Knick Knack Records is proud to announce the release of The Foghorns new EP 'The Big F'

We're releasing it on CD-R and here's why:

track 1:  This Christmas All I want is a Job (lyrics and music by Bart Cameron) track 2:  Ain't I a Man (lyrics Bart Cameron, music by The Foghorns) track 3:  Wee Wee Hours (lyrics by Chuck Berry, music by Chuck Berry and Bart Cameron) track 4:  $400 (lyrics and music by Bart Cameron) track 5:  Cocksucker Blues (lyrics and music by Keith Richards, Mick Jagger.....and Bart Cameron)

The Big F: Why does this EP look like crap? Why is your music on a CD-R?

You’re thinking: “Hey, you’ve done well for yourselves, why are you giving me something anybody could make, if they could just demotivate themselves enough?”

There’s a possibility-- very slim-- that you’re someone who bought one of our beautifully made vinyl records. There’s a greater possibility that you’ve bought one of our professional-looking CDs. And it’s most likely that you heard our music on Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody, iTunes, or the radio. So you expect more from us.

It actually gets worse. Every song on this EP was recorded for us direct to quarter-inch tape using some gear that we couldn’t even afford to look at by the fantastic Charles Bork, who even mixed the EP for us as well. (All songs on this EP are live recordings using the best monophonic equipment money could buy in 1958-- no shit, serious. The master for this EP is prepped to be cut into acetate by Charles Bork, himself. This could have been the most legit electric recording this side of a Jack White wet dream.) (Actually, isn’t Jack White’s life Jack White’s wet dream?)

Additionally, over years of performing, we have some outstanding photos that we could have used. And probably most importantly, the two labels we have worked with recently, Charles Bork’s Groove-o-Matic and Joe Johnson’s Knick Knack Records, those dudes were ready to help us make something monumental.

Instead we’re selling a CD-R.

So here it is:

1. It is my firm belief that this is an excellent recording and performance. It is also my firm belief that the majority of people in Earth 1, or the planet we’re sitting and spinning on, would not find the experience of hearing our music… pleasant. Let me rephrase that-- the minority of people on Earth 1 would not enjoy this. One percent of the world would not enjoy this. If I were to break it down, I’d say more people would enjoy eating putrified shark than would enjoy two minutes of this EP. If “Yesterday” is the Taco Tuesday of world musicology, musicians being the artists that are equal to Waterloo, Iowa elementary school cafeteria master chefs and all the world’s music consumers being equated to 1983 Waterloo, Iowa 2nd graders, “This Christmas All I Want is a Job” would be the couscous and eggplant with sliced beets. (Truthfully, I’d choose something less wholesome as a food analogy, but the couscous scarred me for life.)

This is all to say… it takes a lot of effort to find that one hungry-ass child with the BJ Armstrong jersey willing to eat something different. And it takes even more to find someone interested in listening to what we’re putting out.

When The Foghorns started, we were in Brooklyn. You couldn’t toss a beret in my neighborhood without hitting someone more talented in every way than I was. But it didn’t matter. Brooklynites helped each other… and amazing musicians like Danny Erker and Brad Einhorn helped us. So we put on little shows, people contributed money to help us… put on more shows. (Where was that going?) Then I landed in Iceland, and this Foghorns thing ended up being a way to entertain people at art openings. Yes. Art openings. Okay, we sold cheap booze at the art openings too.

Something crazy happened in Iceland. (Every fucking second something crazy happens in Iceland. While I wrote this sentence, someone puked whale sashimi while bathing in a natural hotspring with a Venezuelan supermodel who has, tattooed above her left buttock, an old English poem about western winds, and who will soon, no doubt, depart for China to pose as a wealthy businessman’s girlfriend because, well, that kind of crap happens there. Iceland is equal to or greater than Stargate) Anyway, Bart gave up his artistic interests, went into journalism, and then… and this really can’t be explained.. The Foghorns became a funky-ass sideshow in Reykjavik. And then we made a CD that people bought. And when we sold CDs, just by ourselves, it turned out to be a lot of money. So much that to avoid being filthy fucking tax cheats, we had to either register as people earning money off art, or we had to invest our earnings in something like a label. We have never ever made money like that since.

So… I listened to that CD the other day. (Note: This ridiculous liner note oscillates between “we” and “I” because this band seriously is a multi-person entity… The Bart who gave up his artistic interests and who is writing this while he burns the CD-Rs for a show, that Bart kind of fades when it comes to music, the “we” of the band, his lack of musical training allow him to just be a part of something.) The CD we sold in Iceland that made money was called So Sober. It doesn’t sound great, to me. As in, it’s too avant garde for me. It’s Bart (see the switch) at his most nasal, slightly off-key, and morose as hell, with a clangy, unforgiving wash-basin beating in time sometimes, off time at others.

Holy God is this digressing. The point is, and this is point 1, as The Coasters sing in “What is the Secret of Your Success” (and by the way, they may have sung some adolescent lyrics, but they did so beautifully), “some folks got it and some folks ain’t.” Or… while we may, as a culture, attempt to justify success by working backwards from success to explain the virtues of each work of art; when you’re putting your money, or, worse, other people’s money, into something, the fact that success depends on so many variables gets uncomfortable.

The music on this record is good, but your parents won’t like it. Your children shouldn’t have access to it, unless you want to have some difficult conversations-- honestly, just get it out of the way,

Well son, this is what a harmony is, and when Bart sings about beastiality, the harmony is, I believe a 1-5-7 harmony, which is complicated, but it’s a stock harmony you’d find in many protestant churches with sub-par choirs. I wanted to wait to tell you this, but some choirs… just don’t use thirds well. Also, some dudes fuck pigs. And gay men are raped by policemen and people of authority routinely… so singing about that is offensive, but the fact that it happens is more offensive, and therefore we will buy every Foghorns album henceforth, though this song itself was written by The Rolling Stones in 1968. Yes son, lyrics that were kind of mainstream in 1968 are fantastically vulgar by contemporary standards because we are in a second Dark Ages. When you grow up, you will communicate only by digital gesture, but using gestures, you will follow extensive commentary about the vulgarity of Miley Cyrus’s ankles, (she will still, somehow, be only 21), possibly deciding to virtually burn her at the stake. Yours will be deemed the Age of Bayless, and yours will be the last generation of humans that can stand in the rain without looking up and drowning. Glad we had this discussion. (SCENE)

So we made a CD-R because we didn’t want to risk any money-- ours, or anyone else’s. We could have made something prettier, found those fans interested in us, and generated a unique little universe of culture. Or we could have tried. But that would mean spending lots of time finding those people. Finding them, reaching out to them. Getting them interested in our “brand” and “backstory” (but wait, what’s all that bullshit about Brooklyn and Iceland). Instead, we thought we’d stick to the people we already know, give them our honest effort, and leave it at that.

2. Odds are 50/50 this is only a temporary measure, and we’ll release something slick-looking and try to sell it to you, too. We might even name it something else to get you to buy the thing twice. We are just barely popular enough where we can make something pretty and not lose a lot of money off of it. But there’s always tons of worry behind it, because we’re really on the edge there, between just popular enough and abject failures.

3. We’re working on an album. The whole idea that anybody care when we were going to release something new caught us by surprise. So we thought we’d take advantage of that energy and go and capture our live sound with this EP. We did that. Then we were supposed to talk about making records, or CDs, etc. The biggest cost of vinyl and CDs, literally, (the old definition, not the new literally means “!” definition), is PACKAGING. For small bands, art and cardboard would be a massive section of the pie chart that is their product. So… we did this big F thing. As a coincidence, F stands for Foghorns

4. This allows us to sell you our music for very little. No, this wasn’t our first concern.

Thanks, The Foghorns

Performing as Ape Tit, GravelRoad rip through a set that includes several new songs that they are working on for their 2014 album.

"“Ain’t I a Man,” with it’s sharp Dylanisms and sharper bass clarinet (thanks to Lauren Trew), makes no bones about its biting social critique. Whereas much of the Foghorns’ rich catalog deals with hangovers, bad lays and good lust, these songs are honest-to-goodness social commentary about the state of values, fairness, manliness, and opportunity in our contemporary, high-gloss bubble. “Ain’t I a Man” is a protest song of the best kind – the kind that looks you in the eye and says “you’re a dick, and here’s why.” About the upwardly mobile urban denizens that swarm Seattle and other urban hotbeds, Cameron not only takes the obvious jab that “9 out of 10 can’t take a shit on their own / yeah they’re utterly helpless if they ain’t on their phones” but, more pointedly, remarks, “So I’m stuck in the city where the geeks are kings / They got all the morals of Louis the 14th,” which gets to the critical heart of the Big F."

-Jon Rooney, Ball of Wax

Click here for the full text

Mystery Ship Fall 2013 West Coast Tour - Breaking in their new tour van to bring rock and roll to the people!

October 21: Seattle WA - El Corazon with Earthless and Joy
October 22: Bend OR - Volcanic Theater Pub
October 23: Reno NV - St. James Infirmary
October 24: San Francisco - The Knockout with Wild Eyes, Electric Shepherd
October 25: Santa Monica CA - TRiP
October 26: San Diego CA -The Casbah with Earthless and Joy (Earthless record release)
October 27: Tucson AZ - Surly Wench
October 28: Tempe AZ - Yucca Taproom
October 29: Albuquerque NM - Blackbird Buvette
October 30: Denver CO - 7th Circle Music Collective
October 31: Provo UT - ABG's Libation Emporium
November 1: Salt Lake City UT - Burt's Tiki Lounge

Here's some video footage from the Santa Monica date:

The new album from GravelRoad, 'The Bloody Scalp of Burt Merlin' Here's what reviewer James Carlson has to say about their fourth studio album:

"GravelRoad’s “The Bloody Scalp of Burt Merlin” is one of those rare albums from whose wholly exceptional songs it proves more than a little difficult to chose favorites. Still, if pressed to do so, I would most certainly chose slide guitar and handclaps and cleverly uneven vocal delivery of Maybe the Wind, the brief yet wild all-out rocker Med Pass!, the fevered Hill Country blues of Death Bed Blues, and the classic rock and country blues fusion of Bring Me Back.

“The Bloody Scalp of Burt Merlin” by GravelRoad – a superb album by an outstanding band. Definitely worth one’s while."

-James Calson, No Depression

click here for the full text

The Obelisk recently gave this very in-depth review of the new Mystery Ship record and here's a bit of what they had to say:

"Mystery Ship revels in a swath of classic heavy rock and blues influences. One might also see them as taking cues from the European retro-minded jetset, acts like Graveyard and Kadavar, but as they display in the smoothly executed jam/build on the closing “Wild Eyes,” they have a sensibility of their own to work within, and a recording job from Jack Endino results in a sound that’s wholly natural, but not reaching for any kind of heavy ’70s lo-fi analog-ism...Anyone with this much boogie in them is going to have a hard time keeping still for very long." 

http://theobelisk.net/obelisk/2013/09/23/mystery-ship-ep-ii-review/

The Foghorns and Los Colognes (Nashville) perform at The Royal Room in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle for another installment of DJ Greg Vandy's summer concert showcase series, American Standard Time

It almost turned out to be a rainy summer evening, but the sun came out and it was pouring rock and roll

GravelRoad, Rose Windows and JD McPherson August 2, 2013 at the Seattle Center, presented by KEXP

http://blog.kexp.org/2013/08/07/photos-concerts-at-the-mural-with-jd-mcpherson-rose-windows-and-gravelroad/

A Northern Howl-- GravelRoad kick down the doors with their fourth album The Bloody Scalp of Burt Merlin

In the heart of the Mississippi Delta, where the Robert Johnson thing happened, the Muddy Waters thing happened, John Lee Hooker... where that beloved and damned blues took shape, there’s a cherished celebration of the authentic-- an annual Juke Joint Festival. You can walk into Red’s, (maybe they’ll shout “white people!” like they did when I visited, maybe they won’t), and you can watch women dance without a blush to heavy-beat blues. History still lives there. If you were there in 2013, you saw a huddle of unassuming, weary white dudes get up with a couple Gibson’s and blow the doors down, side by side with the progeny of Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, and with their good friend T Model Ford.

GravelRoad are the worn down white dudes who can play the holy shit out of the heavy beat blues-- the swung bass beat style that you hear from the acoustic Delta recordings of Clarksdale to the electric work of the Hill Country near Oxford (where the bass drum kicks like a hip bone, sometimes pausing just enough to get the groove into it).

We watched the band develop from DIY blues fans with their 2004 self title release and their 2008 release Shot the Devil, then their apprenticeship with T Model Ford-- across 60,000 miles of touring, across the US and Europe, across two fantastic records, The Ladies Man and Taledragger. When they dropped Psychedelta, I felt I got it. The band was looking for a new angle, a new take on blues. They’d studied up and now they were striking off on their own. The ten tracks on that album are thick, emotive, consistent-- I think Cough Syrup Stomp would be an accurate description-- though maybe people who’ve led cleaner lives wouldn’t use that term. Classic Rock Magazine called it an album of the year.

Well, shit. If that was album of the year, Classic Rock Magazine is going to lose their minds over GravelRoad’s fourth full length release, The Bloody Scalp of Burt Merlin. I’ve been blown away by it from the day they stepped up on stage in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle and belted out the inaugural track, “The Run.” 60,000 miles of touring has an effect. To see Stefan Zillioux and Jon Kirby Newman lay down the weave of guitar work, then sing the doubled lyrics as effortlessly as a breath... I was stunned. I knew they were blues musicians, I didn’t think they could integrate the 60s Brit-Blues harmony more flawlessly than Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

The Bloody Scalp... is full of these displays. There’s the doubling harmonies that so few bands can pull off. There are the great riffs-- not 70s classic rock riffs, but a jittery, relentless riffs... more Angus Young than Duanne Allmann, as demonstrated on “Monkey with a Wig.” There’s even a aching homage-- with the sweet open string partial chord work that blues fans will recognize-- to Junior Kimbrough, “Last Night’s Dream”.

Nothing is easy on this album. Nothing is safe. It’s a full bore explosion of a statement. The band even departs from the hip-shake beat that, I feel, locked them into the Mississippi form. I’ve always been impressed with how drummer Martin Reinsel locks down the groove of their sets live. Here, he takes the role of a hard driving trucker, moving beyond that hip shake kick... slamming the band into heavy rock territory with the RPMS climbing on “Med Pass,” then slipping it back down with “Bottom of the World.”

There’s the old story about the crossroad not far from GravelRoad’s beloved Red’s Juke Joint in Clarksdale. A lot of musicians use that cliche now when a band disappears and suddenly shows up lightyears ahead of the pack. I hate to turn to it, but from the second I heard the first song on this album played live, to today, as I’ve been listening to the final master, I’ve got to admit... when something like this comes along, you’ve can’t help thinking of the supernatural.

~Bart Cameron, American Standard Time