Garbage

Okay so honestly... let’s not retread the history that precedes this record. It's all on the Internet for anyone to have at it. If you have any interest at all ....you can Google anything you need to know about us in five minutes flat. Just please ignore the stuff about me dropping a poo in an ex boyfriends cornflakes and we're all good.

Suffice to say we have been gone for seven years. We now are experiencing what is commonly known as the seven year itch except instead of wanting to leave each other, we want to return to one another. We have made, arguably, the best record of our career. You may hate it. In which case you have no need to read any further.

For those of you who have a further curiosity let me say this: We quit in the middle of our last tour and went home because we were sick and tired of our record company wanting us to make money whatever the cost to our morals or our bodies. We quit and went home because we couldn't stand another backstage hang with anyone from the aforementioned record company. They quite literally were making us sick.

We quit and went home and built ourselves a life outside of Garbage and outside of music and outside of the rest of the world. Then we got bored of doing that and pretty much began to obsess about making music again. We got together about a year ago now in a small studio in Atwater Village, Los Angeles. There we recorded all of the songs on this new record we are calling Not Your Kind Of People.

We wrote, recorded and mixed it ourselves, old school style.

We are self- releasing it on our own record label STUNVOLUME, new school style.

The title of this record is kind of our mission statement. For too long we almost felt like apologizing for the fact that we didn't fit in musically with any kind of scene. We didn't fit in with the electronic scene even though we used electronica. We didn't fit in with the hipster scene even though we were pretty popular. (Probably because we got too popular. We sold 13 million records over the course of our career.) And we didn't fit in with the alt rock scene either.

We just didn't fit in. We never have.

Now we accept this fact and are happy about our outsider status. We realize that we don't sound like anyone else and that is a pretty hard thing to achieve in this current climate where we all have access to an infinite sea of musical possibilities. To have hold on a unique sound is a currency of which we are proud.

If you have further interest in us or the making of this record, please feel free to schedule an interview with our press office. We will be happy to accommodate your curiosity. Otherwise I think we are done here. Don't you?

Thanks for reading.
garbage.

The Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips are an American rock band, formed in Norman, Oklahoma in 1983.

Melodically, their sound contains lush, multi-layered, psychedelic rock arrangements, but lyrically their compositions show elements of space rock, including unusual song and album titles—such as "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus with Needles", "Free Radicals (A Hallucination of the Christmas Skeleton Pleading with a Suicide Bomber)" and "Yeah, I Know It's a Drag... But Wastin' Pigs Is Still Radical". They are also acclaimed for their elaborate live shows, which feature costumes, balloons, puppets, video projections, complex stage light configurations, giant hands, large amounts of confetti, and frontman Wayne Coyne's signature man-sized plastic bubble, in which he traverses the audience. In 2002, Q magazine named The Flaming Lips one of the "50 Bands to See Before You Die".

The group recorded several albums and EPs on an indie label, Restless, in the 1980s and early 1990s. After signing to Warner Brothers, they scored a hit in 1993 with "She Don't Use Jelly". Although it has been their only hit single in the U.S., the band has maintained critical respect and, to a lesser extent, commercial viability through albums such as 1999's The Soft Bulletin (which was NME magazine's Album of the Year) and 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. They have had more hit singles in the UK and Europe than in the U.S. In February 2007, they were nominated for a 2007 BRIT Award in the "Best International Act" category. By 2007, the group garnered three Grammy Awards, including two for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

On October 13, 2009 the group released their latest studio album, Embryonic. On December 22, 2009, the Flaming Lips released a remake of the 1973 Pink Floyd album The Dark Side Of The Moon. In 2011, the band began releasing new songs every month of the year: some were collaborations with artists like Neon Indian and Lightning Bolt; some were elaborately packaged ideas such as a 24-hour-song on a USB drive embedded in a real human skull.

Dum Dum Girls

Write about what you know. That's what they say. But that's a lot easier said than done when what you know is very, very difficult to bear. That was the challenge Dum Dum Girls' leader Dee Dee faced when writing the songs for the band's moving second album Only in Dreams. "The first record was basically the first songs I'd ever written," says Dee Dee, "and I was thinking nostalgically about being a teenager. This record, it was pretty much impossible not to write about very recent, very real things."

Very real things indeed: Dee Dee wrote "Hold Your Hand" immediately after her mother (the pretty lady on the cover of both the Dum Dum Girls' self-titled 2009 debut EP and their 2010 debut album I Will Be) was diagnosed with what turned out to be a fatal illness, and it's one of several songs on Only in Dreams that unsparingly trace her mom's passing. Other songs spell out the emotional toll of separation from one's lover, something Dee Dee had to deal with while she and her husband (Brandon Welchez of the acclaimed noise-pop band Crocodiles) pursued their own tour schedules.

"Just about all the songs reflect the fact that I'd been on the road for about a year, pretty much separate from everything real in my life except the band," says Dee Dee. "A lot of it is about distance and detachment."

On several levels, Only in Dreams is a great leap forward for a gifted songwriter and an equally gifted band—it's heavy, deeply personal stuff and surely unprecedented for this style of music, and that's what gives Only in Dreams both its uniqueness and its gut-punch emotional impact.

Only in Dreams retains Dum Dum Girls' signature blend of the girl-gang eyeliner punk of the Shangri-Las, the trashy propulsion of the Cramps, and the moody atmospherics of Mazzy Star, but for the first time, all four Dum Dum Girls play and sing on the album. Now the harmonies have more depth, Jules plays her own distinctive guitar leads, and the Bambi (bass)/Sandy (drums) rhythm section powers the music like a vintage V-8 engine. Best of all, tons of time on the road—including two massively successful headlining tours—have molded Dum Dum Girls into a very formidable rock & roll band, giving the music an undeniable force.

And now that power and glory is showcased by a full-on studio production—while I Will Be was recorded at home and modestly spiffed up in a studio by legendary pop maestro Richard Gottehrer (Blondie, Go-Go's), Only in Dreams was recorded at Josh Homme's Pink Duck Studios, "almost a museum in terms of the old amps and guitars he's amassed," says Dee Dee admiringly. Gottehrer again produced, this time with Sune Rose Wagner from the Raveonettes.

Only in Dreams more than fulfills the promise of 2011's He Gets Me High EP, with impassioned, front-and-center vocals from Dee Dee that sometimes recall one of her heroines, Chrissie Hynde; big singalong choruses draped with almost choral harmonies; a chugging wash of guitars drenched in reverb, tremelo and fuzz; and mighty, booming bass and drums. "I've always wanted to be in a loud rock & roll band and still maintain some feminine sound," Dee Dee says. "So even though this album is much poppier and a lot more polished, it's still tough." "Heartbeat" hooks with its Buddy Holly-esque guitar line, while "In My Head" uncorks one of the album's greatest choruses, and brace yourself for the incredibly poignant closer "Hold Your Hand."

Listen to the slowdive ballad "Coming Down," which Dee Dee wrote not long after her mom passed away. "That song came out of being in and out of awareness of the depth of the situation," she says. "Sometimes when I write, I don't really analyze what I'm saying but the more I hear that song, the deeper it feels. I don't know if I'm addressing life or God or what, but it's our big, epic song on every scale."

Dee Dee wrote "Bedroom Eyes" after returning from a European tour, jet-lagged and lonely. "I was home alone," she says. "Insomnia was taking its toll; I felt absolutely crazy. I looked up poetry on the subject and found a Dante Gabriel Rosetti poem and the song was born from that. I'd finally convinced my dad to give me one of his prescription sleeping pills and it kicked in while I was writing the song and I started hallucinating."

Only in Dreams represents a musical evolution for Dum Dum Girls and a personal one for Dee Dee, and that's no coincidence. "I'm for real," she says. "We all are. I'm really passionate about this, it's all I know. And maybe we've just grown up a bit—or grown out a bit. There's some weight to what we do, and a pure intent, and I think that comes across on this album."

Royal Bangs

Defying monotony is the reason ROYAL BANGS exist. In recording their third album, Flux Outside, out March 29th, the band has proven their ability to challenge the tediousness that consumes the music industry today. With the new album they have reclaimed their identity: three high school friends playing inspired, kinetic rock and roll, and in the process, discovered the sound they've been looking for all along. "This record is not just another in a progression of little steps forward," Schaefer explains. "It's something different."

Under ROYAL BANGS and various other guises, frontman Ryan Schaefer, drummer Chris Rusk, and guitarist Sam Stratton have been making music together since their high school days. In 2006, they unleashed We Breed Champions, a home-recorded and self-released breakthrough album. The record's potent noise-pop wormed its way into hearts throughout the southeastern US, eventually finding its way to Patrick Carney (The Black Keys), who reissued We Breed Champions on his own Audio Eagle Records in May of 2008.

In February of 2009, ROYAL BANGS traveled to Tangerine Sound Studios in Akron, Ohio to record their long-awaited sophomore album. The studio quickly became home to the three obsessive musicians, who even found themselves sleeping there at night. "We just could not stop working," Schaefer recalls. The result was Let It Beep, released on Audio Eagle in September 2009. It was the intense attention to detail combined with pure joy in songwriting and recording that first attracted Glassnote Records to the band when they saw them play at SXSW in 2010 and months later at Lollapalooza. Glassnote was blown away by the band's powerful performance and it was soon clear ROYAL BANGS had found their new home. "It just felt natural," Schaefer explains.

To say that ROYAL BANGS have developed a saner work ethic since signing with Glassnote, would be to lie. If anything, the band has only become more focused and passionate. To record Flux Outside, they decamped to a friend's restored Victorian house in Knoxville, where they spent a month exploring the unique acoustics of every single room. They'd already written much of the album holed up in their rehearsal space, an old methadone clinic. The resulting album is a beguiling, multi-layered collision of brutal, wittily arranged rock and roll. "Loosely Truthing" is a madcap blend of driving guitars and syncopated keys. "Back Then It Was Different" is an elegy to past desires set to the relentless throb of a defiant piano. But of all the album's tracks it's the bright-eyed frenzy of "Fireball," that really captures the essence of this band.

The "Fireball" demo was initially barely formed, just something Schaefer had recorded and then forgotten about. But they needed new material. After the loss of a few band members due to the rigors of touring, they began to question how they were going to continue on, especially with even more severe touring in the near future. "We had no idea how we would play these songs with three people," Schaefer remembers. "It was depressing, trying to recreate things we'd already done." Schaefer began to play with the beginnings of "Fireball," and quickly, it became the band's motivation to create. Once ROYAL BANGS focused on writing songs the three of them could play together, everything fell into place.

After years of exploration and reinvention, ROYAL BANGS finally know who they are and what they're about. In this state of reassurance, the band is eager to tour. "When you're on tour it's nice because there's a schedule," Schaefer says. "It's not a tough schedule, but it's a schedule, and we're doing the only thing we've ever wanted to do."

The Congregation

Classic soul meets rock and roll in this dynamic eight-piece collective from Chicago. The Congregation features Gina Bloom, a singer whose raw and powerful vocals are underscored by Charlie Wayne's dynamic guitar riffs and the band's garage rock rhythms. You won't find any sugarcoated love songs here, just a little bit of longing and a whole lot of wronging.
The Congregation released the EP, Not for Sleepin', in late 2010 and will make its full-length album debut with Right Now Everything this fall.