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EEI> threats & promises
Garrett Hatch’s Place Without A Name
PLUS, MORE MUSIC NEWS AND GOSSIP
but I’m looking forward to catching them and hearing these
tunes live once our long international nightmare is over.
Find this at Spotify, Bandcamp and Apple Music.
ATHENS EAR CLINIC: Experimental ring leader Michael Potter
continues to clear his decks, so to speak, and has released
another set of archival material from over the past two
decades. This new collection is named Something’s On Fire
and runs five tracks long. Although I’ve held my shoulder
against hours of Potter’s noise barrage for years, he finally
broke me with the excruciatingly high-pitched apocalyptic
Tin Pan Alley-isms of the title track, as well as the swirled
cacophony of “The Vault” (although there is a neat little
clarinet part buried underneath it all). Opening track
“Rotten Timeline” is a great five minutes of throbbing
industrio-rhythm, and “The Final Countdown” is a medita
tive guitar piece that gradually devolves into a multi-layered
pool of loathing. Final track “Fan The Flames” split my head
open again in the same aforementioned
way, so I didn’t even make it through the
whole eight minutes of it. Either my ears
are having a particularly sensitive couple
of weeks, or Potter’s got some work to
do on the mastering end. I mean, I guess
it’s whatever. It’s not like this is birthday
party music or something. Explore at
your own risk via michaelpotter.band-
camp.com.
PAINTED FROM MEMORY: Jacob Chisenhall
(Fake Flowers) has a new EP out under
his Delorean Gray moniker. The new
record, courtesy of Athens’ Marching
Banana Records, is A Lighter Shade of
Delorean Gray and is the first new music
from Chisenhall, by my estimate, since
the spring of 2019. This three-song
collection is deceptively breezy for the
most part, and this hides exactly how
complex these songs are. The multi-mel
ody “Boys For The Summer” handles
its 21st Century Beach Boys self very
well, and “Black Lipstick (ft. Reverie
Rush)” stacks layer upon layer of smooth
instrumentation inside its hit-the-
highway-at-night mood. Andy Barton
wrote the lyrics and contributed vocals
to “Black Lipstick,” and other featured
guests on this EP include Freeman Leverett and Jason
Bronson. Of the three tracks here, I’m most partial to the
legitimately cocktail-worthy “Back To The Beach-Front,”
presented here as an instrumental demo. Find this for your
selves at marchingbanana.bandcamp.com and graydelo-
rean.bandcamp.com. ©
By Gordon Lamb threatsandpromises@flagpole.com
SAVOR LOCAL FLAVOR: Longtime Athens musician, though cur
rently located in Asheville, Garrett Hatch (Mother The
Car, Ancient Ethel) has a new solo album out. The hefty
12-track record is titled Place Without A Name. One great
thing about Hatch’s songwriting is that, at first listen, it
appears to privilege the guitar, but after a while the listener
realizes what he really promotes is melody wherever he
can find it. To this end, there are relatively minimal and
understated tunes like “Nightmare,” and
the utterly compelling Stones-Parsons- qj
fueled piano honky-tonk hymn “Porch =|
Light,” and the desert landscape internal g
dialogue “Someday.” Hatch still brings g
the jams, though, as evidenced on the jit
tery “Moment Undone” and the aggres
sive grunge-punctuated title track. This
whole album is one hell of a great artistic
statement, and you can grab it via garet-
thatch.bandcamp.com.
LIFTING OFF: Relatively new local band Fernfox just released
its first set of tunes and named it The Dissociated EP. It’s
a tight set of enthusiastic pop tunes that touch on classic
college rock, garage rock and a slight amount of surf rock.
The band sometimes threatens to be too clever by half
(’’Real Me”), but pulls back just in time at each instance.
They shine brightest when their well-executed vocals and
sense of melody coalesce to serve the songs, as opposed to
THE DREAMING: I was pleasantly surprised
to come across the debut release from
songwriter Mary Shauna Harris named
Lift My Eyes Up. Harris has a very nice,
very solid voice, and her performances
are wonderfully free of decorative vocal
izing and unnecessary modulation. The
instrumentation for her tunes is largely
acoustic (guitar, piano, ukulele, banjo,
etc). Although perhaps not intentional,
this record has a deceptive depth that
belies its relatively simple delivery. This
tendency first evidences itself on the
self-performed choral backing vocal in
the title track. This is a record of deep
longing but not desperation, and that’s
an important distinction. Harris delivers Garrett Hatch
her songs from a place of strength, but
not indifference. She’s a writer in the same tradition as Joni
Mitchell, Joan Armatrading, Joan Baez, et al. While Harris
maintains her own personality throughout, I’d hold her
song “There, Too” up against anything from, say, Sade and/
or Kate Bush. And, yes, that’s mighty high praise indeed, so
seek this out at maryshaunaharris.bandcamp.com.
amplifying any particular player. This activity is put to won
derful effect on “Losing My Mind,” “I Don’t Know Myself,”
and “It’s Over.” There’s a subtle theatrical quality to these
tunes that makes me think some of them were definitely
drama club kids at some point. At any rate, Fernfox—like
everyone else—has been on a live show hiatus for months,
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