POW! emerges from the tech-waste of the shiny/shitty new San Francisco – deep 80’s synth bass percolating under the circuit-swamp-fried-egg guitar…the drums a teenage tiger’s heartbeat and vocals delivered like a dead-pan face-slap from a kid half your age. After a tour with Oh Sees, Byron Blum and Melissa, the two band members, have released three records on Castle Face, the latest « Crack An Egg » had several great reviews. And the new album « Shift » out on Castle Face May 10th !
« Just when we thought we knew what to expect from POW! they surprise us with a vigorous and rabid LPs worth of moody cybernetic punk that’s frankly their best yet. Their 4th is oil-dipped in a rainbowed slick of dread, yet the songs are buoyed by tight tunes that seem to have a lot of fun among the ruins of the future, dare I say with an eye to a less gloomy horizon? Melissa Blue’s sharp elbowed synths jostle with Byron Blum’s zap gun guitar in an ominous fog of oscillations, and yet somehow my toe is a-tapping. POW! got darker and more catchy at the same time, for which some credit is due to the excellent drumming of Cameron Allen and the fantastically future savvy production by Byron Blum & Tomas Dolas. Lots of sticky punk heart resin-layered in a futuristic-scanning bionic bop. For fans of Solid Space, Tubeway Army, The Units, The Screamers, and glittery black nail polish. It’s out on Castle Face May 10th »
Up a dead end street just before you twist and turn your way up to majestic Mount Washington is a house of stairs and weeds and strays of all kinds. A large iguana remains perma-frozen in time on a brick wall, guarding a small iron door. Sparse and small, a place where time doesn’t matter and solitude is king.
Charles Francis Moothart II went mostly unseen for a month or two. A prisoner of time in a dimension of sorrow and confusion, Moothart was hitting a personal crossroads and nursing a brief and impermanent break up with his long time girlfriend/band mate by retreating, putting the pain from his head into his tape machine, stepping away from struggling for the answers in order to sit with them and pull from them. Greasing the pain to form relief. The only medicine was to challenge himself and sand down enough to break through the fear of failure. To see it all through to the end and find out what stood as truth.
Now, after the fog has lifted, upon returning, Moothart is sharing the souvenir of his travels to another dimension, a postcard from a dream in which time stood still, the girl got away and the wolf-man-glass-in-hand risked it all for the sea change.
“Still Life” is unlike any other record Moothart has recorded; the songs came quickly, were recorded as experiments and he went through the process alone. Previously Moothart’s bands have been collaborations from all sides, from his high school hardcore punk quartet Culture Kids with CFM band mate Michael Anderson to the toughest pop band in Southern California Moonhearts, to the fleeting garage rock band the Perverts with long time friend and collaborator Ty Segall. The monolithic super group Fuzz was the product of Charles’ master riffs marrying Segall’s songwriting prowess and unparalleled rhythmic style. A perfect meeting of minds of two musicians in their prime. Two friends with egos so intertwined in the midst of a five year touring spell in Segall’s band as his secret weapon, heard but not seen, hidden in tangles, the two became a tangled force themselves.
Sometimes you realize you must shed what’s most comfortable to find truth in yourself again and so Moothart has denied the comforts of being the sideman to give listeners a slice of himself. Moothart has recruited high school friend Michael Anderson to play guitar, lone-wolf-jack-of all-trades Tyler Frome on bass and Audacity’s powerhouse drummer Thomas Alvarez to round out the rhythm section of this outsider band.
Jarring, streetwise, darkly shimmering rock & roll— Beechwood is a New York City band born out of necessity. Formed by a pair of close neighborhood friends, Beechwood initially developed a buzz in the small clubs and DIY spaces of New York City, honing their unpredictable, frenzied live performances (twice leading to mid-show arrests) while building a dedicated following.
Beechwood dropped their debut album Trash Glamour (Lolipop! Records) in 2015, but it was with 2018’s Songs from the Land of Nod and Inside The Flesh Hotel (Alive Naturalsound Records) that they began attracting a significant audience outside of the NYC area. Centered around the close knit songwriting and guitar-weaving partnership of Gordon Lawrence and Sid Simons, also featuring Russ Yusuf on drums and recent addition Jensen Gore on bass -Beechwood’s 4th studio album entitled Sleep Without Dreaming is set for release in January 2022 on Alive Naturalsound Records.
Balancing the sonic edge of mid-seventies proto-punk bands such as NY Dolls and Television with the pop sensibility of classic rock groups such as the Kinks, Stones and even the Beatles, NYC rock band Beechwood is authentically rock and roll. Centered around the close-knit songwriting and guitar-weaving partnership of Gordon Lawrence and Sid Simons, also featuring Russel Yusuf on drums and recent addition Jensen Gore on bass – Beechwood’s 4th studio album “Sleep Without Dreaming” is packed with stellar songs and displays a sonically powerful production.
Whenever I listen to Beechwood, I am reminded of the depth they achieve and how fearlessly they let it all hang out there. “Sleep Without Dreaming” is really, really good. They’ve got something unique and cool happening here. – HENRY ROLLINS
Taking inspiration from the weirdest aspects of ’60s psychedelia and Baroque pop, the records made by White Fence in the 2010s sounded like they had been recorded on the cheapest tape available and then left out in the sun for a week to melt. When the band started out, Tim Presley, who had once been a member of the Fall as well as indie rockers Darker My Love, was the only bandmember, and he recorded their songs in his bedroom. As the decade progressed, however, he brought in other people and ventured into recording studios, which resulted in slightly more polished yet still enjoyably weird albums like 2014’s For the Recently Found Innocent. In the last half of the decade, Presley put the band on hold to record solo and with Cate Le Bon as DRiNKS before returning in 2018 with Joy, a collaboration with longtime cohort Ty Segall.
Presley began recording his warped pop-psych songs in his bedroom in 2008 and 2009, while still a member of Darker My Love. The first White Fence album, a self-titled effort released by Woodsist Records in 2010, was made up of these recordings. For the project’s next release, 2011’s White Fence Is Growing Faith, the sound and approach didn’t change much. Also in 2011, White Fence released a live cassette (Live in L.A.) on Teenage Teardrops and a single (« Harness/The Pool ») for Afterlife Records. Presley must have spent all his free time recording as well, seeing how the first half of 2012 was overrun with White Fence records. Family Perfume, Vol. 1 was released in April, Family Perfume, Vol. 2 was released in May (both by Woodsist), and a collaboration with fellow West Coast garage rocker Ty Segall, Hair, came out in April on Drag City.
The next album was meant to be a collection of older tracks that had yet to see the light of day, but Presley changed his mind partway through and 2013’s Cyclops Reap became a batch of his most recently recorded tracks. White Fence weren’t just a one-man bedroom project, though; they were able to translate their sound to stage with a live-wire energy. Their first live record, Live in San Francisco — featuring Jack Adams and Sean Presley on guitar, Jared Everett on bass, and Nick Murray on drums — proved this to those unlucky enough to have never seen them live. It was released by Castle Face in late 2013. The next White Fence recording found Presley leaving the bedroom and heading out to Ty Segall’s garage, where the two friends recorded For the Recently Found Innocent in 2014 for new label Drag City. Segall and Murray handled the drums, Mikal Cronin played piano on one song, and Presley did everything else (as usual).
Around that time, Presley and Cate Le Bon had become friends, as both had recently moved to Los Angeles and were admirers of the other’s work. She joined the White Fence live band as guitarist and the duo bonded, quickly deciding to work on a new project together. Under the name DRINKS, they recorded an experimental album of off-kilter psych-rock called Hermits on Holiday. It was released in August of 2015 on Birth Records. He also branched off in an even more experimental direction, releasing an album of electronic music and weirdness under the name w-x in November of 2015 for Castle Face. Presley continued working with Le Bon, and she produced and arranged the first album he made under his own name, 2016’s The WiNK. He reteamed with Le Bon for another DRINKS album, Hippo Lite, in 2018 before bringing back the White Fence name on a record made with Ty Segall. More experimental and weirder than their previous collaboration Hair, Joy was issued by Drag City in mid-2018. Presley quickly followed up with a proper White Fence album in January of 2019. Slightly rebranded as Tim Presley’s White Fence, the more sophisticated and sometimes ambient I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk was the first album from the project in four years.
The two people in Warm Drag do specific things. Vashti Windish sings, the way Siouxsie sang power, the way Nico sang allure, the way Patti sang sex. Paul Quattrone makes the noise withtwo Akai MPC 1000 samplers. Beats that pummel or seduce, usually simultaneously, synths that soar like Morricone or pump like DAF, and gloriously twangy guitars that clang and echo like Duane Eddy spiraling down a k-hole.
A chance reunion in Los Angeles led Quattrone (of Oh Sees and !!!) and Windish to attempt the outlandish ambition of marrying her love for the genre-defying genius of Blondie’s ‘Parallel Lines’ to Quattrone’s love of Bomb Squad’s production styles. « Warm Drag gives me the chance to blend genres up into a musical milkshake that remains uniform despite all of its parts. I can scream, dance, cry, rage and seduce, all in a single show » Windish explains.
« I basically wanna make Bomb Squad versions of rock n roll songs, » Quattrone says. « It sounds weird but I can hear a common ground where girl groups, dub, harsh noise, minimal synth, repetitious industrial, voodoo percussion, power electronics, black leather jacket rock n roll and DJ Screw-inspired slowing down/pitching down of samples all meet. »
Lyrically, Warm Drag dive head-first into right now, careening from love to the end times, broken hearts to rotting bodies, devastation, lies and emotional self-defense. They have something to say, but they’d never be so gauche as to over-explain.
They’ve been winning over notoriously-inert Los Angeles audiences just over a year now. An early show caught the eye of Ian Svenonius. « Their cut-up collage of electronic stomp-music embodied everything people were searching for that summer, » he remembers. « There were just two of them but the sound was magnificent. Vashti was a revelation and Paul looked tough and cool and preoccupied in just the right way. »
Warm Drag are the soundtrack to the best night of your life. It probably hasn’t happened yet, or maybe it happened in Berlin, in 1980. You won’t remember much, but you still have this record and a few bruises to jolt your memory. Sangfroid has never been sexier.
