#skygreen leopards

[tonnibw]

The Reds,Pinks & Purples - The Town That Cursed Your Name

The Reds, Pinks & Purples és una banda indie pop de San Francisco, liderada pel músic Glenn Donaldson, un artista que edita pràcticament tot el que compon, amb una música melancòlica, de líriques introspectives i una capacitat d’evocar la nostàlgia per la música indie dels anys 80 i 90 que a mi sincerament m’encanta. Donaldson, qui també ha tocat en altres bandes com The Skygreen Leopards, va…

[guessimdumb]

Skygreen Leopards - Disciples of California (2006)

This song definitely has that stoned Cosmic-country psych thing going on. Gotta love the 12-string guitar!

[dustedmagazine]

The Reds, Pinks & Purples — Uncommon Weather (Slumberland/Tough Love)

Uncommon Weather by The Reds, Pinks & Purples

Glenn Donaldson’s third album as Reds, Pinks & Purples distills wistful pop into lucid purity. Fuzz-coated guitar lines lift out of foggy statics of hiss and hum. Wavering melodies pick their way carefully upward, then fall back softly in the gentlest sort of elegiac resignation. There’s a grace and radiance to these songs that might remind you of the best of the lo-fi janglers — The Bats, David Kilgour, Kelley Stoltz — and a sly humor that brings to mind the Television Personalities.

Donaldson started Reds, Pinks & Purples in 2019, after the cycling death of Josh Alper put an end to the gorgeous clangor of Art Museums. All three of his albums so far have been hand-made, one-man artifacts, with sparkling layers of guitars, a bit of keyboards, the muted clatter of organic and machine drums and soft-edged, yearning melodies shaded with minor-key regrets.

Lyrically the songs on Uncommon Weather songs mourn two great, unsatisfactory obsessions: the romantic kind and the artistic one. “I hope I never fall in love again,” confides Donaldson in the song of the same name, and later a few songs down observes, “A kick in the face that’s love/or a punch in the mouth.” Still later, he promises to meet up with an ex and her new love (a promise that he seems not exactly committed to)  sighing, “I’m sure that would be nice.” And yet, these songs are the opposite of bitter, a shrug and a “that’s how things are,” imbuing them with just the slightest color of melancholy.

Donaldson gets more bite and traction out of his professional frustrations. “Biggest Fan,” satirizes the gushers at the merch table who have yet to buy a record. “But did you even buy the records, could you, name three songs by them?” he prods, ever so gently, with a sharp wit but not a mean one. The most stirring, exciting song — that’s “The Record Player and the Damage Done” with its criss-crossing vocals and its rumpled harmonies — is about music, not love.

The songs all have a certain disheveled beauty, as if they’d only half woken up, eyes still ringed in last night’s mascara, but heart-stopping all the same. Uncommon Weather is undoubtedly the best of the Red, Pinks & Purples discs so far, an album that is damned near perfect without seeming to try very hard.

Jennifer Kelly

[bandcampsnoop]

2/24/21.

Glenn Donaldson has been getting a lot of attention for his work as The Reds, Pinks and Purples, and rightfully so.  But, Donovan Quinn was just as important to the Skygreen Leopards and he deserves more attention.

Quinn has some amazing solo work that we’ve highlighted, but another project of his, New Bums, is releasing a new LP via Drag City next March.  His partner here is Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance), and they create melodic, stripped back, acoustic music.  To me, this is reminiscent of some of David Kilgour’s solo work (listen to “Tuned to Grafitti”).

I know Donovan Quinn is from the Bay Area in California.  As far as I can tell, Chasny is also from California (he runs Hermit Hut Records), but exactly where is a mystery (to me at least)

[sinceileftyoublog]

New Bums Interview: Married Couple Vibe

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Unlike the mathematical approach of Six Organs of Admittance or the wound jangly pop of Skygreen Leopards, Ben Chasny and Donovan Quinn’s New Bums is like its name: contemporary slacker vibes, loose playing, easy, gorgeous tunes. The band’s first record, Voices in a Rented Room, came out in 2014, and almost immediately afterwards, they started recording its follow-up. It wouldn’t be released until this March, as the more layered but just as lackadaisical Last Time I Saw Grace (Drag City). Both Chasny and Quinn write songs, and each plays off the other one’s style as much as presenting their own. For instance, on the energetic “Oblieration Time”, which juxtaposes soloing and acoustic strumming, Chasny attempted to write lyrics like Quinn. As for Quinn’s lyrics, more generally, Chasny’s instrumentation shifts them. “One of the great things about songwriting [is] the way the lyrics come across versus what they actually mean,” Quinn said on a Zoom call earlier this year with me and Chasny. “The same words can be funny, sad, [or] ironic depending on the instrumentation behind [them]. It’s really fun to see what Ben does.” Chasny agrees that instrumentation matters, not citing a general philosophy but rather a YouTube video with almost 10 million views that overlays a scene of Darth Vader visiting the Death Star with a snippet of Spandau Ballet’s “True”.

Indeed, the buddy quality of New Bums shines through when they’re in the same room--even a virtual one. They laugh and play with each other and finish each other’s sentences, having been friends for a long time. But such a laid-back feeling wouldn’t be possible without each member’s distinct personalities. Chasny, knowing I was set to interview Chris Corsano later that day about his and Bill Orcutt’s excellent Made Out Of Sound, had me communicate an inside joke to Corsano, with whom he shares a band, Rangda. (The joke? Telling Corsano that he should make a pack of beats called “Chris Corsano’s Breakbeats,” to which Corsano cackled and replied, “You’ve been talking to Chasny.”) Chasny’s also self-deprecating: “I’m not a very good violin player, but the last song has me on the violin,” he shrugs about Last Time’s “Follow Them Up the Slope”. And he forgets the titles of the songs, facetiously chalking it up to the album’s lyrical themes of decay. Quinn, simply, is humble and go-with-the-flow.

Underneath it all are some serious aesthetic and instrumental chops from the both of them, a mix of guitars, harmonium (the circular “So Long, Kus”), violin, and keyboards. Opener “Billy, God Damn” is twangy and layered. “Onward to Devastation” features tasty riffing following the lilting folk of “Marlene Left California”. “Wild Dogs” shimmers, while “Hermitage Song” stuns with deep string textures. All in all, Chasny and Quinn talk about these songs with the same exuberance they do their other projects, or music by Corsano and Orcutt, or even legendary records by 90′s German drone artists. Music fans make music makers, and music bums never fade.

Read my conversation with them below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: What’s unique about Last Time I Saw Grace as compared to Voices in a Rented Room?

Donovan Quinn: I think both of the records come from the same place. A buddy record is the way I would put it, where it grew out of me and Ben in a room, playing two guitars, talking about ideas and records we admired. This one, we built the songs up a little bit more, added some layers to the songs with overdubs, and really added some depth to a lot of the compositions with vocal and guitar work and different synths, whereas the first one we tried to keep it as barebones as possible.

Ben Chasny: Yeah. I would say the first one was more slopdog, like a mutt running wild, and this one isn’t showdog level, but trimming up the dog a little bit, teaching it a couple tricks.

SILY: Maybe album 3 will be showdog. 

BC: Yeah. I think it’ll probably take a poop right in front of everybody, but it will still be up there.

SILY: Those layers are what I noticed from the get-go, on [opener] “Billy. God Damn”. Is that why you decided to have it first on the record and release it ahead of time?

BC: We ran through a number of sequences on the record. It just felt like a good one to start out with. There are definitely more vocal layers on this than the other record we did for sure.

DQ: Yeah, I don’t have a clear memory of recording a lot of these songs because we did it over a long period of time, and “Billy God Damn” is one of those songs. I think we put it first because it set a good tone for the rest of the record.

SILY: The sequencing definitely struck me. It goes back and forth between more up-tempo tracks like “Obliteration Time Two” and more lilting tracks like “Marlene Left California”. Is that something you had in mind when ultimately deciding on the order of the tracks?

BC: I think so, yeah, trying to balance it out without having one of the sides of the records being too much one direction.

SILY: I love records like this where the palate is mostly vocals and guitars but you throw in a wildcard like the harmonium, or the cello on “Street of Spies”. It makes those songs stand out.

DQ: “Street of Spies” has our buddy Jason Quever on cello who has a band called Papercuts. I work a lot with Jason and he was kind enough to put some cello on that one.

BC: He did the drums and some of the strings on the first record, too.

SILY: You could say the whole album has a loose quality, but on that song especially, you kept the false start and the countdown from the live recording.

DQ: We do like that kind of sketchbook vibe with our records.

BC: [laughs] I have a feeling I know what you’re gonna say, Donovan.

DQ: I’m not gonna say what you think I’m gonna say...Me and Ben have known each other for so long, it’s a married couple vibe where we know what the other person is gonna say or is thinking...With the way you can record records now, it’s pretty easy to really get things lined up and cleaned up. We thought with New Bums, it would be kind of a nice contrast to not do that, to keep things a little bit frayed.

SILY: It goes with the aesthetic suggested by the band name, too.

DQ: Yeah, exactly.

SILY: Did anything inspire the lyrics specifically?

DQ: Not anything specifically, but over time, both me and Ben writing, we kind of developed a sense of a type of record lyrically, and it seemed to be a lot of songs about decay and certain kinds of desperation. We built from that, not totally consciously, but everything seemed to gravitate towards it.

BC: I will say, when I wrote some of the lyrics to the song “Obliteration Time”, I was actually trying to write songs like Donovan’s band Skygreen Leopards, and I was hoping he would pick up on it. I was like, “Did you pick up on it?” He was like, “No, I didn’t at all.” That was what I was trying to do.

SILY: In some ways, you still have a ways to go in your marriage, then.

BC: Yeah, a lot of ways.

SILY: What were you going for on the first line of “Street of Spies”, “Who gives a fuck about clemency?”

DQ: You know, I don’t remember. And when we were listening back to different vocal takes, there was one that was so unusually angry for me that Ben was saying I sounded like Rage Against the Machine or something, so we changed it. I don’t know. It’s just meant to have the language contrast the mellow vibe of the song. I like that style when if you have a mellow song with lyrics that contradict that feel.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the album title?

BC: It’s a line [on the album]. When you listen to [the] song, you realize it’s the name of a woman, Grace, but in context on the front of the record, it has a different meaning, which we thought would be kind of fun. You listen to the record, and you realize, “Ah, I see what they’re talking about.” 

DQ: That was kind of a last-minute title. I think we got lucky with it. It fits really well with the kind of themes developed in the record: decay, desperation, etc.

SILY: Is Grace a real person or just a character?

Both: Just a character.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the cover art?

BC: Donovan had the concept behind the art.

DQ: We were gonna see if anyone noticed this, but if you look at the first cover and the second cover, it’s basically the same elements, but we took things away. The first one has the two triangles, and it’s pictures of me and Ben, and this one doesn’t have any pictures. The idea is for every album to have the same basic design that takes elements away to eventually have nothing at all.

SILY: What are you gonna lose on the next one? One of the triangles?

BC: Possibly. That’s when I get kicked out of the band.

SILY: Or it’s self-titled, and you can use New Bums as the band and the title.

DQ: The other day, something cool happened that reminded me of the cover and the two triangles. It doesn’t totally work, but I did this video that heavily references ZZ Top. For the video, we bought a couple of ZZ Top magical keychains, and I was trying to open a box with it, but the fucking thing broke! But the two extreme points of the keys broke off, and what’s left looks a lot like the two triangles.

BC: The original record cover from the first record was based on one of my favorite records, pretty much a tribute to it, a band called The Black Vial. He did a record called Frozen Morning in maybe the mid-90s. He did 300 of them, this German guy, Liebried Loch. They were wrapped in black electric tape, and that’s what held the photograph on. This really gorgeous looking record, one of the most dark, depressing records I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s just droning on electric guitar on a practice amp, really distorted, singing songs like, “Black crows, flying no more!” We based the original artwork off that record and then modified it.

SILY: Have you thought about doing a live stream or socially distant show?

BC: We should try to figure out how to do it together. We still have to figure out Zoom. We may not do Zoom a lot. We’re more Google. We know technology.

SILY: You’re not Luddites?

BC: We have most of our meetings on Google Hangouts. 

DQ: New Bums has a lot of meetings, and we spend a lot of time together, so it’s surprising it’s taken us 5 years to do two albums and two tours. 

BC: We do have some great video footage from that tour a couple years back filmed at a bookstore in San Francisco called Adobe Books, and I think we’re gonna put that out for people to check out.

SILY: Were some of the songs from this record performed there?

BC: Yeah, we [did] “Cover Band”.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

DQ: I’ve been watching a lot of movies more than anything else. I have the Criterion Channel service, so I’ve been finding a lot of inspiration in that. I was just recommending the movie Close-up to Ben, if you want to feel that doing any kind of artistic endeavor might have some meaning, it’s worth it.

BC: I’ve been watching a lot of Poirot. That guy’s great. His relationship with Hastings is quite similar to Donovan and me, though I won’t say who is Poirot and who’s Hastings.

Last Time I Saw Grace by New Bums

[whtaever]

[adsmusiconstellations]

Skygreen Leopards - Sing the Songs of the Lindner Brothers (2006)

https://www.secretlystore.com/store/featured?page=1

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

The Jingling World of The Skygreen Leopards

Bandcamp Monday! It’s been a little while since we’ve heard new tunes from the Skygreen Leopards (Donovan Quinn and Glenn Donaldson), but this Soft Abuse collection, gathering 24 long-lost tracks from the duo’s first CDRs, will do nicely for the time being. “The restrictions were that no songs could break the 3 minute mark, no jamming allowed, and you never went back to fix mistakes.” Chiming 12-strings, wispy vocals, ramshackle rhythms, ghostly reverb -- this is perfectly imperfect pop that makes a nice companion to last week’s Bandcamp Monday offering from Hamish Kilgour. Jingle jangle!  

[cdlistening]

The Skygreen Leopards, ‘The Jingling World of The Skygreen Leopards’ (Soft Abuse)

Monday, February 18, 2019, 10:14pm

A very background listen, but as always hitting all the right notes. Makes me long for the days of recording without a computer, and also for an electric 12-string guitar. Great early stuff from a cool band, will get many more spins before being filed.

[xartwrk]

Family Crimes by The Skygreen Leopards

[aquariumdrunkard]

The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)

Some strange rain. Via satellite, transmitting from northeast Los Angeles — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.

Intro ++ Wolf People – Village Strollin’ ++ Steve Gunn – Water Wheel ++ Ryley Walker – Sweet Satisfaction ++ John Martin – Over The Hill ++ Cass McCombs – Dreams Come True Girl ++ Amen Dunes – Splits Are Parted ++ Cotton Jones – Some Strange Rain ++ Daniel Romano – All The Reaching Trims ++ Little Wings – Boom! ++ Jon McKiel – Mourning Dove ++ Kevin Morby – Harlem River ++ Chris Cohen – Optimist High ++ Damien Jurado & Richard Swift – Hello Sunshine ++ Carl Erdmann – Turritella Flats ++ Yo La Tengo – Leaving Home ++ Tobacco City – Till The Moon Don’t Shine (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ The Skygreen Leopards – Jehovah I Surrender ++ John Andrews & The Yawns – Old News ++ Quilt – Cowboys In The Void ++ Modern Nature with Itasca – Harvest ++ Eli Winter – Arabian Nightingale (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Eli Winter – Til Dreams Come True (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Eli Winter – Something On Your Mind (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Ultimate Painting – Kodiak ++ Parsley Sound – Ease Yourself And Glide ++ Sonny & The Sunsets – Death Cream ++ Color Green – Bell Of Silence ++ Michael Nau – Maralou ++ Alex Izenberg – To Move On ++ Woods – Weekend Wind

[daggerzine]

The Reds, Pinks and Purples-ANXIETY ART (PRETTY OLIVIA RECORDS)

Ok so this came out last year (Sept) so it’s not a new release or anything (and according to the Bandcamp page the vinyl is sold out) but I really like what I’ve heard by the band and had never scribbled about them before so I’m doing it now. It’s the brainchild of Glenn Donaldson who was in the Skygreen Leopards and Art Museums and maybe some other Bay Area bands. It’s really dreamy psych pop that’s high on melody and short on filler, in other words, my kinda record!  “Dead End Days” is a gorgeous opener while “I’m Worried About the New Wave” is another jangle pop classic and the just over two-minute title track glides with the best of ‘em. Donaldson’s vocals are very distinctive (he reminds me a little of Hewson Chen formerly of Vitesse) as he shows quite a bit of restraint and it goes perfectly with the music.  Two other faves include “Bad Habits” and “Citygardens” (I’m assuming he’s not singing about my old punk rock haunt in Trenton, NJ). If record labels like Sarah or Sunday ever turned your crank then this will be right up your alley. I hope some label, somewhere, releases this on cd (or at least issuers the vinyl over here in the USA).  Just sublime.  www.theredspinksandpurples.bandcamp.com    

[guessimdumb]

The Skygreen Leopards - My Friends (2014)

The Skygreen Leopards were SF duo Glenn Donaldson and Donovan Quinn, who recorded somewhere around 9 LPs of lo-fi, indie-psych rock with sleepy, hushed vocals, jangling guitars and cool melodies.

[dustedmagazine]

New Bums — Last Time I Saw Grace (Drag City)

Photo by Apollo

Last Time I Saw Grace by New Bums

Ben Chasny and Donovan Quinn first recorded as New Bums in 2014, when Chasny who had recently moved back to California, ended up living quite close to Quinn. Both had a way of infusing bile and orneriness into soft, unobtrusive formats, Chasny sticking closer to the psychedelic folk of his Six Organs project and Skygreen Leopards’ Quinn constructing intricate jangle-pop conundrums out of sighs and black humor. In reviewing their debut for Dusted, Ethan Covey observed that, “The record’s sloshed vibe has drawn a lot of attention. Drag City even cutely tagged the collaboration ‘Old Drunk America.’ Yet, Voices In A Rented Room is far more hangover than hootenanny, an album of paeans sung to sticky, empty glasses and near-dawn headaches.” The pair gave a few wildly free-associative interviews to promote the record, reinforcing the idea that their joint project was prettier than it was well-behaved. And then seven years went by.

Now the odd couple of acid folk is back (though who is Felix and who is Oscar is anyone’s guess) with another passel of slow strummed, smoke-wreathed bedroom pop tunes that are easy on the ears without being exactly easy listening. Eleven cuts drift by in a fug of daydream and cannabis, with some tipping more towards Chasny and others to Quinn. One is a cover of Deep Purple guitarist Tommy Bolin’s “Wild Dogs,” which came out on Teaser in 1975, just as his main gig was winding down, and someone (Chasny?) gets off a blistering classic rock guitar solo without disturbing the slumberous vibe.

The cleverest songs, lyrically speaking, have a Skygreen Leopards vibe, like Kinks tunes heard through a staticky radio broadcast. The jangle runs placidly, but the words do complicated acrobatics. So, opener “Billy God Damn” plays the blues like a half-dozing street busker mumbling over stinging slides, but the lyrics snap to attention with internal rhymes (“Taste the apocalypse on my lips”) and Dylan-esque asides (“Where I lose the game of Lord of the flies to the denim-clad creature with Spanish inquisition eyes”).  “Cover Band,” another single, is another clever one, its dreamy, clouds of verse and chorus coalescing around surprisingly exact renditions of a life in music. A pretty singer takes off because someone in the band tells her she’s playing the tambourine too hard. The band cranks out chestnuts like “Candle in the Wind” and “Back in Black” and tries to sneak in an original here and there. It’s funny but there’s an undercurrent of melancholy in verses like, “The drunks all curse and call out for the same old songs. I wonder if they wonder where their youth has gone.”

Other songs open up into psychedelic raga reveries in a way that seems very Chasny. “Hermitage Song,” in particular, has his mystic folk vibe in the steady, finger-picked meshes of inner-visioned guitar song and the heady rushes of vocals. It would fit just fine onto Companion Rises, and when I say that, I mean it’s god-damned beautiful. One or the other of the Bums also slips some very searing, very accomplished guitar solos in at various places, a big electric sidewinder slipped into the space between “Obliteration Time”’s verses, a rapid-fire jazz solo at the end of “Onward to Devastation.”

All of which adds up to an album that seems laid back and easy, but which in fact includes much that is knotty and difficult. It’s maybe New Drunk America in the sense that you could listen to it drunk, but you probably couldn’t play or write or think of it that way. Last Time I Saw Grace slouches and shrugs and minimizes its skill, but can’t possibly hide it.

Jennifer Kelly

[bandcampsnoop]

8/12/20.  

I mentioned how Micah and I should be posting more from Soft Abuse.  After that, he mentioned how he’d seen Pumice perform at Aquarius Records in San Francisco some years back.

Today, Donovan Quinn’s newish LP “Absalom” gets the nod.  I’d posted about his excellent 7″ “Dad Was Buried in His Leather Jacket” in 2018.  This is a bit more introspective but still bears his sound developed over years of work with Skygreen Leopards and Glenn Donaldson.

Quinn is a San Francisco based artist.  Sounds on this release range from Arcade Fire to The Clientele and Tom Petty.

Soft Abuse is based in Minneapolis, MN.

[sinceileftyoublog]

The Reds, Pinks & Purples Album Review: Summer at Land’s End

(Slumberland)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Over the past half-decade, Glenn Donaldson (The Skygreen Leopards, The Art Museums) has been releasing picture perfect bedroom indie pop as The Reds, Pinks & Purples. Firmly rooted in a San Francisco scene that also includes Slumberland bands like Papercuts, Chime School, and The Umbrellas, Donaldson has been churning out an album a year since RP&Ps’ 2019 debut LP, along with various singles and live sessions. The project’s self-recorded fourth album, Summer at Land’s End, is at once its fully formed and most simple, and its best.

Really, almost every RP&Ps song is built around a jangly guitar rhythm, a consistent drum beat, and Donaldson’s weary sigh of a vocal delivery. It’s like Flying Nun meets The Cure meets Sarah Records, but fit for San Francisco weather. As much as one might scoff at characterizing a project based on its home base’s precipitation patterns, I think it’s something Donaldson might welcome; after all, he sings about rain just as much as he sings about the push-pull of love. He protects himself on “Don’t Come Home Too Soon” and “Let’s Pretend We’re Not in Love”. If the person who punched through a door on the former is the same person Donaldson needs to end a relationship with on the latter, that he sings with a gentle coo over breezy, chugging strumming is a remarkable emotional buoy. On the surface, the songs on Summer At Land’s End sport a miserabilist streak--“Walking in the rain / Hoping it won’t stop,” Donaldson sings on “Pour The Light In”--dig deeper, and you’ll find that his world weary songs view low points as opportunities to begin anew. “All this time learning how to swim through open clouds,” he continues, “Pour the light in.”

Throughout Summer At Land’s End, Donaldson varies minor elements of the songs, from their pace to which instrument is more emphasized, whether the spritely synth line of “Tell Me What’s Real” or the thudding bass drum and acoustic guitar of “New Light”. As most of them are brief glorious nuggets that occupy similar sonic territory, listening to it, you never feel like you need a palate cleanser or even a break, but Donaldson gives you one anyway in the form of the 7-minute instrumental title track. With echoing lines, the song sounds like the free-spirited journey of a city stroller, so steady that the wah wah guitars towards the end seem at first like a radical departure. The song is straight up gorgeous, a reminder of what Donaldson can do when he does choose to branch out from the RP&Ps formula. He ends the record with “I’d Rather Not Go Your Way”, acoustic guitar and voice, as other elements, like distorted electric guitar, creep in. “Is it gonna rain?” he asks. “Eventually, it will,” he answers. All-knowing of the inevitability of life, Donaldson dives in.