UPHILL GARDENERS “5-6″ LP OUT NOW:

The Uphill Gardeners were a short-lived trio from the 1995-1997 era of Los Angeles. In the mid 90’s our friends started driving us to good shows at the Huntington Library, Jabberjaw, and early Smell in Los Angeles. We were blown away by bands like Los Cincos, Godzik Pink, and the band Uphill Gardeners. When we first started Kill Shaman we wanted to put these bands but were too late. One night, we talked about Uphill Gardeners with Jim (Smell owner and Olfactory Records) and he told us of unreleased Uphill Gardeners songs. We decided we should do a co-label release of these goods. TWO YEARS later…. here it is. Jarrett Silberman and Bobb Bruno contributed to many bands in this time period and since, notably Young People, Get Hustle, Liars, Polar Goldie Cats, For Carnation, Goliath Birdeater, and performing as solo artists. Drummer Nigel Ludemo was a film composer and drummer for Godzik Pink, another pivotal early Smell band. This LP is a collection of unreleased material that has an improvised sensibility that veers toward dark abstraction, but there’s actually a composed structure to most of it.

So besides that, it’s been a crazy month here with the release of the Night Control’s “Life Control” and The Feeling of Love’s “OK Judge Revival” records. I apologize if things have been showing up later than usual, but we’ve been busy. Lots of things are going out of print as well; Landed/Megafuckers 7″, Rodent Plague 7″, there are only about 50 Pink Noise “Graffiti Youth” LP’s left,  about 100 Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin “Reverse Shark Attack” LP’s left and so much more stuff slowly dissipating. Hell, the Feeling of Love LP well over half-way gone and the Night Control CD is too. All in a good couple of weeks.

Anyhow, on to the update. We’ve got a couple things in from AVANT! in Italy including a restock on the KRYSMOPOMPAS “GESA” B/W “VOLKER” 7″ that we had run out of so quickly. Also in from AVANT! is the VIRUS / DOTS SPLIT 7″ record from these two crazy Italian bands. Really cool stuff, and super limited.

New in from Enfant Terrible in the Netherlands is a great LP by Tobias Bernstrup called “1984″. Some really cool Cabaret Voltaire style 80’s synth mangling going on here. Also, restocks on Agent Side Grinders “Transatlantic Tape LP” and their “Irish Recording Tape LP”, both of which have been moving super fast and are limited to 500 or so copies. Last, but not at all least, we got the last remaining copies of San Francisco band Bronze’s debut release 7″. This one is a great Throbbing Gristle-type electronic mangle of joy. A must have.

Look out for the Kill Shaman reissue of Enfant Terrible’s LP from last year, Agent Side Grinder “Debut” LP. This is being mastered by Daniel Haworth of Bad Dudes / Hiking as we speak. We’re also finishing up the artwork for the Moles “Untune the Sky” 2XLP reissue due out in April. Yay!

The month of January brings us to brand new releases, each completely different from one-another and on different formats. First up is Night Control’s “Life Control” CD. The perfect follow-up to last year’s “Death Control”. It just made record of the week from our pals over at Aquarius Records, and here’s what they had to say:

The origin myth of Night Control is almost as fascinating as their music, it was explained in great detail in our review of the first Night Control record from a while back, but in a nutshell, Night Control was at one time called Crystal Shards, and that band released a whole mess of super limited cd-r’s, all amazing and tripped out and weirdly poppy, but before we could get our hands on any of those cd-r’s, the band resurfaced with a new name, Night Control, and a new record, Death Control, which cherry picked all the best songs from those impossible to find cd-r’s and voila, and all time aQ favorite, twisted, fractured outsider lo-fi pop, that managed to infuse hook filled classic sounding pop music, with all manner of rhythmic aberrations and sonic inconsistencies, transforming NC’s music into something truly original and transcendent.
So here we have what could be considered to be the first proper NEW Night Control record, and thankfully, all of the weirdness is fully intact, and the songwriting has seemingly grown by leaps and bounds, without sacrificing a bit of fuckedupness. So, just like Death Control was, it’s gotta be a Record Of The Week! Night Control’s sound is still firmly positioned amongst the current crop of warped lysergic lo-fi popsters: Ariel Pink, Gary War, John Maus, Ty Segall, Wavves, Blank Dogs, Kurt Vile, etc., but there’s just something about Night Control, that makes this music different. And special. Not better necessarily, although in some ways it definitely is, but just special, the songs are ramshackly, but fully formed, catchy as all get out, but laced with all manner of clatter, and squealing feedback, the vocals are generally buried, so sometimes the melody is more suggested than anything, but somehow all the woozy warped parts fall (im)perfectly into place, and yet again, Night Control has created a songsuite, that is at once warm and familiar, but also alien and abstract.
There’s no denying the fact that these songs are tighter, and more rocking, and it definitely sounds more like a real band, than a bedroom project, the opener “CS” is heartbreakingly good, warm and woozy and lush, drum machine, loping piano driven melody, big rich guitars, and a main vocal line that is so dreamy and melancholic and definitely harkens back to classic sixties pop a la The Zombies, but the record immediately changes gears, and “There’s A Chance” begins as a stumbling chaotic lurching kitchen sink pop workout, very New Zealand sounding actually, the drums are distorted and tangled, the vocals are processed and all wrapped up with streaks of high end and feedback, all under a blown out haze, making the song’s poppiness all the more subtle. “Take Apart” is super rocking, with actual burly guitar riffing, pounding drums, even some squirrely almost-leads, but it’s interspersed with some wheezing atonal organ, some detuned guitar squiggle, some surprisingly active rubbery basslines, and the whole thing is wrapped in a cloud of hiss and crumbling distortion. It’s like a Joe Meek track gone haywire.
And so it goes, the whole record veers from perfect pop to deconstructed lo-fi pop flecked weirdness, drums get blown out, vocals slip way up in the mix in a reverbed Lou Reed like sung spoken croon, guitars warble, chords jangle, rhythms are flipped backwards, fragments of songs are looped and layered, some tracks skip and skitter, you can hear someone push the stop button on the tape player, the ‘ka-chunk’ becoming part of the song, vocals pile on top of one another creating big lush, dense harmonies, long stretches of barely there sound drift and shimmer, like a pop song muted and melted into shimmery sonic strings, new wave collides with new age, classic rock stumbles into power pop, drum machine driven skitter explodes into druggy garage rock, hazy riffs coalesce into crystalline space rock, and on and on and on. The final track might just be the most beautiful, a nearly 8 minute stretch of processed guitars, all delicately intertwined, looped and layered, melodies and overtones surfacing and then fading into the background, notes pulse and throb, creating sort-of-rhythms, a little pop ambience, a little abstract Appalachia, warm and lush, the perfect rainy day dreamdrift, and a fitting way to finish off this perfectly imperfect record. One of our new favorites for sure.

On top of that, we have a new LP from France’s The Feeling of Love called “OK Judge Revival”. Brilliant post-punk blues stuff is spattered all over this awesome piece of black wax, limited to 500 copies and with amazing artwork, printed inner-sleeves, and awesome photos inside.

OK Judge Revival

Look for lots of more great stuff from us in the near future, namely:

1. The Uphill Gardeners Lost LP – Out in January. This is a split release between Kill Shaman and The Smell owner Jim’s record label, Olfactory Records. UG’s included members of Pink and Brown, Polar Goldie Cats, Best Coast, and so many more bands that came out of LA’s Smell scene in the mid to late -90’s.
2. Agent Side Grinder “S/T” CD – Out on Feb or March, and in association with Enfant Terrible in the NL, we are re-releasing ASG’s first album onto CD for a North American audience. This album is one of our absolute favorites from ET.
3. The Moles “Untune the Sky” 2XLP – Double LP release of this pop classic from our favorite Aussies. Seriously, the best pop of any day. They toured with Guided By Voices time after time and were loved by many. Great band.
4. Too many more to list, but we have most of the year planned out.