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:
Showing posts with label latest flame records. Show all posts
Showing posts with label latest flame records. Show all posts
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
"I have zero familiarity with any of those"
If you're a friend of mine you know the scoop with the delay behind IfIHadAHiFi's Nada Surf EP, an issue that's finally going to be resolved in the next week when "Somebody Take the Damn Money" gets remixed to replace Harley Race's voice with that of our new buddy, world-traveling indie wrestler "M-Dogg" Matt Cross. Latest Flame has pushed the "official" release date of the disc back to January (along with a 2012 schedule that is shaping up to be balls-awesome), but here's the thing with that--the manufacturing issue with the Harley Race sample came up so late in the game that CD versions of the EP were already out to the press before this happened. As a result, it's possible to find the record floating around out there (my friend Brian, in fact, just informed me that you can listen to it on Spotify, so hey, how about that! I guess we'll find out how much this cuts into what were sure to be bananas record sales).
This also means that reviews of the disc are showing up, which, unfortunately, are now regrettably timed way ahead of schedule (which, i suppose we could be waiting to post the reviews on our pages until release time, but whatever). So far, the reviews have generally stayed true to the form of our last albums' worth of reviews: in short, people who "get it" like it (like Playground Misnomer or PopMatters), people who have no frame of reference for what we're doing don't.
I know how pretentious that sounds--"ooh, if someone doesn't like our record, they just don't get it, is all." Here's the thing--i really don't think our brand of pop-flavored noise rock is that difficult to comprehend. I mean, when compared to some of the more abrasive, esoteric, or just plain weird stuff in my collection, IfIHadAHiFi sounds, to my objective ears, pretty simplistic. Bands like Ho-Ag, Melt-Banana, and HEALTH are doing variations of what we've been trying to do for years, and all of them are doing it way better. So in a way, i'm often surprised when people outside our insular bubble of weirdo spazz-rock can't find anything in our songs to latch onto.
Which leads me to this review of Nada Surf over on Rockfreaks.net. It's overwhelmingly negative, which is fine--not the first time that's happened. But portions of the review, a cursory check into the dude's general music tastes, and the fact that he ended up reviewing us twice (because he thought he was going to be reviewing a Nada Surf record, ha) made me realize a few things about us, or more accurately, remind me about some things i already knew and had apparently forgotten through some sort of slowly narrowing perspective.
Hilariously, the dude provides a great pull-quote when taken out of context:
It also provided a peek into what the dude primarily listens to, and sure enough, when checking out his profile page on the site, his "favorite bands" list includes low-rent mallpunk fare like Fall Out Boy and Jimmy Eat World. As i skimmed through the rest of the writer profiles, i started to realize that it was fairly unlikely that anyone on the site, except for maybe the editor-in-chief (who posted in the comments to both of our reviews on the site saying that he liked the music just fine, even going so far as to essentially tell the writer that, yes, he probably just doesn't "get it"), was going to find any common ground with us at all. It led to an interesting string of comments on the review in which a number of our influences were thrown at the reviewer and he confessed to zero percent knowledge of 100% of the bands listed. The thread was spurred by Chris from Police Teeth and myself, which, yes, i know that commenting on your own band's reviews is pretty sad pool, but i was honestly drawn to post more through the exasperated disbelief that this kid had never even heard Archers of Loaf or The Jesus Lizard, much less Brainiac or Poster Children, and the hope that maybe he'd check out those bands and find something he liked.
When co-workers ask me what kind of band i play in, i generally tell them "noisy punk rock," and leave it at that, knowing and being ok with the fact that those words probably mean a wildly different sound in their heads than what's encoded on our CDs. What this whole exchange with Rockfreaks.net reminded me of (and depressed me to remember) is that even in the subculture of independent bands and internet music publications, the stuff that we fell in love with in our teens and 20s and are emulating now is, in many corners of the internet, becoming completely forgotten. And while it's freeing to know that, since large slices of the population won't ever like what we're doing, we can just not worry about it and do what we will to our heart's content (which also means, of course, that we're never making any money from this stuff), it's kind of a shame to know that even so-called music reviewers could go their entire lives without hearing a Brainiac song. I know that real hipsters are supposed to treat their favorite bands like secrets to protect, hoard, and lament when they become popular, but that's just not me.
This also means that reviews of the disc are showing up, which, unfortunately, are now regrettably timed way ahead of schedule (which, i suppose we could be waiting to post the reviews on our pages until release time, but whatever). So far, the reviews have generally stayed true to the form of our last albums' worth of reviews: in short, people who "get it" like it (like Playground Misnomer or PopMatters), people who have no frame of reference for what we're doing don't.
I know how pretentious that sounds--"ooh, if someone doesn't like our record, they just don't get it, is all." Here's the thing--i really don't think our brand of pop-flavored noise rock is that difficult to comprehend. I mean, when compared to some of the more abrasive, esoteric, or just plain weird stuff in my collection, IfIHadAHiFi sounds, to my objective ears, pretty simplistic. Bands like Ho-Ag, Melt-Banana, and HEALTH are doing variations of what we've been trying to do for years, and all of them are doing it way better. So in a way, i'm often surprised when people outside our insular bubble of weirdo spazz-rock can't find anything in our songs to latch onto.
Which leads me to this review of Nada Surf over on Rockfreaks.net. It's overwhelmingly negative, which is fine--not the first time that's happened. But portions of the review, a cursory check into the dude's general music tastes, and the fact that he ended up reviewing us twice (because he thought he was going to be reviewing a Nada Surf record, ha) made me realize a few things about us, or more accurately, remind me about some things i already knew and had apparently forgotten through some sort of slowly narrowing perspective.
Hilariously, the dude provides a great pull-quote when taken out of context:
Forget how the word 'punk' is mostly used these days. You'll find no buzzy yet warm guitar melodies here, nor any raw yet sentimental vocals or nostalgic songs about hometowns, best friends, ex-girlfriends etc. What you'll get is a truck load of noisy feedback, distortion and discord, crashing drums and tuneless yelling, delivered with no hint of relent or compromise whatsoever.
It also provided a peek into what the dude primarily listens to, and sure enough, when checking out his profile page on the site, his "favorite bands" list includes low-rent mallpunk fare like Fall Out Boy and Jimmy Eat World. As i skimmed through the rest of the writer profiles, i started to realize that it was fairly unlikely that anyone on the site, except for maybe the editor-in-chief (who posted in the comments to both of our reviews on the site saying that he liked the music just fine, even going so far as to essentially tell the writer that, yes, he probably just doesn't "get it"), was going to find any common ground with us at all. It led to an interesting string of comments on the review in which a number of our influences were thrown at the reviewer and he confessed to zero percent knowledge of 100% of the bands listed. The thread was spurred by Chris from Police Teeth and myself, which, yes, i know that commenting on your own band's reviews is pretty sad pool, but i was honestly drawn to post more through the exasperated disbelief that this kid had never even heard Archers of Loaf or The Jesus Lizard, much less Brainiac or Poster Children, and the hope that maybe he'd check out those bands and find something he liked.
When co-workers ask me what kind of band i play in, i generally tell them "noisy punk rock," and leave it at that, knowing and being ok with the fact that those words probably mean a wildly different sound in their heads than what's encoded on our CDs. What this whole exchange with Rockfreaks.net reminded me of (and depressed me to remember) is that even in the subculture of independent bands and internet music publications, the stuff that we fell in love with in our teens and 20s and are emulating now is, in many corners of the internet, becoming completely forgotten. And while it's freeing to know that, since large slices of the population won't ever like what we're doing, we can just not worry about it and do what we will to our heart's content (which also means, of course, that we're never making any money from this stuff), it's kind of a shame to know that even so-called music reviewers could go their entire lives without hearing a Brainiac song. I know that real hipsters are supposed to treat their favorite bands like secrets to protect, hoard, and lament when they become popular, but that's just not me.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
"The Black Flag touring model is long, long dead"
Tuesday night i unpacked my CDs and began to arrange them in the apartment i now share with Liz (as opposed to my original idea of stashing them in the basement since most of them are on my computer anyway). I'm glad i didn't hide them away, because the process of going through my CDs always stirs years of half-remembered memories of bands that otherwise would be long forgotten. There's a disc on the top row called Juvenile Anthems by a band called Anger; i remember them as a run-of-the-mill punk band that i found entertaining at the time but i might not be as into today, 14 years later. Thanks to their show at the Concert Cafe in Green Bay, i've got the Black Halos' The Violent Years, which i'm positive i only listened to once. Digging around in my car i located a CD i picked up at the Borg Ward by a rad weirdo-punk band called Beings; did they open for Torche? I can't remember, but i remember liking them and hating that my aging disc drive refused to rip the songs onto my Mac Mini. Red Planet's Let's Degenerate? Another more power-pop reminder of my Concert Cafe years.
It's a good thing i have these CDs; otherwise, there's a very good chance that i'd have forgotten about every last one of these bands, good and bad. It reminded me of something i wrote on our tour blog, something that i thought about a lot during our road trip:
I count twenty-one CD copies of our new EP remaining out of 50 we started tour with. That's twenty-nine copies out there along the East Coast. Assuming they don't get dumped at a CDMax in a few months, that's hopefully twenty-nine people who will, at the very least, have that same "oh YEAH!" moment i just had while eying my Anger CD for the first time in years. As i said elsewhere in that paragraph, this tour was a pretty inefficient way to encourage memorization of our band name, but for us, the biggest reason to play shows is to visit our friends and play music for them.
Unfortunately, that's not the most fair attitude to have when we have an awesome dude at Latest Flame Records mortgaging his future to promote bands he loves. If we want to move product (if we don't, it sort of makes us assholes, really), conventional wisdom would normally dictate that we have to tour more often than the middling two weeks per year we generally embark on. However, it's 2011, and certain truths have taken hold in our post-Napster age: people are buying less and less physical music, and the number of touring bands competing for that ever-shrinking fan dollar is higher than ever. Also dwindling rapidly is the number of people who value music, period, as evidenced by the basement show we played in Bloomington, Indiana that earned us a cool $13 in donations from about three of the twenty-some kids in attendance. "Hey, man, cool show! Your band is really good!" "Hey, thanks! Did you donate anything for the show at all?" "Aw, dude, i have like no money. *drinks BYO beer #5* So when ya coming back to Bloomington?"
It's obvious that young people don't put a price on music the same way that those of us who grew up with vinyl, cassettes and CDs did, and hell, many of them don't seem to value live performance over the beer they're drinking that night (though i doubt that's a recent development). Yes, money isn't the main reason that anyone should play in a band, but without it, producing recorded music--even the digital kind--becomes less and less appealing of an idea. Look, we can all talk until we're blue in the face about how we make music for ourselves, and how none of us are looking to do this for a living, and that may even be true, but let's be honest--validation is pretty damn sweet too.
So, assuming that there are still people who care about physical music products, and people who still care about seeing new or more underground live bands, what's the best way to reach through the sea of apathetic bodies and connect with those more "active" (for lack of a less douchey, less marketing-sounding term) listeners? I have some thoughts on this, but would love to read some in the comments too:
1) Quality over Quantity. Being able to tour three months out of the year would be awesome, but it's also unrealistic for dudes in their 30s with day jobs, and a lot of those shows would be of the Bloomington basement show sort anyway. But there are ways to tour smarter instead of tour harder. Coordinating with the label to see where the record's getting played; more aggressive regional touring (we could probably stand to hit Minneapolis more than once every two years, honestly); and working those bigger shows wherever possible. That one Archers show was probably more effective than a week of touring as far as getting the name out and about.
2) Teamwork, online and in the meat world. Videos. Twitterz. Podcasts. Facesbooks. Blogs. ENTERTAINING CONTENT. Yeah, establishing a solid base of followers on the internet is a long commitment, but at least you can do it from your living room. During a conversation with James from Police Teeth, he said he was pretty sure PT has sold more records online than via shows. "The Black Flag touring model is long, long dead," he said, and i think he's right.
So how do we coordinate that stuff? Like i said, it's got to be entertaining, and then shared like crazy amongst like-minded folk. The Latest Flame bands have been walking around saying "less of a label, more of a street gang" ever since NAP JUSTICE; maybe we should start acting like an online street gang? Heck, i wear the shirts of other Latest Flame bands at nearly every show i attend these days, and i wore Waxeater's shirt on stage at the Archers show. I dunno how much love that gets the other guys, but there's a mentality involved that puts me in the frame of mind to hype my pals every chance i can get. I was wearing the Waxeater shirt when we arrived in Philly on tour, too; when some of the other bands showed up, they reacted. "Oh hey! Waxeater! All right!" Familiarity compounds on itself and breeds more familiarity.
Any other thoughts? I'd love to hear 'em.
It's a good thing i have these CDs; otherwise, there's a very good chance that i'd have forgotten about every last one of these bands, good and bad. It reminded me of something i wrote on our tour blog, something that i thought about a lot during our road trip:
As i stood around at the Caledonia Lounge on Tuesday night watching everyone drink, chat, and completely ignore our merch table (save the bartender and Chris Dragon's friend Sarah, who accounted for our first CDs sold in four days), i thought about the hundreds--thousands?--of touring bands i've seen over the years from the Concert Cafe in Green Bay to the Cactus Club in Milwaukee, and i'm sure that many of the ones i've forgotten were damn fine. Do any of the attendees at the Longbranch in Knoxville even remember the name "IfIHadAHiFi?" Or are they more likely to say "oh, man, that band...I Wish I Had A HiFi? They were great," their memories of the bands they saw on a random Monday night in August 2011 already fading into a jumbled mash of beer and feedback? As in love with our self-constructed image of the band too crazy to ignore as i am, i realistically get the feeling that by tomorrow it'll be "those bands with the crazy drummer" and "yeah, that night our pals played with some touring bands" by September, if not Friday.
I count twenty-one CD copies of our new EP remaining out of 50 we started tour with. That's twenty-nine copies out there along the East Coast. Assuming they don't get dumped at a CDMax in a few months, that's hopefully twenty-nine people who will, at the very least, have that same "oh YEAH!" moment i just had while eying my Anger CD for the first time in years. As i said elsewhere in that paragraph, this tour was a pretty inefficient way to encourage memorization of our band name, but for us, the biggest reason to play shows is to visit our friends and play music for them.
Unfortunately, that's not the most fair attitude to have when we have an awesome dude at Latest Flame Records mortgaging his future to promote bands he loves. If we want to move product (if we don't, it sort of makes us assholes, really), conventional wisdom would normally dictate that we have to tour more often than the middling two weeks per year we generally embark on. However, it's 2011, and certain truths have taken hold in our post-Napster age: people are buying less and less physical music, and the number of touring bands competing for that ever-shrinking fan dollar is higher than ever. Also dwindling rapidly is the number of people who value music, period, as evidenced by the basement show we played in Bloomington, Indiana that earned us a cool $13 in donations from about three of the twenty-some kids in attendance. "Hey, man, cool show! Your band is really good!" "Hey, thanks! Did you donate anything for the show at all?" "Aw, dude, i have like no money. *drinks BYO beer #5* So when ya coming back to Bloomington?"
It's obvious that young people don't put a price on music the same way that those of us who grew up with vinyl, cassettes and CDs did, and hell, many of them don't seem to value live performance over the beer they're drinking that night (though i doubt that's a recent development). Yes, money isn't the main reason that anyone should play in a band, but without it, producing recorded music--even the digital kind--becomes less and less appealing of an idea. Look, we can all talk until we're blue in the face about how we make music for ourselves, and how none of us are looking to do this for a living, and that may even be true, but let's be honest--validation is pretty damn sweet too.
So, assuming that there are still people who care about physical music products, and people who still care about seeing new or more underground live bands, what's the best way to reach through the sea of apathetic bodies and connect with those more "active" (for lack of a less douchey, less marketing-sounding term) listeners? I have some thoughts on this, but would love to read some in the comments too:
1) Quality over Quantity. Being able to tour three months out of the year would be awesome, but it's also unrealistic for dudes in their 30s with day jobs, and a lot of those shows would be of the Bloomington basement show sort anyway. But there are ways to tour smarter instead of tour harder. Coordinating with the label to see where the record's getting played; more aggressive regional touring (we could probably stand to hit Minneapolis more than once every two years, honestly); and working those bigger shows wherever possible. That one Archers show was probably more effective than a week of touring as far as getting the name out and about.
2) Teamwork, online and in the meat world. Videos. Twitterz. Podcasts. Facesbooks. Blogs. ENTERTAINING CONTENT. Yeah, establishing a solid base of followers on the internet is a long commitment, but at least you can do it from your living room. During a conversation with James from Police Teeth, he said he was pretty sure PT has sold more records online than via shows. "The Black Flag touring model is long, long dead," he said, and i think he's right.
So how do we coordinate that stuff? Like i said, it's got to be entertaining, and then shared like crazy amongst like-minded folk. The Latest Flame bands have been walking around saying "less of a label, more of a street gang" ever since NAP JUSTICE; maybe we should start acting like an online street gang? Heck, i wear the shirts of other Latest Flame bands at nearly every show i attend these days, and i wore Waxeater's shirt on stage at the Archers show. I dunno how much love that gets the other guys, but there's a mentality involved that puts me in the frame of mind to hype my pals every chance i can get. I was wearing the Waxeater shirt when we arrived in Philly on tour, too; when some of the other bands showed up, they reacted. "Oh hey! Waxeater! All right!" Familiarity compounds on itself and breeds more familiarity.
Any other thoughts? I'd love to hear 'em.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Nap Justice! The Story of NAP JUSTICE
Once upon a time, my goals for playing music were fairly ambitious, and not in any way matched by the amount of work necessary to meet that goal: 1) get as many people as possible to hear my band; 2) get signed to large indie label (dream destination: Touch & Go); 3) maybe get to a point where i could make a living playing in my band. Real life and a desire to not live in abject squalor during the 4-5 months i wouldn't be on the road per year doing the necessary touring in order to achieve those goals soon forced a harsh, severe re-evaluation (not to mention the fact that our music is in no way marketable. At all). Today, when it comes to playing the rocks and rolls musics, i have modest goals: 1) write and record the best music possible; 2) get it heard by as many people as possible who would enjoy it; 3) make as many like-minded friends around the country as possible. That new #3 is a goal that i always had but didn't realize until, well, i had achieved it. Now, i understand that the most rewarding part of playing in an independent rock band is realizing that it's a fantastic excuse to meet and visit an incredible network of like-minded fools across the nation, if not the world.
Two bands that qualify as "unstoppably crucial pals" are also our labelmates on Latest Flame Records: Seattle, WA's Police Teeth and Kentuckiana's Waxeater. Along with our other LFR pals Trophy Wives, we've formed the unofficial nucleus of what we consider "less of a label and more of a street gang." That street gang's name, other than "Latest Flame Records," is NAP JUSTICE, and NAP JUSTICE laid down some amplified law on Saturday, while Police Teeth and Waxeater were in town.
After a wildly entertaining Friday night show at the Cactus Club (which included local noisemakers Absolutely, a band you should probably get on board with right now), we prepared for a basement show at the HiFi home base, the Church of Murray (a makeup for a scheduled Madison show with Zebras that was canceled due to Madison cops being lame, which is hard to say in the wake of their overall awesome behavior during the WiUnion protests), by spending the day consuming heroic levels of alcohol and meat, occasionally taking a break to walk down to the street fest on North Ave. to see Scarring Party and Call Me Lightning. By Liz's estimation, the party consumed:
which sounds about right. Later in the afternoon, a couple Waxeaters and Police Teethers crashed into mid-afternoon nap mode to recharge for the actual show, only to be eventually stirred from their slumber by the Church of Murray's across-the-street neighbors--an Axe* of dudebros who had decided to let a hippie jam cover band set up on their porch. As we tried to enjoy the outdoors, The 311 Matthews Traveler laid down the most "mellow" of jams, harshing ours with atrocious renditions of the usual hippie nonsense - Dave, Sublime, and countless blasphemous renditions of CCR tunes.
Slowly but surely, our patience wore thin. Each rendition of a watered-down lite rocker was punctuated with a "YOU SUCK!" or a "STOP PLAYING!" from one of us (usually Yale), or a "BONNAROO!" volleyed at a wasted hippie staggering away from the dudeporch. When Bronaked Ladies dared to sully "Folsom Prison Blues" with their inoffensively offensive hemp-rock, it was decided that a retaliatory strike was needed--nay, mandatory. (EDIT: Yale has sagely reminded me that it was actually a mashup of "Folsom Prison Blues" and the "Beer Barrel Polka." Information presented without comment.)
The Wizard fetched a practice amp and Police Teeth drummer Richy (derisively referred to by his bassist Chris as "the best guitarist in our band") plugged in just in time to join Hurl Jam on a run through "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty, easily outshredding the acoustic guitarist across the street. When the Petty waned, Richy launched immediately into the opening riff to "Paranoid," inspiring a full Church of Murray balcony singalong. NAP JUSTICE was on, and into their third tune, a gut-busting rip through the opening strains of Slayer's "Raining Blood." By this time there wasn't a dry eye or upright torso in the house, as everyone was doubled over in pain from abdominal-toning laughter.
Once Richy was done, PT guitarist James took over for some AC/DC and some other classic punk i can't remember. Waxeater's guitarist (and one of our most essential band pals) Rob Montage began to assist on snare drum as Richy dangled a grill lid for use as a cymbal/cowbell. Our friend George, who had made a trip away from the house, returned with the following report: "you can't hear anything but your guitar anywhere except directly in front of their house. It's pretty impressive."
Eventually, the band across the street cracked and responded with their take on Cee-Lo's "Fuck You," which James simply played along to. After that, they were done, and NAP JUSTICE had prevailed. Latest Flame Records: less of a label, more of a street gang.
PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE!
Chris and i lose our collective shit while Richy lays it down (not pictured: [B.]O.A.R.)
James and Rob take over
Grill Cymbal!
Moral: Do not mess with Latest Flame bands. Because we're fucking assholes.
After the NAP JUSTICE set, the proper basement show was on, which was totally fine, save that part where HiFi only played two songs because the Wizard stormed off the stage for some reason. Eh, whatever, at least we got that out of the way before tour.
*yes, an "Axe" is the proper collective noun for dudebros. Just ask Neil Hamburger.
Two bands that qualify as "unstoppably crucial pals" are also our labelmates on Latest Flame Records: Seattle, WA's Police Teeth and Kentuckiana's Waxeater. Along with our other LFR pals Trophy Wives, we've formed the unofficial nucleus of what we consider "less of a label and more of a street gang." That street gang's name, other than "Latest Flame Records," is NAP JUSTICE, and NAP JUSTICE laid down some amplified law on Saturday, while Police Teeth and Waxeater were in town.
After a wildly entertaining Friday night show at the Cactus Club (which included local noisemakers Absolutely, a band you should probably get on board with right now), we prepared for a basement show at the HiFi home base, the Church of Murray (a makeup for a scheduled Madison show with Zebras that was canceled due to Madison cops being lame, which is hard to say in the wake of their overall awesome behavior during the WiUnion protests), by spending the day consuming heroic levels of alcohol and meat, occasionally taking a break to walk down to the street fest on North Ave. to see Scarring Party and Call Me Lightning. By Liz's estimation, the party consumed:
1 bottle of Everclear (mixed into "doom punch")
2 bottles of cheap bourbon
2 30 packs of PBR
1 30 pack of High Life
Assorted other sixers of higher quality beer
Many, many meats
which sounds about right. Later in the afternoon, a couple Waxeaters and Police Teethers crashed into mid-afternoon nap mode to recharge for the actual show, only to be eventually stirred from their slumber by the Church of Murray's across-the-street neighbors--an Axe* of dudebros who had decided to let a hippie jam cover band set up on their porch. As we tried to enjoy the outdoors, The 311 Matthews Traveler laid down the most "mellow" of jams, harshing ours with atrocious renditions of the usual hippie nonsense - Dave, Sublime, and countless blasphemous renditions of CCR tunes.
Slowly but surely, our patience wore thin. Each rendition of a watered-down lite rocker was punctuated with a "YOU SUCK!" or a "STOP PLAYING!" from one of us (usually Yale), or a "BONNAROO!" volleyed at a wasted hippie staggering away from the dudeporch. When Bronaked Ladies dared to sully "Folsom Prison Blues" with their inoffensively offensive hemp-rock, it was decided that a retaliatory strike was needed--nay, mandatory. (EDIT: Yale has sagely reminded me that it was actually a mashup of "Folsom Prison Blues" and the "Beer Barrel Polka." Information presented without comment.)
The Wizard fetched a practice amp and Police Teeth drummer Richy (derisively referred to by his bassist Chris as "the best guitarist in our band") plugged in just in time to join Hurl Jam on a run through "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty, easily outshredding the acoustic guitarist across the street. When the Petty waned, Richy launched immediately into the opening riff to "Paranoid," inspiring a full Church of Murray balcony singalong. NAP JUSTICE was on, and into their third tune, a gut-busting rip through the opening strains of Slayer's "Raining Blood." By this time there wasn't a dry eye or upright torso in the house, as everyone was doubled over in pain from abdominal-toning laughter.
Once Richy was done, PT guitarist James took over for some AC/DC and some other classic punk i can't remember. Waxeater's guitarist (and one of our most essential band pals) Rob Montage began to assist on snare drum as Richy dangled a grill lid for use as a cymbal/cowbell. Our friend George, who had made a trip away from the house, returned with the following report: "you can't hear anything but your guitar anywhere except directly in front of their house. It's pretty impressive."
Eventually, the band across the street cracked and responded with their take on Cee-Lo's "Fuck You," which James simply played along to. After that, they were done, and NAP JUSTICE had prevailed. Latest Flame Records: less of a label, more of a street gang.
PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE!
Chris and i lose our collective shit while Richy lays it down (not pictured: [B.]O.A.R.)
James and Rob take over
Grill Cymbal!
Moral: Do not mess with Latest Flame bands. Because we're fucking assholes.
After the NAP JUSTICE set, the proper basement show was on, which was totally fine, save that part where HiFi only played two songs because the Wizard stormed off the stage for some reason. Eh, whatever, at least we got that out of the way before tour.
*yes, an "Axe" is the proper collective noun for dudebros. Just ask Neil Hamburger.
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