can at once be a soothing lullaby and a whispered warning. That tension is what makes this album so wonderful. Opener, "In My Room", threatens to burst from its quiet confines, the drums crispy in the mix but played with a gentle touch. When the distortion finally kicks in halfway through, there’s still that sense of unease, as if you don’t know the whole story.
The album standout comes at the end. "Medicine and Tea" is mysterious and atmospheric like the best qualities of Blonde Redhead, a band that must come up a lot when discussing Yum’s sound. Skinner’s plaintive coos supplant the chorus in favor of a dreamy haze. After eight songs of late night reminiscing and nuanced discord, this is the perfect way to end their flawlessly sequenced album. That’s the magic of Yum, even after Take My Blue has ended, it’s still with you, echoing ever so slightly in your head. You don’t have to spend those late night hours alone. Hear for yourself, in person, at their album release party on Friday, 10/18/13. –Written by Josh Denslow
Here’s another new track, "Beyond Your Bones," from Far-Out Fangtooth‘s forthcoming LP Borrowed Time, due out on October 29 via SiltBreeze. The album was mixed by Uniform Recording’s Jeff Zeigler and produced by Residuels/Moon Women‘s Justin Pittney. Far Out-Fangtooth will be celebrating their record’s release on Saturday, November 2 at The Boot & Saddle.
