Artists
The Parson Red Heads
JIMBO PAP
Jimbo Pap's members don't wear rhinestoned Nudie suits like the Flying Burrito Brothers did, or like so many of their current peers continue to—in fact, they declare that right away, in the first verse of their debut LP’s first track— but they do represent a modern, updated version of their city's roots-rock legacy. This is a band that makes honest, relatable music about heartaches, tough breaks and city life with coed
vocals and a wry sense of humor
that doesn’t strain to be overly
clever. In 2019 there’s nothing
new about the alchemy of country
and rock music, but the devil—as
always—is in the details: the way
musical artists transfuse these
elements is what yields distinction
within what we usually refer to as
Americana music.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Like the famed British Invaders of a generation earlier, songwriter/musician Nick Lowe has mined the various strains of American popular music, purposefully ignoring the lines demarcating separate genres. Among the most prevalent influences on his style has been country music.
Lowe Country presents 13 artists—most of them up-and-coming and/or left-of-center—interpreting songs from Lowe’s 4½–decade career. They range in age from 23
to 48 and reside in such disparate
locales as Glasgow, Toronto,
Austin, Portland, Raleigh and
Music City. They are the leading
lights of a new generation of artists
who use classic country music as
a springboard for their unique
musical explorations.
FULL SERVICE
Notorious for operating largely and intentionally outside of the music business establishment, Full Service opts to build national fan-base via direct interaction. Though they tour the country extensively, it’s just as possible to catch the Austin-based band in a performing in a fan’s own living room (on what the band calls the “20 Tour”). The first artist signed to Fiesta Red, Full Service is also the subject of a full-length
documentary film called Takeover. Influenced by the Chili Peppers, the Beach Boys, Meat Puppets, Faith No More, Flaming Lips and many others, the Full Service sound and performance is one of unpredictable fun, with a surprisingly deep and thoughtful underbelly.
THE PARSON RED HEADS
Over a nine-year career that’s seen the band form in Oregon, then move to Los Angeles for nearly six years—where they were influential in a burgeoning music Silver Lake scene still seduced by the specters of Love and Buffalo Springfield—the now Portland-based Parson Red Heads have established a well-deserved reputation as an uninhibited live group.
MICHAEL MACRONE
A veteran of the Providence, RI rock & roll band The Prime Numbers and the Bay Area acid folk band Dreamland, Michael Macrone finally struck out on his own at the tender age of 55, with Icicles and Sand. A survey of pop/rock styles from his (and the genre’s) infancy to maturity, Icicles and Sand blends power pop and post-punk, folk and psychedelia.
GLOBE FACORY No. 23
In the late 1800s, Globe Factory No. 23 in New York City was the leading producer of clear
Havana cigars for the
Seidenberg Cigar Co. Almost
a century and a half later,
Globe Factory No. 23
reemerged as the solo
recording project of Rob
Seidenberg, scion of the
original cigar family.
The debut GF23 album, The Rut Not Taken, released in April, 2013, began as an outlet for some of the ideas Seidenberg developed while working with other artists as a producer, writer and record company exec. Before moving to Austin, the Buffalo born and bred Seidenberg spent many years in New York and Los Angeles, where he worked as president of Mammoth Records and a senior A&R man at Hollywood Records and Rykodisc. As an exec and/or producer, he has worked with, among others, Fastball, Cody Chesnutt’s band The Crosswalk, Colin Gilmore, Los Lobos, Amanda Shires and John Wesley Harding. In 2013, he founded the Fiesta Red Records label, which has released music by, among others, the Parson Red Heads, Full Service and Blank Slate, and Lowe Country, an album of Nick Lowe compositions performed by the likes of Robert Ellis, Hayes Carll, Caitlin Rose and Ron Sexsmith.
Original Sins for Copycats, the second GF23 album, with it's single "The Summer of '72," references the early sounds that shaped Seidenberg’s sensibility, and concludes with a real-life story of music tragically silenced: the horrific assassination of a popular Mexican band (“Lament for Kombo Kolombia [The Day la Música Died]”). The album’s 13 songs form a narrative birthed at a time of relative innocence and extinguished in an exceedingly more complex, bedeviled age.
A few months after the August, 2014 release of Original Sins saw the release of the GF23 EP, Liquid Courage, a collection of six audio flights of fancy initially inspired by the craft cocktails (and their names) served at Vera, in Buffalo, NY, the beloved hometown of GF23's Seidenberg.
Globe Factory No. 23 :
BLANK SLATe
Melodic (with touches of classic metal) and potent (yet capable of emotional subtleties), Blank Slate revels in the many flavors of modern guitar rock.
The band was formed in Austin, Texas in 2011 by singer/guitarist/ songwriter Steve Glazer, bassist Rene De La Mora and drummer Matt Slack. In November, 2012 and
April, 2013, the band released two
5-song debut EPs.
Blank Slate :
