Bon Iver "Bon Iver"Bon Iver "Bon Iver"
$12.99 CD $17.99 LP $9.90 MP3Bon Iver, Bon Iver is Justin Vernon returning to former haunts with a new spirit. The reprises are there – solitude, quietude, hope and desperation compressed – but always a rhythm arises, a pulse vivified by gratitude and grace notes. The winter, the legend, has faded to just that, and this is the new momentary present. The icicles have dropped, rising up again as grass.
Bon Iver "Blood Bank"Bon Iver "Blood Bank"
$7.50 CDEP $11.99 12 inch $4.99 MP3The four song Blood Bank collection continues down the path forged by 2008's critically acclaimed For Emma, Forever Ago.From the title track's remembrance of the winter warmth we seek, to the summer love tribute of b-side gem "Babys," Bon Iver's snow-blanketed harmonies live across the seasons. Both expansive and intimate, these four songs explore the darker and lighter natures of the seasons and what they signify, and offer a dynamic glimpse into the natural energy and refined craftsmanship that characterize Justin Vernon's music.
Bon Iver "For Emma, Forever Ago"Bon Iver "For Emma, Forever Ago"
$12.99 CD $16.99 LP $9.99 MP3We are thrilled to release Bon Iver's debut full-length "For Emma, Forever Ago". Bon Iver (pronounced: bohn eevair; French for "good winter" and spelled wrong on purpose) is a greeting, a celebration and a sentiment. It is a new statement of an artist moving on and establishing the groundwork for a lasting career. For Emma, Forever Ago is the debut of this lineage of songs. As a whole, the record is entirely cohesive throughout and remains centered around a particular aesthetic, prompted by the time and place for which it was recorded. Justin Vernon, the primary force behind Bon Iver, seems to have tested his boundaries to the maximum, and in doing so has managed to break free from any pre-cursing or finished forms.
Bon Iver "Flowers Mint"Bon Iver "Flowers Mint"
$18.00 SM $18.00 LG $18.00 XL $18.00 SM Women'sBon Iver printed on pale green American Apparel 100% cotton T-shirts.
Briana Marela "Call It Love"Briana Marela "Call It Love"
$17.99 LP $12.99 CD $7.99 CassetteThere is something unforgettable about great love songs, and Briana Marela's Call It Love wraps its welcoming arms around the subject, invoking all its complexity. Before writing the songs that would become Call It Love, Briana Marela was guided first and foremost by her instincts as a producer & engineer. Marela's original vision for this album was to dig into the two poles of her songwriting styles: her ambient, ethereal side and her brighter, beat-driven pop leanings. She enlisted the production help of Juan Pieczanski & Ryan Heyner of the band Small Black upon hearing their most recent self-produced album.
On this album, Briana Marela has made her proverbial giant leap, deepening her songwriting and expanding her palette to explore the sounds of love in beautiful, striking new ways. "Give Me Your Love" explores what Marela calls "love's immature, silly & selfish side." "Quit", the deep, dramatic centerpiece of Call It Love, was originally penned about a breakup with a longtime partner and written with the idea that she could give the song away to another artist. Instead, "Quit" is powerful and revealing in Briana's own hands. And, if "Be In Love" is the sound of falling in love, "Farthest Shore" is the sound of looking inward, of reckoning with and without ourselves. It is an intricate, cavernous song, setting a deceptively pretty melody over ominous drones and skittering percussion. And here, again, the contradictory becomes complementary.
Briana Marela "All Around Us"Briana Marela "All Around Us"
$12.99 CD $16.99 LP $9.99 MP3Briana's lyrics are forceful, and throughout her second album, All Around Us, traditional song structure gives way to plainspoken declarations that pull back the record's shroud. Her first single,"Surrender" is musically delicate at first, with flickering blips and chords that float into earshot like fireflies. "Take Care of Me" is the album's brightest and most immediate song, a buoyant celebration of friendship with a skittering beat and a warm, sweet melody. And title track "All Around Us" is a stark but inspiring beauty, built on the memory of a family member of Briana's who passed away, and the sadness of not being able to say "goodbye" or "I love you" one last time. It is the balance of the abstract and the intimate that makes Briana Marela and All Around Us so special.
Cut Worms "Hollow Ground"Cut Worms "Hollow Ground"
$12.99 CD $16.99 LP $16.99 LPMax Clarke has a knack for conjuring up warmth in his music, like endless summer or ageless youth. The 27-year-old's debut LP, Hollow Ground, crackles with the heat of a love-struck nostalgia, woven together with a palpable Everly Brothers' influence and retro sound. It reaches back into decades of plainspoken, unfussy, and squarely American storytelling and pulls it forth into 2018.
Some of Hollow Ground bloomed from that same period of driven creativity that yielded EP Alien Sunset; both "Like Going Down Sideways" and "Don’t Want To Say Good-Bye" find new life on the LP.
The rest is new. There's "Till Tomorrow Goes Away," a sheepish love song, thrumming with twangy guitar and a two-step rhythm. "Cash For Gold" channels buoyancy; a doo-wop effect on the sleepy backing vocals build out the dreaminess of Clarke's own affecting croon.
Hollow Ground strikes the balance between cerebral and simplicity in his storytelling. His lyrics explore the raw realm of youth, its weightlessness and possibilities, but channeled through a lens of restraint. Someone who's old enough to know better but still gets drawn back in to the romanticism of teenage feelings - and knows how to take the listener along, too.
Cut Worms "Alien Sunset"Cut Worms "Alien Sunset"
$11.99 LP"Alien Sunset" is a collection of home-recorded "demos" from Max Clarke's time living in Chicago (Side A) and New York City (Side B). Each track has a sturdy, four-legged American quality, but also contains a gentleness and sense of stolen privacy. The arrangements are both dense and airy, decadent without sacrificing an ounce of effervescence. Something about this EP looks back over time’s shoulder, but it isn't really "retro" music, it just glitters in a way you don’t often hear these days.
If this collection can be said to have any sort through-line, a whiff of motif, it revolves around the obvious delight Max takes in singing his heart out, despite variegated agony. The lyrical work moves from simple, diary-like musings, self-consciousness on the dance floor and general lust problems, to illuminated text. As a lyricist, Max draws upon the Romantics and Symbolists of the rock and roll poet tradition; "Song of the Highest Tower" was written the day Lou Reed died and is an adaptation of a poem from Rimbaud. The project itself, Cut Worms, borrows its striking and ambiguous imagery from the William Blake poem, "Proverbs from Hell": The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dasher "Sodium"Dasher "Sodium"
$12.99 CD $17.99 LPAfter a string of well-received 7" releases on labels like Suicide Squeeze and Die Slaughterhaus, Dasher songs new and old have finally been smelted down into their debut album, Sodium. Dasher knifes out the chop-crunch guitar of latterday post-punk with a seething screech echoing the hardest horizons of the early 90’s underground.
DIANA "Perpetual Surrender / Perpetual Surrender Four Tet remix"DIANA "Perpetual Surrender / Perpetual Surrender Four Tet remix"
$8.99 12 inchSlinky, sultry single from DIANA’s Jagjaguwar debut gets an extended remix from the legendary Four Tet, which warps the track into a minimalist throb that somehow doubles down on the sultry front.
DIANA "Perpetual Surrender"DIANA "Perpetual Surrender"
$15.99 LP $12.99 CD $9.99 MP3DIANA are an enigmatic foursome from Toronto, where they must be putting something in the water with the number of great bands hailing from there. Consisting of Joseph Shabason, Kieran and singer Carmen Elle, with Paul Mathew recently joining the live line up, Shabason and Adams met while studying jazz at music college where they played extensively together. Having lent their skills (saxophone and drums, respectively) to many bands, including Bonjay, The Hidden Cameras and Shabason's recent contributions to Destroyer's excellent Kaputt, it was a leap of faith to make their own full-length. But the time had come.
After a songwriting sabbatical in the Canadian countryside, Shabason and Adams went into the studio with engineer and co-producer Roger Leavens. They asked Toronto musician and vocalist Carmen Elle to sing on a track, as both Kieran and Joseph knew her from her work with other bands such as the much feted but short-lived Spiral Beach, all of whose members have since gone on to play in various successful Canadian bands from Austra to Doldrums. The pair thought her voice might add something special, this turned out to be a huge understatement. Even though Shabason and Adams wrote the songs, the lyrics and melodies belonged to Elle the moment they escaped her mouth, each nuance of phrasing and melody deepening the sentiments. With this last dazzling piece of the puzzle in place, DIANA was born. Right from the first note we’re reeled into DIANA’s intimate world, with the dense, ambient swell that begins album opener ‘Foreign Installation’. A heady mix of drums, electric guitar and lush production, all sewn together and lifted by Carmen’s soothing vocal, their sound is addictive from the off. The pace is picked up with ‘That Feeling’, the detached refrain "We were blind to all the ways we sat and watched it fade away…" echoing through a mist of synths layered over insistent drums and bass. It is future music with an undeniable pop sensibility, though never overwhelming, the glossy yet sparse production always leaving just enough room for the imagination. Album highlight ‘Perpetual Surrender’ boasts an impressive travelling bassline, with Carmen’s gorgeous vocal repeating “I need saving from myself” over blown beats and perhaps the year’s best indie sax solo, all coming together to create well over four minutes of eerie, blissed-out ambience. Though there are glances to music past and kinship with music present, there is a progressive and contemporary feel to the record. DIANA comparisons traverse eras and genres; from the soft-focus soft rock and pop of Roxy Music to the dreamy production of jj and Chromatics, topped off with the Balearic disco swirl of Studio. While referencing so many, Carmen’s unique vocal brings them their own voice. For DIANA, the point is to push things forward, summed up with the embryonic bliss of instrumental closer ‘Curtains’, a startling piece of atmospheric production that stays with you long after the last sound has echoed into the ether.
Dinosaur Jr. "Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not"Dinosaur Jr. "Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not"
$12.99 CD $18.99 LPLet's face facts - in 2016 it is remarkable that there's a new Dinosuar Jr album to go ape over. After all, the original line-up of the band (J Mascis, Lou Barlow & Murph) only recorded three full albums during their initial run in the 1980s. Everyone was gob-smacked when they reunited in 2005. Even more so when they opted to stay together, as they have for 11 years now (on and off). And with the release of Give a Glimpse Of What Yer Not, this trio redivisus has released more albums in the 21st Century than they did in the 20th. It's enough to make a man take a long, thoughtful slug of maple-flavored bourbon and count some lucky stars.
Dinosaur Jr. "Now The Fall b/w Ricochet"
Dinosaur Jr. "I Bet On Sky"Dinosaur Jr. "I Bet On Sky"
$17.99 LP $12.99 CD $9.99 MP3I Bet on Sky is the third Dinosaur Jr. album since the original trio – J Mascis, Lou Barlow and Murph – reformed in 2005. And, crazily, it marks the band’s 10th studio album since their debut on Homestead Records in 1985. Back in the ‘80s, if anyone has suggested that these guys would be performing and recording at such a high level 27 years later, they would have been laughed out of the tree fort.
The trio has taken everything they’ve learned from the various projects they tackled over the years, and poured it directly into their current mix. J’s guitar approaches some of its most unhinged playing here, but there’s a sense of instrumental control that matches the sweet murk of his vocals (not that he always remembers to exercise control on stage, but that’s another milieu). This is head-bobbing riff-romance at the apex. Lou’s basswork shows a lot more melodicism now as well, although his two songs on I Bet on Sky retain the jagged rhythmic edge that has so often marked his work. And Murph…well, he still pounds the drums as hard and as strong as a pro wrestler, with deceptively simple structures that manage to interweave themselves perfectly with his bandmates’ melodic explosions.
After submerging myself in I Bet on Sky, it’s clear that the album is a true and worthy addition to the Dinosaur Jr. discography. It hews close enough to rock formalism to please the squares. Yet it is brilliantly imprinted with the trio’s magical equation, which is a gift to the rest of us. For a combo that began as anomalous fusion of hardcore punk and pop influences, Dinosaur Jr. have proven themselves to be unlikely masters of the long game.
Dinosaur Jr. "Dinosaur"Dinosaur Jr. "Dinosaur"
$15.99 LPJagjaguwar is honored to reissue the band's first three albums, Dinosaur, You're Living All Over Me & Bug, on vinyl this October. Originally released on the venerable Homestead and SST labels in the 1980's, the reissues stay true to form and include the cardinal track lists.
Dinosaur Jr. "Bug"Dinosaur Jr. "Bug"
$15.99 LPJagjaguwar is honored to reissue the band's first three albums, Dinosaur, You're Living All Over Me & Bug, on vinyl this October. Originally released on the venerable Homestead and SST labels in the 1980's, the reissues stay true to form and include the cardinal track lists.
Dinosaur Jr. "Pieces b/w Houses"Dinosaur Jr. "Pieces b/w Houses"
$1.98 MP3Pieces marks the second single from Farm, Dinosaur Jr's critically acclaimed long-player on Jagjaguwar. Featuring more bizarro artwork from renowned poster artist Marq Spusta, the Pieces 7" includes an exclusive b-side of Dinosaur Jr's cover of Houses, originally written & recorded by Elyse in 1968.
Dinosaur Jr. "Farm"Dinosaur Jr. "Farm"
$17.99 2xLP $12.99 CD $9.99 MP3The worry about the reunion of the original Dinosaur Jr. line-up, more than 20 years after their formation and legendary dissolution, was that these guys were just flogging the back catalog as a marketing gimmick. With the release of Beyond, in 2007, the band gave a hearty Marshall-driven "F**K YOU!" answer to those inquiring ears. Restoring the sound established by the opening hat-trick gambit of Dinosaur, You're Living All Over Me, and Bug, the Beyond record continued the band's march into rock greatness by making old ears smile and new ears bleed afresh. And now comes Farm, the fifth full length record by the original line-up-J Mascis, Lou Barlow, and Murph--set to release on their new label home Jagjaguwar on June 23rd.
If Beyond was Dinosaur Jr.'s return to form, Farm is proof that this band continues to deliver that which makes rock worth cranking to 11. At times wholly 70's guitar-epic, at times perfect for sitting by a babbling brook with Joni and Neil, Farm encompasses Dinosaur Jr.'s signature palette - soaring and distorted guitar, unshakable hooks, honey-rich melodies - songs that get into your head and, bouncing around happily, stay there. The ear-catching "Plans" is nearly 7 minutes of classic whipped-topping rock dessert, while "I Don't Wanna Go There" is a meat-and-potatoes main dish, mixing unapologetic lead guitar with straight-ahead delivery a la James Gang or Humble Pie. These two tunes round out twelve tracks propelled by the unique energy of one of America's greatest living rock bands hitting their stride.
Farm was recorded in J Mascis' Bisquiteen studio in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was produced by Mascis.
Drunk ""The Round Couple" / "St. Theresa""Drunk ""The Round Couple" / "St. Theresa""
$4.25 7 inchCinematically speaking, Drunk is a band that ought to be approached not as a static film, but rather as an ever unfurling serial. Indeed, their many public episodes run like connect-the-dots that express a full range of human discourse all embodied in one unified corpus. There are the manic moments of ferocity and tension release ("Miscellany" from RAISED TOWARD), the beautiful moments of melodic playfulness ("Dorothea" from TABLESIDE MANNERS), the brief stops of satire along the way (their footstomping rendition of "Martyr To The People" from their split 7" with the Young Pioneers), and then there are the rare glimpses into the more contemplative and routine -- and, dare we say, serene -- as found on "The Round Couple", which is the A-side and crown jewel of this new single. And such magic does not go unnoticed. Jagjaguwar artist Patrick Phelan heard an early demo of this Rick Alverson-penned song and quickly recorded it for his debut solo album SONGS OF PATRICK PHELAN, therein beating Alverson to the punch, releasing it before the Drunk-founder could release the song on one of his own records (by either Drunk or his own "more solo" project Spokane). That song can now be heard through its writer's voice, in its writer's house. And thank goodness for that. The B-side is an older Alverson song entitled "St. Theresa" which was recorded in 1995, a very pretty song which shows Drunk at its earliest roots.
Drunk "Tableside Manners"Drunk "Tableside Manners"
$9.99 MP3Tableside Manners are post-Christmas musings for the emotionally truant. The songs all deal with familiar Drunk themes -- notions of arrival or becoming, coping with expectations, exploring the crossroads where personal politics intersect with existential deliberation. But on this record the delivery vehicle of these themes is substantially different. Tableside Manners is less melancholic and more upbeat than previous Drunk albums. It relies less on exploiting and contorting musical traditions of the past. And while the words and ideas of this record act like a smooth compress on the back of the neck, lulling the listener, many of the rhythms and melodies, instead, rebel against this plaintive end. They act to move the body, to get the foot tapping, to invoke physical instead of spiritual rumination. Drunk's fourth full-length demonstrates first and foremost that Drunk is a band hellbent on not making the same record twice. Call it chronic reinvention syndrome. While it has been fairly easy to gauge how Drunk have changed sonically over the years, it has been much trickier to track the band's musical development -- or, more specifically, the evolution of Rick Alverson's songwriting. For instance, the band's third record, RAISED TOWARD, features songs from Alverson's warchest that were written way before Drunk was even conceptualized. Which makes TABLESIDE MANNERS different -- it is thoroughly a collection of Alverson's newest songs, all of which make a very strong case for Alverson's recent emergence as an important, truly distinctive American songwriter.
Drunk "Raised Toward"Drunk "Raised Toward"
$11.00 CD $9.99 MP3RAISED TOWARD -- thirteen songs for sufficience and disregard. Drunk's third full-length release features the gently effective words of Rick Alverson set amidst the workings of a full range of musical contraptions. The songs Alverson and crew have put together on RAISED TOWARD are cut from the same cloth as those of many of the great lyrical composers of our time (and slightly before our time): Leonard Cohen, Tim Foljahn, Nick Cave and Mark Eitzel, to name a few. If RAISED TOWARD resonates in that special, timeless style, it is not for want of fragility or the grace of inexperience, or for lack of innovation and youthful exuberance. Drunk has all of these to spare. They are, according to one magazine, "far ahead... in the race to the define the new American sound."
Drunk "Phineas Gage EP"
Drunk "To Corner Wounds"Drunk "To Corner Wounds"
$11.00 CD $11.00 LP $9.99 MP3Drunk's harrowing second release is borne of circumstance and built on the back of various folk traditions. Whether the subjects conjured on TO CORNER WOUNDS arise from nostalgia or from fantasy, nothing is really stated. There are no morals. According to one magazine, TO CORNER WOUNDS evokes "a dreamworld where ghosts of the old world commingle diffidently with those of the new."
Drunk "a derby spiritual"Drunk "a derby spiritual"
$11.00 CD $9.99 MP3Celebratory, contemplative, melancholic: a quick description of Drunk's stunning debut, A DERBY SPIRITUAL. This is the album that established both Drunk as an important musical entity. According to one writer, "Drunk, all arpeggios and sentiment, are a cross between slow Sparklehorse, the Band singing about Dixie, and Russian dirges -- true smart rock for smart people (and really, really beautiful to boot)." According to Jennifer Nine, writer for Melody Maker, "Drunk, whose no-bones name could scarcely do justice to their graceful sweetness, know just what bones hold you together... [they] move with the drowsy precision of music-box figurines. They sound like a sleepy chamber orchestra in threadbare clothes..."
Eau Claire Memorial Jazz I, Featuring Justin Vernon "A Decade With Duke"
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