Upcoming & New Releases
Hot & Cold - Border Area LP (Out 7/17)
Inverting expectations, a shop in Yangon, Myanmar advertises "Hot" and "Cold" in blue and red, changing the typical association between words and sensations. One stop along the way of Josh and Simon's lifelong musical journey, the interchangeable sign mimics the brothers' adventures with noise and melody. Border Area, their debut LP, is their signpost, marking the intersection between restless psychedelia and steady drum machine beats.
From origins of gong, keyboards, and bass during their first official show in 2006 in Beijing, Hot & Cold developed their wild, abstract sound into structured explorations. These transnational brothers perfectly embody the universal, borderless approach of krautrock with their roaming and buzzing minimal set. Hot & Cold build their sound around relentless beats, looping, driving bass, and blown-out keys. The duo's energy and emotion jump through the speakers, creating a vitality that is greater than the elements alone. Anticipation builds, leading to unhinged release, carried by the brothers' execution of songcraft and experimentation. Border Area signifies a drive to follow creativity across borders, across cultures, delivering music that moves beyond expectations or trends. Simple elements allow Hot & Cold to fully explore their warped sense of traditional pop or rock song structures; energy and delivery ensure their sincerity. This is not simply pop or rock music; shifts in rhythmic patterns or vocal delivery or song structure materialize instead of expected songwriting moves. Dan Melchior - Ghost In The Supermarket 12in EP RSD 2012 (Out Now)
From the wilds of England via North Carolina, visionary stomper Dan Melchior has been working on the devil's music since the 1990s . A move Stateside in '99 (for love!) seems to have perversely anglified Melchior, whose subsequent albums (with-and-without slammin' Americanos Broke Revue behind 'im) have tapped into a stridently British-eccentric stratum of pop sensibility more akin to Syd Barrett or Mark E. Smith than the swampy swagger of his earlier work.
This hotshit record-store-day-exclusive wax finds Melchior really letting his metaphysical hair down. The title track is a properly-skewed addition to the Supermarket canon (the Clash were Lost in one; the Raincoats imagined a Fairytale in one; Melchior has his hungry consumer-ghost haunting one, eating trail mix in the aisles and reading tabloid magazines in the checkout line, starving for news of the living), while the outsider-punk of Strange Antennae offers up a healthy dose of 21st-century dislocation and paranoia, and the trippily sweet Wild Starlet Shuffle sketches out a day in the life of a truly unusual heroine. Basically, this is Melchior doing whatever the fuck he wants--which is what he's always done, but, y'know, now more than ever. Mandatory! Yva Las Vegass - I Was Born In A Place Of Sunshine And The Smell Of Ripe Mangoes LP/CD (Out Now)
I could go on at length trying to explicate the force of nature that is Yva Las Vegass, just as I could try to lasso a tornado or play fetch with a rabid dog, but she does a pretty good job herself in the opening moments of this album: YVA LAS VEGASS, she announces, no time for verbs or adjectives. A VENEZUELAN-BORN SEATTLE NATIVE. A MOTHER FUCKER. And how much weight that word carries, how many meanings! A mother fucker, yeah, and let me count the ways: she's a mother fucker of a singer, a mother fucker of a songwriter and a dead-sick mother fucker of a cuatro player. She's reckless, outspoken, a brawler, on both the giving and receiving end of black eyes, split lips, broken hearts and blown minds, so that kind of mother fucker too, as in one badass; there's a sexual connotation as well, and a cosmic one: to be a mother fucker is to give everything, and take no shit. Yva has been giving everything since she first picked up a guitar in the early 90s and headed out to busk in the streets of Seattle. Over the last twenty years she's gotten beat up for her music, been homeless and a drug addict, suffered heart attacks mid-set, starred in a full-length documentary film and played all over the world and she still rages harder than ever. That said, this record is no blast of harsh noise. It's an often-gorgeous collection of tender ballads, raucous cuatro workouts, soul-purging epics like Crack Whore and traditional Venezuelan work-songs, a raw and astonishing distillation of Yva's vast and varied life-experiences. Born in 1963 in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela to a musical, middle-class family, Yva earned a ticket to boarding school in the states as a result of teen rebelliousness—which suited her fine. “I'd just seen Porky's, so I really wanted to come to the US,” she laughs. After a series of educational mishaps (“No school would hold me,” she says), she ended up in Seattle and decided, with a friend, to try her hand at street performance. “We played for like five minutes and we had enough money to buy a Whopper,” she remembers. “We were so excited.” She was soon a staple around Seattle, and after a chance gig playing Krist Novoselic's birthday party the former Nirvana bass player invited her to jam. Impromptu sessions led to a proper band—Sweet 75, after a poem by Theodore Roethke—and, within months, a major-label record deal and opening slots for heavy-hitters like L7 and Dinosaur Jr. For whatever reason (take your pick: lackluster marketing, musical differences, the vagaries of the music industry, a listening public not ready for a queer woman of color who was also an unrepentant badass mother fucker) Sweet 75's debut album failed to find much success and the band fizzled out in the late 90s. The intervening years have found Yva Las Vegass living, loving and singing her heart out, honing her craft to razor-sharp precision. There's not much catering to the English-speaker on this album, the bulk of which is sung in Spanish, just as there's not much excuse for a 21st century American not to speak at least conversational Spanish. But the blood and sweat that are all over this record don't really need translation, either. Guaranteed, no one on this earth sounds like her. |
JOSH & SIMON FRANK of HOT & COLD
Releases for 2012
Hot & Cold - Border Area LP
Stacian - Songs for Cadets LP Rollin Hunt - The Phoney LP Kraus - Supreme Commander LP JT IV - From The Inside Book + Flexi Out Now
Dan Melchior - Ghost in the Supermarket RSD 12"
Yva Las Vegass - I was born in a place of sunshine and the smell of ripe mangoes LP Jealousy - Viles LP Stacian - Pul EP Rollin Hunt - Criminal 7in Trailblazer - Gut Reaction 7in John Bellows - Clean Your Clock LP |
©2012 Moniker