BLAHA “The Art of Not” 2017, Wet Bridge Records. BLAHA is one of the side projects of The Blind Shake’s and Shadow in the Cracks’ prolific Mike Blaha. We caught the band on Friday night at Acme Records in Milwaukee (along with local bands Fox Face and The Pukes) and picked up the new LP at the show, so this is the first listen. It has a similar dark intensity with touches of surf-psych like The Blind Shake (especially on “Home-a-less” and “Delicate Foreigner”) but with less density and speed. The instrumental “High Tide, Omaha Beach” is haunting and sparse, the title track “The Art of Not” is menacing with a hypnotic tribal beat while “Loneliness, I Love You” and “Gone Again” have flavors of indie shoe gaze meets alt-country honky tonk. The show was more raucous than this LP; I think many of the songs BLAHA performed were from their new cassette 499-456 (Kind Turkey Records) which we also purchased at the show and haven’t gotten a chance to listen to yet (I don’t trust our cassette players to not munch up the tape, so will probably do the download soon).

The post BLAHA “The Art of Not” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.

Joe went to see Shadow in the Cracks last week at Acme Records (I didn’t go: too tired and had to stay home with Vault-boy). At the in-store concert he picked up this record, got it autographed while chatting with the guys and took a few snapshots of the show. The Blind Shake will be playing at the Cactus Club later this month and that one I do plan to attend.

The post Shadow in the Cracks “Shadow in the Cracks” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.