This week’s edition of “Pump Up The Jam” features Lowell, Blanck Mass, White Lies, Redd Kross, The Side Eyes, and more!
Jack O’Hara Harris, whom you may be familiar with from spectacular noise rock outfit Bloody Knives, has another musical project in the works called Street Preacher. The band (which really consists of just Harris) has a new single out called “Heaven Beast” which is as loud and anarchic as what you’d expect from a Bloody Knives member. You can listen to the song (and its B-side “Brightest Day”) on Bandcamp.
Canadian alt-pop queen Lowell has released another track from her upcoming Part 1: PARIS YK EP (due August 26 from Arts & Crafts). “Blow Out The Bass” debuted on NPR’s All Things Considered this week and it’s a stunner.
Another new release comes from Blanck Mass (a.k.a. Benjamin John Power). If you’re not familiar with him, you might recall that he did one of the remixes on the first John Carpenter’s Lost Themes album a couple of years back. This new track, “D7-D5” is “intended as the second move in a game of chess initially instigated by Manuel Gottsching when he released (and named said release) ‘E2-E4,’ the recording of which many believe pioneered techno.”
The video to accompany the song is ultra creepy, reminding me a bit of the Cabaret Voltaire video for “I Want You” as well as the infamous Aphex Twin video for “Come To Daddy.”
There’s a new NGLY track out, too. “Strange Expression” is from the forthcoming double LP Cities of Illusion, out October 3 from L.I.E.S. NGLY (Sidney Reilly) who “treads the lines of Industrial/House/EBM/Techno and electro” is based in Argentina and after landing on the Brooklyn-based L.I.E.S. in 2014, created global interest when his track “Speechless Tape” was voted as Intergalactic FM’s #1 track of the year.
And still the new music keeps coming… the first single from the upcoming White Lies album Friends (out on October 7) now has a decidedly weird and NSFW video. Comments on the YouTube page indicate that fans are interpreting the video to mean that “we all make our own gods,” but you can decide for yourself.
Now we go back into the vaults for some reissues from electronica/industrial purveyors Executive Slacks, who started in Philadelphia at the dawn of the 1980s. Dark Entries reissued their four-song debut EP back in 2014 and Cleopatra Records released Complete Recordings 1982 – 1986 in 2015.
Now Dark Entries has prepped another release from the band, who have “excavated two cassettes that contained their earliest recorded material from 1980 and 1981.”
Seams Ruff is a 13-song compilation from these cassette collections plus a bonus flexi disc featuring a live performance on WXPN from 1980. The tracks were created with the use of heavily modified synthesizers and noisemakers, the broken innards of a grand piano, metal oil drums and a spray painted Harmony Rocket guitar.
Seams Ruff will be available on August 8. Preorder the album (and get a discount if you also order the Executive Slacks EP) from Dark Entries.
Last but certainly not least (and always #1 in my heart) is a new release from Redd Kross, in the form of a split 7” with The Side Eyes, a new band featuring Astrid McDonald, who is the daughter of Redd Kross’s Jeff McDonald and his wife, Charlotte Caffey of The Go-Go’s.
The release (from In The Red Records, out July 29) is called Songs That Chargo Taught Us and features covers of songs written by Charlotte Caffey. The Side Eyes cover “Don’t Talk To Me,” a tune from the days of Charlotte’s pre-Go-Go’s band The Eyes, while Redd Kross takes on The Go-Go’s “Screaming.”
Noisey talked to Astrid about the release and here’s what she had to say:
“My dad always asks my mom if she remembers seeing him, the 6’5″ green-haired teenager standing in the front row of [the Go-Go’s] early shows… Redd Kross decided it would be a great way to honor my mom’s songwriting and kickassness if they recorded a punk song of hers.”
It’s just the cutest thing ever. Totally punk rock, yes, but absolutely adorable at the same time.
In honor of this mighty musical juggernaut, this week’s #FlashbackFriday is Redd Kross’s “Annie’s Gone,” from their terrifically underrated 1989 release Third Eye.
