Audio

From the band’s upcoming S/T reissue, I’ll let guitarist Steve Holmes explain:

From the same board recording at the Blind Pig comes this crazy song that, in retrospect, it stands as one of the more interesting things we ever wrote. In fact, Mike once played this very take in one of his college music courses as an example of making music in a vacuum, without expectations. This song highlights our fascination at the time with odd time signatures, and also stands an attempt to all play in different times and overlap the parts until they re-sync.
The song was among the very first we wrote (and uses another alternate tuning we only utilized once elsewhere: EBD#EBE). It also used to be our standard set closer until we wrote “Stay Home” and dropped it from the set. We briefly considered recording this for the album, but we ran out of time in the studio, and we weren’t sure that it really fit in with the other songs we had on the record.
The song opens with Steve drumming in 4/4 with alternating snare and kick drum. My riff comes in played in a 10 measure bar (3/4, 3/4, 4/4). Mike’s riff then comes in, overlapping with mine; however, he’s playing in 7/4 and I add an additional 4/4 bar to sync every other cycle. The second section has me playing a 3/4 riff with Mike overlapping in 5/4. The final section has us all switching to a 7/4 rhythm.
Mike used to get a kick out of throwing a few measures of “Jesse’s Girl” over the top and decelerating the rhythm, just to fuck with Steve and me before switching to his actual riff. This section of the song really gave Steve an opportunity to take “lead” on the drums while Mike and I held down the rhythm with our guitars.
In the outro of the song, Mike switches back to his opening riff while I continue playing the 7/4 riff.
You can really notice how much we sped up the tempo by the end of the song—not a perfect take by any means. But it’s nice that any version of this song survived the intervening years (and survived on cassette, no less).

Jim played this during the show on Friday and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. In case you missed it…

Soaring Baltimore-based shoegaze. They’re playing GarfArt on April 18th, and are well worth the price of admission.

Geographic North just released a cassette of guitar improvisations by Lotus Plaza (AKA Lockett Pundt, of Deerhunter fame) that will make the inside of your brain glow. Stream the whole thing above, then pick it up at the label’s website.

Good music on vinyl can be hard to come by.  Unfortunately, small indie label Rorschach Records is closing shop (for good reasons such as a newborn baby).  But they need to expedite clearance of records due to a sick puppy.  If you have some funds, head on over to their online shop.

I highly recommend Why+the+wires’ All These Dead Astronauts or Amateur Party’s Truncheons in the Manner.  And if you like good rock that may also engage in meta discussions about gender politics within the hardcore scene, check out The Two Funerals’ Boys Club.  Lot’s of hardcore 7″s at dirt cheap prices too.