Dangerous Minds: New music by Rough Francis, from ‘A Band Called Death’

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Surely you’ve seen A Band Called Death by now, right? If not, you seriously need to get on that. Though it seems to have expired from Netflix streaming (booooo), it’s still available to subscribers on Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime (and it’s only like $3 for non-Prime Amazon streaming). If you’ve missed this story somehow, the film relates the saga of the Hackneys, three young African-American brothers in Detroit, MI, in the early ‘70s, whose family band eerily predicted the back-to-basics hard rock ethos and sound of punk by a couple of years, and yet they remained entirely unknown to the world until the discovery of their excellent self-released 7” made them a 21st Century cause célèbre among record collectors.

The rediscovery of Death brought forth some marvelous fruits—Death’s lost LP For the Whole World to See was released to justifiable acclaim in 2009, and the band’s vaults were emptied with the releases of the collections Spiritual Mental Physical and III, and an album of new material by the reconstituted and re-energized band (minus guitarist/visionary David Hackney, who died of lung cancer in 2000), titled N.E.W., is due later this month. And the discovery had generation-spanning effects, in that the three sons of Death’s bassist/singer Bobby Hackney have, rather symmetrically, formed a family band called Rough Francis

Read the full story here
Order heavy on Riot House’s ROUGH FRANCIS 45 of “MSP2/Blind Pigs” — out April 18– as it will surely sell out!
RF 7inch WHITE ILD copy

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Patac legends FISTULA to play ROADBURN 2015!

Ohio sludge legends FISTULA have signed on for the 20th edition of the ROADBURN festival, playing Het Patronaat on Saturday, April 11.

Born out of a primordial ooze made of recombinant DNA, dissolved Percocet and cheap hooch – or as they like to call it, Akron, Ohio – Fistula first became active in 1998 and quickly earned a reputation as one of sludge’s most deranged, malevolent acts.

Its catalog is an impossible-to-chase-down barrage of splits, EPs and singles no less chaotic than their sound itself, but in 2014, FISTULA released its first full-length in six years, Vermin Prolificus, and on songs like “Smoke Cat Hair and Toenails” and “Pig Funeral” FISTULA proved it’s as terminally fucked as it’s ever been.

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“Everywhere FISTULA go, it leaves a trail of destruction behind it,” explains ROADBURN Festival coordinator Walter Hoeijmakers, “So we thought, no place better to have them play than in the church.”

Founder, former drummer and current guitarist/vocalist Corey Bing, vocalist Dan Harrington, bassist Greg Peel and drummer Jeff Sullivan are sure to be the perfect blend of blasphemy and assaulting volume, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have them at Het Patronaat on Saturday, April 11 for the 20th edition of ROADBURN.”

The Adolescents ‘Double Down’ on Bad Cops!

With the use of deadly force by police in the national spotlight following the decisions not to indict the officers involved in the Michael Brown shooting and Eric Garner’s chokehold death, the time couldn’t be better for the release of a protest anthem.

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Orange County punk veterans THE ADOLESCENTS are back to heed the call with their new album La Vendetta… è un Piatto che va Servito Freddo, a Sicilian phrase meaning “Revenge is a dish best served cold”. We are pleased to premiere one of its 16 tracks, “Double Down,” here.

While the latest controversies surrounding the use of deadly force by police center on the cases of black men, and that’s certainly a huge problem in the U.S., THE ADOLESCENTS are focusing on the case of police interaction with another minority — those who suffer from mental illness.

Stream the track “Double Down” and read Craig Rosen’s full story on yahoo music.

New doc ‘Records Collecting Dust’ documents vinyl collections of famous punk rockers

‘Records Collecting Dust’ will begin a series of nationwide premieres this January, with screenings scheduled through the end of March. In a statement, film producer and Riot House founder Brian Jenkins said there was a conscious push to bring the film to venues outside of larger, more “established” cities.

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“Many indie films do a year of theater premieres on the film festival circuit and primarily play in major markets across the country,” Jenkins said. “When I was brought on to this project, Jason and I agreed that we wouldn’t alienate our audience and that we would do our best to make this film accessible to everyone. We’ve got premieres from Los Angeles to Grand Folks, ND scheduled. It’s a film about punk rock records and we wanted to carry that ethic and approach through the filming, editing, and distribution of ‘Records Collecting Dust’.”

Consult the full schedule below, followed by the film’s first trailer.

Records Collecting Dust 2015 Showtimes:
01/09 – San Diego, CA @ Digital Gym
01/10 – San Diego, CA @ Digital Gym
01/23 – Los Angeles, CA The Nerdist Showroom
01/27 – Oakland, CA @ The New Parkway Theater
01/29 – San Francisco, CA @ Balboa Theater
01/15 – Washington DC @ The Black Cat
02/04 – Gainesville, FL @ The Wooly
02/06 – Baton Rouge, LA @ Atomic Pop Shop
02/08 – Baltimore, MD @ Otto Bar
02/11 – Portland, OR @ Hollywood Theatre
02/13 – Grand Forks, ND @ Ojata Records
02/16 – Rockford, IL @ Nordlof Theater
02/19 – Durham, NC @ Motorco Music Hall
02/20 – Sioux Falls, SD @ Total Drag
02/21 – Phoenix, AZ @ Film Bar
02/27 – Richmond, VA @ Black Iris Gallery
02/28 – Santa Ana, CA @ The Frida Cinema
03/07 – Savannah, GA @ Graveface Records and Curiosities
03/08 – Bloomington, IN @ The Bishop
03/13 – Fort Wayne, IN @ Cinema Center
03/20 – Louisville, KY @ Modern Cult Records
03/27 – Birmingham, AL @ Bottletree Café
03/28 – Chicago, IL @ Reggie’s Rock Club
03/28 – Bowling Green, KY @ The Public Theater of Kentucky

Pitchfork review of SRA’s HOUND “Out of Time”!

Available now! Exclusively from ILD.

By Paul Thompson

This year, for Halloween, Hound frontman Perry Shall went as AC/DC’s Angus Young. I don’t mean to say Shall merely “went as” Angus Young for Halloween; what I mean is, from the socks-and-shorts to the upturned brim, this dude was Angus Young. I bring this up to underscore Shall’s greatest strength as a frontman: he has a real knack for inhabiting the look and feel of a very particular era of rock’n’roll, the post-prog, pre-NWOBHM intermingling of hard-rock and proto-punk. At no point during Hound’s Out of Time—a triangulation of “Highway Star”, the first few Queens of the Stone Age LPs, and a not-unhealthy fixation with one Lemmy Kilmister—do Shall and company attempt to flaunt tradition, to push well-defined boundaries, to reinvent the wheel. Rather, the band’s looking to get back to something elemental: burly, bongwater-splattered rock’n’roll, the kind designed to sound particularly righteous coming from a pinstriped AMC Gremlin.

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More than anything, Out of Time is unrelenting; just over 27 minutes of low rumbles and snaky leads, pausing only for the delicately fingerpicked “Colintro”—courtesy of bassist Colin McGinniss, also of None More Black—just past the halfway point. Shall’s not a flashy player, neither as swaggering as Angus or as restless as “Fast” Eddie. Still, as a student of the classics, he’s picked up just the right combination of attack and restraint, and Out of Time does lean every bit as well as mean. Taken together, the album’s arid production—a kind of bleary, mid-fi tunnelvision—and near-monomaniacal drive are transportive, beamed in directly from the middle of a long, dark night spent blasting down some backwater at 90 MPH, lids heavy, heart pounding.

Leadoff single and snarling highlight “Little One” plunges a particularly toothsome Shall riff headlong into a roaring McGinniss bassline. Better still is “I Can’t Take It No More”, an anxious, hard-charging punker that finds an unusually excitable-sounding Shall screaming his way around the chorus. He’s not exactly a brazen presence behind the mic; throughout plenty of Out of Time, he coats his voice in a thin layer of fuzz, or deadpans his way through his delivery, allowing certain lines to get stuck in the surrounding sludge. Even at full howl, though, Shall’s never in any danger of overpowering these monstrous riffs, and Out of Time sounds best whenever he drops the inhibitions and fully leans into these songs. To that end, the Sabbath-indebted slowdown—”Houdini”, “Stupid Dreams”—sandwiching the outlying “Colintro” is a slight momentum-sapper; they don’t plod, exactly, but they don’t quite get the blood going like the scrappier stuff surrounding them.

Lyrically, Out of Time isn’t much to chew on. While Shall smartly sidesteps the dunderheaded machismo too often associated with capital-R rock revivalism, what he offers in its stead—anxiety, boredom, and self-doubt, more or less—is only a mild improvement. “If god was real, I think she’d be disgraced,” Shall sings on “Stupid Dreams”; it’s maybe the single most intriguing thought to be found on Out of Time, one Shall all but leaves unexplored. Still, this de-emphasis on lyrics is in keeping with tradition; despite what your uncle’s trying to tell you with that wrongheaded “Led Zeppelin vs. Nicki Minaj” meme he keeps slapping on your Facebook wall, the hard rock canon Hound are harkening back to has a long, storied tradition of dumb, overwrought, or otherwise beside-the-point lyrics. At this point, Hound seemingly aren’t all that interested in toppling their influences or killing their idols; instead, they’re trying to inhabit them, to pile up enough riffs to tap into that deathless feeling of plowing down the road, windows down, speakers blaring, the night ahead of them. That much, they nail.