Innovative Leisure Indierock | Alternative 25 Items

Mystery-music from the strange and ancient-modern California fringe … thats what the press release says. Kinda fitting!

'pinky pinky are the rising queens of l.a. garage rock' - i-D 'It's always exciting when young ones who are way cooler than you'll ever be make music that sounds polished and tight right out the gate' - THE FADERPinky Pinky have good gut instincts. During an era of limitless distractions, societal pressures and sonic trends, the three best friends are focused on being happy and blissfully on the outside of all that noise. You can hear that on their new music which follows two prior EPs & multiple tours straight out of High School which has earned them some early fans with some of Rock's biggest names (Dave Grohl to Brian Bell of Weezer to Albert Hammond Jr of The Strokes).As they gear up to release their debut album this summer, the first single is a patchwork quilt of garage rock and oddball indie with pop sensibilities via Producers Hanni El Khatib & Jonny Bell. It's rooted in classic bass, drums, guitar, but it's bolstered by the perspectives of a trio of LA youths writing about their everyday observations, anxieties and passions. As a result, it's unpretentious, raw and unpredictably zany.

The Tijuana Panthers are back and this time they’re all grown up (kind of). Combining their signature surf rock with new experimentations in sound, Carpet Denim is the culmination of nearly three years of work and the band’s subconscious evolution into deeper, more personal places.

Taking concepts that have long been percolating, this album is the musical version of a beachside, drop-top cruise -- punctuated by deeply human lyrics. Carpet Denim hits deep notes of introspective darkness with songs like “You Died,” a ballad-y jam that delves into the complex emotional wreckage of a father’s passing, and the album’s single, “Path of Totality,” about a close friend of the band’s who lost the fight against alcoholism.

These soulful forays are offset by Tijuana Panthers singular, upbeat sound, with the playful jam “Little Pampelmousse” that celebrates fatherhood and refers to Phil’s nickname for his new, beloved baby.

Then there’s “710,” a spirited coast down memory lane that embodies the band’s signature sunniness - all while reminiscing about growing up in Long Beach.

The culmination of the band’s many years on the road and making noise, Carpet Denim falls deeper into their weird and wild tendencies (there’s even a synthesizer that makes an appearance). It’s inspired by everything, from politics to the guys’ personal lives, Haruki Murakami and Twin Peaks. There’s the perfectly dissonant “TV People,” a creepy little number that combines simple guitar with a roving bass to create an abstract jam that’s hard to forget.

This album is the same garage-y Tijuana Panthers you love, but this time, they channel their unbridled energy into a moody maturation of their music. The band returned to their hometown of Long Beach, CA to record Carpet Denim at Jazzcats studio. Unlike earlier albums such as Poster and Wayne Interest - which were recorded in a flash-bang, marathon sitting, the band’s latest album was methodically assembled by Jonny Bell over multiple days. Pouring over production, Carpet Denim is a collective deep breath that weaves together years of songwriting -- all jam-packed with summertime vibes, peaks of punk rock and Tijuana Panthers’ signature oddball adventures.

The Tijuana Panthers are back and this time they’re all grown up (kind of). Combining their signature surf rock with new experimentations in sound, Carpet Denim is the culmination of nearly three years of work and the band’s subconscious evolution into deeper, more personal places.

Taking concepts that have long been percolating, this album is the musical version of a beachside, drop-top cruise -- punctuated by deeply human lyrics. Carpet Denim hits deep notes of introspective darkness with songs like “You Died,” a ballad-y jam that delves into the complex emotional wreckage of a father’s passing, and the album’s single, “Path of Totality,” about a close friend of the band’s who lost the fight against alcoholism.

These soulful forays are offset by Tijuana Panthers singular, upbeat sound, with the playful jam “Little Pampelmousse” that celebrates fatherhood and refers to Phil’s nickname for his new, beloved baby.

Then there’s “710,” a spirited coast down memory lane that embodies the band’s signature sunniness - all while reminiscing about growing up in Long Beach.

The culmination of the band’s many years on the road and making noise, Carpet Denim falls deeper into their weird and wild tendencies (there’s even a synthesizer that makes an appearance). It’s inspired by everything, from politics to the guys’ personal lives, Haruki Murakami and Twin Peaks. There’s the perfectly dissonant “TV People,” a creepy little number that combines simple guitar with a roving bass to create an abstract jam that’s hard to forget.

This album is the same garage-y Tijuana Panthers you love, but this time, they channel their unbridled energy into a moody maturation of their music. The band returned to their hometown of Long Beach, CA to record Carpet Denim at Jazzcats studio. Unlike earlier albums such as Poster and Wayne Interest - which were recorded in a flash-bang, marathon sitting, the band’s latest album was methodically assembled by Jonny Bell over multiple days. Pouring over production, Carpet Denim is a collective deep breath that weaves together years of songwriting -- all jam-packed with summertime vibes, peaks of punk rock and Tijuana Panthers’ signature oddball adventures.

First, let’s meet back up with the Molochs—you remember them, right? Their America’s
Velvet Glory was the earliest burst of light and energy to hit in 2017, an album of electrified
rock ‘n’ roll like Dylan and Lou Reed by a band named after the Ginsberg-ian glutton god
who demanded the sacrifice of all things good and pure. But now it’s 2018 and Moloch
himself is fatter and happier than ever, so the Molochs couldn’t just make another record.
After Glory showed the world who they were, they needed to make an album that showed
what they could do. So Flowers In The Spring is where the Molochs worked harder, thought
harder and fought harder to be the kind of band that the times demand: “I like to think the
world just needs some good solid songs out there,” founder Lucas Fitzsimons says. “It’s
simple. It’s not easy … but it’s simple.”
America’s Velvet Glory, their first-ever record for L.A.’s Innovative Leisure label, had sparked
their first-ever U.S and European tours, first-ever festival sets, first-ever international press
and more. (Top music mag Mojo even said they’d made one of the year’s best albums—“Any
year!”) Follow-up Flowers bloomed almost exactly a year later at Long Beach’s Jazzcats
studio between December of 2017 and January of 2018, where Fitzsimons and longtime
band member Ryan Foster had recorded Glory. By the time they’d returned, they had a slate
of songs that had come to Fitzsimons in flash moments, written on nerve-wracking
transcontinental flights or on isolated nights in an L.A. apartment, captured at once in bursts
of insight or rescued from almost-abandonment in discarded notebooks.
As on Glory, inspiration from Syd Barrett, Dylan, Nikki Sudden and kindred spirit Peter Perrett
of the Only Ones was at work, but the Molochs are endlessly (appropriately?) ravenous when
it comes to things to read and listen to and learn from. On Flowers they’d refine and
recombine their sound, working in that long tradition of poets who cover (or discover)
themselves in pop songs. “To Kick In A Lover’s Door” blows Flowers open with the wit and
precision of the Go-Betweens, and “I Wanna Say To You” draws more from some of
Creation Records’ dreamiest dreamers than it does from any esoteric 60s howlers. “Flowers
In The Spring” and “Pages Of Your Journal” could be two lost Kinks singles from two
different Kinks eras—that Ray Davies-ian venom stays the same, of course—and the
charming/disarming “Too Lost In Love” makes feeling down sound like cheering up, just like
the Clean did.
Yes, they do have their first-ever string section here, and that could confuse some people.
(“People go, ‘Wow, it sounds more mature.’” says Fitzsimons. “What kind of boring shit is
that?”) But Flowers isn’t a grown-up album or a show-off album or a break-up album or a
just-had-to-make-another-album album because the Molochs don’t pick targets that tiny.
Love and disgrace and life and death blur and bleed into each other, but at the core of
Flowers is a story about standing against the inhuman by being more human, however
messily honest that needs to be. (Or like Fitzsimons sings at the end of the record: beware
that “determination by a whole / to destroy the human soul.” Funny how that comes in a
song where he claims he can’t explain everything that happens to him, because he sort of
just did.) So consider their new Flowers In The Spring a meticulously plotted counterattack
against all things Moloch-ian, with clear, concise, immediate, undeniable, simple, direct pop
songs, says Fitzsimons, each sharpened enough to cut through anything it touched. That’s
what he needed to do, he says, because that’s what felt most true. Maybe it really was that
simple, even if it wasn’t easy. Like he’d explain in a song with just seven words: “There’s
something I wanna say to you.”

The first word of the album says it all: 'Bang!' On their new album Midnight In A Moonless Dream the Buttertones dig deep and discover something dark. Where their previous album Gravedigging played like the soundtrack of a good spaghetti-western heist movie, Midnight moves to the dark cityscapes of '70s New York and tells the story itself - a perfect and intricate crime executed by a crew of professionals under cover of night, a biting sound befitting of CBGB's while staying true to their LA roots. There are echoes of Suicide and Bauhaus, nods to the spirit of sax and violence that powered the Deadbeats. Midnight is music made for dancers but also for doomed romancers that will appeal to fans of The Cramps, The Gun Club, Car Seat Headrest, Black Lips, King Tuff, Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, and Parquet Courts.

Bird Brains is a four song collection from Holy Fuck, recorded live at various studios over the past few years. They represent the ongoing creative process of a band whose members live in different cities (in both Canada and the US) yet insist their music should be a collaborative process. These four songs aim to capture the raw energy of four people, not apart as bedroom producers, but together as a spirited exchange of ideas, a dynamic interaction that comes from years of friendship. While Bird Brains was largely self-produced, a few very talented Engineers/Producers aided greatly in that process, including Shawn Everett (John Legend, Warpaint, Alabama Shakes), who recorded the song “Chains” at The Banff Centre for the Arts, and David Wrench (Caribou, FKA Twigs, The XX) who mixed the song “New Dang”. The cover image was designed by long time friend Seth Smith, visual artist, film maker, and musician from Nova Scotia. As the band describes, “the image is quite gross and beautiful, natural and artificial all at the same time, which we feel best represents how we hear our music.”

The Buttertones’ Gravedigging is more a movie waiting to happen than an album—or a
soundtrack just waiting to inspire a movie, with scene after scene of action, tension and
release set to a sound that takes everything good and true about American music before
the Beatles prettied it up (surf, sweet soul, the boss saxophone-overdrive garage of the
Northwest wailers like the Sonics) and matches it to punk energy, post-punk precision and
the kind of personality that blows the circuit-breakers at a backyard party.
Recorded at Jazzcats studio in LongBeach—home-away-from-home to fellow Innovative
Leisure artists Hanni El Khatib, Tijuana Panthers, Wall of Death and more—in the spring of
2016, the sessions were supercharged with hard-won live experience from endless
street-level shows and relentless midnight-to-six rehearsals at the Buttertones lock-out.
Think of it this way: you might not yet know how the band that made Gravedigging is going
to land—but you know it’s going to hit hard.

For Wayne Interest, the Panthers team up with producer Richard Swift. The recordings took place at Swift’s studio in Oregon where the band decidedly took risks in performance and production. The risks paid off. With Swift’s direction and upgrade in fidelity, Wayne Interest sounds just as compelling in headphones as it would at a house party in East LA. It also gives the listener a closer look at the idiosyncrasies of the Tijuana Panthers, only making it clearer that there’s something off about these creeps. Their weirdness, or bold- ness to be whoever they may be, is what makes this band great. It’s a rare quality. The more you listen to the Tijuana Panthers the more you wonder about them.

Limited edition of 500 copies, only available at HHV!