Male/Female - First show since 2007

When Jim Paschall moved back to Seattle recently, he didn't just get Display back together, he also un-dormanted (I swear that's a word. Go ahead and challenge, man, you're just gonna lose a turn.) his other band from the same era, Male/Female. Initially a side project where he could play mainly guitar (he played bass in Display), Male/Female continued after the breakup of Display, and released one (to my knowledge) CD-R EP in 2006, Slow it Down in the Mineral Bath. 

Along with Paschall, the art noise kraut groove punk foursome comprised Eric Yates, formerly of Portal and recently of Tit Pig, on synths, bass, and sometimes guitar, Emily Lohuis on drums (now Emily Moore, as she is married to Display's drummer Danny, thus obligating them to regular marital drum-offs), and John from the New Avenues, whose guitar duties have been handed over to Colby Ford for M/F V2.

Download the 2006 EP here. Go to their Bandcamp site to hear a few more, including the one embedded below, a personal favorite.

Male/Female play The Black Lodge this Saturday, August 17th, with Grave Matters and Sweet Weapons. 9pm.

The Prom - Final Demos

The Prom that appeared on Barsuk records consisted of Omaha transplants James Mendenhall at the piano and David Broecker on bass, along with Joel Brown lightly pounding the proverbial skins. At some point following The Prom's last released album, 2002's Under the Same Stars, Brown left and was replaced by Kevin Barrans, who in the years since has gone from what I can only assume from this picture is a Harlem Globetrotters understudy role to playing in Suffering and the Hideous Thieves, The Maldives, Sons of Warren Oates, and this lottery ad (look for the ZZTop beard). In addition, the trio recruited Justin Wilmore, marking the first time the band regularly included guitar. Around the same time, Wilmore played bass for future Pickwick member Kory Kruckenberg's Deardarling project.

Though the new format re-energized Mendenhall's songwriting, his apparent depression and other internal struggles made the project unsustainable. Track 3, the most intense song in the band's catalogue has the line, "Someone please stop me/I fear I'll kill myself", and along with the screamed "I gotta keep moving" at the end, the delivery makes it clear that he was in a really rough state at the time. The directness of the whole song is quite startling, and makes for quite a switch for the band that recorded Under the Same Stars.

There are 7 tracks here, half are still without vocals. I believe these were recorded in early 2004, and to my knowledge, the unfinished songs were never completed.

Download the demos here.

Hero Killer King - When Wanting Becomes Needing

I found this cd at Goodwill the other day and picked it up because I remembered the band name and they thanked Harkonen on the lyric sheet. Now, I know I saw HKK at least once, there's a flier on the facebook page from a show at Ground Zero, but The Powers of Darkness Shall Rain Blood Upon This City For 500 Years is the only band I have any actual memory of seeing that night - and this is probably due having gotten stoned out my mind with some friends while celebrating a birthday before the show. Anyways, I know nothing about these guys but if you like the harder, screamier stuff that gets shared around here, you should check this one out

Hero Killer King - When Wanting Becomes Needing

Lo-Life: Early Tapes from Damien Jurado

Lo-Life was an experimental folk/pop/indie/art project that essentially served as the solo debut of a young Damien Jurado (with help from Yu-Kim and Nadine Lewis). Self released on cassette via his Casa Records, and as the name implies, very lo-fi in its production aesthetic (both physically and sonically), these two tapes are chock full of songs of both the full and impressionistic variety. Restarts and recorder clicks are par for the course. There are sound collage interludes, answering machine messages, and a lot of lovely analog distortion. These really give you a portrait of a young artist finding his voice, full of joy and ideas and restless creative energy.

I don't know exactly when these came out, but the second tape has material recorded in 1994 and early '96.

Download both tapes, with scans of the handmade sleeves and such here. 

Vermilion post updated - added second demo tape

I finally got around to creating the separate mp3's for my other Vermilion tape, and have updated my earlier Vermilion post. Go there, or just download the tape directly here.

The Need - Live @ RKCNDY 9/21/98

This coming Saturday, March 30th, Behead The Prophet and The Need are playing at the Vera Project in Seattle. In my excitement for and in celebration of this upcoming show, I'm planning on doing a few posts this week that are specific to those bands.

First up, we have a live set by The Need that was recorded at RKCNDY on 9/21/98, which was just about a year before that club sadly closed it's doors. The lineup that night also included Built to Spill and Modest Mouse but this is the only audio from that show I've ever come across. If you know The Need, you know what to expect but in case you don't here's a brief description: artsy, no-wave, post punk.

9/21/1998

White Jazz - The 4th Practice

My buddy Benson found this tape at Everyday Music up on Capitol Hill a while back and was gracious enough to let me borrow it for inclusion here. White Jazz weren't around for too long and almost every bit of information I found was from an online show write up from The Stranger in August of '09, which is where I've taken this descriptive paragraph from:

"White Jazz are a new (dare I say super-)group featuring Brandon Nakamura of Teen Cthulhu/Doomsday 1999, Jon Weisnewski of Akimbo, Jeff McNulty of BlöödHag, and Jared Burke Eglington of Patrol. You might expect a band with such a pedigree to combine competently terrorizing metal riffs with a tongue-in-cheek humor meant to deflate not only the metal tough-guy aesthetic, but also themselves. And you'd be right: The band formed to open a show for Pig Destroyer, and they played the show "in silk kimonos and underwear just to bum people out," according to Nakamura. He continues: "We're doing this as a tribute to bands like Excruciating Terror, Crom, and other bands that just destroy basements, ruin lives, and never say sorry." No apologies necessary, guys."

The 4th Practice was released by Wall of Dogs and serves as, I believe, the only available recordings of this all-too-brief unholy musical alliance. I've failed to be able to separate the tracks on this release as many of them run together and I don't believe the tracklisting on the label to be correct, but the whole thing weighs in at just under 10 minutes so you should be able to enjoy it in it's entirety.

White Jazz