Releases "New Lexicon" Today on Jade Tree * Upcoming East Coast Dates w/ Strike Anywhere and Riverboat Gamblers!
"The most intelligent hardcore album of 2008. Paint it Black's most furious effort yet." - Alternative Press Magazine
"Not only is it the most thematically wide-ranging disc in the group's arsenal, but New Lexicon also finds Paint it Black going bigger and wider musically, with hip-hop producer Oktopus (of Dälek fame) morphing the group's brutal, Black Flag-style hardcore into something altogether darker and more furious." - Revolver Magazine
"A standing army of old-school values" - Decibel Magazine
"No bullshit hardcore with pangs of melody and plenty of spots to catch your breath, only to have it torn from your mouth and choked to oblivion. Being pissed off never felt so good." - Punknews.org
"The sound of the eye-opening amazement that drew so many of us into punk and hardcore in the first place." - Pastepunk.com
Overproduction has the reputation of detoothing our monsters.
Rather than straining to re-create “lo-fi” in a studio, New Lexicon pushes the soundboard to the limit, bringing waves of crashing layers to the speakers. With little debate, this is their finest hour - or, half-hour, anyway. In keeping with punk classics from the Circle Jerks and the Descendents, New Lexicon’s 15 songs clock in at a dizzying total of 30 minutes, 26 seconds.
Frontman Dan Yemin says he hasn’t been this excited about a recording of his own since Lifetime’s landmark Hello Bastards.
New Lexicon, the group’s third full-length, marks Paint It Black’s first recording with new drummer Jared Shavelson (Hope Conspiracy, None More Black). Guest vocals from Jeff Pezati (Naked Raygun) appear on album closer “Shell Game Redux.” Still, many of the best surprises occur behind the scenes.
Tracked at J. Robbins’ Magpie Cage studio in Baltimore, MD., the album’s raw recording quakes with the same pulsing aggression as Modern Life is War or Black Cross. One of Robbins’ most aggressive hardcore albums to date, New Lexicon brings the bass to the forefront, rumbling with a distorted grit unseen since the Bad Brains ROIR sessions. (No, seriously.)
“Most indie or underground artists are guitar nuts, treating the bass as an afterthought,” says Yemin. “Especially with heavy music, everyone is obsessed with a thick guitar sound to sound aggressive. I’ve been frustrated with that for years.”
The solution? Take the recording to someone who unequivocally understands the importance of low end, someone with a punk background now working in hip hop: Oktopus of the apocalyptic hip hop duo Dalek. Known for his dark, cinematic production (think the RZA soundtracking the Exorcist), Oktopus samples and stretches the existing sounds of feedback, bass booms and cymbal crashes into haunting ambient interludes and serpentine waves trailing behind the buzz saw riffs.
Such studio effects could easily have gotten out of hand. But this is no attempt at “industrial-core” or a turntable-mosh disaster. Instead, disparate influences like Minor Threat, My Bloody Valentine, Swans, Deadguy and Mogwai merge together as a cohesive whole. Rather than gimmick, the co-production approach to New Lexicon aims at clarifying a brooding tone already at the heart of Paint It Black’s sound.
Lineup:
Dan Yemin – Vocals
Josh Agran – Guitar
Andy Nelson – Bass
Jared Shavelson – Drums
"New Lexicon" Track Listing:
1. The Ledge
2. Four Deadly Venoms
3. We Will Not
4. Past Tense, Future Perfect
5. Missionary Position
6. White Kids Dying of Hunger
7. Gravity Wins
8. Dead Precedents
9. The Beekeeper
10. Check Yr Math
11. So Much for Honour Among Thieves
12. New Folk Song
13. Saccharine
14. Severance
15. Shell Game Redux
Paint it Black Live!
Mar 1 2008 1pm In-store Performance @ Generation's Records in NYC!
w/ Strike Anywhere and Riverboat Gamblers!
Mar 1 2008 Knitting Factory New York, New York
Mar 2 2008 Living Room Providence, Rhode Island
Mar 3 2008 Middle East Cambridge, Massachusetts
Mar 4 2008 Asbury Lanes Asbury Park, New Jersey
Mar 5 2008 First Unitarian Church Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Mar 6 2008 Black Cat Washington DC
Mar 7 2008 Peppermint Beach Club Virginia Beach, Virginia
@ SXSW!
March 14 2008 The Scoot Inn Solid PR / Sailor Jerry / Obey Your Brain Showcase
+2 secret shows tba!
For more information, visit:
www.paintitblack.org
www.myspace.com/paintitblack
www.jadetree.com
Announces New Album Hesperus, out Today on Hydra Head / Tortuga!
Hesperus, 5ive’s forthcoming full-length LP, prods and provokes the listener to ascend through a modulated mind muddle, in attempts to exhume the brimming melodic crest slumbering beneath a cyclic miasma of transformative sound. Ben Carr (Guitars) and Charlie Harrold (Drums) after seven years of relative anonymity, have graced us again with both their presence and a picture perfect record, which serves as a frame worthy summation of the band’s past impressions and conceptual progression.
Produced by Grammy nominee Andrew Schneider (Cave In, Daughters, Scissorfight), these seven tracks will send you silently swaying into a somnambulant state and then abandon you still stirring and stark naked in a roomful of uncomfortable silence.
5ive, longstanding purveyor of the recently popularized metallic twosome, has, with Hesperus, generated a centripetal force to be reckoned with.
Tracklisting for Hesperus
1. Gulls
2. Big Sea
3. Kettle Cove
4. Heel
5. Polar 78
6. News I
7. News II
For more information, visit:
www.myspace.com/thereal5ive
www.hydrahead.com
(Featuring Jon Chang of Discordance Axis and Takafumi Matsubara of Mortalized) Announce Debut Album Headbanger’s Karaoke Club Dangerous Fire out Today on Hydra Head!
Hayaino Daisuki’s approach to frantic grind is far more sugar high than blood thirsty. This isn’t to say that this 4-song EP is pop-chart ready and already up for hip-hop remixes, for there is plenty of metal up your ass from a band who’s name translates to simply, “I Love Speed”. They do indeed.
Here to provide you inhuman speed levels are Takafumi Matsubara (Mortalized) on the ax, Eric Schnee on the drums, and screaming all over the surprisingly catchy madness is none other than speed and all things Sci-Fi obsessive Jon Chang of Discordance Axis fame.
So if you have been keeping up with the upcoming releases Hydra Head are about to plant into your ears in ’08, Hayaino Daisuki’s “Headbanger’s Karaoke Club Dangerous Fire” is the second Jon Chang affiliated project to write a blog about along with the upcoming Gridlink release.
Hayaino Daisuki’s introductory release may be small, but it is in no shortage of what everyone has come to expect from a Jon Chang project, not to mention Fast, Fast, Fast, and Fast. So get out your Discordance Axis T-shirts and grow out your hair, because we ain’t got a speed limit.
Tracklisting for Headbanger’s Karaoke Club Dangerous Fire
1 Into the Throat of Berserk
2 Haiiro Ikotsu Gakidou
3 Horobit Monogatari
4 Aka
For more information, visit:
www.myspace.com/hayainodaisuki
www.hydrahead.com
Announce New Album "The Loyal" out Today on Eyeball Records * US Tourdates on The Eyeball Awareness Tour featuring Kiss Kiss, Baumer, and Pompeii!
“I fear being too specific and dread coming off as a showoff. Does that make sense?”
Meet Rasmus Kellerman. This is the guy behind Tiger Lou. It’s a band; for all intents and purposes, he’s the band. He writes the songs, plays and produces them. For now. Kellerman will tell you not to look too close at “just an indie band, like many other indie bands, with a big heart.” But not listening closely to Tiger Lou would be to sell it short.
The Loyal, the band’s second album, is on the surface, just music. A bunch of songs written by some guy from Oxelösund, Sweden. Only these tunes breathe, they’re dynamic, alive. Straight from the heart of some guy now living in Stockholm. And he wouldn’t say the band had heart if, to some extent, he wanted you to know the music was sincere.
Eeeewwww. Sounds mushy. Fake. How many times have you heard the word sincere, or genuine, in a bio? That’s the go-to adjective for the self-contained acts: singer-songwriters, one-man bands. These words, this bio-speak, is as trite and cheap as “I love you” at last call.
So here’s the music. Thirteen atmospheric, incorporeal (but alive) tracks that, if you put them under a microscope, would reveal a molecular pattern (and movement) identical to Kellerman’s. Maybe that’s why he’d like you to look plainly upon his work: he’s already seen himself at such a high magnification, a potentially painful zoom into who and what he is, and where he came from.
Oxelösund, we know is Kellerman’s birthplace. He arrived in the small harbor town on his mother’s birthday, 1980. Life there was “easy peasy Japanese-y. I skateboarded most of the time, not caring for anything besides that.”
In 1990 the Kellermans relocated to Nyköping, “a very normal town” of 50,000 residents where Rasmus attended “a normal school.” During this time, Rasmus’ older brother and sister hipped him to Slowdive, Depeche Mode, The Cure, Kraftwerk, My Bloody Valentine, Swervedriver, Skinny Puppy. A year later, Rasmus and a friend formed The Womb, releasing a demo tape called Ovulation. “For being the novelty work of one 11- and one 12-year-old, it’s ain’t all that bad,” Kellerman recalls.
In 1994, Kellerman discovered the harsher punk and hardcore sounds of Swedish bands Refused, Randy and Shreadhead. He calls this the biggest musical epiphany of his life. That summer, he stage-dove for the first time, found fanzines and millions of new bands, then started a fanzine of his own, SpinSign. He started booking shows, formed and broke-up numerous bands.
Of his prior bands, he says EM is the only one that matters. Later called Music By EM, the band asked Kellerman to be its bassist in 1996. Before the first practice, the vocalist is fired and Kellerman is asked to sing. It worked out; by 1997 Music by EM had a publishing deal with Universal Publishing. The band dropped out of high school, moved to a big house in Stockholm, and worked toward its first record deal (Sony, in 1999) and completed an album (to date unreleased).
Kellerman quit music. “I concentrated on love,” he says. “I moved to London to be with my present wife. And I was working shit jobs, bus boy, hair salon receptionist, juice-maker, etc.” During this seemingly idle time, a friend found a live acoustic recording Kellerman made shortly after the break-up. He suggested making a three-song seven-inch, to which Kellerman agreed. He chose the name Tiger Lou from a Jet Li film called Fong Sai Yuk. “The rest, as they say, is history.”
Over two years, Tiger Lou and Kellerman’s “main project,” Araki, flowed into each other. “Today, I don’t really differ them,” says Kellerman. The projects’ respective sounds, TL’s neo-folk, Araki’s atmospheric soundscapes, exist within the one band. The Loyal joins the personal, introspective element of one with the sonically expressive traits of the other, and incorporates the spunk of some of Kellerman’s punk influences, to create songs that are molecularly and musically unique.
“The Loyal” pulses insistently, muted acoustic strumming locked in with marching 4/4 drums beneath Kellerman’s subdued but burdened vocals. He questions the merits of sightless loyalty in what might be construed as the voice of young soldiers facing deployment. The song maintains this tense, hypnotic groove for much of its 5:35 running time, even through the comparatively bright chorus and, as with the sentiments expressed therein, does not resolve to anything but taut, catatonic resignation.
The New Order-esque “Patterns” asks us to interpret “the marks on me,” referring perhaps to a palm-reading, where Kellerman wants to know the details and also hopes to revise them. Henceforth, the story finds our hero desiring to know his “Function” in this mortal coil; pledging not to stop searching “Until I’m There.” Henceforth are more promises, some mention of his own blood, and the realization that whatever we’ve found, we’ve brought on ourselves, and what matters is what was there all along.
Again, probably too deep an analysis for one who has already done the introspective equivalent of staring into the sun. We haven’t even mentioned that Tiger Lou played 250 gigs throughout Sweden and Germany in the past three years. And they’ve sold around 50,000 records worldwide between two albums (Is My Head Still On? was released in ten countries in 2004), one EP (Trouble and Desire came out in ’03 and resulted in a month-long U.S. tour) and several singles and seven-inches. There’s also the Swedish Grammy nomination for Best Video, a Best New Act nod at the Manifest awards (an indie version of the Grammys). Or that The Loyal was produced and mixed by producer/mixer Peter Katis (Interpol, Denali, The Dylan Group, The National).
“Sure, Tiger Lou has done some stuff worth mentioning,” says Kellerman. “But let's just concentrate on what it is, and not what we want it to be.” Other than the indie/big heart thing, his list is simple: 1. Tiger Lou is a solo project, 2. Tiger Lou is a four-piece live band.
That’s mostly his brain talking. The band with heart says, “I just want to affect people. Hit them in the guts, but make them wanna dance at the same time. I wanna present Tiger Lou as a very personal thing. That's why I do all my own design work. That's why I try to respond to all the guestbook entries. To make people feel like I'm there, you know? It's not just some band, it's a real person behind it all, a person that is within reach.”
- words by Randy Harward
The Loyal Tracklisting:
01. Woland's First
02. The Loyal
03. Patterns
04. Functions
05. Until I'm There
06. Nixon
07. Ten Minutes To Take Off
08. Albino Apparel
09. Like My Very Own Blood
10. Pilots
11. Days Will Pass
12. Woland's Last
Tiger Lou Live on the Eyeball Awareness Tour
(w/ Kiss Kiss, Baumer, and Pompeii)!
March 4 NYC Crash Mansion
March 5 Asbury Park, NJ The Saint
March 6 Philadelphia, PA Circle of Hope
March 7 Myrtle Beach, SC Soundgarden
March 9 TBA North Carolina / South Carolina
March 10 Athens, GA Tasty World
March 11 Birmingham, AL The Nick
March 12 Little Rock, AR TBA
March 13 SXSW
March 14 SXSW
March 15 SXSW Eyeball Records Showcase
For more information, visit:
www.myspace.com/tigerlou
www.eyeballrecords.com
