Gross, But Not The Final Scene

This is the first of two Gross Relations-based posts that we will give you over the weekend. It wasn't long ago that the Brooklyn outfit brought out their Come Clean 12" (on Raven Sings The Blues Records), so its exciting to hear that their debut LP isn't fair away. In the meantime, quit biting your fingernails and lose your mind to the below single, it's a good 'un. You can also buy it in vinyl format here.

Gross Relations - Cut The Final Scene

Friday Cover Up - Woven Bones Ride Sister Ray In Silence

This is a good one. I am a very big fan of everything Austin's Woven Bones do (which is amazing considering my first listen was met with contempt - see here), so when I heard this brilliant instrumental cover version of Velvet Underground's 'Sister Ray' yesterday I veritably shat my pants in ecstacy. It is exactly what WB sound live, distilled into 3 minutes of a sleazy, scuzzy elixir that may not hold the secret to the fountain of youth, but will make you fiendishly happy as you get closer to the End. Thanks Raven Sings The Blues for this!!

Enjoy the weekend buck-o's!

Woven Bones - Sister Ry (Velvet Underground cover)

Darkness Of The Young

I know there are albums that are deemed as 'growers'. Ones that take their time getting their hooks into you, so surreptitious are their charms that you are addicted before you have had time to think about what's been placed in front of you. But rarely could you say that an album was a 'creeper' - where each song oozes its way over you and enters you through every pore and orifice, like the black oil from The X Files.

The Young's Voyagers of Legend is definitely a creeper.

I heard this Austin Texas band first over at Raven Sings The Blues via the track 'Phoebis Cluster', which is also featured below. I was immediately intrigued - the song has that eerie vibe that the Pixies' 'Gouge Away' has, that Lynchian noir nightmare that slinks along in the shadows before jumping all over you. I delved into the band a little more, and there isnt much to be gleaned, other than they are signed to the great Mexican Summer, which helped put out the LP. So I scoured the WWW to find the album, and whilst the player I found on a nondescript site (which no longer seems to work) wasn't altogether functioning properly, it was enough to get me a couple listens to it.

Voyagers of Legend is definitely a time capsule album, taking me back to the early 90s. But instead of focusing on high school slacker ennui a la Japandroids, this is delving more into the flannel shirts of the grunge generation with more than a pinch of the aforementioned Pixies (a commonly held belief that they were the genesis of grunge as it were). 'Bird In The Bush' to me is the single track on this album that comes across as proper single material, and yet it is the weakest, whilst tracks like 'Smiling God' and Sunburst' rollick along like a burnished black steam train with roadkill in its grill.

Good luck find much on the Web about The Young - just do yourself a favour, head over to Mexican Summer and get the album. Ive got the itch to hear it again - its crept inside me and it will not let go.

The Young - Phoebis Cluster