He's on drugs again

September 25, 2007 1:43 PM

Indiana's Sardina. The New Pornographers of the '90s, the Sardinas released two fantastic albums full of mixtape fodder. Now everything they've got, including some live gems, is up online.
posted by klangklangston (19 comments total)

Fantastic!
posted by synaesthetichaze at 1:56 PM on September 25, 2007

I like them. Thanks!
posted by interrobang at 2:18 PM on September 25, 2007

Even with the long tail, I don't see how many of the not-popular-but-still-good-to-great bands are making any money off their back catalogs. I wish more of them would do this.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 2:38 PM on September 25, 2007

Can anyone recommend a song to start with?
posted by fuzz at 2:48 PM on September 25, 2007

This is pretty great. It would be better if the links went straight to the mp3's rather than this .php thing they've got going. It's still totally worth it to click on each one and save it from within my player though.
posted by Reggie Digest at 2:48 PM on September 25, 2007

"Can anyone recommend a song to start with?"

I like 'He's on Drugs Again.'
posted by klangklangston at 2:52 PM on September 25, 2007

I thought the New Pornographers were from the 00's. Did someone shove the timeline over 10 years when I wasn't looking? Christ, am I 50 now?

great post
posted by psmealey at 3:06 PM on September 25, 2007

klangklangston, are you a Hoosier?

The tracks here are hosted on the quite-wonderful Musical Family Tree, a magnificent archive of Indiana indie music that goes back to the mid 1980s.

PJ returned to Indiana from New Orleans following Katrina, I believe. I made his acquaintance via MFT.
posted by mwhybark at 3:10 PM on September 25, 2007

Nope. Michiganian, actually. Though I stumbled across a Muncie site not too long ago (I think someone put it up on MeFi). Indiana's always seemed relatively barren for Midwest music. I mean, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota… Then there's the funk of Gary, and past that I don't know many bands at all from Indiana.
posted by klangklangston at 3:20 PM on September 25, 2007

Dude, Michigander is the preferred nomenclature.

I've been meaning to post this for a while and never got to it for some reason. I stumbled into them while discovering that Some Girls' "He's on Drugs Again" was a cover and really enjoyed everything I found. I wish other bands would do this -- there are a lot of local UP bands from my mid-90's college days that I'd love to hear again (Justin Planasch or anybody with a copy of the Jeyds' first record, can you hear me?).
posted by aaronetc at 3:27 PM on September 25, 2007

Man, "Michigander" was a Lincolnian slur!
posted by klangklangston at 3:33 PM on September 25, 2007

Michiganites! (makes you sound like the medieval fucks you are, with your baseball caps and goatees and ford pickup trucks!)
posted by chlorus at 4:29 PM on September 25, 2007

Holy shit, just listening to Big Man. Thanks for turning us on to this klang.
posted by snsranch at 4:35 PM on September 25, 2007

Michiganoids! The Mitten State! The Hand People!
posted by klangklangston at 4:47 PM on September 25, 2007

Mitteneers? I think you mean trolls.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 5:42 PM on September 25, 2007

Some Girls is a Bloomington/Indy band plus Juliana. Freda played with Juliana in the Blake Babies and Heidi was living in Indy at the time the project coalesced, as I heard it. MFT has thousands of tracks by great Indiana bands, often contributed by the bands. Here's a few to start:

Pit Bulls on Crack (rock leaning in a punk direction, 1988. Check out the farewell show.)

Vulgar Boatmen (Dale Lawrence, this band's leader, is a legend in the state and has had a profound influence on the independent music produced there. You may vaguely recall the band's name as Jonathen Lethem recently named a novel after one of their songs, sort of.)

the Zero Boys (true hardcore pioneers. their mid-80's 'Vicious Circle' is one of the lost classics of the genre)

Arson Garden (brother-sister team April and James Combs work toward angular alt-pop)

The Rosebloods (polished instrumental surf wizardy meets existentialism down by the Whiskey River)

The Pieces. (Vess Ruthenberg's pop band, opened for Some Girls on tour a couple years ago. I wish he'd post more material.)

the Nevermores (Matt Uhlmann and Gretchen Smear boil up a shambolic cauldron of goofy cartoon mummy music)

Disclaimer: at the least I am an acquaintance of the majority of the musicians represented in the list above.
posted by mwhybark at 6:43 PM on September 25, 2007

Thanks mwhybark for the link to Musical Family Tree. Its good to see Charlie Don't Surf on that site. But no Sloppy Seconds? I thought they were the best band ever in the history of Indianapolis.
posted by Sailormom at 7:08 PM on September 25, 2007

As Mike Whybark mentioned the songs are all on musicalfamilytree.com as well. PJ (the bass player in Sardina) and I basically run the site with some friends helping out. If you go to Sardina's page you can listen to the streaming player of all the songs and also see the bands they were related to.

http://www.musicalfamilytree.com/bands/sardina

Mike listed some of my favorites. I would also recommend people check out Uvula since I think they are amazing as well, broke up c. 2000.

http://www.musicalfamilytree.com/bands/uvula

We would love to have the Sloppy Seconds stuff on the site. Everything we post is permission based and we haven't gotten permission from them yet. If you can hook us up, let me know!

Jeb Banner musicalfam at g mail dot com
posted by captainmono at 7:41 PM on September 25, 2007

"In My Former Country I Was Engineer" by the Ebb and Flow is a good song.
posted by Eater at 9:54 PM on September 25, 2007