2013

 2012

There's a track missing because it was too long to upload. It's a track about Indianapolis super group Vacation Club. Listen to "Club for Vacations" on the Bandcamp page - http://teenbrigade.bandcamp.com/track/club-for-vacations

Read review here - http://spacerockmountain.blogspot.com/2012/01/teen-brigade-into-ocean-2011.html

Rows isn’t literal or abstract. It’s probably somewhere in between, or so wishes it was normal, like you or me. The first album Aroomnoonesees was mostly comprised of live one-take tracks versus an editing structure. Even with all of its flaws and blemishes, the one-take style is something I’m typically adamant about.

- Not because I’m pressed for time or I want to produce shitty material, it’s just that in my experience when cleaning up tracks and removing those blemishes there’s just a finished product that’s not as engaging. One-takes carry an unpolished essence that makes B-sides, live tracks, demos, etc. so appealing.

I started out a handful of songs for Rows with the idea of simplistic pop songs in the vein of Neutral Milk Hotel and a sort of adolescent/immature, pop-punk spirit. I wanted stuff I could play acoustically live and not look like a total ass, but also songs I could layer with synthesizers, samples and live drum machines.

That’s where Rows takes an opposing direction with multiple one-take tracks. The hardest part was balancing out that sound. From first listen it may seem like timing is off and things aren’t properly balanced. There is some of that going on, since these are quick one-takes, but the intention was always to play with form and kind of go against what the trained ear expects. The simple chord progressions carry the songs, and then the drums or samples create the disorienting consistency.

Lyrically, Rows is more serious and at the same time there’s a larger element of humor added to the mix. Rows means death. Either rows of gravestones, mass homicides, multiple flat lining EKGs or any other kind of bureaucratic symbolism. We face rows everyday, but the uplifting factor is the creative impulse all of us embody to disrupt the order of rows and break free of destined loneliness.

 2011,

Teen Brigade is something lame, tired and wild that wants to break free from digital constraints.

Daily, sounds are recorded internally and externally through people and machines, creating sonic inconsistency. To say the music of Teen Brigade bridges a gap of the human portrayal of audible consumption is a gross overstatement.

Live sound is awkward, unnerving; pop sensibilities are played as hymns seeking to be heard as comforting. In reality, they are the eccentricity of cultural pastiche.

When one hears the famous lyrics to the Beatles, “Drive My Car”, an objective assessment is automatically calculated based on social impact. To mock such a significant song is a form of de-canonizing and deconstruction.

The electro-blues of white males bleed in oscillating and enigmatic self-awareness –a solidified reconstruction of broken form mirrored from social norms and worn-out grooves of empirical nothing-know-hows.

Teen Brigade is the vibrating toothbrush or the mechanical vanity of overriding necessity for unnecessary simplicity, never to be anything more than unintentional.

 2012,

This is just a mixtape of me rapping over Zomes' "Earth Grid". I was listening to the album so much in my car that I began freestyling to it everyday while driving, which is where this all comes from.