Presented by Spirit of '68 DUB THOMPSON + OUGHT
Dub Thompson - https://www.facebook.com/dubthompsonn
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Take the 101 north out of Los Angeles, and you'll pass by Agoura Hills, where the core duo of the band Dub Thompson grew up. Whatever you see in that town won't readily prepare you for the music they wrote while there, but you're free to look.
"Most everyone who's in a group who's our age lives on the Internet," says guitarist Matt Pulos. "The kinds of things that have shaped our band aren't anchored to any one time or place."
Pulos and his bandmate, drummer Evan Laffer, are currently both 19 years old, and are putting that line of thought to the test; their musical influences travel from the Midwestern malaise of Big Black and Pere Ubu, to Kraut pioneers Can and Kraftwerk, while bowing to the British belligerence of The Fall and This Heat.
Recorded while living with Foxygen's Jonathan Rado at his rented house in Bloomington, the band had its first taste of a heavy Indiana summer, and all the humidity and insect life that buzzes along with it. "We woke up every day, hard-boiled eggs and stood on a porch," says Pulos of the experience.
Their first collection of songs slyly unties the shoes of genre and convention, shapeshifts mischievously, and tramples on the promises delivered on the name itself.
There are only eight songs on this rangy debut.
Intense blasts of hook-filled noise rock ("Hayward!"), rocksteady marionette stomp ("No Time"), hypnotic bouts of doomy poetics ("Epicondyles"), outlandishly sexy groove rock (Dograces), and a number of other bite-sized forays into parts unknown are made manifest across 9 Songs.
The vibes are strong here. Pulos sings and plays like he's working out long-standing grudges, pulling the most sinewy tones from an acoustic guitar and ripping huge chunks of demon flesh out of his electric. Laffer matches him step for step on the drums, an exacting presence behind the kit who pushes even the band's more placid moments into bouts of tension. Together they succeed in animating their musical ideas to startling, almost unnatural life. Reverb units, keyboards, samples and processing gluing everything together, saturated in the August heat and worn in until they sound second nature, it's like somehow you've been listening to these songs forever.
Ought - https://www.facebook.com/internetought
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Ought came together in Montréal as a band of expatriates initially attracted by sense-sharpening Canadian winters and university tuition that doesn't cost $40k a year. The city's cultural scene – especially its independent music ethos and galvanizing radical politics – was the underlying attractor, however, and one they jumped right into. Guitarist and vocalist Tim Beeler, originally a folk musician hailing from New Hampshire, fell in with New Jersey native Matt May (keyboards) and Australian émigré Tim Keen (drums, violin) – the three of them began sharing an apartment that doubled as practice space, where they were soon joined by Portland OR transplant Ben Stidworthy on bass. Ought played its first show and recorded its first EP in the apartment's largest bedroom, in the summer of 2012.
Ought is part of a vital and politically-engaged DIY arts community that has coalesced around one of the loft spaces at the northern limit of Montreal’s Mile End district in recent years (the same zone that incubated Constellation amost 20 years ago). The four band members are, unsurprisingly, participants in a half-dozen other music projects. Various members have also worked with Montreal’s fearless and beloved CKUT radio and the Howl! Arts Collective.
Additional Ought history comes by way of the band's own account:
It’s hard to talk about how the band came to be without talking about Loose-Fit, the Brasserie, and The Femmaggots. Loose-Fit was (and is) booking shows out of a local mainstay-type bar in Petit-Patrie called Brasserie Beaubien. This empowered a lot of people to be adventurous with new projects, and also it being always pay-what-you-can and chilled out and a publicly accessible venue (versus a loft-type situation where the address can’t be posted)—basically, it was (is) a Good Thing Going On. The Femmaggots were (are) our friends (and, some, housemates) at the time and besides being near and dear and fucking great people, they inspired a lot of others to start making music—many in this weird kind of punk-esque/political/wordy/funny world that we were also really into.
SO…the Femmaggots, plus the Brasserie made for a slowly expanding spiral of great music happening, plus actively bringing in lots of other groups that we didn’t know about + hooking up with great people coming through town. More Than Any Other Day definitely came out of this environment (and coming to terms with working varying degrees of bad jobs, etc), but also Quebec during the student strike, which was a total lid-off type situation that we were all really affected by. Meeting + playing with all these amazing people is really the story of the band, having never really gotten hype’d or even making physical releases and just really playing lots and being excited and thankful for the opportunity to keep playing and having a true fucking blast at shows, as they say.
Following another recording session in early 2013 and the release of a second EP via Bandcamp, Ought spent a few days at the Hotel2Tango studio with engineer Radwan Moumneh (Suuns, Matana Roberts, Jerusalem In My Heart) in fall 2013 at the invitation of Constellation, laying down a clutch of songs new and old that comprise the band's first "proper" full-length album. More Than Any Other Day is set for release by Constellation on April 29, 2014.