***Dateline, December 2013. Ten years after the sinister first stirrings of THE HOWLING HEX, Drag City finally gets the picture as to the truthiness of it all: All-Night Fox needs to live on as a vinyl LP in the 21st century! All-Night Fox was released in early 2005, after a series of vinyl-only LPs introduced to the world the wide range of The Howling Hex. But when All-Night Fox appeared, it was in the then-popular CD format only. Ah—as in so much of life, meaning comes after the moment of impact. Deeply grooved and stomping, alive with a triple-headed vocal attack, aloft on clouds of reverb, All-Night Fox should be heard from every possible angle. This hi-fidelity vinyl pressing from the Quality Record plant will ensure a superior playback for years to come! (STREET DATE - 12/17/2013)
LP $19.75
12/17/2013
CD $13.75
03/01/2005
***THE HOWLING HEX are back in town—you can feel them in the air, man! The Best of The Howling Hex is a new album of new music by a new incarnation of The Howling Hex, now broadcasting as a band from the big town of Denver, Colorado. After years staked out in the border country of southern New Mexico, guitarist and leader NEIL HAGERTY is back in the phonebook, giving The Hex an urban soapbox on which to stand for the first time in their ten years of re-re-revisionist history. Mile high style seems to be a good match for the mercurial back-road attire of The Howling Hex. For this new album, the wide-opens spaces and New Border rhythms of recent albums have been telescoped and accelerated into a high-stepping, uptempo night on the tiles. Kicking the beat with New Border funk is a rhythm section complete with drummer, last heard on a Howling Hex record back in 2007. Also redux is the functionality of the “ditty”—most recently experienced on Earth Junk. The Best of The Howling Hex includes seven shortish songs that weave the wild spirits and far-flung textures of Wilson Semiconductors into tightly compressed sing-songs, before turning the jam out to bring the levee home. Hagerty’s guitar tone is an alien wonder, and the careening beat of the band unleashes him to fill solo spots with fervor. No Export to Europe. (STREET DATE - 2/19/2013)
LP $19.75
02/19/2013
CD $13.75
02/19/2013
***BACK IN STOCK!!! THE HOWLING HEX, Wilson Semiconductors: one guitar, four songs, a multitrack recording unit. Out of the desert and into the mountains, The Howling Hex are at large once again, upping the ante by lowering the body count this time around. Recorded and mastered at Sonic Ranch in the tiny township of Tornillo, a border town in El Paso County, Wilson Semiconductors is a pure strain of The Howling Hex—a Hex of one, one NEIL MICHAEL HAGERTY, who did everything on the record after the writing, which was shared in spots with longtime Hex-mate MIKE SIGNS. Alone at the wheel don’t necessarily want for company though—with time and space on his hands, Hagerty rolls out elegant norteño bass lines and then vocals and guitars that mesh like homemade gears with the beat. Despite the unbending pace, something seems to be melting as if the merry-go-round done broke down—but that’s just the sound of you hearing the music, a common by-product of The Howling Hex listening experience.
LP $17.75
12/06/2011
CD $13.75
12/06/2011
***In 1997, Drag City published Victory Chimp, a paperback book. This had been committed to text by NEIL HAGERTY from memories, wire photos, sheet music, cobol computer printouts and his own typewritten notes circa 1980–88. The story had to be told, but in ’97 the long-form radio show was not quite the fashion and we certainly weren’t thinking about the coming onslaught of media mash-ups that would develop in our new millennium collage culture. But now... In 2011, Victory Chimp returns as an audio book. Not just any audio book, but a nextlevel audio book, which is only fitting given Victory Chimp’s once-and-future status as an out-level sci-fi paperback. The concept of reading with your ears is surely a nonsequitur that fits the logic of Victory Chimp, where sound is used not simply to create atmosphere, but to pace and forward the narrative. It’s not quite the “total work of art” imagined by Wagner before he soundtracked the Holocaust, but VC pictures fascism as well, albeit from a radically different angle. And so we make the comparison. Not many things compare to Victory Chimp when it comes to form, largely due to its elusive play with it. Even Dos Passos caught shit for skewing structure once upon a time. (STREET DATE - 6/21/2011)
4XCD $26.95
06/21/2011
***NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! All three of the limited edition HOWLING HEX LPs released in 2003 and 2004 on one glorious CD. Streamlined to their atomic essences, each song is a diamond of soulful tuneage pre-prepared to incite and excite and invite further investigation. Twenty-three tracks.
CD $13.75
02/21/2006