Atlanta Band Genome - Summer 2008

Hey everybody - sorry I have been out of touch for a few days. I have been busy with many different little projects, including my baby daughter (or "ultra-pet" according to Kip Thomas). I hope to have more stuff posted starting this week, but for now I have updated the Atlanta Band Genome with all comments incorporated, or as much as possible. I receive a lot of comments related to a specific link being missing between two bands, but most of the time I am aware of the link, but omitting it due to the complexity of the drawing and the number of lines crisscrossing the entire page. Please let me know what you think, and I will continue to update as time goes on. One notable addition is Mastodon linked with Noot d' Noot after Rich Morris' set with them at Bonnaroo this year. We now have a 5-step link between Sonn Av Krusher and Brutal Truth, which is pretty awesome.

Scott from Amber Inn (DIY hardcore/postpunk band from Sacramento, CA back in the 90's) contacted me about the genome, as he runs an amazing site called bandtoband.com, you really need to check it out. I can get lost in that site for hours.

Atlanta Singles Week 26 - At the Price of the Union/Some Soviet Station Split

Here are the two songs from the split 7": At the Price of the Union/Some Soviet Station

I have a large stack of classic singles put out by Atlanta bands over the years, and I am trying to keep a regular post going each week to showcase these records. This is planned for every Monday, but I already missed the first one, so we'll just have to see how well I can keep to my schedule. Let me know if you have any requests for old 7"s that you haven't heard for a long time, or would like MP3s made, as I might have them.

The first single in my stack was the split 7" on Buddy System Records (our friends in Brooklyn who helped put out the hal al Shedad records), with Atlanta/Athens bands At the Price of the Union and Some Soviet Station. At the Price of the Union consisted of Craig Dempsey from Lowboy and The 42 on guitar as well as Josh Lott on drums and Luke Gilbert on bass. They were a power trio in the vein of Hoover (you can tell they were big fans) but with a slightly more Ebullition-style hardcore thrown in. Craig is one hell of a guitarist, and the band could ride that deep bass postpunk groove like there was no tomorrow. One interesting thing is that Josh as a drummer plays right-handed, but with his left hand on the hi-hat and right hand on the snare, like Doug Scharin in June of 44 and Codeine and also coincidentally Francis Jensen from The 42. Playing drums like that is strange, normally as a right-handed drummer you hit the snare drum with your left hand and kick drum with your right foot, producing a natural side to side "dancing" motion. With Josh's style of drumming, you have a much more up and down motion without the swaying, and my main concern with this method is that you may lose the natural rhythm of your body when keeping a beat. Fortunately Josh didn't have this problem, and as an advantage, his right hand was free when it wasn't hitting the snare, so he could do a lot more tom work in the songs. Luke is also a natural groove-oriented bassman, and fits Craig's style perfectly. They are so matched together, it's like one guitar unit that cannot be separated. Chocolate Kiss played with them a few times, and I have to say they would put on one hell of a show. They lived in Athens, but was not really considered an Athens band as all three members originally came from Stockbridge (south of Atlanta), and we had known them for so long. They also played Atlanta all the time, not like some other Athens bands that never play the big city. Other than this split 7", they came out with a 5-song CD on Buddy System, which also had a plane on the cover. There was something with them and airplane/military imagery, it was cool. "Shifting" is also a great song, as should be when doing a split 7" with another band. The band didn't last much longer after their CD came out, and Josh went on to play with the string-guys in Some Soviet Station under the name Paper Lions. Craig and Luke went on to form Thoroughbred and released a single a few years ago, and still jam together but I believe no current bands at this time. Josh later played in a band called Teenage Meth Lab with Justin from Some Soviet Station, and now is the drummer for Elf Power.

Some Soviet Station was of course a powerhouse in their own right. They were like taking Drive Like Jehu and making them a band on Dischord Records, and you got an idea of how the did their business. Jesse Smith (ex-Kossabone Red) is a great frontman, Lee Corum (ex-Chapterhall) is one of the great drummers of our town - a real drummer's drummer, Justin Snyder and Chris McNeal held their own in respective duties, especially in Chris' backup vocals. They also used a lot of airplane imagery in their band, which also seemed to work with their sound somehow. Their song "Pistol-Whipped" was a hit single of theirs, with some of the strangest lyrics for this type of music. Click on the insert below to check them out. These guys got pretty popular, but after their full-length came out on Moodswing Records they somehow fizzled. Jesse now fronts the band Gentlemen Jesse and His Men, and they just released an LP on Douchemaster Records. Lee has been playing in many bands over the years, including Copa Vance, Home of the Wildcats and most recently Lay Down Mains, which is about to release their full-length on Moodswing Records.

Definitely good "turn of the century" stuff here.

Corndogs of Years Past

Next Friday will be my 5th and 6th appearances playing in Corndogorama - the big festival held every Summer in Atlanta by Dave Railey. I dug up my old flyers/lineups from the past festivals I have played in and decided to post them here. I wish Dave would post flyers of all previous corndog fests, but so far I haven't seen anything.

Above: 4th Annual Corndogorama July 3rd, 1999 at Dottie's (it actually might have been the 5th). Bob Medina from Chocolate Kiss designed this flyer, and we played sometime in the afternoon, I believe. We have never played Corndogorama later than 5:15 or so - definitely never at night. That will change this year when Noot d' Noot will play on Friday night late as hell, I'm sure. I believe this was Haricot Vert's first show, as they were going under the plural version of their name. Other notable bands on the flyer are The Stimulants and Plastic Plan, but I do not remember many of the other bands. This was also held at Dottie's, the original location before it moved to the EARL in 2000 and Lenny's in 2007.

Below: Corndogorama July 1, 2000 at the EARL. This was a great lineup - probably band for band the best lineup the festival has ever had. I guess this was a pretty good time in Atlanta for local music, as we have The Close, Chocolate Kiss, Spectralux, Plastic Plan, Copa Vance, Hell Mach 4, Ocelot, Black Mollies, Some Soviet Station and Dropsonic all on the same bill. All of these bands made some kind of name for themselves in Atlanta, and it was quite a show. I believe Dropsonic has probably played more Corndogoramas than any other non-Dave Railey band. Let's hear it for longevity.


I love this message on the back of the flyer - total Kip Thomas



Above: Corndogorama June 30, 2001 at the EARL. Compared to the great year before, this was a bit of a let down lineup-wise. Peaks and Valleys. The notable acts being Chocolate Kiss (of course), Remuxers, Haricot Vert, Rizzudo, The Rock Coaches and Copa Vance. Heinous Beinfang is actually playing this year's festival on the nostalgia trip.

Below: Last Year's Corndogorama July 12-15, 2007 at Lenny's. This is the big time. Now we have an amazing lineup of bands, but spread out over 4 days and way too much time spent at Lenny's. This would make an unbelievable one day event taking the best 10 bands (Mastodon, Zoroaster, Gentleman Jesse and His Men, Judi Chicago, The Selmanaires, Sweetloves, ANDPW, Lay Down Mains, Space Seed (!) and I'll even give you Snowden, Magnapop, Coathangers and a couple of others and you got yourself one hell of a show. Fortunately, Dave allows more breathing room so bands like Sonn Av Krusher, Mistaken for Them, Forever War, and others to get on the bill and contribute what they can.


So thanks, Dave, for everything you've done over the years getting this behemoth of a show going every year, and hope you have many more years to come. For your information out there, I will be playing on Friday June 27th with Sonn Av Krusher at 4:30 in the afternoon (Happy Hour) and at 10:50 that evening - my first Corndogorama night performance. Other notable acts include Tenth to the Moon on Thursday, Sonn Av Krusher/Noot d' Noot on Friday (of course), Five-Eight/Anna Kramer/ANDPW on Saturday, and Rizzudo/Battle Cat/Maserati/Let the Night Roar/Zoroaster/Tornado Town (Will Green's new band) on Sunday. Sonn Av Krusher was supposed to play then, but a family trip to the beach happened to be planned during what was to be our moment of triumph. Next time.

Here is the full lineup for the show: Corndogorama 2008 Lineup

Mr. Bob in SoCal - Cabron! and the Mexican Shoe Thief

Here is the album for download: Cabron! Mexican Shoe Thief

Chocolate Kiss played our last show on July 4, 2002, and Bob moved soon afterwards to San Diego in time to start teaching for the upcoming 2002-2003 school year. He is an elementary school art teacher, which is only one of the thousands of professions he has had over the years, and something I know he really enjoys. I got a message from him recently that due to budget cuts he will most likely be layed off from the educational workforce out there, so I hope the best for him and Ana. For the 4-5 years that Chocolate Kiss was together, I think he liked playing our indie rock stuff, but if he could join an old-school punk/hardcore band, he would have been in old-man heaven. Well, when he moved out west, he immediately started playing with various bands and settled into this group of guys here and started Cabron!, which is probably the band he always dreamed of playing guitar for. They seem to be doing very well for themselves out there, playing regularly in SoCal and Mexico, but no plans to come East anytime soon. Bob tells me that they play in Tijuana a lot, and it's like going to a show in the US 20 years ago. Kids in Black Flag shirts, stolen power for the amps and PA being run from one extension cord down the street, completely random bands playing together, good times. They are recording some new music right about now, but here is their original release as well as liner notes, etc. for your enjoyment.

They also have a myspace page (of course). Here it is - CabronSD. You can demand that they come to Atlanta and play - I placed my vote.

Krusher and F.U.C.T. - Together at Last

Sonn Av Krusher is playing this Thursday at Lenny's Bar in Atlanta, but this is not the typical Thursday night out - the classic metallic hardcore band F.U.C.T. from Nashville will be sharing the bill with us. They were around back in the late 80's/early 90's and played with bands like O.C.B. when they would come through Atlanta, and now they are playing with the Krusher. Hope they are ready.

Here is their Myspace page - check it out efyouseetee.com

We are also playing with locals Mourdella and Sex in Cars (myspace pages attached).

It should be quite a night of pleasure.

P.S. The flyer (designed by Gray Kiser himself) has a Car Vs. Driver reference - see if you can find it.

Here is a bonus flyer from Sex in Cars - righteous.

The hal al Shedad Self-Titled Album (1996)

Here is the album for download: The hal al Shedad Self-Titled Album

Where oh where to begin? We had done 3 singles with At A Loss Records (Sound of Swords Clashing), Lunchbox Records (split with Inkwell) and Auto Stop Records (Symbol of Sound Progress), respectively, and had enough music ready to do a full-length. On our winter 1995 tour, we played in Austin, TX with Action Patrol, and Mark Owens from Buddy System Records came out to the show and I guess liked what he saw (or was it Matt Owens?). Later on he talked with his brother (the other one) as well as Mike Simonetti from Troubleman Records in New Jersey and decided to put out a split-release LP/CD. Mike told us that except for Carbomb, it was the first band he ever released without seeing live first. We recorded the album in March of 1996 in New Jersey with Alap Momin (from Dalek) studio in his parent’s house. He had recently recorded all of the Rye singles and the split LP with Karp, and we were big fans of their sound, especially guitar and cymbal sound, so we went for it. The songs were literally tracked in his garage, with the guitar amp on one side, the drums on the other, and the bass amp in the next room. I’m pretty sure the songs were recorded on ADAT tapes, just to give you an idea of the era we are talking about here. Alap was very fond of telling us that something sounded “sick”, which we weren’t used to hearing coming from Georgia, but we liked it. People seemed to enjoy this record, I have gotten many good reviews from all over and the only complaint I ever had was the recording quality. But we are talking DIY postpunk here – sorry the production value is not what you are used to. I believe we recorded the entire album in 3 or 4 days, and then drove home overnight to play with Dahlia Seed at the Driverdome. For the most part there is only one guitar, bass, drums and vocals on the album – we played it live with no overdubs or extra instrumentation. The album didn’t come out until December of 1996 (9 months turnaround time), and by then we already had the next two singles and some of the Textures of Tomorrow album written and incorporated into our set. Ben and Phil Dwyer from Inkwell worked the night shift at Kinkos during this time, so we had inserts printed in file folders for the LP release, just as something special. I think we did two pressings of this album and the file folder insert was only included on the first. Phil Dwyer also did all the artwork, which we loved and were really proud of. He basically legitimized our band through his design. Around this same time the Promise Ring’s first album came out, and it kind of looked like ours, which was kind of a bummer, but what can you do. I also liked the idea of the Hal al Shedad identification cards, which expired on March 15, 1998 although I can't remember the signficance of that date. Perhaps it was 3 years after the first show. We actually had these laminated ID cards printed, but these are long gone now. The video stills on the front were taken by Phil Dwyer from a show at a former frat house at Emory University in Atlanta, I believe it was a Food Not Bombs benefit. I still have the original video, and about 100 still images that Phil went through to find these. One of these stills is included above. The photographs were taken by Valery Lovely, a local scene icon, photographer and sister of Lewis Lovely from Scout. We walked around downtown Atlanta and used Tim from Scout's car trying to get some good surveillance-type photos to include in this release. We almost called the album “Surveillance of Heaven”, but I never had a self-titled album for any release I played on, so I recommended that we just keep it nameless. That is about all I can think of regarding this album, send me a comment if you have any questions and I can try to answer them.

Here are some alternate pictures from that photo session:

Here is an overview of each song:

Walking Blind Dancing – Good early-style song of ours, like the early singles but starting to move in the more varied dynamics direction of our mid-period stuff. Since Ben starts with the big “IIIIIIIII”, we thought it would be good to start the album that way. I liked to play things with a shuffle rhythm, and then back to straight rhythms. This is also done well on After School.

Unification – I liked how Franklin’s first album had a long instrumental song after the first rocker, and we decided to go the same way. We were into non-conventional song sequencing as a band. Josh Lott from At the Price of the Union told me once that he saw us play this song in a house in Athens and that convinced him that this type of music was the way to go.

After School – A good start with the drum fill, shuffle/straight/shuffle structure. Ed does vocal duties, which was very rare. I think Ben wrote the lyrics but wanted Ed to sing them. I always liked Ed’s singing/yelling voice, but he barely used it in the band.

Postcard Communication – We were big fans of the song “The Everyday World of Bodies“ by Rodan, and I think this was our kind of homage to it. Ben used to always start his drives in the van by putting that song on. This is when we started getting into longer and more orchestrated songs, also with The Art of Mapmaking on the same album, but didn’t really hit our peak until Textures of Tomorrow, which has a few big ones. I think we did this in one take, just because it was so long to start over.

Spoken City – This was one we wrote and almost never played live. The only time I remember playing it was in Rapid City, SD when we played someone’s hallway and the conditions were so tight an loud that we had to play the end part just to blow the place out. That end part has 3 basses going at the same time, by the way.

Consolation Prize – Great middle part that had the token “Troubleman Rhythm”, i.e. da-da/da-da, da-da/da-da, da-da/da-da, da-da/da-da. We played this one quite a bit live, along with Local Seeing, Unification and That One (of course).

The Question is Moot – My only singing on a song post-Midget Farmer days. It was fun to play, and I liked the mix of having Ed sing some, Ben sing some and myself. However, Ben was really the singer, and I was just messing around. No more singing after this one.

Falling Out – Another one written pretty much for the album and almost never played live. Like a lost HAS song that I hardly recognize when I hear it again.

That One – If hal had a hit single, this would have been it. We played it at pretty much every show. It was fun to play, and was always powerful. I really miss playing it.

The Art of Mapmaking – We split it into 2 songs just because of the length and to be pretentious. I remember playing it in Philadelphia and getting a great response. We liked to play with dynamics at that point, and trying to make the quietest parts as quiet as possible, and the loudest parts as loud as possible, hopefully in the same song.

Here is the artwork and a promo poster from the album:

The hal al Shedad at the Driverdome

Hal al Shedad at the Driverdome in 1995 (from L to R): Jon Lukens (Retconned, Year Zero, etc.), Josh White (At A Loss Records), Rebeca Merchant (Scenester Extraordinaire), I don't know this person, Bryan Fielden (The 42, San Augustin).

Here are some photos I dug up featuring classic Hal al Shedad photos from the Driverdome, which was along with the I-Defy house one of the main places to play in Atlanta from 1994 - 1998 or so (I can't remember exactly when the last show happened). As always, click on any picture to enlarge, etc.

July 1, 1995 - Photos taken by Shawn Scallen

Also from Summer 1995 - Photos by Andy Stivers (I believe)

Craig Lee Dempsey and Francis Jenson from the 42 (more on them later)

August 21, 1996 - This was my first show back in Atlanta after spending the summer in San Diego and Austin. I was no longer living at the Driverdome - Saucemaster had taken my room by this time and was sleeping in my bed.

Tree Records Post-Marked Stamps Singles

Here is the file for download: Tree Records Post-Marked Stamps Series

I sequenced the CD in the order of the singles as they were released:

1. Ida - Post Prom Disorder

2. The Deadwood Divine - And Where Did I Leave Off

3. Cerberus Shoal - A Lighthouse In Athens Part 1

4. Still Life - Looks Like Tomorrow

5. Ethel Meserve - Belated Blues

6. Giants Chair - Lost Dauphin

7. Braid - Forever Got Shorter

8. The Get Up Kids - I'm A Loner Dottie, A Rebel

9. Healah - Fallen Away

10. Aspera Ad Astra - Black In The Eye

11. Jen Wood - Sheltering Arms (For The Birds That Are Unborn)

12. Tim Kinsella - A Picture Postcard

13. Very Secretary - Nagarkot

14. Compound Red - Building

15. Sweep The Leg Johnny - Walking Home On The Emergency Bed

16. A Minor Forest - Inter Continental Stalker (And So Does The Wolf Whistle)

17. Hal al Shedad - Solitaire

18. Rainer Maria - Pincushion

The hal al Shedad did a split 7" with Rainer Maria for the end of the Post-Marked Stamps singles series on Tree Records, and it turned out to also be the last official release by the band. We contributed "Solitare", which was probably my favorite late-era song of ours, using Ed's Roland Juno synthesizer and guitar simultaneously for a thick, distorted effect (he did this live as well). This wrecked havoc on the single, and our song came out as an over-driven mess. Here is the song taken directly from the record to see what I mean. I read in the liner notes of the CD that timelines were sometimes so tight Ken would give the order to press the singles to United without ever listening to a test pressing. This is unfortunate, as so much love and effort was put into the packaging, but the music started to suffer in the process. Luckily, this CD came out with the song properly mastered, so the song was somewhat redeemed. We pretty much gave away our copies of the 7", or just taking a dollar or so based on the packaging, which was really the selling point of the release.

We were invited to play a festival at the Fireside in Chicago for the series, but Ben had a nasty case of testicular torsion and had to have an operation, so no singing for a little while. I went up there myself and got to see the show we otherwise would have played. Aspera Ad Astra was one of my favorite bands from the series, contributing an excellent song, but when I saw them live they were completely different. They were like a Yardbirds-style blues band instead of the spacey post-rock I was anticipating. I also got their first album and it sounded a bit like Radiohead. I guess they were eclectic in their styles. I also saw American Football, which was not in the series but a good band nonetheless, and hung out a bit with the 90 Day Men guys in the bar, back when we knew each other and would play shows together.

Here are the liner notes from the CD, which has a very good narrative on how the singles were conceptualized and released. It was a very nicely put together project, and we were glad to contribute. Of course these singles are very difficult to find, and I am not sure of the current state of Tree Records, but I wanted to keep the history of this series alive a little longer. Thanks.

Here is also the artwork, etc. from the Hal al Shedad/Rainer Maria split:

The back of this card read "You've come a long way up this mountain to be here with us, the least we can do is invite you in for tea."

Sticker on the back of the single