Indie Vinyl

these recent vinyl LP platters to rattle paned glass & irritate your neighbors. Sic Alps “US EZ” (Siltbreeze) , Crystal Stilts “Alight of Night”(Slumberland) , Vivian Girls “Vivian Girls”(In the Red), Tobacco “Fucked Up Friends” (Anticon),  Wavves  “Wavves” (Woodist).
    UPCOMING LP not to miss is Chicago’s  Mannequin Men’s "Lose Your Illusion, Too" LP  on the Flameshovel label out this June.- this band is always on the road and should be caught live if you have the chance.

“Merriweather Post Pavillion” is such a grand sweeping gesture of pure art, it must be heard on vinyl. Listening to mp3s of this record is like playing tennis with a wet rag.  I’d almost expect Animal Collective to start flying pigs, crashing planes, and building walls in concert; this is their eighth album, and like another great eighth record “Dark Side of the Moon”, it not only defines their career, it is perhaps the most satisfying LP of Arty Rock of its time.

Drag City’s foray into archival Midwestern recordings helps fill in some gaps of the post-psych and pre-punk era for Chicago & Detroit rock. J.T. IV’s “Cosmic Lightning” reissue is such a perfect example of Midwestern suburban affluence crossed with self-destructive glam punk vanity. This lo-fi vinyl-only LP comes with a DVD so gut-wrenchingly personal it is almost painful to watch in a perverse way. I loved the inescapable 1970s-1980s tragic ethos presented here- a car accident on Chicago’s Sheridan Avenue & J.T.’s inevitable death seemed almost prescribed. Speaking of Death, the Detroit band’s 1970s recordings “…. for all the World to See” is almost too good to be true. Students of late-60s Detroit Lama Lama WITH CHOPS- these guys can play in almost a Thin Lizzy kind of way.  A band this intense with such playing skill must’ve been truly devastating in concert.
  I’m reading this delving into the past by Drag City as a call-to-arms to further unleash lo-fi scuzz of our Midwestern past onto vinyl. So much has been done already documenting older forms of weird obscure Midwestern Rawk,  labels like De Stijl (Michael Yonkers) & the forthcoming schedule by the Nero’s Neptune label (Pere Ubu) encourage & solidify this ideal. I’m planning my own vinyl dig into Winnipeg’s past- the far outer reaches of the frozen Midwest’s self-hatred (the ‘peg is probably the biggest Midwestern burg where an escape plan is handed out at birth) has inspired perhaps the most long-standing (25 years!) underdogs of underground rock The Breath Grenades.  Five diff LP releases won’t be enough to even start documenting their mayhem.