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Fire Records
Teenage Guitar 'More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush'
£16.99
Fire Records
Teenage Guitar 'More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush'
£16.99
Robert Pollard, head lunatic of the Guided By Voices' asylum, has a surfeit of original thoughts. (Most people are lucky to have even one, ever). That this even needs to be expressed is evidence enough for its "truth," as only obvious or obviously untrue things can ever hope to be true. Or to approach the truth. Something Pollard does with uncanny regularity, and which is further on display on every track on the gloriously unkempt, roiling-with-ideas More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush, the second record Pollard has released under the nom-de-rock Teenage Guitar.
Here's a song title: "Matthew's Ticker and Shaft a. come to breakfast b. the girl's c. division of swans d. when death has a nice ring." It starts with distorted guitar over a primitive snare-and-bass-drum beat (all instruments on all songs played by Pollard), shifts into an out-of-tune piano clumping along a simple seven-chord progression, lurches into a wall of distorted guitar as two tracks of Pollard wail wide-panned in each speaker, before finally resolving in a pretty harpsichord (or some synthesized version thereof) figure inelegantly trips over itself before trailing off into the next track: "The Instant American," which presents a multi-tracked Pollard vocals chanting over a background of what sounds like a bunch of people at a party drinking.
These are not the two strangest tracks on the fifteen-song album, which clocks in at just over thirty minutes. If there are times when Pollard's musical ambition seems to overwhelm his ability to present his ideas coherently, that's a feature, not a bug.
The spazzy machine-generated beat of "A Guaranteed Ratio," the ham-handed church organ of "Good Mary's House," the off-key crooning, the awkwardly plucked possible-banjo on "All You Fought For" the general (but not always) sloppiness, the rumbling toms and slashing power chording of "New Light": it's all of a piece, and that piece adds up to a sense of urgency and what sounds an awful lot like unconstrained joy suffusing every single track on More Lies From The Gooseberry Bush.
For those who like their Pollard stately, tuneful, and elegiac ' sure, he can do that without effort, but that's not what Teenage Guitar is about. Teenage Guitar is about trying hard without seeming to try hard. The result is that rare thing: a completely original album. Which is also a true delight, a sky-blue gem, a timeless and untimely cabinet of wonder. And by some few miles the greatest musical artifact your ears will have the pleasure of encountering this year.
Tracks:
1. Go Around (The Apartment Dwellers)
2. Spliced At Acme Fair
3. A Guaranteed Ratio
4. Good Mary's House
5. Skin Ride
6. Full Glass Gone
7. All You Fought For
8. Gear OP
9. No Escape
10. Matthew's Ticker and Shaft a. come to breakfast b. the girls arrive c. division of swans d. when death has a nice ring
11. The Instant American
12. Normalized
13. New Light
14. Birthplace of the Electric Starter
15. A Year That Could Have Been Worse
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Sold outLimited edition colour vinyl LP is pressed on split colour blue and black vinyl.Visit product page →
One of Entertainment Weeklies 100 Best Soundtracks Of All Time.
A precursor to Lynch's Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet sets a template for ethereal noir soundtracks in a modern, quite disturbed age. 'The shock of the new fades by definition, but it has hardly done so in the case of Blue Velvet.' Dennis Lim, Salon, 2016
"The haunting soundtrack accompanies the title credits, then weaves through the narrative, accentuating the noir mood of the film." - John Alexander, The British Film Resource
You know that feeling you get when you're shook awake in mid-dream? You were teetering on the ledge of a building, or maybe trying to free a butterfly from a spider web while wearing cricket gloves? Perhaps you're running late for a train and your short cut takes you through a bad part of town, you're being followed but the ever changing reflection in the shop window is a younger you, a healthier person - with a better hairstyle. It's an anxiety thing, an off-kilter almost world, best summed up on the soundtrack for Blue Velvet, David Lynch's 1986 film that nods somnambulantly to the shadowy netherworld of film noir.
Oedipal fantasies, finding a severed ear on your way home, voyeurism, crime and retribution, violence; they're all there in abundance in the movie, a rotten sleazy commercialism set off against a set of strange situations that the edge of the seat is never far away from. And what soundtrack would suit such an experience? Of course a mix of orchestral pieces from composer and conductor Angelo Badalamenti inspired by Shoshtakovich's 15th Symphony (which rumour has it Lynch played onset to create the mood') mixed up with trashy Hammond-led boogie and overblown baroque pop from Roy Orbison and Ketty Lester, suitable for any dive's jukebox.
That awkward mix plays itself out in Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy's rendition of the song Blue Velvet'that melds beautifully and indeed hauntingly into Blue Star', a broken piece of vintage pop. Similarly, the track Going Down To Lincoln'with its narrative audio shtick takes all of the previously-mused elements to create a perfectly disjointed travelogue. The soundtrack album starts with Bernard Hermann-styled Hitchcock-esque strings and violin slashes, which dally before deconstructing the themes and motifs into a disturbing procession that climaxes with Julee Cruise's funereal Mysteries Of Love', a fittingly titled epilogue to an epic that concludes with the hero's true love's reality of a simplistic birdsong dream from earlier in the film.
It's a cyclical trip that feeds directly back to the beginning and, yes, there's that severed ear again, now ant infested laying on the ground, proving that dreams become real, or is it reality that becomes a dream?
Tracklisting:
1. Main Title
2. Night Streets / Sandy And Jeffrey
3. Frank
4. Jeffrey's Dark Side
5. Mysteries Of Love (French Horn solo) (a)
6. Frank Returns
7. Mysteries Of Love (Instrumental) (a)
8. Blue Velvet (b) / Blue Star (a) - Montage
9. Lumberton U.S.A. (a) / Going Down To Lincoln - Sound Effects Suite
10. Akron Meets The Blues
11. Honky Tonk Part I (performed by Bill Doggett)
12. In Dreams (performed by Roy Orbison)
13. Love Letters (e) (performed by Ketty Lester)
14. Mysteries Of Love (a) (Vocal by Julee Cruise) -
Sold outRemastered by Bob Weston and featuring new liner notes by MAGNET magazine editor Eric Miller, physical copies of Vee Vee includes sixteen bonus tracks and new cover art re-imagined by graphic artist Jay Ryan. Reissues of All the Nation's Airports and White Trash Heroes followed later in 2012.Visit product page →
The first full-length produced by Bob Weston, Vee Vee was a slight departure from the previous bombastic noisepop that characterized Archers of Loaf's previous work, and it proved that the band wasn't just a flash in the pan. The album became their best-selling album to date and landed them on the covers of most fanzines and at the top of college radio charts across the country. "Harnessed in Slums" and "Greatest of All Time" became anthems of the underground and led to successful tours with the Flaming Lips and Weezer.
CD 1:
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2. Harnessed in Slums
3. Nevermind the Enemy
4. Greatest of All Time
5. Underdogs of Nipomo
6. Floating Friends
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10. Let the Loser Melt
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CD 2:
1. Harnessed in Slums (Bob Weston Radio Mix, 1995)
2. Telepathic Traffic (Bonus)
3. Don't Believe the Good News (Bonus)
4. Smoking Pot in the Hot City (Bonus)
5. Mutes in the Steeple (Bonus)
6. Mark Price P.I. (Bonus)
7. Bacteria (Bonus)
8. Equinox (Bonus)
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12. Nostalgia (Bonus)
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On saleNew Zealand/New York City legends Bailterspace, offer up their best album to date with their first new recordings in 13 years. The band were once described by Pitchfork as "simultaneously beautiful, jagged, atonal, and supremely melodic" and 'Strobosphere' emerges at a time when the band's trailblazing sound has never been more relevant.Visit product page →
Revered as one of the loudest and most intense live bands of all-time, they haven't lost any of their bite or their love of tone, dissonance, and melody. The first single "No Sense" darts, snaps and swirls with alternating snare cracks, atmospheric surges and dirty buzz, featuring Parker's distinctive vocals. -
Reissue, note new price, release date, catalogue numbers & barcodes. 'One of underground rock's most extraordinary enigmas.' The Quietus.Visit product page →
First time on Double Silver Vinyl.
Critical praise from Pitchfork, Clash, The Wire, Q Magazine and more upon release. New inverted LTD edition artwork.
Fire re-issue Bardo Pond's eponymous eighth studio album from 2010, their debut for Fire from way back when. A lysergic brain wrestler in which the Pennsylvanian drone outfit perfect their modal sound. Teasing the artistry of LaMonte Young and Terry Riley into a guitar shaped cauldron, the album's compulsive reverbed guitar shapes slowly simmer behind Isobel Sollenberger's esoteric vocals 'Like hearing a tannoy at a station in the voice of Jesus.' The Quietus.
A claustrophobic stuttering raga interlocks with their psychedelic leanings best exemplified on Cracker Wrist'which sounds like something that's intentionally always just about to happen/and/or spin back in time.
Featuring lengthy fully nurtured play offs between the quintet Bardo Pond'is a heady statement that's like the most wholesome kind of vegan-friendly mushroom trips.
Pitchfork reckons they're 'playing fuzzed out stoner dreams.' Vice's musical brother Noisey likens them to 'Fugazi On Acid.'
Allmusic intervenes with: 'These are epic, soaring psychedelic ambient power-drone rock noise melodies where partially buried, distant female vocals are laced throughout a roaring, murky/sludge guitar soundscape.'
Tracklisting:
1. Just Once
2. Don't Know About You
3. Sleeping
4. Undone
5. Cracker Wrist
6. The Stars Behind
7. Wayne's Tune
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