IN THE RED RECORDS - SPRING RELEASES

They're busy boys and girls

++ IN THE RED RECORDS++
++SPRING RELEASES++

"In The Red has long been the place for the best ear-shredding, lo-fi, DIY, soul freeing noise....
[the] label is a shining gem for garage rock enthusiasts around the world." NME

Having already released the incendiary Hunches ‘Exit Dreams’ and Strange Boys ‘...And the Girls Club’ albums earlier this year, In the Red are at it again with some QUALITY rock action this spring with releases from Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds, Blank Dogs and Thee Oh Sees with the rather fabulous Vivian Girls on tour in May.

++OUT SOON++

KID CONGO & THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS
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Dracula Boots
Release Date: 18th May 2009
For Fans of: Jungle Exotica, The Cramps, Back From the Grave Comps

On his new album, DRACULA BOOTS, the legendary Kid Congo Powers returns to the psychedelic jungle with a stripped down, no frills set of volcanic songs. Kid, the premier voodoo guitarist for seminal sexy swampy bands like Gun Club. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds and Cramps is a restless aesthete. He used his earlier solo efforts to explore vocals and mix genres but with DRACULA BOOTS, Kid comes back to his roots as a crackerjack guitarist playing the primitive music that inspired him; the raw sounds of garage and early Chicano rock.

It only made sense to record such glittering gems as Thee Midniters, I Found A Peanut, and Bo Diddley’s, Funky Fly in a high school gymnasium. He did this in a Midwest town called Harveyville with his nefarious Pink Monkey Birds. Bassist Kiki Solis from El Paso,TX. and Drummer Ron Miller from Macon,Ga. provided the southern soul sauce needed to fuel the engine of the rhythm train. Recording on a stage using the old PA system created a natural reverb, summoning the magic of a bygone prom interrupted by a juvenile delinquent rumble.

The original songs on DRACULA BOOTS go from loud, fuzzy biker rock of Hitchhiking to a greasy rump shaker groove of Bobo Boogie, from a scary movie soundtrack, La Llarona to The Meters having an acid flashback of Black Santa.

So sink your teeth into this hunk of wax and waste no time strapping on your DRACULA BOOTS. You will dance your way from the cradle to the grave, and beyond.

BLANK DOGS
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Under And Under
Release Date: 25th May 2009
File As: DIY Punk Rock

“The music of Blank Dogs is all mid-tempo drum beats, discarded Cure basslines and vocals that sound as if they were sung through a tape recorder submerged at the bottom of a frozen pond”. Fader

For the past several years a slew of 12”s, cassettes and 7”s have been dropped by the mysterious Brooklyn artist known as Blank Dogs. Blank Dogs are actually singular: It's the insanely prolific one-man Brooklyn-based band of Mr. Blank Dog. We don't know too much about the biography of the guy behind the bedroom new-wave pop/punk and he's usually covering his face with masks or bedspreads, but that's fine. The sound is like Joy Division vocal lines with the Cure's synth and guitar melodies filtered through ancient submerged keyboards and eroded recording equipment. And that voice? All the feedback in the world can't hide his knack for melody. Blank Dogs have been making plenty of rumbles in the noisier and more secretive outposts of the underground. All of their records were pressed in limited editions, sold out quickly and, without fail, wound up fetching big bucks with collectors on ebay

Under And Under is Blank Dogs latest and most massive release to date. The CD has 15 tracks, the LP an additional 5 which do not feature on the CD version - ‘Finding Out Again’, ‘Second Time’, ‘The New Things’, ‘Landmarks’, ‘Wrong Then’ - showcasing his pop chops to a greater extent than any of his previous releases. Also, for the first time, Blank Dogs has incorporated the assistance of outside musicians to lend a hand. Various members of the Brooklyn music scene, such as members of the Crystal Stilts and Vivian Girls, contributed this time around, though the sound remains as dusted and strange as anything Blank Dogs have done before.

UK TOUR DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED SHORTLY.

THEE OH SEES
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HELP
Release date: 8th June 2009

If you’ve followed the San Francisco underground for the past ten years, you might already be familiar with John Dwyer. A friend and devotee of pre-eminent Providence noise rock act Lightning Bolt, the majority of Dwyer’s repertoire falls on the indie spectrum’s more visceral wavelengths.

He was Pink in Pink and Brown, fronted Coachwhips, and played guitar in the dysfunctional Hospitals. If you’re unfamiliar with or in search of a refresher, you can search YouTube for a crash course on any of these bands. Some popular tags are: “garage,” “punk,” and “sweat.”

If you like what you see, do yourself a favour and check out Dwyer’s newest band, Thee Oh Sees. “Newest” because they’ve only been around for six albums—albeit in different incarnations, under several different names (OCS, the Oh Sees, etc) with several different sounds. Formed in the wake of his more volatile commitments, Thee Oh Sees started as an extension of Dwyer’s softer side. Their early recordings were somber and beautiful. Last year, Thee Oh Sees made an unexpected turn, delivering their wildest, weirdest, hardestrocking record yet with The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In. Now Thee Oh Sees have followed it with an even wilder and more hard-rocking record, Help.

Recorded by Chris Woodhouse (the A-Frames, Mayyors), Help draws straight, dark lines to both the British psychedelic rock of bands like The Creation and the caveman thud of The Troggs while a Cramps-like appreciation for rockabilly lies not far below. The album weaves Dwyer’s signature AM radio howl with the catchiest of driving tunes, Brigid Dawson’s gorgeous harmonies, heightened fidelity, thick spring-reverbed bombast, mighty drums, and an undeniable pull.

The result is a sound somewhere beyond nostalgia, beyond the garage, beyond the fireside song and supposed goo-rock. Modern rock ’n’ roll records don’t come much better than this and Thee Oh Sees are one of the best bands going.

++OUT NOW++

THE STRANGE BOYS
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… and Girls Club
For Fans of: Rolling Stones, 13th Floor Elevators, Black Lips, White Stripes, Nuggets

Austin, TX’s The Strange Boys evoke a wild-eyed, porcelain skinned innocence that is capable of summoning the wayward spirit of Brian Jones. The mystery of the South couples with the mastery of rhythm to create a sound completely timeless and familiar, yet absolutely raw and avant-garde. Greg Enlow’s syncopated, organ-driven grooves hark back to The Seeds pushing too hard while guitarist Ryan Sambol’s voice wavers beyond comparison. Older brother Philip Sambol keeps the pulse with the aptly named Matt Hammer, who unmercifully pounds an old Ludwig set.

The Strange Boys began as a duo (Hammer and the younger Sambol) in 2003. The other two joined in 2005 and the band has been on tour non-stop ever since. Since 2003 the Boys have recorded a wealth of material which was passed around at shows and to friends, but never officially released. In 2007, Dusty Medical Records put out the Nothing EP, and in 2008, In The Red released the Woe Is You and Me single. Now, finally, the band’s proper debut album is seeing the light of day. It’s easy to imagine
The Strange Boys and Girls Club, a sixteen-track beast, blasting out of any stereo system between The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators and Wire’s Pink Flag.

The Strange Boys were the backing band for Mighty Hannibal (the ’50s R&B recording artist); were main support for Roky Erickson and the Explosives at the Chaos in Tejas festival; have played South by Southwest the last four years, the Fuck Yeah Fest the last three years, and Austin City Limits, Festival in Music Fest Northwest, and Bamalama (all in 2008); shared bills with Daniel Johnston, Black Lips, Reigning Sound, King Khan and BBQ, Jay Reatard, Mika Miko, No Age, and BRMC; have toured with The Black Angels, Fucked Up, The Carrots, and Crystal Antlers; and are about to go on tour with Darker My Love in the US.

THE HUNCHES
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Exit Dreams
File As: the real deal

The Hunches (Ben Spencer, Hart Gledhill Sarah Epstein and Chris Gunnare) – are Portland’s finest purveyors of cacophonous garage that chews you up and spits you out with such devastating hidden melody you are left wondering how they crammed such pop into the noise cavalcades. Having released two previous full-lengths – ‘Yes. No. Shut It’ (2002, ITR) and ‘Hobo Sunrise’ (2004, ITR), the band are back with ‘Exit Dreams’ their third album (and possibly final album!) that captures The Hunches’ fiery live form on wax once more

It’s a veritable melee of vicious guitar savagery and lo-fi freak-out fugginess. It’s the perfect follow-up to ‘Hobo Sunrise’ – a ragged-of-edge riot of a rock ‘n’ roll album that taps into the past to produce a blurry-eyed and stinging-eared present of bloody mouths and shot-to-shit synapses sizzling with amplified excess.

Not that ‘Exit Dreams’ is non-stop fury, a one-dimensional thrill. There’s much more to The Hunches than simple shock-and-more bombast. Across the course of twelve tracks, the outfit navigate styles known to explorers of under-the-radar rock from the pages of history, each time twisting the tried into forms best-fitting their singular focus. Lose-yourself intensity is stripped back to the bare bones of a perfect pop skeleton; crunched guitar chords shift their weight to turn sweet from beginnings most acerbic. Throughout, vocalist Gledhill plays preacher, teacher, lover, fighter – outpourings from a soul scorched painting over the lines of arrangements that rise to collapse upon themselves, that tumble only to return from the depths like a beastly behemoth royally pissed.

This is Birthday Party hijacking Big Star's 3rd and juicing adrenaline into their eyeballs; it’s the give-a-fuck Velvets getting loose and pissing off the neighbours while The Wipers chuck stones at their windows; it’s every great garage-rock record you’ve never heard in a single 41-minute sitting. It’s the top-up for the tinnitus that only just wore off some four years after the last time The Hunches rode through this town.

The idea that it’s better to burn out than fade away is a stupid one. Much better to set fire to everything around you and dance inside the encircling flames, facing your fate with a wicked grin. The Hunches might be departing us, but the four-piece are leaving with a bang sure to raze these walls to the ground.

Dance the dance of the destined to burn, and every second feels more vital than the last.

++ON TOUR++

VIVIAN GIRLS

14-May Brighton Jun po na na - Plan B Night
15-May Brighton Great Escape @Pavillion - Uncut Night
17-May London Brixton Windmill
18-May London 93 Feet East
19-May Birmingham Dragon Bar
20-May Manchester Ruby Lounge
21-May Glasgow Stereo
22-May Leeds Stag and Dagger Event @ Leeds Library
23-May Nottingham Dot to Dot Festival
24-May Bristol Dot to Dot Festival