Late hours over here, but I wanted to get this one to you post-haste. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it. Whoo hoo!

Music comes in here, make yours part of it: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USA // [email protected]

Show this work to the bands and labels responsible for these records if you can. It’s the best way to find a little more reach. I do it too, but, you know. It means more to me coming from you.

Here it is.

NATIONAL PHOTO COMMITTEE Red Hot Photo Committee LP (Ever/Never)

One of our city’s celebrated deep-dish tradesmen said recently “I want us to be able to produce high-level pizza” and somewhere inside of us all that is a thing we revere. NPC (hah!) is producing some cuts that are on the way to that threshold. Chicago twangers with a laconic vocalist (Max Bottner, in some capacity of NWI noids Liquids and a bunch of regional hardcore bands with photocopied cardstock J-cards in their tapes) get to work plying this craft in a spilled beer/droll regret/thought-about-it-now-singin-bout-it demeanor. Easy vibe to get and like, and nice to see it coming out of directions that haven’t been cranking it out like wild people for years. We are at that Abyss moment with this sort of amped-up flannel-wrapped Americana poetix where we can lump bands in their ordinal positions: giant sci-fi thriller shot with state-of-the-art visuals in a water-filled disused reactor, and also a Leviathan, and a DeepStar Six. (The base level of entry to play countrified rock doesn’t really map to a Lords of the Deep or The Rift). (Would those be references in this band’s lyrical universe?) There’s blood in that water; we have a taste for it that cuts across fandoms and taste brackets and age groups. (And hey, I liked all the model work in DeepStar Six, and Miguel Ferrer busting open like a two ton grape). Who’s with me? It’s hard to unhear the voice and the pedal steel on Red Hot Photo Committee and not think of something else, but that something else can’t come around all the time, so why not this? Songs are killer, vibe right, gets a bit too on the nose at points but tracks like “If I Wait” and “The Bishop” reveal more and more with multiple listens, and the back side of this – three longer tracks, each given an expected but finely-honed example of sparks splitting off the Crazy Horse chassis with a souped-up showroom model right in the middle with “Adelaide.”

More juice after the reamer: