ORDER BOTH ALBUMS HERE: https://postpoprecords.bandcamp.com/
model village and no cars tapes!
Tomorrow is May 7th, which means POST/POP releases two new albums by two brilliant bands. Look at how lovely they look above!
There is this one from MODEL VILLAGE
and there is this one from NO CARS
To be honest, alot of them are already gone through preorder, so you will need to come to their shows, where there will be a few for sale.
Just off the top of my head, NO CARS are having an album launch party tomorrow (MAY 7th) at PAPER DRESS in Shoreditch. Check out their FB for details: https://www.facebook.com/pages/No-Cars/226406527390081. Also, HETTIE is supporting them so you will get a preview of new material before POST/POP releases an EP for her later this year.
MODEL VILLAGE play Cambridge on the 8th and London on May 10th at the Buffalo Bar. Details here: https://www.facebook.com/modelvillagers
ORDER BOTH ALBUMS HERE: https://postpoprecords.bandcamp.com/ (Or click on hettie’s face on the right)
Don’t forget, the KIITES EP is out this weekend too. Details to come!
This album needs no introduction, but I will try anyway. NME’s C86 (1986) tape was an album that you had to send away for via mail order in an advert somewhere in the pages of NME. You know, like Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs. Instead of getting the greatest powder-based life form/friend ever, you got a little cassette tape that launched a barrel of bands that defined a genre for the next 30 years. Look at this tracklisting!
Side one
Primal Scream – “Velocity Girl”
The Mighty Lemon Drops – “Happy Head”
The Soup Dragons – “Pleasantly Surprised”
The Wolfhounds – “Feeling So Strange Again”
The Bodines – “Therese”
Mighty Mighty – “Law”
Stump – “Buffalo”
Bogshed – “Run to the Temple”
A Witness – “Sharpened Sticks”
The Pastels – “Breaking Lines”
Age of Chance – “From Now On, This Will Be Your God”
Side two
The Shop Assistants – “It’s Up to You”
Close Lobsters – “Firestation Towers”
Miaow – “Sport Most Royal”
Half Man Half Biscuit – “I Hate Nerys Hughes (From The Heart)”
The Servants – “Transparent”
The Mackenzies – “Big Jim (There’s no pubs in Heaven)”
Big Flame – “New Way (Quick Wash And Brush Up With Liberation Theology)”
Fuzzbox – “Console Me”
McCarthy – “Celestial City”
The Shrubs – “Bullfighter’s Bones”
The Wedding Present – “This Boy Can Wait”
Yeah, I know. Incred! So the good people at Rough Trade, saw how popular it was becoming and released it properly in 1987 and the rest is history. An instant classic, which means alot of people loved it, but of course there were haters. Now I’m going to cut and paste some stuff from Wikipedia so you can see what I mean…
Ex-NME staffer Andrew Collins summed up C86 by dubbing it “the most indie thing to have ever existed”. Bob Stanley, a Melody Maker journalist in the late 1980s and founding member of pop band Saint Etienne, similarly said in a 2006 interview that C86 represented the:
“beginning of indie music . . . It’s hard to remember how underground guitar music and fanzines were in the mid-’80s; DIY ethics and any residual punk attitudes were in isolated pockets around the country and the C86 comp and gigs brought them together in an explosion of new groups.”
Martin Whitehead, who ran the Subway label in the late 1980s, develops on this line of thinking to suggest that C86 had a political influence: “Before C86, women could only be eye-candy in a band; I think C86 changed that – there were women promoting gigs, writing fanzines and running labels.”
Some are more ambivalent about the tape’s influence. Everett True, a writer for NME in 1986 under the name “The Legend!”, called it “unrepresentative of its times . . . and even unrepresentative of the small narrow strata of music it thought it was representing.” Alastair Fitchett, editor of the music site Tangents (and a fan of many of the bands on the tape), takes a polemical line: “(The NME) laid the foundations for the desolate wastelands of what we came to know by that vile term ‘Indie’. What more reason do you need to hate it?”
Now, I haven’t read NME since my boy Conor left, so I don’t know how many sub-genres they’ve made-up and painfully tried to shoehorn into their pages recently, but this was one of my faves. (That reminds me, at some point I’m going to write a little story about how Melody Maker paid some friends of mine to fake being a band so they could justify a genre they just invented – including multiple photoshoots, interviews and fake song names – I shit you not)
C86 has influenced countless thousands of bands across the world and that leads me to Cherry Red Records, who are one of the best record label I know of, re-releasing C86 on CD. Not only that, its a 3 CD spectacular with 2 extra CDs of bands and songs inspired by the original album. Read all about it (and I think you can preorder it) here: http://www.cherryred.co.uk/shopexd.asp?id=4616
Cherry Red asked me if I could re-issue the original tape for them and I said “YES I LOVE YOU CHERRY RED” which is a happy coincidence. Here’s the catch, and its a big one… You won’t be able to buy the C86 re-issue on tape, as they are only being used for promo purposes. If you are a music hack, you might get one in the post from Cherry Red (email them and ask!) but I am gonna make a few extra to give to some Tapeheads (who will chop my hands off for this!), one to the British Library, and every now and then, throw one in with an order of 4 tapes or more (while stocks last, and obvs they wont).
This is the most limited tape I will probably ever do, so apologies in advance if you don’t get one, but please please please buy the CD boxset from Cherry Red because they truly are KINGS.
I know this is a bit of a tease, but POST/POP completists will want to know this exists 🙂 Sticking the POST/POP logo on this record felt like I was drawing a beard on the Mona Lisa, but everyone loves beards.
Read more about the album and watch videos from all the bands: http://nmecassettes.wordpress.com/nme-022-c86-1986/
You can listen to the whole thing on youtube too:
UPDATE: Here are the tapes!!
jed
p.s. I adore the NME Cassettes. I want to reissue ALL of them.
“YOKO MAKES TITS BIGGER WITH AIRBRUSH”. (limited edition of 50 purple cassette tapes)
Yes, thats what its called and I love them for it. You see, No Cars aren’t the type of band to shy away from japanese stereotypes. They are the type of band to take those very same Japanese Stereotypes and shove it down your kaiju-loving face.
So in this sophmore effort, No Cars have taken the general concept of the first record (YOKO EATS WHALES) – which is of course, Japanese girls being crazy, smashing things up, searching for Bowie, and how people are bitches if they don’t make you tea – and amplify it, creating a super-heightened version of reality where No Cars hang out with terribly abused sentient puppets (james anderson puppet), watch people having sex on hay bales (do re mi farming), celebrate how great cress is, finally! (cress) and also about how english guys are obsessed with japanese girls (jap trap). Are we? Probably. They always have such cool kicks.
For this release though, they now have a guy in the band called “Candy Tanaka” aka Will Kwerk, who brilliantly voices the pain of the aforementioned puppet (james anderson puppet) as the girls kick him down the street, for no real reason at all besides he is alive.
No Cars feel like that kind of band you would make up to impress some identikit hipster girl, before realising that as you are saying it out loud, you wish the band existed and the girl didn’t…. but they exist!
I am so pleased that they reworked “Tuna” on this album. It’s been a live favourite since day one and didnt make it on the debut album, but here is the video to it from the original version:
The new version on the album is twice the speed and twice the frolics, but you really have to seem them live to get the full effect.
Listen to the new songs below:
I’ve been obsessed with this band for years and lead singer Haruna needs to be held aloft as a fucking pioneer of trying to make people happy with music. The band is an inspiration to all other bands out there and if you are reading this and you are in a band yourself, listen to this album and convince your bandmates that you want to go in a Japanese direction. If they throw you out, start a No Cars cover band called “Really No Cars” or “Yes Cars“.
They are having an album launch party/gig at PAPER DRESS in london (http://paperdressvintage.co.uk/) on May 7th 2014 and not only will I be there, but HETTIE is supporting! She will be debuting tons of new songs so it really will be a great night. Did I mention it was FREE? You can buy the CDs and tapes from the band at the gig or…
“If Kenny Lee is in a band, then your band is alright by me…”
Wise words my friends. Model Village are essentially the Avengers. A supergroup made up of ultra-talented musicians who sometimes get together and make beautiful music under the guise of a pop-folk band from Cambridge (Dan, Ian, Piers, Rachel, Kev, Kenny, Lily, Ellie and Mark are all current or former members of the residents’ committee.) Now I’m not saying any of them can fly per se, but THEIR SONGS SURE DO.*
“You Chose These Woes” is the second album from Model Village and its jam-packed full of songs that help you remember that folk needn’t be a dirty word. Some of the most catchy pop songs I’ve heard in a long time lies within and I’m particularly fond of “Walk it Off” as they came and performed it on my radio show. It was gorgeous-on-stilts and due to the power of the internet, here it is:
I just watched that and I forgot how special it was. Pardon my rather verite camera skills and my terrible joke at the end.
So the album came out earlier this year but not on the only format that counts… CASSETTE TAPE, so thats where I come in!
We have gone for MAY 8TH for the release date but you can even have a listen now. Watch my embedding skills…
You can buy it digitally and on CD through the band direct and you can preorder the tape right now…
I know what you’re thinking. A POST/POP release and its not by a pretty girl with long eyelashes looking downwards? YES! Thats right. POST/POP’s 4th release comes from Canada’s very own KESTRELS! I tried to make them all pose wearing long eyelashes – and to their credit, they tried it, but they couldn’t do the looking down thing, so we went with a massive moon instead.
Now, everything I ever learnt about Canada comes from 2 things:
1: ‘Due South’, the 90s cop show about a Canadian mountie that gets posted to a Chicago police force. With this in mind I assume that the members of Kestrels are good at tracking and are extremely polite to criminals.
2: My experience of going to Montreal, nobody being able to speak English to me (or didn’t want to) and Arcade Fire NOT meeting me at the airport riding on a moose. At montreal airport (oddly bigger than the city of Montreal – I am not kidding about this, look on wikipedia) they asked me if I was there for “business or pleasure”. When I said “pleasure” they answered “are you sure?”.
To me, this is Canada. The land of people who dont expect anyone to actually like them, but don’t really care either way as they have amazing healthcare, quality of living and the monopoly on incredible bands. One of these bands is KESTRELS and I am happy to announce that a Ltd Edition Tape of TWO brand new tracks will be available from March 15th 2014 on this very site.
this is their bio from their site but you are welcome to pretend I wrote it – http://www.kestrels.ca/Bio/
I got to see them live when they popped over to London to support Ash a couple of years back (was it that long ago?!) and played the Camden Barfly as a warm-up. I remember thinking that I had known the lead singer Chad Peck for about a million years as “the guy in Canada who knew lots about Ash and had rare stuff” so it was weird finding out he was a living breathing person in a band that I really liked. It was at that point I thought “One day I will release a tape for this band with a big moon on the cover” and that my friends is exactly what I’m doing.
Before you read on, take a look at this video to see what we are dealing with here…
Complete and utter madness. And I love them. NO CARS are my first foray into J-Pop (I’m also releasing a tape for internet and daytime TV sensation Beckii Cruel later this year too) and I am so so excited. They are 3 girls from Tokyo (via Hackney) who are one of the best live acts I’ve ever seen.
I’d first come across them when my friend’s band was playing some dive in London and I got there a little late. by this time No Cars had already played but their name hung heavy in the air. I heard so many stories about their live performances. I heard they had a song about Tuna Fish. I heard they made an audience member join them onstage and wear a kimono. I heard they gave out kazoos so people could join in. I heard they jumped around in the crowd and sang songs from the middle about an Octopus. Quite frankly I had heard enough by this stage and it was quite quite clear that we were dealing with THE GREATEST BAND OF ALL TIME.
A japanese girl band doing j-pop meets delta blues with audience participation and costumes, hits most of my buttons. Over the next couple of years, I’d see them play quite often, and my intitial reaction proved close to the mark. Here were a bunch of ladies, fully embracing the stereotype that the western world had appointed them, and shoved it down our fat faces with tales of adventure and mystery.
Yes, they made me sing their theme song with them. Yes, I think I pulled it off. No I won’t be in your band.
I loved them so much, I even bought the same guitar as Haruna because she made it cool. Taking all this into account, they were the obvious choice to release a tape for. They loved the idea, so what we have is their debut album on cassette for the first time ever!
Here is the digital version which you can buy direct from the band, have a listen and then come back to buy a tape!
this will be the third POST/POP release and I think it’s becoming something really really special and I hope you have liked everything I’ve released so far! It’s going really well and it looks set to be an incredible year. I have so many great new bands I feel very lucky, but so are you as you get to hear them!
POST/POP’s first release is a Limited Edition Baby-Pink Cassette Tape of HETTIE’s “Just The Way”. You get the acoustic version on Side B that will break your heart and put it back together again.
When Hettie first sent me this song it also coincided with the first time I ever met her. She was coming onto my radio show and wanted to have something to play as well as her acoustic session. I knew as soon as I heard the first 8 bars that this was something a little special.
About a week later, I got the very talented Kenny Lee to spruce up Hettie’s song into a POP GEM and this is the result!
There are only 50 of these pink tapes AND this is our first release so it’s like that these tapes will be highly sought after and very ebayable in the future. Try to keep it to two cassettes per address as I don’t want some entrepreneur buying them all up, only to sell it back to fans at extortionate prices!
I have intentionally kept the tape price as low as possible (only £3!) which basically covers the cost of production and maybe enough change for a Cherry Coke, but nobody ever released limited edition cassette tapes for the money. (Well not in the 21st Century anyway).
If you one of the lucky buyers of our first release, then I just want you to know that I LOVE YOU and I hope this is the start of a beautiful set of low cost business transactions friendship!
Emily’s tape is out on February 14th and I am still putting them together. No one ever told me folding j-cards would be so hard 🙂 In the meantime you can pre-order from the store (link at the top) and see some preview photos below. YES, I know it looks like a Smiths tape. YES it’s on purpose!
You can listen/download/Buy Emily’s EP “Who Framed Winston Silcott” direct from Emily’s bandcamp in the player below
POST/POP 