Plain Spoken Music from Warm in the Wake

warm in the wake

Decatur, Georgia band Warm in the Wake have just released a new EP, Speak Plainly. Go to their website and you can pay what you want for it, Radiohead style, or you can give them five email addresses and get it for free. They’ll send an email to those people asking them to check out the music, and download it for themselves if they like it. If everybody gives them five email addresses, and those five give five more each, that quickly and exponentially turns into a humongous number–clever marketing, huh?

It wouldn’t matter much, of course, if the music wasn’t good–it is. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s great, the kind of mellow indie pop that’s easy on the ears yet sticky enough to be a recurring fixture on your iPod playlist. Like the late, great Antenna or Grant McLennan and the Go-Betweens, the band knows how to put across a simple melody without pushing it in your face.

“Explorer (Caving Day)” would be the ‘single’ if this were that kind of release, instead it will just be the song you put on ‘repeat’ the most. Besides, any tune that namechecks the Nantahala River is okay by me. Check it out for yourself here.

Every Day Is Like a Football Sunday

Surreal moment of the week, month, and maybe the year: I’m flipping between the NASCAR race and some NFL game (Houston vs. Jacksonville, I think) and on one of the outros going to commercial, the music playing over the NFL graphics was the Morrissey song, “Every Day is Like Sunday.” Not exactly a song I’d associate with big sweaty muscular men running into each other for large sums of money….

Since I’ve been humming the song all afternoon now, here’s the original video for the song, which appeared on the former Smiths singer’s debut solo album Viva Hate in 1988.

If you look it up on Wikipedia it already contains a reference to its usage by the NFL, so it seems I’m a little late to the surreal-ization, I suppose.

Punk Rock Lives in You, Me, and Us

Last week I had the opportunity to fill in on the air at WUSC-FM for the Police & Thieves show, which focuses on punk rock. The experience forced me to dip into a genre I haven’t spent much time with in recent years; the result was a fun, loud, and fast two hours. It reminded me of how great a well-constructed punk rock tune can be, whether it is pop-punk, hardcore, ska-punk, or any other of the countless subgenres that have sprung out of punk’s origins.

In a recent post here I extended an invitation for bands who are out there doing things their own way to get in touch, and several of you did. The best of the batch was Columbia’s You, Me, and Us, whose loud, fast tunes on their album The Beercan Rebellion remind me of 80′s luminaries such as Social Distortion. With punk, there’s a fine line between adding some melody to sweeten up the sound and going full-tilt into mallcore mediocrity–You, Me, and Us never get close enough to that boundary to worry about having too many preteen groupies. Instead, they concentrate on classic-sounding punk rock delivered with an appropriate sneer on songs such as, “Destroy Yourself.”

The tag on their Myspace page sums the band up pretty well: “It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s angry, and it’s over.”

You, Me, and Us Myspace

Myspace live video of “Black & Blue”
You, Me, and Us – Black & Blue (LIVE)

New Archival Material Posted

Check out the tabs up at the top of the page, I’ve come across a couple discs worth of old files dating back to 1995 that I’m going to put on those pages. The “1995″ tab is features and reviews, while the “The Beat” tab is a chronological archive (also beginning in 1995) of a column I used to write for Free Times. I’ll be putting more on–I found about two years worth of stories and columns from 1995 and 1996–so read, enjoy the trip back in time, and check it again soon.