NNA Tapes Indierock | Alternative 4 Items

Bendrix Littleton is the writing and recording project of Nashville-via-Dallas musician and producer Bennett Littlejohn. The self-aware, malaise-filled songs on his debut LP 'Deep Dark South' are imbued with the painful beauty of the modern American South, including themes of drug and alcohol abuse, and the dissolution of relationships. Bendrix wrote most of the album on a vintage Harmony H162 acoustic guitar that he found at a flea market in Kentucky and restrung with higher pitched strings (a 'Nashville tuning'). After running the tracks through a Tascam four track cassette recorder, which sped the songs up ever so slightly, Bendrix added layers of lap steel, dobro, and pedal steel. 'I tried to pair instruments that typically aren't used together--one's that I've shied away from after playing them with uninspired country music.' 'Deep Dark South' conjures the feeling of wonder one gets from looking up at the vast Southern night sky.

Guerilla Toss returns to NNA Tapes with a brand new EP, What Would The Odd Do?, an exploration into new territories expanding on their recipe for twisted, addictive rock & roll mania: fried funk, damaged dance, and cosmic cacophony. Fans of 70's prog and rock greats like King Crimson and Todd Rundgren and modern torchbearers like Sheer Mag and Deerhoof will be joyfully united by GT's uniquely familiar world of wonder and excitement. For Kassie Carlson, singer, songwriter, and bandleader of Guerilla Toss, What Would The Odd Do? is unarguably the groups most personal release in their impressive history as a music-making collective. After open-heart surgery in 2017 to remove a dangerous blood clot caused by a severe opiate addiction, Carlson has found a new joy in life. She has since cleaned up for good, moved to Upstate New York with her partner and Guerilla Toss drummer, Peter Negroponte, and has never felt more inspired. Kassie Carlson is a true poet of punk, the voice of an unheard generation, the leader of The Odd. Few people have been through what she has'and making it out alive is just the beginning. With her band of musical misfits, Guerilla Toss is an unstoppable force of nature. Like all great and challenging art, their message is abstract, yet decipherable. And once the listener cracks the code, they'll be immersed in a uniquely familiar world of wonder and excitement. What will unite us more than to celebrate the absurd and question what we've been told is obvious? Let GT be just one of the many songs among the soundtrack of existential infinity and divine recovery. A portion of the proceeds from the album will go to the Harlem Harm Reduction Clinic, in an attempt to further our reach in the opiate crisis battle.

NNA is very proud to present our second release from Canadian hero Alexander Moskos’ Drainolith project. Following up 2012’s “Fighting!” full length LP (Spectrum Spools), “Hysteria” reaches new levels in the Draino sound world, resulting in his most fully realized record to date. Moskos has spent years marinating solo in the cold Northern underground, cutting his chops as lead axegrinder with Montreal-based noise punks AIDS Wolf, and most recently rolling with North American all-star clan Dan’l Boone. “Hysteria” is the result of nearly two years spent in various studios with producers and fellow ‘Boone brothers Nate Young (Wolf Eyes) and Neil Hagerty (Royal Trux), working diligently together to take a few steps beyond Trip Metal and extract the skeleton out of “rock”, inserting it into a newer, much weirder, humanoid skin. The epicenter of this sound rests humbly on the foundation of guitar and voice, two facets of sound that Moskos has carefully cultivated through years of experimentation and digestion from a wide array of musical influences. The relaxed, loose, and energetically electric technique of guitar playing is reinforced by Drainolith’s unrivaled tone, which has morphed throughout the years but now stands alone atop a mountain of shredders. It is ripe with Bluesy fuzziness and the humanity of Americana, while punctuated by the gritty stab of 80’s death metal, and further rounded out with a sprinkling of EVH-esque chorus zones and free jazz adventurousness. The result is a sound that pre-dates the internet in a fabulous way. Each note seems to leave behind a glistening impression like a spot of grease on a pizza box. A tone as unique as this is only bolstered by the vocal delivery, the literal voice of the Mind of Moskos. This beautifully cold, dripping baritone is unmistakable, it’s fried-yet-poetic articulation recalling a halfway point between a melting Dylan and a blazed Robert Ashley. Over-tired, over-wired, and over it. Moskos lets every word kerplunk into a mesmerizing puddle of observation, giving something as mundane as staring out the window or a Vancouver hotel foyer the poignancy of a published work. With guitar and voice at the core, the additional instrumentation on “Hysteria” is the bizarre glue that binds it all together, using the palette of electronics, keys, and haphazardly triggered beats and percussion in an intensely layered fashion to ensure maximum disorientation. The compositions are fully stacked, allowing little room for sparseness or tender moments. Tracks like “Qix” stagger forward in a deranged manner, it’s elastic percussion hearkening back to purple Nike foot-pounding of 2011’s “Where Are Ye Col. Leslie Groves?” cassette and the “one man band” era, for those of us fortunate enough to witness Drainolith’s live experience. Other tracks like “Joy Road” burn on patiently, disintegrating piece by piece into the ether of time amid a bed of Fender Rhodes eeriness... almost like a rare Canadian B-side to the Lizard King’s “An American Prayer”. Blues notions are confronted by Beastie-esque guitar stabs, smeared together with repetitive, angular riff rotations and flailing synth filigree, creating a densely-layered intensity that feels like the anxiety of standing in a rat’s nest of instrument cables and leaky pipe water in a moist basement. Pleasant melody is of little interest here, instead thriving on dissonance and reminding us of the OGs of post-punk, when rock met experimentation and abstraction head on, shoving a properlygreased square peg into a circular hole. While thematically cryptic, “Hysteria” drops rough clues to the heart of it’s content, filled withtales of Quebec biker wars, sinking into couches, Detroit street hassles, sneaker worship, sidewalk slush, sexual desire and seasonal affect disorder. At it’s heart, “Hysteria” is the product of a musician who has much love for the past, but also little interest in recreating it. It is a song cycle that reflects the complexities of our day to day world through the psyche of the modern jammer, fueled by the quintessentially Moskosian diet of caffeine and nicotine. Someone who isn’t content sitting stagnant in a crowd of tradition, and who acknowledges that radical ideas are necessary to propel things into the future.