UNEMPLOYMENT FOREVER

Another Band from Portland.....

(part of this originally posted on the Vice website)

Meth Teeth are;

Mattey-guitar,vocals.

Kyle-drums,vocals.

Fischmann-Guitar

How did Meth Teeth come together?

Meth Teeth came about when I quit one really frustrating band.Then another band I had worked really hard on fell apart. I was sick of bands and especially band mates. I become really interested in folk music and just wanted to write songs on my own and play them just for my friends. Exactly two years ago today I had my first show in a friends basement and invited some people to come play with me. That line up included a violin and a piano and was all acoustic. Then Kyle from Leper Print (our drummer) moved to Portland to go to art school on a Sub Pop Records scholarship. He had my really early demos and suggested that just me and him re-record the songs really blown out like an old Pussy Galore record or something. The folk vibe mixed with the lo-fi of our favorite noise and punk records seemed to work really well for the songs. We practiced once and then recorded the songs the next day on a cassette 8 track run through a karaoke machine. There was a layer of tape hiss on it so loud over it that when we would show it to people and they would listen and just look kinda confused. We really dug it though. That recording would later become our first 7''.

There's quite a few great bands coming out of portland at the moment, Eat Skull, The Whines, Rapid Youth were you inspired by them / are they friends of yours?

Portland's always been rich with amazing and original music. The Wipers, Dead Moon, Poison Idea etc. Bobby from the Whines and Rob from Eat Skulls house isn't too far from me. I wake up on their couch every once and a while and we've all played lots of shows together in town. I hadn't heard either of their bands when I started this project so I wasn't really inspired by them specifically but Rob and Rod (sp?) from Eat skull were in a band called The Hospitals earlier that I was listening to a lot when me and Kyle got started on stuff.

Rapid Youth is actually from Southern California though they have links to Portland. Those kids are funny as hell. One time I watched the vegan kid eat a pepperoni pizza that we pulled out of a dumpster when he was drunk. So awesome.

The tambourine's refreshingly loud on your recordings, similar to some sixties bands, notably the Beatles! Was this a conscious decision?

All we have is a set of really old, beat to shit drums that may or may not have been stolen by the dude i bought um off. We don't know anything about tuning them and have no money for new heads so we strapped a tambourine to the snare drum with a necktie to make it more audible.

All-time Top Five records?

Beck - One foot in the Grave
I bought this record when I was 12 and I still love it. Really laid back, weird-o folk stuff. Don't really care for any of his other records so much. This one is amazing though.



Bob Dylan - Another Side of Bob Dylan
I had to sell all my records once to pay rent and they wouldn't buy this one off of me. It was all I had left so I listened to it over and over on repeat. I heard he didn't want this record to be released but was bound by contract or something. Also, I heard he was sick of playing the role protest tune songwriter at the time so there are no 'the times are a changin" crap. For some reason this record of his really got me.



The Jesus and Mary Chain - Psychocandy
Very sweet, wall of sound-ish and almost 60's girl group songwriting mixed with brutal feedback. Pretty much perfect.



Pussy Galore- last show LP released as Live:In the red.
Part noise, part garage rock. Led by Jon Spencer of Blues Explosion. A cool twist on the 80's,NY scene- No Wave ideas they were surrounded by in their day. Drummer plays a trash can instead of a snare drum!



Neil Young - After The Goldrush
...He writes writes the best bummer songs ever. Listening to it right now



Any plans for a UK tour or record being released over here?

Fly us over and we will play! haha. No UK releases planned at the moment. Oh wait, there is a re-release of our 4 song tour tape that we put out last summer. But this time it's being released as a spilt with two other bands. They are Male Bonding and Mazes and that coming out on Split Tapes London any day now.

Who or what inspired you to start making music?

Portland's annual eight months of darkness and rain take their toll. Boredom and insanity as a result of that have a lot to do with this towns music. Kind of a generic "Portland" answer to your question but move here and you'll see it's no joke.

When's the LP out
Late June/early July. Stoked!

Meth Teeth - Never Been To Church

This mp3 is called "Never Been to Church". It's off our debut LP which is coming out on Woodsist in late June/early July.It's not even mastered yet haha.




Thanks Mattey!

MAYDAY NEO_PAGAN PARTY THIS FRIDAY - MI AMI / EDIE SEDGEWICK / GRAFFITI ISLAND / HIRED MUSCLE

This Friday night and only a fiver on the door!



Thanks to Seb for the descriptions.

MI AMI
Myspace
Touch and Go Bio

(Quarterstick Records) San Francisco trio formerly of Black Eyes (Dischord) taking cues from afro-disco rhythms, free-jazz perplexity and post-punk abandon to craft acid-drenched dubby percussive fever dreams. A melting pot of Awesome Tapes from Africa, the mega-treble post punk of The Pop Group and Minutemen, pan-world Cosmology Dubs and Terry Riley psych-tremors.

Mi Ami - "Echononecho" from Touch and Go/Quarterstick on Vimeo.

EDIE SEDGEWICK
Myspace
Website

(Dischord Records) Justin Moyer (El Guapo, Supersystem, Antelope) is the transgendered reincarnation of a Warhol superstar singing songs about Arnie, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek to shake your tail-feather to. Like a glammed-up Suicide or a more heavily made-up Make Up.




GRAFFITI ISLAND
Myspace

(House Anxiety/Sex Is Disgusting) Glue-sniffing mummified surf-punks kickin’ it lo-fi, weaving a mythos of feral beasts and cannibal feasts and summoning the ghost of Lux Interior and your childhood pets.



HIRED MUSCLE
Myspace

Filtering big manly riffs through the James Brown ass-shake machine. Beefheart/Minutemen/Don Cab-tinged math-funk from three Leeds bruisers.



plus NOISE* DJs playing radiophonic oddities, dub oddysies, no wave nihilism, kosmische musik, and shimmering disco diamonds.

PLUS MIXTAPE/CD SWAP. Bring some!

myspace.com/nottmorenoise
myspace.com/threecheersforourside

£5 On the door
8-late
Friday 1st May

EAT SKULL

Absolutely awesome band from Portland who's new Record 'Wild and Inside' is a highly recommended purchase. It will be available from the Siltbreeze website I presume

Listen to them on their myspace and
here is Stick to the Formula by Eat Skull to listen to while you read

Stick to the Formula - Eat Sku...

They answered the usual questions below.....

What are your top Five records that relate to the music you make with Eat Skull? And in particular to your great new record "Wild and Inside."

Glad you like the new record! I don't know how to answer this question so I will instead list 5 records that I can think of off the top of my head today that I love.

Bob Dylan "Bringing It All Back Home"

duh



Neil Young "American Stars and Bars"

especially side 2, although i like the coked out LA honky tonk shit on side 1 too.



Grateful Dead "American Beauty"

duh



David Bowie "Hunky Dory"

insidious and evil. "Don't Believe in Yourself...." Love it.



Hall and Oates "Abandoned Luncheonette"

Relaxing Sunday morning music. Stupid and smooth.



Top Five recent bands you've got into?

Kurt Vile is my favorite thing to drive to with a beer in my hand wearing sunglasses lately. The Violators kill live.



The Hunches are not exactly recent but their new album 'Exit Dreams' is not a meaningless genre exercise or empty ironic gesture at all which is refreshing to hear these days from a punk type band and very rare. Actually none of these bands are like that but The Hunches are a truly great band and have been for years and they will be missed.



The Whines - a young band from Portland who are honest, hypnotic and beautiful.



Mayyors - Best party band I've seen probably ever. Inspiring for how masterfully they play their music, and how they refuse to whore themselves out to others. Tightly contained and controlled. LOUD



Black Dice - Not exactly recent either, but they are still extremely gnarly and fucked up. Sounds like hell aka our world. Bad ass.



Some of you have been in bands together before - How did those projects end and Eat Skull come about?

Rod and I played in the Hospitals seperately and together, and did 'Hairdryer Peace' with Adam and Chris. After the last Hospitals European tour I moved to Portland to play music with him.



You are based in Portland, is it a good place for a band like yours and do you like living there?

There are lots of bars and houses to play shows at and it's easy to jam and record in your basement or house here. It's easy to avoid the more negative aspects of the music scene here and just focus on doing your own thing at home.

What do you miss most when you go on tour?

Tour can be a blast and sometimes you meet the greatest people and are treated so well by the nicest hosts, but it's easy to get sick of sleeping on hard cold floors and waking up next to dog shit and stuff and then eating at taco bell. After years of those kind of hijinks it stops being such an adventure. Usually I end up missing my sanity.

If there was one thing you could change about the music industry what would it be?

There should be less bands, less records, less music and more quality. Then maybe bands and records would be able to be heard by a wider audience without having to be dumbed down into a sugar pill. More meat, less candy. Where's the beef?

What are your ambitions beside making music?

Living in the country somewhere the weather is nice. Having a meaningful life.

Who or what inspired you to start making music when you were young?

Working backwards from crummy industrial music to Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle and the Residents gave me and my friends growing up the impetus to make crazy music and not worry about things too much, just press record on a boombox and go nuts on a casio, pans, broken guitar, recorder flute and whatever else was around. The shitty local punk scene was probably responsible for brainwashing me into an idiot servant for life. Now I will probably never stop.

What are your top five bands from the UK? Of all-time and recent times...

David Bowie
The Kinks
Throbbing Gristle
Television Personalities
Mark Perry

Finally have you any plans to release a record and tour over in Europe and the UK?

We have a 7" coming out on Upset The Rhythm in a little bit. I guess we'll play it by ear from there!


-Rob

CROCODILES

Two guys obsessed with the UK, ex of The Plot to Blow up the Eiffel Tower and various other projects.

Listen Here (mp3 at bottom of post...)

I sent some questions over and they both answered them seperately (with some overlap...)

First up, BRANDON

What are your top Five records that relate to the music you make with Crocodiles?

These aren't necessarily my top 5 records in the whole world, or even necessarily my 5 favorite bands (though I do LOVE them) but they definitely inform what we're doing to a huge degree. These aren't in any order either.

1) Spacemen 3 - Playing With Fire
2) Beatles - Yellow Submarine/Revolver
3) Suicide - S/T
4) V/A - Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era
5) Jesus & Mary Chain - Darklands
6) Primal Scream - Screamadelica/XTRMNTR
7) Dr. Alimantado - Best Dressed Chicken In Town
8) Birthday Party - Prayers On Fire
9) Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request
10) PIL - Metal Box




Sorry, I know this is double the amount of records you asked me to list but I couldn't narrow it down! It's funny because I've seen a few people criticize us online for wearing our influences on our sleeve. We have nothing to hide - we're throwing all the stuff we grew up on and love into a blender, mixing it with copious amounts of marijuana and a severe lack of sleep and seeing what we come up with.

Top Five recent bands you've got into? (Pictures below are linked to myspaces.)

In no particular order:

Dum Dum Girls - She is a brilliant songwriter and as a close friend of hers, I know she is not aping C86 as so many other bands are. She gets lumped in with this post-C86 movement, but I hear a love of girl groups and american garage-punk and stuff like Siouxsie Sioux. Movements are bad!



Reading Rainbow - This is a great new band from Philadelphia. Total bedroom psychedelic punk. Simple, catchy and brainy at the same time. If that makes sense...



Catatonic Youth - Don't know much about these cats ( or is it just one cat? ) other than their Piss Scene 7" is borderline perfect. To me, sounds like early SST punk (when Keith Morris was still singing in a British accent) mixed with the mind bending qualities of early Suicide or even a love of Dub. No idea if this is accurate or how this band sees themselves but that's what I hear.



Spirit Photography - This is a band from San Diego that features 2/3rds of Christmas Island. Rather than referencing Flying Nun and that era though, this band is informed by 13th Floor Elevators, Krautrock and Spacemen 3. I adore their upcoming 7" and we try to play with them as often as possible.



The Soft Pack - Disclaimer: These guys are old friends and even feature an ex-bandmate, but their music shreds. They are probably in the process of blowing up in the UK right now.



You've toured the Uk before in your old band what's your favourite city and your favourite british bands of yesteryear and NOW.

My favorite British city? Kind of hard to say - London is so much fun and we have good friends there, but we also have good friends in Sheffield so we always have a blast there as well. Manchester is amazing. We got to have an all-night bender with Mark E. Smith there about 2 years ago. It would be so hard for me to name my favorite british bands of yesteryear - probably a third or even half of my favorite bands are British. As cliche as it is to say, my all time favorite bands are the Sex Pistols and the Beatles. I don't know, I could probably list 100 records by UK bands that would rank in my favorites.

If there was one thing you could change about the music industry what would it be?

I'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea of movements. They are usually something created by lazy journalists and they discourage individuality. Take for example this current lo-fi thing or this current C86 thing: It's just becoming redundant. I am so much more into the idea of bands who sound nothing alike touring together and playing shows together. If the focus was on being as different from your peers as possible, rather than being as similar to your peers as possible, music would be much more fun, interesting and forward thinking. I've noticed somehow every band in the world right now seems to be "influenced" by the Wipers. I find this hard to believe - I think one or two bands truly were influenced by the Wipers and they in turn influenced a hundred other bands. Those bands in turn claim to have always loved the Wipers, when in fact they heard them for the first time last year. These movements and trends make me uncomfortable.

What are your ambitions beside making music?

I would like to paint more and I'd also like to write more stories. It would be nice to escape this abject poverty that I've been living in my whole adult life as well, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Who or what inspired you to start making music?

I found bands like the Ramones, Sex Pistols and Black Flag extremely inspiring when I was 12. I could play their songs on guitar with little effort and the things they were singing about (particularly Black Flag) I could really relate to. "The First Four Years" should be required listening for all pre-teens. I think it would drive the teen suicide rate down and there would probably be a whole lot less fist fights.
And finally have you any plans to release a record and tour over in Europe and the UK?
Yes, our album Summer Of Hate will be available in the UK via Fat Possum. We are coming over the last two weeks of June to tour with PENS, who we are doing a split 7" with on Art Fag Recordings.

And now CHARLES

What are your top Five records that relate to the music you make with Crocodiles?

As you will see Brandon and I are pretty connected head-wise.

1. Suicide - s/t
2. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR
3. Spacemen 3 - Playing With Fire
4. Kraftwerk - Man-Machine
5. Stooges - Fun House



Top Five recent bands you've got into?
Nite Jewel (usa) - Kate Bushy warm dance stuff pop.



Internet Forever (uk) - Perrrrrfect messy pop.

Pens (uk) - London chicks great gooy fuzzy pop.


Reading Rainbow (usa) - Great Philly pop.

Spirit Photography (usa) - Wicked San Diego pop.

You've toured the Uk before in your old band what's your favourite city and your favourite british bands of yesteryear and NOW.

Manchester will always be my favourite city. I love it. I've been quite obsessed with it. I would like to go to Macclesfield which is a little south because apparently I have some lineage back to that place on my grandfather's side. With that being said, my favourite british bands are either from Manchester (Happy Mondays, Durutti Column, Oasis) or Scotland (Orange Juice, JAMC, Primal Scream), generally, though that is not the rule. I do love London groups alot too (Sex Pistols, The Stones). I can also go into grave detail about the cities I don't like (i.e. Swindon, Leeds, and Portsmouth).

If there was one thing you could change about the music industry what would it be?

It's changed itself alot over that last few years. It's alot easier to get your music noticed and in front of fresh ears. It is still the same however with actually traveling, it is still really difficult to get booking agents to want you. This is something Brandon and I have dealt since the dark ages. I would like to see some general government funding like that have in Sweden or Netherlands but then people would probably get pretty lazy. I hate working two jobs but at least it keeps me sharp. I suppose it is what it is though and it's difficulties are mearly speed bumps if you just work hard and be smart (and sexy).

What are your ambitions beside making music?

I have written a few pieces and they have been printed and are in rotation. Both are now out of print however. I am embarrassed that I am not writing more. It was my passion before music. I am sure it will flare back up soon, it always does. I just went through a rough patch so that didn't help. In my twilight years, my thirties or fourties haha, I would imagine myself recording, and touring comfortably with Crocs and just writing ALOT MORE! Though I have always wanted to be a star left back for Manchester United.

Who or what inspired you to start making music?

My dad is the person who turned me on to it. He was an avid record collector and everyday of my life was a music lesson, and a life lesson. He was the greatest person to have around because of his wealth of knowledge. Not only did he turn me onto all the cool punk shite we adore (PIL, Television, Minutemen), he also knew about nearly everything else in music. Growing up with that around of course I had grown big ears (and a big nose! haha). I would stare at his posters and just image myself in them.

And finally have you any plans to release a record and tour over in Europe and the UK?

ASAP. The record comes out April 28th I believe.

Here's an mp3 of Neon Jesus courtesy of the band

Crocodiles - Neon Jesus

More posts coming sooner than this one did after the last one.