Shorty's Swingin' Coconuts - Surf Shack Shindig [VINYL LP] Colored Vinyl, Ltd Ed date 07/28/2023

My mates went on holiday to the Isles for this one. Galactic romantic entropy three sheets to the 'Wind. Saxy glimmers, broken sunbeams, oil dancing in a puddle of water in a parking lot somewhere in St. Louis or Birmingham. And just as first-wave yankee punk was decidedly solipsistic, the Poms folded in a more civic bent to explain the zeitgeist of generational disaffection. Is 'Scared To Care' about spikey punks whose apartments are littered with Amazon boxes? Is 'Biggest Sale of The Year' an indictment of late-stage capitalism? Is 'The Milkman' an effective populist who wants you to sink so that he can swim? Is this record more political than those dystopian hardcore records you sold when a nice girl opened your eyes once? Merely conjecture...It's an album dripping with clandestine musical intelligence, artisanal song-writing, great voices. The illegitimate son of Dinosaurs' bassist isn't in the mix this time, but I can assure you his spirit is there-I can almost hear the glass of side mirrors cascading to Richmond Ave on a drunken bike ride 15 years before Josh Allen and Conway The Machine made The City That Always Sleeps cool! (NOT recommended... you truly cannot cheat Carma).What is soul? Soul is finding your own catalytic converter at the thrift store. Soul is trying out for the Harlem Globetrotters on your 37th birthday and it not going so well. Soul is wearing those attractive bygone eras on your sleeve without hesitation or embarrassment. Pentatonic rock didn't exactly bubble from a serious bog, and when adults who partake become artistically conservative, grow egos in a Petri dish somewhere in the well-adjusted hyper-capitalist cityslicker life they've created because they can seemingly play Vibrators riffs better than the actual kids, everything is lost! Class know this, resisting that spiritual deficit of our collective moment with the voice of honest men

Earth Tongue, the brainchild of guitarist Gussie Larkin and drummer Ezra Simons, present their second full-length album Great Haunting. The duo, known for their heavy flavor of fuzz-soaked psychedelic rock, are also pleased to unveil their signing to In The Red Records.Earth Tongue's partnership with In The Red stems from a run of shows supporting the legendary Ty Segall throughout New Zealand. Larkin explains "Ty's band Fuzz was a significant influence for our sound early on. Ezra and I saw them play live in London about nine years ago, long before Earth Tongue existed. We absorbed a lot of music at that time, and in fact many of the bands we saw released records via In The Red." Great Haunting sees the duo draw inspiration from the eerie depths of '70s and '80s horror cinema, delivering a sonic concoction of dark and primitive songs with thick layers of fuzz and punchy, compressed drums. The album was engineered by Jonathan Pearce from The Beths at his studio on Karangahape road in Auckland.The ascent of Earth Tongue is testament to their dedication and hard work. They've toured relentlessly across Europe and scored support slots for acts like IDLES and Queens Of The Stone Age. They're consistently selling out headline shows and have featured on festival lineups throughout Aotearoa and Australia. 2024 sees the band embark on a bold new chapter with their first performance in the USA at SXSW, Austin. They also have more than forty dates booked throughout Europe this summer and many more exciting announcements to come.