Rare is it when I get to talk with someone of such knowledge and depth. Rarer still is when that learned musical scholar is also one cool and down-to-earth guy. That guy is dUg Pinnick. dUg is a virtual one-man walking history of music. Having honed his style and tone in the ’70s and solidified his place in music in the ’80s with King’s X, dUg played it all, done it all, heard it all, and been it all. And now we get the honor of hearing some of those stories and much more from the badass of bass in this exclusive interview.
Today we get the latest news on King’s X’s new album and tour, the dirt on his other bands including KXM with George Lynch and Ray Luzier as well as his reflections on his just-completed Jimi Hendrix tribute tour with Joe Satriani and even a much-needed health update on King’s X bandmate Jerry Gaskill and so much more! Consider this interview a lesson in musicianship and a guide to living free.
Check out the full interview HERE.
Check out our interview with Jerry Gaskill HERE.
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BOAT Premieres ‘Loneliness Kills’ Video (The Week in #Indie Segment)
BOAT drops their new video for the track titled ‘Loneliness Kills’. Besides being the perfect track for the hiatus breaching band’s comeback, the song is just plain simply catchy as hell. Not having missed a step in the evolution of the music, BOAT keeps a timely pattern and relevance with a wonderfully quirky video filled with personality and that smile making certain something that makes us bright on the inside. Especially in times like these.
Check out the full episode of The Week in #Indie HERE.
Click HERE to watch Season 6 of Jammerzine’s ‘The Week in #Indie’.
Click HERE to watch Season 5 of Jammerzine’s ‘The Week in #Indie’.
Click HERE to watch Season 4 of Jammerzine’s ‘The Week in #Indie’.
Click HERE to watch Season 3 of Jammerzine’s ‘The Week in #Indie’.
Click HERE to watch Season 2 of Jammerzine’s ‘The Week in #Indie’.
Click HERE to watch Season 1 of Jammerzine’s ‘The Week in #Indie’.ABOUT BOAT
Such fitting words for perilous times, but those words help launch Tacoma / Seattle indie rock legends BOAT’s fantastic comeback record, Tread Lightly. Returning after a seven-year on hiatus, Tread Lightly was released May 1st via Magic Marker Records.
But don’t call it a comeback, as they never really broke up. They just spent some time focusing on other things. According to frontman David Crane, the band’s friendship has always been the greatest component of its existence, so even though they weren’t making music, the crew of BOAT sailed on.
“We all have busy lives, but just generally enjoy hanging out with one another and eating pizza and playing songs,” Crane says. “I focused on Unlikely Friends, J. Long focused on his work at KEXP and recording bands, J. Goodman focused on his other band Brackets, and M. McKenzie continued to be mysterious. Things really picked up when J. Long and I started sending each other demos. He creates crazy drum loops, and I make a song around them, and send them back. He adds extra melodies on keyboards and vocals, and chops them up and sends them back to me for more layers. “
Considering their close bond, it isn’t surprising that Tread Lightly doesn’t sound like a band coming back after nearly a decade. The album’s dozen crunchy but harmonically honey-coated songs swiftly and succinctly hit that Superchunk/Shins/Billy Joel/Ben Folds/Presidents Of The United States sweet spot you didn’t realize you’ve been missing.
And speaking of Presidents…if you listen closely, you’ll discover a President tucked away in “Zombie State Of Mind,” Mr. Chris Ballew in all his glory.
“He is awesome,” declares Crane. “He gave us a bunch of different ideas, and we just put them all together. Listening back to the Presidents of the USA albums, he does so many cool little vocal things that I didn’t even realize until after he contributed to our song. He’s just a true Seattle artist. Much respect for Ballew!”
Yet if you listen close enough, you’ll discover that the ominously titled Tread Lightly actually contains positive, uplifting, and empowering messages about life and getting older. Lead single “So Many Reasons Your Hair Turns Grey” will make you laugh, but when you think about the lyrics a little harder, you’ll completely appreciate it on a different level. The songs on Tread Lightly offer something more cerebral–healing vibes from someone who’s been through trauma and wants to help the world heal, yet leaves you thinking and finding comfort/wisdom in. Crane agrees. “I think more than almost any other album, this one captures what is going on in my mind. It was subconscious, but I think the record kind of plays like a diary to me. Maybe a 40-year-old’s diary?
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/BOAT-99933840627/
https://boat.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/sloppypopstagram
https://twitter.com/boat_music -
An Interview with Earthset
Jammerzine has an exclusive interview with Italian band Earthset. This band, to me, is one of the reasons I created Jammer Direct and Jammerzine. Their music evolves deeper and deeper into the truest form of originality and their career takes them to original places others rarely go.
And in this interview we talk with Luigi Varanese and Ezio Romano, two of the masterminds behind the music, about their upcoming album ‘Bound’, their recent single and video ‘Pills’, and how they got from there to here on their own terms.
‘Bound’ releases on March 8th, 2022 (pre-save links below).
Check out our other features with Earthset HERE.
About Earthset
Luigi Varanese, Costantino Mazzoccoli, Emanuele Orsini and Ezio Romano are Earthset, an alt-rock quartet from Bologna, Italy.
Together since 2012, after their debut in 2015 with the concept album “In a State of Altered Unconsciousness” and the EP “POPISM” two years later, in 2018 they made the soundtrack of “L’Uomo Meccanico”a 1921 Italian-French silent film restored by the Cineteca di Bologna.
A tour was organised as a result of this experience, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, which led them to play the soundtrack around Italy and abroad.
Some of the highlights of this tour were the presentation of “L’Uomo Meccanico” at the Pesaro Film Festival; the show at Franco Maria Ricci’s Labirinto della Masone; the opening night of the Soundscreen Film Festival of Ravenna 2019, in which the band also had the opportunity to play together with the director Abel Ferrara; the shows in Brescia and Pisa, in collaboration with the local Universities; and, abroad, the closing evening of “Les Rencontres du Cinéma Italien” festival, which hosted soundtracks made by Italian groups such as Massimo Volume, Julie’s Haicut and Giardini di Mirò in previous editions.
Following the show’s success, the band released the soundtrack’s LP, recorded live and published by Dischi Bervisti and Koe Records.
The album was released on January 31, 2020 and was officially presented on the same day with a show in Rome, at the Salle du Cinéma of the Institut Francaise Center Saint Louis, in collaboration with the French Embassy. However, the subsequent tour, scheduled to support the release, was canceled due to the COVID-19 crisis.
Thanks to the experience with “L’Uomo Meccanico”, they produced a new cine-concert for Murnau’s “Nosferatu”, commissioned by the Ravenna Soundscreen Film Festival and presented exclusively at the 2020 edition of the Festival.
In February 2021, however, they recorded “Retour au Ciné” a film of the “L’Uomo Meccanico” cine-concert, shot live at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna and produced by Fonoprint studios, with the contribution of the Emilia-Romagna Region and the collaboration of ATER Foundation.
The film premiered at the Univerciné festival in Nantes and was then broadcast as part of VIRALISSIMA, the online event format of the Emilia-Romagna Region, which brought together the best of the regional production. In the second half of 2021, work on the new album “bound” was completed.
About ‘Bound’
In Earthset’s vision, “Bound” isn’t just an LP, but a full audio-visual-performative work of art. The album is made up of 11 tracks, each with its own video, each song and video connected to the previous and the next both visually and musically, creating a unitary 42-minute-long audio-visual narrative.
The concept that binds the whole project together, songs, images and videos, is a reflection on the value of relationships as the foundation of existence and is revealed in the title itself, “bound”. Coherently, the album works best together in its entirety, as it was envisioned as a whole.
As a matter of fact, while each song perfectly stands as a valid single, it is in its relation with all the other elements that make up the audio-visual project that the experience is justified and reveals a completely different meaning. The focus is not on the single elements but in the relationships between them, as the relationships bear meaning and are justified in themselves.
“The act of making music has its value in the infinite series of interactions that lie within it and acquires further value in the potential interactions that may come from it. It is, after all, an attempt at communicating and connecting with a potential listener or viewer. Therefore the whole album was recorded live in a single take, without breaks or cuts and no edit; it is a key feature of the work and is in line with the mindset Earthset adopted for it. This is documented in a video of the full recording session, which is extra content.”
Bound will be released in March 2022 via Dischi Bervisti/Costello’s.
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/Earthset
https://www.instagram.com/earthset_
https://open.spotify.com/artist/27FihPbgJOaSdAyq9kgb9t
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCflPJZXoRcY5hGvGrXZbEeQ
https://earthset.bandcamp.com
https://orcd.co/pills
https://open.spotify.com/album/5YYJf90FktsQTRRMZWNInT
https://music.apple.com/it/album/pills-single/1593429471
https://www.deezer.com/it/album/270196352 -
An Interview with The Rah’s (The Week in #Indie Segment)
It’s always an interesting twist to catch a band in a musical transition. And to get an interview with them during said transition is an absolute lesson in evolution. That band, in this case, is The Rah’s, originally from Prestonpans, Scotland and now in the world.
This interview is also a splendid treat because I get to talk to the whole band. So I get some very distinct answers from a group of individuals that make up a very creative unit.
Stay tuned for some great things from The Rah’s in the near future!
Check out our review of one of their earlier tracks called ‘Sweet Talker‘ and their last video (as of this writing) titled ‘Take It All In’ below.
About The Rah’s
With two previously released EP’s under their belt (Give Me Life 2012) & Living The Dream 2013 and support slots with The Fratelli’s, The View, Chris Helme (Seahorses) & Steve Diggle (The Buzzcocks) the band have been working closely with Roni Szpakowski to produce the perfectly crafted ‘Sweet Talker’ which was released on October 24, 2017 and have additional material ready to be unleashed later this year.The band was selected by FACEBOOK to do a FACEBOOK LIVE show on February 24th, comprising of an interview and acoustic set that included performing the new single ‘SWEET TALKER’, thus far the session has received over 70k views.
LINKS:
https://therahs.bigcartel.com
https://www.facebook.com/therahsmusic
https://twitter.com/therahsmusic
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCks2udwJN0vKiFpCrezcoaQ
https://therahs.bandcamp.com