“Its melodies are simple and near-perfect, its guitars jangly and unembellished. It’s distinctly West Coast in its feel, but it’s also the sound of a band that are increasingly their own.” – Noisey

Empty Cellar Records is stoked to announce the third full-length release by San Francisco’s Cool Ghouls, Animal Races. Fans of their self-titled debut and 2014’sA Swirling Fire Burning Through the Rye will be similarly stoked to hear how this band has continued to evolve. If the first album was a celebratory debut, and the second an earnest venture into deeper waters… this third album is like the crystal born of the murky womb that was the second, fertilized by the initial intention of the first. Not only have the ghouls reaped the crop they sowed; they’ve baked it into some new kind of bread!

For the uninitiated – Cool Ghouls play rock’n’roll. That’s about all there is to it. They’re California natives. They try to do a good job. They like to try to elevate and get far out. They also like to keep it real. They like to make friends and have a good time. They don’t like bullshit. They want to keep growing and learning how to become more powerful musicians. This record reflects the discoveries they’ve made over the last five years about live performance, themselves, and each other.

The eleven tracks, recorded to tape by Kelley Stoltz in his backyard studio, are first and foremost documents of the four-piece’s live performance of the tunes. Many of the songs were road-tested, but – unlike the prior records – a few of them were not. This opened the door for some new looks: an acoustic guitar, some synth, upright piano, a little pedal steel wizardry from Tom Heyman, etc. It’s Cool Ghouls doing what they’ve always done, but in more ways and better.

Animal Races will be available on LP/CD (8/19/16) in the US via Empty Cellar Records and the EU/UK via Melodic Records, and worldwide on cassette viaBurger Records. All versions feature full-color artwork painted by Shannon Shaw(Shannon and The Clams). Distributed by Revolver/Midheaven (USA).

PREORDER HERE

Track Listing:

1. Animal Races
2. Sundial
3. Time Capsule
4. When You Were Gone
5. Days
6. Just Like Me
7. The Man
8. Brown Bag
9. Never You Mind
10. Material Love
11. Spectator

Cool Ghouls – 2016 Tour Dates
8/11 San Francisco, CA – The Chapel (Record Release Show)
8/16 Los Angeles, CA – The Resident
8/17 Tucson, AZ – TBA
8/18 El Paso, TX – Monarch
8/19 Austin, TX – Barracuda
8/20 San Antonio, TX – Limelight
8/22 Denver, CO – TBA
8/23 Salt Lake City, UT – TBA
8/24 Boise, ID – The Olympic
8/25 Portland, OR – Baker Ballroom
8/26 Seattle, WA – TBA
9/1 Zagreb, HR – Mochvara Club
9/3 Vienna, AT – Chelsea
9/4 Prague, CZ – Famu Club
9/6 Gent, BE – Cafe Video
9/8 Lille, FR – Le Biplan
9/9 Paris, FR – Espace B
9/10 Chatillon sur Seiche, FR – Rock on Noyal
9/11 Tilburg, NL – Incubate Festival
9/12 Antwerp, BE – TBA
9/13 Brussels, BE – Pin Pon
9/14 Dortmund, DE – Rekorder
9/15 Breda, NL – Electron
9/16 Berlin, DE – Bassy Club
9/17 Dresden, DE – Ostpol
9/20 Brighton, UK – Sticky Mike’s Frog
9/21 Northampton, UK – The Black Prince
9/22 London, UK – Birthday’s Dalston
9/23 Liverpool, UK – Liverpool Psych Fest
9/24 Sheffield, UK – Picture House Social
9/25 Manchester, UK – The Eagle Inn
9/27 Strausbourg, FR – Mudd Club
9/28 Geneva, CH – La Graviere
9/29 Heilbronn, DE – TBA
9/30 Lausanne, CH – Le Bourg
10/1 Florence, IT – Annibale Night
10/15 Oakland, CA – New Parish with The Sonics

Introducing a new split 45 via Empty Cellar Records featuring harmony-heavy San Francisco legacies The She’s and The Dry Spells. Tight vocal harmonies, ambitious musical arrangements, and diverse influences meet on both sides of this record in a pairing that won’t disappoint. A song for the party and one for the comedown.

“Go ahead and throw a funeral for yourself because this song is both the party and the come down.” – Bryn Lovitt, Noisey (Vice)

The She’s light things up with their ever expanding range: the group that got its start while in middle school have brought their steadily amassed stylistic and dynamic breadth to the track, “Cherry Red,” produced by Patrick Brown at Different Fur. It bursts open with with a driving surf beat cut with the laser-guided vocal counterpoint The She’s are known for. Aggressive Go-Go’s, The Breeders at the beach, Shonen Knife in the Golden State. Call it what you want; It’s irresistible. After winding through a dizzying set of changes, the She’s pull the rug out from under, dropping you (along with the beat) into a half-time dream that would make the Shangri-La’s smile, but also calls to mind english guitar bands of the 90’s – a reference reinforced by singers Hannah and Samantha musing about painting their lips (the classic color that gives this track its name) in the same breath as reminding us that we will all die and ultimately be forgotten.

“I feel like an old buddy came to town for the holidays. […] The vocal harmonies are still stellar and I’m now so happy” – Bob Boilen, All Songs Considered (NPR)

You’re gonna feel pumped after Side A, putting you in the perfect place to enter the restorative trance of the Dry Spells’ “Heliotrope” (members of Sonny & The Sunsets, Jonas Reinhardt, Citay), produced by Tim Cohen (The Fresh and Onlys / Magic Trick) and mixed by Mikey Young (Total Control / Eddy Current Suppression Ring). The track opens with delicate guitar lines reminiscent of Jefferson Airplane’s best slow-psych (think “Today”) spilling from a wash of cymbals. Aquarian? Yes. Wishy-washy? No way dude: A Fleetwood-McVie rhythm tightens this track, clean, warm and hypnotic under vocal harmonies that rise and rise and rise some more. Enter the guitar solo – nuanced, spacious and moody – it slides across a Fairport violin, risen from the mix to dabble in the sun-worshiping harmonies. This song is not, however, without its grittier influences. The bass line is biting as it is melodic. Sinewy and driving like a fretless Television, it coalesces with guitar and vocals into one final pitch-perfect exaltation before everything collapses into the fragile sustain of a tremolo’d guitar.

Take all this, and combine it with the fact that this split comes in a limited run of 500 copies of colored vinyl (250 cyan / 250 red) with artwork by The Fresh and Only’s / Sonny and the Sunsets’ Shayde Sartin rendered in anaglyphic 3D, and you can be sure that you won’t find a more spangled Yin meets Yang 45 this fall.

Order yours HERE

Ivorics is a hip hop compilation featuring Tim Cohen (The Fresh and Onlys / Magic Trick) in his retired duo, The Latter. 100 cassettes dubbed with 14 tracks featuring a dozen off raps performed by Tim Cohen. Tim performed under the aliases Smif Carnivorous and Feller Quentin in groups The Latter and Forest Fires Collective during the late 90’s and early 00’s. They released two hard to find vinyl LPs and a handful of similarly obscure CDs. Fans have been curious about this part of his catalog since he materialized in the fog as someone to watch in the SF garage explosion. Tim (Feller) grew up on rap in Richmond, Virginia and was one of the hip hop czars at Amoeba Music (San Francisco) for the better part of a decade. You can read this brief interview from a few years ago to learn about his all-time favorite rap albums. He gave me over 50 tracks to work with and we managed to whittle the sequence down to this collection with the help of his partner Eddie Vic. Recorded between ’98 and ’03, we think that this tape represents the breadth and variety of The Latter’s history and are confident of the following three things: The beats are dope; The lyrics are fresh; and The styles are incomparable.

Limited to 100 cassettes (no digital, no vinyl, no cd, no 8-track) for the completist and curious minds alike (NOTE: completists must also find his black metal output as AmocomA, his work with improvised space rock outfit 3 Leafs, and genre-free releases with Black Fiction and Window Twins).

Order yours while they last!

Empty Cellar Records is very happy to announce the addition of Grace Sings Sludge (Grace Cooper of The Sandwitches) to our roster, and we’d like to present to you her latest self-released album, Red Light Museum, to kick off the celebration.

Red Light Museum is the third installment of home recordings from Grace Sings Sludge. Following two limited edition cassette releases with San Francisco’s Secret Seven Records, This Time It’s Personal and Last Year’s Friend, Red Light Museum offers ten new emotionally captivating songs in Grace’s inimitable style. From title to title Grace Sings Sludge gives us an exclusive peek into a new chapter in her own personal hell/heaven. Narrated by her stunning vocals and accompanied by sparse layers of guitar, piano, samples and drums (courtesy of Dic Stusso), each listen reveals another subtlety in the mix – a cinematic clue – to help us put the pieces together. Keeping with tradition, the album artwork is drawn and painted by Grace Cooper; and this time, each cassette version comes with a unique hand-drawn original (priceless) mini-artwork. Available in cassette (hand-dubbed by Grace) and digital.  Get it from us HERE or directly from Grace HERE!

Check out the video for ‘Difficult to Luv’ over at Raven Sings The Blues.

Grace Sings Sludge – ‘Difficult to luv’ from Empty Cellar on Vimeo. Directed by Culita of Tirando Terror

…and the VHS video for ‘Such a vision’ over at My Old Kentucky Blog.

Grace Sings Sludge – ‘Such a vision’ from Empty Cellar. Dedicated to the loving memory of its director Johnnie Roberto Russell.

Tracklist:
1. Difficult to Luv
2. Bullshit Ceremony
3. Haunt Me Albert
4. Such A Vision
5. S. Sludge
6. Red Light Museum
7. The Change
8. Fanatical Fanny
9. A Sore Place
10. …and Only

Cut from the cloth of early Soft Machine and Kevin Ayers-isms, garagearray by Dylan Shearer is a lofty, loopy flight in a candy floss-clouded sky, with an ever-present darkness just below the surface. It’s wonderfully off the cuff, in moments reminiscent of a Syd Barrett session where the band must’ve just closed their eyes and felt it out in the dark. Coming together in all the right moments, sometimes absolute in its nick-of-timeness. Dylan Shearer is joined on this LP by Petey Dammit on bass (Thee Oh Sees) and Noel von Harmonson on drums (Comets On Fire). Produced by Eric Bauer (Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin…etc) this session maintains a lighter than life vibration, like a breeze weaving through a tree far overhead. The production smacks with that lost in time quality of a BBC session piloted by a natural on the knobs genius. Although I don’t know Dylan Shearer all that well, he has a sort of shy quality that seems to fall away when singing these songs live. Sometimes singing is much heavier in truth than speaking small talk, I guess. It’s really quite lovely and full of sad and poetic moments and we are VERY proud here at Empty Cellar to be co-releasing this with Castle Face Records, with whom we’re making two special and limited handprinted jacket + colored vinyl editions, featuring artwork by Dylan’s childhood friend Michael Sean Coleman. Get a copy while they last HERE!

Listen to track “meadow mines (fort polio)” on NPR

Listen to track “mold in the fold” on Brooklyn Vegan

Read some thoughtful interviews with Dylan Shearer about his writing process on Impose and The Bay Bridged (with Logan of The Dodos)!

Praise for Dylan Shearer:

“Dylan Shearer makes psych-pop, that rare combination of drugged-out bliss and crystal clear melody that evokes The Beach Boys on acid, or The Free Design on ketamine. Not to say that Shearer invokes the more sinister edges of the drug-addled, oh no, this is psychedelia that wraps you up in a Fall sweater of guitar and woodwinds. This is psych and pop mixed in the most classic of ways, the tenuous edges of free-form psych brought together under the deceptively superficial happiness of best sort of pop.”
— Side One Track One

“Shearer’s vocals have the same eccentric bohemian aristocracy of Kevin Ayers circa Joy Of A Toy, alongside touches of melancholy Nick Drake-isms and some classic, dislocated Syd Barrett/Madcap Laughs style confusion. The songs are great, memorable acoustic constructs that conjure all sorts of phantom hooks from out of the air. Highly Recommended”
— David Keenan

Truly one of my favorite songwriters working today. If a more sullen Ray Davies sounds up your alley, get excited.”
— Chocolate Bobka

Comparisons to Syd Barrett are apt, but the nostalgic and tender domesticity of songs like “meadow mines (fort polio),” from his upcoming record garagearray bring to mind Ray Davies, with whom Shearer shares a prenatural talent for finding pathos in the homey.
— adhoc.fm