Tag: Deadlands
Groundhawgs – Lets Get Dark
75OL-211 Groundhawgs – Lets Get Dark CD
$8.00 S&H Included
Digital download is available here
Track Listing
1 Mr Walks On Water
2 Dogs of El Agustino
3 Lets Get Dark
4 Double Nickels On The Dime
5 Floored
6 Mercury and Mass
7 Apartment Down The Hall
8 Oblivious
9 Out Of It
10 Darkwaters
The Hawgs are back with a deftly crafted batch of NUMBERS that will quench your thirst for TIGHT, HARD ROCKING, POST PUNK FARE. From the get go to the final bell, LET”S GET DARK will scratch your rock itch!
Boston’s The Noise reviews Matt Fraza, Junior Varsity Arson, Sick Pills, and Deadlands in the December 2014 Issue
Deadlands – Faceless Angels
Deadlands play dangerously close to a line that would put them into the schmaltzy bar-band blues category. What saves them from that awful fate is a skill for invoking the ghost of early ZZ Top in order to bring some character to their tracks. As often as the generic “Before You Were Born” and the “Mustang Sally”-baiting “Discotex” make me want to scream, tracks like “Bottom Feeders,” “Libby Prison Blues,” and “Fink” prove that there’s much more at hand with Deadlands than Thursday-night-dive-bar status. There are glimpses of real blues-rock genius on Faceless Angels. If you queue up those stellar moments and skip past the cheese you are certain to find something to enjoy on this record.
Junior Varsity Arson – Self Titled EP
Junior Varsity Arson is the musical project of four long-time New England rock stalwarts, Guy Benoit (Thee Hydrogen Terrors), Kraig Jordan (The Masons), Dave Narcizo (Throwing Muses), and Don Sanders (Medicine Ball, The Masons). What do you get when you throw these four guys in a room together? Not exactly what you would expect. Instead of heavy art punk, you’ll find something more akin to Devo or They Might Be Giants, as spoken/ sung by an odd combination of the guy from Cake and William S. Burroughs. If you have any taste at all you will agree that this is an oddly appealing recipe. The five songs that comprise JVA’s self-titled, debut EP roll by like some strange beat poet’s LSD-induced hallucination. “Her Parents Love Me” starts off quirkily with, “Her parents love me/ I’m such a big improvement/ over the white supremacist. Her parents hated him/ He ruined every holiday,” and continues on with a strange, American gothic love story. “Brown Jacket and Purple Keds” is a song about… actually, I have no idea what this song is about. There are references to shopping at Target, a museum, a Volvo, and shit-stains on the floor. I have to admit that I lost the story line pretty quickly. And so it goes for another three tracks of stream-of-consciousness lyrics spoken and sung over kitschy keyboards, guitars, and drums. Junior Varsity Arson’s debut sounds spontaneous—like a gang of accomplished musicians getting together on a Saturday night, simply enjoying playing together, all wondering what will come out on the other side. Thankfully, what came out the other side is utterly entertaining.
Matt Fraza – Let Trouble Go
As I’m driving down Storrow Drive one fall morning, I slide Matt Fraza’s new album into my player. The opening track is mellow folk melody that puts me in mind of a quiet house concert with a cup of coffee in hand, resting on a couch and surrounded by friends. It’s familiar, relaxing, like a stroll down the quiet roads I grew up on. Much of the lyrics lack a regular format, and have a more stream of consciousness feel to them, reinforcing the casual feeling I get when listening to songs like “Forever.” At first I was a little put off by this, but on the second third runs through the album, I think I get it—Matt, Kraig Jordan (bass, lead guitar), and Tom Chace (drums, keyboards, vocals, bass) have some stories they want to share, and it’s about the telling of the tale, not making sure it fits into a certain mold.
Sick Pills – Sickening
Classic-era punk, particularly of the UK variety, presented us with a lively alternative to bloated arena rock, and the best of its purveyors, particularly the Buzzcocks and The Jam, also offered up some pretty snappy tunes to go with the attitude. This propensity carried forth into the so-called college rock of the ’80s (aka indie rock), and we find plenty of that attitude and tunefulness here, particularly on the opening track, “Wormfood.” But the same opening gambit tropes which seemed so refreshing and new a generation ago have now become cliches: telepathic guitar lines; anti-love songs; stop and start dynamics; brawly Pistols-like chaos; sludgy intros; machine-gun staccato; cinematic whangdoodle; abrasive textures; pounding clamor; grudging grindoramas; feedback-laden echoplex tunings, and so forth. No bad, all in all—just lacking in anything genuinely novel.
Gladhouse – goldencloud
75OL-197 Gladhouse – goldencloud CD
$7.00 S&H Included
Digital download is available here
Track Listing
1 Broken Bed
2 School Bus
3 Ain’t Got the Gas
4 Follow You Down
5 Believe
6 Start Again
7 Sing No Blues
8 I Could Get Used to This
9 Cobwebs
10 Winding Path
After the Pats shit the bed last year Paul and Ray started to write and record some music in Ray’s basement on Tuesday nights. We call ourselves Gladhouse. A largely acoustic affair, goldencloud was pretty much one song per night. We use Lazyboy harps and Terrapin pint glasses exclusively. Our influences include Chuck Yeager and Gunga Din. Come in to eat or we’ll both starve!
Deadlands – Faceless Angels
75OL-185 Deadlands – Faceless Angels CD
$7.00 S&H Included
Digital download is available here
Track Listing
1. Before You Were Born
2. Bottom Feeders
3. Libby Prison Blues
4. (I’m) Sinking In
5. Discotex
6. Fink
7. Cracks
8. Down for the Count
9. Sleeper in a Dream
10. Cold Cold Cold
2014 warms up with “Faceless Angels,” the latest from Cranston’s Deadlands. Murder/apocalypse blues that you can tap your toes to. A good chunk of the album was recorded live at Plan of a Boy. Hot guitars and cool dead dames, where no one is guilty and no one plays innocent (very well).
Groundhawgs – Warbirds
75OL-148 Groundhawgs – Warbirds
[sold out]
Digital download is available here
Track Listing:
- Tops
- Annie
- Warbirds
- Birthday
- Whore
- Chosen One
- Eastern Year
- Box of Rats
- Heaven
- Strike the Bell
- Pontiac/Cheers
Nostradamus foretold of it in his quatrains…. The Mayan Calendar predicted it… and so it has come to pass… THE GROUNDHAWGS! The long dormant rock outfit who made such a defiant and jubilant noise in the late 80’s and 90’s, have returned to this island Earth with a new full length LP titled WARBIRDS. It’s massive riffs, surgical strike hooks, and melodious choruses threaten to shatter the North American continental shelf, and or change the face of ROCK as we know it. DROP, COVER, and ROLL KIDS… GROUNDHAWGS WARBIRDS IS HERE! TOPS!!!
Deadlands – self titled
75OL-117
Deadlands – Self Titled CD
$6.00 S&H Included
Track Listing
- Never There
- Turned 2 Stone
- Cut and Paste Me
- Crossroads
- The Devil’s Playground
- Super Secret Plans
- Hotter Than Hell
Deadlands’ self-titled debut album, Deadlands, is the result of six months of Thursdays and the occasional Friday night. This is very much a rock and roll record. One foot firmly entrenched in murder ballad blues and the other dangling off the top of a burning office building; Deadlands weaves third person tales of deceit, insanity, and betrayal. And guess what? The guy always dies at the end. Always.
von Doom – The Descender
75OL-059 von Doom – The Descender CD
$7.00 S&H Included
Track Listing
- Black Light
- Maybe You Are
- Minerva
- Get Away
- The Descender
- Restless
- Hopeless Motherfuckers
- What to do?
- Freedom of Choice
- Red Pens
Ideal barroom rock and indie-soaked pop, influenced by The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr, The Smithereens, and Pavement. Teetering between just too hip and just plain odd, von Doom, is the retro-hyper-active quartet.
von Doom – The Universe
75OL-032 von Doom – The Universe CD
$7.00 S&H Included
Track Listing
- tragedy
- maybe today
- gravitational pull
- sanity
- j’accuse
- utopia
- in the end
- big bang
- bye bye
- the shape of things
Pure power pop for aging effete moderns, rock oracle von Doom erupts onto the 21st century’s late first decade rock scene with sonic aplomb. Their debut disc, aptly titled The Universe is a mix of aesthetics, Latin roots, the state of the art, and psychedelic effrontery. Navigating the treacherous void surrounding us all, von Doom’s requiem for humanity floats above the fray, all the while forging a path straight through your ear-fields.