HHBTM Records

Crayon existed as a whisper, a rumor, a mysterious name on the wind for the past 20 years. It’s been that long since their only full-length, Brick Factory, was originally released on cassette and CD by Massachusetts label Harriet Records. Since then, it’s been heralded by indie icons like Dinosaur, Jr. But for years, actually tracking down a copy of the album proved fruitless (even digitally). My mom’s Mercury ate my Crayon cassette in the late ’90s, and it’s been that long since I had a chance to give this one a spin. Thankfully, that’s all done – this lo-fi, Pavement-esque flash of noise-pop brilliance has finally been re-issued (on vinyl, no less!) by what’s quickly becoming our favorite label, HHBTM (Athens, GA). How best to describe Crayon? It’s kinda punk, kinda twee, kinda off-kilter alt-pop. It’s a slice of the 1990s, in every sense possible. And it’s glorious. It’s the songs, dammit. The songs are great. It’s not just hazy textures and fuzzed-out guitars that go nowhere. There are meaningful melodies there (sometimes you gotta listen for them, but that’s just a product of the era). The fucking songs. Spinning Crayon in 2015 is an instant trip back in time. Back to my high school bedroom. Back to the days when the Walkman ruled the world. Back to cramped teenage bedrooms overflowing with posters, VHS copies of Mallrats and that secret stash buried in your closet. Back to when you’d play your favorite records endlessly as you figured out what your life was going to be…

Previous Tunabunny albums have always been marked by the occasional detours away from their Pylon-accented noise-pop blueprint & into more experimental sound collage territory, but on Kingdom Technology, they’ve fully given themselves over to those once-brief shortcuts toward non-linearity & the off-kilter sound glitches resulting from their choice to record this latest LP on an imperfect sound input device apparently liberated from a dumpster at the University of Georgia. They’ve also been eating some serious dub for breakfast & it shows, like during the six opening minutes of “Airless Spaces,” with its repetitive mutant disco bass/drums groove & submerged spectral vocals (from guitarists Brigette Adair Herron & Mary Jane Hassell), or “Save it Up,” with a decidedly warped & wobbly early-80s ZE Records-style electronic pulse. I think their greatest successes come when they take their stabs at short & sweet fuzzed-out pop songs & there’s a few such gems scattered amongst the musique concrete manipulations here – namely “Coming For You,” with the sort of sharp hook & sublime harmonies that most power-pop bands would kill for & “Canaries in Mineshafts,” which is barely over a minute long & sounds kind of like a female-fronted Chairs Missing-era Wire wrapped around some gloriously messy Sonic Youth guitar noise. That being said, I’m still curious what they’ll dig out of the trash for their next album.

JG are a bunch of hardcore kids who grew up and decided to play indie pop. That might be an overly simplistic description, but sonically its pretty accurate. Their tracks on this split, the Gruesomes’ first post-Werid Sister release, finds them toning down their aggressive side and focusing more on the sugarysweetness with bubbly, hook-laden tracks such as “Jerome (Liar).” TF are a good companion, sharing a similar musical style but with enough distinction so they don’t run together completely. Their first two tracks are a bit more of a straightforward mid-tempo rock ’n’ roll than the Gruesomes, the closing “No Pressure” is a sweet melancholic pop ballad.

Wow, this was certainly a blast from the past that I had nearly forgotten about. This record by this Bellingham, WA band was originally released on Tim Alborn’s Harriet Records label (Tim also published the half-size zine Incite!). This band included Sean Tollefson (bass vocals), Brad Robert (guitar/ vocals) and Jeff Fell (drums). Both Sean and Jeff went on to form Tullycraft (who may still around in some form or another) while Brad retired from music to work in an eraser factory (not a brick factory). Crayon were fiercely independent, noisy/poppy and probably had some inspiration from Beat Happening. Sean and Brad alternated vocal duties with Sean having the childlike, innocent (which brought the band the twee tag, Sean would later carry these vocals into Tullycraft, let’s face it, his voice is instantly recognizable). It’d be hard to call these guy a twee band though as on many of the songs the guitars roar and the waves of distortion go over you heard and swallow you up (in the best way possible). Songs like “Chutes and Ladders’ (not a Gray Matter cover), “Crown,” “Pedal” and “Hope in Every Train” are too sticky for words. Hold your breath and jump in, people. Kudos to the HHBTM label for reissuing this lost gem 20 years after its original release. As it says on lots of records the world over, PLAY LOUD!

I’m a snob about punk music, a genre which I place into a finite definition. For many, merely having fast guitars and snide lyrics is enough to rise to the punk label — allowing bands such as Blink 182 to be considered punk when nothing could be further from the truth. No, punk music is a churning, guitar and cymbal thrashing cavalcade of sound and noise, sometimes melodic and repetitive, fronted by singers who act as if they just rather do something else, even though they’re really great screaming into the mic. Bad Brains, Agent Orange, Dead Kennedys, Fear, Minor Threat. These are punk bands. I love love love The Clash and Husker Du, but they are not punk bands. A punk band would never make sweeping albums like “Sandinista” or “Candy Apple Grey,” as great as those albums are. Plus Strummer and Mould cared, Jello Biafra always seemed like he didn’t care at all. Music I call punk I hold dear, because it came of age during my restless teenage years, opening a stirring rage within. There is nothing more freeing that slamming into a group of people who share this rage but are human enough to pick you up when you fall down. I remember a Bad Brains show in 1986 at the Cameo Theatre on Miami Beach like it was yesterday — to barely survive the floor during I Against I only to slowly “reggae slam” for The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth is, at 17, discovering true happiness. I don’t slam dance anymore, my knees disapprove and so does my temperament (what kids today will slam to has me shaking my head), but every time I see Muuy Biien, I’m 17 again. I force myself away from the stage, because I want to throw down. The band makes it difficult for me to obey my own common sense. I listened to D.Y.I., Muuy Biien’s latest release on Happy Happy Birthday To Me records, and it is a packed potion of punk power (sorry for the p’s). Infused with an insatiable edge from singer/songwriter Joshua Evans, D.Y.I. is nostalgic and inventive, honoring venerable bass lines while roaming through a modern landscape of musical chaos. To understand the range and verve, all one must do is listen to the first three tracks. The instrumental Cyclothymia I, unexpected with a dreamy sharpness, slides into a drum kick and racing bass line for Human Error. When Evans utters his first words the song tears into new territory — his cadence and ability to filter above and around the sterling din behind him is a treat. With White Ego, all funky-edgy bass line and squawking guitars, Muuy Biien is at its apex. Evans sings, in a controlled yelp, ‘Another white ego/another good gone bad/to overcompensate for what you lack,’ and you understand you’re not dealing with common lyrics. I go through stages where certain Athens bands I won’t miss if I have the opportunity to see them, I went through this with The Whigs, A. Armada, Producto and Easter Island. Three of those bands are gone and the former tours the world. I’m not sure what will happen with Muuy Biien, but it’s my new must-see crush, and D.Y.I. makes the argument that it’s the best show in town.

One of the biggest mistakes that I make when listening to a cassette that is a collection of songs spanning years such as this is that I try to see it as one cohesive sort of release when in fact it was released over the course of six years on various projects and so this is kind of a compilation, a greatest hits if you will, on some level more so than being your standard album. In this sense, these songs can be different from one to the next and it makes perfect sense as to why. To go from that acoustic guitar and vocals route onto piano keys and organ synth and then ending off the first side with a rocking instrumental number might not make sense if Joe Jack Talcum was putting together a brand new cassette right now, but here it works. I also find the time frame of this rather interesting. In 1993 cassettes were still around but they weren’t as popular as they used to be as the compact disc was trying to phase them out. I use 1994 as my gauge for time- because it’s when Kurt Cobain killed himself- and I remember that an album such as “In Utero” was available on cassette but I owned it on CD and that was not uncommon. The early 2000’s were when cassettes became most scarce, as they stopped being mass produced, but I still feel as if this span from 1993 to 1999 would also be a slightly harder time to create cassettes because people were just finally all moving over to compact disc. So what are these songs about? I mean, the music is there and it’s got a great sound which doesn’t always resemble the strict home recording/bedroom vibe, and as such I try to think back about what my life was like in this time and then I get sad and realize I’m old so I stop reflecting. One thing I can say though is that the first song is about drinking Guinness, which is something I can get behind. Perhaps if I had heard that song in its original context I would have bonded with it. Possibly between these years, my sister had a party that I went to by default and one of her friends presented me with Guinness for the first time and compared drinking a can of it to eating an entire meal. Needless to say, I drank two cans (After already having other drinks) and felt close to nothing. Ah, to be young and able to consume mass amounts of alcohol again. A quick journey to Discogs shows that JJT had a “Home Recordings” set before this, from 1984 to 1997, and released as a CD instead on Valiant Death Records. I only note this because it was *not* released on HHBTM and perhaps they could release it on cassette. It’d be kind of like moving backwards when I was looking to see if JJT still made music but I’d be fine with that. The newest offering Discogs has is from 2011, which is a split LP he did which I will not look into but I can’t imagine he stopped making music. To have this sort of piece of time in the life of a musician, a sort of time capsule revealed if you will, is something I can never really get over how amazing it is. This is important for fans of cassettes, fans of certain styles of music, blah blah blah, but mostly it’s just something you should hear because I feel it has that certain mass appeal.

In the fall of 2013, seminal indie rock band Throwing Muses broke a 10-year hiatus – although to be honest it wasn’t much of a hiatus for front woman Kristin Hersh who continued to releases masterful solo albums and guitar-driven punk rock with her other band 50 Foot Wave. But I digress. Throwing Muses return with the 32-track masterpiece ‘Purgatory/Paradise.’ In typical Hersh and band fashion, the Muses gave back to their fans with the return album offering up a gorgeous hardback book full of lyrics, short essays and stories by Hersh about each song, and exclusive photographs and artwork. In addition you got a download code for these exclusives: ~ A commentary track featuring Kristin Hersh and David Narcizo ~ An instrumental version of the full album ~ Prepackaged mp3 and lossless versions of every track with embedded metadata, artwork and lyrics. Taking it a step further, thanks to the fine folks of Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records, ‘Purgatory/Paradise’ is now out on vinyl. True, the 2-LP gatefold vinyl version doesn’t offer up the amenities which the original release did, but hearing ‘Purgatory/Paradise,’ one of the bands best releases in their nearly 30-year career, is priceless. ‘ As an album, ‘Purgatory/Paradise,’ which takes its name from an intersection in Hersh’s Rhode Island hometown, is an exquisite collection of music from one of music’s finest songwriters, not to mention fellow Muses drummer David Narcizo and bassist Bernard Georges put in some of their finest work to date. Hovering around the two to three minute mark, the songs are short bursts, which culminate into one cohesive album. The tracks, much like Hersh herself, are authentic, unrelenting and organic. At 32 songs, you could easily try to break this album down into rock songs and acoustic songs, but after listening to it, that task is virtually impossible. The songs have both elements mixed in. There’s even hints at a little blues and retro pop fused in. The tracks “Opiates;” “Sunray Venus;” “Milan;” and “Speedbath” are forceful rockers which ebb and flow between the other tracks. The Muses are at their best and ballsiest when they turn it up and rock out. Case in point, the two best songs on the album – “Slippershell” and “Sleepwalking 1.” Hersh, Narcizo and Georges put in a lot of hard work and it pays off. The trio play flawlessly on ‘Purgatory/Paradise’ while, once again bucking the conventional in favor of real rock & roll.

CRAYON ORDERS