{"title":"Merge Records","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWhat started in 1989 \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eas an outlet for Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan's own band Superchunk \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003eand music created by their friends, has over the years expanded to include artists from around the world - like Caribou, Waxahatchee, Neutral Milk Hotel and The Magnetic Fields - with many records reaching the top of the \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003emusic charts.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"get-me-the-good-stuff","title":"Get Me the Good Stuff","description":"\u003cp\u003eJade Hairpins waste no time fulfilling their second album’s titular demand. From its harmony-drenched opening note to its baroque-anthemic conclusion, \u003ci\u003eGet Me the Good Stuff \u003c\/i\u003eis positively loaded with musical ideas, an absurdist buffet of sound and aesthetic that comes with one hell of a floorshow as the Hairpins stack those ideas higher and higher, almost daring them to crash to the floor. Instead, those elements punksploitation, power pop, baggy, funk, and Italo disco are just some touchstones are not only held aloft, they defy gravity and convention.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese pyrotechnics are, in true Jade Hairpins fashion, something of a sleight of hand. While the music swaggers and gallops, \u003ci\u003eGet Me the Good Stuff\u003c\/i\u003e grapples with anxiety and self-doubt, obfuscating pain and alienation with sparkling wit and some straight-up ravers. \u003ci\u003eGet Me the Good Stuff\u003c\/i\u003e opens with one of those, “Let It Be Me,” in which Jonah Falco shouts lyrics about being alone with one’s shortcomings against guitars, synths, and harmonized vocals that are on the verge of closing in. The song is just over 90 seconds long, hitting with the gnarled-barb ferocity of punk and the gleeful insanity of theatrical art rock.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is, in other words, overwhelming. Or it would be if Jade Hairpins Jonah Falco and Mike Haliechuk weren’t remarkably nimble in their ability to bring unity to sounds by placing them in competition against each other. When those sounds are adjacent, like the glam and disco that saturate “Drifting Superstition,” the thrill of those universes colliding in the heat of an absolutely filthy clavichord line turns its lyrics, about the habit of solving personal problems by ignoring them, into a winner’s anthem on the order of Bowie or Hot Chocolate.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eGet Me the Good Stuff\u003c\/i\u003e arcs towards unequivocal joy as Falco, Jade Hairpins’ primary lyricist, breaks these cycles and attempts to run away with his dreams. The arc is roughly analogous to how the album came to fruition. Four years removed from Harmony Avenue, an album of material that proved too strong to be contained within the narrative universe of Fucked Up’s \u003ci\u003eDose Your Dreams\u003c\/i\u003e, Jade Hairpins have gelled as a live act with Tamsin M. Leach and Jack Goldstein centering them on stage and planted their flag in the UK punk scene in which Falco has embedded himself. Working out new material live, Falco noticed that crowds were digging into his unfinished lyrics, and the album tightened around the anxieties of being in the spotlight, of being worthy of attention.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt times, those songs are eager to please, like the album’s title track in which a winking self-deprecation rubs up against the self-congratulatory bombast of Freddie Mercury, Falco simultaneously turning heads as a shooting star and a burning car. Elsewhere, as in “Better Here Than in Love,” Jade Hairpins pitch themselves towards creating gorgeous soundscapes that exist nowhere else, channelling postpunk through the glimmering haze of ’80s Japanese electronic music.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTheatrical and personal, absurd and true-to-life, playful and serious, \u003ci\u003eGet Me the Good Stuff\u003c\/i\u003e is album of tremendous personal and artistic growth that signposts towards dozens of potential futures to come. 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The use of the term “composition” is intentional and speaks to Koster’s relationship with the music of Quartet Plus Two in far more evocative terms than “cover” or “standard.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“To me it was always magical that there were these people called ‘composers’ who created symphonies and popular songs for other people to breathe into life and existence all over the world and throughout time,” he explains. “They traveled into our homes as sheet music, endless recorded interpretations, or were passed from hand to hand, village to village, like folk tales, changed by every hand that touched them. That music was something that came to life in our own living rooms and lives, songs that our grandmothers might have sung in a choir that we might sing just as earnestly. 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For the Grammy-nominated musician, whose albums have traced an internal path through adulthood, fatherhood, spirituality, and depression for well over a decade, this is something new. “The tunes on Jump for Joy were composed in free moments throughout 2022, a year during which Hiss was on the road more or less constantly,” explains Taylor. “And perhaps because the post-pandemic energy out in the world felt so chaotic and uncertain, I found myself thinking a lot about the role that music has played in my life and how exactly I ended up in the rarefied position of leading a band and crew all over the globe through dingy graffiti-scrawled green rooms, venerated music halls, dust-blown roadside motels. Sometimes playing in front of 5,000; sometimes 200. Sleeping sitting up. Laughing until my stomach hurts. Not being able to fall asleep at 3 a.m. in some anonymous bed because my mind is spinning with anxiety or depression or adrenaline, or because my ears are still ringing. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Paul to pay Peter back. Over and over again. It’s an outlaw life but one, I’m coming to realize, that makes me happy.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe songs that make up Jump for Joy the sharpest and most autobiographical that Taylor has written under the Hiss name read as a sort of epistolary, postcards between the present-day songwriter and his alias Michael Crow, a teenaged dreamer very much like Taylor himself, who trips his way through the 14 tunes that make up the record. In this way, \u003ci\u003eJump for Joy\u003c\/i\u003e is a meditation on a life lived with art, and the ways that our hopes and dreams and decisions bump up against and, with a little bit of luck, occasionally merge with real life. “Creating this character became the way that I could explore these vulnerable, tender moments that were so decisive in my life, even if I didn’t know it at the time,” explains Taylor.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eProduced by Taylor and engineered by longtime Hiss compatriot Scott Hirsch over two weeks in the late fall of 2022 at the fabled Sonic Ranch studio in Tornillo, TX, just a short walk from the Mexican border, Jump for Joy dances with joyful, spontaneous energy that feels like a fresh chapter in the Hiss Golden Messenger oeuvre. 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Although she has remained a cult hero and critical favorite since the early ’90s, Timony’s many triumphs have long been counterbalanced by crippling doubt and self-nullification.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHer fifth solo album, \u003cem\u003eUntame the Tiger\u003c\/em\u003e, approaches these emotions head-on. This is her first solo release in 15 years and is a startling document of an artist fully coming into her own power during the fourth decade of her career. It is the product of lessons learned during life-altering struggle.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe mystical, acoustic-driven \u003cem\u003eUntame the Tiger\u003c\/em\u003e emerged after the dissolution of a long-term relationship and was bookended by the deaths of Timony’s father and mother. The album was recorded during a two-year period during which she was the primary caregiver for her ailing parents. 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What do you call such inner searching that is hellbent on rollicking? Songs that long for a sense of peace and songs that want romance, all on equal footing in the same plot of earth? Performed wild, but always centered around the incredible lyrical calm that is Rosali’s voice.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBite Down\u003c\/i\u003e makes me think about singers and bands that throw themselves hard into the storm, the way the Rosali quartet does. (Jim captures the tone of this perfectly, again!) The calm of her voice over top of the band’s raging it is the emblem of songs that live to put themselves in harm’s way. But it’s not harm. It’s just that you have to play hard to get at these goods. The calm of Rosali’s voice, the straight talk of her inner search vs. the wildness of the band, the sonic storm she rides in on. That’s their sound.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Mowed Sound. It’s hard to talk about these last couple Rosali albums without talking about them. 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The six-and-a-half-minute tone poem smolders and drones over just two chords, inspired by the strange and silly community events that he saw growing up outside of Chicago, in La Grange, Illinois, in which people dressed up and showed off their pets. Decades later, The Pet Parade emerges in troubled times, living within what Johnson refers to as the beauty and absurdity of existence. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWhile many of the songs on \u003ci\u003eThe Pet Parade\u003c\/i\u003e were actually written before the pandemic, it’s impossible to disassociate the record from the times. As an example, producer Josh Kaufman (Bob Weir, The National, and Bonny Light Horseman, in which he plays with Johnson and Anaïs Mitchell) was brought in for his deep emotional touch and bandleading abilities. However, Johnson, Kaufman, and the other musicians on The Pet Parade drummers Joe Russo and Matt Barrick (The Walkmen, Fleet Foxes), singer-songwriter Johanna Samuels, pianist Thomas Bartlett (Nico Muhly, Sufjan Stevens), and fiddler Jim Becker (Califone, Iron \u0026amp; Wine) were forced to self-record their parts in bedrooms and home studios across America. Still, says Johnson, “The songs have enough intimacy that it doesn’t sound like it was made a million miles away.” \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eSuch tension and turmoil also impacted the lyrics of The Pet Parade. 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With Reigning Sound’s current lineup based in New York City, then a COVID-19 hotspot, Cartwright made the decision to produce the new record back in Memphis—though he did regret not being able to work with the players behind 2014’s Daptone-recorded Shattered. “It was not something I anticipated, making a record with the original lineup again,” Cartwright says. “Mainly, because I had guys I was playing with, and we had an established dynamic that was working.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn addition to working with old bandmates, Cartwright enlisted acclaimed producer Scott Bomar (Al Green, William Bell) at Electraphonic Recording, to produce in downtown Memphis. “Scott was in a band called Impala for many years,” Cartwright recalls. “And he also played bass with me and Jack [Yarber] on the Compulsive Gamblers’ Bluff City album. He has the machine I like to record on, a Scully one-inch 8-track. 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