I made these Dirty Heads posters and this email about them
Also, we have so much record label stuff going on that I can't tell if anyone can sort out what we're up to...it got weird. Very exciting for people who are the "ride or die" Landland people, I think?
Huh…look at that; the little secondary title header thing has a character limit. I’m still learning some limits here. Anyway, hi…it’s the end of July, somehow, and I’ve been bad at updating anyone about all of the things going on over here.
I’ll make a list, and I’ll try to keep the bullet points concise [edit: that didn’t happen, obviously]. Maybe I’ll come back around and elaborate on some of this later, because it’s important to me, but right now it’s 3:42 am [edit: 6:29 am, lol] and at least one of these things is kinda time-sensitive.
Unrelated to anything, if you want to hear what it sounds like in here while I’m working on internet stuff sometimes, it’s just a playlist of whatever Spotify grabbed when I told it to find all the Orindal Records stuff…did you know you can search for record labels on there? It doesn’t always work great, but type in “label:[the label name]” and it’ll grab whatever has that metadata.
So yeah, here’s the stuff that OWEN ASHWORTH has released on his ORINDAL RECORDS label, over a full day of it. It’s one of my favorite record labels, with a disciplined cohesion that—frankly speaking—I don’t think I could ever pull off with mine. It’s all excellent worktime music; an early Orindal sampler compilation had the title “Gentle Weirdos,” and that also sums it up really well:
So, Landland stuff…I very recently made a poster for DIRTY HEADS and their show last night in Raleigh, North Carolina, a city rich with NASCAR history and a region of the country with a plentiful auto racing tradition in general.
The first poster I’d made for them a few years ago depicted an octopus’s POV behind the wheel of an old 1970-something oldsmobuick1 in the midst of some sort of steering overcorrection on the Houston interchanges.
Given North Carolina’s NASCAR history, I wanted to build on that driving theme with a poster that paid homage to the regional auto racing history, while also shaking some of the overgrowth off of a few of the now-abandoned ghost racetracks in and around the Raleigh/Durham area—namely Raleigh’s Southland Speedway and the Occoneechee Speedway just outside of Hillsborough.
These are going up in the store at 3:00pm TODAY, Friday the 28th of July. Central time zone. They’re five-color screenprints—18”x24”—and limited to only 50 copies. There’s also a VERRRRY limited variant edition on RAINBOW SILVER FOIL (25 copies), and an even more limited EXCLUSIVE variant that’s a lot more sepia than the regular, meant to feel a bit more aged and nostalgic and monochromatic.
Our LANDLAND COLPORTAGE RECORD LABEL has been up to all sorts of things this summer. We had a whole bunch of records in the works right around the same time that the entire vinyl production industry hit a giant supply chain brick wall, so we’ve been sorta silently just sitting on a whole bunch of really exciting music and just WAITING for it to happen…and now the floodgates are (pretty much) open, so all of a sudden we have THREE records up for preorder right now, and I love all of them.:
There’s the ACHINGS album, “All These Shapes, All These Days” that I wrote about last time. We’re just about ready to ship these (after a slight delay with the final bits of production). If you ordered the deluxe bundle with the DANIEL DANGER art print, I’m psyched to announce that it’s also a collaboration with our very own JESSICA SEAMANS, as she made a rad watercolor to flesh out Daniel’s trademark linework and tie it into the color scheme of RANDY ORTIZ’s excellent cover illustration. I think we’re keeping the final image secret for now…can’t decide if it’d be more fun for the people who ordered it to get a cool surprise when they open the thing up…I think that’s what I’d want, but who knows.
The next thing is “Destination Isolation,” the debut LP from one of my current favorite Minneapolis bands, CLOSETALKER. I saw them for the first time by total chance about a year and a half ago, opening for MAN AFRAID & SUNSET (both amazing Minneapolis hardcore bands), and by the time they’d launched into a RITES OF SPRING cover, I’d already decided I was going to raid their merch table and pick up whatever they had…except they were still a bit too new to have anything out.
Fast forward a bit, I’d already been thinking of reaching out to them, when I get an email out of the blue, asking if I could help release the tape they’d just recorded. Synchromysticism! No idea I was on their radar at all, but I couldn’t have said YES any faster.
So yeah, add a little bit of mastering help from the legend DAVE GARDNER and a ton of patience from the band while I got all my ducks in a row, and here we are: I get to help make a Closetalker record.The band currently has the cassette version at their shows, and the first two singles, “Threat Level: Punk Time” and “Front Door Schemin’” are streaming on everything right now:
The album is up for pre-order for a few more days, with three vinyl color variants & a couple t-shirt bundles. It’ll come packaged in laboriously screenprinted & hand-assembled gatefold jackets (similar to the ones we made for the DEAD HISTORY LPs), designed by me & built by me & REBECCA SUNDE right here at Landland. Lots of people have been telling me nice things about these gatefold jackets we’re making…if we’re going to be putting out vinyl, it means a lot that all the packaging and everything that comes with it looks and feels the best it can.2
Here’s a bit more context from the CLOSETALKER bio, and a little gallery thing of what we’ve got available for you:“The presence of early emo is particularly strong, as well as later ‘90s post-hardcore bands, especially drawing from the Merge Records sound exemplified by bands like Superchunk & Archers of Loaf. Destination Isolation merges these diverse influences into a cohesive whole. Bringing a punk rock sensibility to what is more rightfully an emo band, these songs celebrate friendship and the “good life” as much as they lament isolation, strife, and capital. Jovial but unafraid to let on that shit sucks sometimes, and representing a wide swath of the human experience, their very versatility is what makes Closetalker resonate with such a broad body of fans.”
This last one is a serious dream-come-true…I actually still can’t really believe this ended up in my hands, but right before Covid shut everything down, in the last months of 2019, one of my all-time favorite bands, SELF DEFENSE FAMILY announced they were going to play a string of shows on the East Coast to record a live album. As is my tendency sometimes, I dropped everything and drove out to Boston to catch the first of these three shows, knowing that every time I’d seen this band over the past fifteen years or so, they seemed to totally reinvent themselves, bending genre and hardcore sensibilities and doing it all with a bit of a cultish smirk. I wasn’t wrong…they played these shows as a full eight-piece band on three tiny stages in Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, and rebuilt a ton of their songs for this big band lineup, presumably to put this part of their catalog to rest and not play this music anymore.
Cutting a VERY long story short—and skipping a lot of boring vinyl production delay drama—that album cover art up above means that the long-awaited live SELF DEFENSE FAMILY double-LP, “Law of Karma Live: Fake Shit Wins But Not Tonight,” is a real thing and not just muffled chatter amongst my buddies or a skeptical running joke on the AXE TO GRIND podcast.
On top of that, PATRICK KINDLON (who also sings in DRUG CHURCH, one of the best post-hardcore bands going right now, and definitely the most fun to see live) somehow trusted me enough to make the thing a Landland release, so here we are…almost immediately after that, MIKE SUTFIN jumped on board to masterfully handle art duties, and in a minute we’ll be screenprinting & hand-assembling all the gatefold jackets here behind the walls of our tiny & secret art compound.The first single “I’m Going Through Some Shit” is streaming all over the place now (and on our fledgling YouTube channel), and it’s gotten great coverage in Brooklyn Vegan as well as a bunch of other indie outlets, but I seriously can’t wait for people to hear the whole thing. I honestly feel that these are the definitive recordings of some of these songs, and if not, it’s definitely a perfect introduction to a band whose ridiculously huge catalog might be a bit intimidating to jump into.
We’ll be launching the second single on Monday…it’s a NEIL YOUNG cover, which fits in perfectly with some of their more recent releases, which veer into the best kind of LUNGFISH-esque repetition. If you know me, you know this is exactly my lane.
Pre-orders are up now in our bandcamp for your consideration. Limited colors that we’re running low on already, weird bundles, all of that. There are a couple different t-shirt options (also designed by MIKE SUTFIN), as well as a strange collector’s item/artifact for the devout SDF fan, or anyone who wants to go deep into these shows: a timed edition lathe-cut 7” titled “Dog in the Manger,” built entirely from additional between-song conversation/monologue that didn’t fit on the record. Those weird things are only available during the pre-order period, which is ending on August 4th.
Here’s a look at the shirts and the lathe-cut 7” and some of the vinyl options:
Yeah, so now I’m getting the angry warning bloops that this email is too long to send, haha. My apologies? The one last thing that I should probably mention is that—as I said up there a little bit ago: WE NOW HAVE A YOUTUBE THING. Take a minute and check it out whenever you get a chance.
I built it mostly to have a place to put the videos and things that we’re uploading for all of this record label stuff, but now that it’s there, I plan to make it a place for putting process videos of drawing and printing (time willing, of course), and to have it be a hub in general for everything Landland-related. Right now, we’ve got a bunch of playlists for video interviews we’ve done, a couple tours of our old studios, and live performances of any & all bands associated with the Landland Colportage record label.3
Okay…that’s all, for real. Grab these Dirty Heads posters in a few hours if you’re feeling it, and check out our record label things if you haven’t…I SWEAR we’ve got more posters and visual art stuff in the works, as well as getting back on the good foot with stuff from before the studio relocation/reconstruction, but I also kinda love it when people get into these records we’re making alongside everything else.
Thanks! Sorry this is long again. Too many things going on…oh, haha, let’s do this: For anybody who read this whole thing and got to the bottom, use discount code “bookitclubpizza” until the end of July to get 10% OFF in either our Bandcamp store, or the regular one. Why not?
Thanks a whole ton for being here, and for everything else, all the time. I think this is all the news I’ve got until August 8th.
Dan (is gonna go get a little sleep)
Would mid-90s post-hardcore enthusiasts get that reference? It’s a ridiculous thing to call attention to…
You know, within our means and abilities, I guess. On the rare occasion that we’re not screenprinting and assembling the jackets here, we push for those really nice tip-on old fashioned wraparound jackets that used to be the norm before direct-to-board printing became the fast/cheap way to get everything done.
There are also a few videos of Jes’s old band BEST FRIENDS FOREVER buried in there, and a couple really well-shot videos of the time that we invited THOU & EMMA RUTH RUNDLE to play music while standing in the very spot where we usually run our press and rack prints. So crazy.