Cory Graves
So Many Festivals, So Little Time.
You guys. We're two days away from the unofficial start of festival season.
For the next seven months — give or take — we'll be inundated with dozens of music festivals across the region and, really, across the nation. And it all starts this week, too, in part due to the launch of Thursday's fifth annual 35 Denton festival.
Did we just say “in part?” Why, yes. Yes, we did. That same day, another upstart festival named after a local highway kicks off as well.
The lesser-known 30 East Music Fest will see more than a dozen local bands (as well as a few regional ones) making the one-hour trek east on I-30 to Sulphur Springs for this fest's inaugural go, among them Madison King, Home by Hovercraft, The Chloes, Venetian Sailors, The Effinays and Ducado Vega.
Meanwhile, in other festival news, Fort Worth's The Orbans and Skeleton Coast have been added to Spune's upcoming Untapped: Fort Worth affair. So, too, have Dallas bands Somebody's Darling and Dove Hunter.
The festival-related news doesn't end there, either. To coincide with the 35 Denton bill they're hosting at Banter this Friday, Denton's Gutterth Records is releasing their fourth compilation since 2008. The comp's whopping 55 tracks come exclusively from bands that Gutterth has recorded or booked in the past, and, as such, most are local. And, as with their past three comps, a good chunk of the songs on this compilation haven't been released previously. A total of 50 copies will be given away during the aforementioned Banter showcase. The full thing can also be downloaded for free — along with past years' comps — on Gutterth's BandCamp page on Friday.
That Gutterth record is just one of many new releases of note this week. In last week's column we mentioned Polyphonic Spree's upcoming album Yes, It's True, which we've since learned will be released May 28. Aside from the track “You Don't Know Me,” which was released last week, the album will also include last year's “What Would You Do?,” and a fully realized version of Tim DeLaughter's 2009 “Blurry” demo, which has been re-titled as “Blurry Up the Lines.” In the next week, fans will have an even better idea of Yes, It's True's content as another new track called “Popular By Design” is set to appear on the March 19 episode of Fox's New Girl.
Also, onetime local Andrew Savage and his Brooklyn-based outfit Parquet Courts have an extremely limited run of seven-inches being released as a joint effort between What's Your Rupture in the US and the Rough Trade label For Us in the UK. While the A-side will feature “Borrowed Time” off the band's Light Up Gold LP, the flip side will feature two unreleased tracks, one of which can be streamed here.
In keeping with the festival-intensive news, we'd like to take this time to remind you that Parquet Courts is, in fact, playing at next week's Spillover Fest, too.
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