Just the sort of thing to shake up your winter blues:

transatmospheric.com/site/the-electric-cave/

HANDWITHLEGS return with an 8-track album of new songs, a fuzzy, fucked-up fusion of electronica, bad-ass drums, and distorted vocals, all fed back and forth across a floor of effects pedals. First track ‘NYA’ is arguably one of the finest tunes to have originated from Planet HWL, so give it a spin and see what you think. It’s free to hear and download, and only buttons on itunes.

So that’s where he’s been!

Having suitably blown everyone away with last year’s whirlwind ‘Exercises In Futility’, Bobby Rogan and THE Fig Mints are back with not one, but TWO records – ‘Say Okay’ and ‘Songs For My Friends & Those Girls’. ‘Say Okay’ has been at the mastering stage for quite some time, so I’ve already had a sneak preview and a review will follow. Needless to say it is very good and a little bit different from previous Figs. ‘Songs…’ on the other hand has fallen from the sky as unexpectedly as a tiny meteor and is available for free download over at CLLCT (links below). I’ve had a quick listen and have a feeling that this might be an under-the-radar gem in the ever-expanding catalogue. Here’s what Senor  Bobby has to say for himself:

Alright, everybody! At long last, there are new Figs tracks available for purchase and download, both from the music section of the site.

Say Okay is the culmination of a year of songwriting and ridiculously tedious mixing throughout 2010. It’s been done for nearly a year now, and finally after all the mixing, remixing and monetary hangups, we’re able to bring it to you for a measly 5 buxxx! Of course I think it’s worth more, but be honest: who’s gonna pay more than 5 bucks for a DIY CD-R, no matter how fancy it looks?

Well, if you just said, “Why, I’d most certainly pay more than 5 dollars for your new songs, but thank you for being such a cheap date,” then I’ve got some news for ya. If you can scare up some more scratch, go to my Band Camp page here and buy the download with the option to donate a little more to the cause. Of course, you’ll still get the real CD in the mail; just make sure you drop a line and let me know where to send it!

Songs For My Friends And Those Girls is the newest of the new, and was written in a month or so between November and December of 2010. Not much time spent behind the wheel of this one; it mostly just spilled out of the various wounds that this past winter has inflicted, which are just now starting to heal. Read all about it at the Figs’ cllct page and download it for free in the music section.

This will be the Fig Mints farewell to cassettes and tape machines as the main recording tools. Of course, there will still be some lo-fi one offs and the like, including the upcoming releases of the two soundtracks for Zombek films that were recorded over the past couple years, but for the most part we’re going big!

So make sure you mosey on over to the music section of the site and scoop up some quality tunes for your summer.

Stay tuned, kiddies!

Download ‘Sweet Home Suite’ here: http://cozyhomerecords.com/08/artists/cashew-cook/

Back on the horse so let’s start at the shallow end and see if we can still swim in the lake by revisiting this old and somewhat tasty cashew nut: Cashew Cook’s ‘Sweet Home Suite’. Written and recorded in 2006, and available as a free download from Cozy Home Records, this has always been one of my favourite musical offerings from Henry Street. As soulful and humming as home recordings can get, you can just about hear the birds squabbling in the forest trees and feel the floorboards creaking beneath your bare toes while it plays. Think easy-listening for Thoreau’s great-grandchildren: acoustics and 12-strings on the porch, banjos and bottles of home brew, with a strong bright voice a million miles removed from the super-self-conscious urban consumer-kid that most of us can’t help but become when we’re not paying attention.

Jam-packed with brilliant song-writing on tracks like ‘Morning Son’ (yeah, thanks everyone for pointing out my misspelling of that one for the last three and a half years), ‘Feeling Can Remind Us’, and ‘Into The Day’, it’s never too late to go back and revisit a record that is a rolling stone of a hit in an alternative universe where substance beats style, and expression trumps pretence. Cashew Cook embodies the idea of the free-thinking songsmith, turning his back on the internet several years ago to go and be with real people and have real experiences – commendable, if a loss to the virtual community. Talk of a follow-up in 2007 never materialised into anything tangible, so for those of us who own an original CD with its handmade bark cover, and those of you who have already accidentally stumbled over this, we’re just going to have to make do with revisiting and mellowly chewing over these songs every so often, much to the universal heart’s content. For those of you yet to discover this long lost gem – well, what are you waiting for?

Listen to ‘Morning Son’:

Download audio file (CashewCook-MorningSon.mp3)

Find out more about Cashew Cook at:

http://www.myspace.com/cashewcook

A bored and drunk Bobby Rogan plays this timeless classic from his last record ‘Exercises In Futility’, and also good old Daydream Generation 1.

Fig Mints have loads of good stuff on their site including a video for shiny new song ‘What Happened To Holiday?’ – go show some love to the little guy at:

www.thefigmints.com

(*never underestimate your own popularity, dig?)

Download it for FREE today

here

Listen to SET YOUR SENSES FREE from THE REAL BURNOUTS “Copious Maximus”:

Download audio file (TheRealBurnouts-SetYourSensesFree.mp3)

I was recently asked to list my five favourite bands of all time and quickly reeled them off – The Stone Roses, The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, The Beach Boys, and The Real Burnouts. Most of you will have heard of the first four, but not so many of you will be aware of the fifth. I mean this list sincerely, and include The Real Burnouts not for gimmick, nor for some kind of pretentious alternative musical one-upmanship, but simply because each of them at some stage have made music that changed my life. If The Roses ripped my head open with their indie anthems and The Beatles saved my brain with a song-writing masterclass, if The V.U took me somewhere dark I never knew existed, and The Beach Boys showed me the stratospheric heights that melody and harmony can reach, then The Burnouts showed me that there was a whole other world to discover, beyond the radio stations and shiny music magazines, happening on the bedroom floors and in the secret basements of the universe. This experimental and reassuringly original psychedelic band from Utica, New York, made music sound alive again by kicking down the doors of possibility in their grotesque painted masks and goofy hipster clothes, with twisted words and unpredictable tunes. From the first time I heard their druggy anthem “Set Your Senses Free” (as revalationary as  experiencing mind-altering psychedelics for the first time) I pretty quickly discovered that nothing was what I’d always assumed it had been, and nothing could ever be the same again. It really is an epiphany to discover that the songs and sounds that actually matter the most are rarely on the radio or television, nor do they frequent the shelves of your local independent music store, or get magically handed to you when you least expect it. The music that actually matters you’ve got to go out and find for yourself.

Whether any of us like it or not, a revolution has smashed through the heart of the music industry at the turn of the 21st century. The tidal wave of recording technology is as important a change for creative culture as the youth revolution of the 1950s were. Now it is possible to cut out the corporate middle man and go straight for the jugular of open ears. Now, the budget-less bedroom bound songwriter can record their ideas and share them with an audience on the other side of the globe within a matter of minutes. Now, the means of production in the form of four-tracks and software programmes are affordable (even free) to anyone who has something to sing about. You can design your own covers, sell downloads, or mail your own CDs. You may not make a living from it, but even in that there is a purity, honesty, and fire in the DIY recordings of this generation. Undoubtedly there always has been, but never before have we been able to capture and share it with each other so easily. I can’t speak for you, but I know myself whose thoughts and experiences I’d choose to listen to if it came to a choice between the decadent rock-star writing from a air-conditioned tour bus that eventually stops at some clinical beach-house, or the people like us who struggle and sometimes succeed, who try to make sense of the world around us from the battle-scarred terrain that is the front-line of actuality. The Real Burnouts in that sense are perhaps fortunate to find themselves in the thick of the wave that finally broke the dam, because this is the kind of band that record company executives could lose a lot of sleep over. As well as being musically brilliant, they can also be frighteningly different (the first time I heard their name mentioned on an internet forum, someone wrote “The Real Burnouts scare me”), and even to this day I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment. These guys are the unwitting pioneers of a time when Lo-Fi became not just the preserve of the sixties garage band, but a movement in its own right. They were there as wasted teenagers trading home-made cassettes on the streets of Utica in the mid-90s, and although the recordings are infinitely more sophisticated, it is still the same principle over a decade later – just a much bigger street. With podcasts and collectives, social networking sites and rapidly shifting advances that cater directly to how the artist wants to be heard rather than how the corporation wants to package a commodity, it is hard to see this revolution failing. The death knell of the vacuous celebrity has been well and truly sounded, and though the world can’t hear it yet, the heroes of a tomorrow a long way from today, will not be pretty poster puppet youths with fuck all to say, or winners of talent shows regurgitating elevator music. The heroes will be bands exactly like The Real Burnouts.

I’ve pestered the creative driving force (Paul Burnout) for the last couple of years to put a record like “Copious Maximus” together. There’s a Utican cardboard box in my bedroom containing every available Burnout record to date (most of these are available through the brilliant little Cozy Home Records). It’s a gargantuan back catalogue – from the twin giants that are “You Won’t Know Until You Find Out” and “Transparent Mirror”, through early offerings with wonderful names like “The Penis and Vagina Syndrome”, or “It’s Not All Hot Chocolate”, right through to the insanely magical “A Lull In Void”, and more recently the subtle and relatively melancholy “Post-Show, Post-Traumatic, Ultimate Mundane”, and “(In) A World Not Unlike Your Own”. With a bit of searching, a few clicks of a mouse, a well-intentioned word to the right people or a little loose change, anyone who digs this band as much as I do shouldn’t find it difficult to assemble the entire collection. The things is, that the first time I ripped through the records back to back I was struck by how many Burnouts songs were missing from them. Tracks like the aforementioned “Set Your Senses Free”, or the spiky psych-punk “Girl You’re The One For Me”, the goofy pop of “Psychological Sacrifice”, sixties-tinged anthems like “Be Right Where You Belong” and “Whenever Will I See You There?”, even the more off-the-wall efforts like the spoken “Wild Sarsaparilla” – all of them seemed to be curiously missing in action. If anything, the scale of lost tracks is perhaps testament to the band’s prolificness – barely a year goes by without a new offering, and a natural consequence of this is that some songs get left behind, fall by the wayside, or just about vanish into the aether forever. Paul himself explained where they’d gone – “to me they were all bits and pieces that didn’t quite fit on albums, and others, to me, were too good compared to other songs on albums to be used”.

Two years of pestering later and here they all are. A 34 track collection of the finest and strangest Real Burnouts recordings that didn’t make it onto the records, hand-picked from the cutting room floor. “Copious Maximus” is lo-fi home pop’s accidental answer to “The White Album”. A coherent collection of songs recorded over four years of arguably “golden age” Burnouts, like a jigsaw of several puzzles that mysteriously piece together. The psychedelic riotry of the band format (all your favourite Burnouts are represented – Luke, Bobby, Katie, Dustin, and Pat) goes hand in hand with the more introspective poetic ramblings. Alternative versions, collide with undoubted hits, drums and synthesisers burst into flame, and everybody wakes up the morning after wondering what the fuck has just happened. Don’t get me wrong – this music isn’t for everyone. It isn’t always obvious, and if you don’t get it the first time around, then chances are that no amount of working at it is ever going to get you there. But for those of you like me, who have been blown away by the honesty, originality, and pure experimental expressiveness of this band in the past, then this is a must have recording. Forty years ago today The Beatles released “Abbey Road” and just about everyone knows it. Forty years from now the chances are that The Real Burnouts will still be a cult group beyond the periphery of the canonized musical pantheon. The great records of our generation are like fleeting gems that flare for a short while before burning out in your brain, to be discovered many years later in tattered old Utican cardboard boxes. So dig well before it burns out.

Smally, 17th August 2009

Find out more about The Real Burnouts at: www.therealburnouts.com

Get more Burnouts recordings here: www.cozyhomerecords.com

www.therealburnouts.com

Why not take some time out of your busy lives and click on the link above? Disappear down the rabbit hole of The Real Burnout’s universe, with news about a shiny new record – (IN) A WORLD NOT UNLIKE YOUR OWN – videos, words, pictures, and the expected unexpected, you’ll be reluctant to ever climb back out again.

Jon of the Atom kindly takes time out from his action-filled secret life as a musical superhero and tells us all about the latest great offering from DEAD CANARIES – “Something Else” (FREE to download from your cheap and spookily cheerful QUIXODELIC RECORD STORE above).

The lion’s share of this album was down when I decided to write and record a song a day, hoping that after a couple months, I’d have enough songs to point a stick at.  I was in a lull.  I had started I Do Not Currently Own A Spaniard against my will, but was glad I had done it, however the comfort of finishing Critical Mass was gone.  So I had nothing to write and no comfort in that.  Something Else also contains a couple orphan songs that were too good to let go of.  Like “Song For #6” may have been the first song.  The title came from the fact that there is always something else.  This album is no exception to the fact that I have a muse and cannot escape from writing about her; it is in fact something else.  Even Critical Mass was done in an effort to not write about her. 

1. Going For A Ride Today- This song was much longer, but it bugged me.  I cut it down after a fall out with the person it was about.  It works better and builds up the cycling element.  Also, there were 2 other songs that were based around Elvis and Roy Orbison that were cut, leaving “Black Hole” to sound out of place!  Go discord!
2. My Pump Caught In My Trouser Leg- A part of the original Going from a Ride that sounded better on it’s own, and the segue is a calliope from Yankee Stadium, the last Boston/ New York game in the old stadium.  Not an important fact, just that’s where it’s from.
3. Something Else- A friend called during recording of one of the clarinets, and the song starts with her message.  The faulty bass wiring can be heard through out, but it sounds good.  The opening verses lyrics were recorded at Bus Stop Studio in Liverpool NY.  The song is little more than it sounds.  It’s to the point.  I was told that everyone has this moment about someone.  Dan came and put down the drums last minute and made the song.
4. Shortest Hour of the Day- This was a cover of a song written by Paul Burnout and Smally Wheelies, however, I had the song so long that I for got to note that!  I don’t think they’d mind.  The lovely Chelsea Hogan put her pipes on this one, thank god.  It would be a different song.  This was another orphan that needed a proper home.
5. Song For #6- The music for this song was written why watching The Prisoner so I named it for #6.  My myspace said, “Who is #1” for a while, but that means something else these days (there it was again!).  The lyrics were inspired by Smally’s original try at writing lyrics for the song.  He ended up having written the first line, then I took over by placing photos in place of paintings and something else took over.
6. Kim’s Unfinished Ride Home- A woman from Maine demanded, “Write a song for me!” and I did.  I don’t think she ever heard it.  It took me awhile to decide it was in fact finished, but the title meant something else too.  There’s a Simpsons quote at the end of the song, and that’s a clue as to what the title means.
7. Doli Lemon- Rob Levy wrote a song we called Doli Lemon, it was really titled Dilemma, and so I wrote a song that was supposed to be about the Doli Lemon, only I ended up not liking it so much rather quickly.  Meghan Geiss recorded the Drums around the time of The New Wave Dirt’s Elephant’s Tap Dance Recital, so I wrote a new song around them.  I prefer this one, but time will tell. 
8. Something- This song was I believe the official first for Something Else.  I recorded into a dictation machine from the 70’s and wrote it down later.  I didn’t write the last line but Katie (beautiful voice heard on this song) pointed out that it sounded like “Plastic Jesus” so she wrote the last line.  This might be the best song I ever written.  It is about moving on and being positive.
9. Nothing Else- Conversely, this is the regression into old habits.  This song was inspired by, but not about, riding passed a friend’s home and ringing my imaginary bicycle bell.  I had the music from “My Pump Caught…” and thought I’d write the song over that, but forgot that the music was sad and a bit unpleasant, the improvised lyrics, recorded on my camera while I recorded the main guitar, are unpleasant as well.
10. Vindaloo Was Her Name- Vindaloo has become my favorite Indian food and there is a song by the Pussy Willows that they sing, “Vindaloo was her name, she will never dance again”.  I had a crazy dream that I would learn to play the oboe well enough to put down a lead part, but luckily gifted saxophonist (Colin Gordon) was right next door one day and he did it for me.
11. Never Tinker With The Gear Shifter- was done to put in an apothecary box and when you opened a drawer it played.  Charity Burger asked me to create music for her art, it fit in the box pretty well.
12. Tim’s Banjo Story- Tim Kotch asked me to work on a song that he said he might not use.  I finished it, he didn’t want it.  Right before I finished Something Else Tim asked for the song, and it was interweaved in the other songs, so I just made a new version for The Hoborchestra.
13. How & When- A Tim Kotch song, one of my favorites, if I had to choose, which I can’t!  Katie Saul again sings and Dan finished it up for me.
14. Nothing- This song was on my enemies list for most of the production, I’m not sure if I like it even now.  I had a dream that I was in a hospital bed and I was waking up and there was a Beatles song playing, not a real Beatles song, but John Lennon was singing.  Then George came on and the music dropped out and his voice got really echo-y, like Paul in “Lovely Rita” and George sang “less stuff from the stores, less stuff for your drawers.” 
15. Who Knew? – Total frustration over wanting and hoping.  Longing and pining.  I was trying to write a Townshend, but the only the Who-ish about this song is the title.
16. Black Hole- I wrote this song in 1996 and the original out version of this album it worked better, but it was the perfect ending and couldn’t be compromised by bullshit.  The refrain at the end is “Something Else” with out the vocals, fuzz bass or noise.  If I had known…

DEAD CANARIES

Something Else

DOWNLOAD IT FROM THE QUIXODELIC RECORD STORE FOR FREE: here

Full tracklisting:

1 Going For A Ride

2 The Pump Got Caught In My Trouser Leg

3 Something Else

4 The Shortest Hour of the Day

5 Song For #6

6 Kim’s Unfinished Ride Home

7 Doli Lemon

8 Something

9 Nothing Else

10Vindaloo Was Her Name

11 Don’t Mess With The Gear Box So Far From Home

12 Tim’s Bajo Story

13 The Hoborchestra’s How & When

14 Nothing

15 Who Knew?

16 Black Hole

(C) + (P) Dead Canaries

A Cozy Home Record, 2009

This much anticipated follow-up to 2008′s brilliant “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things” is available to download from today from our little musical curiosity shop. “Something Else” has been available for a couple of months over at Cozy Home Records, but we know how pressed for time your average surfer-collector is, and this record is that great that we collectively decided to host it here as well. I’ll save babbling on about it here and instead just post a review I wrote a while back for a magazine we just couldn’t get off the ground:

I guess you’d have to live with and probably even sleep with the new offering from Dead Canaries for a month before passing serious judgement on it. But as it happens I don’t have a month, and even if I did I want so badly to stand in its corner and shout about how great it is after only a handful of listens, that I don’t think I could wait that long. It was with the same excitement that I bought the long-awaited second Stone Roses album that I eagerly followed the breadcrumbs back to the Cozy Home record store where the second Dead Canaries record “Something Else” was waiting for free download. It never even crossed my mind that I’d be as disappointed as I was when I first heard “The Second Coming”, simply because Jon of the Atom and his musical friends seem to have been chemically inoculated from making a bad record. From The New Wave Dirt to JOTA solo projects and onto last year’s critically-acclaimed underground Dead Canaries debut “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things”, it’s been an upwards audio trajectory, conversely going irretrievably deeper into the rabbit hole of musical possibility. Whoever said that there is nowhere original for guitar music to go has obviously not been fortunate enough to stumble over the same  aforementioned breadcrumbs.

Smallie Wheelies

& Paul Burnout.

The first time I finished listening to My Own Personal Summer of Love, I said to myself, “This is not an album made by experts.”

The second time I listened to it, I realized, “No, it is an album made by people.” And right then, I realized it was exactly what I wanted.

With each additional turn in my CD player, I love the recording even more – In no short part for the emotional weight it carries. The songs are saturated with sorrows, but not dour. At best, they are reflections of change and mental struggle – the gentle, restive ballad ‘Delphi’ involves the suicide of a friend, ‘Raskolnikov’ personifies living clouds of dark dream in terms of Dostoyevsky’s greats, and ‘What A Waste’ (my personal favorite) sings like a deliberate, majestic march to the grave. The rolling, repetitive songs wash a full polyphony of phrases over the listener; each wave punctuated with that familiar, reedy, Scottish tang. After a while, it’s hard not to sing along.

At times the rhythms are truly spectacular (see ‘Casablanca’) as underwritten by Paul’s steady and expressive drumming. Every tune has a different texture: the stage-setter, ‘At The Bus Stop’ is laced with tinkly bells, and ‘Elephant Teapot’ fizzes like a wind-up toy turning circles. As is to be expected from a Personal Summer of Love, some of the songs (mainly ‘Animals’ and ’66’) channel a throwback, psychedelic vibe – chock full of fuzzy guitars and antiphonal, echoing harmonies. Though it’s apparent that the musicians have a deep respect for The Sixties, it is also true that they relive the standards of the decade in a starker, worried light. In the title track, Smallie sings, “It was the summer of love and I was so broke I walked everywhere and the world was weight on my mind so I cut my hair.” If Love is all The Painted Shuts need, then they certainly seem wary of it.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this album, in reflection, captures the present as well. The dream-like fog of the recordings makes it easy to overlook the emotional significance and immediacy they contain.

This is new psychedelics.

In other words, it’s a problem concerning bread.

The taste and texture of homemade bread may be shocking after eating bleach-white pre-sliced for your whole life, but the homemade deliciousness of this album is beautifully strange enough to make anybody come back for a second helping. The joy of small imperfections and raw, real emotion contained in each earful is truly sustaining. And, maybe, just maybe, this catchy revolution will rip through your brain.

Simon Piler

Seriously, just do yourself a favor and download this album from Cozy Home Records, already!

www.cozyhomerecords.com

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”

- Eugene Delacroix

The boundaries of home recording equipment have been removed for quite some time. Long gone are the days of four-track cassette machines and bouncing; the art of scotch-tape over the protection tabs on Michael Bolton tapes given as gifts from far removed relatives because the store was closed seems almost lost. Digital interface, non-destructive editing, primitive pitch correction, and a galaxy of on-board effects at “reasonably affordable” prices makes analog craft boxes seem archaic and knucklish. The mix tape is gone, the mp3 era as arrived, and the wake created a great wind that set the lo-fi dream ship to sail into the great abyss we call “The Island of Forgotten Toys.”

Or so it was thought.

The latter half of this decade has seen a rejection of this silly idea. While digital recording is nifty and allows for a palette far beyond the capacity or need of many modern musicians, its missing the charm, the soul of tape hiss and natural distortion, the blood of bobbles in the takes, the mistakes that make a song human, the warmth that makes a song honest. This is not necessarily a new idea. Guided By Voices did it way before anyone thought is was cool. Lately bands the likes of the Black Lips and Wavves have been poking out of the mire and grabbing the affections of many purists and old-schoolers. For every group noticed for doing something “new” there always lies a subculture that understands the principles as well or better than the flagships that give it awareness. Fig Mints (of Your Imagination) is a shining example of a band that not only has had a solid grasp of this new ‘old’ sound, but have been at it for several years, culminating to this record, “Exercises in Futility”. It’s from this frame of reference the title is apt.

On the surface this album is unbridled and unkempt. Things are slightly out of tune or minutely out of key. Instruments are pegged and microphones are flattened out by the immensity of the sounds that pummel them. This is the future, ladies and gentlemen. Like track 2, A Change of Season, this record is the sonic equivalent of skipping class with your friends and mocking the world as it toils around you. Its unbounded and focused, yet is fenced by morals and codes that culture seemed hasty to forget. These songs call for normalcy in the midst of hurry, with the understanding that often the express route to normalcy can include a level of self-medication, most clearly represented in the opening track, The Well-Worn Road. What may be most striking about that particular song as well as the rest of the record is its consciousness. The Fig Mints are well aware of what they’re doing, much to our benefit. We are all entrenched in a field of voices, and “Exercises in Futility” sets up camp and is perfectly content to stay where it is and wave to the passing cars.

This is not a complicated record. The songs are ushered and unrelenting, moving like freight in the night. Guitars are towing ever further, yet are not overpowering. Even the solos are conservative and well shaped while commanding and necessary. The understated and restrained rhythm section plants its grooves like furrows in black soil, emerging from its toil to bomb the universe into bending at its every whim. All the while the vocals talk you through, calming and inciting, and always in the drivers seat. The range of the album is great, yet cohesive. Its tantric nature easily takes the mood from darkly introspective (Strung Out Sentries) to warmly reflective (the Stooges-esque My Days At University). The movement of the record as a whole resembles the behavior of a house party. At first all talk is intimate and the ideas are big, the songs are pointed and relaxed, often without drums. As the room fills up, songs like Undead Idea Mines convey a letting go, an acceptance of our own weirdness and the weirdness of others. Further down the line, as the room gets looser, the vibe descends into a lo-fi fuzz fest of whirl and rock and roll, particularly with Don’t Stay There and Its All I Can Do (To Stay Awake).

Down and dirty Ariel Pink kids will love this record. Black-shirted rock kids will love this record. Literate post-secondary astronauts that have learned to enjoy poverty will love this record. “Exercises in Futility” is eerily relevant and strongly appropriate for its time and season.

Wilford Benevolus
Junior Rock Analyst and Amateur Spokesperson for the League of American Wheelmen, Intl.

For more info on “Excercises In Futility” go to: www.cozyhomerecords.com

Out Now!

Here it is! Two years, two states, one retrospective outtakes EP, and five relocations after “Hugs and Smiles” hit the virtual shelves, Fig Mints are back with “Exercises In Futility”!

At the moment, the album is available only through mail orders for $8. Suffice to say, it’s worth it. The songs are his best yet, and it’s been reported that Bobby is only interested in breaking even with the money that he spent putting it out, so show some love and email bobby@cozyhomerecords.com for info on how to buy a copy, or just send your name and address with the payment to:

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION)

Fig Mints is the brainchild of Bobby Rogan (real name “Pinky”), a band name that he flippantly coined to make fun of himself recording without a band, and he’s been reluctantly stuck with ever since (“I had this idea to mix instrumental versions of my songs and do a self-styled karaoke with each “band member” having a part in the act that was prerecorded and very self-deprecating”). Unofficially coming into existence in the Spring of 2004 after moving into the actual Cozy Home on Henry Street, Utica NY – Bobby was inspired by the music and madness of that “scene” to start recording the songs he’d been writing, teaching himself how to play the drums and bass, and attempting to write lyrics “that weren’t sappy”. The last four years have been productive with 5 official Fig Mints full-length records recorded on 100% analogue cassette (“Tascam 488 all the way, baby”) being released through Cozy Home Records – How’dyer Day Go? (2004), Enjoy It While You Can (2005), Bad Choice Brigade (2006), Is It Today Already? (2006), and Hugs & Smiles (2007). All 5 records are available for free download at www.cozyhomerecords.com More recently Fig Mints released “The Passionate Understanding” via our own Quixodelic Records, a 7-song collection of unreleased tracks recorded between 1999 and 2005.

Over the years, Bobby has honed a very distinctive style combining elements of indie guitar pop, experimental punk, and American psychedelics – a style that he frequently attempts to break free from but thankfully never does, describing it as sounding like “someone trying to sound like Guided By Voices but failing miserably”. Quirky intelligent lyrics combined with this spikey and sometimes fragile pop-punk sound have become trademarks of Fig Mints recordings, influenced initially by like likes of Sonic Youth and Nirvana, and latterly by Bob Pollard, The Jesus & Mary Chain, and Syd Barrett.

Although the majority of Fig Mints recordings are written, recorded and produced exclusively by Bobby for live shows he often enlists the help of several Cozy Home crew members including Paul, Luke and Dusty from The Real Burnouts, as well as Jenny Penny, Cashew Cook, and J. Schnitt. Likewise Artie Lester, Paul or Dusty Burnout and Jenny Penny have helped on the records “when I needed an extra bit of something”. As one of the accidental driving forces behind Cozy Home Records over the last 5 years Bobby has frequently been involved in writing, producing, and playing with a seemingly neverending list of bands and deviants such as The Real Burnouts, The Fucking Flame, Pinky Stink’s Problem, The Chesterfield Medical Experiment, The Utica Flower Company (et al.), and Travel Labyrinth.

After a relatively short and perhaps unproductive spell on the road, Figs is in the process of relocating back to his Utica roots where it is fully expected that at the very least he will continue writing ”a song a month” and complete the most recent record he has been working on. There appears to be no definitive plans for either the immediate or long-term future of Fig Mints other than “to make music until I run out of ideas. Hopefully I die before that happens, cos I’d be bored to death otherwise” – how can you not dig an attitude like that?

Find out more about Fig Mints (Of Your Imagination) at:

www.myspace.com/figmints or www.cozyhomerecords.com

Out Today!

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION)

The Passionate Misunderstanding

In association with our brothers & sisters & weird cousins twice removed at www.cozyhomerecords.com we’re grinning to present a seven-song slice of history available to download at your free & easy Quixodelic Record store right now so you can hear how it all began…

JUST CLICK ON THE STORE LINK AT THE TOP OF THIS SITE

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION)

The Passionate Misunderstanding

If record reviews were personality contests then anything from Fig Mint HQ would be greeted like a long-lost Beatles album, recorded in a sunkissed LSD-obliterated Bermuda triangle of a fortnight in the summer of 1967. And on the Quixodelic underground “The Passionate Misunderstanding” should be afforded the same treatment… roll out the red carpet, download it for free, make a little space in your life, hang onto your headphones and disappear down a tunnel of time, way back to before it even started. But we all know it doesn’t work like that – the old cliche about good guys finishing last was seemingly written about songwriters like Robert Richard Rogan, the brains behind a name that began as a piss-take of himself, but stuck for the best part of a decade thereafter. The truth is, if there is a red carpet then it’s a ragged one – beer & vomit stained, threadbare in places, half-rolled up in a stinking backstreet of urban America. And yet, like a resplendant punk beatnik guitar-wielding troubadour, if you peer through the darkness of your own head, you can vaguely make out the silhouette of “Pinky” staggering bottle in hand on the carpet’s remains, perpetually flying beneath the radar. Perhaps more than anything, the reason I love Fig Mints records is the way it deals with the desolation and confusion of just being here through the songs, through the tangled guitar riffs, with bittersweet and comical words that you instantly recognise as the universal badge of intelligent bewilderment.

“The Passionate Misunderstanding” is something for the curiosity collector inside us all, documenting a time pre-Figs, when the music was nameless, and finding it’s feet while trying not to drop the bottle. 7 tracks ripped from almost-forgotten spools of tape recorded between 1999 and 2005, it is as raw and ragged as the carpet I’m imagining it walks down, but for anyone who has been lucky enough to catch any official Fig Mints records released in the last 5 years, it is well worth your attention. Make no mistake – if you want an introduction to Bobby Rogan’s particular brand of music, then head over to www.cozyhomerecords.com where you can download the brilliant “Bad Choice Brigade” or the equally impressive and most recent recording “Hugs & Smiles” for free. But if like me, you’re wondering how it all began, or simply just wanting some more Fig Mints on your iPod then “Misunderstanding” intentionally misses the spot and rolls off down the road behind you.

“The Passionate Misunderstanding” kicks off with the prototypical Fig Mints “War In Space”. There is an umistakeable sound that runs through the veins of any Figs records – like a compass of pop, punk, indie rock, and experimental folk with a needle that spasmodically wheels around the face, stopping for a moment here, before wheeling around to there. Reassuringly, you never know exactly what you’re going to get next, but at the same time you know that it’s going to be somewhere on that compass face. What I think I’m trying to say here is a Fig Mints record without a “War In Space” wouldn’t be a Fig Mints record. Think punk-pop. Or pop-punk. And smile at simply neat lines like “Of all the human race you’re the only one that I would like to save…” while you’re thinking. 

Next stop for the needle is the distinctly lo-fi “Front Porch-Cars Passing”, a dual acoustic recording that is exactly what is says it is – an experimental few minutes of instrumental guitar lines, switching between grungey chords and atmospheric folk licks all the while the Utican traffic rumbling by in lo-fi space. It sounds as chaotic and unplanned as a jazz trumpeter, and gets better and better with every passing second until it closes on a curious bar of seemingly accordian-esque notes. “Misunderstanding” is mathematically heavy on the non-vocal side with a whopping 43% of it being music only – but the other two instrumentals are perhaps two of the high points. “Light 100s” is my current favourite track of the 7, verging on atmospheric psychedelic rock it takes a riff and runs with it building in a crescendo of frenzied guitar squalls, whereas in stark contrast “Requiem For My Puppy Dog” is a breezy little electro/acoustic ditty hinting at the direction of jingle-jangle folk-pop that comprises some of Fig Mints finest later recordings. The instrumental side of this record is really no surprise if you join the dots and trace the development from musician/guitarist discovering and finding their way as a singer/songwriter, and frames a curious glimpse at such a transition. That perhaps the most endearing quality of more recent recordings (the lyrical connection of the words) is absent for much of “Misunderstanding” in the context of this record being such a snapshot, is forgiveable, and actually pretty damn enjoyable.

The record is made up with “What A Day” (the most recognisably Fig Mints track on the record – a chugging acoustic/electric drawl, with a catchy melody, Beck-esque in its delivery), “My Dreams Are Boring” (more of the same, an electric beat and a deadpan delivery that pulsates with digitalised “oohs” and “ahs” like tiny insects), and closing track “They’ll Be Here Soon (Full Moon)”. As a record closer it’s worth the admission price alone – oh shit, yeah it’s free – well, if there was an admission price then that track would be worth it. Here comes the sound of a recognisably Utica-style experimental madness – backwards guitars, tapes fizzing, voices screaming inexplicables (did I just hear someone yelling something about “dodgy ball”?). It is the soundtrack of mispent, beautiful hallucinogenic youth – too many drugs, too much drink, too much thought, much hilarity, alive and prickling with the electric NOWNESS of it, like listening to your own worst nightmare and waking up many years later to find out someone actually recorded it on the other side of the world.

So there you have it. “The Passionate Misunderstanding” is the sound of the artist stretching on the start-line before taking off on a neverending sprint to a finishing line nobody knows exists. If anything, it’s a timely and slightly eccentric reminder of why you can’t wait for the next chapter from a songwriter who is producing “one song a month” in a blacked-out bedroom somewhere, getting on with it, goofing with friends when he can, slowly digesting the absurd world he inhabits so that he can later regurgitate it in the shape of songs and observations, with great guitars and drums to keep it simple, and give it momentum. Beyond that it’s a neat and strange little record in its own right, with a compass needle that goes haywire pulling recordings that never found a place to be from spools of tape and pasting them together on the cutting floor of hindsight. The silhouette is singing to you, an upstairs window opens and someone hurls a slipper down into the street below with a shower of insults concerning time – but what does the silhouette care… the tune he is drunkly trying to whistle is timeless and the red carpet rolls out in the shadows beneath his feet. Long may the carpet keep rolling.

You can download “The Passionate Misunderstanding” from the Quixodelic STORE link at the top of this site FOR FREE

Or find out more about FIG MINTS at: www.myspace.com/figmints

Well the likelihood of anyone ever being interested enough in The Wheelies to interview us is slim to non-existent, so I figured as a vain and probably pointless alternative  I’d talk to myself about the songs that make up the most recent (and most complete) of a long, long line of retrospectives…

1 KEEP MOVING This was the opening song on the “Cosmonaut” album, originally intended as a solo album for the failed Cozy Home box-set “The Troof Above Your Head” – where I’d deliberately instigated a challenge to my fellow Cozy Homers to write and record a full-length album so that all of them could be simultaneously released on Christmas Morning 2006. At this point I was spending a lot of time looking after my two year old son and sometimes I’d play him really simple childlike melodies on the keyboard so as we could dance around the  living room. So originally “Keep Moving” was an instrumental joke song until one afternoon while dancing around with the little guy on my shoulders I started to sing “A finger, a thumb, an arm, a leg, a nod of the head keep moving” along with the music. I guess this itself is a by-product of watching a lot of kid’s television that winter. The idea of “Cosmonaut” was that it was going to be a concept record around Alexander Trocchi’s idea of “the cosmonaut of inner space”, so I twisted the lyrics to suit. At a primitive level it’s about moving through this inner space in circles based on Nietschze’s concept that “All life is a circle therefore it is the going there not the getting there that counts” and the feeling of being trapped in your own head, thus the repetition of the images and lines and the contrast between being stationary while still moving. It’s probably one of my favourite Wheelies songs in spite of the crudeness of the keyboard sounds and the fact that at this stage I still didn’t even know I could pan sounds on the recording software I was using. It’s also one of the rare occasions when the Spiritualized influence of building layers of melodies and sounds has actually worked for me.

2 EVERYBODY DREAMS ABOUT SOMETHING This is probably the nearest thing to a perfect Wheelies “pop” song. If you were going to force these songs into a box then they would be somewhere between low-fi pop, low-fi folk, or low-fi psych. At times I get madly possessed with the idea of writing “one truly great song” even though I know that a copious amount of luck is required when you start with mediocre songwriting skills and brutal musicianship, so a lot of what I write is geared towards that. Late at night when everyone is in bed, quietly strumming chords and murmuring melodies in search of something. When I’m in a writing phase I’ll record at least 3 sketchy ideas on a portable MP3 player with either the guitar or piano. Then, when I’m ready to record I’ll go back through the hundreds of ideas cutting out the rubbish and leaving only the garbage. During the recording of an album I continue to write at night and sometimes if an idea is good enough it’ll be recorded straight away. “Everybody Dreams…” is one of those songs. I seem to remember having a melody in my head and being hunched with the guitar over the MP3 on the living room floor at 2am virtually whispering it out. I recorded it in one go the following day. Out of part-laziness and also the technological inability, I usually settle for the first and occasionally the second mixdown of a song. It tends to be weeks later that I really notice all the blemishes – the horrible sounding keyboard towards the end, the fact that I miscalculated the lyrics and had to improvise the third verse, the way the vocals go out of sync in the final verse. Actually I’m as sloppy lyrically as I am technically – time (or lack of) plays a massive part in these songs. Usually songs are written and recorded on the run via stolen minutes, and a lot of the time I find myself scrawling Kerouacian “first thought, best thought” words on the back of envelopes and scrap paper just to have something to sing.

3 THE DAY THAT I PLAYED GOD I guess there are two dimensions to this one. On one hand its a blatantly obvious  pisstake of religion (if I had to say I was something I’d say I was Buddhist-Atheist or Atheist-Buddhist even though both can be the same thing). But at a more subconscious level it indirectly hints at my involvement and orchestrating role in The Daydream Generation (www.daydreamgeneration.com). Like “Everybody Dreams…”, this track is taken from the album “Strange Kid In A Daydream” written in the weeks immediately following the first ever Daydream Generation compilation between March and May of 2007. That first compilation was a chaotic process and I was struggling to get my head around the idea of being responsible for promoting all these great bands that kindly gave their songs away in exchange for some promotion. It was one thing to put the compilation together, but a much tougher challenge to do justice to the music and switch people onto what we’d done. Hence lines like “Smally, Smally help me please/Give me something to feel at ease/I tried to help but I think I sneezed and started a third world war”. On the subject of lyrics my favourite lines from this one are “I woke to the sound of a marching band going past me on the beach/The Devil was blowing an old conch shell…” – I think this is somehow related to me being wasted many years ago on Silversands beach in the middle of summer and there was a Salvation Army band playing, looking and sounding completely out of context. From time to time I go through phases of writing “story-songs”, usually surreal, dreamlike, unplanned and “The Day That I Played God” probably epitomises that style. It’s also probably worth mentioning the percussion element of this song and in particular the crappy little toy drum that I borrowed from Smally Jr for “Strange Kid…”. To go with the baby maracas, toy harmonica, and kid’s tambourine. Weirdest percussion I’ve ever used? Probably a shaving brush on a plastic tennis racket.

4 THE SOMETIMES SONG So you know that “one truly great song” I’ve been trying to write? Well I never wrote it, but I think this is going to be as close as I’m ever going to get (particularly from other people’s reactions to it). Is it my favourite Wheelies song? Probably. I wrote it for “Cosmonaut” and with the self-imposed pressure of getting a record written and recorded in 6 weeks, the songs were pouring out of me. I wrote “The Sometimes Song” late one evening sitting on the couch, the melody took five minutes and the words took another five, seemed to fall out of me as if the song was already written and just waiting to be discovered. The recording itself is pretty grim and not helped by the fact that I was missing a string on the guitar and too broke to buy a new one through the duration of “Cosmonaut” – probably why a lot of that record is very heavy on the keys. I always feel like when I record a song that it’s not in it’s true form – I mean, I hate singing, and playing music, but I love songwriting, so I usually end up preferring to hear cover versions of Wheelies tracks. I’m still waiting to hear someone cover this but hopefully sometime. The song itself is broken into three sections, the first deals with the fragility of being and the body, the second is about getting dumped, and the third is about being poor. I like to try and find and then write about positives hidden in dark situations, the fear of things, the memory of how I stumbled through depression and came out on the other side. “Sometimes that’s just the way it goes…” I guess is the logical answer to the impossible question that is “Why?”

5 I’VE GOT A GOOD FEELING Another one from “Cosmonaut”. Like I said, when I started out on that record I had it in mind to very loosely tie it around the idea of “the cosmonaut of inner space”, but halfway through the idea of  The 17th Floor began to appear through several of the songs. In that sense “I’ve Got A Good Feeling” is a suicide song – a guy climbs up onto the 17th floor of a building and jumps out of a window. In this instance as he jumps he sees a girl behind him and she in turn sees him and there is an explosion of connectivity between them, like they have always been fated to meet. And yet, at the point when they do he’s halfway out of the window plummeting to his death, and the entire song (at an overly long six minutes plus) is framed within those few seconds of realisation. I guess it’s black comedy, him dangling from her fingers changing his mind about wanting to die, then her letting go and changing her mind about it as he falls away. Ah, there’s really so much in this one that I could sit here all day writing… The song itself is so full of technical fuck-ups that it’s not funny. Ropey vocals, badly played improvised keys (Ray Manzarek I am not), levels all over the place. It’s one of those songs that I’m almost embarassed to play to people, and yet there’s something I like about the descending main vocal line that makes it bearable for me to listen to it. 

6 OH HAPPINESS Perhaps more than any other this song defines the year in my life that these were all recorded in. It was written over the course of a sunny May day, initially sitting in the garden with the guitar while Linz and Dylan buzzed around me, then later playing it in the living room and Linz put her head around the door and sang the repeat line of the chorus for a laugh. It made the song for me, so I forced her at psychological gunpoint that weekend to record it. On the original version it ended with us laughing as she pointed out that it sounds like I am singing “Oh a penis!”  and me going “Aw no! Fuck!” with the realisation she was write. This is the only track from the album of the same name that I’ve chosen for inclusion, for a number of reasons. The first is simply that “Oh Happiness” is technically a shambles: I’m thinking about The crap £60 guitar, no panning of sounds, and the very audible fuck-ups that litter it. At the time it was a one-off record – I hadn’t written or recorded anything for 9 years after “Simple Songs For Complicated People”, and so I wasn’t taking it very seriously. After so long away from writing songs it was more of an explosion of ideas than anything else, and there was no sign of songwriter’s block or struggling to find melodies. In that context it was probably the most enjoyable of all The Wheelies albums to record irrespective of how bad it sounds, and at the centre of it all “Oh Happiness” reflects pretty accurately how I was feeling, both about the music, and about my life.

7 THE 17TH FLOOR As mentioned previously, “The 17th Floor” was a recurring theme on the “Cosmonaut” album. Originally this started as a guitar song, then I added the piano, and later cut the guitar out, which is why the vocals sound too loud (I never went back and fixed it). Like “I’ve Got A Good Feeling” it’s another suicide song, this time the protagonist jumping and landing in a tree where he survives in a physical sense, but dies a spiritual death that leaves his mind “shining in the sky with the ghosts I left behind standing smiling in a neverending line”. I like to think of this as a positive outcome. Actually one of my favourite Wheelies cover versions is “The 17th Floor” as performed by Fig Mints (Of Your Imagination). I was trying to record some of these songs live on the guitar and when I played this one it sounded very like a Figs song, so I asked Bobby if he wanted to cover it, which he did, and the results were pretty special. Well worth checking out if you can find it. Initially I hated the lines about the ambulance sirens sounding like ice-cream van chimes, but I’ve grown to quite like them over time.

8 THE WORLD IS FUCKED I was doing a lot of what we now call “mining” – surfing the Internet in search of bands and individuals that might fit with the Daydream Generation project, and this song was a response to the desperation I felt doing it. The thing was, that it felt like most of the MySpace pages I visited belonged to EMO kids, each one trying to outdo the other with their narcissistic woes and attempts to shock from a safe distance. Not only did it make feel like a old 31, but it didn’t exactly fill me with confidence about the future. And so I wrote “The World Is Fucked”. The verse melodies (seriously out of vocal reach to a point where it sounds hopelessly garbled) were lifted from another Wheelies song “Love It”, which in turn was taken from the bridge section on “Anybody’s Guess”. It’s a tune that I love but for some reason can’t seem to do justice, so hopefully someday someone will sing it as it was supposed to be sung. So yeah, in the spectrum of Wheelies songs, this one is a philosophical monster where humans are neurotic dinosaur puppets taking photographs.

9 STRANGE KID IN A DAYDREAM This is the title-track from the last of the 5 albums I put out during that year. The drum loop I stole from a free loop site, and I took out the main guitar to help it sound more chaotic and different. Essentially it’s about my teenage years, coming last in the waster pumpkin growing competition (though I never wore the winning pumpkin on my head as promised) – mine grew mouldy on the window sill or rolling dice like I did when I was a kid playing imaginary football games that I invented to escape the real world. It’s one of those attempted wisdom songs, trying to sing to others like me, but it probably only sounds wanky and bullshit. Nice tune though I think.

10 WHEN THE MORNING COMES This song originally appeared on “Cosmonaut” but the inevitable by-product of rushing writing and recording and mixing is that sometimes you end up with a song that doesn’t quite live up to it’s potential, so this version was re-recorded for “Strange Kid…”. It probably developed from me playing the piano (keyboard) and getting the chorus and then realising that it fitted in with the original verses (I always hated the original’s chorus which seemed completely removed from what I was actually singing about). Round about this time I was listening to a lot of External World and one of the things I loved about it was the mad percussion sounds, so for this I dug out every pot and pan and rhythm making instrument I could find in the house and put them all on the living carpet in a big line, worked my way round them as the song played. It probably didn’t work that well. The song itself is simply a sweet hymn to being relatively useless.

11 BEAUTIFUL BONES At the turn of the year (06/07) I was asked via The Cozy Home to write a song about a for a student’s art project where they intended to make a vinyl record featuring several bands singing about dinosaurs. I don’t think that record ever materialised, but if it did then it didn’t feature “Beautiful Bones”. My choice of dinosaur was the Supersaurus, and I wrote this throwaway song about a cartoon paranoid dinosaur called Danny. I don’t know where or why I got the idea to somehow frame it in a mock-live setting (possibly regret that I can’t play live – you’d need to put me in a binbag and force me to play at gunpoint, so intense is my nervous disposition in front of crowds of people). Anyway, the mock-live thing didn’t sound half as good in reality as it sounded in my head and the canned laughter is erm, excruitiatingly bad. For a while I considered and re-considered keeping the line “He thought he had bum cancer” in, especially as Linz was telling me she hated that line. But if you can’t laugh in the face of tragedy, then what can you do? So I kept it in.

12 GO One of only two songs to make it onto this from the second album “Wake Me Up When It’s Over”, “Go” is a pretty personal song about something I won’t go into here. “Wake Me Up…” was really a reaction to the  interest show by Cozy Home after “Oh Happiness” – I bought a keyboard to compliment the crap £60 acoustic guitar, and miraculously managed to persuade two of the original Wheelies (Thomas and Martin) to head over to my house by the sea for a day to help out with the songs. I was a bit paranoid about this song sounding too “soft” when I wrote it, but I guess at the end, that’s just me. There are a lot of mistimed instruments on this song, and its the only time the toy harmonica features on The Shite Album – considering I can only play one tune on the moothie, you’re not missing much. There is also a much more psychedelic cover version of “Go” on The Real Burnouts “A Lull In Void” available to download for free at www.cozyhomerecords.com – that record is one of my personal favourites so to have somehow helped with it is a real priviledge.

13 MORNING STAR 07 Recorded for the “Respun” album in January 2007, “Morning Star” originally appeared on “Simple Songs For Complicated People” back in 1997, when I locked myself in a room for 20 something blazing hot summer days to write and record a full-length Wheelies record. By the time I reached “Respun” I was probably reaching a point of songwriter’s burn-out for the first time since I’d picked up the guitar in March of the previous year. It kicked off in the weeks after “Cosmonaut” when I felt like I was still on a writing high and had more songs in me, but the brain ran out of gas pretty quickly. Stuck for something to sing, I picked a few old tracks from a decade previous that I figured I could do better, and “Morning Star” was one of them (hence the “07″). This song actually is the soundtrack to one of the most unique experiences in my life – see Glencoe , September 1997, 4 friends, a pan of psychedelic sausages and a multi-coloured boabey. I’ll not bore you with the details, but let’s just say I had some kind of religious epiphany. The updated version on here perhaps has lost some of the original magic (somehow feeding an electric accordian backwards through a distortion box didn’t quite seem to work this time), but it’s an important song nevertheless and features some interesting backwards scratch drums. Actually a simple Casio keyboard beat going backwards.

14 SO LONG I’ve written a lot of “last songs” in my time. Much the same as I’ve smoked a lot of “last cigarettes”. It’s a concious decision, like leaving a farewell message (or well done) message for anyone who makes it through an entire Wheelies album intact. “So Long” is probably as close as I can get to the perfect Wheelies goodbye, in particular the line “when this stuff is inside of you better get it out”. In actual fact there is no real reason why you should like these songs since they are simply an excorcism of something inside of me, an urge to create that has to go somewhere. Soon enough it won’t be channelled into music, but something else instead. At the time when I was recording this for “Wake Me Up…” I intended it to be like a “Her Majesty” at the end of the record, only I left a couple of minutes with the words “Take it away Slight” for him to play one of his legendary laserbeam guitar solos on, but for one reason or another he never got round to doing it, so I cut the line and faded it out. So not only is it a fitting end to The Wheelies, but it is also a pretty great reflection of why it ended, and probably why it should have ended a lot sooner than it did. And actually it dawns on me as I’m writing this, that this really is The End. It’s been a long, comical, magical, and excrutiatingly painful journey. Thanks to everyone who has supported the band, and laterally me, thanks for downloading the records, and for the kind words of support. Sook the bools.

You can download “The Wheelie” from the Quixodelic Record STORE link for FREE at the top of this site.