Friday Heavy: September 2, 2022

Cliff: welcome to Friday heavy, your guide to aggressive, abrasive, loud music, music, music brought to you by the folks behind tune. Dig

I’m cliff.

Thank you, Kyle. Each episode we cover

Kyle: No, no, let me, I’ll take this. Thanks very much. I’ll tell the people each episode, we cover three things. Thanks for joining us for one or more of them. First thing, one brand new release in the world of heavy and or weird music, and more importantly, why we think it’ll be worth a spin.

Secondly, one playlist we’ve curated to help you explore a heavy sub genre or artist or scene. Often related to the new release in some way, if we can help it. And thirdly, and most importantly, by far one organization tackling a heavy issue by doing critical culture, impacting work in their community. Cuz we punk rockers are all we got in this crazy world.

Another good one today, cliff, let’s get into it. What’s the featured release of

the wheat.

Cliff: are excited to talk about weird asset Atlanta, post math Corps or something, uh, that has made me feel like the blood brothers ate Mr. Bun and are now individually projectile of vomiting chunks of song in my direction. And that sentence describes a thing that I like very much.

Kyle: I love a good of all the like bad ways you can write about music. I love a personification. Like if this were an animal that ate a vegetable in the produce section of a Publix and a suburban neighborhood, it would sound like this.

Cliff: It’s your fault

that I talk this way.

Kyle: the Benford tools, chainsaw PX

Cliff: Yeah. It’s your fault, cuz you’re always like, well, if these two hardcore albums were bananas, what type of bananas would they be? I’m like, I.

Kyle: I’m sorry, I just, I have an overactive brain and I drank too much in my twenties.

Cliff: I mean, hopefully it makes for good podcasting. I don’t know. It makes me think of weird stuff in really weird ways that are a lot more fun than trying to objectively describe what this sounds.

Kyle: I’m always trying to make two synapses bump into each other and my brain party in a way that they wouldn’t have naturally

Cliff: It works sometimes at any rate as our neurons bump, we come up against the callous Dow boys dropping celebrity therapists via Monarch heavy records. And from what we have heard of the singles so far, and what we know about this crew we’re in for a fucking ride. I’m really pumped about being able to bring not only Atlanta, but just the weirdness and the earnestness with which weirdness gets approached by bands like this.

Kyle: The the, the divergent sections of this band. The first time I listened to these singles, I was like, Jesus, this is so

Cliff: yep. Yes. I really love it. So like probably other heavy nerds. Uh, I was kind of reminded that this band rips when they dropped to die on Mars in 2019. Although frankly, listening back a little bit further on occasion, I should have been paying attention before that. Cuz they were, they were pretty on this track already and they’ve always been having fun.

And on top of it, one thing that’s always going to Engender mean to you? Is that the right phrase is releasing an instrumental

in deer? Maybe that’s it. Yeah, whatever. I’m gonna like your band, if you release an instrumental version of your record. Okay. I like that’s the best. That’s the

Kyle: file under the latest entry in cliff hates lyrics and vocal. in the long history of this, we need to do a cliff hates vocal, super cut between two

Friday

Cliff: To be very fair about that point. This band in particular is one of the few that pushes back on that for me. Right. But it’s because he’s going so hard all of the time. Right? I expect unacceptable levels of energy from front men. That’s, that’s pretty much why I don’t dig vocals, but on top of that record being great, uh, that they released an instrumental version at all when they released it in 2020, they did so to support the Atlanta solidarity fund, uh, right after a bunch of Atlanta cops started throwing people in jail for protesting on the sidewalk.

So I wish all bands did. Of the things that we’re calling out that they did. That was awesome about that. But either way, especially with this new record, I feel like, um, Kyle, we talk lovingly about our dads and the way that they introduced us to music, I feel like so much was like this thing you’re letting me listen to you today.

Reminds me of Kansas. This sounds like Edgar winter group over and over. Right. And so like our dads before us, uh, as soon as I started hearing this record, I was like, oh, this is, this is art damage by fear before the March of flames, this is my favorite record in high school. And this is being like aggressively stop start.

Like I’m gonna genre shift now just. You’re an, in an elevator now you’re not like the aggressive and confusing.

Yeah. Uh, yeah, so I love that kind of stuff. And on top of it, I do think it draws from Like the, what eventually got called, like white belt, hardcore and scream of the early two thousands.

I mentioned blood brothers, but the kind of energy from like plot to blow up the Eiffel tower and other bands like that. And the way that some of that music, uh, started. Eventually evolving into just kind of chaotic grind with experimental interludes. I mean, it almost became to the point that it, that these records were like hip hop records with really odd skits in between songs.

And so I love all of this stuff. And on top of it at this point, I think any band

Kyle: I’ve ne I’ve never thought until just now how Dillinger is like di that’s an interesting thought.

Cliff: in what.

Kyle: The collaging and the, in the collision or the way that callous style boys are, are maybe like old ludicrous, not lucri, but like the first ludicrous record where it’s okay. Here’s 28 bars. And now here’s a skit about being at a gas station.

Cliff: Yeah, I think any band anywhere near any of these spaces are knowingly carrying the Dillinger escape plan torch for sure. And I, I do feel like I hear a lot of the vocal styling production techniques. They developed all that stuff. so actually speaking of that, that’s a good tee up the first single that we’re gonna play the it’s called what is delicious, who swarms and like speaking of Dillinger,

Kyle: What is delicious question, mark? Who? Swarms question mark. I’m Ron burgundy.

Cliff: you’re gonna get plenty of MIS machine vibes off of this song. Speaking off.

 

Cliff: Okay. Now, if you are one of the subsets of dorks, probably like me and you heard the end of that clip and it had a little bit of like melodic singing to it and you’re like, oh God, no, no, no, no, I can’t not with another death Corish band that does this. Okay. I just want to come right out. This is not that they do an extremely good job of pretty much.

Doing the same thing more than about 30 seconds at a time. But on top of that, I’ll be the first to say that I think the melodic bits are super interesting the way they do, on these singles, at least that we’ve heard. but let’s go harder. So here’s another single called a brief article regarding time loops.

and if you could get the sound of my neurons firing, when something I don’t know, positive happens, I think it would sound like this.

Kyle: if you could, James Webb telescope, the inside of Cliff’s brain.

Cliff: You’re looking back 110 billion years.

 

Kyle: so check out celebrity therapists out today on Monarch heavy. Go listen to it. However you want. And then as always cannot emphasize, or underline enough, please send this band your money through shows through merch and or through a direct donation. Hey Callows what is your Venn?

Cliff: Yeah, I did wanna make sure we said callous Davos again, cuz I realized we talked about ’em a lot and didn’t really say their name again. go find them and give them money. Uh, they have a. Purple band shirt that I think is great.

Slowly. I’m gonna evolve this podcast into an update of band merch every two weeks.

Kyle: You’re gonna be like the Yankee candle kid, but like cliff reviews, his merch hall, cl cliff unboxing from shirt killer.

Cliff: I I love this idea

and that, um,

Kyle: That’s the two, that’s the tune dig tos first, first contest series.

Cliff: I’m so disappointed in myself. So speaking of Callows inspired kind of a different approach than usual for the playlist this week went a lot wider than deep and I’m really stoked about how it turned out. So tell me about it.

Kyle: So at the risk of trying to make a Cliff’s burnt CD in his truck in high school genre mix, or trying to avoid trafficking the same recommendations over and over again of bands that we have loved for a long time. Like, we can only tell you about the chariot so many times, you know, we thought rather than.

Like talking about genre or sound, we would celebrate the context that could even give rise to a band like KIST style boys. and that is the, the wildly eclectic and deeply underappreciated, heavy and alternative music scene in Atlanta. And I, and I think even underappreciated by you and me, like based on the conversations that we’ve had we didn’t know really how good we’d managed to have it over the past 15 years or.

So couple of caveats, this is not the tourist trap, ATL playlist. So no Macedon, no deer hunter, no Royal thunder, nobody that’s like gotten big or gotten nominated for Grammy or actually made money and shit out there in the world. And it also totally routes around the massive pile up of Atlanta based.

Lighter fair. The indie alternative Fay Webster. Oh, like there’s so much stuff that’s being made. That’s great. But this is not that we wanted to traffic, the weird aggressive, like the counterculture in Atlanta has lots of weird underground tentacles and they’re all strange and not all of them are great, but they’re all interesting.

So even as avid participants in our local music scene for the past 15, almost 20 years at this point, which is a staggering thought, . I, and I think we have failed to appreciate how consistent and diverse the weirdo music pipeline has been in, in our hometown. Um, bands and scenes have always seemed like flukes.

You know, they, they survive in spite of outrageous obstacles. And often, unfortunately they vanish as quickly as, as they pop up as scenes, like get gentrified or people move out of town or, or whatever it like never feels like it gets built up in a systemic. We’ll get into the dark side of that sort of like community based stuff in the next section.

But I, I think the point is that life happens at a scale you can see and touch. It’s weird that we preoccupy ourselves politically and culturally beyond looking beyond that so much. So all that to say, this is a love letter to the sounds that have shaped us in more ways than we realize. And frankly, we have taken for granted a bit.

I think our hope is that we, it encourages you to plug back in on the state of the scene around you. Um, not by being an active participant. Like you please don’t come out of pit retirement. If your knees don’t work so good and don’t feel compelled to like, Fi, chase.

What’s cool again. Now your time was your time and that’s great. Uh, you can be crystallized in Amber forever. If you, if you’re not still an active participant, now you’re either a lifer or you aren’t. And if you have to ask, you’re not. But by finding ways to like godfather the scene, like create actual physical spaces so that the next you and me and cliff have places.

and people in a community that give them permission to discover their full, radical, wonderful weirdness. That’s why scenes like this are so great and important. So, uh, we call this playlist peach skulls and it’s got. It’s got so many good bands in it. It’s 60 songs and it’s like mostly within the last 20 years.

And it’s so wildly different, like noise, rock, hardcore punk. Post-punk just like all manner of stuff. All people that we have seen with a high life or a PBR tall boy in hand at the Earl or 5 29 or Lenny’s, or. You know, now we could just name spots all day. Last thing I wanna say on it is that I’m actually pretty pleased with how much was available on streaming.

Cuz I, I thought it probably died with the CD case that got stolen out of my car in the Highlands. but it is missing some classics, like wanna shout out act of faith and scavenger of death. And then also personal faves of our era, like very early big Jesus, not shoe gays, big Jesus, but grunge big Jesus.

Uh, I tried to find a video of the house show in grant park where they played Nirvana’s breed and they kept slowing it down half time over and over and over. And they sold. Weed brownies and mushroom chocolate out of the kitchen. And I was like, is this, what is this? What a scene is like, is this a thing people do?

And then the cops came and everybody had to split cuz it was just in a

residential neighborhood

Cliff: it was

Kyle: flooding

outside.

It was

flooding

outside.

and, Johnny, Johnny dang from O brother was still in the band at that point, I think. So O O brother another band not included because they actually like have been on terrestrial radio so that, you know, they’re too big to fail.

So early big Jesus Artis pile driver, which is still one of my favorite band names of all time Bigfoot vegan Coke, who used to play at the big house, ask us about the big house on punts and our hippie friends that used to live there and killing floor. I feel very, very fortunate that there are like 50, 60 plus bands that we get to see and hang out with and have beers with.

And not everybody is fortunate enough to have that, but if you, you were ever part of a scene ever, and you’re in your thirties or forties or fifties now think about maybe creating a DIY space so that the kids can get loud and be weird and take good care of each other and figure out who they are and how to make the world a better.

Cliff: It’s gonna be so truly interesting to see what the modern equivalent of those scenes you’re talking about become and what all of it means. Everything’s so different now. Which is the thing I used to think. Didn’t make a lot of sense when people said it, but I don’t know if our experience is actually different and pandemics really do shift everything in people’s lifetimes like this, but. I don’t know, it’s wild. I think about it a lot, cuz I’m, I’m back to going to shows. And I’m, personally I’m masked up and all that stuff but everyone’s approach is different. The feel is different. And I think a lot about what you just brought up, what’s that gonna mean? And is someone else gonna have the opportunity to have what we discovered in that?

Something that gave us a place and a, a thing to think

about.

that was different than just where we were growing up.

Kyle: Yeah. I think the, the takeaway is, is if it’s ever mattered to you and it made a difference in your young life and helped you become who you are, then, then find a way to pay that forward. Now that you are more able,

Cliff: speaking of building communities and taking care of each other, uh, one thing we like to do in every episode is point out, uh, an organization who’s making a difference for the people around them in order to do that, uh, we have to talk about. Shit. That’s not fun. So let’s hit this round this week. And what’s always fun about this moment.

I feel like is because if everyone stops and thinks, Hmm, what are we gonna have to talk about this week? Your brain explodes into 50 possible options that all come to mind very quickly. And that is just a terrifying place to exist inside of. That said let’s talk about water because in the case that you might think that what happened in Flint, Michigan, and their drinking water became some sort of fluke, some sort of thing that actually happened by accident.

We want to help you better understand that. Situations like that are the civil form of war crimes. by a government on its own people. It’s always, always, always, always a policy choice to result in something that fundamental being lost. So this week, as of right now, as far as I know at the moment that we are recording this, it continues in indefinite but 180,000 people or so in Jackson, Mississippi are without safe water for an unknown period of.

School has been canceled. Like kids can’t drink water. People are in real danger. Uh, I don’t know if you’ve been the south ever it’s hot right now. It just became September. Okay. It is just now considering thinking about becoming a different temperature than hot ass summer. Okay. Is is a terrible time to be without water Jackson.

Mississippi is the capital of the entire ass state. Okay. They don’t, it’s the most popular city in the state. They don’t have safe water. And it is related. That Jackson is over 80% black in a state run by a white Republican governor who is systemically and repeatedly ignored calls to fix Jackson’s water issues, including the state leadership over and over as Atlantans, we are familiar with this idea of city versus state but in Mississippi, it is on a different level entirely.

Okay. We’ve got literally water infrastructure crumbling, the state having the ability to fix. Not in, not in, not doing it. Okay. And this isn’t the first time this has happened for the residents of Jackson. They’ve been regularly under water, boil, advisories, going a month without clean water earlier this year.

Okay. So residents of Jackson navigate. General affront to their existence. They need help getting clean water right now. Okay. Policy decisions around infrastructure are yet like a five alarm fire, right? People need to get voted out and new people need to get voted in all of that. None of that’s gonna get safe water for babies to bathe in today or for children or the elderly drink while it’s really hot outside or for people to brush their teeth or.

Okay. So what we wanna bring your attention to is called the Mississippi rapid response coalition. They have a water fund they’ve that they’ve set up. That’s already been set up since earlier this year, when Jackson previously lost this access to clean water, just Google it. It’s I we’ve kind of confirmed.

It’s the main place that’s being pointed to you. Whether it’s online or in articles or on Twitter or whatever, that’s usually a good place that we check in to make sure we’re listening to the community all around. This is a good place to go. So you can literally just Google because there’s not a great URL, Mississippi rapid response coalition water fund.

That fund has. It’s a coalition of over 30 organizations in partnership with the city of Jackson, they’re providing water relief to reduce harm until that infrastructure can be repaired or improved. And because we always want you to know what an organization is, is backed to by and how you can know that you trust it, we’ll call out that this coalition of organizations has.

In part by the people’s advocacy Institute, which is itself a nonprofit community Inc incubator for transformative justice in the American south. So we’ve got a lot of people working together to try to

make this thing better for people on the ground.

Kyle: and. In times that can feel apocalyptic, these organization, organizations and coalitions like this one are often literally the only ones filling in the gaps in the land of personal responsibility and rugged individualism fill in the gaps between inhumane living conditions and stay governments that frankly intentionally keep them that way.

Because they’re busy spending money and people who don’t need money. These organizations and coalitions desperately need your support. So, like cliff mentioned, there’s no easy URL to say out loud for donations. So you can check our social media accounts. When this episode goes live, uh, where we will share the direct link or you can Google, Mississippi, rapid response coalition.

Water fund. The official donation form is an act blue fundraiser page, it’s

something.

Cliff: they’re in the right place for.

Kyle: Yeah, at the risk of, you know, being one of those blissfully naive, all caps, vote, neoliberal people you know, voting is at the bottom of the Maslow’s hierarchy of a more perfect union.

So, so don’t skip the step of voting in your next local and state election. Cuz that’s where every vote actually counts and who’s in the seat actually. Directly impacts the daily quality of life for your neighbors and you like cliff mentioned it doesn’t get the baby’s bathed today and the elderly hydrated.

But it is a longer term fix and something that we’d be remiss if we didn’t tend to as well. And, you know, for sure do whatever you can to at least help avoid the election of a governor who doesn’t have a problem performing a slow rolling genocide on his own capital city in the cold light of day.

Those assholes have no part they, they have no right to be in places of public

Cliff: Nope. And you gotta see it for what it is and you gotta do both. You gotta support the community and you gotta do your voting our own version of it in Atlanta. Uh, they just announced this week that Atlanta medical center is closing. That’s literally my hospital it’s closing because Brian Kemp won’t expand to Medicaid, which is free money from the federal government that it it’s people’s lives.

The stuff matters. Do what you can make a donation, pay attention and do your part as best you can to, to build those communities. This has been Friday heavy. We’ll be back in two weeks.

Go to tunedig.com or follow us on Instagram and Twitter for links to the new release, the playlist and the organization that we talked about today.