Punch Drunk Press is proud to announce a brand-new limited-edition release by Adam Gnade, the extensively titled, Surrenderland: You Could Quit Your Jobs and Run Away Like You Used to, Back When You Did Things Just Because, and Because it Felt Good to Run Away, and Because You Didn’t Worry so Much Like You Do Now… just Because and Leave the Assholes Behind and Fuck ‘em Anyway, They Don’t Mean Shit.
Part two of the three-part cassette series that began with his Island's Islands cassette, Surrenderland will be issued in a limited-run of 100 cassettes, each one recorded live into Adam's 4-track machine, and each one totally different, an analog artifact recorded directly onto the tape that you get with your order.
Theme-wise, the tapes will take songs from Adam's debut record, Run Hide Retreat Surrender, and will offer up alternate versions of the songs.
Says Adam, “I'm recording each 20-minute album onto the tape I send you and whatever you get will be totally different than any of the other tapes. I chose to deconstruct the Run Hide Retreat Surrender songs because there's a lot of room to fuck with those songs and I've been wanting to try new shit with them for years—acoustic versions, experimenting with noise revamps, more avant dissections, full band arrangements, heavier minimalism, fucking up the lyrics—whatever feels right at the time.”
Note: Issued on clear purple cassette tapes with hand-painted faces...
A junkyard of minimalistic deconstructed Americana, Adam Gnade's new record, The Wild Homesick, is a strange, warm, troubled summer record full of doom and affirmations. It's water moccasins and honeylocust trees, motel swimming pools and fruit bats in the dusk, allusions to suburbs, ranch houses, trailerparks, and debt. Says Adam, "The Wild Homesick is the story of a group of people who are stuck. They're stuck for a variety of reasons, stuck in the places they live, stuck in lives they hate, incapacitated by debt; whatever it is, they're stuck and they're terrified."
He continues, "Structurally, I've never done a record like this. It's 10 songs divided into four suites of music over the course of less than 20 minutes. Tiny 30 second-long songs packed with music up against uncharacteristically long ones with barely any backing but a little xylophone. Lots of slide guitar and banjo and lots of lyrics. More lyrics than past records. I think I'm finally hitting closer to what I wanted 'talking-songs' to be in the first place." Released by Punch Drunk Records, The Wild Homesick is the first in a series of four seasonal records. This, the summer record, takes place in Texas.
The first 20 orders of The Wild Homesick come with a free 7", "Your Friends Will Carry You Home," featuring Adam along with members of Gang of Four, Modest Mouse, Tracker, Granddaddy, 31 Knots, and Menomena. —Punch Drunk Records
"Hymn California is a story both romanticized and smeared with blood and shit. The narrator, James, a contemporary take on the vagabond archetype seen in American literature from Huck Finn to Kerouac, leaves his San Diego home with no particular destination in mind. America for James becomes long, lonely stretches of highway and cricket-soundtracked summer evenings looking out over Midwestern cornfields." —San Diego CityBeat
Punch Drunk Press Presents: Hello America! an hour-long journey into new American sounds! Ohioan kick-starts the record with nearly a half-hour of big-group jams and posi-anthems revamping American roots music into a loud, celebratory, modern basement-orchestra beast. Horn-lead drum lines collide with lap steel and musical saw. Lyrics evoke “wide, black country skies.” Adam Gnade's “talking-songs” rustle with a loose, dark, haunted heart. Half-submerged country-blues and summery noise-interludes become dreamlike landscapes of story. Gnade's six songs feature material from the long out-of-print Palaces EP as well as unreleased full-band recordings. Upon Awakening is the debut recording from COASTS, a mellow, deep-layered acoustic collaboration between Adam Gnade (west coast) and rural Pennsylvania forest vibes instrumentalists Wood-Land (east coast). Over the course of 17 minutes, Awakening ends the Hello America! journey on a quiet, warm note full of ambient drones, back-porch noise weird-outs, laughter, and ghost voices.
"Whether it's just Adam and acoustic guitar or a full band beating and stomping on every instrument they can find, Run is an evocative experience, not just for the sounds but for the scents and tastes and sensations it invokes: the smell of rotting horseshoe crabs on an empty Florida beach; the drone of cicadas on dark country roads; the cry of bald tires threatening to blow on the New Jersey Turnpike. It is a record heavy with humid, festering decay, drug damage, and the displaced feeling of a generation stopped dead in its tracks." —Jamey Bainer
Order Run Hide Retreat Surrender
A brand new novella of writing connected to Adam's records and books. Adventure stories, trainhopping, whips cracking, night swimming, William Tell stunts, war-time blues, etc. American trouble-making in the midst of a long hot summer. Part one of a long series of novellas on Punch Drunk Press. Next one is a three-way split between Adam, Ray Raposa (Castanets), and Red Hunter (Peter and the Wolf).
Full-band recording. Honey Slides EP. Music by Youthmovies. Vocals by Adam. "Thumping micro-house morphs into a psychedelic brass band while landscapes of android ghost beats emerge from luminous pools of ambient noise. The vocals shout and proclaim in surreal tones like the spooky hollers of a Southern Baptist preacher inside a swampland chapel. Ideas and images cycle back, flashing brief visions of haunted wilderness, rising seas, decadent youth, faith healers, urban decay, and midnight carnivals in torch-lit clearings. A new animal born to two mothers, an engaging, weird, dancy, absorbing, freaked-out electronic pop tapestry." —Try Harder Records
Order Honeyslides from Try Harder Records
Send cash, check, or money order:
Adam Gnade Order
1075 Reed Avenue
San Diego, California
92109
Shipping and handling is included.
duke /*at*/ adamgnade /*doht*/ com if you have any questions.
Additional info: You can also order Hymn California online from Powells.com or in person at both Portland locations. You can get Hymn California and The Darkness to the West at the Microcosm Publishing store in Portland, Oregon.