Hugs Via Satellite: PRF Virtual Thundersnow 2021

Banner by Christopher Williams

I've been trying to get a handle on my thoughts and feelings about how PRF Virtual Thundersnow went down and went over with our PRF family. By any metric, it was a hit: we put together a great mish-mash of musical performances and videos made by our friends, with lots of random nonsense sprinkled into the mix (Japanese rabbit cartoons? Local Escanaba news features about Dobber's Pasties? Sure, let's go nuts), and everything was received warmly, with heart emojis and friendly laughter. On Saturday the Twitch channel for Thundersnow registered almost 600 individual viewers (even assuming on the low end that everyone at some point streamed from multiple sources, that still exceeds the 150-to-200-person average of your standard in-person Thundersnow). New friends were made as several bands and artists made their PRF debuts. It was a good time.

But also, it wasn't Thundersnow. As the next morning reared its head and Dixie and i sloughed off our blankets in anticipation of yet another cookie-cutter pandemic work week, the reminders of that were clear. No Monday morning brunch trip to the Swedish Pantry. No stop at Dobber's to fill up a cooler with pasties to take home to Milwaukee. No three-and-a-half-hour road trip back home. Just the grey promise of cubicle walls. We really should have taken a day to decompress. 

Don't get me wrong -- the weekend was lovely, and it was great to see everyone's faces, even if they were in a weekend-long Zoom meeting or on the Twitch feed. But it also served as a stark reminder that it's been almost a year since the last time i hugged someone that wasn't my wife. 

On The Book-Burners' outstanding Christmas record, The Ghosts of Christmas Past

I work in customer service, so believe me when I say that for some of us, the Christmas season is a war of attrition. It's long hours, stress, and human beings who've forgotten to acknowledge humanity in others. Lots of “where's my stuff?” and “you ruined our holiday” and the like. But it's also camaraderie, cooperation, and the bonds forged in the pressure cooker of the Christmastime call center between co-workers and those customers willing to let themselves be helped, to work together to make this season the ideal everyone hopes for as the calendar is turned past Black Friday.

But mostly, the attrition thing.

As I write this on Christmas Eve, my newly-minted wife is chopping onions & garlic for rolling meatballs to slow-cook for the friends we'll watch Home Alone with tomorrow while noshing on dips and cookies and laughter and relaxation. She loves Christmas and does me a great service in reminding me that the day is separate from the season, and that it's worth all the trial to get to the food, the revelry, and hell, even the music. Not that I've ever been big on Christmas songs, especially with how vapid they've gotten in recent years. “Christmas Shoes?” What the hell, man.

But that's why The Book-Burners, a collective of friends surrounding our Great Lakes, convene every year to produce a new collection of original Christmas music that shies away from all that cloying faux-sentiment and gets to the real goods. Curated by Burners Bradley R. Weissenberger (late of rock band .22) and Isaac Turner (also of Kalamazoo's Minutes), The Ghosts of Christmas Past was released today as a free Bandcamp download, in true egalitarian, share-and-share-alike Book-Burners fashion. They're very much about the people, you see, and it comes through on Christmas Past, as Brad and Ike have recruited comrades from Minutes, Small Awesome, The Family Ghost, and the rutabega to join them (and regular Book-Burners Jon Terrones & Eliza Rohr) in a triumphantly ambitious collaborative effort. Files have been shared, tracks have been swapped, and the end result is 14 tunes (“but Bandcamp says 13!” Ghosts, y'all) of haunting, meditative, and joyous reflection on a holiday that is equal parts celebration, contemplation, and consternation—cheesy movies, slow-cooked meatballs, hot-tempered customers.

Songs like “The Book of Love” and “Brothers and Sisters” take stock in relationships lost while looking forward to the next year's possibilities, while “Kindness” is a collective cheer for a forever friend that went through life's pressure cooker and came out shining like a diamond on the other side. This one's a standout, by the way—just about everyone who plays on it sings, and the chorus is as close to church as you'll get on this collection. (That being said, the rutabega's Josh Hensley contributes three instrumental versions of traditional Christian seasonals that somehow manage to revitalize them while playing 'em relatively straight. Think you've heard enough versions of “Away in a Manger?” Think again.) Some of the tracks borrow from pre-existing material (“Book of Love” features lyrics from “American Pie” while the fuzzed-out “The Departure” re-appropriates from Kafka), driving home the universality of the subject matter while expanding the Christmas sourcebook with new, re-contextualized traditionals.

There's ambient noise all over these tracks, and I don't mean that in an incompetent lo-fi way, even though there's a distinct “home recording” vibe to the whole collection (“The Book Of Love” is an iPhone demo with vocals layered on top, after all). No, what I mean is that when you put on a pair of headphones and let the ghostly slow burn of “Brothers and Sisters” drape over you like a sheet, you can feel the room it was recorded in. You don't hear it so much as feel it, and it's organic and welcoming and warm, and—seriously, can we talk about this song for a minute? There aren't enough synonyms for “haunting” and “beautiful” to fully convey the exquisite aching of this track, so let me just say it's haunting and fucking gorgeous. If one of these songs deserves inclusion in the Great American Christmas Song Pantheon, it is this one—the tape loops and backing vocals from Faiz Razi push this over the edge into would-be-classic territory.

Like I said before, it's been a rough Christmas season, this December Twenty-One-Four. It's positively healing to hear a band of Midwestern snow-bound scruffs put together a collection that captures the sting of the December air while wrapping you in a blanket by the fire. It's Christmas Eve and I can hang up the phone, put away the grumps, and hang out with my lady while The Ghosts of Christmas Past dance in our heads. As gifts go, this one arrived just in time. Thanks, friends.

Raise Our Fists Up: The 2014 PRFBBQ

My friend Thom came to his first PRFBBQ last weekend. He's heard a few of his friends--mostly members of my two bands--raving about the Chicago getaway that happens once a year during a weekend in late June several times over the years, but i don't think he ever seriously considered attending until this year, when his Seattle band Seminars played. His bandmate James played three of the festivals with his currently slumbering band, Police Teeth, and so Thom (who met James through us after he moved there from Milwaukee--this is important) got dragged along back to the Midwest for this annual collection of Internet nerds that also happens to be the most exhilarating, wall-to-wall excellent DIY festival you'll ever hear about.

Martian Dance Bands of the Week (all-Boston edition): Pile and Ho-Ag

You know where i hear most of the new bands that excite the hell out of me these days? It's not the usual media outlets like Pitchfork, AV Club, what have you, because let's face it--what the big boys choose to cover just isn't in my wheelhouse at all most of the time. Sure, occasionally Pitchfork will happen to give a stamp of approval to viscerally thrilling, noisy music like HEALTH or Ponytail, but each of those bands found their way to my ears in a different way (HEALTH live, Ponytail from a friend's recommendation, then live). And yeah, AV Club's Loud column is doing some good, but the focus on metal and straight-up punk results in a lot of skimming.

Nope--my online source for all things baller awesome is the Electrical Audio Forum, home of the PRF BBQ music fests and thread after thread of killer recommendations (and no, you derisive naysayers, it's not just a bunch of bands that sound like mid-90s Touch & Go Records or Shellac soundalikes). A few days ago i finally got around to checking out a thread about Boston heavy-folksters Pile, and they have been kicking my ass up and down my apartment ever since.



There's not a lot of biographical info on their Bandcamp site or on their home page, but here's what i do know: they are from Boston, and they play loud, meaty rock and roll that sounds like the Melvins playing hard-hitting 70s folk-rock jams. Their current full-length, Magic Isn't Real, is a trove of bluegrass licks run through the most Sabbath of fuzz pedals. "Levee" and "Two Snakes" are big time highlights, while "Octopus" manages to pound out some serious grunge touchtones in a way that sounds completely fresh, more Mudhoney than Pearl Jam, but definitely its own thing. 2009's Jerk Routine, while not as indebted to the stoner gods of yore, has a heaviness all its own, while keeping the dark, thick, country-rock groove. It calls to mind a long-defunct Western Massachusetts band called EZT, actually, but that's probably way to obscure to work as any sort of a functioning comparison.



Pile just came through Chicago on a two-night stand, and while i wasn't able to catch them, crucial dude John Yingling of Gonzo Chicago captured them on film and uploaded a taste of their crazy, badlam inducing set at Casa Donde:

Meanwhile, i was massively stoked on Wednesday to learn that some old Boston pals of mine, Ho-Ag, had reconvened to unleash a new two-song single into the ether: "Seal the Room​/​Kuzka Mom."



While Pile strip-mine the burly forests of the Pacific Northwest for their inspiration, Ho-Ag's always looked toward the industrial desolation of Ohio for their Devo proto-punk influences. Kindred spirits with my band's weirdo brand of noise-punk? Absolutely, although while we embrace walls of noise and pop hooks, Ho-Ag's gone deeper into Area 51, jerking through alien hallways with sharp corners and dead ends with nothing more than a theremin's whine and a Moog's asphyxiated gurgle to guide them. Their previous full-lengths, 2006's The Word from Pluto and 2008's Doctor Cowboy were my favorite albums of their respective years, and would have likely made my all-decade list had i crafted one. "Seal the Room" and "Kuzka Mom" are more of what makes them great--solid, boilerplate entries into their spazzy, sci-fi Plan 9 catalog. Not a lot new happening on either track, but still better than your band (and mine). Careening drums, synthetic bridges, and faux-unnerving horror-film "woah-ooohs"? Check, check, and thank god, check.



Ho-Ag's been baffling the straights about as long as we have (the first release on their Bandcamp dates back to 2002, a year before we played with them for the first time), and have about as much success and exposure to show for it as we do. Crank this nonsense and tell your friends, and we'll see if we can lure them into another long-overdue US tour.