Discography

Despite my best efforts to monitor eBay, Discogs, and various musical rarity locales for Bacon Ray releases, I missed this upload of Bacon Ray’s debut album, self-released on cassette in 1994.

I managed to grab a copy of their last album, The Golden Master, at some point after becoming familiar with one of the band’s vocalists and email contact, Merlin Mann. Of course, I know Merlin primarily as a podcaster, but his taste in music have continually proved eerily similar to my own. Thus, I’ve been seeking out his musical work for some time.

Perhaps down the line I’ll compile the various MP3s he’s dropped on Tumblr and Dropbox over the years. It’s a mess of in-jokes, covers, and instrumentals, but they’re all treats.

Anyway, Merlin noticed the upload on YouTube and tweeted it out today, much to my delight. It’s the first I’m hearing these tracks.

Update: The original upload has been removed. I’ve split apart the tape by track and re-uploaded it to the playlist embedded below.

At risk of this becoming a purely Mansions-related blog (I’m working on some things, I swear), I wanted to mark the release of Big Bad today because I just love this band so much.

I’m still waiting to receive my pre-order bundle, but in the meantime, I filled out the Genius data I could for the record. Lyrics, artwork, production, and mastering credits are all available there now. Chris also talked to Brooklyn Vegan about some of their influences on this record which include Frank Ocean, Spoon, Elvis, Patsy Cline, and Cat Power.

At 7pm pacific/10pm eastern this evening, Chris and Robin will be hopping on IG Live to celebrate and play some tunes. I’ll do my best to archive the occasion.

You can pick up Big Bad digitally on Bandcamp or physically from Bad Timing Records.

It was just a few days ago that Mansions announced Big Bad, their first record in 7 years. The timing of the announcement was greatly overshadowed by great civil unrest as thousands across the country protest police brutality in the United States.

Today Mansions is releasing a collection of demos and b-sides from the making of Dig Up The Dead. The collection is only available from June 5-7, 2020 and all proceeds will be donated to Black Lives Matter

From Christopher Browder on the release:

Most of these were never intended to see the light of the day. Unmastered, mp3 quality, no guarantees that any of it is good.

Today Bandcamp is once more waiving their share of sales to benefit artists during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, many artists are donating 100% of their sales to Black Lives Matter causes, making today a great day to put your money to good use.

To aid in directly supporting black musicians, artist Stephanie O'Byrne has compiled a list of black musicians who have music for sale on Bandcamp. The spreadsheet is being updated continuously throughout the day.