The Zookeepers / Signals 12" split - True to these times...and those times too - Cellar Hits Records

Pat from Cape Cod's, Cellar Hits Records just put out this split 12" between his band, a four piece called The Zookeepers and The Signals, comprised of members of the Mae Shi (check the Venn diagram). Entitled "True to these times ....and those times too" it brings together two coasts with similar insanely elaborate sounds on this huge purple marble slab.

The Zookeepers set the tone with "Welcome Nancy" a rawkus start, in fits and starts of feedbacking, squealing guitar and smashing cymbals, all in a real tempered, specific direction, this isn't some free form jazz experiment, it's swapping that manic breakdown at the end of a track to the very beginning, chopping it up and feeding you the little pieces. There's different tempo's, loose deep crunchy effects, all at this hardcore punk pace.
On "Foil" they get a little looser and minimal, with a goofy vocal but quickly gets massive and experimental with a lot of Deerhoof kind of elements. Loose and raw with those same kind of unbeliveable dirty riffs that sound so good, heavy guitar work, beefy riffs and crisp distortion getting a little metal in this middle section, but you really can't pin this down, like Les Savy Fav. The chorus where everyone joins in on vocals with the carefree, joyous ramshackle ensemble sound of complex energy and orchestration of all these weird elements, horn blasts...just letting you in on this party.
"GGG" has a jangly indie start and warped guitar line, free and loose again, with a Musket and Westing feel without the layers of hiss, then flipping into power riffs and Lync-style choruses yelling. Carnival chords in delicate complex melodic patterns...a drum machine leads the next verse and this is bringing The Unicorns or The Firey Furnaces back from the dead.
This thing keeps changing up in an indie rock operatic way and blasting a new bigger, stronger riff than last time. Their seriousness in the instrumentation... the attention to those details mixed with a freeform rock approach at points gets all the way into pure experimentation, but within their own kind of internal pop structure.
"Radicle majesty" is their ten minute epic of soaring guitar solo's and huge room drums, a totally new sound from the rest of the record. Squealing synths, distorted vocals yelling like a maniac, belting this one out like the jams from Sebadoh that are half catharsis, half melody. "You're never gonna make it kid, until you take the time to snort a line off of this strippers tits" You knew this was eventually going to happen, the mental breakdown and anguish... but you never imagined it like this. A slow breakbeat jam and delayed effects off to the end of this side. You get the feeling that this album was created... destined to change live on a whim, they're inherently going to change as soon as they're observed like those tiny particles, the minute it starts up no matter where they wanted this to go, it's off on it's own again.

Signals all the way over on the opposite coast take this spastic dense sound to a completely new extreme on the "...and those times too" side
with the track, "Spector" blowing in twinkly synth lines, crisp gated guitar and half shreiking vocals with serious range that can layer up lyrics that should be impossible to reconcile like "dumpster fires!" Sounding like a ensemble harlem choir version of Matt and Kim, an out of control energy, times 11. "Shades" takes this even further into The Faint, a band I've completely forgotten about with their high layered chorus vocal and booming drum line. An always bizarrely energetic vocal and singalong chorus. Slick guitar bursts and machine-like drums coming together for this electronic punk. It's an impressive vocal, I really have no idea how it's constructed...little pieces of synth bleeping in under the umbrella of angst and modern protest sound of the Desaparaceidos.
"We knew" gets further down the Faint tunnel, getting dark in it's heavy synth sound and the deep vocal chanting tis verse riding into a new wave bloopy sound. I love how this vocal is matching the digital production. This future pop sounds totally alien, a slick future alien party scene. "Mommy Issues" gets crazy complex and these vocals are borderline devilish, in it's weird harmony and dark chords, making sure they keep it unsettling, talking about, "I think your mom is getting stronger?" Yikes.
An impressive blast of compresion at any volume, I swear this side is getting louder on it's own... "Monster party II" has a back and forth vocal through a tin can, layered as anything with masssive low synth waves breaking into the serious guitar. This crazy wall of a vocal from beginning to end, out of control, is forcing some kind of break in your will. Demanding every ounce of attention beginning to end.

A sparkly assault on lavener swirl vinyl with a hand glued sleeve and xerox insert, pokemon cards, ripped out pages of an old children's book, xeroxed dollar bills and the best part a page from snooki's literary masterpiece. Pop things that don't belong together, but somehow evoke some kind of random stunted adulthood you find yourself in...From Cellar hits records.

Listen below:

Zookeepers

Manorlady - Boyhood Freedom lathe 7" on Cellar Hits Records

Pat over at Cellar Hits out of Cape Cod has been busy working on two new releases, this one sided split lathe cut single from Manorlady and a big split 12" with The Zookeepers + Signals, which I am definitely going to get to sooner or later...but I got a chance to check out this one from 'a family band' out of Charlottesville, VA and it's heavy on the electronics

The only side track, "The Lines in the Corner of Your Face" has a big, electronic, epic rock feel with those clear, weirdo clicks and glitches, rifling away under a massive delayed guitar. Lots of moody electronic atmosphere and a clear up front vocal steering this into a classic dance place. Still though, there's slightly cheap, thin sounds, that go right back to the ancient Cure style with that chorus laden bass. Or that re-appreciation of classic dancepop by I love You But I've Chosen Darkness. They balance this sense of nostalgia and being completely into those sounds that were and still can be great. It seems like you only notice this snare is pure machine when it starts pounding away. There's tons and tons of character going on here with stacks of layers, so when the whole track drops out to go quiet goth, the off kilter thred bare electric that builds and builds gets to sounding like post punk. That distorted electric goes from just sad and distant to aggressive and downright mean. A steady deceptively dance-y beat kicks in again and takes this one out to the end. Reminds me a lot of that Virginia Plain single I keep going back to...privately when there's no one else around to judge me.

Manorlady are a three-piece family band from Charlottesville that play real dreamy pop music. Thick mid-tempo drum machines and slow moving bass set the backdrop for murky keyboards, sweeping guitar chords and interwoven boy-girl harmonies. The band recorded Boyhood Freedom for this lathe release while working on their second LP 'Ego Oppressor'.

Check out the track and grab that lathe from Cellar Hits:



Turns out I reviewed the wrong track! The one cut into the vinyl is "Boyhood Freedom" and sounds to be going more heavily slowdance shoegaze, it's making me want to go dig out my Sugar Tax cassette.

Interview with Pat from Cellar Hits Records

I talked with Pat a couple weeks ago about his label, Cellar hits and the singles he's recently put out by Netherfriends and his own project, The Zookeepers. He's documenting the scene there in Cape Cod and I had to hear what that's all about as well as this Davis Leibe Hart/Adam Papagan cassette. Pat put together the WTF fest in the cape that Fat History Month actually played at a while back...it's a small 7inches world.

A couple of tracks play during the interview, from the Netherfriends, on their angry coast EP, the cut, "Washington, DC", and the opening of the Teen Crumpets lathe from the Zookeepers as well as a couple of tracks from The Best of David and Adam cassette.

Click on this link to listen in your browser, (17-min).

Netherfriends - Angry East Coast on Cellar Hits Records

Pat from Cellar Hits Records let me know about his new label documenting the basement scene of Cape Cod (and soon the world) with this first 7" single from Netherfriends titled "Angry East Coast". It's a three song EP with city names for track titles because Shawn Rosenblatt embarked on a year long project where he wrote and recorded a song and performed in all 50 states. Only after I got to listening did I realize this sleeve was a stapled glossy insert magazine, and opened up to an extensive tour diary of the process. Now before you go dismissing this thing, thinking he ripped off Sufjan or something, I don't know that Sufjan ever actually intended to finish his 50 states albums, it might have just ended up being a good hook to put on a press release...or maybe he intended too at first but now with orchestra's at his disposal and a little neighborhood venue called the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosting his shows...he's obviously moved on from the states idea. But Shawn, not being one to create an easily reachable goal, decided to take a year and attempt this idea for himself. In a way, that's even more balls, I'm not trying to be the first, it's purely for me.

In the zine/sleeve he talks about being worried about wasting time, and wanting to combine playing with creating on the road...and as selfish of a pilgrimage it might seem to be, it's also admirable to put in your time out there in the unknown under the excuse of a band, make this kind of impossible circumstance and then go for it. Possibly more of a performance art project if someone doesn't slap me for calling it that. The point is, you would come back with a bunch of experiences and songs, and you would personally be better...I'm all for it.
With all that in mind I put on the A-Side track, "Philadelphia, PA" where Shawn plays everything but the drums (on this entire record) and there's a hell of a lot going on instrumentally, a hazy cloud of synth and echo guitar lead this one into a bouncy pop that I sort of relate this to Sunset Rubdown with it's ever changing epic structures, or A Faulty Chromosome's warped glitch pop, maybe just vocally. Shawn goes to that bedroom space in moments of hushed harmonies, it's recorded surprisingly crystal clear, I don't know what I was expecting, but if I was writing songs every three days, some of them might be sung into the answering machine back home....but this was a serious setup. I guess I don't know how else you would have gotten to this complicated place...he's not just setting up a one man guitar and amp, it's layered, alien sounds, all in service of a big sound. The synths and effects take this to that story narrative epic place, it sounds huge, and really I'm blown away this could be done on the road and in basically 72 hours, but that's probably what he's thinking about now too.
The B-Side takes us to the capital, "Washington, DC" where Netherfriends goes a little tropical with a high-strung timpani sounding snare from Scott Westrick, who also mixed the single, and gives this one a crazy dub groove, the high pitch echoing all over this basement of a house in DC. I like that Netherfriends builds up a rhythm like this just to abandon it, drop into a chorus of vocalizations and then pickup a completely different groove to deliver a catchy almost spoken melody over a banging stripped down kit...they got a great percussion sound on this one, but it's appearance is brief...like The Annuals, all kinds of great experimentation with sound or even the Lilys, who seemed to write this psyche-pop operatic prog stuff that I couldn't believe I could even like. The pieces made no sense, but I couldn't help but keep listening.

Shawn has that same sense of the bigger picture in each one of these...I'm having trouble believing you could write 50 songs like this in a year, or if you wouldn't have to cheat just a little with a tape recorder at a rest stop.
Finally "Rehoboth Beach, DE". There's a lot of autobiographical sounding things going on lyrically in all of these tracks, I think it's hitting me most on this one, sort of talking to a girlfriend about what he's literally going through...the couches, playing shows to a couple of people...but the way the sound is Flaming Lips blown out, it doesn't ever feel confessional, I think you can get to that weird place where it's so specific you can't relate to it anymore in a personal way...but then he's already working in that 'god damn he's talented' Bright Eyes style that's hard to relate to the everyday jerk. I think maybe that can be the stumbling block for stuff like this, it starts from an intimidating place (let alone the amount of material) and maybe it's not the coolest thing right now to put this kind of time and effort into one track, but I have to hand it to someone with this kind of work ethic.
Part of me wants to like this purely conceptually, it doesn't matter what the result is, but now that this single is going some really intersting places I sort of wish I didn't know that story because these are almost better than the mythology surrounding them. He's motivated as hell, his blogspot is a serious blackhole of random influences and unreleased tracks, I wonder if the rest of the series might appear on Cellar Hits singles?

Go 'like' Netherfriends and then check out their bandcamp for all kinds of releases from this prolific guy.

This single is on Cellar Hits Records, impressive glossy sleeve/zine and some of these are on pink swirl vinyl.