1. Jim Guthrie - So Small - intimacy. delicacy. aplomb. whimsy. harmony. eloquence. this one is for you, Jeff. Love you, buddy. [from Now, More than Ever | buy ] 2. Haywood - Plow - Wow, this song is 10 years old, a fact that I find easy and hard to believe simultaneously. I miss music like this. It's hard to believe I'm 29. This song is about plowing snow, but it doesn't have to say so lyrically for you to feel it. Maybe it's that Weakerthans-esque air lying coldly between [...]
[ALL BAND PHOTOS COURTESY OF JEFF PARETCHAN] The tale of Haywood 's sparkling and formerly final release We Are Amateurs, You And I -- which was issued 10 years ago today, a milestone somewhat overshadowed by some bullshit doo-dad called an "iPod" -- is so enmeshed with the Brooklyn-via-Philly quartet's demise it is hard to pull the two apart. The elements of the story, of course, are not unique (hope, anger, loss, a white knight in tight trousers, resolve, redemption, an A-Team montage where the "plan comes together"), but they don't [...]
Carole King: Chapter 5. Carole King creates an album of her fantasies.
>> Right, then, where were we...? >> In the wake of his first solo performance last month under the moniker Yr Friends (shortened from Yr Dead Friends for some reason, as this site evidences, oh, also this ), Johnny Foreigner fronter Alexei Berrow has digitally released an EP of Yr Friends material titled Yr Friends Are Lying To You . The EP contains three Berrow originals with characteristically verbose titles, and in true Berrow/JoFo fashion Yr Friends Are Lying To You comes packaged with [...]
We don't imagine there is a more die-hard (die-hardier? with a vengeance, sir) Haywood fan out there than us. Consequently, we spend a preposterous amount of time and energy wondering when we will hear new music from any of the band's principals, as Haywood has been mostly dead and/or not-quite alive for a decade now. And so we are very pleased to report multi-instrumentalist Rob Viola, who manned the drum kit for the late, great 'Wood, has returned with myriad ambient electronic and electropop projects. Many of these operate under the nom de guerre Statikluft [...]
>> Long-time readers will be aware of our great love for the wildy under-appreciated indie rock act Haywood . Our boundless affinity for the defunct Brooklyn-via-Philly-via-St. David's/Villanova/South Devon/Wherever Ariel Lived quartet is perhaps rivaled only by that we have for Johnny Foreigner . And so it was an unexpected collision of worlds when we saw that the one-show-only supergroup Kannberg 1664 , which features at least one member of Birmingham, England-based indie titans Johnny Foreigner , will share the bill at an upcoming Pavement tribute show in London with a Madrid-based band called [...]
This is currently the go-to soundtrack to our efforts to get our baby girl to go to sleep and stay asleep. A sad by-product is the fact that we are starting to get sick of a lot of these songs, some of which have been favorites forever and ever (we first got The Glove record around 1989 or 1990, for example). That said, we still find almost all of these to this day to be very moving in their way whenever we stop and sit and listen to them go by on the IPod docked in the nursery. [...]
>> It took us a while to actually focus on them, but it has recently come to our attention that we love the promo tracks from the latest Faunts record. The Edmonton-based electropop quintet, which we first wrote about here in November, released Feb. 17 its sophomore set Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. on Friendly Fire Recordings. The label has been offering the title track and the tune "It Hurts Me All The Time" as free downloads for weeks -- if not longer -- and the tracks have finally made their way to the top of the running [...]
We still have no idea what the complete opening line to this track is ("I meant to take a cue from Bluto?" Like, from "Popeye?"). Even so, there are a few things that make this song, by the then-Philly-based quartet's original line-up, remarkable. Perhaps least apparent among these is the fact that "Crosswords," the lead track from Haywood 's Great Cats Give Chase cassette issued in late 1996 or early '97, was recorded to a four-track tape machine in the attic of an antiques store. For all we know they were recorded off one by one [...]
And so here we have the August Muxtape. We pondered a couple days ago doing a blog post called "Where We're From" or something to that effect, and discussing therein some of the bands that really fired our imaginations and relationship with music when we were a high schooler, and even young college student. As you'll see below we name a number of acts from Philadelphia and its suburbs that inspired us to play and generally cultivate a fathomless interest in indie rock as a younger man. Some of these bands were our peers, some friends of friends... of friends. [...]
Folks who really know their way around the Internetses are likely familiar with Cute Overload 's objective Rules Of Cuteness, which turn on such things as ear size and -- in the case of the newly inaugurated Rule #38 -- belly roundness. We've long pondered a similar set of axioms for indie rock, although our criteria are so subjective that it doesn't make sense to apply them on the macro level that Cute Overload does. All the same, there are at least several things we take a lot of enjoyment from in indie rock, and they are [...]
To hear the band tell it, Haywood has been wasting time just negotiation Times Square crowds. It has been quite some time since we made mention of the late, lamented indie rock dynamos, an act that originally hailed from our hometown -- much like The Fong . The latest word is that Haywood 's second posthumous release As Long As There Is Track, I Will Not Go Back is finally for sale here via Insound. Since the band has been selling the record via its MySpace dojo since earlier this [...]
The thick-glasses-wearin'-est, One Stars-rockin'-est corner of the indie world's version of Chinese Democracy , otherwise known as Haywood 's second posthumous release As Long As There Is Track, I Will Not Go Back , is a few shuffling steps closer to being released. Which is, of course, a certain kind of amazing, since it was made long after the band had saluted us from the bow the first final time, the waves greedily slurping the chaps down into the murky depths of various respectable adulthoods. Don't believe us? Check out the erstwhile Brooklyn indie rock quartet's MySpace [...]
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