TRAILERPARKS CD $10
Trailerparks, Adam Gnade's third full-length album, is a study in darkness and—like a final flicker of light that blooms unexpectedly into a sunny day—a fight for the good life. It's also his “lost” album. Says Gnade, “After Try Harder Records did that tiny run of CDs for tour I had second thoughts about the record and decided it would never be released officially. What I wanted Trailerparks to be was something people could take comfort in but what came out of it was a really dark, haunted piece of music. Just recently, I heard the whole thing again and realized I was wrong; it's not all rosy but it has a big heart and that big heart is full of hope.”
With equal nods to John Fahey, Henry Flynt, and Jackie-O Motherfucker, Trailerparks' 10 tracks are a long and sprawling rustic folk soundscape full of spooky, headphones-friendly noise interludes and breathy micro-drones amidst full-band songs and dark-toned solo pieces. The tracks ambitiously follow the course of one year in the life of its characters, each track taking on a month or a series of months. Produced by Thaddeus Christian, it's a record packed with lyrics, stories of rainy, troubled nights stuck in crumbling mansions, drugged-out kids in clubs, and lonely sun-drenched highways. Says Gnade about the record, “The lyrics are dark, but there’s hope in the end. The plotline curves towards the light midway through, when the characters—who are the same characters from the rest of my songs and from my book Hymn California—find adventures and try to shake off the doom they’ve been living with all spring and winter.” Trailerparks is out now on Punch Drunk Press!
WHIDBEY ISLAND CD $8
A collaboration with John Fahey-esque fingerpick guitarist David Christian, this EP is some of the longest, most detailed work of Adam's to date.
Stretched across five forward-surging acoustic landscapes, Gnade's text here is about leaving the city behind, about the encroaching modern time, and about leaving your past behind and becoming a new being. Characters haunt the Blue Ridge Mountains, sail up bays, are hung and left for dead on beaches, experience satori in the backs of cars.
Says blogger Naomi Whatley, "You know where asphalt starts rotting and cracking apart at the edges of an old road? And the richest, awkwardly crumbled soil that's every colour but brown, with little pieces of glass and paper and tiny dead and growing sprouts show in the spaces that were once blanketed away? That's what Adam Gnade sounds like." Features longtime fan-favorite "Snake Lore."
THE WILD HOMESICK CD $10
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 Novel $16
"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
HELLO AMERICA! CD $10
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.
RUN HIDE RETREAT SURRENDER CD $10
"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
DARKNESS TO THE WEST Novella $5
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).
ADAM GNADE PINS/BADGES $3
Hand-made Adam Gnade 1” pins/badges. Each one different. One dollar apiece; minimum order is three pins ($3) to cover shipping and the money PayPal takes out.
Order Hand-made Adam Gnade Pins/Badges
HONEY SLIDES CD $10
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
ORDER ONLINE
adamgnade.bigcartel.com
MAIL-ORDER
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.
