CD's

It's been three years since the release of Nosaj Thing's highly acclaimed debut album, Drift, which topped countless best of year lists, but 2013 will mark a new chapter for the 27-year-old producer, musician and DJ from Los Angeles. With a new album, label and imprint for Innovative Leisure, Home marks the first time Nosaj has incorporated guest vocalists. Having remixed and worked with the likes of The XX, Flying Lotus, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Beck & Kendrick Lamar, it was time to incorporate of his own with Toro Y Moi and Kazu Makino (Blonde Redhead) providing ethereal vocals for two of the tracks on home. The rest of the album is rounded with Nosaj's signature cinematic soundscapes that explore the space from where Drift left off.

LP is Standard Jacket w/ Printed Inner Sleeve + Insert + Download Card.

CD is 4 Panel Digipack.

First, let’s meet back up with the Molochs—you remember them, right? Their America’s Velvet Glory was the earliest burst of light and energy to hit in 2017, an album of electrified rock ‘n’ roll like Dylan and Lou Reed by a band named after the Ginsberg-ian glutton god who demanded the sacrifice of all things good and pure. But now it’s 2018 and Moloch himself is fatter and happier than ever, so the Molochs couldn’t just make another record. After Glory showed the world who they were, they needed to make an album that showed what they could do. So Flowers In The Spring is where the Molochs worked harder, thought harder and fought harder to be the kind of band that the times demand: “I like to think the world just needs some good solid songs out there,” founder Lucas Fitzsimons says. “It’s simple. It’s not easy … but it’s simple.”

America’s Velvet Glory, their first-ever record for L.A.’s Innovative Leisure label, had sparked their first-ever U.S and European tours, first-ever festival sets, first-ever international press and more. (Top music mag Mojo even said they’d made one of the year’s best albums—“Any year!”) Follow-up Flowers bloomed almost exactly a year later at Long Beach’s Jazzcats studio between December of 2017 and January of 2018, where Fitzsimons and longtime band member Ryan Foster had recorded Glory. By the time they’d returned, they had a slate of songs that had come to Fitzsimons in flash moments, written on nerve-wracking transcontinental flights or on isolated nights in an L.A. apartment, captured at once in bursts of insight or rescued from almost-abandonment in discarded notebooks.

As on Glory, inspiration from Syd Barrett, Dylan, Nikki Sudden and kindred spirit Peter Perrett of the Only Ones was at work, but the Molochs are endlessly (appropriately?) ravenous when it comes to things to read and listen to and learn from. On Flowers they’d refine and recombine their sound, working in that long tradition of poets who cover (or discover) themselves in pop songs. “To Kick In A Lover’s Door” blows Flowers open with the wit and precision of the Go-Betweens, and “I Wanna Say To You” draws more from some of Creation Records’ dreamiest dreamers than it does from any esoteric 60s howlers. “Flowers In The Spring” and “Pages Of Your Journal” could be two lost Kinks singles from two different Kinks eras—that Ray Davies-ian venom stays the same, of course—and the charming/disarming “Too Lost In Love” makes feeling down sound like cheering up, just like the Clean did.

Yes, they do have their first-ever string section here, and that could confuse some people. (“People go, ‘Wow, it sounds more mature.’” says Fitzsimons. “What kind of boring shit is that?”) But Flowers isn’t a grown-up album or a show-off album or a break-up album or a just-had-to-make-another-album album because the Molochs don’t pick targets that tiny. Love and disgrace and life and death blur and bleed into each other, but at the core of Flowers is a story about standing against the inhuman by being more human, however messily honest that needs to be. (Or like Fitzsimons sings at the end of the record: beware that “determination by a whole / to destroy the human soul.” Funny how that comes in a song where he claims he can’t explain everything that happens to him, because he sort of just did.) So consider their new Flowers In The Spring a meticulously plotted counterattack against all things Moloch-ian, with clear, concise, immediate, undeniable, simple, direct pop songs, says Fitzsimons, each sharpened enough to cut through anything it touched. That’s what he needed to do, he says, because that’s what felt most true. Maybe it really was that simple, even if it wasn’t easy. Like he’d explain in a song with just seven words: “There’s something I wanna say to you.”

LP is Standard Jacket + Download Card.

First 15 LP orders come with Limited Edition Custom Booklet.

Traps PS are a band that breaks “less is more” all the way down to “less is everything.” You get it: like the Minutemen, the songs are short because they don’t need to be long. And like the Minutemen, sixty seconds of Traps PS hits harder and resonates longer than five-ten-twenty sloppy minutes from somebody else. Or like Gang of Four, who got it from James Brown, who is a fundamental Traps PS inspiration—Traps PS cares about discipline, rhythm and clarity. Says drummer Miles Wintner: “We don’t waste time.” They’ve always been unafraid to do what needed to be done, this practically telepathic trio of Wintner, bassist/backing vocalist Danny Miller and singer/guitarist Andrew Jeffords. They recorded and released records on their community-oriented/community-involved label Papermade and played any space they’d fit—lost all ages institutions like L.A.’s Pehrspace or not-exactly legal “guerilla” shows on city streets and in dusty Inglewood oil fields. But with their first full-length in three years coming into focus, they found L.A. independent label Innovative Leisure ready to amplify that DIY capability:

“We’ve done so much in our own bubble that it was exciting to explore another aspect,” says Jeffords. “I’m enjoying inviting people into our family. By the time they walked into Long Beach’s Jazzcats studio—where label mates like Hanni El Khatib and the Molochs recorded with producer Jonny Bell—they had more than twenty songs nearly fully finished, trimmed to their most necessary components and rehearsed only enough to sharpen the original inspiration. That was the most important part, says Jeffords, to capture that ecstatic lightning-strike instant that sparked a song in the first place, and to make sure it never fizzled out. “If we didn’t have that feeling,” he adds, “the song would have never made it out of the rehearsal studio.”

Their last full-length was about energy, says Jeffords, an echo of the helicopters that shook the walls in his old apartment and the car crashes in the street. New Chants would be darker in tone and color, he thought—about people and their machines, and the blurring relationship between them. Like the way you can sometimes see your reflection in a TV screen—maybe you lose track of where the media starts and you begin. If “Fourth Walls” didn’t make it obvious, the black border around their cover art does: Traps PS knows there’s always a frame around the image.

This is where the real spirit of that first wave of post-punk is at work on New Chants. It’s that uneasiness with the future and the unpredictable effects it brings, and an effort to make an unpredictable new music to meet it. (Possibly related: there’s actually one of the Jazzcats studio cats playing piano on this album, but not where you’d think.)

New Chants is an album about watching and being watched, about white noise and negative space, about how what’s undone or unplayed or unsaid is just as deliberate and meaningful as everything else. Jeffords even perforated his lyrics sheet with “…” ellipses—negative space in the language itself. So think Wire’s precision minimalism, antidote to the over-the-top spectacle of punk and pop both. You’ll hear it in “Seven Voices” or the album’s title track. Think Public Image and that caustic, corrosive—and purer for it—dissonance.

You’ll hear it in “Two Truths,” with its ragged semi-chorus of “Emmmmmmbrace …” Think the Contortions, who tore out everything in their songs except the rhythm and discovered there wasn’t much else they’d needed anyway, except for some saxophone used more as flamethrower than musical instrument. You’ll hear that as “Fourth Walls” falls in on itself. And then think about Traps PS, who thought about what they didn’t need and then threw it out, and who made an album only out of what they felt mattered most: “Let it be what it is,” says Jeffords. New Chants is barely twenty minutes long—but it’s got everything.

2LP is Gatefold Jacket, Custom Inner Sleeves + Download Card.

CD is Jewel Case.

In a world where art is compromised and commodified, shrunk down and boxed in, Vicktor Taiwò wants us to open up. The vibrant young singer-songwriter traffics in subtle hints and soaring melodies, slow creeps and grand climaxes. Taiwò is on a mission to collect something from himself, and it’s a journey worth following.

It is the frigid winter of the year 2000 and Vicktor Taiwò, an eight year old, accompanied by his mother and siblings, arrive in East London after leaving behind the visceral warmth of Abeokuta, Nigeria behind. Raised in a Christian home, his exposure to performing music came as it does for many with gifted vocal ability; honing skills and crafting harmonies in church choirs.

Years forward and disillusioned by his decision to study Law & Business at university, Vicktor Taiwò makes a choice that alters the course of his life permanently. After encouragement from friends and a brief stint as a frustrated photographer, Taiwò decides on January 1, 2012 precisely - as he does with most things - that he would make music his medium.

Once he started uploading his songs online, listeners caught on quickly. Without label or publisher, he found himself synced on shows like Girls and Dear White People. JUNO, Vicktor’s self-released debut EP, was met with praise by the likes of Vice, Billboard, and Okayplayer for its lean, focused approach to song structure, and for its withering, poetic lyrics.

Even at such an early stage in his development, Taiwò was finding angles that most songwriters would neglect. “At this point, all I really think there is for humans to do is to explore detail,” he says. “To see how infinite an infinitely expanding universe really is, and how small the smallest particle really is.”

His debut album, Joy Comes in Spirit, is at once experimental and comforting – collected shards of soul and style reassembled into something entirely new. Due out on Innovative Leisure, the record introduces a bold new artist willing to take musical and lyrical risks, and to bare himself to an international audience. The result is an arresting, unforgettable work that shrugs off the expectations we have that musicians fit easily into recognizable molds.

A fearless writer, on “Letters I Wrote,” Taiwò opens with a remarkable scene: “If you never see sunlight again / And the sun turns black and makes you so afraid / Can you find the light within to fight the night?” It’s a note to self of course; from Joy Comes in Spirit’s first note, Vicktor is mining his own psyche for its dark depths and hidden crevices, demanding from himself the sort of emotional reaction his work incites in others.

Songs like “Subducta. Psalm 69,” a seven-minute, multi-part epic, echo contemporary hip-hop; “tDS (Surf)” seems designed to be sung around campfires in the distant future; “Supernatural Women” traces 808s & Heartbreak back to its Zappian roots. And “Summon,” one of the record’s highlights, is like if you trapped a troubled spirit in a GameBoy Colour.

Vicktor Taiwò is emotionally complex. His album’s beautiful closer, “Morning Joy,” is redemptive, an optimistic look toward better days. It’s hard not to be optimistic in the face of Taiwò’s talent, the kind of which is rarely harnessed so seamlessly, and at such a young age. He’ll be an artist of consequence for years to come, no matter what outside forces threaten to block his path.

Double LP is Gatefold Jacket w/ a Download Card. CD is 6 panel digipack.

Even though the Mexican border-town of Tijuana has a stigmatized history it has managed to produce many vibrant and unique artists. None are quite like Mint Field.

Comprised of 21-year-olds Estrella Sanchez (vocals & guitar) and Amor Amezcua (drums & synths), Mint Field’s sound is organic, spacious, and inhabited by specters that lurk behind rhythms, where Estrella’s angelic voice evokes a supernatural world of beauty and melancholy.

Their new record, Pasar De Las Luces, first for LA-based Innovative Leisure Records, is “a compilation of our lives from two years ago to now” says the band. Since recording an initial EP in 2015 in their hometown of Tijuana, Mint Field have played Coachella, SXSW and have extensively toured the US and Mexico. In the summer of 2017 the band traveled to Detroit to record with producer Christopher Koltay. “We had a much clearer idea of what we wanted
and we had the tools to make it. When we recorded [our debut EP] Primeras Salidas, it was a homemade album and we didn’t know what we were doing.” This time, they managed to channel their inspirations and influences to transmit sentiments of profound sorrow, nostalgia and immaculate beauty…revisiting sounds from the past to make them contemporary.

Mint Field’s vision comes alive on Pasar De Las Luces ‘s 13 immaculate tracks that nod to everything from dream pop to fuzz-saturated shoegaze. Album opener “El Parque Parecía No Tener Fin,” is a melodic number with haunting melodic lines where we can appreciate their post-punk tendencies. “Ciudad Satélite” has woven harmonies and crescendos that detonate into a flurry of feelings anchored by a dramatic bassline. “Quiero Otoño De Nuevo” goes full krautrock and is like an introverted, reflective and delicate Neu!. ”Combos Del Pasar” borrows the distorted and imperfect guitar sounds of ‘90s indie bands like Yo Lat Tengo. “Nada Es Estático y Evoluciona” develops from minimalism into a silent scream and “Club De Chicas” is probably the peppiest song of the bunch.

The whole record has a unique sound that makes it stand apart from projects by contemporaries. While deceptively young themselves, Sanchez and Amezcua not only show the potential of influencing even younger fans, but of also defining themselves as stand alone voices in emotional music. Although they have a foot in the past, they never let themselves get caught by nostalgia; they reinterpret the best of what the past has to offer in order to better express their feeling in the present. It’s a timeless quality that will surely take them far into the future.

LP comes with custom inner sleeve & download card.

CD is 4 panel digipack.

After establishing a sound on their debut Voyage and then establishing an identity with the revelatory Generation, L.A. disco-not-disco duo De Lux took a moment to re-center and come back leaner, sharper, clearer and deeper on
their new album More Disco Songs About Love. Now that co-founders Sean Guerin and Isaac Franco know how to play and what to say, they’re ready to just get lost in the music. As the band puts it: “We like to say Voyage was our
baby, Generation was our baby all grown up and More Disco Songs About Love thinks growing up sucks and just wants to party smart.”

They started in 2013 with a happy accident called “Better At Making Time,” the lead track of their 2014 debut Voyage and an unexpected practice-space jam session that crystallized a sound, a philosophy and a future direction all
at once. In that sudden moment DeLux snapped into focus as an outfit matching post-punk sentiment and the-sociopolitical-is-personal perspective to joyfully indulgent analog synthesizer soundscapes and a deliriously transportive musical joy. And the press was ready to take the ride, with the Guardian calling Voyage “intricate, witty, inventive, dazzling in its detail” and Billboard celebrating its “lush, eclectic dance music.”

On their 2015 sophomore album Generation—a title activating every sense of
the word—De Lux added a new almost-documentary aspect to their dance music, delivering clearly personal stories of anxiety and hopeful aspiration from the place where IRL L.A. exhaustion collides with a digital city that never sleeps. (As Guerin sang: “All of these things that they put us through / I’m writing it down / I’m writing it down.”) And they were growing up in other ways, too: 2015 saw their first major festival appearance at Bonnaroo, where
they delivered the first of many stand-out big-show performances. Then in 2016, they made a hotly tipped Coachella debut and shared a bill with Arcade
Fire at New York City’s Panorama fest. And then at the end of that summer, they started the very first experiments that would lead to their new album.

Like Voyage, More Disco Songs About Love starts with the song that made
everything clear: “875 Dollars,” a song (in part) about losing the place you’ve always called home. From there it’s a stream-of-consciousness tour through
De Lux’s reality, from the family and friends who helped focus the sound of the album to everyday L.A. experiences, including but not limited to elections, evictions, even porn—although in the context you’d least expect, of course.
New York City dance-punk legend Sal P. of Liquid Liquid—who did a De Lux remix on their first-ever release—takes featured vocals on the relentless “Smarter Harder Darker” and the Pop Group’s maniacal Mark Stewart pushes
“Stratosphere Girl” into interstellar overdrive. (Plus Guerin’s mother Marie helps out with some very French examination of crepe preferences on “Music Snob,” mutant sibling to Generation’s surreal “Oh Man The Future.”)

And even though the title might seem like some kind of clever reference to something, it’s really just as simple and direct as it seems. The disco is the sound—in the most innovative way, of course—and the love is the sentiment:
“‘875’ is love for a house,” they say. “‘These Are Some Of The Things That I Think About’ is love for thought. ‘Keyboards Cause We're Black and White’ is
our love for a friend. ‘Writing Music For Money, To Write More Music’ is love for music—or money. It's all literal to us but we realize that it might not be for others. We like the idea of giving listeners something to question and wonder
about. But there's love in there.”

LP comes with Custom Inner Sleeve +Download Card.

CD is Jewel Case.

Parallels is the fourth full album released under Jason Chung’s distinctive moniker, Nosaj Thing. Masterfully dimensional, Parallels represents the acclaimed Los Angeles-based electronic producer/composer/performer’s most diverse, vital work yet. As such, Chung sees Parallels represents a kind of redemptive rebirth.
The album’s compellingly elusive, uncategorizable sonics developed out of what he terms a personal & musical “identity crisis.”

According to Chung, working with a group of collaborators on Parallels that combined both longtime friends and new creative partners added “new energy which pushed me not to limit myself. Everything felt fresh and alive.” The title Parallels in fact evokes the intense, intimate duality Nosaj Thing and his collaborators share. Chung is known specifically for his innovative, unexpected musical pairings: Kid Cudi hit up on Nosaj Thing via his MySpace page in 2006, resulting in Chung producing Cudi’s autobiographical classic “The Man on the Moon.” Kendrick Lamar flowed over Nosaj’s ethereal boom bap to create the YouTube gem “Cloud 10”; Chance the Rapper, meanwhile, freaked a Nosaj beat for his 2013 breakout masterpiece “Paranoia” and appeared on Nosaj Thing’s previous LP, 2015’s Fated. Chung and Blonde Redhead vocalist Kazu Makino are also longtime creative partners on each other’s work; her voice appears on Parallels as an otherworldly spirit animating the icily ‘80s-synthetic “How We Do.”

LP is Limited-Edition Custom Hardcover Booklet with Three 10" Vinyl LP's & Download Card.

CD is 4 Panel Digipack.

Hanni El Khatib’s first idea for his Savage Times project was to do something he’d never done before. Instead, he ended up doing … well, everything he’d never done before. He’d be playing new instruments, writing in unfamiliar new ways, opening himself up to an unrelenting stream of ideas and dedicating himself totally to pure musical instinct.  And the result? 19 best-of-the-sessions songs, destined for vinyl release as a Limited Edition 10” LP Box Set, as well as the kind of creative revelations that only happen when you quit looking around and start looking ahead.

Originally, he’d hoped to explode the lingering idea that he was simply a blues-rock guitar player, but that’s why Savage Times touches on everything from garage rock to punk to disco, hip-hop and even some unexpected solo-guitar self-portraiture. But on the way, he also exploded his own idea of what he could do—even maybe who he was, or would be.  Savage Times was an experiment as well as an experience, that touched on some of the most personal, social & political elements to date.

LP is Tip-On Jacket, Download Card & Printed Insert.

CD is Tip-On, "Mini-LP" Jacket w/ Insert.

Many moons ago Primo Pitino, the DJ of San Francisco’s legendary Oldies Night, passed me a copy of his friend Nick Waterhouse’s “Some Place.” Nick was a local vinyl DJ and the kid working at our Shangri-la, Rooky Ricardo’s Records. Though he didn’t have a band at the time, Waterhouse assembled some local musicians to cut a one-off 45 in the vein of the electrifying mid-century modern rhythm and blues he loved. I threw “Some Place” on the Technics during sound check a few cities down the line and was blown away from the howling falsetto all the way to the end! I gave it a whirl every night from Texas to Tennessee and all the way back home to New York. Not only were the dancers’ feet responding, but they were also asking about the track on a nightly basis. The Nashville Scene was so blown away that they printed a piece on Nick after a single listen. DJs and collectors everywhere wanted it so bad that the little record with the big sound started fetching upwards of $300 on Ebay.

Double LP is Standard Jacket w/ Printed Inner Sleeve & Download Card.

CD is Four Panel Digipack.

Like a balmy breeze from a world of endless summer, Classixx are back with Faraway Reach, a buoyant follow-up to their 2013 debut - something to cruise to with the top down, from festival fields to the beach, from the dance floor to the shotgun seat. Faraway Reach casts the duo's young-but-nostalgic melodies and sublime chords in a more mature, restrained light, albeit no less lively and bright. Establishing themselves as producers of note on their debut LP (Pitchfork called them “great songwriters, too”), Faraway Reach delivers powerfully smooth and soulful jewels that are still decidedly their own - the Classixx signature is one that can’t be traced. Their love of plaintive voices and disco-inspired grooves is as evident as ever, but this time around everything is a bit bolder, the cast is bigger, the melodies distilled into a higher potency - it’s all just as good, but better. The album traverses locales, vocalists and inspirations. It's a fitting movement for the duo, from Venice beach to the mountains of South Africa and everywhere in between - a Faraway Reach.

CD is a 4 Panel Digipack.

LP is Gatefold & comes w/ Digital Download Card.

There’s so much that went into French psychedelic trio Wall of Death’s new album Loveland. There’s the band itself: Gabriel Matringe, the guitarist and ex-cello player, and Brice Borredon, who grew up in the country in the south of France and who dedicated himself completely to the piano at age 6, and Adam Ghoubali, who taught himself drums after hearing the Doors. Then there’s Innovative Leisure’s Hanni El Khatib, the genre-smashing guitarist who shares songs with GZA and who’d devote his most ambitious production work yet to Wall of Death. There’s the giant stack of vintage equipment—organ, synthesizer, electric piano and a positively luscious Mellotron. There’s the live chicken named Chickpea, who guarded the outside of the Jazzcats studio in Long Beach and wouldn't let anyone pet her except Borredon. (“We directly understood and respected each other,” he explains.)

And of course there are the decades of inspiration and dedication that push Loveland past the limits of what “psychedelic” means in 2015—a connection that sparks to life with 60s groundbreakers like Soft Machine and King Crimson and leaves a comet trail across Creation Records on its way to Radiohead (and past Tame Impala!) to a destination beyond the horizon. With able and agile studio help from El Khatib and engineers Jonny Bell (also of Innovative Leisure’s Crystal Antlers) and Sonny DiPerri, Wall of Death have created a dense and deeply individual album that makes an instant into a lifetime and more: “Loveland is like the last steps you do in the desert,” says Matringe. “Dry and exhausted, one minute before dying.”

Produced by Black Angels compatriot (and BBQ expert) Texan Brett Orrison, their 2012 debut Main Obsessions on France’s Born Bad label was like if Ennio Morricone had taken over for John Cale on that first Stooges LP—an album as desolate as it was heavy. But for their new album, Wall of Death wanted something ... well, new, in every way. They wanted to take that extra step—to make modern music with the most exquisitely vintage equipment possible, explains Ghoubali, and to seek out a new producer with unfamiliar ideas to make it happen. The idea, says Matringe, was pure and simple: “I was interested in getting lost in some uncomfortable ways.”

Enter Hanni El Khatib, who met Wall of Death on tour in 2013. El Khatib was then fresh off his Head In The Dirt album and full of his own ideas about music production, thanks to particularly instructional sessions with Dirt producer Dan Auerbach. That same year, he’d do his first official production work on California psych-garage band Feeding People’s LP, and then in the spring of 2014, he’d lock himself in L.A. studio the Lair for 30 days and emerge with his ferociously experimental and album Moonlight. While on tour, he discovered that Wall of Death were just as ready to break the rules, he says: “I saw a fresh group that was open-minded and ready to do something drastically different. They talked about risk and experimentation and that’s what drew me to working on this record.” And when Wall of Death heard Moonlight, that sealed the deal: “It’s hard sometimes to let people touch your music,” says Matringe. “But he found what we were looking for.”

And so Loveland became a psychedelic album, but in its own irreproducibly unique way—and not like the usual bled-dry psychedelic albums of 2015, which smear reverb across almost everything and put fuzz on whatever’s left. Instead, Loveland is a work of art or even architecture, a castle-slash-cathedral built on catacombs and caverns and secret passages, where the way in is also the way out. Precisely one minute into Loveland, Matringe’s vocals suddenly explode into infinity, and then the bottom drops out of the song—and from there, Wall of Death dive into the void. There are no brutish garage ragers here, and no plotless jam sessions, either. Loveland is the definition of a slow-burn, with cinematic pace and limitless space and a mellotron that’s practically another member of the band. The idea, says el Khatib, was to make Loveland sound like a dream come true: “Although I played quite a great deal on this album, I wanted to make sure that first and foremost it sounded like Wall of Death. This wasn’t about me trying to put my personal stamp on it, but rather to help my friends make an album they were dreaming about in their heads

If there’s one album everyone in Wall of Death owns, they say, it’s Pink Floyd’s transcendental Meddle, and that underwater sound—as depicted on Meddle’s famous album cover—is everywhere on Loveland, especially on nod-along songs like “For A Lover” or “Blow The Clouds.” (They probably all also own the soundtrack to trip-out film extraordinaire La Planéte Sauvage, too.) But then there’s suddenly an unexpected Terry Riley-style synthesizer fractalization, and then suddenly an unexpected Pink Fairies-style guitar-break, and then the song itself powers down to make space for “Dreamland,” which plays like This Heat miraculously allowed to remix slivers of My Bloody Valentine. (Yes, it’s as hypnotic as the title promises.) Listen close and hear how the final moments of closer song “Memory Pt. 1 and 2” slip seamlessly into the title-track opener—that means this album is endless, if you’d like it to be. And in between, says Matringe, is exactly everything Wall of Death knew they really needed on this album: “The sound between love, paradise and fantasy,” he says, “with songs about love, freedom, youth and hope. For me, it’s the spectrum of what we love.”

CD Packaging is a 4 Panel Digipack.

LP Packaging is a Printed Inner Sleeve w/ Digital Download Card.

The Tijuana Panthers are from Long Beach, a great band, staring at the sea, staring at the sand... POSTER is their latest album.

POSTER? As in Post Punk? Post Surf? Post Cowpunk? How about post any wave that has come and gone and will come back and go again? Post all that. How about putting the ‘post’ back in posterity? POSTER is another great record by the Tijuana Panthers! Not just for posterity's sake - for RIGHT NOW!

Earlier Tijuana Panthers albums were urgent - as if cranking out the hits was objective number one. They cranked out the hits and they did it true. From point A to point B. But POSTER is the Tijuana Panthers now, at their most confident and present minded. They have arrived. They’ve stepped out of the past or future and into the now. Go back if you must to revisit the hits, but POSTER is now, I say! There is no longer a race against time.

On this album the hit feeling is all around you. They are exploring the time and space of that feeling. Sounds come and go, maybe to return, maybe not. This is the Tijuana Panthers freed from the tried and true structure. They have freed themselves only to be trapped again and again, in this moment, making noise, stretching out, letting odds and ends fall where they may. After all, this album was recorded in just two days! No time for fallacy! No time for façade! POSTER is but a moment to be lived and continually re-lived! What else do we have? Truth itself?! All I know - and can ever know - is this moment now, POSTER, apartment windows opening and closing, lyrics passing like ads on buses, tones swelling and crashing through breezeways.

In the summer of 2010, Superhumanoids was birthed under the hazy air and bright blue skies of Los Angeles. A fascination for electronic sounds, instruments, pedals, and more, aesthetically united Max, Sarah, and Cameron. Like a petri dish growing each day, the band spent their time together intertwining and experimenting with their R&B upbringings and love for pop music.

Exhibitionists is the soundtrack to the last moments of dusk in LA. With swooning guitars, glimmering air, soaring melodies, the setting sun, and melting keyboards, something about the whole thing makes your breath stop short. With each synth and guitar sound being completely made from scratch, the record brings a homegrown feel that encapsulates the thumps of the beating heart and lulls of swaying palm fronds from LA. Despite being wrapped in an electronic blanket, the trio unravels each songs core to take the listener on a journey that highlights the living R&B undertones and driving groove that brings to light the soul of the record. What is found in the sticky air of the city of angels is found here in Exhibitionists, to ease between the spaces of your body, make you dance, and bring you home.

It’s been a little more than a year since John Barrett and his punk band Bass Drum of Death put out their debut album—a year that took this kid from a sleepy Mississippi hometown (where the bars close at midnight) and got him doing encores in front of 5,000 screaming Europe- ans and playing back-up band for Hodgy Beats and Left Brain of Odd Future on live TV. But no matter what, he always had new songs rattling around in his head, and when it was time to get them out, he did what he had to do—like sneak away from tour on an all-night detour to his home studio to start an emergency recording session, and then get back out on the road the very next afternoon. And that’s how he finished off his new self-titled album on Innovative Leisure.
2013’s self-titled Bass Drum of Death album is everything about 2011’s debut GB City amplified, in every sense of the word. With nothing but his inspiration and his instruments, Barrett spent the fall of 2012 in his studio, smashing out punk rock. This time it was just him, lots of cof- fee, a Realistic reverb unit to give everything just a little of that stoned-in-outer-space and for the first time in Bass Drum of Death history, a bass that he used on every new track.

Beyond the real deal is the unreal deal, and therein lies Feeding People, a band of teenagers making some of the heaviest psychedelic around decadesafter the 13th Floor Elevators declared their hallucinatory sense of purpose. Feeding People was founded and is headed by nineteen-year-old JessieJones who channels the raw power of Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Janis Joplin at her most primal as she leads with strong, almost viciousvocals, bellowing blasphemies as if possessed by spirits with a masked sweetness reminiscent of Billie Holiday. Her siren call reeled in Chris Alfaro ofFree the Robots who produced some of the band’s earliest recordings, all of which were written acoustic and recorded electric in a single take in a’ 6’x10’ walk-in closet with a 4-track recorder and mic stands made of broom handles taped to fire extinguishers.After playing only a couple shows, Feeding People became the second band ever invited to play storied electronic music club Low End Theory, wherethey shared the stage with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. This is the full length LP recorded andproduced by Jonny Bell of The Crystal Antlers and Hanni El Khatib.

Los Angeles based Hanni El Khatib grew up in San Francisco raised on skateboarding (former creative director at HUF), punk rock, and 1950s and 60s classic Americana. Influenced by pioneers of early rock and R&B, the multi-instrumentalist and producer derives his unique sound from a menagerie of inspirations: blues, soul, garage rock, doo-wop … and the most American thing of all, car wrecks. It's malt shop music for those who drink them spiked with bourbon or in Hanni's own words "these songs were written for anyone who's ever been shot or hit by a train. Knife fight music." No word yet on whether Hanni's tested that knife fight thing at any of his shows.

Will The Guns Come Out is his debut album on the Innovative Leisure label, following two 45s: Dead Wrong & Build Destroy Rebuild.

Nothing Is Real is Crystal Antlers going beyond the beyond, with songs that rattle and ricochet from desolation to delirium. Opener “Pray” sounds like what would have happened if Black Flag’s Greg Ginn had produced the first Psychedelic Furs single; “Persephone” and “Anywhere But Here” match the desperate, relentless rhythm of the Wipers with the inside-out guitar melodies of the Pixies. “Li- corice Pizza” recalls lost cult-punk heroes like the Flesh Eaters or the Embarrassment. On Nothing Is Real, you’ll feel as much as hear echoes of bands like Wire, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. Nothing Is Real features cover art by famed surf/skate/ graffiti legend C.R. Stecyk III and recorded as the band returns to its most fundamental roots as an agile power trio - Jonny Bell, drummer Kevin Stuart and guitarist Andrew King.

Double Gatefold LP.Gatefold CD Digipack

BADBADNOTGOOD is a young supremely talented trio of musicians made up of Matthew Tavares on keys, Chester Hansen on bass, and Alex Sowinski on drums. Since their inception at Humber College’s Music Performance program in 2011, the three have challenged the rule book on improvised instrumental music and taken jazz tradition into the future. With early champions including acclaimed BBC broadcaster Gilles Peterson and Tyler The Creator who helped fuel their discovery with a series of live jams that instantly went viral and dubbed them the “Odd Trio”, the band released their first EP BBNG in June 2011 to wide praise. The marriage of jazz virtuosity and hip hop source material offered a fresh take on the traditional “standard” applied to hip hop classics by taking on choice cuts from the golden era rap cannon and writing inspired arrangements for them instead of one-dimensional covers. The band hit a landmark by introducing original material into their composi- tions with BBNG2 in 2012. New songs like “Rotten Decay”, “Vices” or “UWM” carried on the proud heritage of musical juxtaposition by bringing together jazz, hip hop, punk, and dance music into vigorous balance. Since then, they’ve won praise from the four corners of the globe and collaborated with Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt, MF Doom, Pharaoh Monch and RZA among many. Their no- torious live performances have brought fans across the whole musical spectrum together, taking the band around the world from Coachella to Glastonbury. Now, the inseparable friends are prepping to release their biggest project to date III on prodigious young label Innovative Leisure, a highly-anticipated project ushering in the group’s newest explorations which are proving to be limitless.

12" x 12" Full Cover Sticker LP. Digipack with clear tray CD.

It all started over a year ago with the caption “MINDBLOWING PSYCHE- DELIA FROM THAILAND”—the Youtube video that accompanied this head- line on the Dangerous Minds Blog was exactly that. Here was a group of Thai musicians being filmed parading through a remote village hundreds of miles away from Bangkok playing some of the heaviest Psych known to mankind out of a crazy homemade soundsystem. Who were these men and how on earth was this not some unearthed archived footage from the ‘60s or ‘70s?! The Youtube clip quickly made its rounds amongst music enthusiasts leaving many in the Western hemisphere to question who this group of contemporary Thai villagers (loosely named Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band) was.

Six months after that first encounter with Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band, a Los Angeles music producer named Josh Marcy used Facebook and some un- likely interpreters at his local Thai restaurant to get in contact with the band and inquire whether they’d be interested in having him travel to their town to record their music for a global audience. At first the band was naturally suspicious, but through subsequent interactions the group’s leader and namesake Khun Narin (also known simply as “Rin”) warmed to the idea of having Marcy come visit. And so began the journey of uncovering who these mysterious men from an obscure blog post actually were.

Khun Narin’s Electric Phin Band’s membership is always in rotation and spans several generations, from high school kids to men well into their 60s. A standard engagement has the band setting up at the hosting household during the morn- ing rituals, playing several low-key sets from the comfort of plastic lawn chairs occasionally working in a cover version of a foreign classic (The Cranberries ‘Zombie’ is a recent favorite) while the beer and whiskey flow freely. After a mid-day banquet, they start up the generator and lead a parade through the com- munity to the local temple, picking up more and more partiers along the way.

The music they play is called phin prayuk. The first word refers to the lead instrument, a 3-stringed lute known as the phin. Beer, the phin player, uses a string of Boss effects pedals, including a phaser, distortion and digital delay to get his sound. He also builds his own instruments, installing Fender pickups into hand-carved hardwood bodies, with elaborate mythical serpents adorning the headstock. The band takes pride in their custom PA system, as well as an imposing tower of 8 loudspeaker horns atop a huge bass cabinet. To capture the essence of the group and their sound, Marcy recorded th em in their natural environment by doing a proper field recording, literally in a field outside the city of Lom Sak, in the valley of mountains that form a rough border between Thai- land’s North and Northeast. The result was 40 minutes of hypnotizing psyche- delia filled with heavy drum breaks that sounds like something RZA would sample for a Quentin Tarantino film.

LP Comes w/ Standard Jacket & Download Card.

CD is Four Panel Digipack.

The Buttertones’ Gravedigging is more a movie waiting to happen than an album—or a soundtrack just waiting to inspire a movie, with scene after scene of action, tension and release set to a sound that takes everything good and true about American music before the Beatles prettied it up (surf, sweet soul, the boss saxophone-overdrive garage of the Northwest wailers like the Sonics) and matches it to punk energy, post-punk precision and the kind of personality that blows the circuit-breakers at a backyard party.

The Buttertones started their own journey in 2011 as three music school misfits (or drinking buddies, they say) in the heart of Hollywood, happy to learn how to to play, produce and perform but less excited about frequent go-nowhere conversations with classmates who had little interest in either the past or the future of music. So that’s why bassist Sean Redman (also a former member of Cherry Glazerr) felt like he’d lucked out when he found guitarist/singer Richard Araiza and drummer/polyinstrumentalist Modesto ‘Cobi’ Cobiån: “Cobi and Richard were the first guys I met where I thought they knew what they were talking about,” he says. “They had good influences—they weren’t just trying to pander.

Their first rehearsals were in a Hollywood bedroom where Redman was living on an air mattress, then Araiza finally locked down Boettcher—who he’d often see responding to the same casting calls as he did—to replace another guitarist who was transitioning back to family life even as the Buttertones prepared their debut release, a self-titled cassette on L.A.’s garage-pop Lolipop label. Then they absorbed sax player London Guzmån
(formerly in Long Beach’s Wild Pack of Canaries with breakout local Rudy De Anda) after spotting him at a local DJ night, recruiting him for their sophomore album American Brunch—and discovering the kind chemistry they didn't know they were missing. Says Araiza: “We’re proud to be a legit band. It’s a very collaborative process—we rely on each other. I feel that’s rare nowadays, especially with rock bands.”

When it came time to make Gravedigging—the follow-up to a special issue 8” for Innovative, which ended up pulling them aboard the label full-time—they knew it was time to go deeper and get dirtier. Recorded at Jazzcats studio in LongBeach—home-away-from-home to fellow Innovative Leisure artists Hanni El Khatib, Wall of Death and more—in the spring of 2016, the sessions were supercharged with hard-won live experience from endless
street-level shows and relentless midnight-to-six rehearsals at the Buttertones lock-out, then focused even further by the insight and vision of producer Jonny Bell. (“Jonny pushed us like crazy,” says Boettcher. “He had so many ideas all he time.”)

Think of it this way: you might not yet know how the band that made Gravedigging is going to land—but you know it’s going to hit hard.