1. July 2014
Things You Can Buy Today 1 June 2014
This week we will be looking at and hearing three new albums. One from a band that aren’t Americana, they’re a string band and that is country, then an album that marks the return of a emo indie rock band after a 16 year absence and a band of psych rockers from the land of yummy maple syrup and that is sweet!
So let us begin to dig-in and check out some sounds and thoughts from around the web..Please click the album titles for more info.
Old Crow Medicine Show – ‘Remedy‘ (ATO)
Ketch Secor, Kevin Hayes, Morgan Jahnig, Gill Landry, Critter Fuqua, Chance McCoy and Cory Younts make up what is and has been in the music world known as good ole fashioned deep rooted string band music. Not Americana but backwoods and back in-the-hills country music. Old Crow Medicine Show have just released their, ‘not that shocking that it’s killer’, album Remedy and finds the band down home and on the edge Rock N’ Roll town. The way it is and has always been; back when true country and blues were as dangerous as punk was in the late 70’s. Not to mention that on this , their 8thstudio album, they revisit Bob Dylan and the world is right again.
Ketch Secor told Marissa A. Moss over at Rolling Stone this about Remedy, “Minstrels like us, back in the day, we had an elixir. Music has always been a remedy for what ails you. It might just still be the same old snake oil, but that stuff works. I think one of the applications of the word is self-reflective. We needed to take the cure. We’ve been at it for fifteen years now. Let’s make a record that is us, looks like us, sounds like us, is completely made by us in Nashville. There were some parts of the band that needed fixing. We had to take the cure ourselves.”
Secor later added this bit of righteousness about the easily bestowed ‘Americana’ badge; “We’re all caught in this Americana lynch wrap. I think it all started when the record companies decided that Johnny Cash wasn’t country anymore. They decided that, because he was old and had warts on his face, they wanted something young and pink and fleshy to stand up there and shimmy and shake. And when Johnny Cash stopped being country, Americana was born. We’re in good company, but it’s made up, it’s not real. We really are a country band. This is country music.”
Right, so check out the honesty of Remedy and the full RS interview HERE.
Braid – ‘No Coast‘ (Top Shelf)
Illinois emo-core rockers, what would you call ‘em, Braid have reappeared after a sixteen year hibernation with strikingly elevated and devastatingly cool album called No Coast. An Album, which finds a band that has grown from and stepped out of the shadows of any labels given to them. Maybe now, once again, Braid can lead the charge for those deep dark thinkers with a re-envisioned sound.
We decided to forgo any catchy quotes and start you on their backstory featured on thier website. It’s a cool read friends.
For three or four years, Bob Nanna hadn’t heard much from his former Braid bandmate Chris Broach—not since the band’s brief reunion in 2004, at least. It wasn’t due to animosity; both were simply busy with other musical pursuits and living in separate cities. Nanna was in Chicago, a two and a half hour trek from Champaign, IL where Broach lived and where Braid had started writing its angular, dissonant songs in 1993.
When Broach moved to Chicago, though, it took no time before he and Nanna reconnected. They began bumping into each other at local shows and bars before they created new reasons to reconvene. “At the time,” Nanna tells, “I had started to do these DJ nights at a bar called Bar DeVille, and they wanted me to do a punk/indie DJ night. I thought, I wonder if Chris would want to come and join me?”
Read In Full HERE. Here is the opening track from No Coast…
The Vacant Lots – ‘Departure‘ (Sonic Cathedral)
Check this out, we don’t know much about this Vermont psych rock duo. But since we have found ourselves parking on their SoundCloud page reminiscent of a stalker we thought it a good idea to include them on this week’s Things You Can Buy as we dig deeper into what it is about their new album Departure. We’ll get back to ya…
From the band’s Facebook page:
The Vacant Lots initially came together in 2009 in their hometown of Burlington, Vermont, and made their recorded debut a couple years later with the ‘Confusion’ single, which was highly praised by Pitchfork for its “pared down sound, with all excess fat deliciously shorn to the bone, allowing a stone cold downer vibe to bludgeon the listener into a glorious, senseless stupor”.
What Are You Listening To This Week?