Horse King, Furious Frank, Steafan Hanvey and Southern Love in general:(08/07/13) - This website is here largely as an archive. In news however, Horse King just released it's first full-length Places, Steafan Hanvey is continuing to tour the United States in support of Nuclear Family, and Furious Frank is still making noise. Check music page for info.
(09/24/11) - We are proud to release Steafán Hanvey's debut album Steafán Hanvey and The Honeymoon Junkies on October 24. The release will coincide with the premiere of the music video clip, 'Desperation' on Fuse On Demand. For further information:
For press inquiries:
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Ariel PR:
Management:
Furious Frank promises we're almost done with our sophomore effort.(02/23/11) - It's been a long time in the works. At least a year to be accurate, but we promise it will well be worth the wait if you remotely liked The Hobocamp Mudshow!
Furious Frank gets an ego-boosting review.(04/23/10) - Horse Operas have been back from tour for some time now and I've been too lazy to get here and update. In a nutshell, it went great. Portland, Bellingham, Santa Cruz, Seattle, SF, and Eureka all went great. The only turd in the punch bowl was Medford, OR. Shit-hole! Furious Frank is recording a new song tomorrow about Horse Operas' experience there. On a lighter note, Furious Frank got an awesome write-up in Indie Collision: Putting out an altogether appealing brand of folk rock is Furious Frank, a rhythm and horn driven group that is a distinctly American answer to Gogol Bordello. Blending staccato sounds borrowed from gypsy folk and ska, Furious Frank mischievously wind their way through songs that jump with energy but also bend around themselves to create pleasantly distorted melodies that bring to mind carnival barkers and organ grinders. There is a communal shout and smile aesthetic to Furious Frank; all through their songs the band calls and responds in syncopated unison. Their playing pulls in elements of Tom Waits’ wry candor, steppy polka lines, and undercurrents of nashville strings. Furious Frank’s ‘hobocamp’ is a little supergroup of sorts bringing in Travis Mariott from the alt-country group Horse Operas, Jason Taylor and Mason Payne from the soulful country rock group Otis Problem, and Jay Stanek from the Big Sky String Band. Through wicked tracks like “The Coroner of Drifter Creek,” Furious Frank chugs and plucks along to grinning lyrics, “Lungs and livers / Tongues and feet / Never waste the meat,” all with a jolly nod to the days of boxcar travels and Ringling big tops. The fact that the lines are delivered with knowing melodrama–in a deep bassoon–juxtaposes the slight horror with humor, like making making Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” into a musical comedy. The bounding rhythms and playacting showmanship of the group never feels forced, you can tell that the group is enjoying themselves as they carousel the listener around their jittery brand of folk. Every off key and disconcerting lyric is situated for full effect, and the results are assuredly fun. Furious Frank’s debut album from last year can be bought from their website www.furiousfrank.net (a steal at $2.50). They’ll be playing Chicago’s Ribfest on June 12th, but if you feel the need for prior enlightenment, check them out at the Montrose Room in Rosemont, IL at 8pm on May 21st. -Jordan Horse Operas on tour.(02/12/10) - Holy crap is this actually happening? For the first time since 2004, one of our bands is actually going on what could be called a proper tour. If you live between San Francisco and Seattle, come out and heckle us. We need the attention. Awesome last show for German Beef Initiative forthcoming.(01/12/10) - GBI will play it's last show in it's current incantation before Josh Brown heads to Seattle. Please mark your calendars and look at them - Saturday, January 23rd at Cal's (400 South Wells Street) there will be Mr. Walker doing some stand up, Jewsus, German Beef Initiative, and Black Bear Combo Come out and see us off into oblivion. Reviews & an Odd One for GBI(12/16/09) - German Beef Initiative made The Onion's AV Club list:
Check under the "???" section.
Dead Man's Music received a new review but we can only guess it's flattering because it's from AltCountry.NL We did get more stars than Rhett Miller's solo album though. Anyone out there speak Dutch? Furious Frank's new album also received reviews in Bluesbunny & Timeout Chicago. Local Americana act Furious Frank is a group rather than one irate individual, and that communal spirit lends itself to an amiable vibe belying its surly moniker. The outfit's scrappy kitchen-sink concoctions easily rally an eager audience. Thank you Timeout!
Horse Operas new album Dead Man's Music out now.(12/09/09) - New page up for new album. Reviews and tracks to listen to and feel free to buy one. Gigs will be coming in support next year. Check back!
Yet another member to our beloved Southern Love family:
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New Southern Lovers Taunto finished recording their debut and set to head out for printing.
(06/24/09) - Vulture, Feast! will make the perfect back to school distraction for your illegitimate kids.
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It's printed! Furious Frank presents: The Hobocamp Mudshow is back from the press.
(05/13/09) - The CD release party is June 19th at Quencher's but we've got the bad boys in hand and they sound awesome. We've been recording this thing for a year!
Horse Operas: REJECTED!
(2/02/09) - No surprise to me or the drummer, but the Horse Operas have been rejected from SXSW. In the ten years I lived in Austin, only a handful of friends ever got in or even bothered to apply for that matter as all of the funnest things to do were the parties and off-SXSW gigs that are for the most part free, all day and night, and feature a lot of the same kick ass bands you'd want to see anyhow.
However, this is the first time any of our bands applied to the showcase and got rejected. The best part about being rejected is this note at the bottom of the email:
SXSW offers special rates for non-showcasing artists who applied to showcase at SXSW and wish to attend as registrants.
After they reject you, with just over a month's notice, they try and sell you shit as they probably expect that many out there have already made arrangements, applied for travel visas and/or saved in some manner to make the trip.
Kind of scummy or nice depending on your perspective. I'll perspect the first one.
Containers tours Italy!!!
(5/21/08) - Mark of Southern Love's Containers will take his one-man performance to Italy and Southern France this June and July.
Anyone wishing to let him sleep on your street corner from Milan to Marseille, please drop a line or check back for some info.
New Horse Operas music
A new track from the Horse Operas album is up. It's about as rough as rough comes.I'm not in charge of this stuff.
In the Year of the Pig with EARTH
(4/31/08) - SATURDAY, 3 MAY 2008 @ the DOWNTOWN EVENTS CENTER (14 W. MARTIN ST., Raleigh, NC 27601)
Southern Love's In the Year of the Pig will play with Seattle sludge lords EARTH this weekend in Raleigh. If you're in the vicinity, it'll be a good show.
Horses Operas CD review, new recordings and Dubuque show
(4/18/08) - Me and Josh are heading out to Iowa today to finish up recordings for Horse Operas follow up LP. A new song is up for your listening pleasure on myspace.
The second CD will be available a little later this year.
Additionally, all prices on CD's have been dropped several $'s!
Wild Horses on CD
(12/11/07) - Major thanks to Smithers of In the Year of the Pig for the North Carolina gig the other weekend. It was a fucking blast and we even got a tiny review with the "Stellar Show"!
Article:
Gerrard reopens to stellar show
Artists push folk music boundaries
By: Bryan Reed, Senior Writer
Issue date: 11/19/07 Section: Arts
Mike Tamburo plays an Appalachian dulcimer during a solo set at a performance in Gerrard Hall on Saturday night. The concert was the first performance since the renovated hall was reopened.
Concert review
Old Noise, New Blues
Gerrard Hall
Saturday
4.5 stars out of 5
Saturday night, the newly reopened Gerrard Hall sheltered what might well have been the most ambitious and well-executed on-campus concert in recent memory.
The concert, organized by Carolina Union Activities Board, WXYC and UNC's Curriculum in Folklore, was organized to showcase artists whose music pushes - and often breaks - the boundaries of Southern folk music traditions.
But the venue was as important to the event's success as the musicians' performances.
Gerrard offers rich acoustics with a reverb that augments instead of distorts the sounds coming from stacks of speakers and microphones. Its balcony provides a bird's-eye view of the concert, while the stageless main room provides the audience with an intimacy that makes the performances more affecting.
The show's four acts all lean toward the avant-garde, but Gerrard made the music approachable.
Though the venue was never filled to its more than 400-seat capacity, it felt full, as listeners enjoyed the experience of hearing adventurous music in a comfortable setting.
The opening band, Horse Operas, used amplified acoustic guitars and blues progressions to create a rock sound rooted in back-porch folk.
But as soon as the band finished, the music took a decidedly more experimental path.
Pennsylvania's Mike Tamburo performed a strikingly beautiful solo set using only a hammer dulcimer, a traditional Appalachian instrument. He performed wordlessly while creating the necessary feelings of tension and release to keep the music engaging.
Following an intermission, R. Keenan Lawler took to the now-darkened room. Using a 1930s resonator guitar, he evoked images of a conflicted Southern history by finding the dissonances in traditional blues forms and exploiting them until they became harsh, moaning drones. Despite a need for self-editing evidenced by extraneous concluding passages, Lawler coaxed ghosts of the past out through this music, which became a sort of seance for the blues.
But the highlight was Chapel Hill's drone collective, The Hem of His Garment, which performed with 16 members Saturday.
The piling layers of tone the group laid upon the audience became thick and heavy enough that they became a physical entity.
Having arranged themselves in a horseshoe shape, the musicians created a disorienting sense of space and time as their hour-long song took flight.
The concert proved to be academic enough to suit its college setting, but intangibly powerful enough to fit perfectly the former chapel that housed it.
The Beef is Back!
(7/20/06) - Holy crap! German Beef Initiative is finally up and running again. Now with Yankee stylings of our new Chicago boy bass player. We are sad to have lost Zulema, but the sexier 2/3rds have started fresh in Chi-town and playing at Champs Rock Room (6501 W 79th St. Burbank, IL) next Wednesday to a bunch of metal heads. It's the club where nu-metal suck artists Disturbed got their start. Do we care? Well, they are paying us.
New Southern Love Artists Soon
(7/14/06) - Our friends in New York will soon be having some rock n roll action up on Southern Love's site. I know it's ironic, but they moved from Texas so it still kinda counts. Whatever. It'll be up soon.
Awesome Review for Gutshot & Thirsty's Release
(3/29/06) - We're back from Georgia. Thanks to the Flagpole in Athens for the great write up.
Gutshot And Thirsty
Songs About Women And Dying
Southern Love
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Athens-based duo of Paul Stuffel and Jason McClellan, the guys behind Gutshot and Thirsty, play country and western, but rarely to they play them both at the same time.
More specifically, the type of low-country dirges they sing alternate musically between the murder-ballad-filled, heat-oppressed climes of Alabama and Mississippi and the lonesome, despair-ridden emptiness of the American Southwest. Although the style is most famously associated with folks like Doc Boggs and Jimmie Rodgers, Gutshot and Thirsty is much more in the genre of revisionaries like Jason Molina and the pre-fame Will Oldham.
Opening track "Get A Gun" is a spooky, Western instrumental that sets the stage for what's to come next. With lyrics about devils, pistols and angels "Trumpets Are Com'n" is thematically a standard bearer for the whole album. An unrecognizable cover of Dinosaur Jr.'s "Freak Scene" follows this and is the only unnecessary thing on the whole record, but the arrangement does serve to lighten the mood of the record somewhat.
"Black Hair Girl" features a rising bass line that gives way to a nice finger-picking section augmented with minor chords. As luck would have it, it's difficult to hear exactly what's being sung all the time, but one line in the song "Heavy" is crystal clear: "If I knew then what I know now / I would still be alone."
Side two of this LP features the single song "Death Is Here," in which the singer welcomes his end over a bleak, mid-tempo country-blues tune. After the track ends, the vinyl continues spinning into a locked-groove, which requires the listener to actually rise up and take the needle off the record. This works great. The protagonist must be responsible and take charge of his actions if the sadness is to end. It's fully possible, however, that I am simply looking too far into what is, in all likelihood, a simple manufacturing decision.
"Songs About Women And Dying" is a moody, sad, lonely, somewhat self-indulgent album. Music fans will note, however, that many times some of the best music has been described exactly the same way. This is probably one of those times.
Gordon Lamb
The Stewart Sikes recordings
(3/20/06) - During our indecisive back and forth with Power Squid to put out their 2nd and 3rd CDs, the guys completed both and let them sit on a shelf. I finally tracked down the final recordings by Stuart Sikes of White Stripes, Sonic Youth and Loretta Lynn recording fame. I'm not sure what the actual titles are so they're just labeled 1-15 for now. Enjoy.
DON'T FORGET! Gutshot & Thirsty are having their Athens record release this Friday at Little Kings and you can now buy the record online.
Buy Gutshot & Thirsty, "Songs about Women & Dying" Online!
(3/13/06) - You can finally order our new vinyl release over the net. Go to Purchase page and stock up.
In the Year of the Pig Vid and Austin Chronicle gives Gutshot & Thirsty a write up and displays Keith's artwork.
(2/14/06) - Write up on vinyl releases mentions the Gutshot boys. Greesboro06212002 has a video up on the Pig boys' myspace site. Check out the Panda.
Gutshot & Thirsty Press
(1/26/06) Gutshot & Thirsty's record release dates in Raleigh and Chapel Hill got a write up in the Independent Weekly's Best Bets:
in cosmic country crackle
B Y G R A Y S O N C U R R I N
It would be criminal to neglect this lyric, on an album called Songs about Women and Dying, from a band called GUTSHOT AND THIRSTY: "If I knew then what I know now, I would still be lonely." What does this drone-tone hook sung in a death-toll, heart-broken song called "Heavy" mean? Is it attempted closure in a relationship song about smooth sailing becoming a rocky road? Or is it about the Golden Rule's black corollary: When death comes calling, you'd better be right with yourself? This Athens band's debut comes with a reverent cover of Dinosaur's "Freak Scene" bleated over a broken-box boot-scoot. This is cosmic country, dripping black blood. MOUNT MORIAH, one of the best new bands in the Triangle, opens. Expect slow climbs to perfectly despondent heights. They play at NIGHTLIGHT in Chapel Hill on Friday, Jan. 27 and at BICKETT GALLERY in Raleigh on Saturday, Jan. 28. Both shows start at 10 p.m. and cost $5.
(1/17/06) All those in the Carolinas ->Go see In the Year of the Pig TONIGHT! They're playing at The Reservoir (100 A Brewer Lane, Carrboro, NC) with So I had to shoot him (New Jersey/Crucial Blast Records) and Adam Thorn and the Top Buttons (Greensboro). Show up and beat some scensters or pinch Smithers' butt. He needs the lovin'!
New Films page under construction complete with lo-fi music videos, trailers and shorts.
(1/5/06) Gutshot & Thirsty albums, artwork and all are done. We're currently looking for an online distributor that deals with vinyl so you can get your hands on a copy. If you want one now, email TR and he can get a copy to you.
A record release is being put together for the end of this month in Athens, Raleigh and Chapel Hill. Check shows page for updates.
(11/14/05) I'm in the process of finally getting videos up on our site. The stuff we got to compress video right now ain't that hot, but it's workable.
Please check out:
German Beef Initiative video Pearls before Swine - for all the girls we've loved before only to steal our record collections, shoot up our apartments and bone our friends.
The trailer for Plano, Texas
Trailer for No Drinking, No Cussing
Trailer for Crime Pays
Our La Jetée ode Small Pains
& Norwegian Public Television
More to come. Check back.
(10/31/05) A short announcement from our friends In the Year of the Pig.
bad moon over the wall of terror
Hello, most of you probably have very enjoyable and socially productive plans already made on this All Hallow's Eve, but if you don't , and you think you are tough enough, you can come experience the Wall of Terror (not to be confused with the Wall of Plenty and the Wall of Joy which are representative of other festive holiday seasons just as terrifying but a different kind of evil) Most of you are probably already shaking a little bit, your lip trembling, bowels loosening, cold sweat, agitated, just uncomfortable thinking about the possibility encountering the Wall of Terror, but don't let that keep you away. So, I get off work at about 10;30 and then have to make my way home, feel free to come anytime between 10:30 and 11:00 PM or later, but at precisely 11:02 PM all the lights will go out, the Wall of Terror will be brought to full evil, and there will be the annual listening to "Bad Moon Rising" the rather scary Sonic Youth concept album about Halloween (and homage to Creedence Clearwater Revival at the same time). The listening will conclude at precisely 11:56 PM to allow four minutes of terror prior to midnight. I have no candy but I will have one sixpack of cheap beer to enhance the terror. Come if you want, don't if you don't, I got to work in the morning I think so I won't be up too late unless there is a black and white horror movie involved and even then will probably be so exhausted from being so terrified from living with and in and part of the Wall of Terror that I will fall asleep on the couch (also rather terrifying to see). Oh if you do come, take Estes to Airport Rd. no matter what direction you come from, don't even think about trying to go through Chapel Hill. And park up in our driveway, even if you think there won't be room, don't give the cops an excuse please. Also if you are really scared I can give you the ultimate weapon, Knife-On-A-Stick, and then you will feel safe. oh goodness. Aaron
(10/27/05) In the Year of the Pig finally has functional MP3s. Check it out.
(10/24/05) In the Year of the Pig gets a write up from someone or another...
We headed down the block to the Local 506, a club I've heard about thanks to their annual Sleazefest. DN has membership here so we didn't have to bluff our way in like minors with fake ID's or anything.
The place is really small. I can't imagine cramming the acts they feature for Sleazefest into such a tiny space.
Tonight, it was In the Year of the Pig, three guys with furry stuffed-animal hats cranking out modern noisy rock that had some good moments. But then the lead singer would start screaming incoherently and ruin it. They were energetic and enthusiastic and had a few fans but it soon chased us from the bar.
In other news, we're still waiting for the Gutshot & Thirsty test pressings to come back from the printers. There's been some confusion. I will say no more at the moment. I'm probably the most confused.
The Horse Operas are now electric! Well, sort of. The guitarist and ukulele players have rigged up their heat to amps but considering I switch between four instruments I didn't know what to do. Until. The contact mic. So if you missed our show on Saturday, don't worry. We'd been waiting around for 8 hours to play when the cops showed up to bust it and we were rather drunk and pissed off. Even better to boot, my amp blew up the second I turned it on so the next Horse Operas rock show will be the real deal. When? I'll get back to you.
(10/3/05) Gutshot & Thirsty off to the presses!
It's finally off to Morphius printing. We should get the test prints soon and the records should be available at the end of the month. It looks like Gutshot & Thirsty will have to be reborn as an incantation of the Horse Operas, but that's how it goes. It was Jolly John & the Jellymakers sort of, then part of 'em moved to Athens and it was Snotty McFarty, then Those Calamity County Calibrators, then Gutshot & Thirsty then the ukulele player got arrested in Texas and ended up in Austin and then became Reversal Agricultural Endeavor and finally the Horse Operas. What the hell do you want? Coherence? This is an indy record label run by a bunch of screw ups!
The record will kick ass all the same and the present incantation is rockin' too. So check out some tracks and buy yourself a copy of the record with art by Keith G. Herzik
(7/25/05) The Arab League
I suppose an explanation is about due. The Arab League is the insane Grant brother, former-frontman for the Deep Sombreros' new outfit. I saw him at a Scott Birham show hocking these CDs and thought it was hilarious. The dress up in turbans, robes and fake beards and do hardcore Muslim rap. I have no idea when they're playing or even how to get a hold of them but the track King of Frahd is up on our home page for you to enjoy all the same.
Hit by a Car is playing a surprise show with Fang and Century of War this Tuesday at Headhunters. Check it out.
While T$ was in Wales, M-Gun began working with writer Alex Matinez on a new documentary "Pachuqueando". The first documentary directed by M-Gun follows Martinez as he collects the information for his book on the Hispanic cultural revolution of the Depression and World War II years leading up to the Zoot Suit Riots. Zoot Suiters and old tough guys fill the screens and spill their stories. Keep an eye out.
A new for Southern Love. We are publishing a book. "Pachuqueando" by Alex Martinez.
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