most undeserving of being tied dead-last on our staffs year-end list

CRAPPY DRACULA/FARMS IN TROUBLE "White Women" split 7inch EP

 If band's like Tyvek are the bright & clever head of the class students in the modern of school of Wire Pink Flag teachings Milwaukee Wisconsin's Crappy Dracula are the freshmen who are always getting swirlies and being thrown head first into lockers. A barrage of bright & brittle Telecaster bursts, burping bass lines and marching band drums going way off the route of the parade snaps & bangs crash together in overmodulated 4 track glory. Many moments of angular goofing that culminates in what has to be accidental brilliance on their side's 2nd song "Application" (sandwiched between the nerd punk conniption fit of "Hospital Waste Management Facility Party Tonight" and a faithfully battered take on Guided By Voices "A Good Flying Bird") where it's a Pabst drunk Red Crayola before they changed the spelling of their name. Interestingly the band spells their name The Krappy Drakula on this record. I've been assured that it's just in coincidental and I shouldn't put so much thinking into trying to figure out if their are any cryptic messages/secret motives that the band may have because it's giving them too much credit.

Farms in Trouble - The Gas Statioin Soundtrack

The above quote is an extract from a zany press-release accompanying the debut full-length of the Milwaukee based Farms in Trouble and for once here is an album that makes such bold comparisons seem not only justified but almost an understatement. ‘The Gas Station Soundtrack’ does indeed have shades of Beefheart eccentricity, the broad stylistic range of the Beatles’ White Album and employs a lo-fi recording technique similar to Guided By Voices but more than that the band have a personality and charm all of their own. Though largely the work of song-writing duo Zach Pieper and Riles Walsh, the cover lists a total of nine players whose instrumental credits range from the traditional guitar, bass, drums etc. to ‘bike spokes’, ‘static’, ‘junk’ and curiously: ‘enthusiasm’.

By squeezing 27 tracks into a concise 42 minutes it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the album to be overly fragmented and lacking in focus. Actually the opposite is true; the brief song lengths (longest 2:36, shortest a mere 22 seconds) allow the band to trim the fat while keeping all the flavour and though the disc hops from one genre to the next each new track seems perfectly sequenced to follow on from the last. With so many mini-masterpieces to choose from singling out favourites can prove a challenge. The band’s unique approach to recording and mixing means that repeated listens reveal new layers of detail, such as the droning organ chords of ‘Empty Arrows & Exit Signs’ and snippets of sampled dialogue that litter the cut-and-paste sound collage of ‘Guilty Science’. ‘Like a Needle in Heaven’ is about the most perfect piece of jangling sing-song pop I’ve heard in a long time, almost as good is ‘The Open Range’ whose upbeat rhythmic drumming will surely make it a live favourite. The aforementioned ‘bike spokes’ make their appearance on ‘Stick Man Bugs Out’ which sounds a little like some of Beck’s early lo-fi experiments. Further hints of Beck show up in the retro keyboards and hip-hop beats of ‘Many Boss Levels’. Pieper and Walsh’s quirky sense of humour is apparent throughout many of the lyrics and song titles like ‘Tigerlilly Pillowfighter’. The humour can also be tinged with darkness as in the ghostly guitar strums and lonely lament of ‘No Free Rides’. The quality remains consistently high right through to the end; penultimate track ‘Pleasure Dome’ is one of the best with driving drum beats, snaking guitar noodles and sighing vocal harmonies while the final ‘Auto-Biography’ is a brief and bittersweet voice and keyboard closer. These 10 songs along with 17 others make this probably the best album I had the good fortune to discover in 2008. Current edition is in cd-r format and limited to 200 copies.

Farms in Trouble - The Gas Station Soundtrack

Over winter break, I got a chance to give a visit to a few local record stores and a few in Milwaukee as well. On a freezing night, inside of one of the last open shops on Brady St., a not-so-shabby local chain, I fished out The Gas Station Soundtrack by Farms in Trouble. In a plastic sleeve, pressed firmly in the fold of a rectangle of cardboard–the diagram of a patchwork quilt screened on its front–was a disc that the clerk assured me was “dirty.” I don’t think I realized what he meant until later. I gave him $6, the cost of the album. It sat for a few weeks with all the other albums I collected over the break.

This 27-track epic is the product of Zack Pieper and Riles Walsh (of The Candliers), Milwaukee’s own, better known as Farms in Trouble in their 10-piece format. Totaling in at 42 minutes, this album is genius. It’s also, admittedly, dirty. For several reasons. I’ve just finished listening to it, and aside from the fact that my head is still spinning from the manic joy of the whole thing, its texture is also a force to be reckoned with. It’s not lo-fi, it’s not proper, it’s not simple and it’s certainly not a demo. It’s… dirty. No single song breaks the 3-minute mark, but if you weren’t following along, you’d swear there was a long one in there, for sure. Each track lends itself to the next in some way, sometimes chordally, or lyrically, but more often with a particular juxtaposition that makes it rough and crude without losing its charm and brilliance.

As I looked back at the album art, I saw the patchwork drawing. A collection of grids, dotted lines, arrows and what I think are pieces of a city map, the album truly does resemble a patchwork collage. The Gas Station Soundtrack is homegrown. It is rough on the edges and jagged in the seams. There is absolutely no way I could describe this album with a few songs, so I’ve picked some momentary favorites.                                                  INDIEMUSE

CRAPPY DRACULA/FARMS IN TROUBLE "White Women" split 7inch EP

The White Women EP consists of funny, askew punk rock from a couple of Milwaukee bands in a nostalgic 7-inch format. With their semi-psychedelic/semi-crusty numbers, Farms in Trouble add a tad more melody than their compatriots. The act with the crazier name, Crappy Dracula, has the noisier sound, too, but it's an abrasiveness tempered by self-deprecation and the travails of urban ennui. ShepherdExpress