Swinging Singles Club MN

 I don't know anymore. I'm tired. I've been baking bread lately. It's easy as fuck and only needs five ingredients (flour, yeast, salt, water and a little sugar to get the yeast started). It also tastes great and having the oven on warms the apartment while making for a really pleasant aroma. Tonight I took some of the ends and a stale half a loaf and made bread pudding. I've also been digitizing another host of Lps this week. I started diving back into the Recent Arrivals for seven inches tonight too. Needless to say that as long as no one narcs on me and Google shuts me down I've got a whole fucking shitload of stuff that is on the docket for both blogs. It also seems like every time I leave the house and hit up a local record store I find something else local that I wasn't aware of on top of the huge list of things I'm still trying to track down. Eager to Please (1997) So it's the first post of the year. It's the kind of thing where for whatev...

  Since this is kind of weird niche kind of blog it really doesn't get a whole lot of traffic. I mean, sometimes it does, but then there's not a whole lot of people usually partaking of the offerings herein. I mean, last I looked there were some things that despite some people stopping by, nobody wanted to hear. Total Fucking Blood for example. Their loss. But the beauty is that I can basically post whatever shit I want without having to live up to somebody else's unrealistic standards of what a music blog is supposed to be. Half the fucking time I don't even type anything about the music itself and just blurt out some bullshit with a few links. It works for me. It means I can get away with the laziest posts and fewer than a dozen people will even notice and most of them don't care. Trem-or Flo (1997) The band is called Tremorphlo. I picked these up quite a while ago actually. I think I was looking for someone else and got the name confused or something. It wasn...

It's a rainy Sunday at the beginning of the month and I didn't sleep nearly enough, but I've got a shit ton of stuff that needs to happen sooner than later. Like packing up the house and clearing away as much of the detritus we've accumulated by living in the same place for the last seventeen years. I actually look forward to divesting us from so much stupid shit. It's the process of weeding out that seems daunting and overwhelming. It's that standing in the middle of the room and looking around at all of the stuff and not knowing where to start feeling. I think tonight is a clean out some drawers of junk and ruthlessly tossing a bunch of shit out that I haven't touched in the last five to ten years. If I haven't had a use for it in that time then it needs to fucking go. I also need to get the massive piles of recent purchase compact discs filed appropriately so that when it comes time to pack them up I won't have a massive jumble of discs and not be...

 I'm going to do a little work after I hit post on this one Other's Parts (2007) Electric violin, Electric cello, a drummer and lovely female vocals.   Different? Yes. A little pretentious? Maybe a bit But it works. Certainly much more than the truly awful cover art would suggest.  Good lord, what were they thinking...? They're going to be a slightly harder sell as an unconventional band, but one can't help but wonder if better art direction could have helped sell the disc and gotten them on a nice artsy label and another album or two. But that's all speculation and hindsight. Decisions were made and so was history. The cellist used to play in the string quartet that had a regular Sunday Brunch gig at the rather infamous Cafe I worked at for couple of years back in the 90s. Nice dude. Something from this oddly enough played while I was making a pizza tonight (Caramelized onions & artichoke hearts with a simple homemade pizza sauce. Fucking delicious.) Own had ju...

  Out of one's wheelhouse. Such an odd and archaic phrase. A wheelhouse being a place at the end of railroad lines where they'd turn the train engines around to go back the way they came. There are probably some still around, but I doubt too many. It seems like I use way too much obsolete slang. I seem to have to explain words like "rube" to people who act insulted at hearing something for the first time. Kids today just have no interest in colorful language. Anyway, here's Ousia Why is That a Four? (1997) Ambient experimental space noises. Let it wash over your brain with the chemicals of your choice. Dave Onnen would go on to play bass for psychedelic "all our pedals go to 11" overdrive band Skye Klad and dated the bass player for a band I was in back at the start of the century. Ousia also had Fred Teasley (r.i.p.) as kind a soul as you could ever want to meet and have a few beers with on the patio at Grumpy's NE. There were other people in the b...

  So as I have whinged about before, I have more stuff that I want to post than I can possibly put up on any given blog. I rip and tag and fill up file folders with things and then queue things up months in advance. It gets hard to keep motivated to continue knowing that you can slack for six months if you want, but in the meantime that last foot of shelf space you had is already filled with another huge pile of stuff you've yet to process waiting to be done and it starts getting a bit overwhelming until you want to scream and start considering your options. I mean, there's currently like over forty singles I've picked up in the last four months in a pile in front of my turntable waiting for their turn in the digital spotlight. Which is all one long run-on sentence to say that I'm actually considering starting a third fucking blog . How completely ridiculous is that shit? This would be one where all the indiepop stuff goes. SSC MN will retain its specific focus and regu...

  I'm hungry. There's a bunch of shredded BBQ chicken in the fridge that I plan on turning to BBQ chicken enchiladas later. But I might just make a sandwich for now...     1997 - The Squealer Presents...Shuffle This The Squealer was a short-lived local free rag. Couldn't have survived for more than a few years. But it did release this much better than you could expect document of the Twin Cities music scene circa 1997. You got original MN punk rocker heroes, Suicide Commandos, Hip Hop, Jazz (Bill Lang was the house sax player at the bar I used to work at), Shoegaze, Rockabilly, Comedy, Folk, Rock, Pop and all sorts of stuff in between like Own who were a trio with electric cello & violin and a drummer. (the cello player was part of the quartet that played for Sunday Brunches at the original Loring Cafe) There's also a few scattered more notable names among the proceedings. The late Grant Hart's Nova Mob, Soul Asylum and Perfect, which was a post-Replacements ban...

  Nevermind. I fixed it before you even noticed. 1997 - Tomorrow is Today So a while back I had to fly to Central fucking Florida to help with cleaning up my late mother's estate.  If I never have to go back to fucking Florida ever again I will not miss it. Not my kind of place.  Plus I went to like half a dozen record stores throughout like a 30 mile radius (because nothing is ever close) and only found one that was worth a shit, Tonevendor in St. Augustine. All of which is a roundabout way to get to this. I'm browsing through the stacks as one does and perusing the selections up on the wall where the good stuff and big ticket items are usually displayed and to my surprise I see that  this obscure Minneapolis shoegaze album by February reissued as a two lp set on vinyl. (if you are so inclined to vinyl Saint Marie Records put it out in 2016. It was initially released solely on compact disc)  This is a great fucking album. It expands on the previous effort wi...