Bombpops - Death In Venice Beach - VINYL LP

Midway through his long, earnest and often very, very funny essayon the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons in the September 2006issue of The Believer, writer Paul La Farge proposes that Dungeons &Dragons is not a game at all but rather a ritual. La Farge notes the marked difference between game and ritual.Whereas a game seeks to demonstrate how unequal or distinct players/teams are from one another, rituals seek to do the very opposite.InchRitual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse, for it brings about aunion,Inch La Farge writes, himself paraphrasing anthropologist ClaudeLevi-Strauss. InchOr in any case an organic relation between the initiallyseparate groups.Inch And so, across the 25-year history of Jagjaguwar, an independentrecord tag curiously named using a Dungeons & Dragons namegenerator, we find this idea of ritual as a conjoining practice. Wesee it early on when Jagjaguwar joins forces with a midwestern labelcalled Secretly Canadian for a powerful fusion. We see it in familialrelationships and collaboration among Jagjaguwar artists, and theways those artists' most treasured collaborators make their ways to theJagjaguwar game board. Join The Ritual, the third piece of Jagjaguwar's 25th Anniversarycelebration, looks to pay homage to the labels and artists that, whetherthey know it or not, invited Jagjaguwar to the table, to this wild, darkmagic ritual of music. We're talking about independent titans like DragCity, Too Pure, K Records and Touch & Go. We're talking about heroeslike R.E.M., Slint, Stereolab and Tracy Chapman. These songs capturedthe imaginations of our founders Darius Van Arman and Chris Swanson- and ultimately, opened up worlds to them.

L. Perosi - Passione Di Cristo Secondo San Marco [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/30/2007

Plastic death - the second album by Glass Beach - is a follow-up record almost five years in the making. The band's 2019 debut, aptly titled the first Glass Beach album, has over the years grown a cult fanbase for it's unflinching depiction of queer life as mediated through social media, it's oversized ambition, and it's scrappy yet adventurous production. And while it took some time to arrive, plastic death sounds like the logical expansion of all the things that made their first album so special. Years and years of relentless writing, tinkering demos, cancelled tours and a few lockdowns only strengthen the chaotic core of what makes Glass Beach's maximalist approach work so well. Frontperson and primary songwriter J McClendon is joined by lead guitarist Layne Smith, bassist Jonas Newhouse and drummer William White to create something adventurous on each song. Trumpet, trombone, violin, and even marimba dance and bloom alongside the band's own creative and dextrous instrumentation - a stunning, transformative creation that pulls from indie rock, jazz, prog, hardcore, metal, experimental, and beyond.Songs like lead single Inchthe CIA,Inch are examples of the band's ambitious writing. It's a dark, dancy, post-punk/jazz hybrid, a coordinated, breathless braid of synth and saturated guitar. Tension and confusion explode into a brutal modern metal climax to close the track, flickering with glitchy production zaps and razor-sharp stops. The artwork of plastic death is similarly rich with detail, resulting in a bioluminescent, fully-realized double album depicting sprawling scenes where moments of neon brightness shine momentarily in a dark undersea - a metaphor for the moments of optimism and catharsis Glass Beach provide on these songs.InchThis album is the Pacific garbage patch cultural trash strewn together seemingly by accident, standing in stark juxtaposition to each