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Almond Joy are the celestial comet heading the West Coast Pop Revival.

Bret Lunsford (Beat Happening, D+) is featured in the new episode of Low Profile.

  Look at them Olymp rockers. Above right to left there's Tobi Vail, whom you know from Spider & the Webs, Peter Daivd Connelly aka The Mona Reels (also plays in Quayde LaHüe and WULF), Ricky Meyer of Rik and the Pigs and new on the scene KT who phase-shifts between electric bass guitar and vocal dynamisms extraordinaire. This is The Real Distractions! The have a new four song EP out now, Stupid [IPU148], the latest volume in our International Pop Underground series. The Real Distractions make the Olymp weird-out punk noise, less dank than some more corrugated than others,...

  Above: Beat Happening, Crashing Through 1988 12" EP reissued as a gatefold double 7" The guitar scream drum pound of Beat Happening, howling through the rural Northwest, was apparently just the thing to compliment a corduroy enshrouded freak scene going down concurrently in Scotland during the late '80s. Enough so that the second Beat Happening album, Jamboree, released in the United States by Rough Trade Records, was in Europe added to the growing crashpop catalogue of Scotland's 53rd & 3rd label. By the time Jamboree made it's appearance in 1988, 53rd & 3rd, founded by Stephen Pastel (of The...

  If you have seen the recent Beat Happening 45rpm "Crashing Through (Meyering Mix)" [IPU147] in your local phonograph record emporium, you may have noticed the assertive looking rabbit charging toward you on the front cover. This image is derived from a painting by Beat Happening's Heather Lewis, one of a set of mural sized paintings created in April 2020. It was Easter Sunday. There was a global pandemic. Not too many folks were out and about. A Washington State Department of Transportation (WADOT) bicycle underpass near Heather's Seattle residence had ample freshly white walls. Heather had ample paint, and...