Jennifer Mathison-Ohly
Mama Digdown's Brass Band in 2020.
The longer Madison’s music scene stays safer at home, the more music keeps appearing on Bandcamp and other spots online. While musicians may be struggling themselves, many are finding a way to raise funds for others. Here’s just a handful of recent finds.
Mama Digdown’s Brass Band, providing good-time New Orleans-style music to Madison and the world for more than a quarter-century, released a new single created virtually from the members’ homes. “Just the Two of Us” was a big pop hit for Grover Washington Jr. and Bill Withers in 1981, and also a Grammy Award-winner for Best R&B song. Mama Digdown’s swinging recreation was recorded as a tribute to Withers, who died March 30, and released as a fundraiser for the New Orleans Brass Band Musicians Relief Fund. You can watch the band create the song quarantine-style in a video posted on the nonet’s Facebook page.
Maggie Denman
Madison Relief Compilation Vol. 1 serves as a handy compendium of bands mostly drawn from the semi-underground east side rock scene at such venues as Mickey’s, The Wisco, Communication and the late, lamented Art In. The intriguingly alphabetical track lineup includes both familiar bands to club calendar watchers (Bashford, We Should Have Been DJs, Wurk) and some who have only started playing out more recently (LINE, Burnidette). Mix and match four tracks at a time from this 19-cut Bandcamp comp and grab a drink of your choice to create your own mini-show that could take place at your favorite hangout. Two instrumentals make up the widest stylistic juxtaposition here: the building-to-VU blast “Snail Loop” by Judders (the musical alter ego of Scott Gordon) and could-be-yacht-rock lope of “K.K. Dreamin’” by Miles Morkri. Proceeds from sales benefit Dane County Community Defense Fund, a collaboration by the Madison IWW General Defense Committee Local 100 and the Social Justice Center.
Something to Do, which officially calls Milwaukee home base but includes some Madison residents and music scene veterans, also has a new single recorded virtually in April. “Stay Inside” is an uncharacteristically downbeat (or, at least, medium beat) song for the rockin’ ska veterans, but still catchy, and as you may guess from the title it is quarantine- themed. Proceeds from sales will be donated to the GoFundMe page for Cudahy all-ages venue X-Ray Arcade and its employees; the song can be found on just about any streaming platform you can think of.
David Esmond
It’s been rare to catch The August Teens on local stages in recent times, even before the coronavirus shut down the concert scene. However, their long-awaited third album, I’m Selfish and So is My Cat, has finally emerged on Bandcamp. Recorded from 2008-2016, these songs will feel familiar to fans of the band; they certainly stuck in my head after a few times hearing them played live, because singer-guitarist Dan Hardgrove writes Grade A power pop songs. Catchy music, concise song construction and clever lyrics make The August Teens’ music pretty unforgettable, so it’s a very happy day to finally have these songs available in recorded form. Along with Hardgrove, the quartet includes guitarist David Esmond (who also did the cover art); and Josh Labbus (drums) and Kyle Urban (bass and backing vocals), both of The Motorz and Rocket Bureau. Urban also recorded and mixed the album; in fact, a whole raft of projects recorded by Urban have emerged in recent weeks, including three LP releases coming from Dusty Medical Records of lost projects by The Midwest Beat, Drugs Dragons and Phylums.
Sometimes the best way to get out one’s feelings about politics is to let fly in song. Over the past month the Wisconsin Broken Badger YouTube channel has been steadily posting new satirical songs as performance videos, with topics ranging from white supremacist memes (“Have You Seen Kyle”) to trickle-down economics to “astroturf” conservative protests. Fair warning: Be prepared for some blue language; you might not want to crank this one if you are in an office environment.
Also bringing a definite political theme to a new release is Jones Grips. Info Creepin combines some appropriately threatening-sounding electronic music with sliced-and-diced rants by right-wing radio host Alex Jones. If that sounds horrifying, well, it is probably supposed to be, but it’s also pretty damn funny (the Bandcamp page states “use in this manner constitutes parody, which is considered a form of fair use”). However, while the band’s location is given as Madison, Wisconsin, is that just Jones-style fake news? The instrumentals are credited to Stefan Burnett, Zach Hill and Andy Morin — better known as experimental hip-hop trio Death Grips, who, last I knew, had not moved to Wisconsin. Your guess is as good as mine as to the origins of this one.
More definitely in the “Madison-related” category is the Mike Farley Band, which strictly speaking is a Cleveland, Ohio, band. However, Mike Farley has lived in Madison for quite some time, working as a publicist while continuing to play music. His eponymous band’s last album was put together with Farley in Madison and the other members of the quartet each living in different states. They planned to return to Cleveland for a 20th anniversary reunion show this month, but that was precluded by the pandemic. Instead, the group will release a digital compilation album, B-sides and Rarities, on May 22, on various streaming services. This is one for the late ‘90s-’00s guitar rock fans, particularly if you like the rock with some heartland earnestness; for an easy reference point, think BoDeans but with a bit more modern rock spikiness.
