SC Distributon

Born in a cornfield in Ohio, Pterodactyl migrated to Brooklyn, where they spent long hours in a flooded basement writing songs that sounded "as if someone plugged them into the nearest available wall socket and flipped the on switch" (Doug Mosurak, Dusted). After releasing two 7-inches, "Friday, During the Day" and "I Can See a River," Pterodactyl bought a sampler, discovered their fascination with thickly layered vocal harmonies, and set to work on what would become their debut full-length record, officially self-titled, but operationally called "Blue Jay." Soon afterward, Pterodactyl were forced to move all their equipment out of New York City and make their temporary home in the basement of a house in rural Connecticut. Most of the songs on their debut record were written on weekend trips to this basement while Pterodactyl waited for a place to play back in the city. When they finally moved into a less flooded and much less spacious room with Brah label-mates Parts & Labor, they put the finishing touches on the songs and recorded it all on a series of very cold days in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The songs on this record range from incessant and infectious ("Polio") to sparse and spacious ("Three Succeed") to epic and redemptive ("Esses"). Combining a noisy post-punk palette with adventurous, arresting lead vocals and harmonies, Pterodactyl's first full-length offers up a compellingly catchy, scratchy sound that is not easily forgotten. In 2006 Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau caught a performance of "Polio" at the tail end of Pterodactyl's set and ranked it the best "tail end" in a month of New York live shows, writing: "A 20-minute Dungen song deserved its 10-minute flute solo. The unknown Pterodactyl repeated the same climactic six-note riff for six minutes. This was so much better than that flute solo."

Pterodactyl is Joe Kremer, Matt Marlin and Kurt Beals. Beals was previously a principal member of early Jagjaguwar band The Union of A Man And A Woman.

Nurse & Soldier's Marginalia is gentle, bewildered psych-pop from the partnership of Robertson Thacher (aka Bobby Matador of Oneida) and longtime collaborator Erica Fletcher. The two have been making music together since their teenage years, a long history reflected in the intimate nature of the music. Far more vulnerable and raw than Oneida, Nurse & Soldier sing about longing, betrayal and reconciliation; the sound of Marginalia is a confused murmur, as opposed to Oneida's punishing roar.

Long regarded as one of the best live acts in New York, Oakley Hall has finally delivered on the promise of its collective talent and the energy of its live shows with the masterpiece Gypsum Strings, their second full-length release this year. Gypsum Strings busts out of Americana norms and reimagines Laurel Canyon as made of steel and glass. The band's dynamic range and killer songwriting chops are in evidence as they careen from shredding urban rockers ("Confidence Man" and "Lazy Susan") to spare and haunting balladry ("Living in Sin in the U.S.A." and "Nite Lights, Dark Days"). Their co-ed posse harmonies, which BUST magazine recently called "some of the most stunning in recent history," light up the landscape the whole way.

Sinoia Caves is another name for the analog synth wizard Jeremy Schmidt, who is also a principal member of the critically-lauded, maximal-rock band called Black Mountain. The Enchanter Persuaded is his solo debut full-length. It is an ambient psych masterpiece, bringing to mind, as one writer puts it, "the warmth and majestic epic swales" of Florian Fricke's Popul Vuh plus a "little Rick Wakeman and Kraftwerk." The Enchanter Persuaded was originally self-released, in a very limited fashion, in 2002. This newest, more permanent edition comes with a slight remastering and vastly improved artwork.

The Dirty Faces play bang-up rock'n roll. Pushers of that punkass sound. Rickety Rock, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the home of Rock & Roll. The band has suffered from and been propelled and inspired by every stupid rock cliché ever to have propelled, inspired and destroyed the health and sanity (not to mention careers) of its members, and yet somehow, the Dirty Faces just keep on getting better. Drugs, relationship problems and sheer laziness are some of the reasons band members leave the Dirty Faces. Sometimes they come back for the same reasons. Drummers come and go, the notion of excellent musicianship is alternately embraced and discarded, and yet the Dirty Faces continue to set higher and higher standards of what a good rock'n roll record can and indeed should sound like in 2006

Get Right with God", out on Brah Records, is the second of a trilogy that started with 2005's Superamerican (Brah Records, 2005). The Dirty Faces managed to keep the same line-up together over the course of the past year, although they've discarded the two-drummer assault they used when touring Superamerican. The band is T. Glitter on vocals, Tricky Powers on bass, Tweekit and Leadfoot Powers on guitars, Sweet Willie Powers on the drums and Bloody H. Powers on keyboards. As on Superamerican, one track features founding member Dickie Powers and former drummer God-of-Fortune Powers. The Dirty Faces believe in acknowledging their own history, while moving on. Get Right with God is more focused, musically -- harder and heavier than Superamerican.

When Home visited Florida in 2005 for the annual Screw Music Forever "Come the Freak On" festival, they had original Home drummer Sean Martin sit in for a set of songs and the notion of reuniting to record a new album became inevitable. Sean suggested a concept album about fucking and it took little time for all to agree. They wrote nearly 50 songs on the subject, which were whittled down to 20 and recorded in a marathon 3-day weekend recording blitz. Chris Millstein shared drumming duties with Sean, while everyone switched up instruments as needed. The wide stylistic differences between the writers bleed across song borders and gelled into an overall sound that is difficult to categorize but easy to recognize as sex-friendly. The very sweet dudes in Oneida took an interest and offered to release it in their corner of JagJaguwar, Brah Records. Home graciously accepted.

The Dirty Faces thrive on contradiction as well as adversity. A series of personnel changes has seemingly onlymade them a stronger, more creative and more dedicated band. They are fiercely loyal to Pittsburgh, yet theirguitar player lives in Brooklyn. Their live shows are noisy, messy affairs, but their albums contain surprisingmoments of quiet lucidity.While they are equally influenced by both American and British art punk (The Fall,Pere Ubu) and 1970's classic rock (Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top), along with (of course) a healthy admiration for theprimal rock of Iggy & the Stooges, AC/DC and everything hip hop, they manage to boil these influences downinto something at once recognizable yet wholly their own.Originally founded in 1997 by singer T Glitter as a way to set his lyrics to his idea of what punk rock meant backthen, the band soon became known for their energetic, often confrontational live shows. Band lineups shifted,but core members Tricky Powers and Glitter have remained constants. Their first album, Covered in Lime(Rickety Records, 1998), was described by Index magazine as "classic Rust Belt punk, a frenzied take on drug useand crumbling relationships in a city where everybody knows everybody." The album made the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's year-end Top Albums list. In 2002 the band released their second album—the less conventional, moreexperimental More Lies (Rickety Records, 2002)—to favorable reviews, while the live shows maintained theirscary nature. "A reconfigured Dirty Faces swooped into New York recently and blazed through a set of new songswith twin metal guitarists riffing practically the entire time. The unsuspecting audience left with jaws on theground."—Pat Sullivan, Index magazineAfter solidifying their lineup a week before entering the studio in fall 2003, Superamerican was recorded betweenOctober 2003 and April 2005 by three different engineers in three US cities. Its 13 songs manage to span the widerange of stylistic and emotional reference points of the Dirty Faces, from the spastic no wave of "Headlights" tothe quiet, Beat Happening-esque introspection of "High Holy Days" to the lighters-held-high stadium anthem"Amplify (like a prayer)."

The Brooklyn-based band Company evolved out of a miasma of folk, punk, and psychedelic elements in 2001, when its denizens hauntedthe legendary East Village bar Nine-C in an ongoing residency. Here Company made sounds removed from the contemporary musicalmain street that defied past categorization. "Folk rock is the label closest to Company's sound, but their rock references are more Clash,Joy Division, and Meat Puppets than '60s California," Pat Sullivan wrote in Index magazine, attempting to sum it up. He added,"Company derive their musical muscle from the folk side of the formula. The best folk singers have the power to rivet a room's attentionon the cadences of a vocal inflection or the change of a single chord, and each member of Company has this power in spades."With aseemingly conventional four-piece guitar rock lineup, Company can be found wandering and improvising through traditional and innovativemusical styles, but they are always grounded and unified by the songwriter's original vision. Company's members—Adam Davison,David Janik, Christopher Teret and Stephanie Rabins—used these open-ended Nine-C shows like a workshop to develop rough sketchesinto masterful songs, playing to the audience's mood as well as to their requests. Following the tragic closing of Nine-C in 2003, Companyfound another small stage to take on a weekly basis at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg. These pint-sized settings inform their sound,which is as intimate and homey as it is profound and even ominous at times. The results are songs that fill the room like intoxicated partyconversation—loud and soft, wildly silly then suddenly private and sincere. In Time Out New York, Sara Marcus lauded, "the band's phenomenalweekly concerts in that cozy back room showed a group of musicians who are deeply at ease with their sound?impressive performancesfrom a generous, chilled-out band." Staying true to the spirit of the band's name, Company's live shows are all about a communityof friends and fans having a good old time together.