The Summer Set, Everything Fine.” Skinny, squeaky clean faux-indie act which, based on the descriptions I read—Alternative Press likes ‘em, John Fields produced ‘em—would be appropriate summer listening for this hot and sultry week. I was misinformed. This is a year-round by-the-numbers Disney Channel-style pop, with unnecessary harmonies and twangs and other fillips. Overdone like heatstroke.

Can’t keep Christopher Arnott away from his record collection, even though it’s in the basement.

1. Mighty Purple, When Kingdoms Fall/Explode. Mighty Purple was many things to many people: hip high school coterie, heavily promoted pick-to-click regional rock stars, kids living the dream, suburban rebels… This was a band without an “in their prime” time: you simply saw them grow up from teenagers to young adults, watching as their tastes and talents expanded. This single, on their own well-designed Wonderland label, was from a particularly grandiose phase of studio exploration. Some think psychedelia is a nostalgia thing, but it’s a frame of mind we all go through. The A-side here runs over five minutes.
2. Bo Donaldson and The Heywoods, Who Do You Think You Are/Fool’s Way of Lovin’. The Heywoods were not a one-hit wonder, and here’s the proof. They were part of a ‘60s style pop revival in the mid-1970s, which suited them fine, since they’d formed in Cincinnati in 1965. As a snotty youth whose father would bring me back the latest UK hit singles from his regular trips to England, I lambasted BD&H for swiping thieir biggest hit, “Billy Don’t Be a Hero”, from Paper Lace, but “Who Do You Think You Are” utterly redeemed them for me. I finally got the chance to see the band live when they ably backed up an Archies-themed double bill of Ron Dante and Andy Kim at the Mohegan Sun Wolf Den in the mid-‘90s.
3. Wishbringer, It Came From My Grave/ Lost Children/ Nigh Time. Slushy-cool psych-garage, elegantly underproduced yet exorbitantly overpackage. The sleeve is a piece of purple construction paper adorned with cut-outs stickers, rubber stamps and a “#23 of 300” marking, the single also comes with a ripped out page (#137-138) of the paperback Go Ask Alice and a bubblegum sports card (Joe Caldwell of the Cougars: “They call him Pogo Joe”).
4. Cherry Red, Get Set/I Told You. Girly glam from the same label that hosted New Haven’s supreme female-fronted garage band, The Botswanas. Skillful approximation of the hallowed Chapman/Chin—style guitar sound.
5. Boiling Man, Roadkill Museum EP. Seven songs on a 45 rpm 7-inch! Those were the (hardcore) days. The sleeve design is overstuffed as well, thanks to the aesthetic proclivities of Todd Rogers, as famous in the New Haven scene for his street fliers as for this eminently worthwhile band. The crushingly fast music is full of shouted interludes that really draw you in, especially the “Fuck You!” parts.

Greener Good is the environmentally friendly band from the farm that isn’t the farm that the Shaking Quakers hold church at. (Don’t knock farmland bands; they usually get to practice as loud and as late as they want. Plus they tend to be healthy and can play longer and harder).
The Greener Good pulled up for their Bullfinch show on bicycles with little weapons behind them. All their equipment was accounted for, and that included stand up bass and vibes. The GGs’d been told they didn’t need to bring mics or amps, but they told me they could’ve lugged them too if so needed.
That’s a bonus show you want to arrive early to see! (Or, in our case, still be drinking at the Bullfinch after a late lunch.) Everything was in crates padded with newspapers. Everything needed to be tuned. Everything had little nicks and scratches on it, including the musicians. Guitarist “kid kiwi”– who’s not Australian; kiwis are what he grew on the last farm he worked at—had ridden through some brambles and fretted that his pickup had been pricked.
The set went off without a hitch, and the band was even afforded a long encore by the other bands on the bill. Impressed with the lengths to which they’d gone to play for, uh, 20 people who were mostly there to see the other bands or just to drink.
Extra-effort bonuses aside, Greener good says it bikes to shows to make a point about how possible it is, not how difficult. But what would they do if they got a gig in wintertime, during a snowstorm?
“Oh, we’re not idiots,” they say. “We know we can’t bike anywhere.
“If it was gnarly out, we’d take the tractor.”

Retzer’s Elephant Nose, Rosy Dory and the charming duo Pacu &
Opah all at the Bullfinch… Bullfinch has three bands, while Hamilton’s has just one— Striped Mojarra, for multiple sets starting at 9 p.m…. Feel free to dig Pirillo and Sedimentology at D’ollaire’s, for a much lighter tariff than the club has generally been charging for indie fare of late…

Missed several days of making bagels and thought I was through, but they must be hard up because they’re being all nice to me.

Maino featuring Roscoe Dash, “Let It Fly.” A new standard in innocuous, upbeat, unthreatening commercially minded raps: the main sample appears to be from (or at least is startlingly similar to) Billy Joel’s “Moving Up.” That’s got to be the most mainstream middlebrow sample sublimation since Jay-Z plumbed Annie for “Hard Knock Life.”

Here’s an old ad for Wildroot Cream Oil, glimpsed through the front window of Ron’s Barber Shop, across from the Westport (Ct.) train station.
The hair product’s popularity peaked in the 1940s and ‘50s, when it had an unlikely spokesperson: Fearless Fosdick, a perforated parody of Dick Tracy beloved by the infantile title character in Al Capp’s satirical comic strip L’il Abner. Capp himself was Connecticut born (in New Haven) and raised (in Bridgeport).
I’m reluctant to add this link to Wildroot’s radio jingle, it’s so infernally catchy. I first learned it through sheet music when I was a kid, and it’s been stuck in my head for 40 years.

The Leafcutters started built songs a certain way for 18 months. Then they reversed themselves.
“We called it clumping,” fills in Jo Goba, co-founder of the Leafcutter collective. “We’d all bring little snatches of sound, slivers of things, and put them in a pile. We’d clump it all together, and these ‘listening holes’ would magically form. Now we take those strands and connect them into one long extended linear sound.”
It helps to know that the LCs are industrious tape-snipping DJs and that mixtapes are their main oeuvre. They developed their multi-multi-track methodology after studying radical early 20th century art theory at the college on the hill.
But clumping has lost its luster.
“We Were bunching shards, and that worked for warehouse raves. But now we’re mostly in clubs, so it was worth experimenting with extending strands—connections, nerve endings, communal Babel-building.”
Yes, that’s how they talk. How do they sound? Similarly confusing, without the verbality. Find out Saturday at the main common of the college on the hill, where Leafcutter sound montages will blast out of PAs for an hour, starting at 1 p.m.

A soggy folk-pop double bill of Watershed Way and Closer to the Lake at the Bullfinch..
Beluga Digs and Listening to the Uplands at Hamilton’s… An Evening With The Gift of Bark at D’ollaire’s. Great booking, but those prices!…

Still cleaning melted ash/clay gunk off the table.

The Capstan Shafts, Kind Empires
The Capstan Shafts get rapped for sounding so much like (and apparently being nearly as prolific as) Guided by Voices. Like that’s a bad thing. But now that Dean Wells has availed himself of steady bandmates and full-fledged recording studios for a while now, the differences are apparent and invigorating. The guitar solos, for starters. The plaintive wails, for another—totaling different emotional angle from the bar-band bravado of Robert Pollard et al. Interludes such as the disarming two-minute romantic swirl “Like Them from Arthouse Floozy” or the tempo-laden “Hating on the Fleshless Days.” The unabashed real-life-expectations rave-up of “The Deli Girls Give Me What I Ask For…” Totally stands on its own, this stack of all-American pop (via Vermont and points South). Dean Wells, to poach his own words, is no “Garbagetime Pumpfaker.”

Jet Jaunt
Cool Fool
Basket Banter
Bath Banter
Flower the Power
Sammy the Whammy
Game Shame
Ice Cream, You Scream
Vile Visit
Dream Scheme
Burn and Learn
My Favorite Fiend,
Ballet Ruse
Prize Problem
The Great Grind
Finny Finis
A Bit of a Wit
Merrily We Bowl Along
Some Total
Money Honey
Money Makes the Scene
Stop the Music
Cost Conscious
..plus two separate bits entitled “He’s a Card,” and numerous reprinted Archie newspaper comic strips with the collective title “Gag Bag.”
You really got to give it to ‘em for the French plays on “Finis” and “Ballets Russe.”