Day 267.
What the Fuck is Twee?: this is the name of the new compilation put together by the Florida label Ramonescore Radio Records. It is now available digitally but soon should be released on CD. It includes many great bands including friends like My Light Shines For You, Las Margaritas and The Umbrella Puzzles. 11 tracks in total!
Model Village: now we head to Cambridge, UK, to discover the band Model Village and their album “World of Carp”. The album is to be released on March 5, so there’s quite a wait, but that’s ok. It will be coming out on CD and vinyl and right now we can preview the opening track, “Insufferable” which sounds ace.
Johnny Nocash: now we head to Bolton, UK, to hear the new music by the ex-Broken Down Lorry and The Irony Board. IT is an EP called “Roasting on the Cobwebs” and it comes with 5 songs of lovely lo-fi pop. The EP is available digitally now on Broken Down Records.
Death to Slow Music: another Cambridge band! Wow. This is a digital single called “Pressure” and was released on Nov. 27 digitally. The band describe themselves as four anoraks. That sounds good no? This is a fun song too. I should check out the rest of their songs.
Duschpalatset: a four piece from Umeå. That already sounds good. So many great indiepop bands from that northern city of Sweden. “Konstigt” is their latest track and it is superb. It is proper indiepop and I am hooked on this band. We need a proper release soon!
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It’s been a while since I featured a Norwegian band. So let’s do that today. As it is sort of expected I look into the Perfect Pop Records catalog. There are many great bands there and I really haven’t looked at all of them in detail. Maybe that’s something to do the coming year? That’d be great. The Blind Bats or The Ethnobabes are two big favourite of mine. And do not forget The Tables!
The Superman Can Flys don’t have much of a big story on the label, just a 7″ released in the year 2000 and a few compilations.
The “Tar Tar-Pop EP” 7″ is probably their most known work. It had the catalog number POP37 and included 5 songs. The A side had three, “Tar-Tar-Pop”, “Superman Can Fly!” and “Cloudbert” while the B side had “Passionate Hermit” and “Normalize and Stabilize”.
The 7″ comes with some cool art on the sleeve as well as an insert with the songs lyrics and more illustrations. But as we were saying the band also contributed some songs to compilations. In 2001 they would contribute “Nude-A” to the 7″ comp “Perfect Pop 10 Years” (POP39), a rare, not for sale record, that the label put together for the anniversary concert at Mono in Oslo. I wonder how I could get a copy?
The other compilation was “Bestrummed! Perfect Pop 1995-2001” (POP40) also released in 2001. This one is easier to find. The band contributed two songs to this record, “Passionate Hermit” and “To Anyone”.
Aside from these two, the band contributed “Heart of Stone Man” to a 2008 compilation called “Series Two Compilation Vol. 13”. And that’s it when it comes to physical releases. But wait. There’s more.
The band actually still has a website that works. That’s rare, I know. But here we can find good information about them.
First of all there’s quite a biography. Important things we learn from it is that the band hailed from the city of Drammen, west of Oslo. The band starts in 1997 with two brothers, Frode and Vegard who recorded then two songs, “Nude A” and “Superman Can Fly”. Soon after Thomas Innstø would join the band. Thomas being a member of the band The Jessica Fletchers who were also on Perfect Pop.
This trio recorded an album called “Hunk Nguru” which wasn’t properly released, just on CDR. This album included 13 songs, “Nude A”, “Peter Parker’s 1st Bossanova Pt. 2”, “No. 12 Waiting for the Triangle”, “Come On”, “Razorblade Parade”, “Lee Roy & The Disco Stab”, “Superman Can Fly”, “Radiocars”, “Now the Story’s Told”, “Just Another Perfect Song”, “Blueboy Cowboy”, “Stay on Your Horse” and “Drawing of a Fish (live at Cactus)”.
The band would grow bigger. Rune Someday, Bjorn Clumsy, Andreas Munster and Eerie Strøm would join. This new lineup would record a 2nd album called “Tar-Tar-Pop. – So Unfinished, Yet so Complete”. I believe this was also available on CDR. This album had 19 songs! They were “Tar-Tar-Pop”, “Nude A”, “Too Intelligent to Be Happy”, “Are You Funny”, “I Don’t Know Where London Is”, “Superman Can Fly!”, “Major Bill”, “Passionate Hermit”, “Hobgoblin”, “Normalize and Stabilize”, “Bajo Nouevo”, “I Saw You on T.V.”, “Beautifully Wrapped Crap”, “Cloudbert”, “Hermee Life”, “Ba-Boo”, “Blueboy”, “To Anyone” and “Smile”.
Then came the 7″ on Perfect Pop of course. But that wasn’t all. In 2003 the band would release another CDR called “The Superman Can Flys Vs. The E Street Band”, an 11 song album including “Intro by Bruce”, “Big Surprise!”, “One Night to Rock”, “Punk Tambourine”, “Norwegian Ass”, “A Superman Can Fly”, “Bobby Okarina”, “My Love is Just Like Me”, “Sherry’s Place”, “The Toad” and “Aerobic”.
Lastly in 2004 the band would release their last album, “The Whistling One-Chord Band”. Again available on CDR, this one had lots of songs as well, 18! They were “Whistling One Chord Man”, “Heroine of my Dreams”, “Vespa 125”, “Coffee”, “Maggie Waterloo”, “Paulus Pl 4”, “Instant Coffee Break”, “Shoot Me, I’m a Pin Ball”, “If You Know Me”, “CarJack”, “Lee Roy and the Disco Stab”, “Bernie the Barber”, “All You Can Expect From Me”, “Real Springar”, “Spring Comes Anyway”, “Just Like Mom Said” and “Overslept Santa”. It is worth mentioning that all songs are available to download from the website as well as the artwork to put together the CD.
What else? Well on the Perfect Pop website there is a nice review of the 7
by Marianne Jemtegård. It is very nice though it doesn’t tell us any interesting details about the band.
In the Drammen newspaper Drammens Tidende there is an article dating from August 2008 about the indie collective Truls and the Tree. What’s interesting is that Vegard Syrstad was part of this project. It is also mentioned that he played in The Jessica Fletchers.
Lastly, I find three live songs on Bandcamp. They are on the Bandcamp of an Oslo label called Fog Records. It says the three songs are live from Korpsveien, which I believe is a big street in Drammen. The songs are “Tar-Tar-Pop”, “Beautifully Wrapped Crap” and “Superman Can Fly”. These were recorded in the year 2000.
And that’s it. Who remembers them?
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