Cory Graves
Fishboy Preps A New Release and Reverend Horton Heat Gets Saucy.
Say what you will about Eric “Fishboy” Michener's musical output, but there's no arguing the fact that each of his releases since 2007's Albatross has been extraordinarily well thought-out and wonderfully packaged.
Aside from that aforementioned 2007 rock opera, there was 2009's NOM, which saw Fishboy demos fleshed out by outside musicians and custom packaging personally screen printed by the artist, and 2011's Classic Creeps, which told the intertwining tales of 10 characters whose names all began with the letter “A” and even came with a 10-panel hand-drawn comic depicting the album's complex tale.
Now, for Fishboy's latest EP, the soon-to-be-released IAMAVOLCANO, Michener once again finds himself broaching concept album territory — this time in order to tell the tale of a man who inexplicably turns into, you guessed it, a volcano. The album will be printed on brown vinyl with a red label meant to resemble a bird's eye view of a volcano. It also will come with hand-letter-pressed jackets that open to reveal an exploding volcano, plus a 16-page comic delving deeper into the tale.
An official release show for the EP will come on August 3 at Rubber Gloves with Two Knights and Savage and the Big Beat opening. Until then, peep the band's latest video, which examines the exorbitant number of pizza joints packed within a three-mile stretch of University Drive in Denton.
Sticking with the food angle: Jim Heath of Reverend Horton Heat fame has quite literally spiced up his website's merch section recently with the addition of Reverend Horton Heat Sauce, a pepper sauce made from the devilish red savina pepper. Be careful, though: The red savina habanero pepper typically reaches over 500,000 Scoville units. For comparison's sake, jalapenos generally measure about 3,000 Scoville units.
We also hear that Dallas Music founder Jessica Martinez has been cooking up a new project of her own.
“We mixed two things and got something more awesome than a liger,” Martinez told us of her upcoming Deep Beats & Eats cooking show. “We're in stitches editing it.”
Though she chose to remain mum about when and where her show will air, we did manage to scope a few behind-the-scenes photos from the upstart's Facebook page. Best as we can tell, the series' pilot episode will feature guest band Dead Flowers cooking and playing music in what appears to be a locally-centric takeoff of the short-lived IFC series Dinner With the Band.
Finally, we've a few new releases worth mentioning. First up, Denton's Timothy Jarrod Smith & Hot Coffins posted a pre-release stream of their upcoming I H8 Black Magic EP here. The batch of dark, angular jangle pop tunes was produced by John Congleton, and serves as a primer for a self-produced LP the band will release in the coming months.
Also, those new McKenzie Smith-produced Sarah Jaffe tunes we mentioned a while back finally became available for purchase today via iTunes.
Lastly, you should also head iTunes' way in the near future to pick up the new Matt Pence-produced effort from Dallas stonegaze heroes True Widow. The album, called Cirumambulation and the band's first for Relapse Records, earns its official release today after streaming on Pitchfork for the past week.
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