Swinging Singles Club MN

  Are you, hippie?  Soundcheck (1998) God, I hope you're high. It's going to help. The second and final release of Superman Curl in the 90s. Apparently some of them decided to revisit their rebellious punk rock days and threw together an Ep a decade after this thudded to earth.  I don't have that strangely enough. This is more of the same as the previous post.  Suburban, Dockers wearing, motherfucking punk rock at it's absolute most mediocre, cliched and forgettable. (Sorry, Ted. I know you tried. You really did.) I mean, you're perfectly welcome to disagree with my personal assessments. And I welcome the feedback. It's just like, my opinion, man.

  I am full of garlicky cabbage rolls. And in your time, it's April Fools Day. This is not a prank.     Songs From the Sonic Burn (1998) This is a bit of mystery band. But there is a Zack, Joshua and a Noah Norton in the lineup (along with a drummer named Mike Gravenish) so I'm thinking they're like Hanson,  only with butt rock and goatees.

 I've been getting my lunch stuff together for the coming work week and realized that I should probably refill the queue lest I leave it empty for a period of time. I like to be nothing if not at least reliable. This one is hard though. There's so much stuff that I have things to say about but lack the ambition to do the typing involved. I'm not big on thinking too deeply lately. But here we go anyway. Keep Cats Off Catnip (1998) Flora for this was I'm pretty sure just the result of John Kuker fucking around in his studio, Seedy Underbelly. He was a beautiful crazy motherfucker and it's reflected in this mess. I honestly appreciated him and the version of Flora that he eventually formed and played out with was so very entertaining. There was a night when our band played with them and Eta Carinae and had a friendly competition that night with each band throwing down their version of Pat Benetar's "Heartbreaker". Flora owned it with their bass player (an...

  Well kids, Here we are at the century mark for posts on this highly specialized, but nonetheless supremely interesting and beloved by a handful of anonymous internet users who'll download anything so long as it's not Total Fucking Blood. (which is generally a terrible shame because their music goes "Hurrdurrroarhurr" and everybody needs some of that now and again) But 100 posts. That's some crazy bullshit right there. I was already planning on setting this up this week before I noticed the number, but let's just pretend it's actually some kind of month+ celebratory thing anyway. (On a side note I will also pass on that after a year I've maxed out the free storage on this Mediafire account. I started another, but I suppose it means that this stuff won't last forever in the aether before I start deleting things to make space for other things. You have been warned.) Twin Town High Music Yearbook Volume One (1998) Here we are. Between 1998 & 2008...

  Yeah, It's just me queuing up posts. And it's one of those rare occasions when the heavens congeal and there's posts on both blogs at the same time. Lucky You So anyway. Got packages in the mail. One of them is the reason that this is the stuff coming at you today. Lucky you yet again. Chump Lessons (1998) Love-Cars . They first came to my notice with a song on the second volume of the Twin Town High School Yearbook series that local free weekly City Pages put out yearly for a decade. The song was called " Even The Animals Have Realized That We Are Not Alone In This World" and I quite like it. (I only need one more volume before I start posting that) So today as part of the larger of the two packages the elusive third and final album arrived and they become the subject of what I'm gonna queue up tonight. So here's the first. If you're in need of the late 90s indie rock this may scratch that particular itch in ways you were unaware of being itchy.

  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...

  Yeah so we should still be unpacking and figuring out where to put everything in less space. There's a lot of art and stuff to hang and we'll need to figure out the best method with the picture rails and fishing line. We're probably pretty freaking busy. The nice thing is that I also got some time off coming this month that I took back when whether or not we were moving was still a little bit up in the air. So I'll have three weeks in the middle of the month to get acclimated to the new place. So that will be nice. In the meantime Mollycuddle Mollycuddle/Pilot Light split (1998) Here's a split single with the unknown entity called Pilot Light. There's almost no useful information about Pilot Light on the sleeve or that I could find. They releasd an album on Bandcamp in 2011. Based on a couple of the names there, I'm going to assume they're also a local entity. Go and give them some love. The primary reason for this posting is of course the Mollycuddle...

 The horror of only being able to sporadically do laundry is the accidentally forgotten load that sits in the machine for a warm week and gets that lovely bacterial sour tang to it that don't initially notice, but wafts out gently once you're out of the house and can't do anything about it except hope nobody gets close enough to notice your clothes stink faintly like kimchi. The helpful household hint is that when you wash your sour smelling clothes again, which really doesn't do much to dispel the odor, is to pour a heaping helping of white vinegar into the rinse cycle. That seems to be the most effective solution we've ever come across. I just had to do it with a load of reds of unknown vintage. Not that any of that matters because if things have gone according to plan (as if they ever do) we'll have spent the day moving into a slightly smaller, but slightly nicer apartment in an entirely new neighborhood today. I hope that went smoothly. We now return you to ...

  I moved some posts ahead to next month. It will make sense when you get to them. Trust me.   1998 - Oh My G*d - It's the Odd A half joke garage band made up of dudes in other bands called the Odd and centered around Mark Mallman in one of his earliest incarnations. They touch on all sorts of shit here. There's some disco, some fake soul It's great fun if you're not looking to take things too seriously for a bit.  Liquor can only enhance enjoyment.  I quite like "Tarantula" and there's a song about "Wet Pussy" released when Cardi B would have been all of 6 years old. Plus there's tits on the cover. Always a sign of quality.

  10:20pm. Typing. Listening. Thinking I really ought to be going through and working on the most recent arrivals to the vinyl collection.  Not doing it. I also have a bunch of things I want to scan. Not doing that either.  This is me procrastinating.  You're welcome     American Paint (1998) If there's one thing you could do in Minneapolis at one point is throw a rock in any direction and hit either a loud AmRep type band or a Roots Rock band. So here's the first album by American Paint. Here's what they looked like playing at Bunkers, a club that I've only frequented a handful of times in the last few decades. I had no idea that they existed. Roots rock was pretty far out of my wheelhouse. I don't remember the name. I don't think I ever encountered this band even accidentally on a Tuesday night at the Uptown Bar and Grill. But here they are. It's a fine example of its genre and hews pretty close to its core elements, but definitely leans a bit harder o...

  I took some time off from work so it's been a while since I went. In the meantime I flipped my sleep schedule to more align with daytime hours, so I've been working to get myself back to what is my normal overnight sleep routine. It's not easy.  I'm too old for that shit.   Elevator (1998)   I have no memory of the existence of this band, but it's a bit out of what I might have sought out at the time. They do have a track on a compilation that intrigued me a bit, so I shelled out my dollar for this.  I'm not totally sure what to make of it now.  It has ambitions. It's big and well produced. They've listened to Oasis enough to internalize it. The songs are tuneful, well written and played precisely. But it doesn't quite fit anywhere. It's too slick for college rock, but to indie for mainstream rock. It's a sound that would be great in a medium size venue with a big crowd but would seem more than a little bit overblown in a small club. So he...

  So those blueberry corn muffins came out pretty nice. Not as sweet in the end than the batter would have suggested, but tasty as fuck. So I take that as a win. I also hope that you kids out there in the interwebs have noticed that I've staggered the posts here with the regular flavor SSC so that there's essentially something new every couple days between the two. I have way too much music... Which leads us to today. This is a personal favorite that I have no shame in saying is a personal favorite. The biggest struggle I've had tonight is figuring out how to split these things up.  I kind of settled on seven posts. This is the first.   1998 - ...And his Baby Blue   This is where the wonderfully named Sean Na Na story starts.   This being the first thing released by Sean Tillman following the disillusion of his previous band Calvin Krime .   Now where Calvin Krime was more of a punk rock screamo type outfit, the new guise as Sean Na-Na is all about bitter p...

If you're following along at home, I didn't actually finish out the month the last posting session. I got bored and moved onto something else.  Tonight I just finished baking off some blueberry corn muffins. It seems pretty inevitable that I'm wearing all black clothes whenever I get the urge to bake. They're less black in places now. But the muffins are gonna be bomb. (as the kids might say)   1998 - I've Got You Right Where You Want Me I posted their 1994 single a while back on Swinging Singles Club which is worth your time to investigate if you haven't already gotten it from three years ago already. This is the full length follow up from 1998. It's one of those discs that feels like if it had been released any number of years sooner or later than when it did could have been a contender. Or at least gotten a decent amount of college radio play and a one off release on a major label subsidiary. Shoulda, coulda, oughta There's still yet a few more track...

  We continue... Split Personalities (1998) In general when I've posted stuff I've tried to avoid putting up things that were released on major labels because I don't want to draw attention to this weird gray area I occupy posting out of print material into the aether. But this has been out of print for nearly 20 years with no likely reissue in sight. Copies can be had for under five bucks. (which I recommend.) And damn it, it should be listened to and reconsidered. It's the major label debut of 12 Rods. Self recorded and produced. Never available on vinyl. Well received at the time and long since forgotten. But damn, I can listen to this over and over. "Red" and "Make-Out" music make the transition from "Gay?" for another go. (the latter of which should have been the second single after the title track.) Contemporary video evidence shows what a monster the original drummer was. What's not to love?