Dummy is a rock band from Los Angeles comprised of Alex Ewell, Emma Maatman, Nathan O’Dell, and Joe Trainor. Their debut full-length “Mandatory Enjoyment” (Trouble in Mind) arrived in late 2021, becoming one of the year’s sleeper hits and garnering praise from Pitchfork, Stereogum, and more. Coming out of lockdown, the band spent two years touring in support of the record, and it is this transformational experience that pulses through “Free Energy”, the exhilarating follow-up to “Mandatory Enjoyment”.

A creatively restless band, Dummy (Ewell: drums, synths, bass; Maatman: vocals, synths, organ; O'Dell: vocals, guitar, organ; Trainor: guitar, bass, synths) wanted to get harder, dancier, more psychedelic for their next record. This meant applying explorative potentials of electronic textures to the elemental qualities of rock i.e. more vocal loops, sampling, more crazy rhythms, and playful synths - but make those samples of Trainor’s guitar, let Maatman sing bolder, experiment with using cold mechanical elements in warm and sparkly ways, and lean harder into traditional-yet-still-awesome forms of rock guitar experimentation like feedback. The result is a record that celebrates music’s ability to move the body, whether that be through a teeth-rattling wall of MBV-esque noise, a sticky pop chorus, or a joyous drum machine or, if you’re Dummy, maybe all of them in the same song.

Pop music has always been a big part of Dummy’s sound and it manifests in different ways all over Free Energy: the bubbly synth sequence made with a Korg EM1 popping all over “Nullspace,” the revved-up drone-pop inspired by second and third wave Dunedin Sound bands like Look Blue Go Purple and Dadamah, and the motorik beat powering “Nine Clean Nails,” perhaps the most confidently pop song Dummy has ever recorded and one that exemplifies “Free Energy”’s balancing of live performance intensity with electronic augmentations, the dancier rhythmic elements created out of a drum loop recorded by Ewell while the bridge recalls the Feelies with call-and-response guitars from O’Dell and expressive vocals from Maatman.

“Free Energy” also features guest appearances from Oakland-based saxophonist and electroacoustic artist Cole Pulice (Moon Glyph) contributes saxophone and wind synths and Jen Powers of Powers / Rolin Duo (Astral Editions, Feeding Tube Records).

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro-UB
2. Soonish
3. Unshaped Road
4. Opaline Bubbletear
5. Blue Dada
6. Nullspace
7. Minus World
8. Dip In The Lake
9. Sudden Flutes
10. Psychic Battery
11. Nine Clean Nails
12. Godspin

This is a thoroughly researched exploration of one of the most original, unexpected, and durable British albums of the 1990s. An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural, and social ether, Portishead's "Dummy" was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential. RJ Wheaton offers an impressionistic investigation of "Dummy" that imitates the cumulative structure of the album itself, piecing together portraits and interviews, impressions of time and place, cultural criticism, and a thorough exploration of the music itself.

The approach focuses as much on the reception and response that "Dummy" engendered as it does on the original production of the album. How is it that so many people have, collectively, made a quintessential headphone album into a nightclub album? How have they made the product of a niche local scene into an international success? This is the story of how an innovative, experimental album became the iconic sound for the better part of a decade - and an aesthetic template for the experience of music in the digital age.

"Okemah Rising is the final installment of the Woody Guthrie/Dropkick Murphys collaboration, so we wanted to bring it home with a bang. Whereas the goal of This Machine Still Kills Fascists was to raise consciousness, Okemah Rising intends to raise the roof. Sure, it has one or two tender moments, but all in all it’s much more of a party than TMSKF. Even a party record can have a message though – we’ve felt that on the road over the last few months as we’ve played Okemah Rising songs “Gotta Get to Peekskill” and “I Know How It Feels” on tour all over the world. Every night, when the audience is singing along with Woody's words, his steadfast defense of the working class, and his fight against social injustice and the abuse of political power comes across loud and clear. So as long as Dropkick Murphys are involved, Woody’s message will always be heard."

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another 'collaborative' outing from Dropkick Murphy's and Woody Guthrie, putting Guthrie's lyrics to their Celtic influenced rock and roll. While Guthrie's lyrics are rousing on their own, the combination of Dropkick Murphy's traditional but driven folksong, and his pertinent vocal musings are another level.

TRACK LISTING

1. My Eyes Are Gonna Shine
2. Gotta Git To Peekskill
3. Watching The World Go By
4. I Know How It Feels
5. Rippin Up The Boundary Line
6. Hear The Curfew Blowin
7. Bring It Home
8. Little Boy
9. Run Hitler Run
10. I’m Shipping Up To Boston - Tulsa Version

In the 10 songs that make up This Machine Still Kills Fascists, Dropkick Murphys bring Woody Guthrie’s perennial jabs at life – many of which are from the 1940s and ‘50s – into the present, with the resulting music eerily relevant to today’s world. And they’ve done it all without their usual arsenal of electric guitars. In fact, not a single amplifier was used to animate Woody’s words in these songs, but DKM harnessed all of their trademark power to bring Woody’s lyrics to life.

Dropkick Murphys founder Ken Casey explained, “The project has been a long time in the making. Nora Guthrie thought her father would’ve got a kick out of us, would’ve liked us, that we were somewhat kindred spirits so to speak, which to us was a huge honor.”

The idea for the collaboration that became This Machine Still Kills Fascists has been percolating between Woody’s daughter Nora Guthrie and the band for more than a decade, with Nora curating a collection of her father’s never-published lyrics for the band over the years. The challenge was always finding the right time to pull it together. When Dropkick Murphys co-lead vocalist Al Barr was sidelined in the latter half of 2021 – taking a leave of absence from the band to care for his ailing mother – the band was apprehensive about making a normal DKM album. The perfect time to take on the Woody project had presented itself, and the band leapt at the chance to bring more of Woody’s timeless lyrics to life with a Dropkick Murphys musical twist. The end result is This Machine Still Kills Fascists – the true fruition of like-minded rebellious artists collaborating – albeit nearly a century apart.

Woody Guthrie wrote songs from the heart and for the common person. He made a point of showing up when it counted most, often performing at fundraisers, benefits, and rallies to champion working class causes and condemn greed, war, and unchecked capitalism – all with his guitar in hand.

This is exactly where Woody Guthrie and Dropkick Murphys intersect. Dropkick Murphys’ entire ethos of family, community, service, and action depends upon honest reporting in their music. Like Woody, showing up in real life is what makes their songs so impactful. They just are who they say they are. Whether it’s standing up to Nazi thugs or standing with working men and women on a picket line, showing up is what holds the center in DKM’s world.

As Woody once said: “A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is, or who’s out of work and where the job is, or who’s broke and where the money is, or who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is.” In both song and deed, Dropkick Murphys have always held true to this same view.

TRACK LISTING

Two 6’s Upside Down
Talking Jukebox
All You Fonies
Never Git Drunk No More (featuring Nikki Lane) 
Ten Times More
The Last One (featuring Evan Felker Of Turnpike Troubadours)
Cadillac, Cadillac
Waters Are A'risin
Where Trouble Is At
Dig A Hole (featuring Woody Guthrie)

LA five-piece Dummy follow last year’s acclaimed debut album ‘Mandatory Enjoyment’ (released by Trouble In Mind) and their recent single for Sub Pop with ‘Dumb EPs’, a compilation of their first two EPs from 2020, remastered especially for vinyl by Simon Scott from Slowdive.‘EP1’ was recorded from late 2019 and released in May 2020, both digitally and on a tape by Maryland punk label Pop Wig. It became a lockdown essential, and despite the pandemic the band managed to record the follow-up, ‘EP2’, remotely using smart phones. It was released in November 2020 by the Chicago label Born Yesterday. Together, the ten tracks that comprise the EPs manage to show off all of the band’s broad range of influences – from Stereolab-style drone-pop to baroque psych, chamber folk, noisy shoegaze and Japanese ambient and new age – which have made them one of the most exciting new bands to come out of the US for years

TRACK LISTING

1. Angel’s Gear
2. Avant Garde Gas Station
3. Slacker Mask
4. Folk Song
5. Touch The Chimes
6. Thursday Morning
7. Pool Dizzy
8. Nuages
9. Mediocre Garden
10. Second Contact
11. Prime Mover Unmoved

Recorded exactly two years after acclaimed visual artist and songwriter Terry Allen’s masterpiece Lubbock (on everything), the feral follow-up Smokin the Dummy is less conceptually focused but more sonically and stylistically unified than its predecessor it’s also rougher and rowdier, wilder and more wired, and altogether more menacingly rock and roll.

Following the 1973 Whitney Biennial, in which songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen and fellow iconic artist Horace Clifford “Cliff” Westermann both exhibited, Allen maintained a lively long-distance correspondence and exchange of artworks and music with Westermann, whose singular and highly influential art he admired enormously. In a February 1981 letter to his friend and mentor, written shortly after the late 1980 release of his third album Smokin the Dummy, while he and his family were living in Fresno, California, Terry explains the genesis of the album title: Westermann died shortly after receiving this letter, enclosed with a Smokin the Dummy LP, the minimalist black jacket of which Allen suggested that Cliff fold into a jaunty cardboard hat if he didn’t like the music. That response was unlikely, since Westermann loved Terry’s music, calling his debut record Juarez (1975) “the finest, most honest and heartfelt piece of music I ever heard.”

The Panhandle Mystery Band had only recently coalesced during those 1978 Lubbock sessions, Lloyd Maines’s first foray into production. Through 1979, they honed their sound and tightened their arrangements with a series of periodic performances beyond Allen’s regular art-world circuit, including memorable record release concerts in Lubbock, Chicago, L.A., and Kansas City. Terry sought to harness the high-octane power of this now well-oiled collective engine to overdrive his songs into rawer and rockier off-road territory.

His first album to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. Alongside the stalwart Maines brothers co-producer, guitarist, and all-rounder Lloyd, bassist Kenny, and drummer Donnie and mainstay Richard Bowden (who here contributes not only fiddle but also mandolin, cello, and “truck noise theory,” the big-rig doppler effect of Lloyd’s steel on “Roll Truck Roll”), new addition Jesse Taylor supplies blistering lead guitar, on loan from Joe Ely (who plays harmonica here). Jesse’s kinetic blues lines and penchant for extreme volume were instrumental in pushing these recordings into brisker tempos and tougher attitudes. Terry was feverish for several studio days, suffering from a bad flu and sweating through his

clothes, which partially explains the literally febrile edge to his performances, rendered largely in a perma-growl. (By this point, he was regularly breaking piano pedals with his heavy-booted stomp.) Like the album title itself, the songs on Smokin the Dummy ring various demented bells. The tracks rifle through Terry’s assorted

Obsessions especially the potential energy and escape of the open road, elevated here to an ecstatic, prayerful pitch and are populated by a cast of crooked characters: truckers, truck-stop waitresses, convicts, cokeheads, speed freaks, greasers, holy rollers, rodeo riders, dancehall cheaters, and sacrificial prairie dogs, sinners seeking some small reprieve, any fugitive moment of grace.

A reigning deity of a certain kind of country music since the mid-70s.
– The New York Times.

The kind of singular American artist who expresses the fundamental weirdness of his country. – The Wire.

TRACK LISTING

A1. The Heart Of California (for Lowell George)
A2. Cocaine Cowboy
A3. Whatever Happened To Jesus (and Maybeline)?
A4. Helena Montana
A5. Texas Tears
B1. Cajun Roll
B2. Feelin Easy
B3. The Night Café
B4. Roll Truck Roll
B5. Red Bird
B6. The Lubbock Tornado (I Don't Know)

LA-based Dummy signs to Trouble in Mind for the release of their new album! Dummy refuses to slow down. After releasing two cassette EP’s in 2020 (on Popwig and Born Yesterday respectively), Dummy’s debut full-length album arrives via Chicago’s Trouble in Mind Records. Employing pummeling guitars and celestial ambience within the same breath, the band folds a myriad of reference points into their drone-pop style. Influence from ’60s melodicism and ’90s UK noise pop can be found woven in with inspiration from spiritual jazz, Japanese new age, and Italian minimalism. Dummy dodges the brooding, dark, dramatic tropes of contemporary “artistic” music often found in punk, experimental, and electronic, instead insisting on joyous and euphoric sonic palettes.

They refuse to be artistically stagnant, continuously shifting their approach to writing across 12 tracks. Shaped by performances around Los Angeles in 2019, songs like “Daffodils” and “Fissured Ceramics” feature relentless driving energy and ample psychedelic noise. Elsewhere, Dummy counterbalances the aggression with meditative synthscapes focused on sound design and studio experimentation, like on the motorik “X-Static Blanket”. Finally, centerpiece “H.V.A.C.” and the album’s final track, “Atonal Poem”, seek to synthesize these two poles, offering multi-part journeys through uncharted sonic territory. In contrast to blissed-out instrumentation, Dummy’s sardonic lyricism examines “the burden of modern life, consumerism, environmental collapse, alienation, and other anxieties born out of living in this absurd moment in history”. Interior design, marine pollution, the psychology of commercial architecture, and nuclear testing are all featured subjects.

Dummy’s restless creativity keeps them moving ever-forward, continuously challenging themselves and pushing their sound into exciting and exhilarating places. This is – as the album title suggests – “Mandatory Enjoyment”. "...the album’s lead single finds Dummy at their most immediate, riding an urgent textural wave directly into the core of the melting sun." Post-Trash // "It's sort of a conversation, more of a comparison of opposite viewpoints. It's about how easily vanity can take precedence over the greater good. It's about putting on your bucket hat and stepping out into the wilderness, carelessly taking natural beauty for granted and then hopefully falling off a cliff."Dummy

TRACK LISTING

1 Protostar
2 Fissured Ceramics
3 Final Weapon
4 Punk Product #4
5 Cloud Pleaser
6 H.V.A.C.
7 Tapestry Distortion
8 Unremarkable Wilderness
9 Daffodils
10 X-Static Blanket
11 Aluminum In Retrograde
12 Atonal Poem

Hip hop enthusiast and obsessive break hunter Geoff Barrow, jazz musician Adrian Utley and singer-songwriter Beth Gibbons created Portishead's genre defining 'trip hop' album "Dummy" in 1994. The set's combination of head-nod beats and cinematic atmospherics (including Theremin, Rhodes, and Hammond) both sampled and played live, was given an extra twist by Barrow, who pressed the recordings up on vinyl and scratch-mixed them together, passing the resulting tapes on to Gibbons to add lyrics and a tune to. And it's Gibbon's who lifts the album into Mercury Music prize-winning territory, adding a heart-rending melancholia with her fragile folk-soul vocals. Featuring the singles "Sour Times" and "Glory Box", "Dummy" is just one of those must-have albums.

TRACK LISTING

1. Mysterons (5:02)
2. Sour Times (4:11)
3. Strangers (3:55)
4. It Could Be Sweet (4:16)
5. Wandering Star (4:51)
6. Numb (3:54)
7. Roads (5:02)
8. Pedestal (3:39)
9. Biscuit (5:01)
10. Glory Box (5:06)

Recorded live at Molly Malone's in 1997, "Alive Behind The Green Door" was Flogging Molly's very first recording. It documents the raw and raucous energy of their early days, and includes three Flogging Molly originals only found on this CD, early live versions of songs that are now fan favourites, and the only recorded version of "Delilah" which was a staple of the band's live show during their early years.

"Far From Nowhere" was produced by the legendary Ed Stasium (Ramones, Pennywise, 7 Seconds, Talking Heads) and delivers 12 fast, fun and melodic punk rock songs from SoCal punk band Slick Shoes. It's not only their shoes which are slick, these songs slip out like a glib indiscretion with clever, cheeky lyrics that reveal an underlying heartache.

Another radical set of ska-core punk missiles from The Suicide Machines, back with their fifth album "A Match and Some Gasoline". It matches the intensity and creativity of their early work allied to a new confidence that takes the intensity a step further. It encompasses a bunch of new styles - hardcore, harder edged thrash, punk, reggae, ska all put into a blender.

Official soundtrack for the 2003 Vans Warped Tour - the sixth installment of this highly successful compilation series. Double CD features NOFX, The Used, Less Than Jake, Glassjaw, Thrice, Yellowcard, Rufio, Poison The Well, The Suicide Machines, Mest, The Unseen, A.F.I., Slick Shoes, Dropkick Murphys, Bouncing Souls, Me First And The Gimme Gimmes, Lagwagon, No Use For A Name, Motion City Soundtrack, Coheed And Cambria, Rise Against, Avoid One Thing plus loads more bands!! Free keyring with first orders.

Led by bassist Joe Gittleman (Mighty Mighty Bosstones)Avoid One Thing are an energy filled punk pop band of the type that comes along rarely - after only one listen you'll be hooked. Featuring guitarist Paul Delano (Darkbuster, Mung), guitarist Amy Griffin (Raging Teens) and drummer Dave Karcich (Pilfers) the band has recorded 12 songs that are bursting with ideas, musical originality and an energy that most bands only dream of achieving.

The undisputed leaders of the street punk scene return with their fourth, most powerful full length album to date. For over eleven years, The Casualties have set the standard from the streets of NYC as they continue to keep it real with their unrelenting hardcore street punk attack.

Kill Your Idols exploded onto the hardcore scene back in 1995 and instantly gained a reputation for their amazing live performances and relentless work ethic. This album could well be the band's definitive recording. Relentless from beginning to end, it goes for the throat and won't let go. 16 punk rock tracks from the pitbulls of punk.

The official soundtrack to the biggest worldwide tour of the year 26 new tracks from some of the best hardcore acts around including Anti-Flag, Rancid, Me First And The Gimme Gimmes, H2O, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, The Ataris, No Use For A Name and loads more! Mosh and body surf in your room to your heart's content.

Straight from the depths of LA comes Madcap, the new breed of street punks. In the spirit of early Rancid, Anti Flag etc. " Stand Your Ground" possesses the punk rock fury and sing along anthems that makes this an instant classic and another great release from Side One Dummy.