#plowunited

The Rentiers - Amateur Hour

 Artist: The Rentiers (Philadelphia, New York, Durham) Release: Amateur Hour four-song EP (digital and limited one-sided mono 10") Label: Death to False Hope/Red Executive  

New Digital Store Release Listen on Apple Music/iTunes Listen on Spotify

Very limited edition lathe cut 10" can be purchased here 1. We Don't Cry 2. Jessica and Dan and a Cat Named Bolt Thrower 3. Arms 4. Hang Out or Die Trying

Artist Bio

The Rentiers is a name for whatever kind of music Joel Tannenbaum (Plow United, Ex Friends) feels like playing, and whoever he feels like playing it with. In theory this could meananything, like a record of calypso standards played by Joel, a disgraced Russian astronaut and a bonobo. In practice however, so far, it has primarily meant Mikey Erg (The Ergs!), Anika Pyle (Chumped), and a revolving cast of producers/arrangers that has included Seth Kauffman (Floating Action), Tyler Pursel (Gym Class Heroes) and Jesse Miller (Lotus). In 2014, after two decades on and off in DIY punk and indie pop bands, Joel finally gave up on anything ever working out the way it was supposed to. He decided from there on out to ignore all of the rules -written and unwritten- about how to be in a band and how to make a record. The Rentiers is what that sounds like. It sounds pretty good. 

Album Bio

Amateur Hour

 is the latest effort by the Rentiers, an amorphous collective of East Coast punk and indie lifers, at the center of which is Joel Tannenbaum (Plow United, Ex Friends, the Skywriters, the Snow Fairies). Joined once again by Mikey Erg (The Ergs!) and Anika Pyle (Chumped), the fourth Rentiers release is all sorts of epic, featuring an expanded circle of friends including Dave Weston (Weston) and Heidi Vanderlee (Early Riser, The Chris Gethard Show) and Plow United frontman Brian McGee. Sensing the drama implicit in Tannenbaum's seemingly simple pop compositions, producer and multi-instrumentalist Scotty Sandwich (Death to False Hope Records) went for broke, layering the record with strings, horns and percussion, set carefully against the more conventional tools of the punk rock trade. Due out on February 29, 

Amateur Hour 

can be downloaded at the Death to False Hope Records website and streamed in the usual places. An achingly limited one-sided lathe-cut 10" with hand-screened cover can be purchased from the

Red Executive web store.

The Rentiers on this recording are Joel Tannenbaum - singing Scotty Sandwich - guitar, bass, keyboards, programming Anika Pyle - singing Mikey Erg - drums, singing

with

Dave Weston - guitar on “We Don’t Cry” Heidi Vanderlee - cello on “We Don’t Cry,“ vocals and cello on Hang Out or Die Trying” Brian McGee - harmonica on “Jessica and Dan and a Cat Named Bolt Thrower”

and introducing the Boom Unit Brass Band on “Hang Out or Die Trying”

Evan Atherton - trumpet Jeremy Boomhower - trombone Benny Latino - tenor saxophone Brannon Bollinger - baritone saxophone

 therentiers.org

deathtofalsehoperecords.com

redexecutive.storenvy.com

Brian McGee (Plow United) streams solo album "Ruin Creek"

**featured photo from Nicole C. Kibert Hold on to your butts, you guys are in for a late Friday treat. Brian McGee (front man of Plow United) is streaming his upcoming solo album Ruin Creek in …

Plow United / Marching Band / Jump Start Records If you’re skeptical of bands that break up, take long hiatuses, and then reform to do reunion tours, you should be. It’s a terrible trend that too many bands are cashing in on. And for the most part, they end terribly. The band that comes back is never the one you remember. They’re usually slower, lamer, and more concerned with mortgage payments than when they left. So when Plow United, a thrashy pop punk band that formed in high school, ended their 13-year hiatus to put out a new album, it raised a red flag. Marching Band starts on an all too light and poppy note with its opening song, “Human 2000.” And upon hearing it, you immediately regret your decision to give reunited bands a chance and start wondering how much your record collection would be worth on eBay. But after 1:15, it’s over, and almost as if it was a ruse, the band immediately and forcefully jumps back into their old selves. The rest of Marching Band, for the most part, sounds like it could’ve been ripped from the band’s late 90s catalog. Some of the songs are actually faster and more aggressive than Plow’s original material. A lot of credit is due here to Plow United. Pop punk is not typically a genre that matures well. Because it’s not meant to. It’s meant to stay dopey and juvenile forever. Pop punk should be associated with bad hair/fashion choices and chasing after someone who, in hindsight, had no romantic interest in you. It’s sort of funny to see a bunch of dudes in their mid-30s rehashing their pop punk sound but amazingly, Plow was able to maintain the sensibilities of their teen years. And they drive that point home with lyrics like, “We’ve got no future, we might as well act like it.”  Plow United is one of the only bands that have successfully reunited without missing much of a beat. And while Marching Band is distinguishable by its slightly more professional recording and production value, not much else about the band has changed. And that’s a good thing. reviewed by Dan Ozzi

After a run from 1992-1998, Plow United reformed in 2011 and they return with new material in the form of Marching Band (Jump Start Records). Plow United hasnt just re-formed, theyve written ...

After Plow United acquainted a new audience with the fairly comprehensive comeback album, Sleepwalk: A Retrospective, the band set out to record their first new full length since their abrupt breakup in 1998.  And for a band that had been out of commission for thirteen years, the Wilmington, Delaware trio has not missed a beat.  The result is Marching [&]

Hey. This is a post about writing things. If you're reading this, there's a pretty good chance you are some kind of person who does things or make things. Those things probably involve music, or maybe something else awesome like movies or paintings or restoring old helicopters or something. Whatever it is, way to go. I'm glad you make stuff. If that's the case, chances are you have trouble finishing some of those things that you try to make, because most people do. I certainly do. Last summer I had to finish something, and it was the hardest thing I ever had to do. I managed to finish it. Along the way I learned some things about how to finish things. I'm writing this post because I think maybe some of those things I learned might be useful to other people. So this is about that. 

WARNING: This is not a post about punk music, or even just music. But it could be. That's why I'm writing it. 

This past summer I had to finish something I'd been putting off for a long time. It's something that should have taken me about two years at the most, but had already taken me more than five. And what's worse, if I didn't finish it by the end of the summer, it was going to mean that I had failed - finally and irrevocably - to achieve a goal I'd set for myself 13 years ago, at age 25. This failure wasn't going to ruin my life, not exactly anyway, but it was going to mean that a lot of things I'd wanted to do in the future were going to be permanently out of reach, and a lot of things I planned to do that were already going to be difficult no matter what were now going to be REALLY difficult. And then of course there was the thought of having to tell people I care about that I had failed, and having to see the look of disappointment in their eyes.

And to make matters even worse than that, I had been almost completely stalled on this thing since 2010.  Failure seemed not only possible, but maybe even imminent. 

The thing I had to finish writing was a doctoral dissertation. If you're not totally clear on what that's about, just think of it as a book: an awkward, boring, repetitive book that barely anyone reads, with a style and structure left over from the nineteenth century, but a book nonetheless. Books are hard to write. Lots of people intend to write a book, and quite a few of them start. Not many of them finish. The reason books are hard to write is because they are long. Mine ended up being around 60,000 words, and a little over 200 pages. When the summer started I had probably written around 20,000 of those words, and around 80 pages. I had no idea how I was going to write enough in such a concentrated period of time to actually finish by August, given my previous track record. But here's what I did know:

1. I had to to try write something everyday. 

2. I had to block out a significant portion of the day for writing. (I'm lucky that I have a job where I don't have to work in the summer if I don't want. I get that this is not the case for most people.) And I had to stop going out in the evenings on weekdays. Sometimes having a fun night planned means that the writing day just turns into counting down the hours until fun time starts. 

3. I had to focus on each day as it was happening. Thinking about everything that had to happen for the whole summer, well, that way lay catatonic depression.

4. There needed to be some kind of accountability. I needed to report to someone other than just myself, or I was just going to end up making rules for myself and promptly breaking them. Some people have an inner cop that tells them to exercise or eat a kale salad or only have one beer. I do not. Or I do, but I can just totally tune that little bastard out like it's no big deal. 

5. I love screwing around on the internet and I especially love communicating with people via social media. I love sharing ideas, opinions and dumb jokes. I love seeing other people's ideas, opinions and dumb jokes. I love just throwing something out there and seeing what people do with it. And unfortunately. over the last five years, a lot of this has happened when I was supposed to be writing my stupid dissertation. 

All of the above were important realizations, but Number 5 was probably the most important, because I realized that this whole time I had been fighting the wrong battle. Instead of telling myself to stop screwing around on the internet and get back to work, I needed to make screwing around on the internet into part of the work. Furthermore, because I, like all humans, want validation, and the internet is where I typically turn for validation (look at this blog, I mean...damn), I decided to combine Number 5 and Number 4 by making social media the place where I would fight my daily battle with words, and air the results. 

On a practical level, what this meant was that at the beginning of each day, I took note of the word count and the page number I was starting on for the chapter I was working on at the time. Then, over the course of the next six to twelve hours, as I paced, stared into space, cursed, threw myself down on the bed, ate peanut butter out of the jar using a fork and, finally, when all other options were exhausted, wrote something, I had a clear sense of where I'd started. At the end of the day, when I came to what seemed like a logical stopping point, I'd look at the word count and the page number, and carefully note on an index card with a sharpie how many words I'd written that day, and what page I'd stopped on. Then I'd tape it to the wall, photograph it along with the previous days' cards, and post it to Instagram and Facebook. 

People would see it. Sometimes they'd ignore it. Sometimes they'd "like" it. Sometimes they'd post an encouraging comment. Sometimes they'd say something weird, or even unhelpful. but the point is that they saw it. 

And more than that, the point is that I let everyone into the daily struggle. And they came to expect it. And - and this is the critical part - on bad days, when 2 pm rolled around and despite having sat in front of the computer for five hours I hadn't written a word, I would think of the index cards and be like "Fuck. I don't wanna have to post that I wrote 12 words today or, worse, none at all." And in nearly every instance, that would be enough to push me back to the page. I'd start thinking about whatever idea I was stuck on in a different way, from a different angle and slowly, laboriously, the words would come. 

That ended up being the difference between last summer and previous summers. in previous summers, when I hit that point of total frustration and self-loathing, I'd just go lie down on the sofa and watch like eight episodes in a row of The Big Bang Theory. This summer, it was that sense of being answerable to other people's expectations, however fleeting and, perhaps, imaginary, that would push me to keep going. 

I set goals, and the goals, in retrospect, were ludicrous. Two thousand words a day? Crazy. I learned that 1200 was the outer limits of what I was capable of. Writing seven days a week also turned out to be a little far-fetched. But by setting the bar so high, I insured that when I failed, I would fail high. I ended up averaging about five days a week of measurable progress, which would have been science fiction in previous summers. 

The cards became fetish objects, kind of. I became obsessive about the (completely arbitrary) format and would rewrite the same card three times to get it right. I color coded by chapter, and caught myself obsessing over what color to use for what chapter. As the day was winding down I would get excited in an almost childlike way about the ritual of writing, placing, photographing and posting the card. It became a reward in itself.

I would get excited about the reactions too. In retrospect, these ended up being helpful in a very concrete way. People who had been through the process or, just as often, had a partner who had been through the process, would respond by offering advice, and the advice was often quite pragmatic and helpful. And their reassurance meant a lot, because they knew what a shitshow this all is. And, most importantly, I came to hate the idea of having to explain to them why I didn't write anything that day. That was the clincher. 

And the way the cards built up over the summer. Into this multicolored rectangle of positivity and productivity and hard-won optimism. It was beautiful. I felt like I was building a skyscraper. 

In the end, I completed a draft shortly before Labor Day. It ended up being the most productive summer of my life. I finished writing a fucking book, for fucksake. And on balance my time was managed so much better than in the past that I still had time left over to travel around the country playing loud music a little bit. It ruled. After work got busy again I still managed to do all the revisions and all the paperwork, and on November 15 I successfully defended the whole pig. And now it's done. This thing that hung like an anchor around my neck since 2007 is done. And it happened, in large part, the same way that everything else positive in my life has happened: I brought it to the community and said "Hey, everybody. What about this?"

It's a weird plan, admittedly. You can call it narcissistic, you can call it OCD, you can call it trivial and annoying. i won't disagree with you. But, if you've ever had a good or maybe even great idea and felt like you were slowly suffocating under the weight of your inability to execute it, I urge you to try it this way. Bring it to your people at the end of every day. They'll know what to do. And you won't want to disappoint them. 

Special thanks to Heidi Saman, Melody Kramer, Sarah Watkins and Josh Brown. 

On Friday, October 25th, The Switchboard Sessions closed down for good. Here's why this is a big deal:

In 2010, Dane Erbach, a a lifelong fan of punk/emo, was settling into life as a married high school English teacher in suburban Chicago. Like many of us, he felt disconnected from the music he built his identity around as a young adult. And like many of us, he contemplated ways to keep that connection to the scene without turning the rest of his life upside down. Here's what he came up with:

Dane began conducting interviews with and recording minimally arranged (often but not always acoustic) performances by members of bands he liked. Here's the catch though: All performances had to be recorded over a telephone landline, with virtually no production on either end. 

Okay, first of all, why a landline? Glad you asked! The answer is simple. The audio signal that comes out of your cell phone is far more compressed than the one coming out of the landline at your work, or your parents' house, or wherever you still have access to one. The purpose of voice audio compression on old landlines is basically just to eliminate frequencies that just carry noise, or are too low for your ear to actually hear. On cell phones, however, where the carriers have incentive to conserve as much bandwidth as possible, compression is more aggressive. For the purpose of the Switchboard Sessions, a song recorded over a person-to-person cell conversation would sound like gibberish. 

So trying to transmit and record the performances over cell phones on either end wouldn't have worked. But why a telephone at all? Why not just get an M-Box and a Shure 58 and Pro-Tools, like everyone else? To understand that you'll need to take a moment to sink in to Dane's unique way of looking at music, and art, and the world. His words:

The purpose, though, is to capture a song in its rawest, most spontaneous form. In its imperfection, I hope that you can perceive the intimacy and honesty in each offering; I also hope that you can hear, even when the quality of recording is intentionally reduced, that the quality of songwriting cuts through.

Armed with that philosophy, Dane recorded and interviewed over 50 bands/artists between 2010 and 2013, before packing it in due to exhaustion (duh), job and family responsibilities, a desire to pursue new projects, and a sense that he'd accomplished what he set out to do. One of the things that will strike you about the Switchboard Sessions roster is that it included plenty of subjects for whom a gritty acoustic performance is all in a day's work - like Murder By Death, Laura Stevenson and Restorations - and plenty who had to temporarily reinvent themselves and their songs for to pull it off, like Samiam, Small Brown Bike and The Promise Ring. 

And then there are the interviews.

If you've played in punk bands in both the 1990s and now, then you'll know what I mean when I say that interviews ain't what they used to be. They tend to be conducted via email with little or no follow-up, and thrown up on the web with minimal editing and a brief introduction full of misspelled names and factual errors. 

Dane is a very striking exception. Conducting the interviews via phone, immediately after the performance, Dane goes deep. After being interviewed by him for over an hour last January I walked away with the impression that he begins by formulating a thesis about band and the songs - like a unifying idea that connects them all, something they all have in common - and then uses the interview as a means to test the thesis. I've been writing punk songs since I was 17 years old, one or two of which seem to be kind of a big deal, at least to some people), and this was literally the first time anyone ever asked me a serious question about how songs get written. It was almost disconcerting. 

But it's not just a vanity thing. Read Dane's piece on Brendan Kelly of the Lawrence Arms and you start to get a sense of what he was trying to do. Kelly has to sing extra quietly because he has just just put his kids down for a nap. 

And - and I think this is the important part - by tethering the performer to a landline, what he is actually doing nine times out of 10, is tethering them to some physical location that, more times than not, is part of their non-musical life and non-musical persona. That, I think, is where Dane suspects the real stuff is hidden. And if you talk long enough, you end up revealing stuff you didn't necessarily mean to, or weren't necessarily aware of. Dane thinks maybe somewhere in that stuff lies the key to whatever it is he finds interesting about the songs themselves. 

The Switchboard Sessions captured a brief but not unimportant moment in the history of this kind of music. Tom Gabel did a Switchboard Session shortly before Laura Jane Grace. Tony Sly did one shortly before his death in 2012. Punk music will go on without the Switchboard Sessions, but it will go on with a small piece missing.

Hosting capabilities mean that all 50+ sessions can't just live online perpetually, but Dane has thoughtfully arranged highlights of the sessions into four volumes, all of which can be downloaded for free here. If you want something from a specific session you can always ask.

- Joel