Red Jacket Mine - Bellar & Bawl on Fin Records

The never ending conveyor belt of singles from the Fin Records factory keeps right on rolling and I'm starting to realize you'd need to start your own blog to keep up. They must run a tight ship over there with deadlines and teams of artists designing sleeves, lining up recording sessions...a whiteboard of upcoming projects, phones ringing off the hook...like the trading floor of the stock exchange, but for singles. We can dream.
Lincoln Barr is the mastermind behind the bedroom 4 track project that was became early Red Jacket Mine. That kind of dense experimentation comes through on this latest single from Fin Records where Lincoln's sparkling hyper-pop has been distilled from raw innovation with Andrew Salzman and Matthew Cunningham bringing their own live performances to the recording. His previous single on Fin brought together a lot of the masters pop, from the session groove of Steely Dan to the indie pop of Kurt Heasley on both of these brief samples for a full length out later this year.

A-Side's "Bellar & Bawl" is a slick, clear, rocking and rolling number with those glittery doubled up vocals and polished handclaps. A sort of country honkey tonk sound, with it's share of piano flourishes and harmonious backup vocals. He's one of those talented songwriters who's absorbed a tremendous amount of intelligent song craft and draws equally from across the board. This results not only in instrumentation but lyrics that you aren't going to really get until tomorrow. Picking up heavily on the Squeeze sound, sort of timeless in that it's not tied distinctively to any trendy genres.

B-Side's "Grow Your Own" has got these subtle strums and an odd tom beat, Lincoln's got an enthusiastic vocal and slight reverb on his almost 50's bopper sound, maybe that's where the Elvis Costello references come from, it's an equally strong, unique vocal tying all sorts of classic early rock and roll. A similar kind of do-wop soul sound once removed; simultaneously a condemnation and celebration about that particular era. It's the kind of thing that should actually be in a jukebox somewhere in a highway diner, the middle of nowhere....scratchy,coming out of a crappy speaker. It would actually give you some kind of energy to finish that roadtrip. Incredibly emotive, dense disjointed lyric narrative, complex songwriting that might even be his undoing at times. But then damn I'm into this crunchy, alien distortion solo that pops up towards the end of this, completely out of place, and I appreciate that borderline unlistenable sound... that hes going to take a chance on that.

Download card included on clear orange vinyl with the usual embossed stamping and color inner sleeves...get it from Fin Records.

Red Jacket Mine on Fin Records

This sleeve from Fin Records, Red Jacket Mine is perfect foreshadowing for the sort of '80s Graham Parsons, Steely Dan direction this one is headed. The blindingly slick, warm organ, crisp metal strum...it's a kind of Elvis Costello poppy, clean perfection. A really careful style of songwriting, pouring over the right + k of EQ on a single note. It's that side of song craft that can happen at home, you've got the technology to sit around and play with every minute detail...you'd think we'd be smack in the middle of a resurgence of this kind of sound, but maybe we're just in that rejection period of slick production again, and we'll have to wait until it's nostalgic again.
It's completely alien, I can't even figure out how this minimal gated construction adds up immediately to this groovy late '70s sound, picked apart it can't possibly add up to this. They were going as far as possible with the perfect sound back then, and RJM has re-nailed this period in such a bizarre way.
The lyric is about suicide, so I'd have to assume he knows exactly what he's doing putting a demented twist into this ultra commercial pop sound. It sort of makes me put this into a Ween context, and that's when it starts to get genius. I know he's got to have that kind of sense of humor. It's a little too perfect. To the point where you almost expect that '50's barbecue-ing dad to be a serial killer on the weekends. The repression is spot on and killing me.
A reverse masked ditty at the end of this one for the kids to try to play backwards...extra weird...it's where the bodies were buried.

"Rosy Days" on the B-Side, get's slicky sick into a motown backbeat, I think it's that organ sound that goes to that Elvis Costello place? It's all of these elements really, the abrupt melodic changes, the seamless smashing together of towering pop...you end up with glitter all over our face. It's not coming off.
This could be the way that Stephin Merritt says he loves cheesy pop music and is deliberately trying to create the most perfect pop song but claims to just keeps failing. Well Red Jacket Mine is succeeding to a crazy degree, in an almost obsessive Tom Waits kind of place...insanely authentic, doing it as good or better. Like Nick Kershaw? He's taken this joke to a razor degree. Keep adding blades. 6 have to be better than 5 right?
All the previous era's influence in a blender of pop composition.

The sleeve is just like that shitting all over America sleeve of Armed Forces. Look how ridiculous trends are. Look at them.

Oh you crazy seven inches.

On brown marble vinyl from Fin Records.