Mac DeMarco

Olympia/Seattle's Naomi Punk are at least partly inspired by their grunge forbearers. The genre's basic elements are well-represented: The sludgy erosion over the guitars, the drums blasting with machine-grade heaviness. Since the old formula goes "one part metal, two parts punk, and one part psychedelic weird shit," it's not a stretch by any means to consider Naomi Punk a grunge band. And while t
hey're clearly a part of a long lineage of bands taking their influence from the Seattle rock scene of the early 1990s, Naomi Punk's songs are not cheaply manufactured recreations of Soundgarden or even TAD. The Feeling, originally released on vinyl and now being issued by Captured Tracks digitally and on CD, captures the trio studying the grunge rulebook just to tear it in half. Naomi Punk's approach to grunge is one of deconstruction and rebuilding in different places with fewer parts.

This is Calvin Love: He started a punk band in the northern Canadian city of Edmonton at the age of thirteen. The oppressively long, dark, and cold winters kept him indoors making madcap music while summer nights found him tearing up the sleepy streets with rock ‘n’ roll fueled adrenaline. Friends would say he was born with a rebel heart.
After the early years, he left town and has been on the road for the last five years touring dive bars and clubs throughout the US, playing in various bands in and out of Los Angeles. During this time, he managed to create a collage of visions, sounds, and scattered tracks while writing and recording in his bedroom studio, motels, bus stations, or wherever the road happened to lead.
This is Calvin’s first foray into a solo career. Armed with a 4-track, mics, computer machine, keyboards and guitar, Calvin has laid down his debut record New Radar, due to be released this fall on Autumn Tone Records. With backing influences of pop and dance music of the 50’s and 60’s, as well as the punk/electronic/new wave of the late 70’s and 80’s, Calvin Love’s music is a sonic escape into psychological mysteries and enlightened tales of love and death.
For what it’s worth, Calvin’s interests lie in photography, aesthetics, the paranormal, technological adaptations, pirates, The Goonies, zombie apocalypse, Jarmusch, strange states, dancing girls, sleepless nights, D.I.Y., Iggy, Bowie, tombs, hitchhiking, black & white, and the space-time continuum…