3-Way Singles Club Volume 19 drops April 2nd!

We have a tendency to seemingly go dormant, and then come storming back as projects come to fruition.  "Storming back" is perhaps the perfect description of Volume 19 of the 3-Way Singles Club, which will be released Tuesday April 2nd!  Featuring brand new tracks from Trenton, New Jersey pop punkers Honah Lee, moodier post-punk propulsion from Lansing's Language, and a rocking self-dissection from the increasingly hard to pigeonhole indie punk band Decades (also from Lansing), Volume 19 of the series is a rush of energy that never lets up.

My own contribution to things is often in the form of artwork, which I usually complete in advance of receiving any of the songs, sometimes as a spur to bring the project to completion and sometimes as a teaser for those of you out in the internet hinterlands -- a sort of flier tacked to the weathered telephone pole of this blog, on its own little patch of street corner in a backwater of the world wide web.  In the case of Volume 19, I took some visual cues from PiL's "Second Edition" version of Metal Box, using a blurred photo of something vaguely resembling a face made of smoke (it may actually be the pull-cord of some venetian blinds) that I snapped the very day I got my first new digital camera, maybe 10 years ago.  I still have that camera, even though these days my wife's phone takes way better pictures.

What the photo truly is, I don't remember, but I walked around the house I shared with 3 roommates snapping away at lampshades, plastic skeletons, wallpaper textures and closeups of paint cracks.  I took nearly a hundred shots, and I still pull from that batch of photos frequently for abstract fliers or digital collages.  On reflection, maybe the art is a little dour for the music within? But these are the risks of creating cover art in advance, as my own visual "song" to add to the proceedings, and I accept those risks.

Without any communication between bands, as is (surprisingly) often the case, a loose concept develops over the arc of this little three song mixtape.  Honah Lee's "The Accommodator" offers to shape to any of the listener's desires, a hyperspeed offer of complete (and quite probably, disingenuous) codependency replete with gang-choruses through what sounds like a taxi dispatcher's microphone.  In fact, a second listen proves that the song has nearly the opposite meaning.  A friend of Honah Lee's described the overall sound of their newest songs as "Green Day being butt-fucked by the Foo Fighters," which may be more crass than the measured prose we typically use here at It Takes A Village To Make Records, but, oh well, it fits.  Language responds with "Limits," a metaphoric landscape of guitar chime, speed limits, and dissolving boundaries.  Musically, it's a churning diorama of motion-blurred headlight rivers and cities streaming by, while Christopher Minarek sings "who knows where the city goes when I'm with you?"  Beneath, it melts away into disintegrating guitar textures and a galvanic bass line.  Decades caps the three songs with "Piling It On," a personal and impassioned inspection of experience as the greatest teacher, and of physical and emotional distance as a tonic to past relationships.  From frank and confessional, conversational singing to a throaty howl, "Piling It On" moves on in a crunching and melodic way that steps through several mutations of its song form before gently landing on a slightly resigned, slightly relieved note. 

So there it is.  A preview in words of what you can expect in sounds, and we're excited to post the link for you to hear it in its unvarnished glory one week from tomorrow!