Despite my grumbling yesterday, bands and artists and labels continue to fill the TVD HQ email in-box with some damn fine output. Case in point: the Brooklyn two-piece that is Heroes Of Popular Wars.
They garnered my attention initially by citing David Sylvian as an influence, yet drive home a point of their own—“drunken, leering robots patiently laying it all out for you and making you fall in love with them because they make you look them in the eye.” Or something.
We chatted up Stephe (aka the “Blue Eyed Devil”) who proves that The Beatles are STILL inspiration for people—and robots—everywhere.
“I first new I was going to be obsessed with music young. At age 12 I had saved up money from mowing my Mom’s lawn for a month and though my family already had multiple copies, in multiple formats, I wanted something very specific. The gigantic poster/4 small posters that came in the packaging for the vinyl version of the Beatles’ White Album. As 96-97% of all music lovers know, the vinyl version, and only the vinyl, comes with one gigantic “collage of pics” poster and 4 8×10 of each Beatle and I wanted that poster as bad as I wanted the music.
My mother had agreed to drive me on a Saturday to the mall to go pick it up. However, there was some kind of disagreement, like I had an argument with my brother or I wouldn’t take out the trash, I forget now. The end result, however, was that my Mom refused to drive me. Probably heated by the now-forgotten argument, I stomped out of my Mom’s house and walked the 4 1/2 miles, got to the music store (I believe it was a one-off store called Musicsmith in suburban Massachusetts) and picked up the record. I walked out of the store, sat on a nearby bench, tore the plastic off and tore the poster out of the sleeve.
The poster has so much going on, I may have spent an hour trying to process every little piece of the collage (and rest my feet.) After taking long looks at each of the individual portraits, I packed up the whole thing and trudged home. I don’t know if I ever “earned” a record as much since but every time I hear Rocky Raccoon or I’m So Tired I remember that hour on the bench and how mystified I was by the photographs all haphazardly piled on top of each other.”
Heroes of Popular Wars – Bus Called Further (Mp3)
Heroes of Popular Wars – American Loser (Mp3)
Heroes of Popular Wars – McDonald (Mp3)
