No Pain In Pop

RIP 2009

You wouldn’t leave a football match early.

› Continue reading

RIP: Natural Numbers

Bedford, Indiana’s Trevor Fitzhugh is retiring his Natural Numbers project. Eloquent, reasonable and perceptive suicide note below. The existential funk of a flannel shirt.

“over the past few months, i’ve been feeling increasingly like my popularity and interest in my music has just been a product of blogs looking for the next noise pop project — i don’t know any other way to put it than i am completely sick of the hype around this genre. just like every other underground music trend, it will be dead when music journalists migrate to the next “big thing.”

i hate feeling associated with that. i hate feeling like a hype artist. the subsubgenre that i feel pigeonholed into already has annoying conventions and stereotypes (punk has once again been co-opted into a certain sound and image, not a body of ideas and actions), all of which i hate the thought of being affiliated with.

i’m not quitting music, but i am moving on to other projects. my first 3 releases were born completely out of hate, and i want to move away from that. this was fun, but at the same time, i feel like it’s the right time to move forward.

RELEASES THAT HAVEN’T BEEN RELEASED YET:
they’ll be posthumous. this includes my splits with old blood and fungi girls. ocean ghosts will be re-written, re-ordered, renamed, and released under a new project.

i hope none of you feel like you’re being cheated out or anything, and if you do, i’m sorry, but it’s the right time for me to move on.

-trevor”

Tags: natural numbers, trevor fitzhugh

R.I.P. Family Wagon

Photos: Rachael Davis

What once seemed relentless and forever has passed and gone the way of all things, teary congregates, for Gentle Friendly’s family wagon haf died. Quiver for broke cam belts, fried engines, lost pistons.

MP3: Gentle Friendly - Five Girl Night

Want to help Gentle Friendly tour always? Chuck $$$$$ for a new ride:

We are gathered here today, loose and mysterious rabble, to pay respects to a vessel valiant and accommodating, a motor, surrounded by metal and high tenacity polyester, that – even when bullied into situations beyond the remit of its nuclear moniker – sought never to rush the important things in life, allowing us instead to the savour the pleasure of From Here We Go Sublime on a storm-beaten, four-hour drive home from Liverpool in six.

Though I feel I never truly got to know Family Wagon while still the odour of oil lingered on its breath, it was a pleasure to observe its own odd mannerisms and idiosyncratic tics – the inexplicable terror that would grip Family Wagon whenever in close proximity to the 65 mile per hour mark and the way it would transmit that fear to us through windows that rattled and wheels that moaned and ached and threatened to drag us off onto some verge somewhere at the eternal periphery of the Midlands.

By all accounts its final voyage, a mid-morning trolley from a former cotton-spinning mill turned site of communal rhythm rite, was a fitting send off for a timid beast that espoused a “Soon come” mindset, an outlook which, while perhaps not entirely fitting for a vehicle built for prompt deliverance, was valuable to even the most learned among us. May some other deliverance, divine or otherwise, drive you now to tarmac warm and sticky and fleet underfoot, Family Wagon, forever relentless in our hearts.

Tags: family wagon, gentle friendly, memorial fund