November 7, 2016 – 7:53 am
To loosely paraphrase one of the more well-known passages of the Bible, it is easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than for an introvert to start a successful record label. That’s what David Dickenson was up against when he founded Suicide Squeeze in Seattle two decades ago. “If I could go back 20 years and give myself a piece of advice, it would be to learn to have a regular conversation without feeling stressed out of my mind all the time,” he laughs. “For example: I loved Elliott Smith well before I started the label, and I wanted to ask him to do a single. But I was so into his music that I couldn’t bring myself to ask him. I was way too nervous. Eventually, my wife was like, ‘Do you just want me to ask him?’ And she did, and he said ‘Yes,’ and that’s how the ‘Division Day’ 7″ came about.”
That single came early in the label’s lifespan—their fifth release after successful 7″s from Modest Mouse and 764-Hero—but it helped chart a course for the label’s early days. It was an artist Dickenson was passionate about who, like Modest Mouse and 764-Hero, was geographically local and whose music felt distinct and personal. Over the course of the last two decades the label has moved past its Pacific Northwest focus, but the artists on its roster are still defined by their distinct musical sensibilities. They may operate in loosely familiar genres—post-punk, post-rock, surf, and pop—but all of them approach their music slantwise, loading them with unlikely left turns. And while Dickenson is celebrating the anniversary with a spate of reissues, and even a Suicide Squeeze-branded IPA from Fort George Brewery, in the end, his focus has never been on building a brand. “To me, it’s not about Suicide Squeeze,” he says, “It’s about the bands. You want people to respect what you’re doing as a label, but to me, I’d be just as satisfied to know that people are digging the bands.”
With that in mind, we asked Dickenson to talk through some of the releases that have defined the label’s history to date.
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By Editorial
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Posted in featured music
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Tagged Childbirth, Cotton Jones, Elliott Smith, Guantanamo Baywatch, Label Profile, Minus the Bear, Modest Mouse, Suicide Squeeze, The Coathangers, This Will Destroy You, VHS
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November 7, 2016 – 7:06 am
Los Angeles rapper Blu is known for both his prolific output and his tendency to work with a single producer for an entire project. And while that’s also the case for Cheetah in the City, a collaboration with Union Analogtronics that arrives just three months after his last release, the album also contains some of his most surprising music to date. In interviews, Blu has talked about his interest in releasing albums that mirror various points on the color spectrum. Where his previous release, Open Your Optics To Optimism, was “gray” because of its “emo” qualities, Cheetah In The City is far more vibrant and striking—perhaps neon green.
The album’s title, according to Blu, refers to, “a young squire from Los Angeles, running around the streets of Paris, doing a bunch of ‘illegal’ shit while he creates an album.” The music it contains is appropriately freewheeling, full of rich, bass-heavy, jazz-funk.
Lyrically, the album finds Blu at his most braggadocious, as if he took the bars he spit on OYOTO’s “Oblivia,” and spread them out across an entire project. It’s a respite from the deeper, thinking-man’s rap that’s become his stock in trade, and the new approach allows him to open up and simply rhyme. Opener “LA Counting” is all flossin’ and shit-talk over sun-kissed, gloss-funk production. That combination of brash bravado and deep low end continues throughout the record, making for songs best suited for summer heatwaves (“Sunny,” and the Dam-Funk-assisted “Don’t Trip”) and afternoon drives with the windows down (“Whatever” and “City Dreams” with Olivier St. Louis). These tracks demonstrate that Blu is not only capable of making killer warm-weather tunes, but that he’s also capable of loosening up—and making damn good music while he’s doing it.
—Andrew Martin
November 7, 2016 – 7:04 am
Jeff Rosenstock. Photo by Andy Johnson.
Jeff Rosenstock is a contemporary cult icon, the kind of musician who goes unnoticed if you’re not actively looking for them. There’s a reason for this: his unique brand of songwriting can come off as irritating to some—he sings in a distinctive whine over tracks that pull from a variety of familiar punk structures. Sometimes, he’s borrowing the loose, bouncing rhythms of ska that turned up in his previous bands, The Arrogant Sons of Bitches and Bomb the Music Industry. In other places, he’s speeding things up, delivering the kind of breakneck songs that would appeal to fans of Rancid and the Descendents. His solo work deftly balances both elements, and on his latest album, Worry, he branches out to include lush orchestral pop and mod-inspired rock.
And yet, Rosenstock remains something of an acquired taste. His music is decidedly uncool, exhibiting a certain confidence and vulnerability in its silliness that can, at times, feel cringe-worthy (for one thing, he tends to over-share). But that’s also what makes Worry a smart, self-deprecating album, one that has the power to grow on even the most resistant listener. I spent Worry’s release day with Rosenstock, observing how an unassuming musician from Long Island quietly became a beloved hero.
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November 4, 2016 – 11:05 am
The Necks. Photo by Camille Walsh.
Asked to describe The Necks, the Australian avant-garde trio for whom he has played drums for the last 30 years, Tony Buck opts for understatement. “We find ourselves in situations where improvised music doesn’t often find itself,” he says. Part of that is by design. Critically-championed cult favorites, The Necks play at the edges of jazz and avant-garde composition, but have never forgotten the necessity and power of underpinned rhythm and groove. Instead of throwing some sort of self-indulgent retrospective, they’re “celebrating” three decades together in appropriate style: playing live together improvisationally, the way they always have. So what makes such an inventive group, straddling multiple styles and always keen on new directions, stick together for so long?
Buck credits the band’s longevity to the fact that he chose to leave the country early in their career. “After we’d been together about four or five years, I moved away from Australia to Japan,” he says. “We wanted to keep playing any time I was back in Australia, and I think it made us use our time wisely and not play in drips and drabs here and there. We decided to set aside periods and really focus and get stuff done. When we did get together, it felt like a special occasion as well. People who’d see the band would look forward to those periods when we were touring.”
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November 4, 2016 – 11:03 am
Listening to their early material, it’s easy to see why Planes Mistaken for Stars were often lumped in with post-hardcore revival bands like The Used and Thrice. Like those bands, their songs were unhinged and propulsive, powered by jagged mathematics and ragged-throated vocals. But the Colorado-via-Illinois band seemed to distance themselves from their peers with every release. Their 2004 LP, Up in Them Guts, incorporated sludge-metal grit and classic-rock muscle, elements they explored even further on 2006’s Mercy, a swansong of sorts that ended the band’s first chapter. And while their contemporaries favored vocalists with a who attacked each song with a thin screech, frontman Gared O’Donnell sang in a gruff howl that wavered and warbled above the surrounding noise.
The group’s latest album Prey, is their first album since their 2010 reunion, and it showcases the group at their most diverse. Its songs range from the fist-slamming noise-rock of opener “Dementia Americana” to the twisted acoustic balladry of “Black Rabbit.” We spoke with O’Donnell from his home in Peoria, Illinois about the birthplace of the band, their move to Denver, and the other locations that have proven important to the band’s ongoing evolution.
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