Ten Latest Flame Records Releases You Should Hear

On Thursday Milwaukee Record ran my feature article on Latest Flame Records closing up shop after nearly 13 years of kickass releases. It was really difficult to write that piece without injecting lots of personal asides and, admittedly, sour grapes and snarky butthurt feelings about Dan's decision to close up shop, which is why i'm hopping over here to do that, naturally. Make no mistake--i fully support Dan's decision to stop setting his personal income on fire in order to allow his favorite bands to have something to sell at shows. But the day i got the email from Mr. Hanke breaking the news, i felt like a family member had died.

To me, Latest Flame Records and the bands that recorded for it during its noisy second act were family. Having become aware of punk rock and independent record labels beginning with a mind-expanding summer between my senior year of high school and the onset of college in the early 90s, i was immediately drawn to the romantic notion of record label as symbol of quality and community. If i bought a Touch & Go Records release in the 1990s, i had a pretty good idea of what it sounded like before breaking the shrinkwrap--it was going to be loud, it was going to be abrasive, and it wasn't going to sound exactly like anything else available. And i was probably going to love it. Just as importantly, i had a pretty good notion that each of those bands were likely to play shows together, tour together, hang out together. Eli Janney of Girls Against Boys recorded Brainiac's Hissing Prigs in Static Couture. Blond Redhead opened for Shellac at the Congress Theatre. And so on. It quickly became a dream of mine to be a part of something like that. Dan shared that dream and made it happen with a stacked roster of aggressive and off-the-beaten-path-yet-completely-accessible-if-you-give-it-a-chance rock tunes from the likes of Police Teeth, Waxeater, Trophy Wives, Nervous Curtains, his Like Like The The The Death, and my own IfIHadAHiFi and Body Futures.

Music, like any art, is deeply personal and subjective, of course, and that the Latest Flame roster never exactly set the world on fire is by no means an indictment of its quality....of course. It's the same story that scores of labels that have come and gone have endured over the years. But when you're sinking the amount of money that it takes to release a record or a CD into something in which you believe, it's hard to not be frustrated when those efforts aren't validated by the outside world. We are only human beings, after all, and human beings are inherently social creatures seeking outside validation. But make no mistake: almost every time i get on stage with Body Futures or IfIHadAHiFi, and every time i throw on one of our records, i feel completely validated in that we've produced music that i would want to listen to and would be stoked about even if i wasn't in the band, and that's all anyone can realistically hope for. As my friend John Dykstra has often said to me, we should all be thankful for living in a time where we are able to make music and press records with our pals in the first place; should anyone else actually enjoy it, that's a bonus.

Still, being able to cover costs would have been a nice bonus.

In the spirit of celebrating the diverse Latest Flame catalog, here are ten Latest Flame releases that everyone should hear. Dan was kind enough to document it, so dammit, it should be heard. This stuff is all over the map, from new-wavy power-pop to wiry post-punk to brutal riffage, and it all deserves to be remembered. I hope you take some time to check them out if you don't know about them already. And thanks, Dan, for helping all of us live that dream of being part of a musical family with a sense of real community and belonging, just like those indie labels of lore. What a gift.

In more-or-less chronological order:

Hold the (Yellow) Phone

I suppose that, what with we in the Latest Flame roster brainstorming ways to promote the label and bands in a more aggressive manner, i should be thrilled that the Yellow Phone Music Conference is coming to Milwaukee this weekend. But it probably surprises no one that the descriptions i've been reading on line fill me with a vague sense of...what is it? Oh yeah, bile:

Yellow Phone Music Conference (YPMC) is a three day gathering of talented artists and music professionals. YPMC will present engaging panel discussions and mentor sessions with experienced, respected leaders in the music business, bringing professionals, artists and fans together to share ideas and discover new opportunities.

Yellow Phone is a more focused version of larger conferences which seem to have become less accessible to up-and-coming talent and new industry professionals. The priorities of those conferences have been redirected toward launching signed acts instead of showcasing undiscovered talent. Yellow Phone, on the other hand, is focused on the unsigned artists. With fewer artists and fewer venues, the quality of the talent presented is paramount.

Yellow Phone's goal is to bring together career oriented artists and positive, forward-thinking leaders in today's music business, taking the best qualities of the larger industry conferences and downsizing them into a concentrated, quality experience with powerful, pertinent takeaways.

I suppose that once i read the phrase "career oriented artists" i should stop bitching and just realize that this whole dog and pony show isn't targeted at me, but i remain conflicted. The organizers, local entertainment consultants Doug Johnson, David Silbaugh and Scott Ziel, make some great points in their interview with Even at the Shepherd Express; in particular, they're exactly right about the problem with SXSW and CMJ these days:

"We have all been going to South by Southwest for a long time, but we found it increasingly hard to find unsigned, new and upcoming bands there amid all the established acts," Johnson says. "We had talked to some of our cohorts out in Los Angeles and they had a similar impression. They said they weren't going to South by Southwest because there weren't bands on the spot they could sign, since every act they saw had already been signed. We all thought that these events would work better for both parties if bands were able to network with industry professionals in a boutique situation, where they could actually talk one on one."

Obviously these guys care about making Milwaukee a hotspot on the national music scene, so their plan to lure Big Music Industry Folks from the coast by luring them with hot unsigned talent from New York and L.A., only to subject them to Milwaukee's Most Accessible, is crafty. (What, you think they'd come out to a Milwaukee music fest without bands from the "big" cities? Cool, how many execs were at WMSE's Radio Summer Camp this year?) Where things start to fall apart for our new Little Music Fest That Can is the pricing, which feels more like a Little Music Fest That Cons:

Panels, which will be held at the Intercontinental Hotel, 139 E. Kilbourn Ave., are reserved for attendees paying $99 in advance or $199 the day of the event. However, the shows that will be held at clubs downtown and in the Third Ward will be open to the public for $5 each at the door, with weekend show passes going for $20.

A weekend show pass for $20 is a hell of a bargain, but how many broke-ass "career oriented" bands have $199 lying around to spend on a roundtable discussion on getting your music in a commercial? (Let me save you some money--hire a girl singer who sounds like Feist, and your music will be ready-made for commercials.) That's a level of pricing that screams "scam," and if you don't agree, check out the list of panelists, find the magic word "SonicBids," and get back to me. (As my esteemed labelmate Sean Kirkpatrick of the excellent Nervous Curtains tweeted yesterday, "I would like to pay a monthly fee to be able to pay another submission fee to possibly get a gig that we definitely won't get paid for." Speaking as a former SonicBids sucker customer, i can back this up.)

Still. Conflicted. I want Milwaukee to get the recognition it deserves, but like the selective radio play of Milwaukee acts at 88Nine Radio Milwaukee (where you will get significant local support, provided you play music palatable to easy-listening suburban white liberal "arts enthusiasts"), the local bands showcased by this event are, predictably, mostly commercially viable (ok, i'm not sure why Elusive Parallelograms got on the bill, but in fairness, neither does the band). Does this music conference really showcase the diversity of Milwaukee's music scene? I don't think so, and if you disagree, i have $50 that says you'll never see Northless or Holy Shit! get invited to one of these.

But like i said earlier, this is a festival for "career oriented" bands, a phrase which excludes probably 90% of Milwaukee's finest. Which is not to disparage the Milwaukee bands in this festival, as the musicians i know who are playing aren't exactly looking for fame and fortune doing what they do. So i wish the Brewtown bands well in their shows this weekend (attending the conference shows but don't know which are the Milwaukee bands? They're the ones without emo swoop haircuts).

And hey, if the Big Music Execs without the Wisconsin ties fall in love with our little city over the weekend, i hope they come back and dig a little deeper, maybe even visiting the aforementioned Radio Summer Camp next year. I'm not holding my breath, however, because unlike the Yellow Phone Music Conference, Radio Summer Camp is about the music--not the money behind the music.