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Blang Records are thrilled to announce another two vinyl album re-releases from Jeffrey Lewis's back catalogue: The debut classic The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane (originally Rough Trade 2001) and The critically acclaimed 4th album 12 Crass Songs (originally Rough Trade 2007). 12 Crass Songs (VV004LP): Astonishingly transformed covers of songs originally written by the band Crass in 1978-1984, this 2007 LP is the most rare and sought-after vinyl in Jeffrey's catalogue and is also now completely out of stock. "Weird? Very_ _ but it's also downright inspiring" (4 of 5 stars) - Rolling Stone. "The record presents Crass's lyrics calmly, often demonstrating how sane and practical they are; it proves once again, and kind of thrillingly this time, that no music is immune to interpretation" - The New York Times. "Folk maverick raids anarchist commune and finds catchy tunes_ Works wonderfully" - Spin "Jeffrey Lewis' talents appear without end_ (on 12 Crass Songs he) magically makes the anarcho-rockers' anti-establishment savagery his own, by wrapping their barbed sentiments in his trademark mottled tea-towel warmth" - NME. "12 Crass Songs succeeds utterly_ eerily beautiful and strangely affecting" - Plan B Magazine "He's taken hold of any number of my old stormy favourites and breathed fresh life and fire into them. . . Man, I'm in awe of Jeffrey right now. Who'd have thought he could have done that?" - Everett True/ Village Voice "Quite brilliant" - (4 of 5 stars) MOJO. "It's no mean feat to transform such abrasive harangues into lush, tuneful folk_ without defusing their righteous anger_ but Crass's intelligent and indignant screeds could not hope for a more sympathetic translator." (4 of 5 stars) - THE GUARDIAN. Blang Records and Jeffrey Lewis have history: before Blang was a label, it started life as a live night at the 12 Bar Club in Denmark Street, hosting many a set of the NY Antifolk artists over on UK shores, including Jeffrey Lewis. Now 20+ years since Jeffrey first played Blang. Native New Yorker Jeffrey Lewis is a comic book writer/artist and a musician. A cult hero birthed from the now infamous antifolk movement that sprung up on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 90s, Jeffrey has released dozens of albums showcasing his unique blend of bleakly witty observations, scratchy, lo-fi punk and croaky folk/anti-folk, all firmly rooted in a strong DIY sensibility. Jeffrey and his band have toured the world multiple times over, released albums on Rough Trade, Moshi Moshi and Don GIovanni Records, and have been featured by NPR, The History Channel, The NY Times and more.

Before Circus Lupus landed on DC’s venerable Dischord Records, the group’s original Midwest lineup recorded a full album’s worth of songs less than a year after forming. With the demise of DC’s Ignition in the late ’80s, bass player Chris Thomson headed to Madison, WI for college. Before leaving DC, he dove headfirst into being a vocalist fronting the short-lived throwback punk / hardcore project Fury. Thomson served up pointed and profound Tony Cadena-inspired screeds about betrayal, disappointment and poseurs all set to a soundtrack of furiously primitive and chaotic music supplied by members of the DC punk band Swiz. Brief yet influential, this band marked Thomson’s switch to vocals, putting him on course to front Circus Lupus and claim a notable spot in the DC punk timeline of the late 20th century. Soon after arriving in Madison, Thomson was invited to join a new project started by friends Chris Hamley, Arika Casebolt, and Reg Shrader. Circus Lupus marked a change in direction from the familiar sounds of DC punk that Thomson had been associated with for years. The newly formed group looked to noisier Touch & Go and Homestead bands for inspiration, aligning themselves with bands from Chicago, Louisville and Milwaukee. One early supporter of the band described the new group as “profoundly familiar yet uncategorizable. Like if the Germs had gone to college and never got pulled into hard drugs and suicidal behaviors.” The original Circus Lupus lineup played a dozen shows and recorded these songs with Eli Janney at Inner Ear studios in August of 1990 while on a brief tour. Within a year, the band would decide to permanently relocate to Washington DC, where they felt they had more opportunities. Shrader opted to move to Chicago and would ultimately join the Touch and Go band Seam. Old friend Seth Lorinczi (Vile Cherubs) would become their new bass player, forming the version of the band that most listeners are familiar with. While a few of these ended up on their first single, the rest were shelved, some later to be rerecorded with Lorinczi and released on Dischord. L.G. Records is proud to have helped this notable recording see the light of day. The original tapes were recovered by Ian MacKaye and transferred by Darren Edwards. Tim Green remixed and remastered the original recordings at Louder Studios in California.

Freak Frequency was a fitting title for the new material Greg Obis was planning for Stuck, the frenetic and twisted post-punk outfit he formed in 2018. Inspired by the doomy social economics of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, the bleak worldbuilding of horror games Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, and the bombastic yet arty satire of Devo, Obis channelled his audio analogy into Freak Frequency, an album ringing out with explosive sounds and ideas.

Stuck formed after Obis’ previous projects, Yeesh and Clearance, called it quits in short proximity. Obis is on guitar and vocals, which span from booming theatrics to ecstatic yelps. The project’s rhythm section is completed by shoegaze guitarist-turned-chugging bassist David Algrim and tightly wound drummer Tim Green—also a graphic designer, and the artist responsible for Stuck’s distinctively unified visual aesthetic. Original co-guitarist Donny Walsh contributed freely inventive lines for the first few years of the project, including on Freak Frequency; Ezra Saulnier of Red Tunic, the newest member of the band, now brings calculated contrapuntal riffs to match Obis’ parts.

The building blocks of Stuck include the egg punk eccentricities of Uranium Club and The Coneheads filtered through noise rock power, à la Jesus Lizard or Slint; that melange is glittered with the precision microtones of Unwound and Women. “I want the feeling of immersion and chaos and tension, with a big guitar amp playing a big chord,” says Obis of his inspirations, citing friends and peers Cloud Nothings and Preoccupations. “But I want it delivered by having a lot of smaller points of light poking through.”

In fact, writing for Freak Frequency began while Content’s recording was still underway—beginning with “Scared,” which features acoustic layers under feedback squalls. “Time Out,” with motoric guitars in the sputtering lineage of Wire, was also composed in late 2019. Obis wrote it about the cycles of compulsion and shame woven into social media use, and the way negativity drives algorithmic engagement. It became an exciting exercise for the group in ramping up speed; “I thought I knew how far I could push Tim’s tempos,” Obis recalls. “But Tim kept insisting we do it 20 bpm faster than what I had. He is an absolute monster for playing that.”

Album opener “The Punisher,” a spiral staircase of disembodied guitars and rhythmic slams over a 2/4 beat, came in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. It felt immediately emblematic to Freak Frequency, and Obis describes it as his favorite Stuck track: one he wishes he could write again and again. “It hits all the boxes that Stuck can do: it’s goofy, but there’s a lot of intricate guitar interplay, and at the end, there’s a big payoff,” he explains. The last song written was “Do Not Reply,” a pre-album single that came to Obis after engineering for Melkbelly and channelling their earworm melodies. Algrim wouldn’t let it on the record unless Melkbelly’s front person Miranda Winters dueted on vocals; she was happy to oblige, and the gritty epic closes Freak Frequency.

With slippery snark, percussive heft, and funhouse mirrors of sludge, Freak Frequency delivers its needed screeds with gratifying nuance. If Stuck’s interpretation of this messed-up world goes down like a bitter pill, it’s only because its sugar coating is too delicious to keep from eating.

Historically Fucked is a four way entanglement made to create short, eruptive songs and then set about obliterating them from the inside, like improvising a barrel to encase themselves in and then proceeding to lick their way out of it. It is about playing and laughing at playing, and it is about not doing either of those things sometimes. Sometimes it is to do with talking, howling or grunting, and sometimes it is to do with hitting and rubbing.
Historically Fucked contains four people, who each share the same duties, and whose names in sequence are Otto Willberg, David Birchall, Greta Buitkuté and Alecs Pierce. They are from Manchester and often other places. Guitar, bass, drums and voices keenly jostle amid the group’s frenzy of spontaneous rock throttles. Some of these rampant exercises in avant are collected on ‘The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067’, the band’s new album, released by Upset The Rhythm on February 3rd. This is the group’s first release since 2018’s mantlepiece staple ‘Aliven Wool’ (Heavy Petting). This is Rock and/or Roll as fertilizer, uncivilised and free, as if one were to imagine what the Plastic Ono Band would’ve hit upon if they had read ‘Riddley Walker’, the sound of an entire timeline of expression put back together back-to-front, misshapen and irradiated.

‘The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067’ is not mere Sedentary Rock but Blasted Basalt, Frog worshipping cave-funk, harmolodic hullabaloo-wop, a musical game of “badger in the bag”. It is the sound of sacks crammed full of aggregate, a chimerical mind-meld, a seductive din that is to a hound dog in blue suede shoes what a raking of the dorsal fin with a fat marrow pinecone is to a pelican in the midst of being fired from the academy.

‘The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067’ by Historically Fucked was recorded by Rory Salter, mixed by Otto Willberg and mastered by Mikey Young. The liminally worrisome artwork was painted by John Cobweaver.

“They say these days that History is Fucked. Nothing ever dies but continues to rule the earth as an undead tyrant that cannot accept its own decomposition, look earwardly upon the dance of the proudly dead and decrepit!”

Vymethoxy Redspiders, Leeds 2022

Tripe. It’s what graces the cover of Cassels’ third album, A Gut Feeling. It looks gross. And Cassels are a rock band who’ve often sounded gross. You know the adjectives. ‘Discordant’. ‘Angular’. ‘Cynical’. Shellac quickly mentioned. I’ve done it already, see?Listening to A Gut Feeling, though, Cassels sound different. Not too different – the molten riff of advance single ‘Mr Henderson Coughs’ puts paid to the idea that the London-based duo have taken a hard 180. But instead of writing as quickly as possible, riding the churn forced on DIY bands by an indifferent ecosystem, the Covid-19 pandemic gave the brothers Beck (Jim, guitar/vocals, and Loz, drums/BVs) some time to mull things over. Instead of sticking with the stripped-back recording approach of previous LPs, Jim and Loz spent time at Tom Hill’s Bookhouse Studios in South London, considering tone, layering tracks, and bringing new instruments into the fold. Lyrically, the approach has changed too. Rather than presented as personal experience, Jim notes that his words this time around “are an intentionally muddy mix of experience, opinion, red herrings and fiction,” adding, “I found that setting myself the brief of writing character pieces offered a nice way of sneaking quite personal things into the songs without being explicitly autobiographical.” The result is the most satisfying and unexpected collection of songs in the Cassels catalogue. Instruments at turns razor-sharp and bludgeon-blunt provide the backing track to a savage, hilarious, and tender collection of short stories. Jim notes that “writing can be a great way of unearthing hang-ups and becoming acquainted with your own anxieties”. Hardly new ground for a rock band, but presented in this third person format – unbiased and filled to the brim with human warmth – these songs are more empathetic than anything the band have written before. You might have been Michael on his daily commute. Perhaps you’re Sarah, or have a mum like her. And many of us will recognise ourselves in the heart-breaking ‘Family Visits Relative’. It’s clear that the band still aren’t afraid to tackle weighty subjects too, with A Gut Feeling picking up where their previous album, The Perfect Ending, left off. ‘Charlie Goes Skiing’ pulls a similar trick to Future of the Left’s ‘Goals in Slow Motion’ – setting a screed against consumerism to one of the most propulsive, catchy tracks on the record. It’s followed by ‘Dog Drops Bone’, a rustling loop overlaid with sad, simple chords reminiscent of a Sparklehorse tune, which uses the internal monologue of a beloved canine companion to question the true depth and sincerity of human relationships. This kicks into the breakneck ‘Beth’s Recurring Dream’ – a track exploring a sexual identity crisis which owes as much to early Los Campesinos! as it does Steve Albini. Of ‘Your Humble Narrator’, the album’s punishing, pulsing opener and A Gut Feeling’s thematic frame, Jim explains: “I liked the idea of introducing an unreliable narrator who frames the album as an exercise in manipulation for personal gain. When a person engages with a piece of art they are invariably being manipulated by the artist to some degree – that’s part of the fun. The artist aims to elicit some sort of emotional response, the audience buys into the conceit at the promise of experiencing some form of escape.” as listeners, we experience that manipulation first-hand on A Gut Feeling. But the fact Cassels have packaged it up as offal feels like another bleak wink. This is far from a stinking by-product, salvaged and sold to maximise profit. It’s nothing less than the most complete, relatable, and fully realised piece of art the duo has produced to date. Emotional response elicited. Conceit embraced.

2021 Repress

Rone is a stalwart of the French electronic scene and returns with his fourth album, 'Mirapolis', a synesthetic journey with features from Bryce Dessner (The National), Baxter Dury, John Stanier (Battles) and Saul Williams. The artwork was created by the critically acclaimed director Michel Gondry.
Stepping into Rone's music is like sleepwalking through a vividly colourful dream, eventually stumbling across a strange, scintillating Megapolis of saturated light and colours: 'Mirapolis'. Its twelve tracks / districts, each with their own specific planning, pulsate as though animated by their musical mastermind.
The project was an opportunity to get reacquainted with long- time stage and studio partners John Stanier, Gaspar Claus and the Vacarme band and Bryce Dessner (guitarist for The National,) while bringing in new collaborators (and thus, new interpretation of Rone's dreams). We find American slam-poet Saul Williams, who happened to be in Paris for a moment and contributes a searing anti-Trump screed, Baxter Dury, who brings an irresistible East London touch to 'Switches', a kind of fan fic that reimagines the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper lounging pensive in a club chair, Israeli electronic music muse Noga Erez, who inspired 'Waves' which, despite being recorded remotely, betrays a euphoric partnership, and finally, Kazu Makino, Blonde Redhead's bewitching singer and multi- instrumentalist, who contributes to the album's closer, the gauzy 'Down For The Cause'.
Rone remains a producer of grand instrumental pieces, which cannot be easily categorized in the architectural canon of our electronic music galaxy. Hypnotic, cinematic opening track 'I Philip' is an offshoot from the score for the first French virtual reality fiction, built around Philip K Dick - the perfect gate into a city that then opens up myriad temporal perspectives.