Discoveries of the Day :: Bare Wires & Wild Flag
Bare Wires patents their own brand of electrified garage punk with their latest album Seeking Love (Castle Face). The Oakland based trio fuses glam glitter pop with garage punk grime, producing what has been called everything from “Soft Punk” to “Leather Jacket Rock”. Breaking away from the “Biker Psych” sound of Snake Flower 2, Bare Wires started as the side project of Matthew Melton in 2007 with the release of a crude garage punk single Voodoo Doll on European label Solid Sex Lovie Doll. Later developing on what was called “a rawer Raw Power” and adding his own analog recording system into the mix, Melton continued to record under the name, releasing the Artificial Clouds LP on Tic Tac Totally in 2009. With solid mid-fi production and a minimalist aesthetic, Artificial Clouds dispensed with the jagged, proto-punk edges of “She’s So Out” and slipped into the smoother, hook-laden, but no less scrappy rhythms of “Go Away Frankie” and “Teen Witch.” Bare Wires’ “smooth punk” found only further expression on the Let Down 7” (Milk n Herpes), a dirty, sleazy pair of fuzz-doused songs with guitars ripping through a crunching amplifier on a hazy cloud of smoke. With their latest album Seeking Love, recorded in Melton’s bedroom studio in Oakland, CA, the three piece comprised of vocalist and guitarist Matthew Melton, bassist Fletcher Johnson, and drummer Nathan Price, delivers ten stadium-ready tracks of hand-clapping, speaker-blasting rock n’ roll, while still speaking to the sincerity and authenticity that has become Melton’s songwriting trademark.
http://www.myspace.com/thebarewires
What is the sound of an avalanche taking out a dolphin? What do get when you cross a hamburger with a hot dog? The answer is: WILD FLAG.
WILD FLAG is a Portland, OR and Washington DC based quartet consisting of Carrie Brownstein (co-star of ThunderAnt, Portlandia with Sled Island 2007 alumni Fred Armisen), Mary Timony, Rebecca Cole, and Janet Weiss. The members of WILD FLAG have played in numerous and notable bands, including but not limited to: Helium, The Minders, Croissant Cocktail, Feeble Knees, Quasi, Dogz, Sleater-Kinney, @, Asia, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks.
Brownstein and Weiss were in Sleater-Kinney, and toured with Timony’s band Helium on numerous occasions. Brownstein and Timony played in a side project called The Spells. Rebecca Cole’s Portland based band The Minders was a frequent opener for Sleater-Kinney. Weiss and Cole play together in The Shadow Mortons. If someone drew a visual representation illustrating the ways in which all indie bands are interconnected, the four musicians who make up WILD FLAG would be in the same, tiny sphere. Eventually, they figured it out. It’s more exciting to simply join musical forces, than it is to make sense of this paragraph. Apt adjectives for describing the band’s music: wild. Also: flaggy. .
