photo by William Chaffin
12.31.2012
Best Thing About Monday
12.30.2012
12.28.2012
Long Live the Man Bear!
Man Bear is whispered pop sweetness in jangled anthem form. It buzzes and beeps with weeping coolness. A tossing aside of a derelict bang of hair. An old battered acoustic with weathered punk rock stickers. Man Bear represents the very best of Kansas City's nearly untapped indie pop market.
Sure, there are a few other bands that *attempt* to embrace and flaunt it but none come close to Man Bear's aching garage insanity and sticky pop sweetness. It flows into your speakers like a 1984 cassette tape masterpiece and remains free from succumbing to feeling like some relic of retro hipster cool. *Infinity Cat* IS cool. It's as if all the weirdo outsiders from early John Hughes films got together in a garage and decided to start a band.
Too vague?
Stick this in your pigeon-hole pipe and smoke it: Mix a little "Let It Be" by The Replacements & "Psycho Candy" by The Jesus & Mary Chain...
That's a little hint of what Man Bear has to offer. Sprinkle in a little Big Star...maybe even a little bit of early Jonathan Richman...
And more than that...
Man Bear is also that old car you had with no air conditioning and aging Pioneer tape deck. It's sweat that would bead up on your lips as you drove fervently toward the house of the person that you believed for just one moment you just couldn't live without. It's weathered jeans with oil stains and girls that eat pencils.
It's Kansas City's best hope for the development of a sugary-sweet, post-punk, indie-pop empire.
-William Chaffin
Kill Your TV caught up with Alex from Man Bear and asked him a few questions via email.
"Infinity Cat" feels like the end of a trilogy. Can you confirm or deny this theory?
Deco Auto is certainly up there. I really liked the EP the Tambourine Club put out a year or so ago. I saw the Brannock Device live a few months ago and they pretty much blew my mind. Of course, if we are going back a bit, Ultimate Fakebook was pretty much THE band for me for my high school years.
Tell us a bit about the recording process for "Infinity Cat"...
I had a pretty good idea what songs would be on this release as soon as we finished the last one. There were probably 2 other songs in contention at one point or another but this collection of songs seemed to fit well and felt a little different than “Feeling Kind of Lo-Fi”…which was really just a bunch of random tracks I never thought we would record. Certainly nothing we would ever pay to take to a studio.
With “Feeling Kind of Lo-Fi”, we were sort of just trying to get our bearings in terms of doing drums and everything ourselves. In my mind, “Infinity Cat” was going to be our 70’s rock album, so I wanted it to have more of a T. Rex/Big Star/early Tom Petty by way of Man Bear kind of feel. That probably only ended up coming across on maybe 2 tracks. There was a lot more care payed to balancing EQ between tracks and utilizing compressors and other things I don't fully understand. Once we had the songs decided, recording began.
The Man Bear Recording Process:
1. Record Guitars
2. Record Vocals
3. Record Drums
4. Re-record all guitars, profanity ensues
5. Apologize to girlfriend for stream of profanity coming from basement
6. Re-record vocals, debate becoming instrumental band
7. Record Bass
8. Mix tracks, debate deleting everything
9. “Master” tracks...whatever that means
10. Vow to never do this again
Any wisdom you would care to share with our readers? A favorite quote or famous last words?
We're just very thankful for all the kind words from Kill Your TV over the past few months. We're pretty self-depreciating as a band so it's nice to hear so many positive things.
Check out an exclusive Man Bear unreleased track at the Kill Your TV Bandcamp site!
Sure, there are a few other bands that *attempt* to embrace and flaunt it but none come close to Man Bear's aching garage insanity and sticky pop sweetness. It flows into your speakers like a 1984 cassette tape masterpiece and remains free from succumbing to feeling like some relic of retro hipster cool. *Infinity Cat* IS cool. It's as if all the weirdo outsiders from early John Hughes films got together in a garage and decided to start a band.
Too vague?
Stick this in your pigeon-hole pipe and smoke it: Mix a little "Let It Be" by The Replacements & "Psycho Candy" by The Jesus & Mary Chain...
That's a little hint of what Man Bear has to offer. Sprinkle in a little Big Star...maybe even a little bit of early Jonathan Richman...
And more than that...
Man Bear is also that old car you had with no air conditioning and aging Pioneer tape deck. It's sweat that would bead up on your lips as you drove fervently toward the house of the person that you believed for just one moment you just couldn't live without. It's weathered jeans with oil stains and girls that eat pencils.
It's Kansas City's best hope for the development of a sugary-sweet, post-punk, indie-pop empire.
-William Chaffin
Kill Your TV caught up with Alex from Man Bear and asked him a few questions via email.
"Infinity Cat" feels like the end of a trilogy. Can you confirm or deny this theory?
It wasn't originally intended as a trilogy but in hindsight it sort of seems that way. All three EPs certainly feel like a smaller part of a larger piece. And I don't see us approaching the next release the same way as these three so I imagine they will continue to be lumped together. I suspect the next one will just be a collection of Bruce Hornsby covers.
"A Girl I Once Knew" is perhaps Man Bear's saddest and sweetest song-what can you tell me about this track?
"A Girl I Once Knew" is perhaps Man Bear's saddest and sweetest song-what can you tell me about this track?
That song is probably about...5 years old at this point. Something like that. It's been a candidate for each of our releases but never really fit into the track listing. A lot of our songs tend to be either loud or fast so I wanted something a bit different for this release. And I always like to try and include a song in an alternate tuning and this one filled that niche. Honestly, it’s so old (in Man Bear years at least) that we almost never put it out. It’s certainly the outlier from the rest of the tracks lyrically and I find the phrasing quite embarrassing.
Any plans for making a full length release?
Any plans for making a full length release?
We can barely plan ahead to our next practice, let alone our next release. We certainly love the idea of doing a full length but EPs tend to work better for us for a few reasons. It lets us spread out our content a bit more so that we have releases coming on a more regular basis. This last one took about 3-4 months, which seems to be typical for our EP cycles so I imagine a full length would take us between 6 and 8 months. That’s a lot of time to go without anything new for a band trying to build a following from the ground up. These days, it feels like you need to have a steady stream of content. That being said, at one time “Infinity Cat” had potential to be 10 tracks.
Probably more than anything else, I get bored pretty quickly. Doing a full length means committing to the same group of songs for quite a while. If we could expedite the process or get a more ideal recording set up, a full length could be possible. I'd like to approach things from a new perspective with whatever we end up doing next so maybe that means we'll try putting out more songs in one chunk. It's hard to say for sure. I'd like to go back to the studio but so much of our stuff happens after the core track is laid down that it's not super conducive price wise. Most of the lead guitar parts are written after the fact and I'm not great at trying to recreate them. I barely remember most of them. I also suck at vocals and tend to redo them quite a bit which gets expensive.
Give us a little back story...how did Man Bear become Man Bear?
Probably more than anything else, I get bored pretty quickly. Doing a full length means committing to the same group of songs for quite a while. If we could expedite the process or get a more ideal recording set up, a full length could be possible. I'd like to approach things from a new perspective with whatever we end up doing next so maybe that means we'll try putting out more songs in one chunk. It's hard to say for sure. I'd like to go back to the studio but so much of our stuff happens after the core track is laid down that it's not super conducive price wise. Most of the lead guitar parts are written after the fact and I'm not great at trying to recreate them. I barely remember most of them. I also suck at vocals and tend to redo them quite a bit which gets expensive.
Give us a little back story...how did Man Bear become Man Bear?
Man Bear really started as a solo project 5-6 years ago. I'd record a song and throw it on MySpace, whenever it was still a thing. Eventually I had 20-30 songs and nothing else to do, so I turned it into a full band. Aaron and I have played together in bands for the past 12-13 years and we met Keith about 6 or 7 years ago so they seemed like ideal candidates. We all like the Replacements which was really my only requirement. Because it was based on a lot of my solo recordings, the earlier songs had more of an electronic element to them and we used to play with a laptop. We found that was getting in the way of our inherent shambolic nature so we stopped that within a year. We've tried bringing in a fourth member from time to time over the years but my fragile ego probably couldn't handle another guitar player.
Let's put a spin on the "Who are your musical influences?" question. BESIDES music what else inspires you as a songwriter?
Let's put a spin on the "Who are your musical influences?" question. BESIDES music what else inspires you as a songwriter?
Hmm...that's tough to say. I don't really have much of a songwriting process so it's pretty hard to identify what inspires me when I do. I like words, so a lot of times when I'm reading I'll jot down cool words that I might try to incorporate at some point. But really, I just pick up a guitar and sometimes something comes out and sometimes nothing happens. I've never really understand why it works.
Who are some of your favorite local bands?
Who are some of your favorite local bands?
Deco Auto is certainly up there. I really liked the EP the Tambourine Club put out a year or so ago. I saw the Brannock Device live a few months ago and they pretty much blew my mind. Of course, if we are going back a bit, Ultimate Fakebook was pretty much THE band for me for my high school years.
Tell us a bit about the recording process for "Infinity Cat"...
I had a pretty good idea what songs would be on this release as soon as we finished the last one. There were probably 2 other songs in contention at one point or another but this collection of songs seemed to fit well and felt a little different than “Feeling Kind of Lo-Fi”…which was really just a bunch of random tracks I never thought we would record. Certainly nothing we would ever pay to take to a studio.
With “Feeling Kind of Lo-Fi”, we were sort of just trying to get our bearings in terms of doing drums and everything ourselves. In my mind, “Infinity Cat” was going to be our 70’s rock album, so I wanted it to have more of a T. Rex/Big Star/early Tom Petty by way of Man Bear kind of feel. That probably only ended up coming across on maybe 2 tracks. There was a lot more care payed to balancing EQ between tracks and utilizing compressors and other things I don't fully understand. Once we had the songs decided, recording began.
The Man Bear Recording Process:
1. Record Guitars
2. Record Vocals
3. Record Drums
4. Re-record all guitars, profanity ensues
5. Apologize to girlfriend for stream of profanity coming from basement
6. Re-record vocals, debate becoming instrumental band
7. Record Bass
8. Mix tracks, debate deleting everything
9. “Master” tracks...whatever that means
10. Vow to never do this again
Any wisdom you would care to share with our readers? A favorite quote or famous last words?
We're just very thankful for all the kind words from Kill Your TV over the past few months. We're pretty self-depreciating as a band so it's nice to hear so many positive things.
Check out an exclusive Man Bear unreleased track at the Kill Your TV Bandcamp site!
12.23.2012
12.17.2012
Best Thing About Monday
12.16.2012
Goodbye Two Zero One Two
Saturday, December 15, 2:33am
Whispering tones of brilliant moments from tonight's show are establishing their hierarchy in my brain as I write this. Still buzzing...buzzing between the muffled cotton of temporary deafness.
I can still hear faint echoes of Oobergeek's "Same Difference"
It's mad-hatter, cool-as-fuck flow colliding with apocalyptic chorus pumping from the stage.
......buzzzzzz.....
And Grenadina's driving & frantic aura...the sweet delicate notes delivered at bullet-speed & the harrowing scream of golden throated youth kicking against the void.
.....buzzzzzz....
Slum Party's echo-verb driven darkness gaining frenetic fuzz & low-key insanity. It was the big bad wolf in a lugubrious crawl toward the torture of beauty & then it became beautiful.
.....buzzzzzz.....
And Jorge Arana Trio's cinematic acid-jazz, cool-chaos----so controlled and fucking wild! Displacing every listener but delivering on the promise of next level epiphany.
......buzzzzzzzzzzz....
James Christos & crew commanding not only the microphone but summoning the power of other worlds & ancient Gods to manipulate electricity.
.......buzzzzzzzzzz....
Lazy's punk rock coolness flew at us so hard and fast that we were drenched in the effervescent joy of their sweet wonder. Their vintage tones & sing along bad-ass-ness becoming almost unbearable exciting.
........buzzzzzzzzzzz.....
And Wurm & The Madness pulling late shift and playing macabre Shakespeare with his fuck-this-world poetry.
.......buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....
It was next level.
It was true community.
A rare & beautiful night. A wonderful year.
The buzzing subsides but the memory will always be with me.
Kill Your TV Kansas City
Until Next Year...
I Remain,
William Scott Chaffin
Whispering tones of brilliant moments from tonight's show are establishing their hierarchy in my brain as I write this. Still buzzing...buzzing between the muffled cotton of temporary deafness.
I can still hear faint echoes of Oobergeek's "Same Difference"
It's mad-hatter, cool-as-fuck flow colliding with apocalyptic chorus pumping from the stage.
......buzzzzzz.....
And Grenadina's driving & frantic aura...the sweet delicate notes delivered at bullet-speed & the harrowing scream of golden throated youth kicking against the void.
.....buzzzzzz....
Slum Party's echo-verb driven darkness gaining frenetic fuzz & low-key insanity. It was the big bad wolf in a lugubrious crawl toward the torture of beauty & then it became beautiful.
.....buzzzzzz.....
And Jorge Arana Trio's cinematic acid-jazz, cool-chaos----so controlled and fucking wild! Displacing every listener but delivering on the promise of next level epiphany.
......buzzzzzzzzzzz....
James Christos & crew commanding not only the microphone but summoning the power of other worlds & ancient Gods to manipulate electricity.
.......buzzzzzzzzzz....
Lazy's punk rock coolness flew at us so hard and fast that we were drenched in the effervescent joy of their sweet wonder. Their vintage tones & sing along bad-ass-ness becoming almost unbearable exciting.
........buzzzzzzzzzzz.....
And Wurm & The Madness pulling late shift and playing macabre Shakespeare with his fuck-this-world poetry.
.......buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....
It was next level.
It was true community.
A rare & beautiful night. A wonderful year.
The buzzing subsides but the memory will always be with me.
Kill Your TV Kansas City
Until Next Year...
I Remain,
William Scott Chaffin
12.14.2012
12.12.2012
12.10.2012
Best Thing About Monday
Need we say more?
Steddy P & DJ Mahf!
photo by William Chaffin
steddyp.bandcamp.com/track/rock-steddy-vs-vajra
12.08.2012
KC Musicians' Top 10 of 2012
William Chaffin
williamchaffin.bandcamp.com
2. Oobergeek • "Noise" & "Same Difference"
3. Blood Birds "LP"
4. Lazy • "Obsession"
5. Merriweather • "Sex, Murder & Summer"
6. Grenadina • "Pretend For Me"
7. Jorge Arana Trio "Mapache"
12. Your Reflection "Electric Indian"
13. Wick & The Tricks "DEMO"
14. Soft Lighting "Slow Motion Sillhouettes"
Merriweather
merriweather.bandcamp.com
2. CV- Humans
3. Slum Party- Magic Scents
4. Lazy- Obssesion
5. Wick & The Tricks- DEMO
6. Soft Lighting- Slow Motion Sillouettes
7. Regret, The Informer- Less Than Three
8. Man Bear- Feeling kind of Lo(fi)
9. Petrie's Lake House- Dogboat
10. Dracula Glasses- Upgrade EP
Lazy
lazy.bandcamp.com
2 Torben - demo- cassette
3 dry bonnet- seeds ep cassette
4 scammers - conventions digital release
5 Umberto - night has a thousand eyes lp
6 meat mist - smut lp
7 blood birds - blood birds lp
8 all blood - someone else's ocean digital release
9 folkicide - a night at the opera
10 Dated - live at fokl - digital release
12.04.2012
12.03.2012
Best Thing About Monday
If hell were a rusted out junkyard where stoner-doom, metal bands went to play then THIS song and THIS band would be sitting on thrones made of skulls and stolen pirate jewels.
photo by Chad Cogdill
Someone kept this band in a cage and fed them a steady diet of black licorice and Black Sabbath vinyl and the result is a fuzz feast of Satanic sludge sex. That's a high compliment by the way...enjoy your Monday...we are all going to hell!
thedevil1.bandcamp.com/track/suidae
thedevil1.bandcamp.com/track/suidae
12.01.2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)