Tag: Fried Egg

Categories
Arts

Turn it up: Our favorite local recordings this year

From punk to kids’ pop, hip-hop, and so much more, 2019 was another year with a lot to hear from Charlottesville-area musicians.

Lots of people complain that there’s no music scene here. And we get it—there can be lulls in shows (and definitely lulls in good shows)—but a music scene is more than what’s on stage. We love recordings, too, so may this list serve as your entry point to some local sonic treasures. We’ve compiled a lengthy list of local album and EP releases (scroll down for that) and while we were at it, highlighted a few of our favorites.

Fried Egg, Square One

When every day starts to feel exactly the same, when you’ve bought a car to drive to work in order to pay for the car you bought, you get down on your knees and pray to whatever idol you pray to for a band like Fried Egg to make you jump out of the pan. On Square One, an album about feeling disillusioned with modern life, the half-Charlottesville half-Richmond band turns up the heat with tight, off-center hardcore punk that’s neither over- nor undercooked.

Read more: “Over hard: Punk band Fried Egg goes beyond its hardcore roots”

Heron & Crane, Firesides

“It’s very much ready to be played during a Folgers coffee commercial,” Dave Gibson told C-VILLE about Heron & Crane’s Firesides. Gibson and longtime friend and musical collaborator Travis Kokas used a limited palette of instruments—a 12-string guitar, a few MOOG and Yamaha synthesizers, an Oberheim DX drum machine, and an organelle—to venture out onto the lush and gentle kinda-folksy, lightly-psychedelic, almost-kosmische, pastoral aural landscape.

Read more: “North by southeast: Heron & Crane’s Firesides arrives via online collaboration”

Little Skunks, Smells Like Music

Don’t turn your nose up at this kids’ album —we’re not talking Wee Sing Silly Songs, KidzBop, or even “Rockabye Baby” here. Smells Like Music was made by a bunch of adult musicians with pretty good manners and a sense of humor, people who usually make electronic, experimental, and rock music for grown-ups. The record is silly (“Mice in My Underwear Drawer”), endearing (“I Love You”), inspirational (“Start A Band”), and slightly ridiculous in the best way (“Who’s cooking pancakes?”). You don’t have to be a kid to get a total kick out of it.

Nathaniel Star, Bush Master

There’s alchemy in the combination of Nathaniel Star’s butter-smooth voice and producer Vintage’s rich beats, and the resulting elixir was so magical, it caught the ear of Bandcamp’s Chaka V. Grier, who named it one of the site’s “Best Soul on Bandcamp: August 2019” selections. Grier sums up the album’s appeal perfectly: “It’s not an easy thing to achieve—making music that enchants and enlightens—but Star makes it sound effortless.”

Read more: “Time to play: After nearly a decade, Nathaniel Star returns to the stage”

Patient 0, Girl Problems

In order for a small music scene to survive, young people have to start bands, make music, and play shows. So it was exciting to see a fledgling rock band like Patient 0 (one with solid skill and a lot of potential) release a full-length record, Girl Problems, which the teen band members recorded at the Music Resource Center here in town. Singer, lyricist, and bassist Tessa Majors wrote with a lot of heart and a good dose of ’90s riot grrrl attitude, and moved her audiences at every show. Majors died while this list was being put together, but her voice lives on in this record.

Space-Saver, Exponential Bummer

Local drum ‘n’ sax duo puts on one of the most fascinating live shows, and its recordings are no different. Do you lock into Steve Snider’s drum grooves, following them as they take roundabouts and sharp angles? Or into Travis Thatcher’s sorta-distorted sax paths? What if you get both at once? Whoa.

Waasi, From Virginia with Love

This is Malcolm “Waasi” Wills’ second release in as many years, and the young rapper has this to say about his new record: “If you don’t know me, I feel like From Virginia With Love gives you a perfect description of my personality: Funky, feel good, and raw.” He’s got flow, social consciousness, self-awareness, and solid stage presence—a combination that makes it easy to see how his record release show nearly sold out The Southern Café & Music Hall.

Wild Rose, Cosmic Miasma

Riffs, riffs, riffs, and more riffs. This local punk ‘n’ roll band has put out a couple tapes in recent years, and its first 7″ record (issued on local label Infinite Repeats) careens in at just under 10 minutes, with singer Josh Phipps maxing out his voice at whatever cost, eager to get his point across. The record’s great, and the band’s live show is even better. Next time Wild Rose plays in town, don’t miss it.

More 2019 local releases

Albums

Abstract Threats, Contentment (indie rock)

Alice Clair, Loop (folksy rock and soul)

Andrew Neil, Merry Go Round (alternative indie folk, grunge)

Angel Metro, Dark Days Bright Lights (dark synthpop)

Angela on the Arts, Within (chamber jazz, modern classical)

Bergot, Surmae (electronic, experimental)

Big Lean, C.A.L.M. and The Rabbit Hole (smooth, soulful hip-hop)

Butterfly Vendetta, Running in Place and Contents Under Pressure (pop punk, rock)

Charles Owens Trio, Three and Thirteen (jazz)

Chris Hall, red winter beats (emo, experimental, pop, trap)

David Wax Museum, Line of Light (indie folk-rock, Mexo-Americana)

Dropping Julia, Wake Up (funky/rootsy pop-rock)

Fried Egg, Square One (hardcore punk)

Front Porch Revival, Live at Lance’s (drum & bass, experimental hip-hop)

Grand Banks, Autumn Cannon and Live 3-31-2019 (experimental, electroacoustic, drone, raga, pastoral)

Greg C. Brown, Premieres (classical guitar)

Guion Pratt, Drone for the Holidays Vol.I III (experimental, ambient, drone)

Harli & The House of Jupiter, Deja Vu (alternative rock)

H.B. Kipps, Dead Air Telepathy (electronic, video game music)

Heron & Crane, Firesides (pastoral electronic psych-folk, library music)

Holly Renee Allen, Appalachian Piece-Meal (country, folk, Americana)

Human Shaped Objects, Country Countdown 2013 (ambient, algorithmic)

J Certi, Now or Never (hip-hop, rap)

Jeneene, the Areas (punk, garage)

Jordan Perry, Names and a Draft of First Cold (experimental guitar)

Jovon White, Thought Noise (experimental hip-hop)

LaQuinn, Nostalgia and Laquinn in South 900 (rap, hip-hop)

Lowland Hum, Glyphonic (minimalist hush folk)

Little Skunks, Smells Like Music (electronic rock for kids)

Matéo Amero and Ezra Miller, Tales from the Lazy River (country, folk, cowpunk)

Minnush, Minnush (Sephardic, jazz, roots, improvisation)

Nate Braeuer, altars were here (acoustic indie folk)

Nathaniel Star, Bush Master (Afrobeat, hip-hop, R&B, neo-soul)

New Immersion Blender, Feel Right, MF (experimental, kosmiche)

Oil Derek, The Devil’s Nine Questions (country, folk, spiritual)

Panda Slugger, Standing Outside in the Rain Trying to Remember the Way It Feels to Believe (ambient, chill)

Patient 0, Girl Problems (alt. rock with a touch of riot grrl)

Pearl Pile, Plastic Plant (alternative basement psych, indie rock)

Piko, œ (avant garde, experimental indie)

Pluto, Pluto (reggae-ish electronic)

Salvaticus, Ordo Naturalis (black metal)

Ships in the Night, The Remixes (darkwave, dream pop)

Six Foot Ceilings, Six Foot Ceilings (pop rock)

Space-Saver, Exponential Bummer (experimental drum ‘n’ sax)

ST/MiC, sevens & thr33s or something like that (lo-fi hip-hop instrumentals)

Studebaker Huck, Wired in the Darkness and Barn Burner (punk-ish Southern rock)

Tracy Howe, Things That Grow (gospel, folk, rock)

Va Doe, The Chris Newman Show (rap, hip-hop)

The Voice of Saturn, otherwordly transport (electronic, synth, kosmiche)

Willie DE, Runaway Child (blues-rock singer-songwriter, jazz)

 

EPs

ArtificalRealitySoundscape, Neutral Centipede Carpool (experimental electronic, noise)

Beasts of Least Concern, That’s Not How I Like to Do Business (gothy acoustic ballads)

Bobblehead, Bobblehead (alternative swamp rock boogie)

Cameron Taylor, The Reef (experimental hip-hop)

Carry, Small, Early, Free (Appalachian experimental drone)

Gold Connections, Like A Shadow (hi-fi indie rock)

Gold Sounds, Gold Sounds (jazz-funk)

Good Dog Nigel, The Implied Sunrise (indie rock, power pop)

jaRed lodwick, ¿ (hip-hop, rap)

Kate Bollinger, I Don’t Wanna Lose (chill indie bedroom pop)

Kendall Street Company, Lunar Dude (improvised rock, jazz-grass)

Kylie Cloud, Royal City Harbor Remixes 2

LaQuinn, If I Sold Dope (the Mixtape) (rap, hip-hop)

Lost Ray, Conflux (ambient electronic)

Matéo Amero, Untitled (folksy country rock)

Maxwell Mandell and Elinor Glassco, Next To You (electronic singer-songwriter)

Naomi Alligator, Big World (arty alternative singer-songwriter)

Paint the Watermelon, Composer (alternative ambient electronic)

Patrick Keese, Gallery (indie chamber pop)

Pretty Pulp, Break Me Up and Atrophy (grunge, alternative rock)

PROLO, singles ep and Te Hip Vol. 1 (hip-hop, rap, boom-bap)

Reagan Riley, Glass (chill neo-soul)

Ruckus the Bulldog, Welcome to Thrashville (hard rock, comedy)

The Skavaliers, The Skavaliers (ska)

Spillway, Fall 2019 Live Demo (shoegaze-y hard indie rock)

Stray Fossa, Laridae EP (poppy indie rock)

Synthetic Division, digital singles (synthpop)

Time Nothing, Losing Faith (metal, metalcore)

The Vailix, Ageless (conceptual hard rock)

True Spirit, II (noise-y post-punk)

Wild Rose, Cosmic Miasma (punk ‘n’ roll)

Wülf Boi, Thanatophilia (rap, hip-hop)

Local mixtapes

Various (Music Resource Center), It’s Here. It’s Always Been Here. (alternative, hip-hop, indie, rap, rock)

Various, Nine Pillars Mixtape Vol. 2 (rap, hip-hop)

 

What’d we miss? Email us at arts@c-ville.com to add your album or EP to the online list.

Categories
Arts

Over hard: Punk band Fried Egg goes beyond its hardcore roots

Fried Egg plays Magnolia House on January 9. The band will have cassettes of its gutsy first full-length, Square One, available for purchase. Photo by Tristan Williams

One week before the winter solstice, the weather is nasty in Charlottesville and it’s cold as fuck inside Magnolia House. The four members of hardcore punk band Fried Egg—guitarist Tyler Abernethy, bassist Sam Richardson, drummer Sam Roberts, and vocalist Erik Tsow—sit on mismatched couches and chairs in the dim living room of the DIY venue where Roberts lives and books shows. Richardson and Tsow drove in from Richmond, as they regularly do.

There’s an old piano in one corner, and a crucified Mikey Mouse, a Buddha figurine, a couple of Kermit the Frog dolls, and other miscellany on the mantle. Neat rows of show posters are taped to the robin’s-egg blue walls.

The band members crack open cans of beer and flavored seltzer and take turns leaning into the weak waft from an old space heater. Tsow blows into his hands to keep them warm.

Fried Egg shares some band lore before getting to the music. How the band started in late 2014 with Daniel Berti on guitar; how they had to cancel their first shows when Roberts broke his wrist; how Abernethy joined after Berti’s departure. The sick shows they’ve played to 15 people, 150 people. The long drives on two hours’ sleep; the fragrant one past a garlic farm; and the foul one past industrial livestock facilities.

There’s the time they kicked off a West Coast tour drinking beers on top of an inactive volcano in Portland; the time their borrowed van had a shitty radio and A/C that died in Death Valley. There was a show hosted by a guy too old to be living in his mom’s basement, where Fried Egg played to maybe 10 people, through a crap PA, and made $30…but the next night, in Washington, D.C., they met bands they’ve shared bills and music and camaraderie with ever since.

The newest Fried Egg story is about the recording of the band’s first full-length LP, Square One, to be released in the coming weeks on Richardson’s Feel It Records label.

It almost didn’t happen, they say. Or, more accurately, Square One almost didn’t exist as it does.

After recording and releasing a number of shorter projects—The Incredible Flexible Egg flexi disc, the Delirium and Back and Forth EPs pressed to 7-inch records, the Beat Session Vol. 4 cassette, and the band’s contributions to the Fried Egg Mixtape cassette—the band took nearly two years to write (and in a couple cases rewrite) enough material for a full-length record.

When it came time to put the songs to tape (yes, analog), Fried Egg sought out Montrose Recording, a Richmond studio with plenty of allure. Built and run by father and son Bruce and Adrian Olsen, Montrose has some of the best gear on the East Coast, and its credits aren’t bad, either: Bruce engineered some seminal Richmond punk records, like White Cross’ What’s Going On? LP and Graven Image’s Kicked Out Of The Scene 7-inch, and Adrian (whose recent work includes records by indie rockers Lucy Dacus and Natalie Prass) had recorded a single for garage rockers The Ar-Kaics, and Richardson dug how it sounded.   

Montrose books a few months out, so Fried Egg nabbed two days in mid-September 2018 and set to playing shows and practicing their asses off; they wanted Square One to reflect the urgent energy of the band’s live performance, something that’s often difficult to achieve in a studio setting. “We were in really good shape to record” when the date came around, says Roberts.

That same weekend, Hurricane Florence was in really good shape to thrash the East Coast. Some meteorologists thought the storm might pummel Virginia, and Fried Egg considered postponing the session—located deep in northside Richmond and at the end of the gravel road, Montrose is the last building on its power line. When the power goes out, it’s out for days.

Fried Egg took a chance—the band had experienced worse on tour anyway—and it paid off. Florence slowed to heavy rain, the power stayed on, and Fried Egg laid down all nine songs on Square One in mostly first takes; Adrian mixed it the next day, with sci-fi film classics Forbidden Planet and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla playing silently in the background for a bit of what he calls “visual inspiration for the Fried Egg sound.”

“It’s not often that I get to do an all-analog tape record from start to finish in two days,” says Adrian. “The immediacy and run-and-gun nature of the process was a lot of fun, which definitely fit the spirit of the project. In general…punk records should not be overcooked experiments anyways,” he says.

“It’s really good that we didn’t cancel because I don’t know if we could have gotten the same performance ever again,” says Roberts.

The result, aptly described on the Feel It Records Bandcamp page, is “a concise and unnerving album—one that echoes the anxiety, tension, and disenchantment running rampant through modern-day America.”

Behind the cover

The back cover art for Square One “ties thematically, lyrically” to the music, says Fried Egg vocalist and lyricist Erik Tsow, who came up with the idea. Artist Jason Lee drew a nine-panel comic in which each square shows someone going through daily life, experiencing some measure of suffering. “It starts and ends in the same place,” back at square one, says Tsow, an illustration of “feeling like certain things in your life come together and others totally fall apart, feeling like you’re in the same place all the time.”

Song titles indicate a bit of what Tsow growls about: “Bite My Tongue,” “Apraxia” (loss of the ability to perform certain learned movements), “Grin and Bear.” “Lyrically, I use Fried Egg to concentrate on what frustrates me in my life,” says Tsow, and every song on Square One touches on “an inability to communicate how you feel.”

And while Fried Egg plays hardcore punk, it’s not “hardcore with a capital-H” punk, says Tsow.

After putting down straightforward hardcore roots on earlier recordings, Fried Egg branches out on Square One, letting stoner rock and noise rock—and the confident ambition captured in album cuts from experimental artists like Captain Beefheart—influence its music. It’s not what a listener might expect from hardcore punk, and that’s part of the point, a defining feature of what the band constantly refers to as the “Fried Egg vibe.”

Square One’s music, lyrics, and cover art is all “pretty intentional,” but it’s not formulaic, says Richardson. It’s not “programmed for other people” or “pandering to just our genre” in order to attain some sort of status, sell a certain number of records, or tour Europe at a loss just to say they did, he adds.

In Roberts’ opinion, a good punk band expresses a singular identity wherever and whenever it’s making music. “There are so many different times, and places, but people are always expressing their shit, their frustrations, their issues,” he says. “Or they’re just copying someone else who’s expressing their frustrations,” he quips, to laughter from his bandmates.

No one who hears Fried Egg would think it’s copying another band. “I think it comes pretty easy that we just do our own fucking thing,” says Roberts as the band members head into the other room and switch on their amps.

Square One “is our band. This is our record,” says Richardson. “This is what we’re doing, this is what we are. It’s deep in a lot of ways…it’s coming from more of a gutsy place.”

 

Fried Egg plays Magnolia House on January 9. The band will have cassettes of its gutsy first full-length, Square One, available for purchase.