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Pictured above: Thin Veil Olympia Underground cassettes! Super cool and groovy new music from Olympia available on cassette tape, perhaps the perfect format for such soundz. Here are a few recent releases one really can't live without. Fold them within.   Field School, It's only Everything (Small Craft Advisory) CS An EP, five songs by Charles Bert (formerly of Olympia's Math and Physics Club) on a new Olympia label, Small Craft Advisory. A whole new era dawns! Field School has Charles and the Field School orchestra jangling brightly on their Vox guitars and tambourines. A hush ascends. Ghost Bitch, Pop...

  Above: Mike and Anton preparing for the WULF recording session, Olympia, WA In Olympia the rock'n'roll keeps coming. The latest addition to the pile is a new cassette album by WULF, a super-combo comprised of assorted players you may recognize from other bands: Jonny Wulf (Christian Mistress, Quayde LaHüe, Cosmic Highness), Anton (Earthgasm), Mike Liebman (Vexx), Peter David Connelly (The Mona Reels, Quayde LaHüe, The Real Distractions). Veterans of heavy sounds, these folks gathered together in 2014 to create a power pop panoply influenced by the likes of Stories, Pilot, Dwight Twilley Band and other '70s ear wormers. Pure...

  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...

  Above: advertisement for Blind Willie Johnson's first record, 1927 Third Man Records has issued several volumes of their American Epic series, based on the three part PBS documentary presented by T-Bone Burnett, Robert Redford and Jack White. American Epic explores the birth of American music and it's roots in jazz, blues and country music in the early twentieth century. Some volumes of American Epic are now available from The K Mail Order Dept. One volume focuses on Blind Willie Johnson, a Texas bluesman who recorded over 30 songs in the '20s and '30s. The following overview of Blind Willie...

  Above: a still from The Mona Reels "Without Love" video directed by Jolie M-A of Ribbon Stage Without love all over again. Exploring a world without love while making a cup of tea at home is the subject of the new single by The Mona Reels, as exemplified by their new video "Without Love". It's not a bad life. The song doesn't say "poor me" or even "I'm lonely"; the perspective is "here I am, deep in the human condition, without love". Staying off the tilt-a-whirl is such relief, in fact. In comparison to the Carole King/Gerry Goffin Brill...