***‘Summer’s here and the time is right for getting blackout drunk in the street.’ EUREKA CALIFORNIA's going way too fast, and if they don’t slow down they’re gonna crash. Like peak Elvis Costello, they think if they keep the wisecracks and the puns coming fast enough they can avoid facing the truth—that death comes for everyone and nothing dies faster than dreams. Versus, their 3rd album in 3 years, is the first one recorded in a studio and it gives EC a power they’ve never had before. It’s incredible that two people can make such a big sound, but JAKE WARD and MARIE A. UHLER have developed a near-telepathic ability after years of playing together, and while they’ve always been good, Versus is their first stab at greatness, soaked in television and gin and the kind of language you hear everyday but you never heard quite like this. Endlessly self-referential and endlessly self-destructive, stuck on an endless treadmill of tension and release, of megalomania and doubt. Versus is agoraphobic fight songs, songs about loving television more than people because people always let you down and the static from the set makes more sense than the static coming out of their mouths. EC songs exist in a world where ordering a pizza is fraught with anxiety and you have to laugh to keep from dying.
LP $15.50
03/25/2016
CD $9.25
03/25/2016
MC $6.45
03/25/2016
***The winners want us to believe the world is beautiful, but WITCHING WAVES has seen the world and knows this is a lie—that everything is lost and nothing is to be trusted. We saw them open for Eureka California in the UK last year and couldn’t get the songs out of our head so we’ve jumped on the second album. EMMA WIGHAM, MARK JASPER and ED SHELLARD are Witching Waves, and they sound like exiles in their own country. Because this music is rooted in UK DIY and the only alternative to the clean smiles of 21st century surface life is dirty frowns, you might hear the fuzz, the flattened shouts, and think you’ve heard it before, but then you notice the guitars at the end of ‘Red Light,’ how they swell & buzz like an attack of locusts, and the oceanic rise & fall of album closer ‘Flowers’ and you realize that in their endless explorations of black & white, WW has created a universe of infinite textures and shade.
LP $15.50
02/26/2016
MC $6.45
02/26/2016
***ANTLERED AUNT LORD is entirely JESSE STINNARD, a guy who’s spent the past ten years in Athens, Georgia as a cherished eccentric in a town known for its cherished eccentricities. HHBTM is honored to bring Stinnard’s tuneful genius into the light with his first official release. Antlered Aunt Lord is everything today’s music is not—melodic, lyrically inventive, reticent, and moving. Songs so catchy they sound like they emerged fully-formed from the radio, with lyrics so mysterious they sound like they emerged from your dreams. This is the prophet sharing—the missing link between the Pixies and The Byrds if they’d been raised in the Appalachians. Little was known about Stinnard, an autodidact often seen around town in 24hr diners reading thousand page books, until he was begged into joining TUNABUNNY when their drummer quit days before the band’s first tour (Stinnard had approached the band after their third show and asked if he could record them). His shows around town are legendary for their passionate indifference. Stinnard’s been known to stand with his back to the audience screaming at unseen phantoms. Sometimes there’s a band, sometimes it’s just Stinnard with tape loops streaming around the space. Culled from a several-hundred song backlog, Ostensibly Formerly Stunted (And On Fire) is the sound of brain fever on fire. You think of R. Stevie Moore until you realize he never made a song as moving as ‘Throwback Bikes.’ You think of Robert Pollard until you realize Pollard hasn’t made a song as great as...
LP $15.50
11/17/2015
***HHBTM is honored to be handling the vinyl/cassette release for THROWING MUSES’ Purgatory/Paradise. Released last November on CD with an accompanying book of lyrics/essay/artwork, Purgatory/Paradise won the band some of the best reviews of their illustrious career. Coming on the heels of KRISTIN HERSH’s Rat Girl, a stunning piece of literature, P/P heralds a creative renaissance from one of the most unique artists in the history of rock. Hersh has always written with a cinematographer’s eye, the epitome of show v. tell, and P/P is a masterpiece of detail. Sweaty and noirish, it unfolds like a film.
2XLP $31.25
10/14/2014
MC $8.05
10/14/2014
***Crunch marks the second EUREKA CALIFORNIA album in 18 months, eleven more songs you can't stop humming. In an age where everything's overplanned and under thought, underwhelming and overwrought, EC's spontaneity feels like a breath of fresh air. They walk the fine line between not giving a fuck and not giving a shit and come down on the right side every time. Crunch moves with an easy, breezy confidence. Just when you think they're only tossing off, they turn around and toss off a powerpop classic like 'This Ain't No A-Side,' that can stand proudly alongside early Jam or Plimsouls. Like a baseball pitcher who knows how to change speeds, EC works the corners of the plate, leaving the listener dizzy and off-balance, entertained but needing to go back and listen again.
LP $14.00
06/03/2014
CD $9.25
06/03/2014
***Last year’s This Is What Your Mind Imagines featured a bunch of teenage boys about to go off. Like early Husker Du, it bypassed conventional notions of melody and headed straight for pure anger. Nevertheless, every paper in Athens put MUUY BIIEN on the cover. For DYI they’re going to need to build them a goddamn statue. Only a year on from their debut, Muuy Biien have undergone an evolution nearly as startling as the primordial fish that grew lungs and crawled onto land. It’s a band that is about to make the lazy comparisons of the past—to Savages, to Iceage, to Joy Division, to The Fall—seem ridiculous. It may be all anger & brutality on the surface, but there’s a pop sensibility at its heart, a buoyancy that TIWYMI lacked. That album was a pure laser beam of black & white rage, but DYI finds the band slowing down every so slightly and allowing things into the songs—melody, vulnerability, dynamics, hooks—that up till now you had to look closely to find. Muuy Biien is the real thing. No college degrees, no connections, no future. Kids in their 20s raised in the Georgia countryside, born to work in fast food—the band members met while all working at fried chicken chain Raisin’ Cane’s, eventually moving in together like some kind of white trash Monkees. But art springs forth from the unlikeliest of places (though you’d think everyone would know by now that being rich in Brooklyn doesn’t give you access to...
LP $14.00
04/08/2014
CD $9.25
04/01/2014
***TUNABUNNY from Athens, Georgia take their most dance oriented track "Form A Line" from their recent and third album Genius Fatigue and give it the remix treatment and have a dream come true with having VANESSA HAYof the legendary post-punk band PYLON, one of Athens' most iconic voices doing her own version of the song with the band backing her. Edition of 200 copies.
12" $10.50
04/30/2013
***It’s the sound of someone tearing their room and their mind to pieces. This Is What Your Mind Imagines, the debut album from Athens, Georgia’s MUUY BIIEN, is the soundtrack to your next nervous breakdown, your next transcendence. Five guys in their early 20s living in the same house, working at the same fast-food chicken place, like an enraged underclass version of The Monkees. They spend their days besieged by college students in their Bulldog sweatshirts and BMW’s, and spend their nights looking for a way out. Like an American Mark E. Smith, singer JOSH EVANS delivers his lyrics with a vicious snap. He has no patience for fools—no patience for anything. He sings of prisons that are spherical and without exits, songs of family violence and loneliness. It’s punk without the pose, punk without the poise, a desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of your memories. Muuy Biien knows that eternity is a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness, and sometimes not even then. TIWYMI ricochets between moments of pure black anger (think side 2 of Zen Arcade) and blissed-out white ambience (think Eno’s unrecorded album Music For Shitholes). One is a dream, the other reality, but there’s no telling which. And the ambience is even more intimidating, more frightening, than the rage. It’s the sound of someone lost in labyrinths of thought who may not ever return. With another album scheduled later this year, the band is moving fast, charging headfirst into melody and...
LP $14.00
04/23/2013
CD $9.25
04/23/2013
***BAM! BAM! got their name after an audience member came up and told them ‘you just fucked the shit out of those Pebbles comps!’ The Bay Area duo sings about bad times until they become the good times. With their Young Marble Giantsish take on garage-pop, they elevate the mundane and everyday until it becomes profound. And you’ve gotta love a band that puts the song with the CALVIN JOHNSON guest vocal on the B-side. Bam! Bam! aren’t in it for the name-checks. Ryan Gosling told them it was rude to name-check. Bjork has said the same thing. Edition of 500 copies packaged in silkscreened sleeves with a download.
7" $4.90
02/19/2013
***Genius Fatigue is 37 minutes bursting with ideas. Punk rock, new wave, power pop, no wave breakdowns, experimental ballads, musique concrete, and free jazz solos—it’s all in there, combined with a lyrical prowess that borders on the intimidating. Genius Fatigue attacks with a clear-eyed frenzy. It is the boldest, brightest TUNABUNNY yet. Ten songs about drag queens & political defiance, notoriety & humiliation, casting couches & Hollywood uncles, the end of the world & the beginning of life. Impossible to classify, impossible to put down, Genius Fatigue is a classic. The band is already at work on their next album, expected summer 2013. They are available for interviews and grief counseling sessions. (STREET DATE - 1/29/2013)
LP $14.00
01/29/2013
CD $9.25
01/29/2013
***SWEATER GIRLS got the beat. Sweater Girls are living down on Infatuation Street. Sweater Girls are a bright, Vitamin D-enriched ankle sock delight. Their debut album, Sweater Girls Were Here..., sounds like the band inhaled all three packets of Fun Dip along with the sugar sticks. It’s all about spazzing out over love and loss, the jittery adrenaline jag of youth. Its vertical melodies skip up and down the scale, even as they describe a horizontal lifestyle Sweater Girls are stuck in Los Angeles and they’re choking on the smog. They lost their bubblegum in the iceplant. Their music is major keys and minor tragedies, healed scars and broken hearts. They’re spectators in paradise, always on the outside looking in. Anonymous, yet at the center of it all—swooning at the future, the possibilities it might hold. Like a less-stoned, less-insipid Best Coast, singer DIANA MEEHAN has a Southern California lilt in her voice that’s impossible to fake. Sweater Girls may be smiling on the outside, but they’ve got a switchblade tucked in their back pockets in case you get out of line.
LP $14.00
09/25/2012
***Restraint. The callous insults thrown into the faces of dear friends and relatives, while you sit at the dinner table holding back hot tears, too ashamed to stand up to your drunken uncle at the holiday party. Enter ORCA TEAM’s debut album. Traffic lights sway in the wind of a forgotten town. The beach is near but pine trees line the shore and it’s never warm enough to swim. Orca Team’s Restraint is smooth and smothered in disappointment. A voice, barely audible, heard in the wind while wrapped in a windbreaker skipping stones into the waves. At the end of the night, you can find Orca Team standing in the corner, as they slyly try to seduce your girlfriend’s younger brother. They only recently found the self-confidence to try winning a heart and when they leave, you go with them. Restraint is the tension found on a first date. You refrain from speaking your mind; your posture is impeccable and decorum is priority. Orca Team creates the soundtrack of heartbeats under streetlights, and under crisply ironed shirts dipped in sweat. Orca Team is ‘arctic surf,’ the music echoes minimalist post-punk but within layers of reverb and unfocused yearning. It is the soundtrack for a city where there isn’t enough social lubrication to get anyone to notice your woeful desires. The melody slides down the neck of a bass guitar while the drums and guitar fills the gaps; only when necessary. Picture them playing unaffectedly in the back of a restaurant...
LP $14.00
07/17/2012
CD $9.25
06/26/2012
***British art-pop five-piece SHRAG and US indie sensations TUNABUNNY are teaming up for a joint headline UK tour in February. To commemorate this union and the unmissable series of shows, the bands have released a split 7”, a three-way release between labels WIAIWYA, Fortuna POP! and Happy Happy Birthday To Me. The single features a brilliant new track from Shrag entitled “Tendons in the Night” as well as Tunabunny’s song “Locusts.” Edition of 500 copies, with only 50 available for distribution.
7" $6.30
04/24/2012
***Like the title implies, RED PONY CLOCK’s Whatevz Forevzzz is a summation of their firm belief that they should be able to play whatever music is striking their fancy at any given time. Most member's of RPC are first generation Mexican-Americans. They were raised listening to the music of their homeland, but hit the ground running upon the discovery that not only did their new home have a rich musical history, but so did the rest of the world. With an "everything including the kitchen sink" approach to both their songwriting and instrumentation, RPC always manage to infuse their music with the festive looseness of their mariachi forefathers. The end result sounds a bit like the video store clerks in Michel Gondry's "Be Kind, Rewind" accidentally erased an ethno-musicologist's Ipod and had to replace the content with their own "Sweded" renditions of the lost tunes. Limited to 500 copies on gold vinyl.
LP $14.00
10/18/2011
***TUNABUNNY is, for now, less of a criminal element that it used to be. On last year’s self-titled debut album, you had to listen closely to hear the Blondie, to hear the Abba, to hear the pop. Some people just heard noise. Some people thought it was glorious. The album received rave reviews in some unexpected places, including Everett True in Australia (‘this music makes me deliriously happy’) and a top-5 end of year placing on the BBC’s website. They’ve been mentioned in the same breath as Sonic Youth, Kraftwerk, and Can. And this spring saw a successful tour of the eastern half of the United States. Now comes Minima Moralia. The album marks an unprecedented leap, like the one that took Nirvana from Bleach to Nevermind, like Pavement from those early EPs to Slanted & Enchanted. This year’s Tunabunny marks a shift from noise towards melody, from chaos towards structure, from indifference towards rapture. It signals a Tunabunny more pop, yet more intense; more accessible, yet more desperate; more comforting, and yet more uncomfortable. Minima Moralia takes the first album and ratchets up the melody, the chaos, the intensity, and the beauty. Even Southern Baptists can believe in their evolution.
LP $14.00
09/27/2011
***Their fans south of the border may call them ‘Las Siestas,’ but AFTERNOON NAPS are wide awake and snapping their fingers. Cramming their songs with chord after glorious chord, stuffing them with hook after catchy hook, this music makes you want to open the windows, shake the dust out of your curtains, and finally get around to cleaning your house. Based in Ohio, the AftNaps know what it’s like to suffer through another winter, paralyzed by stiff joints and frozen toes. Their new one-sided 7-inch is a triumph of sunshine over rust, of enthusiasm over entropy. Irresistable. RIYL: Felt, Orange Juice, Aisler’s Set. Limited to 300 copies in matchbook silkscreened and die cut sleeve. Includes a digital download.
7" $6.30
03/29/2011
***Only the young truly know what it means to age, when every torn calendar page mocks you—it whispers in your ear that your dreams are a fraud, that you’re going to end up as defeated and disappointed as your parents whether you like it or not. This fear fills the songs of EUREKA CALIFORNIA with a dark humor and a sense of yearning that is rare in today’s scene. The songs push and they keep on pushing. While their peers sit around getting stoned, throwing the kind of tantrums that only the lazy & privileged can ever find meaningful, Eureka California knows that there are millions of people out there who work for a living, and they stand in solidarity with the workers. When the Taco Bell workers unionize next year and go on strike for a living wage, the agitated garage pop of Eureka California will be the soundtrack to their bonfires. RIYL: Superchunk, Sugar, Archers of Loaf. Limited to 300 copies with in a three-color silkscreen sleeve. Includes a digital download.
7" $6.30
03/29/2011
***Bopping and skipping out of the Pacific Northwest, ORCA TEAM’s music is a clean twang, minimal and precise. Every note is drenched in reverb, not as a fashion, but because you never want it to end. You might call them an arctic surf band, dancing through fog, hiding behind moss—to stay in the water would require the amputation of limbs. A voice sings in a sweet but insistent monotone, wrapped in a windbreaker and skipping stones into the waves. Enchanted dance music. RIYL: Buddy Holly, Beat Happening, Santo & Johnny, and Oh Ok. Limited to 500 copies in silkscreen sleeves. Includes a download.
7" $6.30
03/15/2011
***TUNABUNNY sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before. Their debut album walks an amphetamine path between Pere Ubu and The Raincoats. Three girls, one guy, and a synthesizer sitting on a carpet covered in paint and the sprawled out works of Julio Cortazar, Tunabunny has fallen down the rabbit hole and is begging you to follow, even as they doubt your own existence. Growing up in Athens, Georgia surrounded by a surplus of instruments and boredom, Tunabunny set out to remind people that pop/rock music shouldn’t be about technical ability or social networking. They’re wrong of course. Pop/rock music in the 21 st century is a played-out corpse being skullfucked by overprivileged boys and girls hoping to manufacture a personality for themselves out of something that other people think is cool. That is why Tunabunny thinks of pop/rock as something that should be destroyed, or at the very least subverted, but would probably be better for everyone involved if it simply ceased to exist. LP comes with digital download.
LP $14.00
09/21/2010
***THE SMITTENS are a five-piece indiepop band from Burlington, Vermont and like to think of themselves as a DIY twee pop explosion. DANA KAPLAN, COLIN CLARY, DAVID ZACHARIS, HOLLY CHAGNON and MAX ANDRUCKI switch up instruments, song-writing, and singing to create brilliantly lyrical and hyper-catchy pop songs of all colors, shapes and sizes. Formed on a whim at a party in 2002 by a group of popkids who wanted to make for their friends the kind of music they love, the Smittens have emerged as one of the country’s best-loved underground indiepop quintets, with headlining slots over the past years at the New England, New York, San Francisco,Toledo, and Athens Popfests as well as the Indietracks Festival in the UK. The band’s third album The Coolest Thing About Love, mixed by ERIC MASUNAGA of the DAMBUILDERS fame. Limited to 300 copies w/ a three-color silkscreen sleeve.
LP $14.00
05/18/2010
CD $12.25
07/29/2008
***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! With nothing more than just three minutes, and a "verse-chorus-versechorus-end!" motto, AFTERNOON NAPS are a vibrant indiepop band from Cleveland, Ohio. Like Brian Wilson if re-imagined by Felt or the Primitives, these teenage symphonies are relics from the past; brought back to save the 21st century from complete and utter pop boredom. Influenced by the C86 scene, ‘60s bubblegum, and sunshine pop act Yellow Balloon, songwriter/guitarist TOM DECHRISTOFARO and keyboardist/arranger LEIA HOHENFELD have been happily playing together since 2006. Having no expectations and "Walk away Renee" constantly spinning on the stereo, the duo recruited some close friends to help bring the band to life.
LP $15.50
11/02/2009
CD $12.25
11/02/2009