I'm going through the archives of Philadelphia label Single Girl Married Girl. So far, very happy with the outcome. Nice to throw a dart at their catalog, throw a few virtual dollars in the mail, and have a box full of little beautiful cassettes show up in front of my door in a week or so, with old-school download links that exclude Bandqlamp entirely no less. Quality.
Their stuff is well curated - from the disembodied android weirdness of Actual Pearls (nice Mark Beyer album cover!) to bands with names like Your Children Is Beautiful (whose floaty feeling reminds me a bit of Disco Inferno minus the samplers) to Scott Churchman - see next paragraph.
Mr. Churchman's Ignore That Noise has been on heavy physical and mental rotation lately. Pick-to-click sad hit "Anna" begins inauspiciously with the line "nape of your neck" - for some reason I can't hear the word "nape" without hearing bad poetry - but it ends up going to some cool, dark, and surprising places. Bonus points for upright bass. I've also been enjoying his downer showtunes on No Ambition. He mentions that the four songs "seemed to just fall out of the sky on four consecutive days." The best songs are all written in 15 minutes anyway, right?
OK, I was going to throw in that reference to Maxine Nightingale's "Right Back Where We Started From" as a little joke (apparently it really was written in 15 minutes though), but I think the gold lamé waves (complete with shark fins) on this ridiculous TopPop set deserve their own entry:
Sorry for hijacking your blog entry, Single Girl Married Girl! Keep making great stuff!
