Today, Asbury Park's raucous and rowdy punk four-piece, The Vansaders, are sharing their video for the raucous and rowdy "Siren's Song." The track is part of an upcoming split 7" with Asbury paisanos, latewaves. The Quixote x Broken Bird 7" is due at the end of this month.
The Vansaders once again worked with producer Pete Steinkopf at his Little Eden Studios for "Siren's Song." The song is a familiar story in which our narrator is unable to resist his lover's charms even though he knows it will probably lead to his demise. Appropriately, "Siren's Song" adopts kind of a seafaring vibe embellished by The Vansaders' trademark harmonies, huge drums, and a blistering guitar solo. The Chris Shashaty-directed clip features Sara McDermott.
The Vansaders and latewaves will celebrate the release of their split Quixote x Broken Bird 7" on February 29th at The Wonder Bar in Asbury Park along with special guests kqhyt kqhyt. $3 from each ticket and $2 from each record sold at that show will benefit animal rescue organization Wag On Inn. "Siren's Song" will also appear on The Vansaders' next full-length, scheduled for this summer.
Some CoolDad Music mainstays have been putting out some cool stuff lately, and I decided to get off my ass and tell you about it.
Lowlight, "Coastlines"
Lowlight had a big summer. August saw the band head out on a jaunt around the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. They released their fantastic Endless Bummer LP on September 13th, and they capped everything off with a triumphant weekend at Asbury Park's Sea.Hear.Now. Festival just as the summer was officially drawing to a close.
Well, there was one more thing. As September gave way to October, Lowlight released the video for Endless Bummer and live set standout, "Coastlines." Using footage gathered from that August tour, the band give us a glimpse into life on the road and time spent with friends. The song is a twangy, rocking rambler that I've loved from the moment I first heard it. It's the perfect soundtrack to Lowlight's mini road movie and, really, to any of life's literal or figurative journeys.
And we get some bonus RockNRoll Hi-Fives in there, too.
Lowlight will be at The Saint in Asbury Park on Halloween with America Part Two, Shred Flintstone, Idle Wave, and Blaise.
Dentist, "Someone Like You"
At our show with A Giant Dog, Dentist, and The RockNRoll Hi-Fives at The Saint back in July, Dentist treated us to a new song they'd been working on. They took "Someone Like You" into Oceanport's Simple Sound Studio; and, yesterday, the band released the single accompanied by a new video.
"Someone Like You," like a lot of Dentist tracks, presents a sunny, smiling face to the world; while something slightly more melancholy sits just beneath the surface. Dentist have their sound so dialed in at this point that creating dreamy, reverby, crunchy pop seems almost effortless for them.
The Sean Bell-directed video reveals that Dentist's pop expertise doesn't translate to home improvement. The clip features power tools, an attempt to hammer a screw into a block of wood, and comedic gore. It's also probably the only 3-minute song to feature a lunch break.
Dentist are currently out on tour with Brick + Mortar. That run makes its final stop at the new Lanes on 11/2.
Screaming Females, "Ancient Civilization"
Here's something I probably should have told you about by now, but I'm getting in just under the wire. This Friday, 10/18, Screaming Females will release Singles Too via Don Giovanni Records. The collection brings together around 15 years' worth of non-album tracks including early 7-inches and digital-only releases. Download and CD versions of the album will add 6 covers, including songs originally done by Neil Young, Taylor Swift, and Patti Smith.
This morning, Screaming Females released the final pre-release track, "Ancient Civilization." The song originally appeared, I think, on a 2013 split with Wisconsin's Tenement (which I own). It's a doomy storm of Marissa Paternoster guitar heroics from right around that time when I took my buddy to see Screaming Females, Tenement, and Waxahatchee at the old Asbury Lanes and he just about lost his shit.
Screaming Females have a couple of area shows this weekend. They play a set at OctFest 2019 at Knockdown Center in Queens on Saturday, 10/19. On Sunday, 10/20, the band headline the Trenton Punk Rock Flea Market after party at Championship Bar and Grill with Dusk and Freya Wilcox & The Howl.
Singles Too is out Friday, 10/18, via Don Giovanni.
CoolDad Music is just about the same age as The Battery Electric. This site was born in 2012, the same year as the (formerly) Asbury Park rock n roll quartet; and we've been through all the changes that have taken place in Asbury Park since then together. One of the big changes has been that the Battery boys now center their operation, mainly, in California. Sometime last year, the band trekked out to Dave Catching’s (Eagles Of Death Metal) Rancho De La Luna recording studio in Joshua Tree to lay down their third full-length album, Goin' Wild. The band loved their experience out there so much that they couldn't resist trading the New Jersey boardwalk for the Southern California sunshine.
Late last month, The Battery Electric released Goin' Wild. The album continues their unabashed embrace of straight-ahead rock n roll. There are nods to rock n roll royalty like Chuck Berry and the twelve-bar blues on "Hell or Highwater," AC / DC on "Can't Dance," or The Stooges on "Lose Control." There's the deeply-felt soul music of "Need Ya" and the deep darkness of the soul on "Bad Vibe Baby" or "Lust in You." There's the manic and mind-altered energy of the title track. The Battery electric aren't trading in dream pop or shoegaze or synth pop or indie rock. This is Rock n Roll of the studded denim and leather variety.
That sound is helped along by producers Jesse Hughes and his Eagles Of Death Metal bandmate, Dave Catching. The production team gives us new takes on Battery Electric staples "Shake," "Heathen," "Need Ya," and "Lose Control." Hughes and Catching also each make cameos on the record as does Dwarves' (and Kyuss, and Queens Of The Stone Age, and more...) Nick Oliveri.
A lot has changed in our little music scene over the last several years. In their early years, The Battery Electric shook Asbury venues multiple times per week. There were wild release shows at the now gone Asbury Lanes and roiling, sweaty scrums at Asbury Park Yacht Club or in the bowels of Bond St. But Asbury doesn't have The Battery Electric to kick around (or to be kicked around by) anymore.
The band have headed out to LA to pursue their next chapter. Maybe they're hanging with a different crowd. Maybe they're even a little tanner. One thing hasn't changed, though. Whether they're doing it on the Jersey Shore or straight from Lala Land, The Battery Electric remain devoted to bringing you pure, all-natural rock music made from ingredients like Chuck Berry, The MC5, and Sam Cooke.
Goin' Wild is out now on Gruesome Twosome Records, and the band just today released the video for the album's title track.
Asbury Park punk quartet, Hot Blood, are back. With a vengeance. In the time since the band released Overcome Part 2 in 2016, let's just say a lot has happened in the political landscape of the USA and the world. In many ways, we've never been more divided as a people. There's a sense that we're all being gaslighted on a daily basis as we wonder if what we're watching can really be happening.
Over the course of 17 (18) songs in a fiery 30 or so minutes, Hot Blood touch on all of it -- from the sensitive nature of international relations to Donald Trump to the opioid crisis to mass shootings to climate change. And there are also moments when the band narrow their view to the personal and to the connections among individuals. In that way, like all of their past work, Hot Blood's anger and rage at the state of things are tempered by a sense of hope that, through work, we can effect change.
The album opens with early single "Nuclear Summer." Propulsive drums, buzzsaw guitars, and Kiley ruining his vocal chords as he screams about our obliviousness to the threat of impending doom. A product of Catholic school and a citizen of the most religious country in the industrialized world, Kiley looks for "an education" on how to reconcile the world's misery and division with religious beliefs on "Searching for God." Humans are messy and weird, but it's our differences and imperfections that unite us on "Flaw." "...it becomes so clear that we're all the same and at the end of the game the pawn and the king sleep in the same box."
"On the Roof," when it's just a bunch of workers together on a job, "there's no backwards politics." The band offer some unsolicited advice to the president on "Donald." The surfy "Horse" only takes a minute to get to the tragedy of our country's opioid crisis: "Could've been anyone."
The title track comes at, roughly, the album's mid-point. The chorus lends itself well to fist-pumping, sweaty screamalongs during which participants can forget their differences and chant as one. The band address the toxicity of the politics of division later on "Naptime for Democracy."
Hot Blood take on other high profile issues like mass shootings on "Duck and Cover" ("Is this really who we fucking are?"), rampant consumerism on "Logoland" ("They're always there!"), and climate change denial on "Rising Tide" ("Til hell or high water but they're both showing up."); but they also focus on the personal and the little, human things that unite us -- "My Heart's Still Beating."
Those who purchase the LP version of Fear of a Unified Public also get secret (acoustic!) track "Joke." On it, Kiley gives his deeply personal take on losing friends and feeling like he's losing his mind as he watches the crumbling of our civil society.
With the exception of "Joke," Fear of a Unified Public is relentless, hardcore punk. Kiley, guitarist Alex Rosen, drummer Billy Straniero, and bassist Charlie Schafer don't let up even for a minute as they take us through their view of American society. Anyone who's been even a semi-regular visitor to this blog can probably tell that hardcore punk isn't necessarily in my wheelhouse, but I've always been able to get behind Hot Blood. I can hear the musicality coming up through the barrage, and the lyrics are always intelligent and spiked with humorous turns of phrase. And while Hot Blood don't go easy on anyone in their crosshairs, they always offer up a sense of hope.
The album closes with a quote from Noam Chomsky that, I think, sums things up pretty well:
"You have two choices, you can say, "I'm a pessimist, nothing's going to work, I'm giving up, I'll help ensure the worst can happen." Or, you can grasp onto the opportunities that do exist, the rays of hope that exist and say, "Well, maybe we can make it a better world". It's not much of a choice." Fear of a Unified Public is out now on Gruesome Twosome Records.
