ARTIST: The Eastern Stars
TITLE: July 5th, 1961
LABEL: Mental Monkey Records
GENRE: Indie
BITRATE: 212kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 30m total
RELEASE DATE: 2006-05-00
RIP DATE: 2006-05-10
Track List
----------
1. They Know What To Do 2:49
2. Lovely Love 2:27
3. Little Punk 2:49
4. Money Money We Want Yours 3:27
5. The Diamonds In Your Eyes 2:59
6. The Ticket That Exploded 2:41
7. In Russian Blue 1:41
8. I Fear The Love (I Will) 1:50
9. White Belts/Adverse Invest 1:53
10. Jail Bait Baby 3:36
11. Secret # 3:51
Release Notes:
July 5th, 1961 is the debut album from New York folksters Rob Corradetti and
Kaia Wong. On break from the touring frenzy of their psychedelic pop band, Mixel
Pixel, the two got together in the Summer of 2004 to record this album on an
8-track in Rob's basement in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
The songs on July 5th, 1961 ping-pong back and forth between straight folk and
more experimental folk styles with layers of guitar, violin, Moog, omnichord,
ukulele and dueling boy / girl vocals. Songs such as "They Know What To Do", and
"The Diamonds in Your Eyes" hearken back to an eerie American mysticism that can
be found in the poetry of Theodore Roethke or the paintings of Edward Hopper.
Songs like "Little Punk" and "Money Money We Want Yours" are more like Kerouac
hanging out with The Carpenters.
Rob and Kaia wrote the bulk of their album in 2001 while living together in
Koreatown, Manhatten. They worked on songs in the back room of their loft space,
a Christmas-lit spaceship jutting into an alley shadowed in the sway of the
Empire State Building. Through bomb threats, break-ups, and political mishaps
all throughout 2001, their home had become a haven for nomad artists, drifters,
malcontents, and police officers stopping by to evacuate everyone.
To escape the chaos around them, The Eastern Stars played late into the Winter
night, their work punctuated only by coffee breaks and Kaia's scientific soup
creations. Through music they transfixed themselves into another time and space,
a simpler era both in American history and in their own personal lives. Hence
the title of July 5th, 1961, a date on which nothing of political or social
significance occurred, yet a date on which everything imaginable happened:
birth, death, tragedy, baseball, and slugging back to work with Holiday
hangovers.
The Eastern Stars take their name from Masonic roots. The Order of the Eastern
Star is the largest fraternal organization in the world to which both men and
women may belong.
The Eastern Stars influences are mainly bands which feature a dual boy / girl
lead vocal (The Vaselines, The Mamas and the Papas, Galaxie 500, and fellow New
Yorkers, The Moldy Peaches) or use multiple tripped out voices in an album (Pink
Floyd, Love, Sonic Youth).
They are also clearly influenced by the sweet Northwest sounds of mid-nineties K
and Kill Rock Star bands such as The Softies, Beat Happening, Beck, Heavenly,
Elliot Smith, and Lois.
Kaia Wong was born at the Hammond organ in a suburb of Philadelphia and now
lives in a Brooklyn warehouse, Rubulad. She plays saxophone, Moog Opus 3, sings
(and hula hoops) in Mixel Pixel. She has toured the world with The Luminescent
Orchestrii on her fiddle. She also makes lip balm and soap, and occasionally
explodes.
Rob Corradetti is a self-taught musician. Since being struck by lightning when
he was 15 he has recorded over 300 songs on his portable 8-track under the name
Mixel Pixel and now The Eastern Stars. He also makes bright, psychedelic artwork
and comic books.
Lindsay Kay (ex-CrΦme Blush) played keyboards and percussion on "I Fear the
Love".
Penelope the Kitten purred on "The Ticket that Exploded".