Evangeline Recording Co

Brand spanking new Hi Electric Video…

Grateful to Burn (coming in February)

Andy Grooms’ record Grateful To Burn begins with the words “unsung songs” and ends with “that’s where I’ll find the unspoken truth“. This wasn’t a conscious decision on his part; no “hidden message” to decipher. But it does, in a sense, sum up what Grateful To Burn gives the listener or rather what it indelibly marks on them. There are innumerable brilliant lyrics to quote but the collective meaning (if such a thing even exists) is, by brilliant mistake, captured between and within those first and last words within a broad palette of sounds.

It is impossible to listen to Grateful To Burn without feeling as if, in some “unsung” place, you’ve both been shown some of that “unspoken truth” and left searching for it at the same time. Andy speaks that truth when he sings to us, “decadent eyes you don’t have to worry because now in time your world will turn blue”, and continues on in the same song to shred to pieces the false happiness we seek in materialism but not without destroying those who would deny it, too. He pronounces in that same song, Decadent Eyes, “And we become what we’re expected and when we should scream we don’t make a sound. We don’t make a sound.”. He calls us all out. He reminds us that we are all acting out parts pre-arranged for us; shoved down our throats and thrust into our hearts since birth. But he includes himself in this judgment, and the song’s righteous indignancy cannot be ignored or argued against. He nails us to the wall he’s already nailed himself to. (more…)

Andy Grooms and his Living Room

Andy Grooms has no biography. He isn’t definable. Nor is he separate from those who know him or his work. He isn’t definable because Andy Grooms writes much as the great Werner Herzog directs and narrates: he takes the outward landscapes of life and proves that they are, in truth, our own personal monologues and interior landscapes. Like Herzog, any subject Andy touches becomes a part of Andy. Andy is the warzone journalist incapable of not crying or of joining up when the fighting becomes intense: he doesn’t attempt to be “objective” and in not doing so shows us the true horrors and, in equal parts, the beauties of our world through his music. He is too human to stand back and watch but too idiosyncratically thoughtful to blindly leap into the flames, even as he is doing just that. What we are left with is something bigger than what he witnesses yet much smaller, as well. We are faced with ourselves and our own world. We see Andy and, in the brutality of his honesty and observations and the severity of his love and disdain, we see our own faces. In it all, he shows us, there is good and bad and then there is all that’s locked up in between. His laughter is ours. His pain is ours. His confusion is ours. He is a conscientious objector with a gun and no bullets.

Andy has lamented, “There is no punk rock piano playing”, noting at the same time that “maybe that’s why all my friends play guitar”. Thankfully Andy never gave much time to the memorization of rock and roll history like a good little indie rock boy should… He was too busy pining over the “genius of John Prine” (as he says) and playing gospel music to do it. Even given the time to he would’ve ignored it all anyway. Strangely, though, it’s easy to imagine placing Andy Grooms; replete with a beat up Acrosonic piano and a Southern drawl (slow and mesmerizing enough to allow for, even demand, the two hours it takes for him to fully tell his detailed and uniquely observant stories) in New York City circa 1977. Not up on stage at CBGB’s or in the crowd at a Ramones show. That was never punk rock, anyway. Andy would’ve done as he does now. But he would’ve been tracked by those who understood what the punk rock ethos really was and made the music they made without regard for the standardized sounds associated with it; those like Tom Verlaine and Jonathan Richman. That ethos was upheld well before anyone donned a leather jacket and shredded jeans. Andy came by it naturally. Honestly. Just as he does his other roots. (more…)

John Murry on Hi Electric

Hi Electric..

Enigmas are easy to come by these days. Pseudo-sensitive art-as-rock bands dripping irony from their records like blood from their teeth. So I suppose that, in reality, the enigmatic is found in the band that refuses to be an enigma.

Memphis, Tennessee has been repeatedly stabbing itself in the back and refusing to pay the hospital bill since Chris Bell wrapped himself and his car around a light pole. Arguably, the greatest drummer in rock and roll history was murdered there and no one remembers his name. It’s Al Jackson, Sr.,  if you yourself need reminding. Here’s to hoping you didn’t. But you did. So pay attention:

When a kid with a ragged heart on his sleeve, not a silver one or one for the girls to swoon over and chase after; when a kid with every card on the table decides to make a record, refuses to stop until it’s done (really fucking done), brings in Kevin Cubbins – an equally obsessive producer – and demands more guitar repetitiously, you inevitably end up with something. Maybe anything. But not with Neil Bartlett. It’s more than something.

Neil’s a bit too smart for it, a bit too full of self-doubt and equal parts self-will, and likes rock and roll. Do you remember when people still did that? When they wrote songs about actual things and people and shit that mattered to somebody? Before “indie rock” became a global circle jerk? When a solitary 15 year old might throw on a record and get goosebumps? Fucking turn it up so loudly he destroys the 50 dollar boombox his brother handed down to him?

DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE PLAYED GUITAR? DO YOU???

Neil does. (more…)