Post by petrolino on Aug 28, 2019 4:24:54 GMT
Buffalo Tom
Buffalo Tom formed in 1986 in Boston, Massachusetts, consisting of backhand guitarist Bill Janovitz, bassist Chris Colbourn, and drummer Tom Maginnis. They helped inaugurate a new era for one of rock music's great city scenes, often joining hands with Boston's poetic pop radicals Blake Babies.
"Boston was a pivotal nerve center for Eastern seaboard punk and hardcore in the early 1980s. A tight-knit musical community of often politically charged bands on either side of hard drinking or straight edge, commonly bonded by intensity and violence, Boston hardcore breathed through the city’s various college radio stations, Newbury Comics and the whole fanzine culture.
The scene also enjoyed the luxury of dedicated local record labels, in particular Taang!, that paved way for the alternative music boom to come. The hardcore scene waned within a few years, but the cultural impact it made is far more everlasting, and Boston had by then established a well-oiled infrastructure for fostering underground music. Taang! also gradually evolved beyond its hardcore roots, releasing hometown alternative pioneers like The Lemonheads, Moving Targets and Swirlies.
Another crucial point of interest in the growth of New England’s alternative sound was Boston recording studio Fort Apache, which housed seminal bands like Pixies, Throwing Muses, Belly, Dinosaur Jr., Bullet LaVolta, Sebadoh, Blake Babies and literal thousands more over the years. This further fortified Boston as one of the major ports of emerging indie rock of the 1980s and 1990s, continuously being fed each year by new hordes of students and local kids, including Bill Janovitz.
In 1982, at the age of 16, Bill and his family relocated from Long Island to Massachusetts. The move brought the aspiring musician straight into a honey bucket of independent creativity and vibrant teen spirit. Janovitz soon discovered usual suspects like Black Flag and the Replacements, who roamed across America and played every town and every club at the time. Attending the post-punk breeding ground of UMass Amherst, he met up with soon to be bandmates Chris Colbourn (bass) and drummer Tom Maginnis, and also befriended J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., who later became an important patron of the band soon to be baptized Buffalo Tom.
Their eponymous 1989 debut album, Buffalo Tom, recorded by Mascis at Fort Apache, introduced us to a band peppered with teen angst and a knack for loud, distorted walls of guitars that couldn’t quite hide an obvious flair for pop hooks underneath it all. Propelled by the lead single “Sunflower Suit,” a regular at MTV’s 120 Minutes back in the days, the debut established the band as immediate indie darlings."
The scene also enjoyed the luxury of dedicated local record labels, in particular Taang!, that paved way for the alternative music boom to come. The hardcore scene waned within a few years, but the cultural impact it made is far more everlasting, and Boston had by then established a well-oiled infrastructure for fostering underground music. Taang! also gradually evolved beyond its hardcore roots, releasing hometown alternative pioneers like The Lemonheads, Moving Targets and Swirlies.
Another crucial point of interest in the growth of New England’s alternative sound was Boston recording studio Fort Apache, which housed seminal bands like Pixies, Throwing Muses, Belly, Dinosaur Jr., Bullet LaVolta, Sebadoh, Blake Babies and literal thousands more over the years. This further fortified Boston as one of the major ports of emerging indie rock of the 1980s and 1990s, continuously being fed each year by new hordes of students and local kids, including Bill Janovitz.
In 1982, at the age of 16, Bill and his family relocated from Long Island to Massachusetts. The move brought the aspiring musician straight into a honey bucket of independent creativity and vibrant teen spirit. Janovitz soon discovered usual suspects like Black Flag and the Replacements, who roamed across America and played every town and every club at the time. Attending the post-punk breeding ground of UMass Amherst, he met up with soon to be bandmates Chris Colbourn (bass) and drummer Tom Maginnis, and also befriended J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., who later became an important patron of the band soon to be baptized Buffalo Tom.
Their eponymous 1989 debut album, Buffalo Tom, recorded by Mascis at Fort Apache, introduced us to a band peppered with teen angst and a knack for loud, distorted walls of guitars that couldn’t quite hide an obvious flair for pop hooks underneath it all. Propelled by the lead single “Sunflower Suit,” a regular at MTV’s 120 Minutes back in the days, the debut established the band as immediate indie darlings."
- Bjorn Hammershaug, Unsung Heroes
'Late At Night'
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Red House Painters
Red House Painters were formed in San Francisco, California in 1988. Aside from being recognised as a major influence on the "Queen of Sadcore" Cat Power, they also became known as "Kings of Slowcore", alongside California legends American Music Club. The band mysteriously dissolved in 2001 and frontman Mark Kozelek reappeared with Sun Kil Moon.
"While I was writing Facing The Other Way: The Story Of 4AD, there were only two occasions where I comfortably put myself into the story – and one was only in the role of chauffeur (driving Kristin Hersh from Throwing Muses’ London hotel to the band’s soundcheck). The other was certainly more impactful, for both the label and Red House Painters.
It was five years later, 1991, and another interview in another non-descript hotel room in undoubtedly another transient part of London. Mark Eitzel of American Music Club, San Francisco’s purveyors of intense melodic graft, savage brooding and gallows humour, was a wonderfully engaging conversationalist, and as we were finishing up, he muttered something like, “wellll, if you like us, you might like this,” and fished into his bag.
I still have the C100 Memorex cassette that he gave me. There are seven tracks listed on Side One, and nine on Side Two. There are two San Francisco phone numbers (one “day”, one “eve”) and the name “Mark”. The name on the spine is Red House Painters. It turned out that these were acquaintances of Eiztel’s back home, a band that was struggling to make inroads, and had given him a handful of demos to give to receptive listeners.
I played the tape; and then again, and who knows how many times? I’d never heard a demo like it – not one lasting 90 minutes and 16 tracks, with more than one breaking the ten-minute mark, with such an overwhelming air of unresolved and unrelenting sadness to both the music and the male vocal, even more than American Music Club. I was reminded too of Nick Drake: less the musical timbre than the effort to dissect those universally identifiable, mortifying feelings without a safety net of metaphorical wordplay, and aspects of Big Star’s Sister Lovers/Third ballads taken to an anthemic level. It’s still the best demo I’ve ever heard, so extreme and committed, just beautiful. It demanded to be shared, so I copied it twice and sent one apiece to Geoff Travis at Rough Trade and Ivo Watts-Russell at 4AD.
“I’d never had a 90-minute demo to listen to,” Ivo recalls, 20 years on. “I’d drive from my flat in Clapham to [the 4AD office in] Alma Road, and I’d stick the tape on and hear the first track, ‘24’, and then I’d arrive at the office. When I started again, I’d wind it back to the start and hear ‘24’ again. So it went on. I now think ‘24’ would have been enough for me to pick up the phone straight away, it’s such a knee-buckling song. But it took me weeks to hear the whole tape.”
Ivo, who would make Red House Painters 4AD’s first Californian signing in 1992, telephoned Kozelek, who was in the bath when he took the call: “It was very surreal and caught me off guard,” he recalled when I contacted him for the purposes of the 4AD book. “I knew nothing about 4AD, or the music business, although I recognised the name Cocteau Twins when he mentioned them. But I knew Ivo was for real. And, within the first ten seconds of the conversation, that we would release a record on 4AD.”
Born in Massillon, Ohio, several state boundaries from the trend-chasing cosmopolitan centres on the USA’s East and West Coasts, Kozelek was a classic rock fan in his teens, into Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Heart and Peter Frampton, Black Sabbath and Bowie. “Massillon was a football town, and the energy from the Massillon Tigers’ high-school football team was always in the air,” he said. “I didn’t like football and so I went searching for something else, and I found a guitar.”
By the age of ten, Kozelek had also found marijuana and alcohol, and done a stint in rehab at 14. He had channelled his sober energies into songwriting, though what gelled had little of classic rock’s pervading formula. “I’ve liked music that’s fast and hard, and I went through a stage of playing punk,” he said when we first talked in late 1992. “But I’ve otherwise enjoyed songs more than riffs, lyrical songs with acoustic guitars, which sound much better when it’s slow – anything else feels really forced. I’m a pretty slow-paced person. I don't go to clubs, I don't roll down the windows and shout at people. I keep to myself in lots of ways, and my songs come from spending time in my apartment and in bed.”
It was five years later, 1991, and another interview in another non-descript hotel room in undoubtedly another transient part of London. Mark Eitzel of American Music Club, San Francisco’s purveyors of intense melodic graft, savage brooding and gallows humour, was a wonderfully engaging conversationalist, and as we were finishing up, he muttered something like, “wellll, if you like us, you might like this,” and fished into his bag.
I still have the C100 Memorex cassette that he gave me. There are seven tracks listed on Side One, and nine on Side Two. There are two San Francisco phone numbers (one “day”, one “eve”) and the name “Mark”. The name on the spine is Red House Painters. It turned out that these were acquaintances of Eiztel’s back home, a band that was struggling to make inroads, and had given him a handful of demos to give to receptive listeners.
I played the tape; and then again, and who knows how many times? I’d never heard a demo like it – not one lasting 90 minutes and 16 tracks, with more than one breaking the ten-minute mark, with such an overwhelming air of unresolved and unrelenting sadness to both the music and the male vocal, even more than American Music Club. I was reminded too of Nick Drake: less the musical timbre than the effort to dissect those universally identifiable, mortifying feelings without a safety net of metaphorical wordplay, and aspects of Big Star’s Sister Lovers/Third ballads taken to an anthemic level. It’s still the best demo I’ve ever heard, so extreme and committed, just beautiful. It demanded to be shared, so I copied it twice and sent one apiece to Geoff Travis at Rough Trade and Ivo Watts-Russell at 4AD.
“I’d never had a 90-minute demo to listen to,” Ivo recalls, 20 years on. “I’d drive from my flat in Clapham to [the 4AD office in] Alma Road, and I’d stick the tape on and hear the first track, ‘24’, and then I’d arrive at the office. When I started again, I’d wind it back to the start and hear ‘24’ again. So it went on. I now think ‘24’ would have been enough for me to pick up the phone straight away, it’s such a knee-buckling song. But it took me weeks to hear the whole tape.”
Ivo, who would make Red House Painters 4AD’s first Californian signing in 1992, telephoned Kozelek, who was in the bath when he took the call: “It was very surreal and caught me off guard,” he recalled when I contacted him for the purposes of the 4AD book. “I knew nothing about 4AD, or the music business, although I recognised the name Cocteau Twins when he mentioned them. But I knew Ivo was for real. And, within the first ten seconds of the conversation, that we would release a record on 4AD.”
Born in Massillon, Ohio, several state boundaries from the trend-chasing cosmopolitan centres on the USA’s East and West Coasts, Kozelek was a classic rock fan in his teens, into Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Heart and Peter Frampton, Black Sabbath and Bowie. “Massillon was a football town, and the energy from the Massillon Tigers’ high-school football team was always in the air,” he said. “I didn’t like football and so I went searching for something else, and I found a guitar.”
By the age of ten, Kozelek had also found marijuana and alcohol, and done a stint in rehab at 14. He had channelled his sober energies into songwriting, though what gelled had little of classic rock’s pervading formula. “I’ve liked music that’s fast and hard, and I went through a stage of playing punk,” he said when we first talked in late 1992. “But I’ve otherwise enjoyed songs more than riffs, lyrical songs with acoustic guitars, which sound much better when it’s slow – anything else feels really forced. I’m a pretty slow-paced person. I don't go to clubs, I don't roll down the windows and shout at people. I keep to myself in lots of ways, and my songs come from spending time in my apartment and in bed.”
- Martin Aston, 'Beds, Rollercoasters, Bridges And Beaches : A Red House Painters Retrospective'
'Grace Cathedral Park' \|/ 'Down Through'
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Pavement
Pavement formed in Stockton, California in 1989. The group mainly consisted of Stephen Malkmus (vocals and guitar), Scott Kannberg (guitar and vocals), Mark Ibold (bass), Steve West (drums) and Bob Nastanovich (percussion and vocals). The band developed an unwritten manifesto and attacked the underground. In 1999, the members moved on to other projects having spent a decade together constructing melodic noise (they were initially inspired by early heavy labelmates Royal Trux to leave it all out there and then some).
"Pavement made some of the finest, most influential slacker noise of the '90s, racking up an almost obscene amount of critical love along the way. Now, a decade after their final show, Stephen Malkmus and his old bandmates are once again about to rock."
- Chuck Klosterman, GQ
'Embassy Row'
