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:

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.

R.I.P.W.A.H.

Back at it, y'all, with some weird stream-of-consciousness nonsense.

On Wednesday the big Facebook linkfest was all about the news that Jack White has produced/collaborated on a single with Insane Clown Posse for his Third Man Records label. Weird as hell, but anyone who's done more than the cursory research that i have into what Jack White's been doing with the label (read: Everything I Know About Third Man Records I've Heard From The Wizard) knows that Mr. RaconteurWeatherStripe is essentially running his label as a crazy-ass doing-it-because-he-can vinyl nerd boutique (just check out the catalog and dig all the crazy two- and tri-color vinyl runs, as well as some of the other less-than-conventional choices: a Conan O'Brien 7-inch? Pairing the Black Belles with Stephen Colbert and using them to record Elvira's Movie Macabre theme song? Apparently one of the Dead Weather singles comes inside a 12-inch, and then the 7-inch detaches from the inside of it or something. I dunno, sounds like some crazy rock-n-roll warlock shit). So, Jack White working with Insane Clown Posse? Hey, sure.

My not-at-all-scientific take on the whole thing was that maybe this stunt will call enough attention to Third Man that my pals We Are Hex will sell a few more copies of the single they just released on the label, "Twist the Witch's Titty." I'm all for anything that will cast a light on pals of mine, not that it's all that likely. (How many music fans are there these days that pull the old Sub Pop allegiance trip and swear fealty to record labels as eagerly as they do to bands? Yeah, not many.)

Of course, that was before Chris from Police Teeth alerted me to a cryptic breakup notice on Hex's Facebook page, which...well, shit. Now i have to post a eulogy for this fantastic, urgent band.

So. We Are Hex.



My band's known their singer Jilly for ten years in October. We met her in Muncie, IN on our very first multi-day road trip out of Wisconsin, and ever since, we've been hooking up shows in the Dairy State for her bands, many of which she would prefer us to wipe from our brains. (I can say that because she told me that personally. "Dear god, forget any of those bands ever existed.") She started to hit her stride, though, with a band called Ari. Ari. that she formed with future Hex drummer Brandon. A swirling melange of Sonic Youth-y feedback walls over post-punk, gothy synth waves, Jilly swirled around the eye of the Ari. Ari. hurricane, stabbing the occasional black keys while wailing about god knows what, a blur of black hair and tattoos. They were loud, crazy, driving, and thrilling as hell, but as is the case with many a band that shines too brightly too quickly, they burned out in a matter of months.

Enter We Are Hex, Jilly and Brandon's next step in refining the Ari. Ari. cyclone into a more focused weapon of mass destruction. The synth-and-feedback carpet bombing approach was replaced with stabby guitar licks and precision drumming, a post-millennial Siouxie and the Banshees filtered through Touch & Go's back catalog, their makeup washed off with lighter fluid. Their sophomore release, Hail the Goer, will stand as their definitive mission statement--a deliberate tension-and-release exercise that, of course, should have been on every goth bar DJ's playlist for the past year. I'm pretty sure i've seen gamer nerds, metalheads and science fair enthusiasts unscrewing imaginary light bulbs while dancing to this record, but don't quote me on that.

Then again, "should have" will now be used quite a bit when discussing this band. I have no idea why they're calling it quits, but i know this--with a charismatic lead vocalist, tightly-wound, killer songs, and a record on Jake White's label, We Are Hex should have been on the verge of blowing the fuck up instead of imploding. But if there was ever a band that matched my band's ability to hatefuck Murphy's Law, it was We Are Hex. Every time we got together with these guys, the stories would flow about canceled shows, shady clubs ripping them off, and all sorts of random drama. Heck, very few of their Milwaukee shows were without some incident or another.

In Spring 2009 they played Frank's Power Plant with The New Loud and us during that period where the club's owner was getting noise complaints from some asshat neighbors. Soon, the owner was yelling at Hex and telling them they couldn't use their full stacks and would have to borrow gear or not play the show. The band was ready to say "fuck it" and bail before we calmed the owner down enough to remind her that amps have these things called "volume knobs" that can turn the loud boom sounds down if necessary. They, of course, went on to stomp everyone's teeth in that night.

November of last year we brought them to town at Stonefly with our labelmates Trophy Wives. In classic HiFi hometown fashion, no one came to the show save about 15 of our best friends, who can now rub it in to everyone else in Milwaukee that they saw one of the most exciting sets to be played in our city last year, and everyone else missed it, so screw y'all. On top of the low attendance, the "sound guy" took all the money from the door for his "fee," a fitting reward for the bang-up job he did setting up barely audible vocal mics and one kick drum mic.

So if We Are Hex finally ran into one obstacle too many, i suppose i can't blame them for packing it in, although part of me hopes that they looked at the news articles about Jack White working with ICP and thought, "wait, we're gonna be labelmates with Insane Clown Posse? Fuck this, we're done."

In any event, if i know Jilly just a little bit after ten years, i know she'll be back at it with something new and perhaps even more exciting than We Are Hex, and honestly, i'm a little scared of what that could entail.

In the meantime, let's have a wake. Go to the We Are Hex Bandcamp site and listen to their debut, Gloom Bloom, the aforementioned Hail the Goer, and a few other choice treats. Chances are you screwed up and missed seeing them live; make up for it by at least discovering them posthumously, since that's apparently all we've got left.