Much of my young career has been spent pondering the current state of critique and its effect on popular music. I’m starting to come to a rather crass conclusion – Our generation has no excuse for its tastes. In the past, large corporations held sway, dictating what the masses listened to like the woman at your office who brought the boombox. The fickle corporate boss lady picked the stations, picked the songs and adversely, picked our tastes. Rebellious and curious individuals had to resort to making their own magazines, dubbing their own tapes and crafting their own mail order communities. (more…)
Stream ALL of both LPs we’ve remastered for Liam the Younger on PrefixMag.com, or listen to After the Graveyard and Clear Skies Over Black River below.
Both vinyl full-lengths are available for pre-order in the UP Store right now and will ship on February 7th. Purchase both in the “special deals” section and save $4. (more…)
Check out Family Portrait’s video for Never Should’ve Been There, by Alice Goldsmith and Blair Waters. It’s a good time Roller Skating, cake and juice party. (more…)
Is there anything as ubiquitous and personal as nostalgia? It is a feeling we all readily acknowledge and are inescapably drawn to, often finding it in the same places, while cherishing it for our own reasons. Simply reading the word evokes a unique slew of images in all of us, from which we subconsciously define the sentiment. Yet culturally, at least from an American perspective, it is common to find that we describe the emotion using very similar phrases and images, as if they were drawn from a collective memory – a national dream in the most literal sense.
Liam Betsonʼs music lends itself to our collective memories – the true American dream, blasting images into the blackness of our minds like a spinning animation wheel making a horse gallop. (more…)
Wild Animal Kingdom – Monthly Mixtape Club – Year 3. “The Gift That Keeps on Giving”
Much to our delight, Dana Jewell has informed us that The WAKR Monthly Mix Tape will be perpetuating into the year 2012. After two years of top flight tapes collected by an array of characters from the UP & The WAKR-Olympia underground music scene – year three promises to be another 12 months of heart crafted tracklists. (more…)
I subscribe to a demographic of Jewish people who unabashedly love Christmas. We’re not entangled in the “Holy Birth v. All Mighty Dollar” debate that Christian folk grapple with.. We just get to enjoy a season of woodsy scents and merry melodies… (more…)
Last year, Liam released Revel Hidden Worlds and was decidedly loose with the MP3s. This is a custom we’ve always felt akin to. He also pressed a very limited run of painstakingly beautiful vinyl. We feel akin to that as well. (more…)
We asked Twerps to put together our latest Mixtape in celebration of the release of their self-titeled debut LP tomorrow, October 18th! You can pick up your copy now in the UP store.
Altered Zones graciously posted the mix this morning, quoting Rick Milovanovic of the Twerps:
It was impossible for us to make you an Australian pop compilation without including some songs from New Zealand too. (more…)