Grand Hotel |
• GRAND HOTEL's new video for "Sakura" renews the best possible premise for a music video: two adult males driving a golf cart through inappropriate terrain (see Dinosaur Jr.'s "Feel the Pain"). It's irrefutable proof that the group intend to release another record, potentially even more funk-forward than the glitteringly post-punk album In Color they issued last February.
• The PINSKY post-mortem goes like this: they'll play one or two more shows in Portland, then head down to Baltimore to record an EP at Brian McTernan's Salad Days Studio in May. That's right, the same guy who did that Texas is the Reason EP, all those Hot Water Music albums and that crappy In My Eyes record. Release date on the EP TBA, but it caps the end of a five-year run for a well-done, in-genre pop-punk band (not gonna say the "e" word). Lots of memorializing available at pinskyparty.com.
• This era of music has its perks — widely accessible high-quality production methods, rapid-fire file sharing, beatmaking devices, you name it. It's never been more possible to make terrific music from the comfort of your living room. Surely most agree it's pretty sweet . . . but not so fast. One of the hazards of this new environment is the slow extinction of an already rare bird: the complex, mathematical, instrumental post-punk band. Twenty years ago it was entirely conceivable for a small group of people to spend thousands of hours assembling, measuring, and negotiating the time changes of raw and relatively unpopular passages of music. Today, when everything else is so easy, the effort seems Herculean. All of which is why we appreciate the recent sighting of THE WALDOS, whose new five-song EP Sludged Out Fish Logic contains some of the finest, most interesting moments of post-genre skronk Maine has seen in a while. Like it or not, it's proof that if nothing else, these guys actually hang out with each other. A teaser for a forthcoming full-length on Rough Draft Records; check out Sludged Out at the-waldos.bandcamp.com.• Correction: we fumbled last week's report about the recent musical output of ANNA LOMBARD. We said that the forthcoming full-length by Anna and the Diggs was titled Head Full of Bells and is being mixed in LA and mastered in Nashville. It's not. Those are attributes of the solo record coming out under the name Anna Lombard in the summer. River Girl, the full-length by ANNA AND THE DIGGS, was mixed and mastered by Jon Wyman here in Portland, and drops in May. So to recap: new records each by Anna Lombard and Anna and the Diggs, the latter formerly known as ANNA. Y'dig?
