Press Release: The Brainstems’ Album ‘No Place Else’ is Out Now on Bad Diet Records
Children of men, the time has come to put away those magicky crystals and pouty selfie undercuts. The time has come to get back to the basics. Bad Diet Records is bullish about our latest band. Let’s give a cuddly industry welcome to The Brainstems, whose debut LP, entitled No Place Else, is out now worldwide on Bad Diet. How bullish are we about our latest signee?
When we say that No Place Else soars wingtip-to-wingtip alongside our favorite albums (yeah, including outside our label, what, you think we’re grifter publicists?!) we mean it. We mean it like a pocketknife across a palm. We mean it like the ghost of John Peel, when he lifted the severed head of Skrillex before us and cursed a rock-depleted world overrunneth with NP(unker)Cs and tongue-wagging pop tarts. For pale members of Generation Z, let us better communicate in algorithmic marketer speak how we feel about No Place Else and The Brainstems:
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The nimble vigor of The Brainstems shall peel jaded souls off Sleepy Street. Tracks like “Keep It Together” (think a peppier Meat Puppets) and “Time to Ride” (an angsty pile-up in Black Lips mode) will have listeners keeping beat upon the threadbare couch of punk/rock posterity. Granted we’re not sperging or into Nostradamus, but we have a good feeling about this one!
It’s the effortless way No Place Else wills the listener out of the House of WiFi before rushing them around the block that makes the album connect. The Brainstems are punk savants at embedding new listeners into the circularity of their lives. Hit play and all-a-sudden you’re in a spartan performance space right there with them: immersed in the fun, frantic action. Listen further: now you’re present for the innumerable downbeat walks and observant lulling that led to the music’s creation. Without liners!
This is rock borne of days that are uneventfully eventful; days when a caved-in sidewalk covered in bars of shadow and light seems to mimic the chords of y/our discontent.
The Brainstems record and eat tacos in St. Louis, Missouri. They bonded a few years ago at a local radio station. This led to them forming a cover band indebted to garage rippers Ty Segall and The Coachwhips. After a pact to pursue the rock-for-real-life, the band inevitably began to feel the tug of the glittering coasts, the anchor of the falling dollar. The title No Place Else is a nod to the decisions and developments that kept the band banded (thankfully). Counted among their peers are St. Louis’ golden heathens Lumpy & The Dumpers. In fact, both groups share a band member in Gabe “The Babe” Karabell. Trivia for the GF/BF/cat/unemployed paperboy: Lumpy himself drew up a debauched poster insert for the LP.
Most anyone relates to how living in a place outside the media’s eye informs identity and shapes character. It’s a central theme on the album not confined to St. Louis. Similarly, when St. Louis was engulfed in heated debate and overheated camera lights, all the socio-political protests, debates and policing in Ferguson, Missouri, it proved an downbeat harbinger. The Brainstems proximity to headlines led them to write “Redline,” which Bad Diet is backing as the album’s first single. Simmering in frustration “Redline” examines Ferguson’s aftermath in the context of literal boundaries, lines drawn by the unseen hand of bureaucracy.
The tracks “What It Is” and “The People’s Joy” showcase The ‘Stems knack for switch-footing to unpretentious spoken word narrative a la Modern Lovers. These songs in particular sound of another time. They possess a daydream quality that never tips collegiate-quixotic. These songs tap formative (or modern escapist) memories of absentminded browsing huge mom-and-pop record stores. Such detours do not slow the album’s momentum. With No Place Else, The Brainstems surf unstoppable concrete.
Wow. This was a pretty deep press memo for a snarky rock label like us. Eat your heart out, Richard Linklater. We hope you enjoy No Place Else. Spread the word. The Brainstems deserve your coverage, interviews, social hearts, airplay and air mattresses.
No Place Else was mixed by Mikey Young (member of Total Control and Eddy Current Suppression Ring). Cover art is by Dustyn Peterman of Mushroom Necklace. Heart on sleeve by Bad Diet Records. Not literally. We’re not a wine aunt Boomer.
