LIQUOR STORE
Yeah Buddy. Two words that might mean nothing to some, but for true believers of righteous American style living, two words that signify a call to arms, a rallying cry of affirmation to all who crave the finest things in life: free pizza, cold beer and lovely ladies. That “Yeah Buddy” was also the title of Liquor Store’s critically acclaimed debut LP is certainly no coincidence. There is no band operating today that epitomizes those cornerstones upon which all great rock’n’roll is built, no band more ready to haul the half-dead carcass of American rock music upon its shoulders and carry it through the warzone that is 2013’s “music scene” than Northern New Jersey’s finest export, the mighty Liquor Store.
BIRDCLOUD
Birdcloud is Jasmin Kaset and Makenzie Green, a pair who met in a place called Murfreesboro and who, since 2009, have used things like booze and sacrilege to make very modern country music. The duo write songs about what Sarah Palin deemed “the real America,” that unsung republic of countrified interstices stretching from coast to coast between cities. Kaset and Green’s America is a nation of indulgent reprobates and boastful imbeciles, laughing maniacs and horny high school dropouts— the desperate, absurd place we all inhabit in one way or another. The band’s music is the ravenous id of today’s commercial country sound, and in place of the pandering and polished banality of Nashville’s Music Row is a savagely honest depiction of “real Americans,” where a teenage evangelical designates her vagina (alone among her orifices) to Christ; a Desert Storm veteran dispenses ancient wisdom while driving drunk and toppling birdbaths in the suburbs; a coked up blackout drunk on a spree fellates a rodeo clown and tells her friend’s children that Santa doesn’t exist. These characters are characters in both senses of the word: 1) eccentrics with notoriously outsized personalities, as well as 2) complexly three-dimensional literary creations. The complicated sensation of listening to Birdcloud’s music—the simultaneous urge to laugh, vomit, and maybe break down and cry a little at how familiar and sad and true it all is—has won the band fans across the lower 48, stupefying and sickening audiences in equal measure.
Boasting a strong YouTube presence, Birdcloud’s un-unseeable videos resonate beyond the continental U.S., with a slew of fan-versions of songs available online as well as an odd amount of unauthorized re-releases of official Birdcloud videos with Russian subtitles. Birdcloud’s third and darkest EP was released in spring of 2014, and their follow-up record will launch in the summer of 2015.
PUJOL
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Citybeat Interview
In February of 2013, Daniel Pujol set out to write and record the follow-up to his debut album, 2012’s UNITED STATES OF BEING. Pujol and producer Doni Shroader set up shop in Mt. Juliet, TN at The Place: a suicide-prevention center for teens located in a strip mall. They used largely borrowed and donated gear, recording every day from 5pm until 6am, all the while breaking down and setting up the temporary studio every day between office hours. Mixing took place during the building of Battletapes, a two car garage that was in the midst of being converted into an acoustically treated, professional grade tracking room; building permit, construction workers, and all. Following four months of vampiric living and working around conflicting schedules/eccentricities (the band, the engineers, the sun), Daniel, Doni, and Battletapes had finished the album they had been working towards. Recording and mixing happened in a “non-location” where things were being built or set up, in order to work on the album, working around the obstacles the location presented.
