Located at 3019 Broadway in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, Welcome Back Records can be spotted by their great sign outside the building.
Yes, they’re in the old Wildwood Liquors building and I hope they never get rid of that sign.
The staff is great here, and the vinyl collected is well-curated. It has a comfortable vibe as soon as you walk in the door.
Dollar bins!Live Nirvana bootleg!
Their prices are good, especially when it comes to CDs.
I will shop at your store if you have BOGO on your CDs. I scored albums by Interpol and Gas Huffer from these racks. If you need still more ways of playing your music, they have cassettes, too.
And, yes, they have 8-tracks.
How are you going to listen to all this stuff, you ask? Easy. Just buy your stereo from them.
They pack a lot of neat stuff into the small space, and it’s well worth a trip down Broadway to find it.
Jaco Jaco — the project of Philadelphia-based musician, visual artist, and former member of beloved indie-rock trio Sports,Jacob Theriot — announces his new album, Gremlin, out March 21st, and shares its lead single, “Woman.” The music Theriot makes as Jaco Jaco straddles genre: a little funk, a little psych, a little dreamy 70s AM rock. The follow up to Jaco Jaco’s 2024 debut Splat, Gremlin is a playful, elegant record that isn’t directly inspired by the movie Gremlins, but honors the movie’s use of kitsch and camp to explore a prevailing mood of irreverence and introspection. “This record came from a somewhat confused and lonely state of mind,” says Theriot, “It’s a journey through reflection and longing for something real—an inner dialogue giving me advice on navigating life when it feels like it’s working against you.”
Following last year’s Brazilian Jazz-funk-inspired “Favorite Kind of People,” “Woman” is anchored by slick, wet bass, bright guitars, and light distortion. The lyrics are abstract, but behind that abstraction, there’s something deeper: an exploration of the complexities and nuances of relationships. It is a meditation on honesty and acceptance, being real with yourself, and being real with your partner.
Recalling the song’s creation Theierot says “‘Woman’ was one of those rare, serendipitous type songs that just kinda happened. Everything fell into place pretty quick, lyrics and all. I played guitar along to some random breakbeat and out came the guitar riff(s). I was big into Black Messiah (D’Angelo) at the time, so that influence may have seeped in a bit, maybe? No comparison though, of course. I just wanna be like Pino Palladino when I grow up.”
Hailing from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Theriot began writing and recording music in grade school with his brother and childhood friend. The musical relationship eventually resulted in the band Sports. After three successful albums and international tours with Sports, Theriot then decided to venture out on his own, using all of the skills he learned as a producer and composer to breathe life into something new.
Gremlin, above all else, is a mature work from an artist who has been perfecting his craft for his entire life. It’s also a visual marvel that is aesthetically inspired by the early ‘90s sitcom “Dinosaurs,” Les Blank docs, and the world of alternative comic books. Theriot is thoroughly enthralled by the extremes of both “absurd cartoons and animatronic puppets,” lending even more of the prevailing feeling of playfulness throughout the artwork. Gremlin is a seductive record, beautiful and meticulously arranged. “It’s written in the third person,” Theriot says, “but really it’s in the first person. It’s a form of therapy. It’s like journaling.”
Used Kids Records is an institution in Columbus, Ohio, and their new location at 2500 Summit Street is a definite upgrade from their prior location across the street from the Ohio State University campus.
The space is much bigger, giving them a lot of room to stretch out their collection of seemingly every genre of music under the sun.
That vinyl copy of The New Pornographers’ “Brill Bruisers” is well worth your money.
You know you’re in for something when you walk into the store, immediately see a rack of newly arrived CDs and find one of them is this.
As Matthew Baty from Pigsx7 once said, “If your Uber driver asks if your band is like G.G. Allin, get out of the car because he’s a fucking nutter.”
Their vinyl collection is impressive. You could spend hours and thousands of dollars here if you’re not careful.
Sade and Butthole Surfers on the same rack.Also for the girls and the gays. Trust me on this.
This was my favorite section in the store. It’s stuffed with lounge, exotica, and other weird stuff.
I’d spend most of my cash here if I were a vinyl collector.
Another fun section was an entire wall of Christmas music that showcased how many different genres of Christmas music are out there.
Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings next to Dee Snider and Lizzy Hale.
It’s amazing that I walked out of there with just a CD box set of The Who (at a crazy low price at that). Don’t skip this place if you’re in town and looking for a vinyl fix, or just want to browse and find stuff you didn’t know existed.
I don’t know what’s in the water in Belgium and France as of late, but both countries are churning out good doom and stoner metal bands seemingly every month. Belgium’s trio of Mind Wolf is a good example, and their new EP, Chalet, is a great way to be introduced to them.
The opening riff of “Love without a Home” crushes you right away, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they named the EP Chalet, start off the record with this track, and featured a pixelated image of a burning house on the cover. The song burns everything around it to the ground, bringing to mind some early Alice in Chains tracks.
The bass on “Like a Song” reminds me of some Royal Blood tunes as Mind Wolf speeds down the road and sings about how music can change the feel of anything around you. The short guitar solo on it is pretty slick, and the breakdown after is is pretty sick.
No, your ears aren’t deceiving you, the only lyrics of “Hanne Desmet” are, “She can do it. She can really, really, really ice skate.” That’s because it’s about Hanne Desmet – the Belgian short track skater who won a Bronze medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics in the Women’s 1000-meter event. She was the first Belgian woman to win a medal in any Winter Olympics event. Mind Wolf are apparently big fans of her and I hope she cranks this on her earbuds during practice.
“Just Don’t” is a brutal takedown of perhaps an ex-lover or some jerk the band met who tried to show them up at something, but they quickly figured out it was all “just a show.” The EP ends with “Seduction,” which has some of the wickedest beats on the record and grungy guitars from end to end.
Go visit this Chalet, but be careful it doesn’t scorch you.
Before Electroclash and the wave of 00’s Dance-rock there was The Faint, emerging in the late 1990s in Omaha, Nebraska—a place known more for stoic practicality than synth-punk. In that unlikely setting of beige restraint, they pioneered a sound that combined the melodic essence of new wave, the raw edge of post-punk, and the robotic futurism of Detroit electro. Breaking free from indie rock’s humble comfort, they arrived armed with synths, dark eyeliner, and a raw, frenetic energy that dared audiences to actually feel something real, somethingprimal. The late ’90s and early 2000s indie scene was overdue for a shock, and The Faint delivered—not just as a band, but as an invitation to cast off coolness, to sweat, to move, and to live fully in the moment.
Onstage, the band turned every show into a raucous dance party. In a time of understated guitar rock, flannel shirts and torn blue jeans, their DIY foot-controlled lighting rig and all-black wardrobe was eyebrow raising. Behind unironic smoke machine clouds, keyboardist Jacob Thiele’s priest collar lent an eerie vibe while frontman Todd Fink delivered a fractured vision of a hyper-sexed cyber dystopia. The electro-punk beats of his brother Clark Baechle supplied the pulse and energy, and later, death metal guitarist Dapose infused a raw tension with his howling atonal guitar work. It was clear that this was more than a nostalgic nod to the 80’s. It was a spark from theunderground, foreshadowing an era of dance-oriented indie music that is still reverberating in the work of some of today’s most vital emerging artists.
The distinctive, synth-driven sound that brought The Faint to wide acclaim first surfaced on 1999’s Blank-Wave Arcade. The album was raw and daring, striking its own chord between early synth-pop pioneers (The Human League, New Order) and more recent heroes like Fugazi and Sonic Youth. The band’s blend of new wave, and DIY post-punk was trailblazing, and when the new millennium dawned that sound took hold of the zeitgeist, launching the band to new critical commercial peaks. 2001’s now classic Danse Macabre found itself scratching an itch that many indie rockers didn’t know they had. Wet From Birth followed in 2004 with its unusual electro-orchestral arrangements, cementing The Faint’s reputation as pioneers of the indie synth scene.
Today, 25 years removed from its release, The Faint are returning to announce a reissue of Blank-Wave Arcade, and Wet From Birth, which just celebrated its own 20th anniversary. Both reissues will arrive on the band’s longtime label home Saddle Creek on March 14th. This will be the first time that The Faint’s full catalog has been available on vinyl. To mark the announcement the band are sharing an unreleased Wet From Birth-era track entitled “Zealots,” and and accompanying remaster of Wet From Birth track “I Disappear.”
Fink says of “Zealots”:
“This song came from a dream Jacob had (our late keyboard player). In the dream, people were chanting, “You will know we are zealots by our guns,” . The lyrics are about the paradox between Christianity’s core message of love and the obsession with guns among some of its followers.”
In celebration of these reissues, The Faint will be embarking on extensive touring throughout 2025. Full details of those dates can be found below.
Tour Dates
Mar-21 – Santa Barbara, CA @ SoHo
Mar-22 – Las Vegas, NV @ Backstage Bar & Billiards
Mar-24 – Tucson, AZ @ 191 Toole
Mar-25 – Santa Fe, NM @ Meow Wolf
Mar-27 – Tulsa, OK @ The Vanguard
Mar-28 – Kansas City, MO @ Warehouse on Broadway
Mar-29 – St. Louis, MO @ Delmar Hall
Mar-31 – Cincinnati, OH @ The Ballroom at The Taft
Joan Arnau Pàmies is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist who was born in Catalonia. His career spans fifteen years of highly diverse work, encompassing live electronics, acoustic instruments, unusual forms of music notation, electroacoustic pieces, and free improvisation. An artist who unhesitatingly walks uncharted aesthetic paths, Pàmies has never been comfortable working within the boundaries of specific musical genres and traditions. For him, music is a liberating space where elements of classical and electronic music, free jazz, modernism, noise rock, and experimental music coexist and can be combined to generate unique results.
Today he announces his new album Guidelines/Fonaments, set for release on April 4th via Protomaterial Records, a label he founded in 2022. On the new album, he weaves together influences that have shaped his artistic voice over the years, from classical and modern music to jazz, from glitch to avant-garde pop. It balances structure with freedom, precision with spontaneity, and reflects a commitment to creating music that engages both intellectually and emotionally.
The first single “Esperança” is out today, which features the vocals of Martina Perpinyà, a former student of Pàmies, over heart-beating electronics that provide a comforting backdrop. In Catalan, “esperança” means hope, and “this song is precisely about that,” Pàmies says. Spoken from the perspective of humanity, the words suggest that humanity will prevail.
Listen to the new track on YouTube, and pre-save the album here.
Guidelines/Fonaments represents a significant moment in his artistic journey as a composer and performer, blurring lines of solo piano music, ambient, contemporary classical music, and free improvisation. “It is an intensely personal exploration, inviting listeners into a meditative state to reflect on the synthesis of diverse sound worlds and experience yet-to-be-known aesthetic perspectives,” he says.
Pàmies was introduced to music at a very early age. At home, his father, a professor of Catalan literature, would often play records by Miles Davis, Lester Young, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and Glenn Gould. At age three, his mother, a public school teacher, gave him a toy saxophone as a birthday gift. A few years later, Pàmies started learning the piano at a local music school.
His artistic journey has thus far unfolded in three distinct periods: his youth in Boston, where he was shaped by the Second Viennese School and early modernism; his graduate studies in Chicago, where free jazz, improvisation, and extremely demanding music for acoustic instruments informed his approach; and now, a return to his homeland of Catalonia. This current period represents a creative maturity, where he performs his own music and integrates improvisation and electronics into his practice.
He adds some additional background on the new album: “The album’s title, Guidelines/Fonaments, reflects the principles I’ve developed since returning to Catalonia—foundations for what I see as a groundbreaking evolution of my aesthetic. The bilingual title—in English and Catalan—is deeply personal, a reflection of my own life (my wife is American and my kids are dual citizens), and a metaphor meant to express how I see music: a historical product in constant struggle between past traditions and present aesthetic concerns. The pieces that form this record are my “guidelines” as well as my “foundations”: they present ideas that have been important to me for many years but also show new principles upon which to create future music.”
Pàmies performed, recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered Guidelines /Fonaments himself, ensuring that every detail reflected his vision. It was created in the span of four years, during downtimes between parenting, composing, performing, and producing for other artists. The album was recorded in a wide variety of places, from apartments where he had lived to professional recording studios.
Kinlaw is an artist. She’s an opera singer, she’s a choreograhper. She’s a performance artist, she’s a student of psychoacoustics and neuropsychology. She’s not a dancerwho happens to make music. She’s not a composer who happens to have a movement practice. All of her work is connected, completely symbiotic, ruthlessly in conversation with itself, focused on community. She’s been living and working in New York City for over ten years, popping up as a member of several notable musical projects, while earning commissions from institutions like the MoMa Ps1, Pioneer Works, and the New Museum, and working on performance pieces scored by SOPHIE, Caroline Polachek and Dev Hynes among others.
In 2021 she released her first album under the Kinlaw name, an album called The Tipping Scale, which earned comparisons to Jenny Hval, FKA twigs, and Cate le Bon from Pitchfork, and 4 years later she is returning to announce her sophomore LP gut ccheck, which will be released on 3/21 on Bayonet Records. To announce the record she is sharing its first single “Hard Cut” along with its accompanying video.
Kinlaw says of the track:
“The song is about conditions and extremes. It’s about being fed up. Ultimately, it’s a song that’s about aggressively choosing yourself and offering that permission to the listener.”
Matteo Liberatore, an artist and composer who has become a fixture in New York City’s experimental and intermedia art scenes over the last decade, today announces the debut album from his audio-visual electronic music alias Molto Ohm. After introducing the project with live performances at DIY spaces, art venues, and music clubs—often collaborating in duos with artists like Taja Cheek (L’Rain), More Eaze, and Ka Baird—Liberatore is set to release FEED on March 21 via New Focus Recordings.
On the work, Molto Ohm presents his thesis: “FEED aims to capture the fragmentation and alienation of modern life, an exploration of ambition, consumerism, purpose, intimacy, and self-awareness, juxtaposed with a longing for calm, joy, and human connection.”
Alongside the album announcement, Liberatore is sharing the project’s first-ever released track, “Sponsored #1,”which serves as a captivating entry point into Molto Ohm’s idiosyncratic and concept-driven world. The lead single delves into the commodification of self-care, where the quest for mental well-being is shaped by algorithms and consumer-driven promises of a better you. Beginning as a blissful electronic track overlaid with a voice that sounds dialed in from a meditation or self-help app, the track shifts into uncanny territory, magnified by Liberatore’s video, which splices together footage of faux advertisements for a dentist along with shots of smiling individuals and an unsettling last 20 seconds.
In FEED, Molto Ohm urges us to confront how capitalism’s relentless drive to commodify everything has left many subjugated by the promises of an unattainable life. Advertising, consumer technology, and the culture of self-optimization dangle visions of happiness, peace, and prosperity. Deep down, we know that these promises are often hollow, designed to sustain an economy where alienation and dissatisfaction drive consumption. Yet, the pull remains powerful, leaving many feeling estranged from themselves and their world.
FEED examines the battles between material comfort and bodily alienation; ecstasy and ennui; engagement and weariness by recontextualizing familiar signifiers: heavy dance beats, glitchy effects, connection static, motivational speeches, sales pitches, podcast-like confessions, and (faux) ads. The sonics span EDM and abstraction; snippets of yearning songs flash by, and dissonance interrupts lulls. Commanding synths shimmer and stab, while wavy melodies offset the tension. Wistfulness is ever-present, Liberatore conveying that something is being lost. The music looking to a new paradigm.
As an immigrant that moved to New York from a small village in central Italy, Liberatore experienced the cultural shift of transitioning from a stereotypically quiet and idyllic place to the world capital of art and capitalism. After more than a decade in New York and the absorption in the experimental music world (with albums and countless collaborations with Mark Kelley, Elliott Sharp, Taja Cheek, Gold Dime, Amirtha Kidambi, Ava Mendoza, Brian Chase and many more), Liberatore felt the urge to come to terms with his hybrid existence, reconnect to his lost teenage years overseas, the love of Italian pop music, 90s Eurodance nostalgia, small manual cars, the waveless Adriatic sea, and to make sense of this constant feeling of unrest and race towards an elusive, imagined destination.
Liberatore anchors FEED’s production in a loud, contemporary style that marries hyperpop energy and festival friendliness, complicating it with atonal timbres, environmental sounds, and human voices. The music morphs and shifts. The quiet moments are brief and artificial; soulful warmth flickers; noise bursts through, disrupting the transmission. Maybe we can still push back against the corporate machine and retain a hint of autonomy, imperfection, and organic beauty. The inclusion of a Mark Fisher quote in track nine, “After All (Mark)” is fitting. “After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable, and incomprehensible, in our hyper stressed, constantly disappointing and overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy.” Like the critic-turned-theorist, Liberatore confronts shattering and incomprehensible dread in our overstimulated lives, where even “calm joy” has been heavily commodified and sold to the willing bidder, leaving no escape for the soul.
Keep your mind open.
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