Monthly Archives: March 2020

VIA PRESS RELEASE | “Celebrates and immortalizes the culture of the record store.” —Variety

Factory 25 announced the acquisition of the North American rights to the Tribeca Film Festival premiering documentary Other Music by Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller and premiere of the film’s official trailer featuring a 1996 live in-store performance by Neutral Milk Hotel (the first live performance ever of “Two Headed Boy”). The film delves into the iconic New York City record store’s influence with appearances by Tunde Adebimpe (TV On the Radio), Jason Schwartzman, Martin Gore (Depeche Mode), Matt Berninger (The National), Janeane Garofalo, Ezra Koenig (Vampire Weekend) and more…

Other Music was an influential and uncompromising New York City record store that was vital to the city’s early 2000s indie music scene. But when the store is forced to close its doors due to rent increases, the homogenization of urban culture, and the shift from CDs to downloadable and streaming music, a cultural landmark is lost.

Through vibrant storytelling, the documentary captures the record store’s vital role in the musical and cultural life of the city, and highlights the artists whose careers it helped launch including Vampire Weekend, Regina Spektor, Animal Collective, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, William Basinski, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sharon Van Etten, The Rapture and TV On The Radio.

The Film will open theatrically in New York City at IFC Center on April 15th and will be playing in theaters in over twenty North American cities and around the world corresponding to Record Store Day (April 18th) weekend. The film will be available digitally in the late summer.

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PHOTO: BEN TAYLOR-VIVIAN | Old-school Australian rockers Datura4 return in April with their fourth studio album, West Coast Highway Cosmic, an ode to the open road and lost legends of rock and roll. Their latest single, “You Be the Fool,” takes us on a sun-soaked trip from the 1970s to now.

With its fuzzy blues-rock riff dipped in psychedelia, “You Be the Fool” sounds like “Roadhouse Blues” covered by Count Five. Reliable set pieces from the classic rock canon in unexpected variations make the song feel at once fresh and familiar: a wailing harmonica which might have been filched from Howlin’ Wolf by the Rolling Stones, a funk undercurrent that smacks of Stevie Wonder, a falsetto refrain which—down to the lyric “What you gonna do?”—seems to echo Gary Clark Jr. on “What About Us.”

“We’d had the main riff kicking around for a while. During our shows we’d regularly incorporate it into our extended jams of ‘Demon Blues’ from our first album. The more we jammed on it, the more I thought it would be cool to extract a song out of it,” says frontman Dom Mariani. “The verses came from another unfinished tune. I was able to marry the two together. The contrast between the straighter rocking verses and the funky blues groove of the main riff and chorus worked nicely.” Listeners will likely agree; “You Be the Fool” is eminently grooveable, and West Coast Highway Cosmic promises more good grooves to come.

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With the release of Mind Hive, Wire reinforce their status as the quintessential post-punk band who, in the sheer unlikelihood of their tenacity, simply refuse to settle into obsolescence, or appealing predictability, even. Utterly disinterested in nostalgia, their new record is sharply focused on the ominousness of the current moment. Powerfully terse, it’s out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Pinkflag. They are also currently touring the USA, with a stop on March 9 at Union Stage in Washington, DC.

The worthiness of Wire’s longevity finds them essentially without peer in the realms of punk’s class of 1977, though it’s well-established by now that the band were never a tidy fit with that style in its baseline form. Art-punk specialists before that subgenre was articulated, they were also one of the foundational acts in the whole post-punk shebang.

By extension, they have been often (brazenly) imitated. These approximations, even when likeable, do sit in stark contrast to Wire’s resistance to the regurgitation of formula. Where the vast majority of outfits who persevere across decades thrive by delivering a well-practiced sameness to an audience eager for slight variations on the same pattern, Wire seem to exist in a state of perpetual growth while always being identifiable as themselves.

This recognizability factor is crucial in reinforcing a trajectory of coherence throughout the group’s history. Each Wire album is quickly identifiable as a byproduct of the band, an experience not at all like meeting a succession of strangers but rather akin to consistently reconnecting with a tight pool of individuals who maintain a fine equilibrium of restlessness and tenacity.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Philophobia, Arab Strap’s sophomore slam dunk released in the spring of 1998, begins with one of the most memorable opening lines in all of indie rock: “It was the biggest cock you’d ever seen / But you’ve no idea where that cock has been.”

So starts an album that, while picking up thematically where the duo’s debut album The Week Never Starts Round Here left off, promises from its very first seconds a renewed sense of purpose: the narratives are more streamlined, the music more confident and mature. Gone are the sketches and doodles that unquestionably distinguished 1996’s The Week Never Starts Round Here as the work of first timers, replaced with a consistent, almost conceptual, musical framework. On Philophobia, singer and lyricist Aidan Moffat’s realism is more profane, gritty and poignant, while multi-instrumentalist Malcolm Middleton’s honeyed orchestrations increasingly provide clinics in subtlety and restraint.

In the world of Arab Strap, the good years are either long gone or are rapidly speeding by in a feverish montage of big weekends, scandalous secrets, discarded clothes, and bogs full of bile. Tempting as it may be to dismiss Moffat as another lonesome lothario in the tradition of Greg Dulli or Jarvis Cocker, the singer’s oversharing unerringly carries with it an unmistakable aura of longing and loss; he’s not bragging, he’s confessing. Over Middleton’s variety of elegant tones and textures, Moffat’s mordant confessions become unlikely anthems. The result is music that is bleak but beautiful, full of dread and toxic nostalgia, and dotted with repentance, impotence, and wounded male ego.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Author Jenny Boyd, whose new memoir Jennifer Juniper: A journey beyond the muse is slated for publication on March 26 from Urbane Publications, will launch the book at the annual New York Metro Fest For Beatles Fans at the Hyatt Regency Jersey City over the weekend of March 27–29. The Fest For Beatles Fans, now in its 46th year, is the world’s longest-running Beatles fan celebration, bringing together a huge range of fellow musicians, artists, family, friends, and associates from the Beatles world.

For Jenny Boyd, the forum is appropriate. When fashion and pop culture intersected during the Swinging ‘60s in London, she was swept up into both worlds. A promising young model for cutting edge designers, she worked in Carnaby Street by day and danced at the city’s most popular clubs at night where the music of the best of the British Invasion was showcased. She was Beatle George Harrison’s (and later Eric Clapton’s) sister-in-law, she married Mick Fleetwood, founder member of Fleetwood Mac, twice, and she was entrenched in the rock ‘n roll world of fame, money, drugs, and betrayal. She accompanied The Beatles to Rishikesh in Northern India in 1968 to study meditation at the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and worked in The Beatles’ Apple boutique in London.

It was during her 10-year marriage to rock and jazz drummer Ian Wallace that Jenny Boyd stopped her rock and roll lifestyle and went back to school, becoming a research psychologist and author with a Ph.D in Human Behavior. Bridging her two disparate paths, her Ph.D dissertation about musicians and the creative process morphed into a book that was first published in 1992 and later updated and re-issued in the US and UK in 2014 under the title It’s Not Only Rock ‘n’ Roll. She has effectively lived two lives, both of them extraordinary.

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“Since I am a child of the ’90s, I grew up with CDs and wasn’t really introduced to vinyl until I was about 10 years old.”

“My dad is really into prog rock and I remember rummaging through his record collection and finding artists like Genesis and Yes. With artists like those, there’s so much emphasis on creativity and artwork, and with vinyl you can actually see it and pay attention to it. Music is so much more than just the songs, it’s all of the art and imagery that goes along with it and vinyl really allows you to appreciate those things.

I grew up on bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Led Zeppelin. Something I have always loved about all of them is their insane album artwork, so I have grown quite the collection of vinyl from bands from the ’70s and ’80s.

As my music taste has evolved and expanded, I have traded my denim cut-off vest for a nice button up and cardigan. The harder stuff will always be a part of who I am, but now I prefer to dabble in ’90s music and my favorite current artists. Nothing like Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? on a record player to instantly make any ’90s kid want a Lunchable and a Skip-It.

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There are 75 million Kenny G albums out there. This figure may not frighten you, but it has epidemiologists worried sick. According to public health officials we’re in the midst of a full-blown Kenny G pandemic, and the scary thing is he’s gone airborne.

You can contract Kenny G at your dentist’s office, a karaoke bar, or the frozen foods aisle at your local supermarket. In certain counties in Kansas people have taken to wearing earphones. You may think they’re being overly cautious, but you won’t be laughing when you find yourself grooving to the smooth jazz sounds of 1986’s Duotones.

Duotones marked the beginning of Kenny G. Patient Zero is believed to have been a high school jazz band saxophonist with a compromised musical immune system who happened upon Duotones’s opening track, “Songbird.” Said high-schooler then played the song for other band members, who in turn played it for classmates and parents. And by then it was too late. Kenny G spread faster than Enya.

Few expected the Kenneth Bruce Gorelick who began his career as a sideman with Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra would one day become a worldwide scourge, infecting millions of innocents whose only desire was to ease their daily stress or set the mood for love. It’s true what they say–easy listening destroys lives.

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