Being that my typical night consists of hitting the sack at around 10pm, and that my new radio show is Friday nights from 10pm to midnight, I figured that my second show would center around the theme of sleep. So I pieced together a playlist of bedroom pop, chill wave, dreamy shoegaze and what I’ve dubbed as psychedelic ambiance.

I am a huge Carissa’s Wierd fan. If you are too, you know exactly what I’m talking about — the die-hard fan gets a little extra out of the music, hears a little bit more, and has a deeper, seemingly one-on-one experience with it. New music, for a band that parted ways several years past, is enough to bring tears to your eyes. “Tucson” b/w “Meredith & Iris” is such material and Hardly Art has made the latter from the single available for stream.

If you spent any extended period alone in personal confinement during the early days of the century, and you had a predilection toward mopey, soft pop, you may have let the hours wane away dwelling on the heartbreaking bedroom-ish pop of Carissa’s Wierd. If you didn’t, you should have as it is some of the best music created both during and post 90s. Little known, and with even littler quantities of albums produced, many long-time fans cheered quietly when Hardly Art announced a cherished set of reissues.

“Die” ultimately picked up where Songs About Leaving left off, and it adequately summed up where the band was heading — the inevitable hiatus. Carissa’s Wierd is borderline historic — their members have gone on to great things, from personal projects like S. (Jenn Ghetto) and Sera Cahoone, to full-fledged bands like Band of Horses and Grand Archives. So, there was a second inevitable in here somewhere… the reunion-slash-reissue.
Most of the band’s library of material has been out of print for quite some time, and as …

Tonight I hit the kitchen to compile the second FensePost podcast, or FenseCast, while cooking up one of my signature dishes: spicy steak enchiladas with homemade sauce. For desert, a delicious slice of gluten free cake courtesy Andi (the girlfriend), whose cake photo you can see in this post. Unlike the first podcast, this one had a range of bands that stemmed into several genres rather than focusing on garage rock and pop. Within I reminisce on one of my favorite bands of all time, occasionally hover …

As one of the few individuals to own a copy of Ugly But Honest, You Should Be At Home Here and Songs About Leaving by Carissa’s Wierd (sic), let alone ALL THREE, including their super-duper rare tour album, Scrap Book, it’s only with a hint of sadness that I relay to you the news that Hardly Art will reissue all three of the band’s proper albums. But the probable decline in value of rarities is far below the excitement I have for all the world who has yet to …

The third installment of A Retrospective, this time the focus is on 2002. The year of rebuilding, so to speak. It was the year I discovered Cider Jack (and did so plentifully) at the local Pullman bar Rico’s, and we all would rehearse Bill Brasky skits (from the SNL spots, and made up on the spot) as twenty feet away the university jazz combo performed excellent renditions of Van Morrison’s “Moondance” and various Motown favorites. As we see every year, 2002 saw several real great releases. …

The second installment of A Retrospective, in which I recap my favorite albums released from 2000 to 2008, this time: 2001. Wrought with turmoil and watching a life fall apart as so many others were having similar experiences but in a different manner; that was 2001 for you. The year I turned 21 (hence the wine bottle photo above). A year that lives in infamy. Young or old, we all seemed to grow up that year. Music, too seemed to progress in ways unthought, even …

I’ve decided to create an installment in which I do a recap of my favorite albums of the past ten years now that we’re coming up on the turn-of-decade – yes, 2010 is upon us. They key: I do them one at a time. I figure contemplating the weight of albums that have been instituted in my library for the better part (or even just half) of a decade would warrant a skewed opinion when comparing them to those released just this month. And, as these things …