What have I gotten myself into now? A cassette tape (CT) with a solitary, celebratory piece of 'toast' named Toasty Grandpa, which is apparently hammered. Sounded cute. Cute enough to the point of being a bore, but as it would turn out, it wasn't... I foolishly let my guard down to the same level with my expectations. If this CT didn't have an attachment with the local Insta-Label Lo-Fi City (LCF), I'd maybe not give this a listen... But that's bullshit, I know... And really, just aesthetically wrong. Upon hitting the appropriate buttons, I immediately fell in love with the minimalist nature (a LCF trademark) that was taken with Toasty Grandpa once more!
If you close your eyes real tight, and crank-up the volume knob, you could just as easily be taken back to your earliest listens of installments of the Killed By Death series! In example: The Eat, Child Molesters and Screamin' Mee Mees... Maybe even The Embarrassment! I didn't give LFC a 'preferred status' within the non-pages of Thwart for nothing! LFCs releases, like Toasty Grandpa, have won me over. Again... Still... You know, all that Jazz...
Still though, what the fuck is Toasty Grandpa? Taking it straight to the top, I got a hold of Jonny Lo-Fi , the anchor of LFC himself to find out.
"Toasty Grandpa was Matt Archibald's band in high school along with John Mattock (both members of Little Trees and Toboggan Race) I believe what I gave you is a mix of songs mainly recorded on boom boxes during their band practices (a couple ft. me on drums or back up vocals).
One of the things that I appreciated was the 'I need a label/Now I have a label' movement behind the LFC project. "I just figure most of my collective of friend musicians have a lot of underexposed music we've made over the last 10 years and if it's just sitting around it might as well be out out there, even if it ends up no one listens to it. Oh, and also a
Providing more background on Toasty Grandpa, Jonathan explains more:
lt started as just John Mattock and Danny Grosh. They struggled to keep or attain drummers since grunge and music of that nature wasn't popular at the time. They were in a bit of a rut until Matt moved here from Chicago. He came to school and looked grungie and just downright cooler than all of us and John and Danny automatically wanted to talk to him. Ends up, of course, he was super cool and had a lot to show us as far as music goes. Plus, he had seen he Melvins before which we thought was awesome!"
As always though, life is a hard-fucker-- and then you start a band.
"Unfortunately they [Toasty Grandpa] still struggled to keep a drummer. Eventually Craig started playing drums for them (even tho he was basically a non-musician) and Andy (brother of Matt from the founding fathers) started doing some noise on synth."
This isn't the end though... There's still more to come:
"Toasty Grandpa eventually recorded a full, low-fidelity album on some early digital recording software that I'll be releasing eventually. I just want to remix it"
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