What's up with US Maple?

Seconded. I assume that at least someone in Pavement was a fan, as otherwise that would have been crazy.

So I was reading about larva trapped in amber that was discovered in Spain that carries trash to camouflage itself, and the phrase "dense trash packet" reminded me of US Maple. Can I be an official fan now?

good mental association imo

"Dense Trash Packet" would certainly make a good U.S. Maple song title, so yes, you are an official fan!

For some reason I just remembered the MC Paul Barman line, ”I almost threw up when I saw you at US Maple”

Some recent Al in Dubuque:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14LtqVbxL-Q&feature=youtu.be

wow thanks for sharing. that's the most i've ever heard Al speak.

It's pretty cool for sure, interesting mix of approaches!

also reading maple lyrics, crazy!

Yeah, I loved that bit. So weird without the music. I have never had to memorize lyrics, but I imagine that I would need to remind myself of a bunch of them (or read them) if I did this kind of thing.

First album is getting reissued on vinyl w/metal sleeve and the bonus track. Nice.

original is super expensive now so that's cool

oh word? pretty sure both mrs. a & I have our copies from our chicago days

http://www.discogs.com/buy/Vinyl/US-Maple-Long-Hair-In-Three-Stages/22249499?ev=bp_titl

whoa

It's time to go down the U.S. Maple listening hole again. This is awesome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JarSldMzLfo

i was just wondering what al johnson was up to last week, and i found no answers. i was going to revive this thread but i forgot!

Huh, embed didn't work for me, but that is a full set from Baltimore in 1997. Pretty good audio and the band seems "on", though I never got to see them personally. Whoever posted the video claims the band is in good form, and it sure seems like it to me. Best band.

oddly enough, i just got this email
TODD RITTMANN'S DEAD RIDER SIGNS TO DRAG CITY;
NEW ALBUM, CHILLS ON GLASS, OUT MARCH 18TH!
http://youtu.be/TWNCaRAuMH4
Dead Rider's third ride, Chills On Glass, is as distinct from the second time around as The Raw Dents was from their debut, Mother of Curses. The goal for Dead Rider, always: super-heavy, super-driving, more 'up' moments than ever before. An album experience; listening, you're put through some changes. Illusions radiating out from the real. You're rocked into submission, but asked to participate on the listening level. Rebuilt, regrooved, with favorable upgrades. Chills On Glass moves forward in this tradition, juxtaposing high and low values - serious playing, danceablity, controlled-outcomes experimentation, don't-give-a-f**k rad-itude. Shocks don't surprise the band - it was the effect they were looking for, just what the song needed. All the sounds in the songs - the shouts, croons and whispers - draw you into the fantasy of Dead Rider, the spectacle of a night on the town, gliding through the darkness while thrust up, out of the limousine's sunroof. Scribble, confetti and other sonic details rain down like snow, providing an exquisite dressing for thick and thrashing rhythms and expertly maneuvered tight corners. Vocal textures smooth and sandy rub together and ignite, blowing glass as you head your body through the labyrinth. Rhythm is king in Dead Rider, but melodies, changes and production carry the crest in this processional.

Self-recorded, produced and mastered, Dead Rider leave no stylistic stone unturned in their restless path and no knob on the board untwisted in their search for the mixe parfait. This is composition that uses improvisation as an element within a larger structure - the ultimate streamlining of production, where songs are processed on several levels, mirroring and flashing their meanings through tactics and layers, backgrounded by a panaroma of yawning, silent, benevolent and black velvet.

Todd Rittmann, infamous from his daze in U.S. Maple, is a guitar warrior with intensive craft at his fingertips. For the past five years, he's been furthering his reputation by doing further damage with his instrument and others, reconfiguring sonic relationships, imagining the sound of a rock band reshaped into a gleaming spectacle, and by spreading the carnage wide with Dead Rider, comprised of Matthew Espy (drums, conga, percussion), Andrea Faught (synth, piano, trumpet, trombone, vocals), Thymme Jones (synth, trumpet, vocals) and Rittmann (vocals, guitar, drums). Lurching from pole to pole, pausing mid-stop, leaping and bursting into a double-twist and then resolving into a sweet glide; the dust they kick up in this fracas glitters gold, spicing the recipe with elevated powders of perception, deflecting metallically, hip-hoptically, free and jazzy, operatic, electronic, flashing like squad-car rollers.

Scroll up the thread for a bit. There is some recent Al posted there. He is on twitter, and goes on bouts of posting but has been pretty quiet recently.

does he really live in iowa?

Yes.

woah this is weird...for some reason I chose to wear my U.S. Maple t-shirt to work today for the first time in ages!

somewhere in iowa al johnson is drumming his fingers together and hissing yessssssssss

It's cause you're a champ UMS, but also weird as hell. I jumped on this cause of a facebook post by Marc Masters, who'd "shared" it via Mark Shippy. This is the world we live in ....

i just felt a gravitational pull because i found a book of sentences that i thought al johnson would appreciate

Purple On Time isnt my favorite but to me its the sound of a band with a lot more gas left in them

Maybe....maybe not.

La Lechera, have you looked at any actual U.S. Maple lyrics on the printed page? I know that Acre Thrills at the very least has them printed out, but maybe all the records do (can't remember, lost copies of several of these on CD some time ago). They are amazing.

Man I would love for this band to put anything out again just so that maybe I would get to see them live. Or they can just tour without making a record and play whatever the hell they want. I just wish I had caught them.

No, I don't have any of the actual releases. I bet they are exquisite!

Why do people still act like Al is in some mysterious no-man's land? As discussed upthread, he lives in Dubuque. I mentioned before how it was a post-industrial economically depressed hell-hole when I grew up there, but 26 years later it's much better, ranked 7th and 3rd recently for economic and job growth. It has four good hospitals and outpatient clinics, four colleges/universities, three seminary schools, three large high schools, a newish casino and convention center, winery and an assload of bars and churches, ha ha. The latest references to it in movies, books and TV to represent an obscure place vaguely somewhere in the Midwest, were Elementary and Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge. Perhaps because it stands out from most boring Midwestern cities as one of the oldest cities, coming from one of the original French settlements in the 1670s which was then controlled by the Spanish after the Seven Year's War, and permanently settled by Julien Dubuque from Quebec, who married a member of the Fox tribe and mined lead. By 1860 it was one of the 100 largest urban areas in the U.S. It's always been a tourist attraction, overlooking the Mississippi where IA intersects with WI and IL, and steep bluffs and hills that rival San Francisco. Another random fact, in 2011 it was sited as one of the 10 smartest cities on the planet by Fast Company magazine. Dubuque was the only city from the western hemisphere on the list.

Like many other people I know, Al was probably drawn there in the past 10 years for job opportunities and good schools for raising kids. Perhaps if more minor avant music celebrities move there to raise their brats Dubuque will be recognized as "cool," ha ha ha.

Anyway, stoked for the new Dead Rider, look forward to seeing them live this year.

I just wondered if he still lived there -- no hard feelings! I grew up in the pit of the industrial midwest, I know the feeling :)

La Lechera, in re the lyics being exquisite, they are. Al rules, as is stated over and over in this thread.

One of a number of bands I saw live at a time when I didn't know I would later think "I would kill to see that again"

I am excited for the new Dead Rider, they were fantastic when I saw them last year, truly great.

Funny to me how many people recognize the greatestness of US Maple now, cuz certainly not the case back in the day.

Dubuque is pretty boring.

this is very exciting

I thought it was surprising to see that Dead Rider signed to Drag City. Where were they before? I just assumed it was Drag City.

The Raw Dents was released on Tizona

Well, I guess I'll be buying a CD this year (Drag City doesn't do Spotify/Rdio).

Chills on Glass is streaming - exclusively! - on hightimes.com. Sounds pretty good so far. For sure the most US Mapley guitar I've heard in a while at the very beginning.

http://www.hightimes.com/read/exclusive-full-album-stream-dead-rider

that's kind of exactly what i expected them to do musically, so underwhelmed by my own damn fool unrealistic expectations of being totally confounded, but maaaan, is rittman's voice ever good this time around !

realllllly liking this

some neat, unusual sounds in there... vocals recall Mother Love Bone, or some sort of 90s alterna-grunge/glam... the variety of (electro) sounds has me associating it w/NIN. Needs more woody, splintered, wheezy maple.

The whole project reminds me a lot of some alternate universe David Bowie, including the vocals.

that was stan seitrich's whole deal, after leaving drunks w/ guns he released a bunch of 7"s that were covers of drunks w/ guns songs with a 12 year old girl doing the vocals

I think I heard these actually, and I wanted there to be five albums worth of it

Not into this, the sound of composed weirdness instead of effortless weirdness

that is an authenticity trope and I'm calling you on it, not that you have to like this but it sounds like a way of copping out from saying "I like my weirdos raw"

haha absolutely NOT! If you think I think of US Maple as anything but “composed” you are incorrect, you of all people know that I think of all music as equally inauthentic.

But US Maple doesn’t sound like place cards for “insert noise here”, “awkward turn of melodic events”, “flat-5! isn’t dat weird??" and it definitely is not underpinned with a boring drum-beat to click.

Ultimately I judge music on a “the mood was created” vs. “they failed to create the mood” and this music fails to create any mood other than some clean-cut guys underlining "make it weirder!” on a steno. Which ultimately I'm sure was the case with US Maple too but it didn't sound like that

ha as I was reading your response dude spoke-sang "enemy/sex-grill/peanut butter" so lol point taken

lol well yeah

The US Maple affiliation is a burden here, not an asset; removing this music from the glare of that filter, it sounds like music I like an awful lot-- Dead Science, Capillary Action, Extra Life, Skeletons, ZS, and so on-- but the crit of "sounds too composed" goes for all those bands on some level, they all sound tethered to something.

Re: the burden of a US Maple affiliation, I grew to quite like the band Singer once I started listening to it without the "ex-US Maple!" prefix