Pages tagged “sub pop”

Songwriter continues to finely hone his unique, affecting DIY styleFrom Stevie Wonder and Todd Rundgren to Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, self-sufficiency in recording—being your own one-man band—has served as more than just a badge of honor. It's also a disarmingly simple way to maintain consistency over the course of multiple albums, if not a career. On Soft Airplane, bedroom/basement-recording aficionado Chad VanGaalen still plays nearly every instrument in the mix, as he did on previous LPs Infiniheart  and Skelliconnection, but something's changed. Where earlier albums could seem scattershot, with tracks independently culled from hundreds of stockpiled songs, Soft Airplane is concise and fully-realized.

CSS' name, an abbreviation of the Brazilian-Portuguese phrase "Cansei de Ser Sexy," is literally translated to "I got tired of being sexy." This moniker seemed harmless and sufficiently ironic when the group's self-titled debut album came out two years ago.

Though CSS has shed the overt pop of its 2006 debut (which spawned the highest ever Billboard charting single for a Brazilian artist, “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex”), the true nation of origin for the electro-punks’ Sub Pop follow-up, Donkey, is still the dancefloor.

Portland, Ore.-based Blitzen Trapper will release its fourth album, Furr, on Sept. 23. It will be the band's Sub Pop debut, following last year's Wild Mountain Nation.

In case you haven't already heard, Sub Pop (the Seattle-based bastion of indie-rock that has released work by everyone from Flight of the Conchords to Nirvana) has survived two decades. And it's damn proud of it, too. So proud, in fact, that the label is throwing itself one hell of a birthday bash, the Sup Pop 20th Anniversary Festival, and unleashing a slew of other goodies in honor of itself. The two-day music festival is scheduled for July 12- 13 at Seattle's Marymoor Park, but tickets are still available.

The Shins may still be willing to...wait for it...change your life, but now they’re doing it on their own terms. After being the first Sub Pop band to chart a top 10 album in its first week of release (Wincing The Night Away debuted at number two in 2007), it looks like Mercer and the boys will release their fourth full album on the frontman’s own Aural Apothecary label.

On April 1, this showed up on SubPop.com: "Today, and this is no April Fools joke, is Sub Pop Records’ 20th Anniversary. When I asked Jon Poneman, aka The Jonald, how it feels to turn 20 he responded, 'The company maintains bowel movements at regular intervals so we’re not nearly as grouchy as some other labels our age.' I couldn’t put it better myself, but this is coming from a man who has never once used the bathroom in the office." If that's not cause for celebration, we don't know what is.

So then, the indie rock name-makers, "in an unabashedly conspicuous celebration of 20 years of not going out of business," will be hosting a series of festivities, the centerpiece of which will be the SP20 Festival, July 12-13 at Mary Moor Park in Redmond, Wash. (just outside Seattle). Rumors had been flying as to just what and whom these festivities would entail, but Sub Pop has started to put an end to the speculation. The list of performers includes acts from all across the label's catalogue, from new releases to reunions. Some of them are: Beachwood Sparks, Comets on Fire, Fleet Foxes, Flight of the Conchords, The Fluid, Foals, Grand Archives, Green River, The Helio Sequence, Iron & Wine, Kinski, Low, Mudhoney, No Age, Pissed Jeans, Red Red Meat, The Ruby Suns, Seaweed and Wolf Parade. More will be announced in the coming months.

Discounted $30 single-day or $50 two-day passes go on sale April 26 at SubPop.com or Ticketmaster.com. Ticket prices will increase May 10.

The label will also be hosting a comedy show July 11 at The Moore Theatre featuring Eugene Mirman, Patton Oswalt and Todd Barry, as well as putting out a series of re-issues in honor of entering their third decade of operations. The first re-issue will be Mudhoney's Superfuzz Bigmuff: Deluxe Edition May 22. They'll launch a limited edition of the Sub Pop Singles Club, and in their words, "throw a series of over-the-top birthday parties...this summer."

Happy Birthday, Sub Pop!

Related links:
News: Sub Pop digital store open for business
Review: Mudhoney - Under A Billion Suns
Review: Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Lively Local Labels
Sub Pop remains king, but Barsuk and Suicide Squeeze are emergent while Light In the Attic has become one of the nation’s finest treasure troves of historical sounds.

Underground hip-hop
National attention has fallen on The Program, a hip-hop showcase hosted by Seattle backpackers Blue Scholars (and featuring their alter egos, Common Market) that sold out Neumo’s, a hot local venue, for five nights running.

Indie thrivers and survivors
New bands such as Grand Archives, The Blakes and Minus the Bear; clubland stalwarts Neumo’s, Chop Suey and High Dive; the indomitable Sonic Boom Records; influential KEXP morning-show host John Richards; the Vera Project (a youth music/arts center that recently raised $1.5 million for permanent digs and counts 17,000 kids as participants) and ThreeImaginaryGirls.com (the city’s self-proclaimed “sparkly indie-pop press”) are all reminders of Seattle’s time-honored ability to reinvent itself.

Earlier today, The Daily Swarm posted an interesting little AP news item regarding the effects of digital music sales on indie labels. The main gist of the story: it's becoming more difficult for labels to make money off of digital sales through large-scale retailers.

So here comes Sub Pop, as established and beloved an indie imprint as they come, starting up its own digital store. It seems like a logical decision: axe out the middleman and, like the alternative rock acts that built Sub Pop, do it yourself. The .mp3 downloadable albums on SubPop.com go for $9.90, down from the $12-$14 Sub Pop charges for a typical CD.

Sub Pop's Dean Hudson posted a note on the label's website with some more details: the files come at 192kbps, and once you purchase them you can download them multiple times from your Sub Pop account page. That includes any updates (higher bitrate, bonus tracks) - at no extra charge. Very sweet.

The initial list of digital-available albums includes Paste favorites such as Iron & Wine, Band of Horses, and Sleater-Kinney. Hudson also added in his post that the label should be expanding this section over the next week, and that digital downloaders should keep their eyes peeled for "bribes" (such as bonus downloads and album previews).

Related links:
Sub Pop on MySpace
Sub Pop artist Wiki
YouTube: History of Sub Pop Records

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.