Tag: Back to the Light Records

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The Subteens Level Up

The Subteens (Photo: Chris Reyes)

The resurgence of vinyl records has not only brought a plethora of new material sporting colorful platters and beautiful cover art, it’s given a second life to albums that were originally released when CDs were king. The vagaries of time having winnowed the wheat from the chaff, albums from decades past that have only taken on more artistic value can now be elevated to a more perfect medium: vinyl.

None are more deserving than the Subteens’ 1999 CD-only debut, Burn Your Cardigan, freshly reissued on wax by Back to the Light Records last month. Recorded just after seminal punk/indie drummer John “Bubba” Bonds joined the group, it revealed what a perfect complement he was to the visions of co-founders Mark Akin (guitar and vocals) and Jay Hines (bass), and established the Subteens, with their mastery of adrenaline-charged pop-punk originals, as one of the best Memphis groups at the turn of the 21st century.

Yet, as Hines relates today, Bonds was nervous about the sessions. On the first day of recording, Hines says, “We had to go find him, and it was raining really hard. He was down at the South End or somewhere, and we had to go get him, get his drums, and then go by Buster’s to get him a fifth of Jack or something. Then we went back to the studio and got busy.”

Album Cover Artwork: Mike McCarthy

Not that any of them were plastered as they recorded. They took the album very seriously. “We were just trying to get him to relax a little bit,” says Hines. “He didn’t get sloppy or anything — he played to a click track on a lot of that. But that made him nervous. Also, he had just joined the group. We had had maybe one practice and maybe one show with him at that point. But he just nailed it. Most of those [songs] were done in one or two takes. So miraculous!”

Also seemingly miraculous at the time was the studio’s proximity to cheap eats. The sessions were booked at Robbie Pickens’ Nu-Star Studio, not a well-known recording destination even then. “It was over off Summer behind Sonic. You could literally walk out of the studio, climb over his back fence, and be at Sonic. So that was amazing,” Akin recalls today.

“Robbie was not a typical person that a Midtown fan would seek for help producing a record, you know?” notes Akin. “I can’t remember why we ended up with him. Maybe he was just cheap. But for whatever reason, the stars aligned. Robbie really understood the punk that we were coming from. But I think he also understood that we wanted a little bit of gloss on it, a little bit of pop sensibility. Robbie was able to have a foot in both of those worlds and bring it together. I just can’t overstate enough how helpful Robbie was.”

Surprisingly, for a band that seems to have had great guitar sounds dialed in from the start, the crunchy riffs of Burn Your Cardigan came down to Pickens’ production skills. “I could not get the guitar sound right,” says Akin. “And finally, Robbie was like, ‘Mark, leave. Go to Sonic! I’m going to get your guitar sound.’ Later, he calls me to come back in and listen to it, but he won’t let me see what he’s done. And it sounds fantastic. Then he said, ‘Okay, let me show you how I got it.’ He had put a really small amp, like a Pignose, in this tiny closet, and had somehow gotten this magical guitar tone out of it.”

The end result was indeed a perfect blend of noisy punk attitude and the band’s unmistakable pop instincts. “Even our favorite punk bands are really pop bands at heart, or at least my favorite punk bands,” says Akin. “The Sex Pistols, the Ramones … And Jay’s really into the Buzzcocks, Sham 69. I’m really an AC/DC [fan]. That’s all hooky pop, just with harder rock guitar tones and different tempos. And every single one of those songs are arranged with a purpose and they’re arranged in a sensible, linear way.”

The ultimate statement of this approach may be Side One’s closer, Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right,” thrashed out with complete sincerity as if it were the latest track by the Clash. There’s a defiance to the track that helps one understand the band’s historical context. The late ’90s were trending away from the punk/pop axis, toward more introspective, watery styles like “shoegaze.” Shoegaze bands, it must be said, often ditched the rock-and-roll threads of jeans and a T-shirt in favor of … sweaters.

“The title of the album was totally Mark,” says Hines. “This was back when he was working at the Memphis Pizza Café, and I came in and he had this funny look on his face. He said, ‘What would you think about …’ — and he sort of hesitated, I guess because he thought I would laugh at it — ‘Burn Your Cardigan?’ And once I realized where he was coming from, I thought it was perfect.”

No shoegazing was going on with these guys. As Akin remembers, “When we first came out, we weren’t super well received. I feel like people didn’t quite know what to make of us at first because we wrote songs with beginnings, middles, and ends. We tried to have a chorus that got in your head and we tried to make the songs short. We would just go to play 10 songs and get the hell offstage. But then when that record came out, I think it really represented what we were all about. ‘This is what we are!’ And we started getting more people at the shows, and that never stopped. It’s always fun to have people come and watch you play.”

The Subteens cap off the Record Fair at Soul & Spirits Brewery on Saturday, June 15th, and will celebrate the reissue of Burn Your Cardigan with the River City Tanlines at Bar DKDC on Saturday, July 6th.

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Music Record Reviews

J.D. Reager Brings a New Vision to Light with Latest LP

Though this latest is his third album, J.D. Reager’s latest, Where Wasn’t I?, leaps from the turntable like a sizzling, fresh-off-the-grill debut. After all, it’s been ten year since his last solo release. Yet perhaps we ought to celebrate third albums more, assuming OK Computer, London Calling, Electric Ladyland, and Led Zeppelin III qualify as milestone works. Let’s say Where Wasn’t I? (Back to the Light) is Reager’s own bid to enter that esteemed company.

The larger point is that this really hangs together as an album, a unified body of songs and moods, despite springing from a variety of disparate recording sessions and venturing in multiple stylistic directions — much like Led Zeppelin III, in fact. When kickoff “Diane” explodes from the speakers, it sets a standard for what’s to come: perfectly raw-yet-crafted pop gems. And, as gems go, “Diane” is a stomper, a soaring power pop steamroller given wings with seraphic background voices.

(Credit: album art by Jason Pulley; layout and design by Graham Burks)

Speaking of voices, Reager is in better voice than ever, keeping his trademark vulnerability but now adding a more determined tenor to it. “There’s no reason to shy away!” he cries out in track two. While unique, Reager’s voice might arguably be compared to Bob Mould’s, in terms of feeling equally at home (and authentic) in a soaring post-punk power pop anthem or a screaming punk rager like “Stop Staring.”

But keep listening, and soon the fourth track will summon echoes of Rick Danko. “I need help from a friend,” Reager sings with a quaver, and it may bring a chill to many a listener. “Through all we recover/The dead friends and lovers/What we discovered/Was that it meant everything.”

Later, you’ll hear traces of Thunderclap Newman. But whatever the echoes, Reager’s uncanny ear for a rock arrangement ties the tracks together, backed by a host of A-list guest artists who always step in with the perfect part. Each pop gem fits together like clockwork.

Though Reager’s often been known to collaborate, he notes on his own Back to the Light podcast that the 2020 quarantine helped him take that to a new level. “I’ve always had a little home studio or project studio of some kind; previously, I would just invite folks over to the studio. But under quarantine, with everybody getting into home recording and file sharing, I caught the wave at exactly the right time, and everybody said yes.”

As Reager told Commercial Appeal’s Bob Mehr in August of last year, “There is a bit of a story to the record, about my recovery, and in a way, finding myself in the midst of all the madness in the world.

“The pandemic also created an availability for other people to work with me who normally wouldn’t have. I don’t know that nailing down people like Steve Selvidge [of the Hold Steady] or Dave Catching [of Eagles of Death Metal] would have been possible if everyone was as busy as they normally would be.” Beyond those players on the international stage, the LP hosts a legion of local luminaries, often grounded by the Midtown powerhouse, John Bonds, the drummer formally known as Bubba. Mark Edgar Stuart, John Whittemore, Paul Taylor, Jeff Hulett, Jeremy Stanfill, Jeremy Scott, and Graham Burks also make appearances.

Those players help bring a rock classicism to this project that gives the tracks a timeless feel. But while the guitars might channel a ’70s/’90s timewarp, and the synths the ’80s, this is most strikingly an album for now. Something in Reager’s frank delivery doesn’t let us forget that.

J.D. Reager (Credit: Jennifer Brown Reager)

That may be because the album grew out of a major time of struggle and growth for the artist. As he told Mehr last year, in 2019 “I finally got into therapy and quit drinking – now I’m over two years alcohol free. But then the pandemic hit and I lost my job. It came to where I didn’t have anything else to do but work on music and podcasts all day.”

Yet all backstory aside, coming to grips with his own personal demons seems to have pulled out some of the songwriter’s most emotional work. It shows in his delivery, but that’s taken up a notch by the delivery of another, one Ross Johnson, who makes two cameos on this LP. His trademark self-excoriating humor (is self-directed schadenfreude a thing?) proves to be a perfect foil for the slamming sounds of Reager’s band(s), especially on “Philanderer,” which hits like a pounding outtake from Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk (that’s a compliment). And Johnson touches a very personal nerve when ruminating on his father’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (“PTSD Story”), stemming from the World War II era — eerily reminiscent of what this author’s own father experienced.

As crazy-quilt as all this may seem, the best approach is just to listen. Listen to the well-crafted prose of Johnson the wordsmith, and the well-crafted power pop of Reager, and you’ll hear the album as a seamless whole, offering many flavors of regret, passion, and maybe even redemption.

“What does it mean to be a best friend?” Reager asks with childlike wonder in the album’s closer, “Wore Me Down.” But, as with most of the album, the raw nerves and sensibilities of youth are soon met with more adult concerns moments later in the song: “There are times when I can’t sleep next to you/And I thought about running ’round/But you wore me down.” From there, the song leaps along like a go-cart over the landfill: perfect power pop, complete with trash and shadows.

Songs from the new album and more can be heard at the Back to the Light Fall Turnout, Saturday, November 5 at 2 p.m., Wiseacre Brewing Company, featuring these bands:
2 pm – Loose Opinions
3 pm – Rosey
4 pm – J.D. Reager
5 pm – S p a c e r
6 pm – The Subteens

Categories
Music Record Reviews

The Subteens Get Out Alive — and Then Some

It’s quite appropriate that the return of the Subteens, via their first album in 18 years, is happening just as the Indie Memphis Film Festival celebrates the ten year anniversary of Antenna, the documentary on the famed club of the same name. But that’s not because the Subteens played there — they formed the same year the fabled venue was shuttered. It’s more because that group has perfected a sound that somehow defines not only the Antenna Club but the whole bedrock ethos of Midtown Memphis rock and roll.

I call it that “Bastards of Young” sound, after the classic Replacements song: big, broad, propulsive anthems, driving riffs, and soaring solos that offer portraits from an underground community teetering between hope, exultation, rage, and despair. It’s a huge, pounding rock sound carried on by diverse bands here, from those Antenna Club godfathers, the Modifiers, to the Psychic Plowboys, to Neighborhood Texture Jam, and beyond.

A band need not sound like the Replacements to capture that sound, as the Subteens demonstrate. Rather, they have a few extra dollops of the Damned or the Ramones, with those bands’ tighter focus and lack of drunken antics. The Subteens — Mark Akin, John Bonds, and Jay Hines — have a sound all their own, and it’s welcome news that their latest release, Vol. 4: Dashed Hopes & Good Intentions (Back to the Light), presents and preserves that sound in all its glory.

The Subteens (Credit: Back to the Light Records)

“You spend your free time running away/Now the loneliness is coming to stay, but/I believe in you/Even though you won’t hear me say it,” Mark Akin sings on side one’s closer, conjuring up a whole world of friends on the fringe, and what passes for affection among us.

There is much hard-won wisdom in these songs. “If we ever get out alive I’m going to tell you how I feel,” runs the title and first line of a personal favorite from the LP. Those awkward barriers to communication recur in this song, this time because “it’s hard to believe it’s real.” There’s a sense of leaning into one’s adulthood in these songs, despite the surreal quality of life. But here, that doesn’t sound like mellow country rock ballads. It sounds like someone stomping a hubcap back on a fixed flat and rolling on, gunning a rumbling engine of indomitable riffs.

The production is spot-on, a rock band in your face, stripped of most of the effects so readily available these days. Yet the songs are arranged with great care, the occasional background and doubled vocals helping choruses punch through. Overall, the mix favors parts that jump out with a bit of drama, as when a ripping guitar solo leaps from the speakers in “If We Ever Get Out Alive.” It’s a difficult trick to pull off without irritating the mastering engineer.

And it’s yet another sign that producer J.D. Reager is guaranteeing down to earth, imaginative, rocking good times under his Back to the Light imprint. That’s all the more true because this LP is being released alongside a solo album by Reager himself, Where Wasn’t I? But that’s another story.

Both albums will be celebrated at a double record release show at the Hi Tone, featuring the Subteens, J.D. Reager, and Seize & Desist, Friday, October 14, 9 p.m. $10.