Friday, March 23rd at The Hi-tone Cafe (1913 Poplar Ave.), The Angel Sluts will be celebrating the release of two new records. The first, Love Sweet Love, is a 7″ being released by Brooklyn, New York’s Chickpea Records and features three new songs from the band. The second is a CD and cassette of B-sides, outtakes, and song’s previously released on the band’s 7″s titled Singles Staring at the Steady released by Memphis’ own Fat Sandwich Records. Since it had been a while since I had last caught up with The Angel Sluts, I sat down with the band’s singer Harry Koniditsiotis to find out a bit about the new records and to see what the band has been up to. Koniditsiotis warns that if you want to see the band play in Memphis this will be the night to do it. “If you miss it, and you cry to me about ‘When are you guys going to play again?’ Suck it! Come now or forever hold your peace.”
Memphis Rock City: What have the Angel Sluts been up to since we last spoke in August?
Harry Koniditsiotis: Uh, Let’s see. We have a new single that’s coming out on Chickpea Records, which is out of Brooklyn, called “Love Sweet Love,” which is what this record release show on the 23rd is for. Also, we have a singles compilation coming out that is going to collect all our 7”s and put together singles, B-sides, and unreleased songs. We’ve been compiling that. We’ve had a lot of out of town shows. We’ve had a lot of shows in Alabama for some reason. Alabama seems to be the happening spot now days. That’s been the vast majority of it, and working on this new record that we’re going to put out probably later this year. We were hoping to release it this summer, but the way things have worked out, we’ve been too busy, leaving town, and then with our bass player having a child on the bus in route to Chicago.
MRC: Do you want to talk about that? That seems to be a funny story.
HK: I’ll glance it a little bit. I’d rather let the myth speak for itself to be honest. That was pretty nuts. Pretty crazy. This year was a lot of out of town shows. More than we were expecting. I think we were expecting to spend a lot more time working on the album, but then all of these shows kept getting thrown at us, and we were like, “sure.” So, it’s been one of those things. It seems like we are always getting ourselves into situations like that. Do a bunch of recording, and then we have to go on the road for six months, before we are able to come back and work on it.
MRC: How did you guys get hooked up with Chickpea Records?
HK: Through some friends of ours called The Back C.C.’s, who are a Japanese band from New York. We had played with them in New York a couple of times, and then last summer, The Back C.C.’s came down here to record with me. We did some recordings at 5 and Dime, and we did some recordings at Sun Studio. Chickpea was the label that had put out one of their previous 7”s , and they had told me to contact them. It was one of those connections, a New York connection I guess.
MRC: What can you tell us about that 7”?
HK: It’s three songs. The lead song, “Love,” is the closest thing to a pop song, I think we’ve ever done. People seem to really like it. It’s a pretty fun song. Pretty tongue in cheek. The two B-sides, I actually like those better. There’s one of them, “So Dull,” which was actually recorded with just one mic in the room, and we had just written the song and played it two times. To me, that’s like you just captured this magic moment. There’s a song on the first 7”, Hot Teen Action, called “What Do They Say” which was actually recorded the same way. With just one mic in the room, after we had just written the song and played it a couple of times. Those two songs, “What Do They Say” and “So Dull” I think are my two favorite Angel Sluts songs. Mostly because of that one microphone in the room, we had just written it. It was spontaneous, and it was “That’s it!” It just came out and sounds awesome to me. I kind of dig that on both of those.
MRC: Tell us about the singles cassette as well. Is this the stuff you have released on 7”s before?
HK: Right. It’s all of our previous 7”s. Then out of the 19 songs, there are 5 unreleased songs. One or two unreleased song from each era or time period. There are definitely a lot of songs from earlier on that were supposed to be on records, but didn’t get on them for whatever reason. The split record that we did with The Six String Jets was originally going to be our own 7” with four songs, but then it turned into a split, so the other two songs that we had, which were “Gina” and “Final Days” were just kind of put aside. Then for whatever reason, when the Designer Heat album came out, they didn’t really fit to that album. There’s another song that we had written during Hot Teen Action called “Time To Go,” that was kind of a Jawbreakeresque, jokey kind of song, that also just kind of fell through the cracks. We might do a re-release of Designer Heat, because I recently found some other songs, that I had forgotten we even recorded, or written. It’s kind of kind of like that. We also have a dance remix of “Love” that our guitar player Matt did that sounds kind of like When In Rome’s “The Promise.” It’s pretty hillarious. He said his inspiration was writing menu music for 80’s DVD releases. Like if Better Off Dead needed menu music. I thought that was pretty hilarious and interesting inspiration.
MRC: Why did you choose to release this on cassette rather than vinyl or CD?
HK: It’s actually going to be on CD too. I like the layout. I guess the artwork is kind of an homage to The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy. I was listening to the cassette and I had taken the sleeve out and unfolded it, and it was like putting it down, I thought, that would make a good record cover. I just kind of thought, the way you had the spine, and the song titles. The idea was we’ll do a cassette, but we decided we would do a CD version of it too, but it’ll still have the unfolded J-card as the cover. I kind of dug that, and I think some people were like, you have the front and the back of the CD and that’s kind of repetitive, but you know, who cares, so what. There were tons of cassettes, I remember back in the day, they’d have the record cover real small, and they’d have the song titles underneath, and then you’d turn it over, and you’d have the song titles on the back spine. I just kind of thought it would be a cool homage to it, and I hadn’t really seen anyone do something like that. I thought it was kind of neat looking.
I dug the way it looked.
MRC: Will the CD be available at the show also?
HK: Yes! It’s gonna be our usual thing whenever you release something. Just pay at the door and get something for free. I guess this will be the biggest one we’ve done, because generally its always just a 7” or just a CD. This time you will have a choice between a 7”, cassette, or CD. The cassettes are going to have digital download card, so if you wanna go all 80’s retro, you can still put it into your laptop. Everyone who has cassettes still uses their laptop to listen to music too. No matter how cool they try to be, they still listen to music on a laptop.
MRC: Do you think that cassettes still have a place in music?
HK: It is what it is, like anything else. People are always going to prefer one over the other. Hell, people still listen to 8 tracks. People still listen to 78s. If you have it, and you have the means to listen to it. Cool. At the same time, people hear music, wherever they’re going to hear it. Whether it’s a cassette player or a laptop. Whatever is readily available. Obviously, I have a cassette player in my car, so I’ll drive around and listen to cassettes. I can’t say that when I’m at home I go out of my way to listen to them. When I’m at home, I prefer vinyl. That’s always been my preferred medium.
MRC: I think a lot of us still have cassette players in our cars. We’re all broke.
HK: Yeah, and it’s still a cool medium. I think people are making a big deal out of it right now. Which I think is funny. That’s just the way people who are into music are in general. They discover something old that everyone knows and act like it’s something brand new that no one knows about. Everyone’s kind of like that. In ten years, they are going to be like, “Hey I found this thing called a CD player.”
MRC: What can you tell us about the album you are currently working on?
HK: I’m liking it! We’ve tracked about 10 songs. I think some of them we are going to end up dropping in lieu of some of the newer songs we’ve written. Not really dropping, but we had done versions of “Final Days” and “Gina” again, but with the whole release of the singles record, I don’t feel the need to put newer versions of those songs on this record. I kind of feel like, it speaks for itself, and the original versions are fine. They’re rough and they’re raw. We had been writing some new songs, and I felt we should focus on that more than the back catalog. That’s kind of one of the things the singles album took care of was releasing unreleased songs and left room for all of the new songs we had been writing. Some of the new songs, it’s all over the place. There are times where it sounds just like anything else we would write, and there are times when I think this song sounds different, but there is still a pretty heavy 70’s U.S./British punk feel to it, which is what we’ve always focused on for the most part. I don’t necesarily think that the Angel Sluts will ever be doing any Swans type songs (Koniditsiotis was wearing a Swans t-shirt). I’d love it, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. That’s more Twin Pilotish. The newer stuff, I’m really happy with it. There’s actually a new song, that to me sounds like The Replacements, there’s some stuff that sounds pretty street punk, and there is some stuff that sounds straight out of 77, that era. I think we’ve always made a really good effort of meshing it all together to some extent. Oddly enough, we’ve been playing all these new songs live, out of town, but we haven’t played any of them live in Memphis. I think, “So Dull” and “Don’t Have Time,” which are on the 7” are two of the songs we recorded that were the newer ones, we’ve been playing those in Memphis for a while, but as for the other ones, we haven’t been playing them. The out of town cities have heard the new stuff more than the Memphis crowd has.
MRC: Do you guys have tour plans for the summer?
HK: I think we’re going to do a week-long thing in Texas in May and do a festival thing out there. I think we will mostly lay low over the summer and finish this record, then get back on the road. Things keep popping up, so that’s the plan to finish the album up. Once this thing happens in May, we are going to try to feel out and see how much time we have left to finish up the touring and the record. Things have been so busy. I also have a bunch of shows with The Turn It Offs coming up, so we are hoping after this show on the 23rd, we will have all of April to finish the record before we go out in May.
MRC: What’s been the reaction to the new songs on the road?
HK: Really good. Everyone really likes them. People keep asking us, what album is that song on? And we have to be like, it’s not out yet. There is a place in Montgomery I like to play, and we usually end up playing a couple of sets there. Last time we played three sets, and it was the discography, and the crowd loved it. We gave them old stuff and new stuff, and it was neat to be able to play this…in a way compilation show, where we were able to play stuff from our entire career through the order of releases and then play a whole bunch of new stuff. Its kind of funny how some people hear the new stuff, and to them it’s just like any other song out of our repertoire. I think it comes down to how we sell it as a live band more than how you listen to it on a record.
MRC: When you go out of town are people typically already familiar with your music?
HK: Yes. It has gotten to that point now. They know how we sound live, and at least have a CD or some kind of record. They’ve like the Facebook page, they’ve seen the posts.
The Angel Sluts will be joined by Chicago’s The Black Belts who Harry describes as a Hamburg era Beatles punk rock outfit. Local queercore band The Gloryholes will also be performing and Memphis Vic will be djing. Things kick of at 10:00pm and 18 and up. There will be a $5 cover, and you will get your choice of a CD or cassette copy of Singles Staring at the Steady or a Love Sweet Love 7″.
Tomorrow (3/31) at The Hi-tone, a benefit concert is being held for Grow Memphis! Founded in 2007, Grow Memphis runs several community gardens throughout the Memphis area, many of them in high needs areas where residents might not have access to fresh food. Tomorrow’s benefit show at the Hi-tone kicks off at 8:00pm and features Wuvbirds, Chris Milam, The Near Reaches, and Jeffrey James and the Haul! While a cover isn’t listed, I assume they will be asking for $5 at the door, and if you have more to give, please do because this is a good cause!
Memphis Rock City! 