Flavor Crystals are a psychedelic shoegaze band from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Hi everybody, sorry we’ve been pretty quiet lately, but we’ve been busy working on something. It’s been quite a challenging year for most all of us, but we do have some good news in this crazy thing we call 2020…Flavor Crystals album number five has arrived!. After years of exploration and weirdness, they added bubbly liquid and jelloed into a real band, recording their debut album On Plastic as a document of the sleepy wobbly blurry dreamscape vibe they found together.
For alternative music fans, the college town of Athens, Georgia, means R.E.M. and the B-52’s . Through the 1980s, the city was synonymous with a kind of against-the-grain music epitomized by those two bands’ very different styles. In 1987, Rolling Stonenamed R.E.M. “America’s best rock ’n’ roll band.” Drummer Bill Berry denied it. The best band in America, he said, was Pylon.
In its original incarnation, Pylon only lasted for five years. But no single band did more to define what it means to be an Athens band than Pylon. Formed as a performance art project by four art students who mostly did not know how to play their instruments, Pylon created a startling, original sound by combining formal experimentation with a danceable beat. Beyond their music, band members’ commitment to making art in their small, Southern college town helped transform what had been a tiny network of art students and their friends into one of America’s most important and enduring music scenes. This is how in that period when what would become alternative was new, Pylon broadened the very idea of what a band could be.
In Athens, Georgia, people got into bands the way people everywhere get into most things—through their friends.
As a high school student in suburban Atlanta, future Pylon bassist Michael Lachowski had taught himself photography by reading the Time/Life photography series and building a darkroom in his parents’ house. He met Randy Bewley, future guitarist, in the photography studio at the University of Georgia where the sculpture major from suburban Atlanta had a work-study job. Outside class, Lachowski made drawings, prints, Super 8 films, and sculptures, as well as photographs. Bewley made photographs and other two-dimensional work and later switched his major to painting. As Lachowski remembered, this kind of experimenting with genre just seemed normal at UGA: “We had an exuberant group of people; creativity was prized above all else; everybody was just putting out work. It led to us going out of the boundaries of our disciplines. A lot of us in the art school were trying out different media with a punk rock message, which is just go in there and do it. You don’t need training, or authority or legitimacy. Just figure it out.”
At the UGA library and at Barnett’s News downtown, Lachowski and Bewley followed the art and music news in publications like the Village Voice. After the B-52’s started playing New York City regularly in 1978, Bewley and Lachowski read about people they actually knew. Bewley wanted to form a band, too. Lachowski resisted. His problem with the idea was not that they were not musicians. The fact that they had no experience playing instruments was no different from the fact that they had no experience making prints or installation art before they went to art school. They could learn. Instead, Lachowski hesitated because making music seemed unoriginal: “I thought it had been done already.” But then the friends had an idea. As the band’s singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay remembered, “They’d been reading New York Rocker, and it seemed like it would be an easy thing to have a band and go to New York and get some press and come back. And that would be it.” Once they got the press, they would quit. Instead of a band, they decided, they would create a kind of performance art.
Bewley bought Lachowski a bass at a pawnshop and found a guitar for cheap at a flea market. Sometime that winter, the two friends started practicing regularly in Lachowski’s off-campus studio, a second-floor space on College Avenue right across from the university. Lachowski worked from a bass instruction book. Bewley played his guitar with an alternate tuning because he did not know the standard one. Plugged into little Pignose amps, they practiced by alternating positions, with one holding the groove and repeating a phrase while the other experimented.
In the future, these long jams would give birth to a remarkable independence between the bass and the guitar parts. At the time, they sounded like “endless riffs.” Curtis Crowe, their landlord, who lived upstairs, remembered hearing “a never-ending series of hooks—no bridges or chorus, just hooks” echoing and vibrating right up through the floor. One day Crowe reached his breaking point: “So I kinda went ahead and knocked on the door lookin’ real timid and said, ‘Hey, mind if I drag these drums in here for a little bit?’ ” The band’s future drummer “had every song memorized before I ever went down.”
When Bewley and Lachowski decided to find a singer, it made sense to them to ask art students whose work they liked. Bewley’s friend Vanessa Briscoe Hay—then Vanessa Ellison—had started out in arts education before switching her major to drawing and painting without telling her parents. After she graduated, she got a job at the local DuPont nylon factory, through word of mouth at the art school. Bewley was still in school, but Lachowski got a job there too after he graduated. Bewley told her about a performance art project he, Lachowski, and Crowe had created that involved making music. Bewley wanted Briscoe Hay to try out for the role of singer. She told him she wasn’t really a musician. Bewley insisted they were all amateurs. What mattered was they respected her as an artist.
The audition at Lachowski’s studio turned out to be oddly formal. On a music stand, her future bandmates had placed an orange vinyl notebook full of typed lyrics. They would play a song, and she would try to make the lyrics fit, sometimes cracking up in the attempt. “They couldn’t really hear what I was doing,” she remembered, but “they liked the fact that I put forth some honest effort and they liked the way I looked, and they liked me as a human being.”
When the band debuted on March 9th, 1979, in the second-floor space downtown above Chapter Three Records, it was hard to imagine its members would soon be local stars. All the songs they played were originals, except the theme song from Batman. Briscoe Hay stood on a mirror with her back to the big windows that looked out on old campus and concentrated on the words. Bewley and Lachowski looked at their hands. Only Crowe seemed at ease. In Athens, everyone danced at parties, and yet the audience at that first Pylon show and a second at Crowe’s loft stood strangely still. As Crowe told a critic in 1981, “Nobody knew what to do, so they were real polite.” In a letter to a former professor, Lachowski added a list of comments he had heard after their first few gigs: “too art oriented,” “conceptual,” “they sound like a bunch of artists who got together and decided to have a band,” “Michael, your music sounds just like your art,” and “they’ll like what you’re doing in New York (as if to imply that they don’t really in Athens).
At their third gig, though, at a house in the country, everything changed. As Briscoe Hay recalled, “The B-52’s showed up at that party, and they started dancing and running around like crazy and everybody else did too.” After the show, Briscoe Hay said, Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson “were very supportive.” They said, “You’ve got to play New York.”
To get that date, Pylon had to make a demo. Someone bought some Kmart cassette tapes, and the four art students recorded themselves playing a few songs at Lachowski’s studio. Then Schneider gave a tape to Jim Fouratt at Hurrah, a punk dance club where the B-52’s had been playing lately. The timing was perfect. “Rock Lobster” was a New York hit, and the B-52’s reached the peak of their underground fame in the weeks before the release of their first album that July. Fouratt actually called the members of Pylon in Athens, read through a list of coming bands, and asked them who they wanted to open for. Bewley and Lachowski picked Gang of Four.
In New York, a huge crowd filled with other musicians turned out at Hurrah to see Gang of Four. Briscoe Hay borrowed a whistle from the doorman and blew it during the song “Danger.” People in the front shook Bewley’s hand after the set and badgered him with questions about how he came up with his strange tunings and original chords. After they got back home, the September 1979 issue of Interview arrived with Glenn O’Brien’s review that gave as much space to Pylon as to the Gang of Four:
Pylon, the first Athens band to hit the town since the B-52s. A tough act to follow—but Pylon is also a credit to their community. There’s not much resemblance to the Bs. Although the guitarist has real classy taste in licks that is sometimes reminiscent of Ricky Wilson’s. Pylon has a charming chanteuse up-front—sort of Georgia Georgie Girl who manages to carry off several difficult postures, including kooky, endearing, sincere and wry. And not all the songs sound the same. These kids listen to dub for breakfast. Recommended.
Interview was not New York Rocker, but O’Brien’s coverage was better than the band members’ dreams, even if they had to look up the meaning of the word dub. Their project was a success, but they did not want to quit. They were having too much fun.
In making their performance art rock, the four members of Pylon drew on what they had learned in art school about the ways that tensions between materials, mediums, and expectations could animate art. Middle-class kids holding down working-class jobs, they turned the factory into a style. Posters featuring orange safety cones and music full of machinelike repetition punctured by whistles and screams contradicted audience assumptions that small Southern towns produced only county and folk sounds and handmade things.
Their name referred to “the kind in the road, not the architectural one or the ones that hold up electricity,” as Lachowski wrote a former professor. “We chose Pylon because it is severe, industrial, monolithic, functional. We subscribe to a modern techno-industrial aesthetic. Our message is ‘Go for it!, but be careful.’ ” Working the contrast between flat, machinelike minimalism and ragged, Southern-accented amateurism, their songs used a four-on-the-floor disco beat to mash together punk’s emotional excess and industrial repetition and detachment. The bass throbbed and the drums boomed as guitar licks cut across the rhythm section without being leads. The vocals varied from deadpan recitations of short phrases to howls, and Briscoe Hay rarely flirted with the audience. Instead, she belted out vocals while bouncing up and down and shaking her head like a dancer in a Charlie Brown television special. Sometimes, she blew a shrill whistle midsong, like a referee or a cop.
Live, Pylon’s act could be shocking or jolting or heavy. It could also be deep. In fusing pop and rock forms with an avant-garde sensibility, the band members asked what art could mean in the midst of industrial decline, production-line mass culture, and rising political conservatism. And they tentatively offered an answer. “Be careful, be cautious, be prepared,” the lyrics of their song “Danger” warned. But be creative, too. “Everything is cool.” “Turn up the volume.” “Turn off the TV.” “Now, rock and roll, now.” “Read a book, don’t be afraid.” “Function precedes form. Things happen.” Pylon pushed people to think as well as dance, to put their minds and bodies back together. Playing live, the four art students could pound their awkwardness and their amateurism and their artistic vision into something transcendent. If people in Athens revived on a local scale that old dream that music could make a new world, it was because they were living it.
Pylon nurtured the creativity the B-52’s had helped spark in Athens before they left for New York. Pylon’s performances, shows by other bands, and art installations by Lachowski and others transformed the open space behind the Victorian house at 265 Barber Street where Lachowski lived into Pylon Park, one of the emerging scene’s important gathering places. The band also played the club Curtis Crowe started, the 40 Watt Club. In the summer of 1980, Briscoe Hay had to quit her job at DuPont when the B-52’s invited Pylon to open for them in New York’s Central Park. By the end of the year, band members found they could live two or three months in Athens on their New York City guarantees. Pylon became their job.
Over the next three years, Pylon toured the Midwest and Canada with the Gang of Four and played a string of dates in England. In January 1982, they sold out the large Memorial Hall ballroom on the University of Georgia campus. In April, when the 40 Watt moved from Clayton Street to a bigger venue on Broad Street, they headlined the back-to-back closing and then opening shows and packed both rooms. In Athens, Pylon ruled the scene that the band’s members had done so much to create.
If Pylon seemed wildly successful from an underground perspective, outside Athens, New York, and a few other cities, audiences often did not seem to know what to make of the group. Band members made enough money to live cheaply in Athens, but they weren’t exactly comfortable. To reach the next level, they hired a professional booking agent. He landed them a gig most bands would have been giddy to get: the opening slot for U2’s U.S. tour in support of their recently released album War. When they took the stage, crowds impatient to see the Irish band ignored them. As Briscoe Hay recalled, “People were heckling … ‘Where’s U2?’ and ‘Get off the stage.’ ” What everyone said was great felt instead like failure. It certainly was not fun. Maybe they did not really want this kind of success. Maybe their performance art–turned-band was exactly what they said it was, “temporary rock.”
At the beginning of 1983, Briscoe Hay told a local Athens paper, “I think if it ever became miserable, we would just disband,” and in retrospect she was hinting at what was to come. Band members decided around this time to break up at the end of the year, after they fulfilled their bookings, but they kept their decision secret. In Athens, most people found out when posters went up for “Pylon’s Last Show” with opening act Love Tractor.
A recording of that farewell show released in 2016 finally gave those of us who missed it a chance to listen in on this essential moment in Athens history. From the opening note of the first song, “Working Is No Problem,”Pylon played 22 songs with hair-on-fire intensity that did not let up until the five-song encore finished. Over the course of approximately an hour and a quarter of music, the crowd roared out its encouragement. Sometimes the fans sang along to lyrics like “Everything is cool” and even occasionally to guitar hooks, like the woo-woo of “M-Train.” At other times, they just yelled. No one wanted the evening to stop.
Interviewed afterward about the breakup, band members reflected on why they had started making music “as another form of artistic expression.” “We accomplished what we set out to do,” Lachowski said. “It’s not that we are miserable, it’s just that we’ve seen all we’re going to see and don’t want to put any more time into it.” “What was frustrating was not trying to live like other bands, but trying to convince everybody that we didn’t want to do it that way,” he explained. “We were the only ones that understood why we were not out there with the other bands trying to make it big.”
A critics’ darling, repeatedly named the best band in Athens, Pylon carried its art piece so far that it broke up on the cusp of stardom. “We’ll become a cult band now,” Bewley predicted on the eve of Pylon’s last show. “This is a type of suicide that’ll make us more popular in the long run.” And he was right
Randy Bewley, Vanessa Briscoe Hay, Michael Lachowski, and Curtis Crowe of Pylon
Box Set Includes:
The studio albums Gyrate and Chomp – newly remastered from the original tapes
Extra – a collection of singles, B-sides, rarities and live recordings
Razz Tape – the first-ever Pylon recording, a 13-song unreleased session that predates their 1979 debut single, “Cool”/”Dub”
Plus a 216 page, full-color, hardbound book featuring a treasure trove of never before seen images and artifacts from the band’s personal archives, and writings by R.E.M., Kate Pierson of The B-52’s, Corin Tucker & Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, Steve Albini, Jon King & Hugo Burnham of Gang of Four, and many more
47 tracks in all, including 18 unreleased recordings
The Shins put out Heartworms, their first new album in five years, earlier this year and a video for “Half A Million” has been released.
Filmed on a white backdrop, edited, then printed out. “Half A Million” was created with 5,566 stickers, hand cut from the 4,868 frames and animated by sticking them down on top of each other at each of the 40+ locations.
The Worms Heart is a complete re-work of The Shins critically acclaimed March, 2017 album ‘Heartworms’. The album offers new reworked versions of the ‘Heartworms’ album original tracks, and the sequence is flipped as well. The album is available digitally, on all formats.
When James Mercer wrote, produced, and recorded the Heartworms album, he had this desire for an alternate version, an opposite version. The album’s slow songs would be flipped and re-recorded as fast songs, and vice versa. The reasoning was to showcase the versatility and strength of his songwriting, and the result is The Worm’s Heart. This ‘flipped’ collection is produced by Yuuki Matthews, Jon Sortland, & James Mercer; and is a must for any fan of The Shins
Tough Love Records have partnered with West Coast imprint Mt St Mtn for the release of “Free Advice”, the instant slowcore/dreampop classic by San Francisco four piece, Cindy. The full album is available to stream/download now, while a highly limited transparent vinyl pressing will be released on 20th November. Limited to just 250 copies, this pressing follows the long sold-out edition of 100 released earlier in the year and which was previously only available in the US.
“Free Advice” offers a sombre-yet-uplifting take on sobered dream pop. Imagine if Galaxie 500’s On Fire didn’t have a guitar solo or if The Trinity Session was stripped of its folk & blues roots; it’s just pure mood. Like sitting in a half-empty movie theater that’s playing Alphaville or Wild Strawberries and watching patron’s heads briefly illuminated from the screen; Free Advice (as with all of the Cindy output) transfers you to these momentary worlds.
Cindy is Karina Gill on guitar/vocals, Aaron Diko on synth/keys, Simon Phillips on Drums/Percussion, and Jesse Jackson on Bass/Keys + Simon and Jesse on backing vocals. The songs on Free Advice are these moments in mood: Phillips & Jackson’s rhythms create the foundation, while Diko’s keys rise and fall. Gill’s guitar rattles, vocals brood, and lyrics create these narratives that depict observers, not necessarily wronged rather, cautious and investigative of the world around them.
This year San Francisco band Cindy were plucked from obscurity into internet cult fandom with their second album, but it may as well have been their first since they were so under the radar. Free Advice is a record that is made for these times. Super chill, nearly hushed vocals accompanied by glacial guitars and some nice synthesized sounds. Galaxie 500 fans take note and snatch it up before it goes out of print (again).
Nestled deep in the forests of Mendocino County in Northern California, huddled under the protective shade of towering redwoods and within earshot of frothy waves crashing against the Pacific coastline, squats a geodesic dome that has served as crucible for the experimental genius of Carlton Melton. Nature and Man operate under different logics. But here, Carlton Melton wholly entrusts this idyllic environment with the task of inspiring and guiding their musical improvisations. The Dome has been the ideal setting to facilitate their creativity. Without forcing a specific dynamic or theme, the band inhabits its womb-like confines to improvise, explore, dream. Their music draws on psychedelia, stoner metal, krautrock, and ambient atmospherics to convey, above all else, a mood.
A prickly guitar melody will float lazily, a wall of dissonant feedback will resolve into a hypnotic drone, or a colossal riff will exhume the soul of Jimi Hendrix. One hears Hawkwind or Spacemen 3 jamming with Pink Floyd at Pompeii Indeed, Carlton Melton have one foot in the ancient world and one tentacle in deep space. They are both the pack of proto-humans drumming with femurs in Kubrick’s 2001 and the film’s inscrutable monolith hinting at the universe’s mysteries. The “Stoned Ape” theory holds that early hominids ingested psychedelic mushrooms that provided an evolutionary boost to their brains, helping them blossom into Homo Sapiens. Imagine such cavemen trippin’ balls, their nightmarish visions sending them into feverish bouts of rage and then gentle moments of introspection. They very well could have heard the music of Carlton Melton rattling inside their skulls, first driving our ancestors mad then upward into a higher realm.
Andy Duvall (drums, guitar), Clint Golden (bass), and Rich Millman (guitar, synths) have yet to play Pompeii, but they have already wowed crowds at European festivals such as the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, Roadburn, and Desertfest Antwerp. Live, they are jaw-dropping. On record, mind-altering. In fact, with each album, Carlton Melton adds a subtle new element, synapses firing new neural connections. In 2020, they release new full-length Where This Leads, marking ten years of the band’s working relationship with their UK label Agitated Records and five years of recording with Phil Manley in his El Studio in San Francisco. With Where This Leads, the band rewires the listener’s mind. “Smoke Drip Revisited” is a ticklish acid flashback, “Porch Dreams” a dabbling in country psych, and “Closer” a driving, freak-out of guitar heroics.
One senses that the group is conveying a message that cannot be expressed verbally but only suggested through synth sighs, walloping rhythms, and soaring solos. Would Carlton Melton therefore be a group of stoned apes dizzily grasping for meaning or telepathic futurists communicating to us through crude man-made instrumentation?.
Carlton Melton from the 2XLP ‘Where This Leads’ to be released October 30th 2020 on Agitated Records.
Heaters from Grand Rapids, Michigan In the year 2015, it may be that only foolishness or forgetfulness can excuse being surprised by the pace and power of a rock and roll machine coming out of the holy state of Michigan. Yet such is the power of the perpetual energy expressed throughout “Holy Water Pool,” the new full-length album by Heaters on Beyond Beyond Is Beyond Records.
If there’s an offer of salvation within “Holy Water Pool,” its one that comes with a catch: you have to risk drowning. Drowning in this case brought on by the rapid-rush of these eleven songs over forty-one minutes, creating an album that consistently offers explosion while also always keeping its fuse lit. “Kamizake” is the suitably deadly opener, as much an invocation of the ghosts of reverb past as it is a song. Broken shards of the Bo Diddley beat, detritus left behind by the three-eyed men of the Elevators, the amplifier-abuse-turned-illumination of The Warlocks – all feed the rich soil from which “Holy Water Pool” emerges. And perhaps nowhere on “Holy Water Pool” is the fruit of that soil better served than on “Master Splinter,” an instantly-under-your-skin gallop of greatness that lays bare both the unbridled joy and teeth-gnashing distress of what we like to call rock and roll.
Moments of “Holy Water Pool” threaten to turn into a wave pool, holy or not, given Heaters almost incongruous surf-city leanings. Sonically, this is more than the sum of its parts (and more than the sum of second-hand Ventures records, too) in the way it colours the band’s sound, with their relatively defined palette expanding to a depth that’s deceptively broad and ultimately breathtaking. “Gum Drop” is perhaps the albums sweetest treat, here the pace slowed to a somnambulistic shuffle, with the band threatening to disintegrate completely into the sound that grows ever more cavernous at every turn, tethered to reality only by the siren sound of saxophone. On the album ending “Dune Ripper,” our eyes initially crossed and read the title as “Duane Ripper,” as in the million-dollar twang delivered by Duane Eddy. It’s a ripper, for sure, and leaves little doubt that this dose of “Holy Water,” delivered with chilling efficiency by Heaters, has had its intended impact on our ears.
Onward flows the “Holy Water Pool,” the rambunctious and replenished flow of rock and roll, inviting all for a cleansing, refreshing dip. Jump in.
Laura Jane Grace wasn’t planning on making a solo record this year. In fact, she was planning on making a record with Against Me!, the band she’s fronted for the past 23 years. But clearly, nothing went according to plan this year. “We came home from the Against Me! tour we were on in March, and right before we left, we had been in the studio working on songs, and I had been working on them for months prior,” says Grace. As she sat at home, all of her tours cancelled, and the members of Against Me!—as well as her other band Laura Jane Grace & The Devouring Mothers—spread across the country, she was left with a batch of songs and no band to record them with.
“I sat around for a month-and-a-half at a home just being shellshocked being like, ‘What the fuck happened and what the fuck is happening with the world?’ As I started to get my bearings, I just came to the realization that waiting was going to kill the record and kill the songs. I spent two years working on all these songs, and the idea of throwing them away didn’t sit well with me,” says Grace. “But then I was like, ‘What am I waiting for?’ All I have to do is adjust my scope. I can sit here on my fucking ass and do nothing, or I can work.”
So, Grace got to work. She picked up the phone and called Electrical Audio, the iconic studio in her adopted hometown of Chicago, Illinois, to ask if she could make a record with famed engineer Steve Albini. The goal was to go in and document these songs exactly as she’d been playing them in her home, straight to analogue tape. When she hung up the phone, she had four days booked.
The result of the session at Electrical Audio is “Stay Alive”, a record that doesn’t just embody that title, it serves as the guiding principle behind its creations. But it also put life back into an industry that’s been ravaged by venue closures, cancelled tours, and delayed records. “By putting the songs out, that puts the label in work, that puts a photographer in work, that puts a graphic designer in work, that puts a merch company in work, that keeps it alive,” says Grace. “You hear on the news every day about people losing their jobs and everything collapsing, and I want to fight against that. The only way I can think to fight against that is to work.”
Across the 14 songs that comprise Stay Alive, Grace takes all her pent-up fears, anger, and anxiety and releases it, like an olive branch to the weary listeners who are feeling those exact same ways. As she says in “Blood & Thunder,” a love song to Chicago—or perhaps a mea culpa for “I Hate Chicago” on The Devouring Mothers album Bought to Rot—the album’s thematic premise is all but spelled out: “When you give in and quit / There’s a power to be found in it.” It’s an idea that may sound odd on its face, but it displays Grace’s commitment to no longer resisting the changes in front of her. On a record that sees her traversing the globe—from Marbella, Spain to Glasgow, Scotland to London, England to the Land of Oz—”Blood & Thunder” is a begrudging embrace of what can’t be changed; Instead of resisting the city she once loathed, she finds the beauty in the little things, like the moon rising over Indian Boundary Park, or the wind rolling up Western Avenue.
The album’s title is one that surfaces in the record itself, and serves as a subtle rejoinder to her Polyvinyl labelmate Chris Farren, who gifted Grace a hat that said “Can’t Die,” and she’s spent the last two years running in it every single day. By flipping the phrase on its head, Grace built her own message; one based around work, struggle, and reaffirmed commitments. In certain cases, songs like “Hanging Tree,” which has a chorus that builds to the phrase, “A burning crucifix and a hanging tree,” have been kicking around since 2017, but finally found a moment that made sense for it on Stay Alive. And in the case of “Shelter In Place,” a song about her own isolation and introspection, the pandemic finally gave words to a feeling she’d long had but was never able to accurately describe.
The songs that make up Stay Alive are documents of a time and a songwriter who experienced enough to find levity in the simple act of doing the work. Recorded with nothing more than an acoustic guitar, an occasional drum machine, and her own powerful voice, Grace’s distinct song writing signature is front and center. What’s more, she made it purely for herself. “I just want to put this out because it makes me feel alive and it’s giving me something better than sitting here losing my mind while the world falls apart,” says Grace. “It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about what you do. Just stay alive.”
Told Slant is Felix Walworth’s dark and evil band based in Brooklyn, New York.
Told Slant has released the third song from their upcoming full-length “Point The Flashlight and Walk”. According to songwriter Felix Walworth:”‘Run Around The School’ is about the allure of loving another regardless of reciprocity or the promise of being loved. It explores the beauty and delusion of pining, and of love’s power to satiate us even with its table scraps.”
All instruments and words by Felix Walworth Arranged, performed, and recorded by Felix Walworth
“The track transforms a playful playground taunt into an affecting quiver that lays bare some serious emotions. It’s twinkling and sad, weighed down by the heaviness of life never living up to expectations.” —Stereogum
“A song that is equal parts pure joy and hidden anguish, “Run Around The School” is exactly the tone that we know and love Told Slant for.” —Beats Per Minute
Carla Geneve has announced a national tour this August performing shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle! She’s taking her debut self-titled EP on the road, which was released in June via Dot Dash Recordings/Remote Control Records.
Carla’s also been announced on a national tour from September-October with HOLY HOLY.
To celebrate the announcement, Carla has shared a video for ‘Things Change’. The video was filmed on her recent debut tour of North America supporting San Cisco, Carla shares – “The video is a tour diary of sorts for my first ever shows in North America. It has been a year of big change for me and I felt like being on the road and touring was very significant of a big shift in my life. I wanted to capture some of the moments on the road that people don’t usually get to see – from travel to preparing for a show to everything in between.”
Carla Geneve recently brought her musical mastery and lyrical charm to the Live at Enmore studio, with an incredible version of Things Change.
Carla Geneve is a 21 year old singer-songwriter based in Fremantle, Western Australia. Backed by a captivating show and unique brand of brutally honest lyricism, Geneve established herself as one of Australia’s most prominent up and coming artists after the release of her breakout debut self-titled EP which saw her tour Australia prolifically playing sold out shows and festivals such as Laneway Festival & Falls Festival as well as tour with/support artists such as Cat Power, Kurt Vile, Julia Jacklin, Belle & Sebastien, Fred Armisen and more.
Her critically acclaimed debut self-titled EP was released in June 2019 via Remote Control Records/Dot Dash Recordings receiving praise from KEXP, Beats 1, Triple J and more. Geneve promoted the EP with her debut tour of North America was awarded the leading number of wins at the 2019 West Australian Music Awards taking home Best EP, Best Single – ‘Things Change’, Best Guitarist & Best Rock Act as well as Live Voice of The Year (WA) at the National Live Music Awards.
Geneve will release her forthcoming single ‘Don’t Wanna Be Your Lover’, the first from her debut album aided by extensive national/international touring, further solidifying her as one of Australia’s most exciting up and coming artists.
Carla Geneve singer songwriter from Perth, Australia
How do you describe a creative force like Poison Ivy? Born Kirsty Marlana Wallace and also known as Poison Ivy Rorschach, she was armed with a guitar and a strong desire for change. With her band The Cramps’ influence spanning over three decades, she led the alt-scene in New York at CBGB’s, the hallowed hall of punk which opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal in Manhattan’s East Village. A 350-capacity venue, its intimacy was a draw for other emerging bands such as The Ramones and Patti Smith. Ultimately, Poison Ivy had big hair and even bigger dreams, she was the driving force behind shaping the alternative music scene.
Rumoured to have taken the name ‘Poison Ivy’ from a dream while at Sacramento State University, she always aligned herself as an outsider, hence chosen to wear more revealing clothes and smokey make-up. Always keen to paint her life outside of the lines, she decided to work as a dominatrix at The Victorian, leaving her former job as a waitress due to the huge difference in pay. She met Lux Interior at College in 1972, who actually took his name from a car ad. This meeting prompted the birthing of her brainchild with Interior, who also became her late husband and the lead singer of their punk-rock band, The Cramps. Despite its changing line up from its creation in April 1976, until its disbandment in 2009 due to the death of Interior, they left a legacy yet to be diminished.
The Cramps were managed by Ivy, as both a band and a gang. She was an impressively accomplished lead and rhythm guitarist, always staying true to her artistic vision. The band brought the emerging genre of psychobilly to the forefront of people’s attention. Usually referred to as a cult band, they blended rockabilly and ‘60s garage rock with punk. They used pop culture as their inspirations and were a literal project of America. They quickly gained a reputation for their unusual, rockabilly-inspired music and wild live performances. The Cramps, with Ivy, Lux, and various other guitarists, drummers, and bassists, continued to release records and perform live until the fall of 2006, enjoying some commercial success (mainly in Europe) and acquiring a strong cult following worldwide.
The rockabilly element was partly due to Ivy’s admiration for American Shawnee Rock ‘n’ Roll musician, Link Wray, who was placed by Rolling Stone as 45/100 of the greatest guitarists of all time. They even covered the “King of Rock and Roll’s” track themselves, a strong rendition of the King’s hit track, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Early on, Ivy used a clear plexiglass Dan Armstrong guitar, then the unusual Canadian-made Bill Lewis guitar heard on the first few Cramps recordings. Since 1985 she has mostly used a 1958 Gretsch 6120 hollow-body. She uses Fender Pro Reverb amplifiers onstage, and smaller Valco and Allen amps in the studio.
Always thriving off the unusual, one of The Cramps most infamous shows was their performance at Napa State Mental Hospital. Some of their lyrics may have been regarded as being slightly near the knuckle, such as ‘Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?’, ‘All Women Are Bad’ or ‘Bikini Girls with Machine Guns’, with the latter being their sole Top 40 chart success. Also, Ivy posing as the track title also reiterated her unique persona and her tendency to step away from the norm, in a similar way to the likes of Jordan Mooney and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX.
Throughout the band’s career, they played with the idea of image and identity, after swapping their focus on B-side horror to sexual ventures. Not only were they ahead of their time with their music, image and love of horror, but the band itself was also split evenly with half men and half women, something which is still rarely seen decades later. They celebrated their relative longevity by marking their 25th anniversary with a re-issue of their post-I.R.S discography. Their last album of fresh material “Fiends of Dope Island” (2003), successfully set the band’s sound in front of the backdrop of the 21st Century.
Their last time performing as a band live may have been at House of Blues in Anaheim, California, in November 2006, but Poison Ivy and the band’s influence is yet to dwindle. They sparked the movement for horror punk and changed what people thought music should be. Poison Ivy herself acted as an inspiration for others to accept themselves as they truly were, and with her obvious guitar skills, became a role model for any girl to pick up an instrument. We can still learn a lot from one of the most underrated bands in alt-history.
The Albums:
Songs the Lord Taught Us (1980,Illegal Records)
Psychedelic Jungle (1981,I.R.S._Records)
A Date with Elvis (1986,Big Beat Records)
Stay Sick! (1990,Enigma_Records)
Look Mom No Head! (1991, Enigma)
Flamejob (1994, The Medicine Label)
Big Beat from Badsville (1997, Epitaph_Records)
Fiends of Dope Island (2003, Vengeance)
EPs
Gravest Hits (1979, Illegal)
Blues Fix (1992, Big Beat)
Live albums
Smell of Female – (live at the Peppermint Lounge) (1983, Big Beat)
RockinnReelininAucklandNewZealandXXX (1987, Vengeance)
Compilations
Off the Bone (1983, Illegal)
Bad Music for Bad People (1984, I.R.S.)
How to Make a Monster (2004, Vengeance)
The Cramps: File Under Sacred Music Early Singles 1978–1981 (2012, Munster)
If you’re interested in finding out more about Poison Ivy and The Cramps, make sure to read “Journey To The Centre of The Cramps” by Dick Porter
