Label - Sub Pop

A TAV Curator's Pick.

“I Love You, Honeybear is a concept album about a guy named Josh Tillman who spends quite a bit of time banging his head against walls, cultivating weak ties with strangers and generally avoiding intimacy at all costs. This all serves to fuel a version of himself that his self-loathing narcissism can deal with. We see him engaging in all manner of regrettable behavior.

“In a parking lot somewhere he meets Emma, who inspires in him a vision of a life wherein being truly seen is not synonymous with shame, but possibly true liberation and sublime, unfettered creativity. These ambitions are initially thwarted as jealousy, self-destruction and other charming human character traits emerge.  Josh Tillman confesses as much all throughout.

“The album progresses, sometimes chronologically, sometimes not, between two polarities: the first of which is the belief that the best love can be is finding someone who is miserable in the same way you are and the end point being that love isn’t for anyone who isn’t interested in finding a companion to undertake total transformation with. I won’t give away the ending, but sex, violence, profanity and excavations of the male psyche abound. 

“My ambition, aside from making an indulgent, soulful, and epic sound worthy of the subject matter, was to address the sensuality of fear, the terrifying force of love, the unutterable pleasures of true intimacy, and the destruction of emotional and intellectual prisons in my own voice.  Blammo.

“This material demanded a new way of being made, and it took a lot of time before the process revealed itself.  The massive, deranged shmaltz I heard in my head, and knew had to be the sound of this record, originated a few years ago while Emma and I were hallucinating in Joshua Tree; the same week I wrote the title track.  I chased that sound for the entire year and half we were recording.  The means by which it was achieved bore a striking resemblance to the travails, abandon and transformation of learning how to love and be loved; see and be seen.  There: I said it.  Blammo.” -Josh Tillman (A.K.A. Father John Misty)

All LP versions are 45 rpm.

Source: Sub Pop Records

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A TAV Essential Listening Album.

Helplessness Blues is the second studio album by Seattle, Washington-based folk band Fleet Foxes. It was originally released in 2011 as a follow-up to their eponymous 2008 Fleet Foxes album.

Upon release, the album received universal acclaim from critics and was nominated for Best Folk Album for the 54th Grammy Awards. The release peaked at number 4 on the Billboard 200, the band's highest position on the chart to date. To support the album, the band embarked on a worldwide Helplessness Blues Tour.

Helplessness Blues is the band's first studio album to feature bass guitarist Christian Wargo and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Henderson. It is also the band's only album to feature drummer and backing vocalist Joshua Tillman, who departed from the band in 2012 to pursue his solo career under the name Father John Misty. - Wiki

“On the band's follow-up, Helplessness Blues, the mood is darker and more uncertain, adding shade to their gold-hued sound. The change in tone reflects the tumultuous road Fleet Foxes traveled during the album's creation.

Helplessness Blues is comparatively deeper, more intricate, and more complex, a triumphant follow-up to a blockbuster debut. Working again with producer Phil Ek, they've crafted a cavernous record that allows more room for them to breathe and stretch. The album's longer, episodic cuts contain disquieting shifts in tone.” - Pitchfork

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A TAV Curator’s Pick.

Black Up is the debut studio album by American hip hop duo Shabazz Palaces, originally released in 2011 by Sub Pop. Shabazz Palaces the experimental hip-hop duo led by Ishmael Butler, aka Palaceer Lazaro (formerly Butterfly of jazz–hip hop group Digable Planets) and multi-instrumentalist Tendai "Baba" Maraire, son of Mbira master Dumisani Maraire.

 “Black Up is the new sonic move from Shabazz Palaces. Like rich velvet hijabs or gold threaded abayas. Luxury as understood by the modest. Shabazz Palaces. If Bedouins herded beats instead of goats and settled in Seattle instead of the Atlas Mountains, this would be their album. Forward thinkers but nostalgic for a sparer time when ancient astronomers only recognized five planets. Hip hop. Black light uses electromagnetic radiation to eradicate microorganisms, but shabazz didn’t come to kill a sound, just to shine their own incandescent lamp on this. Hear. Hard and clear. Fifty thousand years in the making. Honorable.—palaceer pink gators. Produced by Knife Knights.plcrs at Gunbeat Serenade Studio in Outplace Palacelands. It was recorded and mixed in Lixx-alog by Blood.” – Sub Pop

“Shabazz Palaces were making compelling, left-field hip-hop that had much in common with UK dubstep or the digital soundscapes of Radiohead favourites Flying Lotus.

This enthralling album's first track, "Free Press and Curl", opens with oscillations andrattling handclaps, before a serious worm of a bassline drops. Throughout, Black Up's production is stark and uneasy; tinged with jazz, but coloured principally by the dystopian corners of urban bass music. And once it gets hold of you, it doesn't let go. Every track is lean and muscular, never losing sight of the fact that hip-hop should writhe inexorably forward.

The allure of this sonically startling outfit only deepens with the knowledge that Shabazz Palaces' main man – Palaceer Lazaro – is really Ishmael "Butterfly" Butler, who once formed a third of Grammy-toting, 90s Daisy Age hip-hop crew Digable Planets.” – The Guardian

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