here is the NFO file from Indietorrents
Uploaded by ieatrats 1 week, 5 days ago
01 The Knock
02 Buddy in the Parade
03 Horseshoe Crabs
04 Waitress
05 Happy To See Me
06 Texas Funeral
07 Powerful Man
08 I Saw My Twin
09 Well dressed
10 Sister Cities
that rip on the internet you heard about
Album info
This is band that is pretty much the singer who has been playing for years and years, but she’s big enough here that I heard her by sheer word of mouth.
This is that type of rock played by people in their early 20s that is said to sound 90s but doesn’t really if you were from the 90s, but on the other hand, how this woman uses her voice as an instrument is not unlike how the guy from Neutral Milk Hotel did.
yr favorite ‘fork and mine sez:
The songs on the second album by the Philadelphia band Hop Along seem to have come whirling out of a fairytale, visceral but ornate, outside reality but still scarred by it. Their energy comes from punk but their style comes from somewhere older and more obscure—a Victorian attic, maybe, or the kind of basement where the band’s singer Frances Quinlan got turned onto punk in the first place.
This was ten years ago or so. Quinlan had just graduated from high school and was touring around with a folk record influenced by playful, sharp-witted writers like Joanna Newsom and Kimya Dawson. The record, Freshman Year, felt cute and warm but took dark turns into the nightmare logic of children—one song, called “Bruno Is Orange”, is sung from the perspective of a girl who fears that the government is going to put her friend in jail because the two of them kissed.
Eventually, Quinlan formed a band with her brother Mark and a bassist named Tyler Long and assumed a sound that filtered Quinlan’s storytelling through the rough, emotionally unguarded approach of bands like Rilo Kiley or Bright Eyes—bands who turned diary entries into anthems and vulnerability into a shuddering kind of power. Their first album, 2012’s Get Disowned, is a messy world where people stomp on old floorboards for percussion and saw violins like they were made of something stronger than wood. Everything is governed by Quinlan, who sings in the wild voice of someone casting out demons (or having the demon cast out of them). Its second song, “Tibetan Pop Stars”, should be etched in titanium and shot into outer space for safekeeping.
Painted Shut is cleaner but just as purposeful. The album was produced by John Agnello, who has also worked with Kurt Vile, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and the Hold Steady—bands who play full-blooded classic rock with an idiosyncratic slant. (Quinlan once ended an interview by thanking Neil Young and the nature documentarian David Attenborough, both of whom have fascinated stoners and gentlefolk alike for decades.) For as bullish and dramatic as the music seems, the songs here often escalate for several minutes before making a point you think they’ve already made, like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms.
Quinlan is a sharp writer who understands the poetry of deflection, of putting herself to the side of the drama instead of in the middle. “Powerful Man” tells the story of a parent hitting their child from the perspective of a teenage bystander: “Your dad told you not to look at me/ Down came the fists hard upon your head,” she sings, no special inflection. “I was the only other adult around/ I was the only other adult around.” What might’ve been just another routine tragedy becomes an exploration of guilt and responsibility. After all, Quinlan can do something about the situation but the kid can’t.
Painted Shut is being released on Saddle Creek, a label built on the kind of romantic, middle-American indie that made Hop Along possible in the first place—music more indebted to the 1970s than the 1980s, more to the earnest mythologizing of folk than the grandstanding of rock, more to the fantasias of Edward Gorey and e.e. cummings than to the flash of the city; music for rickety houses in college towns and the lonelyhearts who collect in their corners like dust and give each other stick-and-pokes. I’d say it all seems old-fashioned but it has been this way for about 25 years and seems part of a longer continuum all the time, so who knows.
My favorite song here is a dusky, countryish ballad called “Horseshoe Crabs”. “Hey did you hear me, mom? Baby’s headed home,” Quinlan sings. “Against your wishes I went into the woods alone.” She goes on to tell us about concrete things: A pellet gun, a broken nose, a Jackson C. Frank song played for a college kid on his nylon-string guitar. Nothing seems to mean much alone but it accrues a kind of magical importance, a collection of almosts-but-not-quites. Heartbreak here isn’t an abstraction but an event, one in which something falls on the ground and breaks and nobody seems to have the wherewithal to put it back together. As for the Jackson C. Frank song, Quinlan barely makes it through, but like all the failures documented on Painted Shut she still manages to sound triumphant singing about it.