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viewing 1 To 8 of 8 items
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LP
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SMC 045LP
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"There's an insurmountable weight to Big Mess' music, and at times, an insurmountable wait too. The Lowell, MA based trio have earned themselves a cult like status among those in the know. To come across the heavy thud and dissonant groove of their instrumental wreckage is to fall in love with the band, but it's been seven long years since their last release (a split with New Hampshire's Black Norse) and nearly a decade since their last full length. You'd be excused if you'd thought they'd hung it up, but thankfully, you'd be dead wrong. Big Mess comes roaring back to life on Heroic Captains of Industry. The album is colossally heavy with nuanced writing that see-saws and tugs in opposing directions at will. There's a wealth of atmosphere in Big Mess' songs as chord structures push and pull, rattling in the still air, the band using repetition and space to create their void. Once you've been pulled in, there's nothing left to do but marvel in its wake. 'Caoutchouteuse,' the record's first single is a shimmering example of their spatial focus, a song that moves at a slow-pulled pace, opting for seasick progressions and the juxtaposition of sludge and open-air freedom. As the dust begins to settle, the avalanche comes toppling over. Rather than a post-rock informed crescendo though, Big Mess pull back and peel at the seams, the course a spiral rather than a straight path. It's one brilliantly unpredictable moment on an album full of them (wait til you hear its companion in 'Misery Blues'). Big Mess is back." --Dan Goldin (Post-Trash)
RIYL: Earth, Exploding In Sound, Harvey Milk, Sunn O))), Son House.
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LP
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SMC 043LP
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After a wait of over three years since their last LP, Inspector 34's hotly anticipated follow-up to 2020's Love My Life (SMC 010LP) does not disappoint. Recorded by the band themselves, at a makeshift studio in a cabin in the woods, Squint Your Ears represents perhaps the group's most fully-realized artistic effort to date. Songs, riffs, and sounds ooze in and out of each other with wild abandon as Inspector 34, despite being ostensibly a fairly straightforward rock group, somehow defies classification -- only their own self-styled "junk rock" appellation seems vaguely appropriate. It's a sound full of contradictions -- simple and complex, loose and tightly angular, noisy yet somehow catchy. Songs flirt with a variety of diverse genres without ever falling solidly into one camp or another, shifting (or lurching dizzily) from knuckle-draggingly heavy to whimsically playful in the blink of an eye -- or an ear, as it were. Each one leaves the listener gasping for breath and anxious for more. RIYL: Pixies, Captain Beefheart, Pile, Sonic Youth, Polvo, Animal Collective, Pavement, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Ween, Pink Floyd, Elephant 6, Drag City.
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LP + 7"
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SMC 040LP
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At long last, Lowell MA psych-trash-rockers Squash are coming to vinyl. This pairing of 2021's Whatever It's Like Is That's What's Happening and 2023's Where Did I Go? EP finally gives fans of the chance to own a physical piece of their particular brand of sonic onslaught. Aside from the fact that they were undoubtedly created by the same band, these releases provide the perfect companion pieces to one another. Whatever It's Like is a richly crafted aural experience, awash with meticulous overdubs creating enveloping sonic textures that wrap your brain in a fuzzy blanket of sound. On the other hand, the Where Did I Go? EP demonstrates a loose, raw sound more reminiscent of the band's chaotic live performances and is the perfect follow-up. Raunchy riffs, wandering guitar lines and warbly howling vocals, this has got it all. RIYL: Grateful Dead, Fugazi, Smashing Pumpkins, Pavement, Built to Spill, Nirvana, The Gerbils.
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Cassette
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SMC 040CS
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Benjamin Lee Farley has been writing and recording music for around 20 years and he swears that he's finally gotten good at it -- though we know he always has been. Diagnosed bipolar and schizophrenic and recently medicated, he is finally willing to use his mental illness to his advantage if it gets people to perk up their ears. In other words, he hears things and sometimes it translates to music and lyrics. After more than a decade of performing with different acts and under various aliases in the Boston area, he has relocated to the hills of North Carolina and become a hermit. Self-taught and frighteningly prolific, he has recorded and released over 50 albums in the past 5 years alone, in styles ranging from singer-songwriter-folky-americana to grimy electronics to dub to thrash metal to straight up rock n fuckin' roll. With yelling. His latest album The Stalker is in many ways a synthesis of the different musical strains he has explored over his long career, a frenetic burst of energy showcasing his raw talent and well-honed DIY production instincts. His music has been compared to a wide breadth of legendary musicians, but is really its own unique monster. Highfives and backpats all around. RIYL: Vic Chesnutt, Fiona Apple, Queens of the Stone Age, The Coasters, Neil Young, Screamin' Jay Hawkins.
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Cassette
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SMC 017CS
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So Low We Can't Hear You is the first live album from Lowell, MA's Inspector 34, as well as the first solo album from founder Jim Warren since the formation of the band's current line-up following 2016's Cuando En España. Its 34 tracks are sourced from a variety of live recordings made over a ten-year span from venues across the country. Presented as they are, simple acoustic performances with no overdubs, they showcase Warren's eclectic songwriting and the raw energy characteristic of his solo performances. RIYL: Daniel Johnston, Pat the Bunny, Pixies, Animal Collective, Neutral Milk Hotel.
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LP
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SMC 014LP
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Songs About Water and Trying to Feel Okay is the 12th full-length album by DIY anti-folk wanderer Billy Mack Collector, and the first in four years. Lyrically it follows the narrative of songwriter Billy Mack's journey through life with undiagnosed depression and finally seeking treatment, with each song documenting one of many ways a person can cope with depression. Musically, the album is somewhere at the intersection of anti-folk and early 2000s indie-rock, evoking comparisons to Modest Mouse, Kimya Dawson, Daniel Johnston, and Beat Happening -- however, influences emerge from all over the spectrum, with tinges of traditional American folk, avant-garde, prog rock, shoegaze, folk-punk and just about everything else showing through at different points throughout. Recorded largely in quarantine, it features a rotating cast of over 20 musicians (including, among others, members of Inspector 34, Freddy Fuddpucker, and Jacob Norman Chainsaw Arm) on a large variety of instruments, giving every song its own unique style of instrumentation. Musicians self-recorded and sent in their parts from multiple states and continents, and as tracks and ideas passed back and forth with time to simmer, grow and evolve, each song took on a life of its own and the album grew into something entirely different from any of the band's previous recordings, while still remaining very distinctly a Billy Mack Collector album. The band has always self-described as "happy songs about being uncomfortable" and this album is no different.
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LP
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SMC 010LP
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Love My Life is the latest full-length album from Lowell MA's Inspector 34. With their Don't Worry This Is OK EP (SMC 004EP), Inspector 34 showed a wild capability to make a simple rock song big and boisterous, but Love My Life cracks the whole chestnut open, creating a gigantic universe to crawl inside and lie in. With a wide embrace of sound, the 13 songs on Love My Life emit faint whiffs from all types of American budget lo-fi records of the past 30 or so years, from Guided by Voices to U.S. Maple. And it's the variety that grabs you -- starting with the tripped out "Love" intro moving into the staggered groove of "Everybody," ribbed with delicate fuzz and a fizzy electronic exoskeleton somehow reminiscent of Animal Collective's Centipede Hz, the album ends with the mushing Akron/Family groove that boils over on "Ride the River of Light." In between, there's the sizzle of a "Thick Bologna" slice hitting your buttered frying pan in the cold morning before you lay it down on your morning biscuit, oozing out grease like the great Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919 -- it settles in your guts, a perfectly honed and stoned rocking chair groove. "My" slips in shortly after and wedges itself in between your brain and your mind as a solidified, rock tumor metastasizing the same way a Surfer Rosa joint would, clocking in at under a minute-and-a-half. "Grow Old" is a glacial grower, adding elements like ticking guitar parts, choral vocals, and guttural grime. It's a jungle of solid guitar motifs laced with a Sgt. Peppers kaleidoscopic wonderment similar to Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle. This is junk rock, sludge pop, indie rock for the apocalypse. Influences pop out sharply at times, but dissolve quickly; one minute you think you're in the bridge of an OK Computer B-side, the next you're submerged in a simmering fuzz tunnel with a set of limber guitar chords that titillate like no other this side of the Mississippi. Inspector knows their sound oozes from the space and lulling strums, never too bogged down, but wildly intricate like waves of sonic mercury. Love My Life is a noisy odyssey through a quantum field with mellowing currents of fuzz, coalescing into warm, phosphorescent pockets of self-portraiture.
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7"
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SMC 004EP
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The first full-band EP from Lowell MA's Inspector 34. With a healthy whiff of the same self-sufficient spirit as the '90s Drag City or Kill Rock Stars rosters, these four tracks are pinned together by sauntering, oddly distorted guitars tweaked with subtle effects and swooping, near-hawkish vocals that run in the same register as pre-White Stuff Neil Hagerty. Like Polvo with pinched nipples. Recorded live at Q Division Studios.
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