The Release: Welshpool Frillies (LP—GBVi, 2023)
I’m gonna be completely upfront with you: I will not be writing about Welshpool Frillies this week. Sorry if it’s been a while since The GBV Project actually focused on Guided by Voices, but I’ll make up for it next week by discussing each of the band’s three 2023 albums. The context is more or less the same for all of them, and honestly, they all kind of blur together for me anyway—even after having spent a week revisiting each one of them.
This week I’m going to do something that I have avoided since I launched Strange Currencies at the beginning of 2020: discuss my own music in unambiguous terms. Sure, I’ve referenced my musical endeavors in previous pieces—including several entires in The GBV Project. We’ve referred to it as “Royalty Free (To Us) Music” in the two podcast series that I’ve hosted with Tim Ryan Nelson and Glenn Krake—both of which utilized our recordings as transitional music. But never before have I ever mentioned it by name, tried to promote it, or directed the readers of Strange Currencies to the places that they can find it.
And honestly, I never really saw the value in doing so. In fact, I’m still not convinced that such a value exists. This website draws a few thousand visitors per month, but most of the traffic comes from Google searches that direct people toward specific articles related to topics that they’re already interested in. As such, most of that traffic seems to be of the ‘one and done’ variety. Occasionally a newcomer will stumble across a project like this one, The American Garage Rock Road Trip, or A Century of Song, and cycle through multiple entries; but for most visitors, they find the article that they’re interested in, (maybe) read it, and then move on to someone else’s dimly lit corner of the internet.
But over the past few months, I’ve had a number of people who are aware of my dual hobbies as a musician and a music writer ask why I don’t use the latter to promote the former. And of course it’s something that has crossed my mind, but in the early days of Strange Currencies I was in the middle of a years-long malaise when it came to music making. In fact, this website was something of a coping mechanism for that very problem. But since I’ve reengaged with songwriting and recording over the past two-and-a-half years, the question has become a bit more relevant.
And I’ve always responded to it with some kind of comment on the notion of ‘journalistic integrity,’ despite the fact that I’ve never been a professional journalist, and have had no formal education on what defines the ethics of what is, for me, merely a hobby; in fact, I haven’t had any formal education on writing since a time when it was widely considered improper to begin a sentence with the word ‘and.’ And over these past few months, my responses have been met with more pushback—mostly of the encouraging variety—from the people asking me those questions.
So, at the risk of alienating those who are drawn to Strange Currencies by its editor-in-chief’s legendarily-unremarked upon journalistic integrity, I’ve decided to indulge those who have encouraged me to cross-pollinate my pair of unpaid hobbies. To the loyal readers of The GBV Project who would rather not hear a forty-six-year-old high school teacher talk about his band, feel free to check out now; I hope to see you again next week, when I finally write about La La Land, Welshpool Frillies, and Nowhere to Go But Up.
Oh, you’re still here. Thanks…
So, I’m in a band/musical project, alongside my aforementioned podcast co-hosts and occasional Strange Currencies contributors, Tim and Glenn. We call ourselves Glass Suburban—named after my own teenaged mishearing of a line (“so sneak out this glass of bourbon”) from They Might be Giants’ “Road Movie to Berlin.” We all grew up playing music—myself in Northern Arizona, Glenn in Northern California, and Tim here in the Portland metro area—and the three of us previously played together in a band called The Postcards.
We write songs. A lot of them. Some of them are short. Some of them are even shorter. We record them in my basement studio, to cassette tape, on a Tascam 424 Portastudio four-track. Eventually we transfer the tracks over to a computer, where we mix them, and send them off to my friend of thirty-plus years, Jack. He masters them, and then arranges for them appear on all of the major streaming services (Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Bandcamp). This is all done under the banner of a label called Agua de Sed Records, which Jack formed in 2001.
Despite the fact that we have a core of supportive friends and family, not many people listen to our music. At present, we have fifty-eight followers on Instagram. We personally know most of them, which—we’ve been told—is not something that bands typically brag about. Apparently these things matter. And while this relative lack of followers (and engagement) might bring us down from time to time, we keep writing more songs. Lots of them.
And, if I’m being completely honest, I think more people should listen to those songs. A lot of them are really catchy. Some of them are pretty clever. And none of them are all that long; so if you don’t like one, you won’t have to wait around very long for the next one to start.
But since this is a music website, I should probably provide more of a reference point for our songs than ‘catchy,’ ‘clever,’ ‘plentiful,’ and ‘short.’ Chances are good that if you’re reading this, you like Guided by Voices. They’re a pretty big influence on us—even beyond the fact that they were also led by a middle-aged teacher who would get together with his friends on weekends to drink beer and record songs on a four-track. Collectively though, we’re probably more into Pavement than anything. I’d also say that you don’t have to listen too hard to hear influence from the likes of Pixies, They Might be Giants, Beck, Dinosaur Jr, The Breeders, Wire, Daniel Johnston, Sebadoh, The Clean, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, Television Personalities, Devo, Yo La Tengo, Violent Femmes, Modest Mouse, the Mountain Goats, R.E.M., Parquet Courts, Built to Spill, Duster, Sleater-Kinney, The Olivia Tremor Control, Cleaners From Venus, and Frank Black. If you love any of that stuff, you might like us.
And—this is really important—I don’t promote our music with any kind of desire or expectation that it becomes ‘known.’ Seriously. First off, Strange Currencies doesn’t have that kind of influence. Second, we already have steady jobs. I gave up on making music my career long ago—somewhere on the way to having two kids by the age of twenty-five. We don’t have those kinds of ambitions.
What we do have are songs. Lots of them. We started recording them in January. We began releasing them this past summer. We put out an album in August. We have another one coming out later this month. We have a third one mixed and ready to be mastered. We’re planning to record three more of them next year.
And the end goal for this particular project—at least this phase of it—is to release all of those songs in the form of a six-LP set. We’ve been designing artwork. We’ve been scouring the bargain bins of Portland’s record shops, in search of a very specific series of Reader’s Digest multi-LP compilations, for which we plan to repurpose their outer slipcases as unique, handmade, numbered box sets.
But pressing records isn’t cheap. It makes zero economic sense to produce anything less than 250 copies. We’ve made a few discs for ourselves through an on-demand service, but each record costs us around $25. If we pressed a short-run (250) of each of our planned six discs, we could sell the entire six-LP box set for $50. And really, we’d only need to sell a little over a hundred of each disc at the wholly reasonable price of $12 to break even. However, pressing 250 copies of records by a band with only fifty-eight Instagram followers doesn’t seem advisable. And so, our passion project may just be destined to become a victim of the economies of scale.
But, like a certain Ohioan who faced a similar reality forty years ago, I feel compelled to go for it anyway. After all, if we can just make enough money to fund the next project…
Rating: Welshpool Frillies (6.9)
*Singles are star-rated by their A-side; albums and EPs use the “Russman Reviews” scale.
Bob-ism of the Week: “Leave your skin at the border / Enjoy our brief northern summer / It’s a feathering flutter / Down in gravity’s gutter” (“Rust Belt Boogie”)
Next Week: GBV manage to squeeze one more album into their busy 2023 schedule.
