Innovative Leisure Rock & Indie 30 Items

Limited edition of 500 copies, only available at HHV!

Meet Jonah Yano, the Toronto based singer, songwriter, whose journey into
music began with recording music using his cellphone in 2016. Having played
piano and guitar as a child, it wasn’t until Yano moved from Vancouver to
Toronto in 2016 that he began putting his songs online, catching the eyes of
Toronto’s thriving local music scene. Spending the next couple of years obsessively songwriting and practicing vocals, and learning technical skills, he
collaborated with Toronto duo MONEYPHONE on the 2018 song “On Lock”
which became an underground success. Shortly after, Yano released his first
solo single “Rolex, the Ocean'' with producer Joseph L'etranger. Once he
began writing his full EP, he was introduced to frequent collaborators
BADBADNOTGOOD, who are featured on the EP’s title track, “nervous.” Yano’s
work has garnered praise in major music publications like The Fader,
Billboard, Complex, and Exclaim and the attention of Virgil Abloh and Gilles
Peterson along with millions of streams on Spotify and Apple Music. Most
recently, Yano released a highly praised cover of the Majestic’s “Key to Love
(Is Understanding)” also with BADBADNOTGOOD, finding himself in the
natural position of writing the feature length album, 2020’s souvenir.
Following a highly acclaimed 2019 which included the release of an EP
nervous, collaborations with BADBADNOTGOOD, MONEYPHONE, and Nono;
industry praise from The Fader, Billboard, High Snobiety, NME, KCRW and
Exclaim — it’s not a stretch to say Jonah Yano’s highly anticipated debut
feature album souvenir took a lifetime to make.
Yano’s souvenir, mixes his soulful, genre blurring vocals with searing, personal
lyrics. With collaborations from talents like producers Monsune ("strawberry!," "delicate"), Leland Whitty of BADBADNOTGOOD ("poor me," "monarch,"
"anywhere"), and Jacques Greene ("what i can do to help"), souvenir touches
on themes of family separation, healing, and reconciling with the past.
With each track delving into Yano’s personal history, the album tells the story
of his parents separation and absence of his father from his life through the
perspective of each of his family members. Following the separation of his
parents in 1998 in Hiroshima and subsequent move to Vancouver, Yano spent
years with very little connection to his father beyond occasional calls and
birthday presents.
Having not seen each other in 15 years, Yano visited his father in Nagato in the
fall of 2019 with the goal of making sense of their complicated relationship
through music. Both being avid musicians, Yano then incorporated some of
his father’s earlier recordings into his own, while making peace with their
past. The result — the album’s final track, “shoes,” featuring his father Tatsuya
Muraoka and written by him about a pair of shoes he purchased for Yano as a
child. Most of the track was recorded live at some point in the 1990’s in
Hiroshima, with Yano’s own vocals filling gaps between his father’s vocals.
Recording the album in Tokyo’s Red Bull studios, a log cabin in Nagato, Toronto’s Studio 69, and his own home — the intensely personal album incorporates
Yano’s unique sound with a deeply relatable concept, making it the natural
follow-up to an already impressive catalogue.

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

In the life of any interesting artist, there is the perpetual war between the
simplicity of public perception and the complexities of reality. Consider Hanni
El Khatib, a definitive purveyor of visceral, blues-wracked, punk-spiked,
soul-warped, knife fight rock n’ roll over the last decade. You may be familiar
with him through any one of his four acclaimed solo albums on Innovative
Leisure, his work with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, or as one of the rare
polymaths able to artfully blend serrated guitars and hardcore rap on collaborations with GZA and Freddie Gibbs. And while these are all real things that
could accurately yield a sketch of the multi-dimensional Los Angeles-based
artist, they amount to little more than a black and white pencil sketch.
From 2010 until 2017, there was the usual cycle that consumes most working
21st musicians: make an album, and tour it for the next 18 months. Return
home, rinse and repeat. And with it came the predictable pitfalls that ensnare
too many artists whose professional obligations require high-octane performances before 1,000 or more strangers every night. It is a dream until that
one night when it isn’t any longer, and despite his gratitude for his fans and
station in life, El Khatib found himself wracked by depression and anxiety.
What had once been joyous creative outlet felt like a job. In the wake of the
release of 2017’s Savage Times, it became readily apparent that if El Khatib
didn’t make drastic changes to his lifestyle, there might not be a life to speak
of. So he quit drinking, stopped touring, and took an indefinite hiatus from the
studio. But eventually, the desire to create songs slowly returned.
What would eventually become El Khatib’s fifth studio album, the virtuosic
but characteristically raw FLIGHT began as spontaneous experimentation.
Over the last several years, El Khatib had become close friends with Leon
Michels, best known as the mastermind of the soul controllers, the El Michels
Affair, but who has also quietly racked up producer credits for the likes of pop
juggernauts like Lana Del Rey, Rick Ross, Travis Scott, A$AP Rocky, and
Eminem -- as well as frequently working in sessions with Grammy-winning
super-producer Mark Ronson. The finished result is a rollicking sampledelic
opus that recalls the beautiful chaos that the Dust Brothers created on Paul’s
Boutique and Odelay. It’s the type of thing that Dilla and Madlib would’ve
created if they had come up on The Cramps.
The irony, of course, is that for a record that sounds like little else El Khatib
has ever done, it’s the most complete embodiment of who he is as an artist.
It’s a record both dense and intricate yet direct and spontaneous. It is garage
rock, it is hip-hop, it is soul, it is blues, it is psychedelic, but more than
anything, it’s a brilliant Hanni El Khatib record -- one that taps into the adolescent spirit of creation that first stirred him to make songs in the first place.
Here he is on his fifth album, back for the first time.

Rotterdam’s Iguana Death Cult hasn’t exactly been shy about causing havoc on whatever stage they set foot. That’s likely been the one constant since establishing their giddy brand of protopunk and garage rock on debut LP The First Stirrings Of Insect Life. Iguana’s pending follow-up Nude Casino marks a swift and sobering departure from the miasma of psychedelics they purvey so fervently. But no less intense: this band has been sharpening their tools, reemerging from their concrete cavern with a ragged and convulsive post-punk attack akin to Devo, The Gun Club, and Richard Hell. Playing an abundance of shows – at small clubs, squats and festivals such as The Great Escape, Lowlands, c/o pop, Plissken and Reeperbahn – has whipped Iguana into even more ferocious live band, and that experience carries over in the recordings. "Bright Lights" is the lead single from the upcoming effort Nude Casino.

'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.