DOUBLE BLACK DIAMOND RECORDS

Hailing from Ixtapa Mexico and sounding like a cross between Steely Dan and Tone-Loc’s dj, here’s the GREEN GLASS!

Check the tuneage: http://tinyurl.com/bjwa8c

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart Exclusive interview with Evan Chase

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart are really, really great. Groove is in their indie shoegaze-y art, to be certain. I had the chance to sit down with Peggy, Kip and Alex at Schubas in Chicago two nights ago during their 9-city US tour and found them to be much like their music: earnest, articulate, and right-on indie-minded people.

Here’s what they had to say about their rave Pitchforkmedia.com review, the joys of creativity, where they got their amazing band name and new 7″, Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan.

On The Pitchforkmedia.com review http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/148850-the-pains-of-being-pure-at-heart-the-pains-of-being-pure-at-heart

Kip: It was a wonderful thing. I think the things that still matter in the Internet Age, touring and playing for people and putting on a good show—all the things that seem 100% oldschool. I think that’s a good thing; it makes bands work for their dinner. You have to earn people’s acceptance— it’s not just handed to you.

Peggy: It’s cool to receive accolades from the indie community. I think a lot of people heard us for the first time after reading the Pitchfork review.

Where The Pains of Being Pure of Heart Name Came From

Kip: A friend wrote a children’s story called The Pains of Being Pure At Heart and its moral, as all children’s stories have morals, that the time you spend when you’re young traveling with friends and the friendships that you forge at that time of your life are really to be valued and celebrated. It’s a nice way of thinking about our band—we’re all friends and young and we have these adventures getting to go places and play music together. It’s a pretty fitting name. The phrase feels really right.

Artistic intentions/Comparisons to My Bloody Valentine and The Smiths

Kip: It’s always flattering when people draw comparisons to our music to such incredible artists as Morrissey or My Bloody Valentine, but our music is more about us and a natural outgrowth of who we are as people and who we are when we plug in our instruments and play that’s us. We have a huge respect for a huge canon of music through the past, but we’re pretty happy being The Pains of Being Pure At Heart. If people want to draw comparisons to bands that are a lot better than us, that’s fine, but we’re happy to be our own world.

On The Pains of Being Pure At Heart cd

Kip: We wanted to capture that and document that so these songs lived in a permanent way. To have that final product sound like and not be something we’re not. It was a very natural-sounding record.

The Pains of Composition

Alex: Kip writes the songs and brings them to everyone.

Kip: Behind every great writer is a great editor. I think creativity is over-valued in our society. Being creative is a wonderful thing, but being able to pick-and-choose is really important. If it was just me there’d probably be thirty songs on the album and twenty wouldn’t be that good. (laughs)

Peggy: We also get a lot of ideas from just hanging out. Inside jokes and stuff. Like Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan.

Inspiration for Kurt Cobain’s Cardigan 7” single

Kip: All of our experiences and our friends’ experiences, they’re (the songs) very much about our collective experiences, shared experiences. The title’s almost a reference to what the song sounds like. The song sounds a lot like the Vaselines. My introduction to The Vaselines was through Nirvana’s covering of them and Kurt Cobain’s championing of these smaller indie-pop bands that would’ve never gotten mainstream of any attention in the U.S. He took the time to use his celebrity to further other bands and offer listenership. The song isn’t about Kurt ,but the song wouldn’t have existed were it not for Kurt Cobain.

the-pains-of-being-pure-at-heart_07_everything-with-you

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart Myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/thepainsofbeingpureatheart

The New Mary Jane Dave Shouse and Scott Taylor, formerly of the mighty Grifters, have their new thing going off called The New Mary Jane (see Beatles if you don’t get the reference.) Groovy, more guitar-driven than say Those Bastard Souls, Shouse’s previous solo, and then later, band incarnation. What it sounds like Hail The Young Girls is a spacey, heavy, drum n’ guitar thang. Shouse still channels Bowie gracefully. Guitars and bass and synth effects still collide and reign supreme thankfully. The Chinese government prides itself On delivering a clear blue sky for the holidays Great new stuff form two of the greats in the indie world everyone with any sense of taste was dying to see play together again. Be ready to run right out when The New Mary Jane cd drops and if you’re lucky enough to see them play live, prepare to be blown away. Years ago my brother’s friends and I traveled three hours in the snow in Upstate New York to see The Grifters play. Joan as Police Woman’s lovely Joan Wasser was in attendance, and when the Grifters laid into Bummer from One Sock Missing (Shangri-la Records) she and we couldn’t help from bopping our Heads to a sound coming through the stacks unlike anything we’d ever heard before. Again, prepare to be blown away. Link to three mp3s at The New Mary Jane Myspace: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=373565214

Wherein Steve Kilbey spills the beans on the Church’s follow-up to 2006’s masterful Uninvited Like The Clouds:

new church album(straight from the panthers mouth)

Original post at THE TIME BEING, Kilbey’s bloggy:

http://stevekilbey.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-church-albumstraight-from-panthers.html

Touching From A Distance is a tremendous gift to Joy Division fans and anyone else who might care about the star-making machine and its human toll. 

This book is captivating as all hell, a peek behind the veil into who Ian Curtis was in his homelife, in addition to being just the guy who wrote Unknown Pleasures. After all, Deborah Curtis has an innate understanding of the man as she saw the madness closest-at-hand.

The early chapters concern, inevitably, the formative years of Ian and his future bandmates in New Order and Joy Division, respectively to their later larger fame. Ian was obsessed, as so many young men of that era, with Iggy and Bowie. Ms. Curtis does a fantastic job of letting us see how they came to be a married couple with a new child by the early age of 21 and the sad, tragic effect this had on a rising star in the shameless rock business. Ian wouldn’t live to see 24.

What’s most stunning here is that Deb Curtis seems to have inherited, inhabited even parts of Ian’s reality and hallow-graphically, rather than hagiographically, represented the many attributes of Ian’s poetic gifts and stunning sensitivity and window into the human condition. In point of fact, she proves herself equally gifted. God bless Ms. Curtis for what she endured in losing Ian and having her family shattered, and her return to her better senses and the legacy of inheritor/benefactor to her fair share of Joy Division’s not inconsiderable fortune. Lord knows she deserves all this and more for all she’s been through.  My hat is off to her. Run, don’t walk to Barnes & Noble or your computer for excerpts.