Banquet Years is the third EP in a digital-only series of releases by Seattle-by-way-of-Austin’s Jon Rooney, the Virgin Of The Birds mastermind and proprietor of Abandoned Love Records. The album, containing five songs, finds Rooney further expanding his capabilities and musicianship. Opening track “Let Me Be Your Bride” demonstrates his folk-versatility, from the 60s-era bass guitar bop to the borderline experimental tinkering on the keys. Not to mention, the wicked guitar-work radiating in emotive psychedelic hypnosis.

We’re excited to exclusively premiere the sixth track of Virgin Of The Birds’ latest EP, Dear Furies, available only here on FensePost. The song features Jon Rooney’s growing focus of meshing his love for folk-pop with the obsession with classic underground films, like the classic works of Christopher Lee circa the 60s and 70s.

Virgin Of The Birds is the solo project of Jon Rooney, the primary individual behind Abandoned Love Records. His latest project is a slew of EPs available from the ALR website, the first of which is Every Rival.

What is the perfect driving music? You can probably rattle off a ton of names—my list, past and present, would include: Sing Along With The Acid House Kings by Acid House Kings, Up Against The Legends by The Legends, and Friend And Foe by Menomena. Surely we can all name great music to drive to, but what about bad music to drive to? This is a bit more difficult.

Once again Austin delivers, this time with the recent release of The Lovely Sparrows‘ Pulling Up Floors, Pouring On (New) Paint on Abandoned Love Records. And with this five-song debut EP, the Texas town continues to pump out quality artists. The Lovely Sparrows take folk music in a new direction, adding a unique abundance of percussion and a few non-traditional instruments, like the flute. I raved about “Chemicals Change” when I wrote the feature article on The Lovely Sparrows, and the rest of the EP continues with more cymbal heavy, …

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I recently joined Jon Rooney on a trip to a record convention in which we perused piles and piles of albums in various collections. On this journey I snagged two 7” singles, one by The Wedding Present and one by The Smiths. As we hit Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood where Rooney resides, he mentioned he had a few albums for me, two of which were Morning Spy (MySpace) releases.

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The Lovely Sparrows (MySpace) embark on an exciting journey with Bury The Cynics, and while they loose much of the excessive percussion I loved so much on their EP, they replace it with heightened production value and an array of additional instruments. Or, rather, the additional instruments are brought to the foreground and allowed to shine.

Each Ball Of Wax compilation has a theme behind it and this one is the thirteenth quarterly comp that Seattle artist Levi Fuller has done. What Fuller does is concoct a theme (at least on some… several have no theme other than being “music to enjoy”) then gather a mass of (usually) local Pacific Northwest artists, who all write and record an exclusive song for the release. This was my first time seeing several of the performers on the list, from St Rainbow (the folks behind Hollow Earth …

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Spin recently took the exclusive debut of The Lovely Sparrows’ (MySpace) video for “Year Of The Dog” and I initially found it astonishing that they related the Sparrows to Neutral Milk Hotel—I mean, The Lovely Sparrows are distinctly folk-pop and while NMH included some of these traits in their music, the emphasis was almost always on the pop.