Artist: Minus Story
Album: No Rest For Ghosts
Bitrate: 202kbps avg
Label: Jagjaguwar
Genre: Indie
Size: 71 megs
Playtime: 0h 47min 07sec total
Rip date: 2005-07-29
Store date: 2005-10-11
Track List:
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01. I Was Hit 5:53
02. Knocking On Your Head 3:09
03. Ringing In The Dark 5:04
04. Hold On 4:36
05. Little Wet Head 4:22
06. Waking Up 5:58
07. Will I Be Fighting? 5:02
08. There Is A Light 4:09
09. To The Ones You Haunted 4:27
10. In Your Hands 4:27
Release Notes:
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If we could hear the angels singing about us, they would be in harmony with the
chosen sons of Boonville, Missouri. With No Rest for Ghosts, their second
full-length record for Jagjaguwar, Minus Story have arrived. Their heavenly
racket shuffles, flutters, crashes and bangs all about us. Their reedy artistic
voice nears multi-octave range. Their rhythmic presence delights us in a sublime
collision of the conventional and the experimental. And while their trademarked
ôWall of Crapö sound is still present to some degree, No Rest for Ghosts has
transcended the earnest collage aesethic of sounds battling it out for attention
and now fully exhibits a depth and subtlety of performance not found on their
critical darling The Captain Is Dead, Let the Drum Corpse Dance (their first
full-length for Jagjaguwar, released in 2004).
No Rest for Ghosts is a portal to a richly imaginative Minus Story universe,
where the band sings about a narrator being eaten and regurgitated by his/her
own baby in order to feed its own monstrous young, the chasing of a cloud that
eats souls, the jumping off of a cliff like lemmings after employers are laid
waste to, the dreaming of a Nazi invasion of their hometown, God sadistically
laughing at them, and their respective minds being invaded by undead
celebrities. The emphasis is on either structure over hooks, or the willingness
to enjoy a story in words unfolding over a set of chords without any
unneccessary ôwindow dressingö getting in the way.
Minus Story is influenced musically by the solo work of John Frusciante, the
tenderness of Bjork, the melodic interplay of Television, and the directness of
late period Tom Waits. The band is also conceptually influenced by the brutality
of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird, the sweeping and ambivalent
authoritarianism critique of Jason Lips (the provider of cartoon drawings for
the album art, and the creator of the Opera and the Blond Stalin character), and
most of all by the idea of the invisible enemy and the erosion of the soul by
unknown outside forces.
The isolation and boredom of small town life has led Minus Story to put the love
of art and best friends before career, fashion and professionalism. The writing
and recording process for them is one of festivity and trying to capture
inspiring moments in their mistakes. They will never hit their mark, but, in
failing, they arrive transported somewhere else. A driving aesthetic force
within the band is their conviction that they are only different from their
musical idols in that they are dependent on shitty jobs to fund their art. Only
the rich and privileged are truly independent. Minus Story feel that they and
their peers are bound by a common lack of funds as ôbudget artistsö playing
ôbudget rockö.
A compelling history of the band neccesarily begins with the bandmatesÆ
childhoods. Jordan Geiger and Brian Phillips met in kindergarten, where they
became fast friends based on a mutual obsession with dinosaurs. Nick Christus
came into the fold through mutual friends and by virtue of the Nintendo Club he
hosted at his parentsÆ house. Soon Nick would make Jordan a Led Zeppelin tape
and Color Me Badd would be forever forgotten. Then Pearl Jam came along and the
friends bought instruments. Brian discovered the Sex Pistols during the same
time and they started to play music together. Andy Byers joined JordanÆs Little
League team and then later shared a row of gym class lockers with Jordan and
Nick. Much later, after the friends had re-located to Lawrence, Kansas, and were
a fully-formed band, they met Mark Sanders. And after Mark described early demos
of the bandÆs album The Captain Is Deadà as ômusic that actually sounds like it
came from Boonville, Missouri,ö he was invited to join them, bringing the rock
and guitar atmospherics to Minus Story. It was also after many hours talking in
the Kwik Shop at which Jordan worked, and hanging out for many nights at the
Replay Lounge, a Lawrence rock venue, that t