Grand Jury

Twin Peaks

Lookout Low

Grand Jury

***BACK IN STOCK ON ORANGE VINYL!!! The freshly powdered TWIN PEAKS have returned with a collection of new bangers for your fall season. Their first studio album since 2016’s Down In Heaven and their first produced effort with ETHAN JONES (Kings of Leon, Paul McCartney, U2). Lookout Low is a testament to the boys honing in on their songwriting as well as further exploring studio capabilities.

Parker, Monk

Crown Of Sparrows

Grand Jury

***The lush, melancholy world of MONK PARKER has a thousand indirect referents, touchstones hidden in the cinema (Lynch, Wong Kar Wei), the library (Transtromer, McCarthy, Bruno Schulz) and the museum (Saul Leiter, George Shiras, Anselm Keifer). It is located diffusely, in the dark, hidden places of America, from the empty midday honky-tonks of Austin to the ghost-crowded highways of the foggy northern forests. Within his own field—music—his antecedents comprise a half-forgotten, mournful legion. He came to the practice of music late, and after briefly forming and dismantling two bands in the early aughts (THE LOW LOWS, PARKER & LILY), his debut solo album arrived in 2016, coinciding with his 40th birthday. That album was the result of a sudden & debilitating—though ultimately temporary—illness that ended his years in New York City and took him back to the family farm outside Austin, where, over three years of recuperation, hundreds of hours of music was recorded, mostly in an unused welding shed by the banks of the Blanco River. Involving over 30 musicians (including friends from OKKERVIL RIVER, THE POLYPHONIC SPREE, HEAVY TRASH and SWANS), the sessions revolved around a slew of vibraphones & vintage organs, steel guitars, a raft of cinematic strings and an intricately orchestrated brass section that manages to evoke both stax/volt-style balladry and Neutral Milk cacophony. Drawn mostly from the same huge batch of sickbed recordings, the Crown of Sparrow is both majestic and feral, it’s tension hidden beneath a scratched-surface warmth, a woozy country narcosis, with layers...

Hippo Campus

Landmark

Grand Jury

***“There’s a moment in growing up when it becomes clear that the road you walk is your own to cultivate.” A surprisingly profound sentiment for a band of 21-year olds. Nevertheless, it’s a sentiment that animates much of landmark, the debut album from Minneapolis’ HIPPO CAMPUS. From the resplendent “Way It Goes,” a guitar led gallop about the Instagram-filtered church of cool, to the propulsive “Boyish,” a horn-kissed rumination on children of divorce, Landmark is shot through with a woozy dissonance between precocious wisdom and old-as-time coming of age stories. The result is a messy, brave, and earnest whole—not to mention, a tectonic shift forward for a young band still discovering itself. Of course, that should come as no surprise. Hippo Campus—comprised of vocalist/guitarist JAKE LUPPEN, guitarist/vocalist NATHAN STOCKER, bassist ZACH SUTTON, and drummer WHISTLER ALLEN—have done their fair share of growing up since forming in late 2013. Their pair of 2015 EPs, Bashful Creatures and South, catapulted a freshly-formed band onto sold out tours, radio airwaves, late night TV stages, timelines, feeds, and glowing screens the world over. After a 10-month stretch of work informed by their surprising ascent, Hippo Campus’ first full-length showcases not only their trademark ear for ringing melodies and impeccably constructed pop frameworks, but a desire to dig deeper—both into their talent and in their selves—for inspiration. (STREET DATE - 2/24/2017)

Twin Peaks

Down In Heaven

Grand Jury

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.2 rating from Pitchfork. Give TWIN PEAKS an inch and they’ll take a stretch of the road. Having careened across America and beyond, sharing their staggering energy, the band made their third album the best way they know how: by themselves. The same group that produced the scuzzy squalor of their debut Sunken, had legions of fans screaming along to their anthemic sophomore effort, Wild Onion, now swings and serenades with Down In Heaven. Co-produced by the band and longtime collaborator R. ANDREW HUMPHREY, and mixed by new confidant JOHN AGNELLO (Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile, Sonic Youth), the record is by turns raw, polished and wise beyond its years. The diverse new songs beg the listener to sway slowly, bang their head wildly and question what they were doing wasting emotional time on anything less. It is a marked, and some may say mature, development for a band that doesn’t know how to play it safe. They aren’t here to tell you what youth is like or what being a little older now means, though; they want to join you in a conversation about why we hurt, love and tug at each other.