Paradise Of Bachelors Vinyl, CD & Tape 23 Items

2014 vinyl LP pressing deluxe reissue of the 1973 album widely recognized as the first openly gay country music album-and cited as such even by Nashville institutions like the Country Music Hall of Fame and CMT-the landmark self-titled Lavender Country album stands as nothing less than an artifact of courage, a sonic political protest document of enormous power, clarity, and grace. Songwriter, singer, and guitarist Patrick Haggerty, a fearless first-generation gay liberation activist and artist, seasons his songs with Yippie deviousness; in the manner of the Cockettes, the laughs both sharpen and sweeten the impact. The inimitable aesthetics and glimpses of cockeyed humor recall some ethereal psych-folk nexus of the Flatlanders and the Holy Modal Rounders as much as any standard country and western forebears, rendering the biting poetry in an even more otherworldly and timeless light. The record reflects Haggerty's experiences: his upbringing on a tenant dairy farm in rural Washington, on the Canadian border; his dismissal from the Peace Corps on the spurious grounds of his sexuality; and his righteous struggles as an outraged young gay man navigating the Pacific Northwest in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall. He designed Lavender Country as a vehicle for what he deems "The Information": valid cultural communications intended to resonate with those unable to access similar resources. (Playing "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears," one of the indisputably great country song titles ever, cost a brave Seattle DJ her FCC license.)

The Choctaw, Assiniboine, and Texan poet, journalist, visual artist, American Indian Movement activist, and musician Roxy Gordon (First Coyote Boy) (1945-2000) was above all a storyteller, known primarily as a writer of inimitable style and unvarnished candor, whose wide-ranging work encompassed poetry, short fiction, essays, memoirs, journalism, and criticism. Over the course of his career he recorded six albums, wrote six books, and published hundreds of shorter texts in outlets ranging from Rolling Stone and The Village Voice to the Coleman Chronicle and Democrat-Voice, in addition to founding and operating, with his wife Judy Gordon, Wowapi Press and the underground country music journal Picking Up the Tempo. Along the way he cultivated close friendships with fellow Texan songwriters such as Lubbockites Terry Allen, Butch Hancock, and Tommy X. Hancock, as well as Ray Wylie Hubbard, Billy Joe Shaver, and, most famously, Townes Van Zandt, whom he called his brother. Although his work covered a vast array of topics exploring strata personal, local, global, and cosmic alike, Gordon's primary subject as a writer, musician, and visual artist was always American Indian culture, specifically the ways it collided and coexisted with European American culture in the South and West-and within the context of his own life and braided identity. The ten songs on Crazy Horse Never Died, his first officially released and distributed album, were recorded in Dallas in 1988. "Songs" is perhaps an imprecise taxonomy for what Roxy captured on this and his other albums, all of which remain out of print or were released in instantly obscure limited editions of homebrew cassettes and CD-R's. (Paradise of Bachelors plans to reissue remastered, expanded editions of his catalog; Crazy Horse is the first.) He only occasionally attempted to sing, and his musical recordings are primarily corollaries of, and vehicles for, his poems. His sharp West Texan drawl, tinged by formative years of reservation living in Montana and unmistakable once you hear it-high, lonesome, flat, and cold-blooded as a bare rusty blade-instead patiently unfurls in skewed sheets of anecdotal verse and discursive narrative rants. Although Gordon's music at times incorporated powwow style drumming, fiddling, or unaccompanied ballad singing, the majority of it hews to an idiosyncratic spoken word style, accompanied by atmospheric, sometimes synth-damaged country-rock that skirts ambient textures and postpunk deconstructions. His songs are essentially recitations over backing tracks of finger picked guitars, rubbery washtub bass, and buzzing, oscillating keyboards. On the stark yellow and red jacket of Crazy Horse, which he designed himself, Gordon describes these recordings as innately ambivalent in terms of form, content, and identity: These are poems and/or songs about the American West, white and Indian. My life has been Indian and/or white. Maybe there's not a lot of difference-maybe. I guess that's mostly according to which white person or which Indian you're talking about. That's probably what this album's about. Crazy Horse Never Died comprises songs that span the personal and political arcs of his writing practice and the poles of his native and white ancestries.

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. The first album by Allen to share top billing with the Panhandle Mystery Band, here featuring Jesse Taylor on blistering lead guitar alongside the Maines brothers and Richard Bowden, Dummy documents a ferocious new band in fully telepathic, tornado-fueled flight, refining its caliber, increasing its range, and never looking down. This first-ever vinyl reissue, remastered from the original analog tapes, includes a gatefold jacket and inner sleeve with restored, new, and alternate art and photos by Terry and Jo Harvey Allen; an insert with lyrics, original notes, and Terry's letter to H.C. Westermann about the songs; and a high-res download code. The kind of singular American artist who expresses the fundamental weirdness of his country. - The Wire It has always been a fool's errand to frame Allen in terms of other artists_there was nobody like him before he showed up, and the subsequent forty years have been equally light on plausible peers. - Uncut

The magical Mega Bog returns with another fantastical off-world transmission, the most sophisticated, exploratory, and accessible statement yet from surrealist songwriter and avant-pop prospector Erin Birgy. Featuring James Krivchenia (Big Thief), who co-produced, and Zach Burba (iji) among its cast of vibrant players, Life, and Another bristles with painterly technicolor surface textures while plumbing fathomless depths of feeling. Life, and Another stages a semi-fictionalized drama in the community theater of the interior self, with scenes of collective longing at the bowling alley, disputes over a distended memory outside the bar, and the solitary circling on the patio, looking out over the yard in stubborn awe. These memories, from both past and future, bubble up throughout the album and present their characters as new entries into the Mega Bog Book of Symbols. In "Station to Station," an artichoke, the decadent indulgence young Erin learned to steam for herself, is gutted around the spine. In "Weight of the Earth, on Paper," named after the collection of memoir tapes by the artist-warrior David Wojnarowicz, poppies sprout in Birgy's shadow and scare her companion, while harpies circle above Loch Ness. Fantastical visions beget inherited family traumas that taunt withering romantic relationships. A deep faultline connects the record with the work of Wojnarowicz, who, in the years before his death in 1992 (twenty-nine years and one day before the release of Life, and Another), recorded in his tape journals a series of moments of rapturous solitude in the deserts of the American Southwest, carried from dream to dream by real and imagined friendships with human lovers, horses, scorpions, clouds, and the occasion cruiser. Listeners know by now they can trust Mega Bog to continuously lead them into deeper and wilder, spiritual pop territories. Skittering piano glissandos, haunting psychic background voices, and tequila-inspired improvisations creep and crawl over the dark-night-of-the-soul rock and roll dreamscape, before vanishing to make way for invocations of quiet clarity and living-breathing instrumental passages.

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.

The debut solo al bum by Mike Polizze finds the erstwhile Purling Hiss frontman and Birds of Maya shredder stepping out from behind the wall of guitar noise into the bright sunshine.Performed entirely by Polizze with longtime friend Kurt Vile (largely live and acoustic) and recorded by War on Drugsengineer Jeff Zeigler, this intimate Philadelphia affair clarifies the bittersweet earworm melodicism of Dizzy Polizzy'ssongwriting, revealing bona fide folk-pop chops. Long Lost Solace Find finally harvests the wild local honey from thebuzzing hive of Hiss.The debut solo al bum by Mike Polizze finds the erstwhile Purling Hiss frontman and Birds of Maya shredder stepping out from behind the wall of guitar noise into the bright sunshine."Beautifully melancholic_ A craftsman whose easy mastery hides the years of work it took to get there. Thehooks seem to never stop." - Pitchfork"Idiosyncratic and remarkable _ unwashed, long-haired pop strum." - NPR Music

2xLP edition features heavy-duty tip-on gatefold jacket, lyrics, printed inner sleeves, DL code, and 28 pp. bookwith related artwork and photos, an oral history by Allen, and new essays by David Byrne, Lloyd Maines, & Brendan Greaves.The definitive, deluxe edition of the art-country classic: produced in collaboration with the artist; remastered from the original analog tapes; first to correct the tape speed inconsistencies evident on all prior versions; and the first to contextualize the record within Allen's 50-year career.

Quietly contemplative sophomore LP refines & elaborates their debut, offering an airier, more spcaious second chapter. Recorded live to tape without overdubs.

Camelot, the legendary seat of King Arthur's court in Early Middle Ages Britain, was probably not a real place. A corruptionof the name of a real Romano-Briton city, the word "Camelot" accumulated symbolic, mythic resonances over centuries,until achieving its present usage as a near-synonym of "utopia." In the mid-20th century alone, Camelot inspired anexplosion of representations and appropriations, among them the violent, affectless Arthurian court of Robert Bresson's1974 film Lancelot du Lac and the absurdist iteration of Monty Python's 1975 Holy Grail, both of which feature armoredknights erupting into fountains of blood; the mystical Welsh world of novelist John Cowper Powys's profoundly weird1951 novel Porius, with its Roman cults, wizards and witches, and wanton giants; and the nationalist nostalgia of PresidentJohn F. Kennedy's White House. Unsurprisingly there are fewer Camelots in more recent memory.Camelot, Canadian songwriter Jennifer Castle's extraordinary, moving 2024 chronicle of the artist in early middleage, charts a realer, more rooted, and more metaphorical place than the fabled Camelot of the Early Middle Ages (or itsmyriad depictions), but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle's Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates themundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrialconcerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection inone's own nature. Co-produced by Jennifer and longtime collaborator Jeff McMurrich, her seventh record is at once hermost monumental and unguarded to date, demonstrating a mastery of rendering her verse and melodies alike withcrisply poignant economy. For all their pointedly plainspoken lyrical detail and exhilarating full-band musical flourishes,these songs sound inevitable, eternal as morning devotions."Back in Camelot," she sings on the lilting, vulnerable title track, "I really learned a...

- Steve Gunn's first album with a band, featuring John Truscinski and Justin Tripp- His most affecting, accessible, and articulate work of pure songcraft to date, with a new emphasis on vocals- Available on virgin vinyl, in a deluxe, limited edition, as well as on CD and digital formats- Vinyl edition features matte, tip-on jacket, full-color inner sleeve, and digital download coupon- CD housed in heavy matte gatefold wallet- Package features artwork by Anthony Campuzano, Constance Mensh, and Justin TrippIn the city we're all angling for Quittin' Time, laboring along and among the hours, searching and scheming for the sweet sound of those two easy words: Time Off. It's something you take-or sometimes steal, like a thief or a baserunner-but seems you can never get enough of it. It's regulated, rationed, and billed by volume, like water or electricity or ice cream. Sometimes you have to beg the boss for more, or even for a trifling taste. So let's make time! Let's roll the dice and get these old bones out on the road again. Steve Gunn's new album imagines the fugitive moments afforded us during time off, out, and away as occasions for dilatory investigations into our immediate environments and interiors. Time Off (PoB-08) showcases the virtuosic guitarist and songwriter's oblique character sketches and story-songs, some of which, like "Lurker" and "Street Keeper," portray specific denizens of his Brooklyn neighborhood. "Old Strange" celebrates Jack Rose, a dear and departed friend and muse. Those contemplative studies frame Gunn's most affecting, accessible and articulate work of pure songcraft to date. His definitive statement as a songwriter, Time Off represents the culmination of nearly fifteen years of stylistic experimentation as a solo artist, a member of GHQ and the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, and more recently, as a guitarist in fellow Philadelphia-bred troubadour Kurt Vile's touring band the Violators. Gunn's first eponymous album with a full band, Time Off harnesses a core trio format to...

The duo's third album of instrumental guitar recordings pushes their sinuous compositions into labyrinthine new shapes, interlocking and interlocutory, supported by a cast of stellar collaborators. Interwoven among the dazzling original pieces is a fascinating array of covers, ranging from traditional Breton dance tunes to a deconstruction of Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance."Their melody-first sensibilities are perfectly suited to each other _ playfully complex guitar work that sounds as if it was tossed off in an afternoon of whiskey and laughs. - NPRAn intoxicating, intricate web _ Wherever Salsburg and Elkington go, it's always a pleasure. - Aquarium DrunkardSounds like winter has always been approaching, like Indian summer never quite fades, like fall isn't built around loss. - Stereogum

On Imitation o f War, songwriter and guitarist Kayla Cohen advances Itasca into rockier terrain, with a suiteof smoky nocturnes and uneasy idylls surveying, with refreshing urgency, mythologies and psychologies bothclassical and personal. Co-produced by Robbie Cody (Wand, Behavior), these ten sturdy set-pieces representthe loosest, leanest, and most smolderingly electric guitar-forward recordings of Cohen's deepening catalog.

Setting, befitting its name_which can be read as noun or verb, and simultaneously suggests the sun, orany star in the firmament from our earthbound perspective; a story and its surroundings, its scenic contextor mise en scène; or a psychedelic experience, as in the prescription to mind one's "set and setting"_aroseoutdoors, uncontained and unconstrained by architecture. The group's debut recordingShone a RainbowLight Ontraverses textural, phosphorescent topography with a certified organic folk-engine. Kosmischecorrespondences are inevitable and valid, but also somewhat deceptive, given this meditative music'sterrestrial rootedness in the familiar natural world, more in native humus and humidity than in outer space.Fueled by a vibratory hybrid of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, these four stately longform piecessound like a UFO slowly sinking into a peat bog (or, as we call it in North Carolina, a pocosin).An instrumental trio comprisingNathan Bowles(solo/trio,Pelt,Black Twig Pickers) on strings, keys,and percussion;Jaime Fennelly(Mind Over Mirrors,Peeesseye) on harmoniums, synthesizers, and pianozither; andJoe Westerlund(solo,Califone,Sylvan Esso,Jake Xerxes Fussell) on drums, percussion, andmetallophones, Setting established its own setting and found its footing in regularly scheduled improvisa-tional sessions outside Westerlund's home inDurham,North Carolina, beginning in 2021. The three playersbegan as two, in the context of occasional Bowles and Westerlund percussion duo performances dating backto 2018. Fennelly provided the initial impetus to gather and play together with intentionality and discipline,as well as an harmonic adhesive and thickening agent in the grain and gravity of his harmonium andsynthesizer. As always, Bowles's background as a pianist and drummer informs his approach to banjo,imparting a woodiness, a piney verticality and resinous tang. Westerlund's training withMilford Gravesisapp...

Mike Cooper wrote his final songwriter record, a suite of gloaming glam-rock anthems performed with a spiritual jazz trio, while living on the Costa Tropical of Granada , Spain , an era when he was considering retiring from music altogether. A chance encounter and a last-ditch record deal convinced him to make one last album, which he recorded in 1974 at Pathway Studios in London, with "The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World," featuring the inventive South African jazz rhythm section of Louis Moholo and Harry Miller with UK saxophonist Mike Osborne. This first-ever reissue includes a bonus CD of Milan Live Acoustic 2018, a previously unreleased solo set that represents Cooper's return, after forty-four years pursuing free improvisation and electronics, to a new, deconstructed approach to singing, steel guitar, and songcraft. The deluxe LP+CD edition also features a six-panel insert with additional artwork and an essay by the artist about both records. The deluxe 2xCD gatefold edition features an eight-panel version of the same insert