Simon Joyner "A Rag of Colts-Disgraced Songs 1987-2012"(Unread Records

 Simon Joyner is a folk fella currently in his 40s residing in Omaha. His music has been cited as influencing and inspiring artist such as Conor Oberst and The Mountain Goats and reached acclaim when John Peel played Joyners album "The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll" in its entirety on air. The great label Unread Records and Tapes, currently operating out of Pittsburgh, has released 3 tapes by Joyner. Rag of Colts, the latest release, is a collection of demos and abandoned songs from 1987-2012. Joyners style is reserved and pulls no tricks but his style of song and storytelling is pure. Some songs are Joyner alone and others are with a band or another collaborator. All in all for someone who is not drawn to this sort of thing I really enjoyed this tape. The whole thing plays out well and is a nice clouded dip into his world.

http://unread-records.com/
http://unreadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/unread-125
http://www.simonjoyner.net/

-- Mark Johnson

DAVID KENNETH NANCE "Lush Bruises Suck Rice and Barley" (UNREAD)

This new-ish UNREAD (release #122) offers some finer NE trash and roll, presumably rehearsed and recorded in one of three attached apartment houses that do that sort of thing in Omaha.  David Kenneth can howl like a Mick + Jonathan steering a scrap heap through through basement leakage, with extra cowbell and tape hiss in his crew to spare.  Themes are typically isolationist, drunkenly and existentially, scrubbing streets and unloading spiritual ammo, not impervious to loneliness but not defeatist.  Choice moments arrive in the way of shimmering leads over crashing free rhythms with the song structure teetering more towards the chaotic.  Mid album track "Lights Stay On" shifts to a lower gear for slower burners and some country joe reminiscent jamms.  The tougher/leathery tracks approach the cook-out zone but mostly steer the ship smoothly back on course.  

visit www.unread-records.com/releases/lush.html for this and many more releases, limited drawings/prints/paintings/nice notes by Christopher Fischer. 

- - Matt Robidoux

The Debts "On the Banks of the Big Muddy," and Noah Sterba and the Cocktails "Chooglin' with the Cocktails" (Unread Records)

Folky Nebraska low fidelity duo The Debts have a helluva quality tape here. Titled On the Banks of the Big Muddy the album is The Debts (Dane Sybrant and Kevin Shaw) ripping through originals on a dusty and chipped 4-track. These are sturdy songs though, not the kind of fragile Daniel Johnston style, but more like Lomax went traveling 'round Omaha the past spring and found two guys singing and playing just for the thrill. They happened to record their music. The artifact exists. Find these midwest musings and pop them into ye old boombox.

Chooglin' with the Cocktails is one of the most fun tapes I've had the pleasure of reviewing. Like the Holy Modal Rounders jamming with Brian Jonestown Massacre, Noah Sterba and crew are flying high. Some drunk hit record on the machine and failed to tell the band. This is whacked out freak music. Jams begat songs and vice-versa with allusions to Bob Dylan as an added bonus. The electric guitars are garage...the acoustic guitars are comfortably quaint. Unread Records is a great label and, dear readers, that is no joke. 

Buy HERE.

Joe Kile "Songs About the Same Old Stories" (Unread Records)

I remember sitting on a porch at a small house just east of downtown Austin, drinking Lone Star's, passing a semi-hollow body guitar back and forth with a friend visiting from Houston, looking at the dead brown lawn that was more dirt than grass, and thinking about how goddamn hot it was getting outside. It was the beginning of June and we were sweating our asses off just sitting there singing and playing music. This memory is the first image I have after pushing the play button on my cassette deck. The sounds I hear come courtesy of singer-songwriter Joe Kile. Alone with his acoustic guitar and twang vocals, his collection of tales of living by six strings and heartbreak is titled, "Songs About the Same Old Stories."

Kile, to my ears, is a disciple of the school of Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Though his rustic poetry doesn't reach the heights of Van Zandt's (an impossible task, TVZ is untouchable), Kile's songs do recall Clark and the southern Texas, Louisiana, up to Tennessee country folk tradition. I love the hiss of this album. It sounds like it was recorded alone in an empty house or good sized shed. Maybe it was early in the AM and Kile didn't want to wake the family that was letting him sleep on their couch after a gig. The album's title is both tongue in cheek and accurate because his genre-style of lonesome acoustic picking does tend to tell the "same old stories," but they're good stories and that's all that really matters. Kile's fingerpicking riffs roll off the guitar as natural as a mountain stream runs after heavy rains. My favorite tune here is called "One Day Behind" and it starts off Side B with the kind of spot on melancholy typical of the introspective songwriter, but I love it just the same.

One small complaint: the cassette's packaging. I enjoyed the music and that's what counts, but the hand cut j-card (unfortunately paper of the thinner variety) and copy machine layout left me wishing for something more. I do love the typewriter aesthetic of Unread Records & Tapes though. In the end, I'd recommend this to fans o' folk quite happily. 

Buy HERE.

CHARLIE McALISTER "Turn of the Century Photograph"(Unread Records) C30

UPDATE: 3/10/10 - I am pleased to announce that a handful of songs from this cassette will be coming out on Charlie's first release for Feeding Tube Records: "Country Creamed/Victorian Fog" LP.

I first heard Charlie McAlister on a mix tape. "What is this demented rockabilly jam with all that fucked up banjo"? Sounded straight out of a "God knows when" time vortex. "A Hasil Adkins outake"? "Oh this was made last year"? Cool! The next encounter was the song "Sleep Walking" from an obscure 7" from the once published Whump Magazine that also featured Caroliner and a bunch of other great 90's stuff. Even cooler! Pop music with absolutely crucial organ sound and reedy vocals. Thus began the search to aquire more of the records and tapes McAlister has made throughout the years, and continues to make to this day. Many of these remain in print.

I'm choosing to review the decade old "Turn of the Century Photograph" tape because it offers a solid introduction to the McAlister catalog. It doesn't go as far out as some of his more collage-based recordings, but it has some really amazing skewed-pop gems. "Bog Man" has a mummy coming back to life to terrorize a small village, "Girls in the Big Parade 1917" has a wonderful WWI feel, and "Plantation of Pain" is just pure postbellum magic. If you haven't figured it out yet, McAlister creates true American folk music. It is the way he twists old stories and symbols into nearly incomprehensible new versions that has made him a legend of underground music for the last couple decades. The tape also has a very long and bizarre play about fried sandwiches at the end of the B side.

When I finally met the man, outside of his "Fire Ant Mound" in Charleston, SC, he took me 45 minutes down some railroad tracks and then told me and my compadre that he was going to cut our heads off. C. McAlister has a thirst for blood and it shows in his desperate recordings and works of art, which all come highly recommended.


"Turn of the Century Photograph" available from
http://www.unread-records.com (catalog #12)

You can get much more of Charlie's work at his website:
http://www.zen-grafix.com/charliemcalister/

SAMUEL LOCKE-WARD "Boombox by Bedside" (Unread)

I spent a lot of time listening to this tape trying to figure it out, which is perfectly all right. It is after all a pleasant ride. True, but it makes you feel like you haven’t slept in days and you’re seeing little minute hallucinations out in your peripheral vision. From the first track on this record latches onto a weird amateur auteur sort of sensibility. He starts with a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cover that has schizophrenic background vocals that curtly yell “shut up” between bars of the belted chorus. What really makes this tape great and mysterious is the slide between slow paced boombox languor and serious up tempo pop and pomp. The line of the intimate and the public is crossed repeatedly. The finest example of this is the weird slow falsetto of “heaven,” which is endearingly awkward, but segues into “holy shit” which sounds pro and pop by comparison, with a driving drone from the chord organ and an absolutely viral chorus. That would be enough to make it a particularly interesting release, but then there are all the overt and vague religious overtones that abound on the record. Locke-Ward speaks to God, talks about those we’ll be seeing in heaven and places these ideas next to something utterly absurd (something about eating eggs) and obscures it all in boombox fidelity. Another good one from the dubbing decks of Unread Records.