Austin Sound

As our so-called winter quickly turns into a short-lived spring, we wanted to catch up on a batch of recent local EPs that certainly deserve attention. Wine and Revolution deliver their debut effort with the noble 6 track Edward the Magneficent, and The Georgian Company drops their much anticipated first eponymous album. We also couldn’t overlook Leatherbag’s quick four tune disc released in February, which finds one of our favorite songwriters continuing to delve deeper into the classic rock and power pop archives with a new ensemble, the Pretty Tuffs. In his usual prolific fashion, he’s already working up another EP to be released soon. And finally, we revisit the geographically challenged and multiply imbalanced Wax Museum Pandemonium for their attempt to fuse their split ends into a 5 song 7″.

Last December, Wax Museum Pandemonium played a rare show with all nine members of the band, members from the band’s Northern incarnation and those from the Southern half down here in Austin. If your not familiar with WMP, the band is the premise of brothers Noah and Clem Poole, but Clem lives in Connecticut while Noah lives in Austin. This hasn’t stopped them from carrying on the band though, just in two different manifestations. If you missed the December show at Lovejoy’s, now you can get a feel for both halves with their new “North/South” split 7″! And you can download a track from each band below!

7/9/07
Wax Museum Pandemonium, the project started by brothers Noah and Clem Poole, is actually too completely different bands. In Texas, WMP is made up of Noah and Araminta Poole, Amarin Enyart, Josh Duke, and Landon Peterson. But Clem has also carried the band back to Connecticut with him where you can catch a Wax Museum Pandemonium consisting of Clem, Charlie Potter, Lee Camfield, and Elliott Shaw. The Indie world can get mighty confusing at times.

The New England faction of the group, or at least Clem, recently put together an illustrated song, accompanying “A Walk in the Mist” with a graphic short story. The song is off of his new album, Domestic Violence and the illustrations for “A Walk in the Mist” are quite excellent, portraying the haunting WWI tale in impressionistic strokes. He has set up the song on WMP’s blog so that you can listen and scroll through pages. Check it out here. Also hit their myspace page to hear more songs from Domestic Violence, including the fantastic “potatoBUG.”