In 2011 I stumbled across the band Shores playing a pre-Fest show in Gainesville on the night before Fest kicked off properly. They were playing in 1982 with Caves and Pure Graft, two British bands we knew well. Also on the bill were Charles the Osprey and Beast of No Nation. It was a fun night and a good introduction to how the rest of Fest was going to play out - drinking cheap PBRs in a sweaty venue listening to punk-rock. I really enjoyed Shores - they took more influence from bands like Low than they did from punk-rock bands and sat in a very interesting and largely unique position between punk and slowcore. It worked for me; afterwards I went to the merch table and picked up both of their albums at the time, Coup de Grace and To Volstead (for a bargain $15. I was also given a free compilation cd which introduced me to Bars of Gold, which in turn introduced me to Bear vs Shark. It was a pretty good free cd).
I enjoyed seeing Charles the Osprey that night, but in a more casual way. My memory is of them basically being an instrumental math-rock band, which is in no way a bad thing - they were certainly fun to watch - but it's just not something I'm hugely into. Sarah, however, is a big instrumental math-rock fan, so she picked up the Charles the Osprey record afterwards.
About a year later, I discovered the Different Kitchen distro here in the UK, which stocked a lot of No Idea records. I'd been directed to it after buying a Cutman record at All Ages that turned out to have the wrong 7" in the sleeve (Cutman being another Gainesville band we discovered on the first day of actual Fest) - they didn't have the right one, but suggested the distro as a place to find it instead. They had a huge selection of stuff, and I was particularly pleased to see that not only had Shores released another album, Leavening, but there was also a 7" with a Nirvana cover and a split with Charles the Osprey. Sarah had told me the CTO LP she got was pretty good, so I figured the split was worth getting too.
The split is actually much more interesting than you might normally expect - each band offer one new song, one cover of a song by the other band (although, reinterpretation might be a better word) and one song where they swap members to create two new bands. Both bands are technically two-pieces, although Shores have additional live musicians, so the third song on each side is then half-Shores, half-CTO. It's a level of collaboration you don't see in split records as much as you'd like to.
Both sides sound distinctly like the bands listed on the labels, despite the different types of song included. Shores' original Tipper is a perfect example of their style of music, and their cover of CTO's Kids sounds like it could easily have been a Shores song - the addition of vocals obviously being a major factor, the mathy guitars still present, but much less prominent. The first half-and-half song is credited to a band called Beaches and is essentially a step further along the same trajectory as the last two songs - distinctly Shores-esque (mostly due to the vocals again), but with a much more mathy edge and unusual instrumentation.
On the other side, CTO's Sculptor is exactly how I remember them from that night in Florida. Their take on Roux, one of the highlights of Shores' first album, is fascinating - the guitars taking over where the vocals would be. If I play it without paying much attention to what song I'm on, I'm aware of it sounding familiar before I realise why. The second collaboration goes by the name Howard the Duck and, fittingly, is more mathy but with much darker guitars, which works pretty well for me.
All in all, a very interesting record and one I'm glad I picked up.
Format: 12", half-a4 insert
Tracks: 6
Cost: £9 new
Bought: Different Kitchen distro
When: 14/11/12
Colour: Grey mix
Etching: Side A: "All song, no solo" Side B: "All solo, no song"
mp3s: Download code
