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BOG-SHED

Mega Bog

End Of Everything

    End of Everything is the intrepid seventh album from Mega Bog, a nightmarish experimental pop ensemble led by Erin Elizabeth Birgy. In 2020, Birgy was surrounded by seemingly endless turmoil: mass death, a burning planet, and a personal reckoning when past traumas met fresh ones. Living in Los Angeles, against the backdrop of brilliantly horrifying forest fires, she questioned what perspective to use moving forward in such dumbfounded awe. Deciding to seize something tangible, she produced a record that spoke of surrender, of mourning, and support in the face of tumultuous self-reflection.

    Writing on piano and synthesizer, instead of the familiar guitar, Birgy explored a spectrum of new sounds to illuminate a state of volatility and flux that was both universal and personal. Speaking of this transition, she describes the need “to feel… instantly. I didn’t want to dig into secret codes. I no longer wanted to hide behind difficult music. I was curious to give others the same with the music I create; to make music someone could use to explore drama, playfulness, and dancing, to shake the trauma loose.” Heavy grooves, metal guitar squeals, Italo disco bass lines, rhapsodic synth layers, and huge choruses stomp around the delightfully sanguine pop drama. Where previous records stretched out into the abstract and ethereal, End of Everything delivers a hit straight to collective awareness and healing.

    A seemingly disparate jukebox of sounds – ranging from Thin Lizzy, Bronski Beat, Franco Battiato and Ozzy Osbourne to 90’s house classics like Haddaway’s ‘What is Love’ and Corona's ‘Rhythm of the Night’ - foregrounded a new punchy theatricality in Birgy’s music. The songs she was creating at home followed suit with bolder hooks and more dancefloor energy than she’d ever dared before.

    While an ecological narrative is clear with songs like “Anthropocene” lamenting a blazing atmosphere—“City skies turn black in the daytime / I see a burnt up alligator / What the fuck?”—End of Everything is an incredibly personal record, charting a journey through Birgy’s own psyche. Midway through producing the record, Birgy made the personally necessary choice to get sober and work through stored debilitating experiences that had begun affecting her ability to communicate creatively.

    Thrilling melodies grow to ascend throughout the length of a song, clutching your hand and whispering in your ear one minute before screaming off a cliff edge the next. The soft and the guttural nuzzle and crash of heads, where every moment holds the multitudes of all possible dimensions stirring each other through the veil.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Cactus People
    2. The Clown
    3. Love Is
    4. Don't Doom Me, Now
    5. All And Everything
    6. Anthropocene
    7. Complete Book Of Roses
    8. End Of Everything

    Bog-Shed

    The Official Bog-Set

      At the beginning of the year it was reported that Tesco was phasing out CDs and DVDs in its UK stores, with plans to stop selling physical media altogether by the end of February 2022. So obviously the time is right to finally commit Bog Shed's recorded output to CD (and digital platforms) for the first time.

      The band formed in 1983 and over the next four years released their debut EP Let Them Eat Bog Shed, followed by two albums; Step On It and Brutal, as well as a compilation of their John Peel Sessions (Tried & Tested Public Speaker, originally a 6-track EP). The version of Tried and Tested Public Speaker released here features 20 of their John Peel session tracks, 14 of which have never before been released.

      Mike and Mark were born in Liverpool in 1961 but met at school in Ormskirk aged 9. Their 70s were T.O.T.P, Top 20, Fluff Freeman, John Peel, Probe, Eric's and the peculiar hippy/ punk crossover of the free festivals. Every Saturday they would play rubbish guitars through a home made amp. After leaving Polytechnic Mike and Mark moved to Hebden Bridge soon to be followed by Phil who moved into Northwell Cottage in Heptonstall. This was an ideal space to play and rehearse. Stone-built and clinging to a hill with the toilet in a shed down a steep path next to a well for your water.

      Drummers were tried, but were either temporary or just plain wrong. Tris, who befriended the others drinking in the Trades Club, got the job having never played the drums. The Bradford gig on Who Scoffed The Trill? was 2 weeks later and these live songs are early tunes that never got recorded. There were many more, but C90's got recycled and we will never again hear Open Up In The Name Of Fred Feast or I saw Cleo Laine In A Phonebox. Who Scoffed The Trill?'s 22 tracks are exclusive to this box set and won't be available on streaming platforms.

      Their debut EP Let Them Eat Bog Shed was released on John Robb's Vinyl Drip label in 1985 and led to their track Run To The Temple appearing on the NME's now-legendary C86 cassette. However, this was the age of DIY and Phil decided they should be even indie-er and start their own label, Shelfish, having declined offers from the Creation and Abstract labels.

      Phil was technically the best musician in the band, he could play and sing every Beatles song. John Robb describes him and the cottage, 'A total one-off, Phil was a Stanley Baxter lookalike with flared nostrils and a flared mind who was funny as fuck and had a brilliant quirky worldview. His house was an extension of his unique personae. Every morning at breakfast a horse from the neighbouring field would poke its head through the kitchen window and nibble bits of toast and listen to the clatter of cans being swept up.'

      Phil still organised gigs in Britain and Europe but the well-known stresses of travelling in the back of a van for miles and miles to be manic for an hour started to tell. What had been creative tension just became tension So in 1987 it stopped. Phil died of throat cancer in 2006 having fallen out with Mark and Tris. Tris went on to play with A Witness before joining Jackdaw with Crowbar. He played in many side projects on a variety of instruments until he died of brain cancer in 2008. Mike still draws and came up with the new sleeve artwork.


      TRACK LISTING

      CD1 – Let Them Eat Bog-Shed
      1 Panties Please
      2 Spencer Travis
      3 Fat Lad Exam Failure
      4 Slave Girls
      5 City Girls
      6 Hand Me Down Father

      CD2 – Step On It
      1 Mechanical Nun
      2 Run To The Temple
      3 Adventure Of Dog
      4 Tommy Steele Record
      5 Jobless Youngsters
      6 Tried To Hide But Forced To Howl
      7 Packed Lunch To School
      8 Summer In My Lunchtime
      9 The Fastest Legs
      10 Oily Stack
      11 Hell Bent On Death
      12 Can't Be Beat
      13 Little Car
      14 Morning Sir
      15 Story Of Bogshed

      CD3 - Brutal
      1 Raise The Girl
      2 Geoff's Big Problem
      3 Old Dog New Dance
      4 No To Lemon Mash
      5 I'm The Instrument
      6 Opportunatist Knocks
      7 People Equal Greedy
      8 Sing A Little Tune
      9 C'mon Everybody
      10 Uncle Death Grip
      11 Spring
      12 Loaf
      13 Excellent Girl
      14 True Rope
      15 Stop Revolving
      16 Your Science My Sound

      CD4 – Tried & Tested Public Speaker
      1 Packed Lunch To School
      2 Oily Stack
      3 Hell Bent On Death
      4 Can't Be Beat
      5 Fastest Legs
      6 Adventure Of Dog
      7 Morning Sir / Little Car
      8 Summer In My Lunchtime
      9 Tried And Tested Public Speaker
      10 Champion Love Shoes
      11 Little Grafter
      12 Raise The Girl
      13 I Said No To Lemon Mash
      14 The Gourmet Is A Baby
      15 Loaf
      16 From The Stubble
      17 Six To One And Likely
      18 Into Me
      19 Duck Fight – US Bands – Wally Wallah

      CD5 – Who Scoffed The Trill?
      1 Budgies
      2 This MUST Be Taken Seriously
      3 Necktie Murder Shopping Trollies
      4 Gathering Change
      5 Proper Music
      6 You Are This
      7 Too Many Personalities
      8 The Amazing Roy North Penis Band
      9 Hardly Manky
      10 I Feel Like A Thing
      11 Are You Alive
      12 Thankyou Horse
      13 Pain Is Nice
      14 Lodger Problem
      15 Piano Vocal Easy Organ
      16 I Taste Little Windmill
      17 I Prayed In Your Parlour
      18 Monument
      19 Soon To Exist
      20 Oh Regulation!
      21 Sunday Man
      22 My Little Heart's In A Whirl
      23 Simple Spinal
      24 Runner On A Blunder

      Mega Bog

      Dolphine

        Mega Bog is the fluid musical moniker of songwriter Erin Elizabeth Birgy, who has spent the last ten years channeling, capturing, and releasing her unique bouquet of fragrant, sci-fi pop experiments with a handful of bicoastal collaborators. She is joined on her fifth and finest album (and first for PoB) by members of Big Thief, Hand Habits, and iji, who help her spin a manic web of emotions into beautiful, abstract future poems and thrilling genre perversions. Mega Bog has visited a significant portion of the Western world, frequently looping the USA and Europe to sing in tiny art spaces and haunted historical theaters alike. The live concerts are known for their emotional unpredictability.

        The title of Mega Bog’s newest album Dolphine is inspired by a myth that suggests that, as humankind evolved from sea creatures, some individuals chose not to leave the water and walk the earth, but rather to stay in the ocean and explore the darkness as dolphins. (The extra “e” was added to take the word out of the everyday, translating it into a potential futuristic dialect.) The songwriting was inspired by Erin’s own swim through a myriad of overwhelming emotions, including the ongoing mourning following the death of her childhood horse companion Rose, her navigation of the feelings and physicality of two abortions, and the hapless and shattering social, political, and environmental turmoil on the planet. In October of 2016, Erin took her dark sketches to the Outlier Inn studio in Woodridge, NY, with a passionate crew of deeply bonded musicians.

        Together, they arranged and executed these eleven dizzy pop songs, live, over a tight seven days. The completed sound is thick and inviting. Bellowing, breathless vocals, mystical lyrics with the presence of poetry and the intuitive logic of dreams, and promiscuous, sometimes dissonant chord structures swirl together, coalescing into hazy and hypnotic fantasies. On album opener “For the Old World,” anguished affection and confusion bloom over lounge-music genre perversions, both ethereal and belligerent. On “Diary of a Rose,” Erin steps through her losses and growths to a continuous groove that crescendoes into melodic chaos and revelation. “Truth in the Wild” (the title is taken from a quote by Ian Cheng) speaks surreal and lonely images over soft percussion, classical guitars, and clarinet, pointing to influences like Joni Mitchell’s jazz period and Laurie Anderson’s 1989 record Strange Angels. “Untitled (with ‘C’)” was written for Philando Castile the day after his murder, and “Fwee Again” works through all of Dolphine’s devotions instrumentally. Ash Rickli wrote and sang the airy outlier “Spit in the Eye of the Fire King,” recorded on the porch of the studio with the wind chimes blowing. Between the album’s recording sessions and its release, Ash’s heart stopped unexpectedly during one of his live shows in Athens, Georgia. He was thirty. The tragedy, devastating to the many people who loved him, permeates the album

        TRACK LISTING

        A1. For The Old World 3:57
        A2. I Hear You Listening (to The Bug On My Wall) 3:41
        A3. Diary Of A Rose 4:40
        A4. Dolphine 3:15
        A5. Left Door 3:16

        B1. Spit In The Eye Of The Fire King (by Ash Rickli) 1:52
        B2. Truth In The Wild 3:59
        B3. Shadows Break 2:05
        B4. Untitled (with “C”) 2:00
        B5. Fwee Again 4:25
        B6. Waiting In The Story 3:27


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