New Stuff from Quiet Slang, Japanese Breakfast, Big Ups

James Alex will be releasing a Quiet Slang LP.

Trying to Swim through the Flood

The South By Southwest music festival starts next week; and, when I signed up, I checked the little box that said I'd be willing to have showcasing artists contact me with information. Hoo boy. Let's just say it's been a lot. I'm pretty much a one-man show here with very poor organizational skills and the flood of incoming information has been sort of paralyzing. A good problem to have, I guess.

Anyway.

I made an effort over the last couple of days to try and make sense of what's coming in, and I'll share some of the SXSW- and non-SXSW-related stuff I find most interesting in a series of round-up posts.

Quiet Slang, "Dirty Cigarettes"

Quiet Slang is the solo, acoustic project of Beach Slang frontman James Alex. In October of last year, Alex released we were babies & we were dirtbags, a four-song, Quiet Slang EP featuring reworked versions of a pair of Beach Slang tracks ("Future Mixtape for the Art Kids," "Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas") along with covers of The Replacements' "Androgynous" and Big Star's "Thirteen."

Today, Alex announced that the first Quiet Slang LP, Everything Matters But No One Is Listening, is due from Polyvinyl on May 18th. To coincide with the announcement, Quiet Slang gives us the video for "Dirty Cigarettes." This version replaces the wall of guitars found on Cheap Thrills on a Dead End Street with piano and strings. The video features Mynabirds' Laura Burhenn and Heather McIntosh of the Elephant 6 collective.

James Alex is bringing his Quiet Slang to Austin for a couple of sets at SXSW next week, and [Loud] Beach Slang will be opening for Dashboard Confessional on a tour that brings them to The Stone Pony on April 2nd.



Japanese Breakfast, "Boyish"

Japanese Breakfast's Soft Sounds from Another Planet, with its combination of shoegaze, dreampop, and general spaciness, was one of our favorite albums of 2017. Japanese Breakfast is the solo project of Michelle Zauner, but Zauner has collaborated with Adam Kolodny on several videos. Zauner and Kolodny worked together once again on the video for "Boyish," and the clip shows that Japanese Breakfast is maturing visually as well as musically.

The song has kind of a sad, 60s vibe; and its themes of insecurity and unrequited love are captured perfectly by the setting of a school dance.



One of my great regrets has to be that I still haven't managed to catch Japanese Breakfast live. A spring / summer tour makes its way to TCNJ on 3/23, Warsaw in Brooklyn (SOLD OUT) on 5/31, Philly's Union Transfer on 6/3, and Panorama Fest in NYC on 7/28. Maybe I'll check that box after all.

Soft Sounds from Another Planet is out now on Dead Oceans.

Big Ups, "PPP"

I stumbled upon a set from Big Ups at the end of a long day at Northside Festival a couple of years ago. It was a stifling hot evening at Silent Barn, and I was spent. The band's energy, though, was contagious; and I left that show pumped and a fan.

Joe Galarraga (vocals), Brendan Finn (drums), Amar Lal (guitar), and Carlos Salguero Jr. (bass) have been at it for eight years. The post-hardcore four-piece have produced two essential albums in Eighteen Hours of Static and Before A Million Universes; and, yesterday, they announced that their third LP, Two Parts Together, would be out on May 18th via Exploding In Sound.

"PPP" is the first single from that record. The song is thrashing and confrontational. It uses the image of looking into a broken crystal ball as a metaphor for the way people can create their own, biased versions of the truth: "see what you wanna see, you wanna see, you wanna see."

Northside Festival 2014, Night 1: Piers, Dog Bite, Chandos, Herzog, lost boy ?, Vomitface, Big Ups

Big Ups at Silent Barn

Cameo Gallery / Silent Barn

After several days of unsolicited advice from my Brooklyn born and raised father about how to avoid death and dismemberment in the wilds of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick, I got in the minivan and headed up to Brooklyn for Night 1 of this year's Northside Festival. Getting in from Jersey and finding street parking was uneventful. I went and grabbed my badge and then headed over to Cameo Gallery on 6th Street for the early Terrorbird Media / Carpark Records / Kanine Records Showcase. My plan was to park myself at Cameo Gallery until after Herzog's set and then head over to the Deli Magazine show at Silent Barn for Big Ups and whatever other bands I could catch there. I didn't want to get too ambitious on the first night.

I like what Kanine are doing as a label. Eternal Summers, Bleeding Rainbow, Fear of Men, Beach Day. There's lots of reverb and lots of post-punk sounding pop. In between the early sets last night, Kanine's label head was spinning tunes from the likes of The Smiths and The Jesus and Mary Chain. I knew we were on a similar wavelength.

The front of Cameo Gallery is a nice little bar. The performance space is in the back, down a narrow hallway and through a door. It has a little bit of an extra-legal feel to it (Though, it is without a doubt totally on the up and up.), but it's open with a tall stage. It's dark, though, except for some sea anemone-looking fiber optic lights that hang from the ceiling.

Brooklyn's Piers started things off and played just the kind of pop you'd expect at the Kanine show. They were a little more rocking than they sound on the 7" they recorded under another name, but that could be because they were down a keyboard player and playing as a power trio.

Carpark Records -- home to bands like Speedy Ortiz and Cloud Nothings -- also had a hand in curating the show. One of the bands on their roster, Atlanta's Dog Bite, were next. I enjoyed their set as well. Somewhat more downbeat than Piers, but still plenty of reverb. A Strat and a Jaguar. My thing.

Food truck taco break.

Things got a little punkier for Chandos from Allston, Massachusetts. It was buttoned up and very polite between songs punkier, but I liked it.

Herzog took the stage right on time at 8:30 and played a set heavy on songs from this year's Boys. Dual guitarists / vocalists Nick Tolar and Dave McHenry did a great job reproducing the record's big sound of huge guitar hooks and multi-tracked vocals. As the final jam on "You Are Not The Villain" ended, I started making plans to head over to Silent Barn. Before leaving, I did manage to grab a few minutes with Nick Tolar and, hopefully, put a bug in his ear about keeping Asbury Park in mind for any upcoming tour plans.

Attending a festival in a minivan proved advantageous as Silent Barn is a good 2 miles from Cameo Gallery. I rolled over to Bushwick and got to the venue a few songs into the set by lost boy ?. Silent Barn, like a lot of the DIY-type venues in Brooklyn, is an art space as well as a music venue. It's got large murals on the walls and a garden outside. Talk about your "extra-legal feel." There was a guy selling beers out of a fridge, and there was free water with a sign next to the cups: "Save your cup. Save the planet." I drank my water and stuffed the paper cup in my back pocket.

Oh, and it was about a million degrees in Silent Barn.

lost boy ? play some enjoyably heavy guitar pop and appeared to have lots of friends in the audience. I feel like maybe Butter The Children, who I really wanted to see, were a late scratch from this event; but I may have just missed them. At any rate, Jersey City's Vomitface were next. They experienced a few technical difficulties and equipment malfunctions, but I liked their set of 90s-infused, quiet-loud-quiet rock.

The crowd was, surprisingly, pretty stoic for the set. It was weird. I could tell they liked it, but nobody was really moving. Maybe it was the heat. Frontman Jared Micah remarked on it a couple of times. I realized then that, while I don't do the mosh, circle pit thing; I do enjoy being on the outskirts of it, being pushed around, feeling like something is happening. None of that for the short set.

Brooklyn's Big Ups were the act everyone was waiting for, and they are having a bit of a moment now. 18 Hours of Static is an excellent half-hour or so of post-hardcore emo. Frontman Joe Galarraga dispenses with the overly testosterone-driven act and, instead, opts for a punk Mick Jagger style of performance art. Barefoot and shirtless for most of the set, Galarraga contorted his body and face, posing or writhing on the stage, as he delivered the lyrics.

A pit kind of got going during the set -- if about 8 guys literally running around in a circle counts as a pit. At one point, Galarraga got down from the stage and did a few laps with them.

"Thanks, guys." And the set was done. A few guttural growls from guys in the crowd, which was weird, and my night was done. I thought about humping it back to Cameo to catch the pre-record release performance from Beverly, but my journalistic curiosity bowed to exhaustion.

Back tonight. I'm thinking maybe Sharkmuffin, Tweens, and Marnie Stern.

Here are some pics from last night.