So I've got two new songs on a cassette single to talk about. You might have heard them before, and they're from a band you might know on a label you might not know but with a name you've maybe heard before. Does that sound convoluted enough to count as an introduction? 

Anyway! The songs are "Jimmy" and "Til' the Day She Die," the band is Bloomington's The Brown Bottle Flu, and the label is Crush Grove Records, which of course, you might know from sharing a name with Bloomington's Crush Grove house venue. Everything is connected and this is not a mistake. The Brown Bottle Flu's bassist is Jared Coyle (alongside Alex Molica on guitar/vox and Sharlene Birdsong on drums/vox). Coyle also runs the house venue Crush Grove and this very cassette single from The Brown Bottle Flu is Crush Grove Records' first release. 

You can hear an assortment of the group's older work here on the MFT archive (embedded above), but the tracks on this single have this solid feeling of re-centering. It's worth nothing that the members of the band have been pushing off in all manner of directions lately--e.g., Molica in Wet Heave, Birdsong in Thee Tsunamis, White Moms, and MFT's own IN Covers project--and as such, in a way, these tracks send off a feeling of comfortable return. It's like hopping back on that bike that sat unridden all winter and heading straight for the steepest hill in the neighborhood. 

"Jimmy" bursts right out of the gate while "Til' the Day She Die" leans a little more on swagger but both tracks are compact little vibe delivery systems. Simple in structure but always ever casting baited hooks off into the dark waters of memories of sound and place. Birdsong's rattling slapbacked voice is scratched up by Molica's guitar and then pulsed straight through by the thunk-comma-thud-comma-thunk-comma-thud of the rhythm section. None of it is polite about asking to be played loudly. 

Become a part of history; grip the tape today.