Thursday, December 24, 2009

Strictly Ballroom - Hide Here Forever + First two 7"s


I uploaded this to mediafire the other day for Kevin so I figured I might as well post it here too. Strictly Ballroom were a band from Los Angeles around the mid nineties with members that were all mutually connected through KXLU. For those of you who have never spent some time in Los Angeles KXLU is by far one of the best radio stations I have ever encountered in California let alone the world. I will leave a link for their website at the bottom of this post which I would highly recommend checking out, especially Bomb Shelter with Uncle Tim Friday nights from 8 to 9. At the time when Strictly Ballroom were beginning Jimmy Tamborello, who is now known as Dntel and one half of the Postal Service, was the music director at KXLU where he met the rest of the band including Chris Gunst of Beachwood Sparks/Mystic Chords of Memory and sometime member Jimi Hey of All Night Radio and a number of other good bands. On their first self titled 7" Strictly Ballroom played pretty basic mid nineties post hardcore that reminds me of early Unwound and maybe even a little Native Nod. On their second 7" they started to adopt a slower pace with a more atmospheric sound which people thought sounded like a combination of Brian Eno with the energy of a hardcore band. If you look up Strictly Ballroom you will see the ridiculous term that was probably invented by critics at the time to describe their music but I think its better to let words like that stay in the past. Their last record "Hide Here Forever" was their first full length and most memorable release. It is by far my favorite record of theirs and I think for the genre its probably one of the best releases period. If you are a fan of any of the people involved in Strictly Ballroom than I think it would be worth checking this out just to see what they were doing early on. The picture above is Henry Miller playing ping pong with a naked woman, it has nothing to do with Strictly Ballroom.

2 comments:

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  2. Do you have there 2 bsides from risk 7", 2 unreleased songs and the fire 7"? i only found there comp song.

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