Sophomore Lounge Indierock | Alternative 12 Items

LP | 2022 | US | Original (Sophomore Lounge)

Release: 2020 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie, Electronic & Dance

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This is the recording project of Jesse Dewlow. There is just something so Philly about Jesse’s music. Read about this music you’ll find a lot of people making bold comparisons to mad degrees across the globe, but I’ll save you the finger work. I run it up me dome lit in a lineage so very local: the early woobled Wollensack-era US Girls, those absolutely blunted early Social Junk cassettes, melted Kurt Vile demos in Wharton Esherick’s basement style and you’re getting close. Remember for me, Philly is an exotic local. The eastern seaboard should be so lucky to have that as backyard.

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Ace Of Spit

Release: 2022 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Ace of Spit has been playing regular gigs around South St. Louis for the last five years. Typically you’d find the band inside a basement, burned-out warehouse, or one of the dive bars that still permits smoking, mangling a Sanford Clark or Link Wray cover – perhaps closing out a punk bill because the city ran out of 80s-style hardcore bands. “Oh, it’s that Spaghetti-Western band again...”

All that went away in 2020, so Ace of Spit hid out in a basement and wrote this, their self-titled debut full-length (following a scant scattering of home-dubbed, hand-distributed demo cassettes in editions of don't-even-try), which probably would’ve stayed buried deep inside The Sinkhole if their cohorts at Sophomore Lounge hadn’t fortuitously (if not bizarrely) decided to take interest in the sessions' unbridled stink 'n' spirit.

The songs on "Ace of Spit" chug with a free-wheeling swagger, swaying loosely on the rails and yearning for a time of tweed Fender amps and warbled tape echo. Dragged through the decades, hamstrung by digital distortion and the band’s musical ineptitude (perhaps "enhanced" with the help of available studio substances), small fragments of these undefined and impressionistic eras still shine through from the cracks in the tracks.

Was any of it real, or just a nostalgic dreamland? Some imagined place and time you long for while being punished by a Dumpers super-fan in the Arizona desert? Dreaming of Apollo Bay as you climb back inside a duct-taped E-350 and drive half-asleep to the next job.

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C Joynes

Poor Boy On The Wire

26,99 €*

Release: 2021 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Over the last decade-and-a-half, C Joynes has ploughed a singular furrow through solo guitar, with a body of work incorporating English folk-tunes alongside North & West African music, and lifting proto-minimalist and improvised techniques from the European classical and avant-garde traditions.

His new release, ‘Poor Boy On The Wire’, is his first full album dedicated wholly to the electric guitar. Through a typically wide-ranging set, Joynes exploits the instrument’s potential by placing intricate parlour music alongside overdriven garage blues throw-downs, wiry electric folk and the brittle ringing tones of free improvisation. However, these explorations of the tones and timbres of close-mic’d guitars and amplification retain an overall coherence and unity through the deliberate use of a limited palette of budget instruments and vintage equipment.

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Equipment Pointed Anhk

Without Human Permission

Release: 2021 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Roadhouse

Aladdin Sales

2LP | 2021 | US | Original (Sophomore Lounge)

Release: 2021 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Warmer Milks

Soft Walks

41,99 €*

Annihilation Yellow Vinyl Edition

Release: 2021 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Footings

LP | 2020 | US | Original (Sophomore Lounge)

Release: 2021 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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"Footings is the long-running/rocking outgrowth of Peterborough NH's great ruralist duo, Redwing Blackbird. Initially formed as a trio in 2012 by Eric Gagne on guitar and vocals, Footings' sound embraces a sort of inner light derived from folk music, but surrounds it with a variety of rockist tropes. This rock action can take many forms, especially on this new album, which features their most expanded/expansive line-up yet.

Original trio member Elisabeth Fuchsia (frequent Pile collaborator) is on viola and long-time collusionist Candace Clement provides guitar, synth and vocals. Jordan Holtz (from Rick Rude) supplies vocals. Ben Rogers (Eric's bandmate from Death to Tyrants) adds drums where needed. Will Killingsworth (Ampere/Bucket Full of Teeth) adds pedals and tambourine as required. The latter pair were also responsible for engineering the album, but their musical additions are sonically notable.

Gagne's songs and deep vocals, often the core of the band's operation, combine the literary qualities of a heavy reader with the observational data of a poet. In this, Footings might occasionally be mistaken for one of Will Oldham's multifarious projects. But the band has a distinct way of scrambling their eggs, and that was never clearer than it is here. Full songs are interspersed with fragmentary shards in a way that reminds me of how Michael Hurley faded out “Rat Face” after its intro, on Hi Fi Snock Uptown. I mean, “Sleeping” sounds tantalizingly close to a Neil Young penned out-take from Deja Vu for the 35 seconds it runs. But that's all there is!

This outré editing process works quite well. By allowing themselves to create slivers of textural similarity to Sonic Youth (“Ordinary Night”), Crazy Horse (“Sleeping”), and even Heldon (“Wouldn't It Be Something”), Footins display wide possibilities while maintaining their primary focus on creating a kind of avant garde American roots music with the brash complexity of Yo La Tengo and the stately depth of Wilco.

Annihilation is the best Footings record to hit the planet yet. And that is saying something."

- Byron Coley

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Wren Kitz

Earl Worm

22,99 €*

LP | 2024 | US | Original (Sophomore Lounge)

Release: 2020 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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"Wren Kitz plants ululating tremors of feedback, and as he beckons them forth and encourages them, he wades in and allows himself to be carried; not away, but in concert with. This is a difficult thing to achieve; most of us, upon eliciting the positive loop gain, have to accept that we have no control, and it often will float away or burst like a bubble. Wren is a surfer, and the best surfers are artists in their own right. He also is adept at speaking to and with old tape machines, threading his effortless falsetto in and out of the adventurous treatments, and coming out on the other side with a song; it's needlepoint really, of the highest order.

Early Worm, his latest effort for Sophomore Lounge, is not a mere example of these aforementioned superlatives, but a culmination of hard work and songcraft. Wren is an empath, from a long line of beautiful big-hearted people, and for him to sufficiently be able to translate his empathy and thoughtfulness into music is nothing short of a gift. As he says within, "...Come in, come in..."; you will be glad that you did."

- Eric Gagne

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Dar

A Slightly Larger Head

37,99 €*

LP | 2023 | US | Original (Sophomore Lounge)

Release: 2024 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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Preorder shipping from 2024-06-07

On his second album as DAR, Chicago songwriter Aaron Osbourne conjures a strangely triumphant celebration of life and love from beyond the casual boundaries of personal loss. Forging a complex path from grief to healing through self-spun yet ultimately collaborative music, there's some objectively tough stuff here. But the record never wallows in despair, nor asks you—the listener—to join in its trials. It’s a rock record. A really *good* rock record. And even furthermore, against all odds, a distinctively joyous one. In the spirit of K Records’ ramshackle heartbreak and the damaged baritone of Ted Lucas, Osbourne’s own idiosyncratic yowl lights the path from song to song with a fiery combustion of charm and dread. An unlikely landscape of acoustic guitars, toy pianos and digital brass surges into the foreground of normal rock shit to touching effect. Recorded by JIM Marlowe in Louisville at End of an Ear studio with the help of longtime friends and collaborators Jenny Rose & Ryan Davis (Equipment Pointed Ankh, Roadhouse Band) over the course of two years, A Slightly Larger Head is the album that Osbourne deemed "essential to my survival…it was necessary." Savor the ride and keep going.

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Gub

33,99 €*

LP | 2023 | US | Original (Sophomore Lounge)

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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GUB—debut full-length from the two-headed beast of Beau Wanzer / Champagne MIRRORS—is a low-boiling cauldron aswirl with glurpy synthscapes, hypnotized rhythms and eerily dubbed-out electronic discharge. A timeless collaboration from two of Chicago’s finest exports.

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Greymouth

Parked Up

37,99 €*

LP | 2023 | US | Original (Sophomore Lounge)

Release: 2023 / US – Original

Genre: Rock & Indie

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The duo of Mark Anderson (Bancho Taste / Mysteries of Love) and Mark Sadgrove (Mazda Hatchback / Mysteries of Love) take the wheel and don the louvres to serve up a paean to landlocked listlessness, hoons in souped-up saloons and wide-eyed, drunk teen wandering. Recorded both on the road and in typical bramble-brained fashion at Dom Studious in Koenji (with help along the way from Leighton Craig), this LP was mastered by Forbes Williams and follows on from recent releases on Kasual Plastik, What Lies Beneath and Cost of Living.

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Coffin Prick

Laughing

34,19 €* 37,99 € -10%