Modern Rock in Motion reviews The Red Step, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Josh Caterer, Hypnosonics and Junk Ranchers
Old faces turn up in strange and different places in this edition of Modern Rock in Motion.
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By Peter Lindblad
Old faces turn up in strange and different places in this edition of Modern Rock in Motion. It appears that The Black Heart Procession’s Tobias Nathaniel has opened a separate branch in Serbia with The Red Step, while the Smoking Popes’ Josh Caterer visited The Hideout in Chicago to amplify songs of his grandparents’ generation with a whole new band and never-before-released records from a beloved side project of Morphine’s Mark Sandman finally see the light of day. Sunburned Hand of the Man pushes the boundaries of New Weird America in a heady, thrill-seeking masterpiece, and the Junk Ranchers’ sparkling debut LP arrives about 34 years late. Let’s dig in.
Press Play: Listen to ‘Reverse Cowboy’ by W.O.W.
The track is from the indie rock band s forthcoming album A Dog Staring Into a Mirror On the Floor.
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W.O.W. is a Portland-based indie-rock band currently working on a full-length album. The single “Reverse Cowboy” was recorded over the past several months of pandemic-induced quarantine and was edited, mixed and mastered at Chillhous Studios in Boston by Will Holland who was worked with The Pixies, Dead Can Dance and Fall Out Boy.
W.O.W. was founded by longtime songwriter and band leader Whit Walker (Pay the Coyote, Formorning, Dixon Benjejo Trash). Because COVID-19 prevented much in the way of in-person recording sessions, Walker enlisted the help of some of his musician friends to collaborate on the album.
The Sopranos when he heard Morphine’s song “Buena,” from the trio’s 1993 album
Cure for Pain.
Ortega, who was 28 years old at the time, had never heard the band before, but took a deep dive into Morphine’s music. He was particularly drawn to frontman Mark Sandman’s two-string slide bass, and became so obsessed that he had local luthier Scott Lofquist build him two basses, one of which is a left-hand replica of the instrument played by Sandman, who died from a heart attack during a concert in Italy in 1999.
When Ortega, who plays in a duo called the Two-String Project, heard about ArtHyve’s Record to Record, a series of online panel discussions via Zoom that combine the intellectual atmosphere of a book club with the world of music, he asked the group s founders, Jessie de la Cruz and Sigri Strand, who Ortega says are huge Morphine fans, about doing a discussion on the album as part of the series.
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