Petty Bunco

Robb, Emily

If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection

Petty Bunco

The fantastic new album from tireless seeker Emily Robb. It’s a no-frills, high-minded celebration of guitar and sound and tone and string and amp and adventure committed to tape at Emily’s own Suddenly Studio in Philadelphia in fits and spurts stretching over 2022/23. These are economical tunes of utter trance and tightrope pulsations, with a fearless spirit and a devotion to energy and personality that digs into previously untapped mines. With zero fuss and pomp, If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection builds a wholly new palette of expression, and Emily follows her Les Paul like it’s a divining rod. It’s anyone’s guess where it points next, but we’re all fortunate enough to be invited along for the ride.

Nance, David

Pulverized & Slightly Peaced

Petty Bunco

A collection of raw, ragged, home-recorded originals from the down-home prolific mind of Omaha’s top talent David Nance. Originally slated for a 2017 release on Richie Records, the tunes were shelved in favor of some comparatively slicker recordings with Nance’s fleshed out band for what would become the Peaced & Slightly Pulverized on the Trouble in Mind label. Only a fool would find fault with that album. Nevertheless, this one (with a confusingly similar title to that other release) is a ripping, screaming, blown-out affair that comes out the gates salty and hungry for blood on “Ham Sandwich” and it never seems to lose its appetite. Conceived and recorded within a single work week, with our blue-collar Nance setting up all the microphones, playing all the instruments, and riding all the faders, Pulverized & Slightly Peaced contains all the elements that we at Petty Bunco admire in music: the tried and true Rn’R instruments lovingly misused to create a vital ragged sound dripping with personality and verve. And along with it all: Nance’s unmistakable soulful howl. To wit: the sidelong “Amethyst”, should go down as this era’s Broken Arrow, a tune with twists and turns and a cathartic climax that’ll inspire air-guitar heroics and repeated needle drops over and over and over again.

Heavenly Bodies

Universal Resurrection

Petty Bunco

As any casual student of astronomy will tell you, the heavens move at their own pace. A certain slowness and deliberateness marks each tug and shove of any given celestial object. To push too hard is to upset creation’s harmony. Such a folly is at best unsettling; at worst, cataclysmic. Our vast unearthly soup swirls with a patience largely unknown to mere humans who burn out and rot in the blink of a lunar eclipse. Heavenly Bodies, the slow-simmering trio from Philadelphia, seem to follow their namesake’s temporal sense as a goddamn mission statement. With Universal Resurrection (PB011), the inscrutable trio suggests a creeping theme, sets it free in zero-gravity, and dares the listener to outpace the patience of its black hole crawl. Best of luck to those who try, the rest of us await the only universal resurrection we deserve. For fans of grounding issues, psychedelic discomfort, and patient anxiety. Recorded 2020 at Jerry’s on Front by Heavenly Bodies, mastered by John Dawson.

Robb, Emily

How To Moonwalk

Petty Bunco

How To Moonwalk is the brash n’ bold new one from Philadelphia-by-way-of-Maine-&-Montreal’s Emily Robb. With a formidable CV in the underground and sub-underground, Emily sits as the top contender for the East Coast’s most modestly masterful electric guitar abuser and this is the record to prove it. Though she served as top talent in efforts by Astute Palate, Storks, Louie Louie, & Lantern, How To Moonwalk marks Emily’s long-overdue, mucho-anticipated debut unencumbered release. And the album is, as they say, a motherfucker. Splattered across its eight or so tracks, How To Moonwalk shows a loyal respect to the rock n’ roll form while refusing to be held back by a single one of its limitations. No vocals, no artifice, barely even a drum. It’s a totally fried, mutant offering that’ll entice the twisted seekers-- a sustained, distilled meditation on the unabashed revved up freedom of rock. Naturally, the folks here at Petty Bunco couldn’t be prouder to have our humble trademark of quality on it.  Recommended for fans of the reductive threads that run through Link Wray, Poison Ivy Rorschach, Les Ralllizes Denudes, and the Smashchords.   Recorded summer 2020 at Emily’s Suddenly Studio in Philadelphia with help from Bill Nace.

Strapping Fieldhands

Across The Susquehanna

Petty Bunco

Fourteen brand new instant classics from Philadelphia’s original purveyors of fractured psychedelic shanty rock. Pared down to the original duo and every bit as potent they were in the days of The Demiurge, Bob Malloy and Bob Dickie assembled Across The Susquehanna in their private isolations in the year 2020—literally traversing the mighty Susquehanna River via the ether as they crafted the album. What they’ve come up with is yet another in the deep canon of Fieldhands classics, an album of uneasy lullabies rich with Barrett-damaged melodies, spare arrangements as likely to feature a horn section as an overdriven strat, and Malloy’s ever evolving vision of a timeless pastoral psychedelia. To those who have been following the Fieldhands from the beginning, this new one will prove an essential piece of the intricate puzzle. To those searching for an entrance into this hidden world, the way in is Across The Susquehanna.

Astute Palate

S/t

Petty Bunco

***NOW AVAILABLE ON CASSETTE!!! Twelve inches of evidence of a whirlwind Philadelphia weekend. ASTUTE PALATE wrote and recorded the record and played a gig and consumed a dozen burritos and a pile of beer and shipped a fella back to Omaha. The audacious ad-hoc 4-piece ragged combo put in the sleepless 48 hours and this is what we get: 2 raw sides of electric rock action with all the humbucked girth, single-coil screech & low down thud a Tascam 388 can handle. Today’s necessary palate cleanser. Astute Palate is EMILY ROBB (guitar/vox), DAVID NANCE (guitar/vox), DANIEL PROVENZANO (bass) and RICHIE CHARLES (drums). Recorded & mixed by Emily Robb, mastered by MIKEY YOUNG.  “When discussing supergroups, I am sure we can all agree there are some that have exceeded all artistic expectations (Methods Of Mayhem, McBusted) and others that have been crushing disappointments (Winery Dogs, La Coka Nostra). Astute Palate fall squarely between the two (I respect you far too much to engage in hyperbole) but the results of this unique collaboration feel like a fully realized thing as just as much as any of the projects they’ve spearheaded previously (Writhing Squares, Storks, Watery Love, David Nance’s Rock’n’Roll Circus). If you’re anticipating some kind of hastily conceived, vague “jam” exercise in directionless fuckery, well, I take it back. You will be disappointed, bitterly. But if your attention span can handle genuine songcraft, incendiary guitar work and a band that sounds improbably fused together, Astute Plane’s debut will rank very high...