This content appears in ALARM #40. Subscribe here to get your copy!
Driving from gig to gig, playing mixologist, giving away free booze — week after week, it can get exhausting. Somehow, Ashley Miller and her Sailor Jerry cohorts muster the strength to enliven parties everywhere. Here’s a little about her and one of her favorites, the Lola.
Drink of choice:
Lola
2 parts Sailor Jerry Rum
1 part sweet vermouth
2 dashes Angostura bitters
Combine in glass over ice; garnish with an orange
Last month ALARM presented its 50 favorite albums of 2012, an eclectic, rock-heavy selection of discs that were in steady rotation in our downtown-Chicago premises. Now, to give some love to tunes that were left out, we have our 50 (+5) favorite songs of last year — singles, B-sides, EP standouts, soundtrack cuts, and more.
Another year, another torrential downpour of albums across our desks. As always, we encountered way too much amazing music, from Meshuggah to The Mars Volta, Converge, Killer Mike, P.O.S, and many more.
El-P: Cancer for Cure (Fat Possum, 5/22/12)
Hip-hop producer/MC El-P and his amoral, coked-out squirrel sidekick Mr. Killums are back. And they’re not as popular this time around.
Tennis: Cape Dory (Fat Possum, 1/18/11)
Tennis: “Long Boat Pass”
[audio:http://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Tennis-Long-Boat-Pass.mp3|titles=Tennis: “Long Boat Pass”]Fiction is at the heart of pipe dreams. Rarely when we scheme something far-fetched or grandiose do we actually follow through in executing our plan, especially if it’s something as profound as selling all of our possessions and sailing across the map for about a year or so. But that is precisely what husband-and-wife duo Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore, the masterminds behind indie-pop outfit Tennis, did.
After graduating from college, the two philosophy majors sold their belongings and ventured away from Denver to embark on the unknown by means of a sailboat — a plan for which they prepared extensively. Navigating around North America, the couple then decided to document the experience, not through film or memoir, but through music. And thus Tennis was born.
From the get-go, Cape Dory, the couple’s debut effort on Fat Possum, gives you a glimpse of what its voyage must have been like. With 10 songs clocking in at less than 30 minutes, Riley and Moore’s feeling of staying put for too long in any one place is almost tangible. Once the album sets sail, it’s ready to move along without the need of staying anchored in any one spot. The songs, with titles like “South Carolina,” “Baltimore,” and “Bimini Bay,” move along swiftly, as the band looks to cover the most ground (or water, rather) in the quickest amount of time.
With a trophy for “Strangest Band in Tokyo” under his belt, Bob Log III maintains an energetic and unpredictable air with flashy costumes, improvised sets, and nonsensical lyrics.
Among the thousands of under-appreciated or under-publicized albums that were released in 2010, hundreds became our favorites and were presented in ALARM and on AlarmPress.com. Of those, we pared down to 100 outstanding releases, leaving no genre unexplored in our list of this year’s overlooked gems.
Pummeling mid-tempo rock icons The Jesus Lizard will briefly reunite; idiosyncratic rapper Busdriver performs live with a jazz band tonight; minimalist folk group Phosphorescent has recorded a disc of Willie Nelson covers. Read on.