Memoryhouse / Memoryhouse Dots - 2092599

This t-shirt features artwork from Memoryhouse’s debut record, The Slideshow Effect. Printed on American Apparel’s 50/50 blend t-shirts for maximum softitude!

Released: January 30, 2012

Memoryhouse / The Slideshow Effect - SP925

Memoryhouse formed some five years ago in the depths of Southern Ontario, Canada, in a mid-size town called Guelph as a collaborative project meant to serve as an artistic outlet for composer Evan Abeele and photographer Denise Nouvion. Evan, a dedicated student of classical music and a pop-music encyclopedist, intended Memoryhouse to be a multimedia art project, pairing his instrumental compositions with Denise’s photographs and short films. Testing ways to blur the boundaries between genres, to weave a synthesis of music and photography, they experimented with themes, lyrics and multiple layers of instrumentation. Nouvion’s soft, ethereal voice anchored the frozen textures of Abeele’s compositions with frank sentimentality—a unique approach towards humanizing the electro-pop compositions they were creating. The results, at once timeless and new, were impressive and in September 2011 we at Sub Pop released a fully re-recorded, remixed and re-mastered version of the band’s 2010 self-released, digital-only EP, The Years.

The new album is called The Slideshow Effect and its title speaks to what hasn’t changed for Memoryhouse: their continuing interest in the synthesis of the aural and the visual. It refers to the photographic/cinematic technique of zooming and panning to animate still images, often used in documentary film making to give movement to archival photographs. The 10-track album, produced by Abeele, with assistance from friend, collaborator, and occasional Memoryhouse bassist Barzin Hassani Rad, finds Memoryhouse heading toward a new clarity in composition as well as sound; a more organic direction for artists who are, in their own words, transitioning from a “bedroom recording project” into a fully realized band. Nouvion’s voice has never been more present than on the new album, which finds her stepping away from Memoryhouse’s past reverbed sound in favor of a more upfront, and intimate vocal approach. They half-seriously refer to their new sound as “Taylor Swift with Built to Spill as her backing band.” However The Slideshow Effect might be described, we fully-seriously love it.

If you pre-order The Slideshow Effect by February 28th, you’ll receive a limited edition photo scrapbook put together by the band!

Also worth noting, if you pick up The Slideshow Effect LP from us, or at your local, independent record store, you’ll get the Loser Edition, a colored vinyl version of the record, in this case, a lovely light purple. Just look for the official LOSER seal!

Released: February 28, 2012

Spoek Mathambo / Father Creeper - SP975

Johannesburg’s Spoek Mathambo (real name: Nthato Mokgata) first hotwired our world with a series of collaborative projects—Sweat X, Playdoe—that placed his smart, dirty vocals on top of electro-rap bangers that activated dance floors across the globe. Things went darker and deeper with his 2010 debut album, Mshini Wam, a record which took Spoek’s love affair with South African culture and his coined “township tech” as a starting point. As always, he pulled those influences in a direction all his own (incl. a pitched-down wobble-house cover of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control”).

With the arrival of his second album, Father Creeper, Spoek Mathambo makes the Afro-futurists look old school. Each song arrangement is a statement in and of itself. Rock moments swerve electronic. The crisp, changing rhythms of Mathambo’s live drummer go cyborg with drum machine beats. Guitar lines snake and ripple across the album, ranging from summery highlife melodies to amped-up rock riffs. Soulfully sung choruses shift up into double-time rap choruses as video game bleeps splash through Mathambo’s gutturals. Lyrically, Father Creeper flips the concerns of mainstream rap by embracing a deep sensitivity for a traumatized society where the fucked-upedness is real, the optimism stubborn and the booty ripe. The more you listen to Mathambo’s world, the more it makes sense. The big picture shows us a musician hitting his stride with enough confidence and vision to craft songs as robust and challenging and attractive as life in our electrified, apocalyptic 2012.

Released: March 13, 2012

feedtime / the Aberrant years - SP980

With the Aberrant years, Sub Pop finally realizes our goal of releasing feedtime, a longtime staff favorite and a huge influence on the label’s early artistes. From 1978 or 1979 (dates are hazy) until the breakup of their classic lineup in 1989, Sydney, Australia’s feedtime—no, that’s not a typo, the ‘f’ is lowercase—shoved their mutant fusion of early American blues, stripped-down hard rock and minimalist punk on an often-hostile music scene. Their raw vision of rock music and disdain for trendy music-biz maneuvering earned them little in the way of mainstream success, but it did get them a rabid underground following (notably Sub Pop’s very own Mudhoney) and the support of seminal Aussie indie label Aberrant Records, Amphetamine Reptile Records and Rough Trade US.

The sound of feedtime was like nothing else in Australia: a vintage blues swagger via roots rock and the late ‘70s that didn’t come from an established clique, a pure strain of rock and roll with a relentless mechanical propulsion. It was the perfect symbiosis of syncopation, minimalist rock that carried a thunderous atmosphere of reckless intoxication and intense personal pain but with a self-assured “ease” amongst the chaos. The sound was both Zen-like transcendence and a form of self-defense from psychic scum. Impenetrable, yet welcoming. Guitar noise you could dance to with lyrics cut straight from experience, tradition and dead crazy urban confusion.

the Aberrant years collects the entire output of feedtime’s 1978-1989 lineup, including their self-titled debut, shovel, Cooper S and suction, plus gobs of rare bonus tracks and a full-color booklet with extensive liner notes by band biographer Leon O’Regan.

This is perfect sound and pure art. Avant-garde pub-rock. All hail the concrete urban blues.

Available as a 4 LP or 4 CD box set.

Released: March 13, 2012