***Radio MDMA, Greg Ashley’s 9th solo album, and his first since 2018’s Fiction Is Non-Fiction, and his first for Real Charmer Records, is perhaps his best album yet. The 12 originals (two of which are co-written by Hugo Lamy, and one with ex-Thirteenth Floor Elevators’ Powell St. John), are among the final recordings he produced at the Creamery studio in Oakland before his return to his native Texas. And, in many ways, this song cycle documents a protracted farewell to Oakland, whose thriving indie-underground music culture Ashley witnessed being decimated by gentrification. It’s certainly his darkest lyrically, but the bitter medicine of this confessional “dark night of the soul” is washed down with an eclectic mixture of balls-out hilariously cynical Saturday night rockers and Sunday morning despairing country ballads, while exploring yet new sonic territory for an artist (producer, engineer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist) with an already very diverse discography.
LP $17.50
04/22/2022
***"GREG ASHLEY’s 4th album under his own name, his first since 2009’s Requiem Mass (Birdman), signals yet another change in direction for this multi-instrumentalist / producer / arranger / singer / songwriter / bandleader. Death of a Ladies' Man is a reverential song-for-song treatment of Leonard Cohen’s least ‘reverential’ album: the 1977 Phil Spector-produced album of the same name. Greg’s cover photo replaces actual women with two mannequins, but in almost every other way Greg’s stripped down arrangements with a basic bar band lineup give the original animal more human warmth, making the album more accessible than it’s ever been behind that bloated fortress Phil built. Ultimately, Ashley’s Death of a Ladies' Man pays tribute to the songwriting team of Cohen/Spector. Greg’s rock and roll background informs his Death of a Ladies' Man, but the tenderness, and the mid-life crisis evident in Cohen’s lyrics is highlighted, and conveys the meaning of the songs in ways even Cohen might appreciate. Greg also brings the sensibility he honed in the Oakland bar circuit, and his country-tinged ‘One Thin Heroine/ Misery Again’ single (Mexican Summer), to make ‘Fingerprints’ a much more convincing country rocker than it does in Spector’s version.”—Chris Stroffolino, from the liner notes. Edition of 500 copies with download code.
LP $15.00
11/12/2013
Requiem Mass and Other Experiments, the new album from Gris Gris founder and Creamery Studio owner Greg Ashley, opens with the side-long track "Requiem Mass"; the flip is a series of sound and music experiments. Ashley himself was kind enough to explain his methods of recording an experimental piece like this: "I begin 'Symmetric Juggling' with two competing tones panned away from one another between the two speakers. Then, a set of tribal-sounding drums fade up from the hum. Each individual drum was tracked / recorded separately, so they could be panned away from each other. During the song, the drums are constantly flipping back and forth through the speakers. This diverges into the symmetric part of the track in which all the music has been performed forward and backward identically over itself. You can hear the bass and drums suck into themselves in this fucked-up pulse. The end of this song is the beginning and the beginning is the end, and the center point explodes with a gong. 'Loop' is a mixing-board performance. It is a tape loop with eight tracks of different instruments and noises on it. Moving the faders up and down on the board and using the pans creates the music, if you want to call it that--more like a wall of shit--then I cut the tape to end it. "'Megalith' was written by Brad Dunn of Seattle, WA, who was partially the inspiration for this record. He performed it solo on a guitar in my...
LP $13.00
06/08/2010
Greg Ashley, mastermind behind The Gris Gris and The Mirrors, is going solo for the first time since his 1993 masterpiece Medicine Fuck Dream. The result, Painted Garden, is Ashley's most ambitious, textured, beautiful and dark record to date. Warmer and more intimate than Gris Gris' 2005 garage-psych stunner For The Season, Painted Garden still reflects the same vision behind that band's greatness. Written in the burnt-out ghettos of Oakland and in Ashley's remote East Texas cabin, the album's ten songs drip with the psychedelic flair that turned on cats such as Roky Erikson, Mayo Thompson and Skip Spence (and more recently Vetiver, Six Organs of Admittance, and Devendra Banhart). Beautifully orchestrated, sometimes fragile and always fuzzy, the album features great tunes, proof that the young songwriter's star is still on the rise. Written, produced and performed almost entirely by the artist, Painted Garden is a true vision realized, and puts Ashley right up there with the great musical minds of the day.
LP $9.75
03/13/2007
CD $12.00
03/13/2007
***Coming from Houston, settling in Oakland, friend to the Cuts, loved by the Modey Lemon. Makes sense this acid-tinged, macabre piece of beauty falls on the lap of Birdman. Think Roky Erickson, Syd Barret, Mayo Thompson, post-ax wielding Skip Spence; the songs on Medicine Fuck Dream are hypnotizing, mind-altering, dark, fuzzy bits about love, love and death, love and war, and Technicolor love from the leader of Texas' Mirrors (not the old Mirrors from yesteryear). Greg Ashley has a new band called The Gris Gris, whose Birdman debut will be coming early next year. Ashley will be touring with the Gris Gris during the last months of 2003 playing songs from Medicine Fuck Dream as well as others. "Greg Ashley is a troubled young man and that's the good news. He writes and sings like he's felt it ten times harder than you hear it. Listen the second time and the avalanche catches up to you quickly. This kid's a star and recognition begins right now." -Greg Dulli, 2003 * Solo acid-folk vehicle by the lead singer of touted Bay Area band The Gris Gris * Bolt down the cash register! Features a friend of The Cuts!
LP $9.75
11/11/2003
CD $12.00
11/11/2003