Released the week of April 16th, 2001

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Musicians reaching a point in their careers when it is imperative that they release an album with the most ridiculous title imaginable - it is a revered tradition with a long, colorful history. Honestly, now, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, what the hell's that about? And Their Satanic Majesty's Request? As if! And then there's Works, Volume 2. Where do they get this stuff! It should be perfectly obvious that Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 have been poised to gussy up the canon of Ridiculous Album Titles since, oh, about their third day as a band. Of course, there is a story behind Bob Dinners and Larry Noodles present Tubby Turdner's Celebrity Avalanche, a long, ridiculous story about a talkshow that's probably detailed in excruciating detail on a website somewhere. Their latest album on the Communion label, literally years in the making, went through numerous nomenclatural changes because of, y'know, certain negative associative baggage that each working moniker brought to the mind of the beholder. Savor the sigh of relief you can now freely breathe because we are not asking you to buy an album called Boobfeeler or Eickelberg of Nine or Adolf Hitler - the Nazi.

If one had to complain about past TFUL282 recordings it could be argued that they're too ambitious for their own good - packed as they are with more unorthodox recording techniques and layers of sound than relentlessly minimal budgets allow producers to contain and accurately reproduce. The slow, methodical approach to creating an album serves this San Francisco quintet enormously well, and longtime TFUL282 producer Greg Freeman is the only person on Earth who is right for the job. Within the first seconds of the opening track, "Another Clip," anyone familiar with past TFUL282 efforts will suspect that they have finally made an album that sounds as good as it deserves to. And they won't be wrong. Bob Dinners and Larry Noodles present Tubby Turdner's Celebrity Avalanche will certainly join Strangers from the Universe and Admonishing the Bishops as a premier item in the band's discography, and in some ways, surpasses the earlier efforts. It's almost as if they've finally discovered stereo.

TFUL282's biggest strength - arrangements that allow the ugly beauty of avant rock to meld organically with peppy little melodies that kick you in the nards - is finally flourishing not despite the recording quality, but because of it. Faux operettas suddenly transform into ground-to-a-halt shanties at the wrong speed; whale songs spontaneously corrupt themselves and become cries of harpooned whales; stockcar guitar riffs fishtail across bluegrass mirages; between debased jingles that have college radio station ID written all over them and chilly tinklers that could have been lifted directly from an hilarious new episode of Star Trek, backward Carnaby Street melodies battle like simultaneously occurring concept albums by the Kinks, the Pretty Things and... hell, name someone, Giles, Giles & Fripp.

• A lifestyle decision more than ever
  
• Their warmest sounding recording
  
• Did you see our TFUL282 ad during the Super Bowl?
  
• Be sure to visit the newest addition to the Midheaven propagand-o-pus: The Tubby Turdner Self-Reverential Kiosk.
  
• A free MP3 and the obligatory ReallyGrainyAudio files for all (see below)

  Download a free MP3:

  You In A Movie

  Streaming MP3 (high-bandwidth connections only):

  You In A Movie

  30-second RealAudio excerpts:

  Another Clip
  Sno Cone
  You Will Be Eliminated
  Holy Ghost
  Everything's Impossible
  Birth of a Rock Song
  You in a Movie
  Boob Feeler
  In the Stars
  El Cerrito
  '91 Dodge Van
  Remindor
  The Barker
  He Keeps Himself Fed

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PAULA FRAZER
Indoor Universe
(BIRDMAN BMR030) CD

Released the week of April 16th, 2001

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Paula Frazer is the former lead vocalist of the critically acclaimed Bay Area band Tarnation. Tarnation's releases on Warner/Reprise and 4AD showed Paula to be a singing/songwriting force to be reckoned with - her rich voice radiates beauty. Occupying the space between Patsy Cline and the Cocteau Twins, Paula takes her country-infused influences to wonderfully dark extremes. Some have called her music "country gothic" but Birdman's David Katznelson just calls it excellent. Indoor Universe is Paula's first solo effort and it is unquestionably her finest work to date. Her heavenly voice has never sounded better and the dreamy expansiveness of her music never more vibrant.

Paula Frazer grew up in Sautee Nacoochee, Georgia, and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, singing in the church choir where her father was minister and her mother played piano (it was her mother who taught Paula piano, bought her first guitar when she was nine years old, and introduced her to the music of Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, George Gershwin, Roy Orbison and the pop music of the '60s and '70s, all of which have remained big influences on her singing and songwriting). As a teenager, Paula sang with jazz groups in Arkansas, performing standards and some of her own songs. She moved to San Francisco in 1981 and since then has sung, played bass and guitar with various local bands such as Frightwig, Pleasant Day, Trial, Cloiter, Virginia Dare, and an Eastern European women's choir in Berkeley called Savina which performed mostly Bulgarian choir songs at community centers and churches.

Paula Frazer's voice swoops like a barn swallow on the last day of fall, riding hot currents for the pleasure of swooping and dipping, and not altogether concerned with destination. Hers is a beautiful voice, pure and limber ... [Her] country phrasing is much like jazz, but no less effective for that. The effect is a trifle like an imaginary melding of Joni Mitchell with k.d. lang.

-No Depression
• The debut solo release by the frontwoman of critically acclaimed major label band
  
• Paula (with Tarnation) has toured with Tindersticks and Nick Cave
  
• Paula will be touring solo behind the release of this album
  
• Paula has been nominated for best local SF songwriter by Citysearch.
  
• What a voice!

  30-second RealAudio excerpts:

  That You Know
  This is a Song
  Gone
  Think of Me
  Not So Bad, But Not So Good
  Stay as You Are
  Mean Things
  Everywhere
  Deep was the Night
  We Met by the Love Lies Bleeding
  The Only One

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OOIOO
Feather Float
(BIRDMAN BMR031) CD

Released the week of April 16th, 2001

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OOIOO follow up their debut album on Kill Rock Stars with the magnificent Feather Float. Yoshimi of Boredoms / Free Kitten on guitar and vocals, Kyoko on guitar and vocals, Maki on bass, and Yoshiko on drums recognize no one musical style but manage to touch on nearly all of them. New wave, no wave, pop, punk, electronic, trance - it swirls organically in every direction. Like the Boredoms, there is a prevalent primal groove reccuring throughout, yet it is so melodic in parts as to be almost accessible (for a Boredoms-related project, that is).

If you want to look at OOIOO for its patterns, you'll find them both in the band's name and in their quirky loops of sound. It's a patchwork, but it's not a Grandma's quilt. It's more like OOIOO set out to make a blanket and ended up with a Juicemaster... the manic experimentalism of the Boredoms seems to be boxing the avant-grrl relentlessness of Free Kitten. The catch is, neither wins - they just keep slugging away... [W]hat sounds like a spoon hitting different sized glasses ... eventually gets lost behind crazy power chords and general babbling.. . [A] steady bass beat disintegrates beneath what sounds like a theremin being bludgeoned with a balpeen hammer, but then the beat comes back from out of nowhere. It gets even weirder... OOIOO give another face to the kitsch world of Japanese noise rock.

-Pitchfork
• Yoshimi (of the Boredoms) and her crew whips omnidirectional primal groove on our unworthy behinds
  
• OOIOO brought their alpha-numeric magic across the Pacific this past March for a full US tour, leaving beaucoups dropped jaws in their wake
  
• U.S. release of this sought after import

  30-second RealAudio excerpts:

  Be Sure to Loop
  Oizumio
  Ina {kanji}
  Ah Yeah!
  Switch On
  Jackson's Club "Sunspot"
  Asozan
  Baby Bamboo from Nose
  1000 Frogs and 3 Sun in a House
  Ring Ring Lee
  {kanji} OOIOO

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SHELBY BRYANT
Cloud-Wow Music
(SMELLS LIKE RECORDS SLR36) CD

Released the week of April 30th, 2001

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If you went back in time to 1956, got Jerry Lee Lewis feeling a little loose, took him to see a Flash Gordon movie and asked him to close his eyes and imagine what kind of music would be coming out of Memphis in the futuristic paradise that awaits mankind beyond the year 2000, the Killer might very well answer dreamily, "Cloud-Wow, darlin', Cloud-Wow."

Forget the worn-out, overexposed sound of one hand clapping, and about why the Killer's calling you "darlin'." Shelby Bryant's music expresses the jubilant and, until this time unthinkable, sound of Charles Brown kicking Lucy Van Pelt's elusive football over the sun - with a soundtrack courtesy of an all new electric Schroeder. It pours from the speakers like vibrating sheets of dark and viscous liquid heated to womb temperature.

Shelby Bryant has retro gear and oddball style a-plenty, but it's the pure, ruthless, bona fide hooks that set him apart from the hordes of synth-pop pretenders. Harvested in his hometown of Memphis, this bountiful crop of Cloud-Wow Music marks this ex-Clears mainman's inaugural plunge into solo mode. Actual tunes, pitch-perfect in their execution, and Lindsay Buckingham-like in their effortless tour-de-forcedom, drape the album in a kind of cosmic tunic (with platform heels and eyeliner to match). We expect this album, and therefore expect you to expect this album, to make serious waves.

• Dare we suggest, happy synth pop from Memphis by ex-Clears mainman
  
• Think joyous beagles dancing atop doghouses, love notes to little red-haired girls, thumb-sucking runt brothers with security blankets; go ahead, say it: Vince Guaraldi on acid!
  
• The non-conformist is _IN_

  30-second RealAudio excerpts:

  Hello So Fine
  The Walk
  Everything
  Fluxogen / Neverything
  In the Sun
  Inchworm
  Totally Sigmund
  You're a Star
  Peebly McNownow
  Thurmond Crimm
  Wedding
  My Dandylion Wish
  The Bitter Wind
  Never Wrong
  Arabesque

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SIMON WICKHAM-SMITH and RICHARD YOUNGS
LAmmERGEIER
(VHF VHF58) CD

Released the week of April 30th, 2001

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LAmmERGEIER is the first new recording by Simon Wickham-Smith and Richard Youngs since Metallic Sonatas, recorded way back in the spring of 1998. Following closely on the heels of the VHF reissue of the their classic 1990 debut LAKE, LAmmerGEIER finds the duo continuing to pursue the head-scratching assortment and range of outer sound in a somewhat more contemporary style. LAmmERGEIR makes use of all sorts of exotic instruments, but like Metallic Sonatas, many of the pieces have undergone electronic transformation, adding an extra layer of unsettling aural alchemedia to the tunes. Some of the sounds show the influence of Simon's laptop work over the last couple of years, as heard on his limited edition Adelaide Audio release and some forthcoming titles (which should establish him as a major laptop sound arrangement force, if there's any goddamn justice in the world). Laptops aside, the layers of microscopic detail on LAmmERGEIER should give listeners plenty of practice in differentiating sounds that are produced by complicated software and sounds that are produced by a guy whacking a baking tray with a stick.

• S!&R! continue to fly high the exploratory banner of listenable sonic manipulation
  
• Sure to wag goatees of The Wire readers and drone-list trainspotters the world over
  
• Laptop-transcending vibrato-warp for the ages

  30-second RealAudio excerpts:

  [1]
  [2]
  [3]
  [4]
  [5]
  [6]
  [7]
  [8]
  [9]

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FROM QUAGMIRE
The Tropic of Barren
(VHF VHF59) CD

Released the week of April 30th, 2001

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The Tropic of Barren is the debut release from Virginia's From Quagmire. A trio of Dorothy Geller, James Wolf, and Rake guitarist Vincent Van Go-Gogh, FQ's beautiful, mysterious and just plain weird art-song drift is a look into a rather under-explored corner of the underground universe. The slowly unfolding songs are based on Dorothy's nylon-string guitar and hushed-but-pointed vocals, punctuated by Wolf's expertly sawed violin and Van Go-Gogh's unpredictable percussion, electronics and guitar interjections. The music is highly detailed and performed with significant individual personality, rather than the predictable loud-soft-repeat bombast of other contemporary post-whatever ensembles. Geller and Wolf have done time in Camera Obscura recording artists Laconic Chamber and the Library of Congress (the federal institution, not the band). Van Go-Gogh is straight out of DC's long-running freakazoid ensemble Rake (as we stated). The Quag plans to tour both coasts during 2001.

"All songs and sounds imagined and written in exile." -FQ

• Eerily and beautifully effective use of silence, spatiality, voice and acoustic and electronic instruments (not necessarily in that order)
  
• Our vote for one of the most curiously unique CDs of 2001

  30-second RealAudio excerpts:

  Suite of Windmill and Sycamore
  Tropic of Barren
  Suite of Atoms and Media
  Fragment of Nothing
  Suite of Houses
  Separation of Bells and Birds

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AROMADOZESKI THERAPY featuring ROMANOWSKI and DEVIOUS DOZE
Strudel Strut
(FUTURE PRIMITIVE SOUND FP06) 12"

Released the week of April 16th, 2001

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Devious Doze's hip-hop pedigree reaches nearly as far back as hip hop itself. From his earliest days as an original member of the legendary Rock Steady Crew to his current post as a vanguard in the neo-graffiti art scene, Doze defines the progressive b-boy. He now joins forces with Bay Area funk / rare-groove fiend Romanowski to create music as cutting edge as his art. The lead off track to the new Urban Revolutions compilation, "Strudel Strut" is a deliriously funky, Latin-influenced rhythm, laced with up-tempo hip hop breaks and soulful flute overdubs by '70s jazz legend Jacko Pete. This monster track is set to make big noise on the dancefloors and find a place in the crates of every party-rockin' DJ.

"Ranchero-Hop," an original track by Romanowski produced exclusively for the flip of this 12-inch, is a left-field combination of ghetto, electro and Latin ranchero flavors, creating an absurd yet funky beat - a definite must-hear. The 12-inch concludes with four minutes of original scratch noises and DJ toolz, guaranteed to provide relief from that same ol' ahh and fresh.

• The lead-off track from Urban Revolutions, and the debut effort by this production duo
  
• Features two non-album cuts
  
• Devious Doze profiled in The Story of Straight No Chaser (December 1999); feature in Vibe in March 2001
  
• The second single from Urban Revolutions, which has received perfect scores of 10 in both Vice and XLR8R magazines

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