what

Paint the Rain (Beck Remix)

La Luz

The Pines

Busted heart - Bishop Allen

Music toys with time. Or, maybe songs reflect back that time is always toying with us. The world of a song takes hold of us like an eternity to be lost in, with its repetitions and variations, but ultimately, as with everything else, it has a start and then ends. And there’s no place to lose time like San Francisco, where there are no seasons and all the seasons occur within one day; where the fog takes the space where your plans might have been; where there’s insane wealth all around and everyone you know and love is hanging on at the periphery and making art on any given Tuesday night. About Glenn Donaldson’s new record, "The Town That Cursed Your Name," he says, "I realized as I was piecing it together that it's a song cycle about trying to live while also feeling called to make music." It’s a double life when it works and a deeper doubleness to mirror the Gemini nature of songs themselves. "The Town That Cursed Your Name" contemplates this problem with wryness, generosity, and the micro- and macroscopic realness Donaldson is known and loved for.

Whereas the 2022 collection "Summer at Land's End" was a softer, gauzier world, "The Town That Cursed Your Name" is heavier, with fuzzed lines running through. "Leave It All Behind" starts out with an amorphous whine but quickly launches into something both supremely melodic and buzzing at the edges. "Here Comes the Lunar Hand" is an impressionist geometry that seems to capture the album’s themes without telling you how. Lyrically, Donaldson embraces the earnestness of his heroes Paul Westerberg and Grant McLennan. Sonically, late '80s college rock is filtered through song-forward lo-fi acts like East River Pipe and House of Tomorrow-era Magnetic Fields. Like the images that accompany his releases – flowers and residential street scenes are pushed to the breaking point with color – Donaldson’s songs are at the same time dazzling and lurid, beautiful and burdened, not unlike life as a musician around here.

In the liner notes, Donaldson dedicates the record "to everyone who ever tried to start a band in the Bay." There will be many knowing smiles at his title "Too Late For An Early Grave." But, this dedication captures something else about the particular strain of sincerity that laces the city water supply – the front man around here is on stage under those lights evincing the fervor not of the pop star but of the biggest fan.

-Karina Gill

The Town That Cursed Your Name

The Reds, Pinks & Purples - Life in the Void

Perished In Bloom

Pomegranate

Lemon Poppy

Purchase from label: paradiseofbachelors.com/shop/pob-023
Purchase from Bandcamp: gunoutfit.bandcamp.com/album/dream-all-over
Other options: lnk.to/PoB23

paradiseofbachelors.com/gun-outfit

On their most refined and ruefully elegant album, Gun Outfit perfect their incandescent sonic signature: a dusky, canyon-cult blues fueled by melodic dual-guitar weaving and seductive male/female incantations at zero hour. It’s the nocturnal sound of desert-damaged L.A. burnout, a soured American surrealism in rock and roll creole: white line fever, paint fume flashbacks, a stranger wading out alone into the black surf.

Gun Outfit - Dream All Over (PoB-23, 2015): "Gotta Wanna"

I wish you were next to me.

Socials:
Instagram: quinnskyemusic 
YouTube: quinnskyemusic

Next To Me

chest (prod. fez)

Quinsberry Shot - Don't Shot Me Down

MESCALERO  - Vo - Vsem - Vinovaty - Poezda

Чарівні Гітари - Все Говорят Вокруг  Что Тебе Я Не Пара

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy & Matt Sweeney - My home is the sea

The UFO Club - My Love Is Waiting

Лояльный Муравей - Сад

Four piece band: old good piano, bass,  drums and some guitar. Let's go. All songs are leave recordings.

Paradise of Bachelors is a Record Label, Soundsystem, and Archive located in the North Carolina Piedmont and in the subluminal aether. We are dedicated to documenting, curating, and releasing under-recognized musics of the American vernacular, with an emphasis on the South, broadly defined. 

Paradise of Bachelors is available for licensing, disc-jockeying engagements, music supervision, folklife consultation, research and writing. We cheerily accept recordings, visual media, curatorial proposals, tips, comments, invitations to DJ, artist inquiries, research queries, recipes, and miscellaneous correspondence. 

info@paradiseofbachelors.com

PO Box 1402
Carrboro, NC 27510

Gun Outfit - Dream All Over (PoB-23, 2015): "Gotta Wanna"

Paradise of Bachelors

Related tracks