Quartz City

Sigh 🙁… Terribly underrated, Wright was largely responsible for why my favorite band is my favorite band and by indirect connection why music means so much as it does to me. I guess no one outside of his family knew that he was ill.

I suppose it’s appropriate that his last appearance was singing “Arnold Layne” at the Syd tribute concert last year. Everything full circle?

UPDATE: Ned articulates much better than I can.

Twenty-three years ago I ran across an album called Revenge Of The Prisoners by some paisley-looking bunch of Brits called The Prisoners. Any band naming themselves after my favorite cult TV show was well worth the five bucks for the LP and I wasn’t disappointed. At all. Amazingly gritty sound full of attitude – all of 1966 coming at you at 200mph. Too full-on for mere revivalism. The band fell apart a couple years later (though reforming on occasion) and lead singer/guitarist Graham Day continued on with the equally as furious Solarflares.

The Solarflares disbanded in 2004 and since then I hadn’t heard anything from Day until out of idle curiosity I searched on him and found that he had a new band: Graham Day & The Gaolers. One album, Soundtrack To The Daily Grind, was released last year and there’s an EP out soon.

Here’s “Glad I’m Not Young.” Welcome back!

I’ll have a post-Terrastock core dump here shortly but here’s a couple things in the meantime…

I programmed episode 15 of the Deconstruction Podcast and it was just posted over the weekend. The podcast is worth a listen… I tried to limit myself here to more recent pop stuff that’s been released within the past three years. As usual things take a left turn midway through and that 7% Solution track breaks the rule (it’s from 1996) but I like how it turned out.

Track listing is:

1. The Morning After Girls – “Run For Our Lives”
2. Asobi Seksu – “New Years”
3. Airiel – “Thrown Idols”
4. The Oohlas – “Gone”
5. Persephone’s Bees – “Muzika Dlya Fil’ma”
6. Hooverphonic – “Stranger”
7. Goldenhorse – “The Last Train”
8. The Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound – “The Morning Maiden”
9. Mahogany – “Tesselation, Formerly Plateau One”
10. Emily Loizeau – “L’autre Bout Du Monde”
11. The Lovetones – “Everybody Hides Away”
12. Telenovela – “Breakfast With Birds”
13. The High Violets – “Xstacy”
14. 7% Solution – “The Road And The Common”
15. Ed Kuepper & The Kowalski Collective – “Miracles”

Episode 15 link. RSS feed for the podcast.

Years ago I helped briefly on Fire Records’ Chamber Music project and after a long gestation it’s finally about to be released. NPR interviews producer James Nichols and discusses the project.

Terrastock VII is taking place in Louisville, Kentucky this weekend so, as always, if you see any befuddled-looking underground music types in the nation’s airports, give ‘em a break.

I’ll be there for all four days so say hello if you’re going also (and happen to be reading this). See you on the other side.