WATCH / SHARE “KEEP IT BURIED” HERE
BUY / STREAM “KEEP IT BURIED” HERE
SAM JR.’S SELF-TITLED DEBUT LP OUT MARCH 10, 2022 VIA ARTS & CRAFTS
Photo Credit : Tess Parks // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Fuzzed out guitars with psychedelic laced wah wahs and bongos?? And flutes? rock oozing buzzed out hippie rock ? Evil nihilist ooze-rock slacker fuzz? There’s a lot of play within that framework of Sam Jr.’s (aka, Sam Goldberg Jr.) new self-titled debut so we’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself what Sam Jr. is all about when the appropriate moment comes.
The album’s first single, the Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips/MGMT/Tame Impala) mixed single “You Lock The Door, I Broke The Window”, an “anthem for career anarchists” lead the way last year for more new music from the celebrated songwriter.
Today, he shares another new track from the album, “Keep It Buried”, a song which is “my ode to all of us going through our days telling people ‘we're doing great’ but at times behind a smile we're crumbling with anxiety inside,” says Goldberg. “The rhythm guitar part reminds me of a ZZ Top riff. I think I'd seen a doc on them around the time I wrote the song so they wormed into my brain. I also acquired an obsession with the wah wah pedal out of the blue for some reason while making my album. I have no idea how it happened but I have an addictive personality so it's on every song now.
The video for the song is about a farmboy out mowing the lawn comes across an injured stranger who has crashed a motorcycle onto his property. The unsuspecting farmboy takes the stranger into his home to tend to his wounds, but it soon becomes clear that something is amiss with the wayward stranger. Farmboy breaks out his stash of fantastic fungi to cure the stranger of what ails him, and together they embark on a psychedelic journey. What could go wrong?
WATCH / SHARE “KEEP IT BURIED” HERE
BUY / STREAM “KEEP IT BURIED” HERE
“Keep It Buried” Single Art // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
MORE ABOUT SAM JR.’S DEBUT LP
“My concept for awhile making this record was actually ‘What would the Dude’s band from The Big Lebowski sound like?’” laughs Goldberg, the titular architect behind this long-overdue solo stepping-out. “I’m not sure it landed there at all, but I think I was trying to harness the easygoing nature and spirit of that character. I’m a hardwired optimist and a mellow person overall, and I wanted that to come across in the songs.”
Meantime, you’re probably wondering how such a confident ‘debut’ could pop out of nowhere. Well, that’s because it didn’t. This Samuel Goldberg, Jr., chap looks oddly familiar, right? And that name… it rolls off the tongue nicely, yes, but it also rings a bell. So where exactly have you seen this guy before? Because you know you’ve seen him before.
You have indeed seen Sam Goldberg before. And you’ve seen him pretty much everywhere, that’s where. If you’ve kept even a casual eye on the Canadian pop landscape for the past 25 years or so, in fact, Sam Goldberg, Jr., has been hiding in plain sight the whole time as a vital member of an uncanny number of bands with whom you’re either already acquainted or – and no judgement here – should perhaps be ashamed of yourself in hindsight for previously failing to get acquainted with.
There’s the globetrotting group hug known as Broken Social Scene, of course, which has counted Goldberg as a stable conscript since 2007 and whose ranks have over the years helped launch the likes of Metric, Stars and Leslie Feist to a modest form of indie-rock greatness. But there’s also Uncut, a truly formidable noise-rock “guitar band’s guitar band” that made evangelicals of its far-flung followers but never quite grasped as a whole how huge it could have been to properly follow through on its generous promise. There’s Bodega, whose subtly transfixing 1997 debut album Bring Yourself Up got gobbled up and murdered by an international major-label deal gone wrong and remains to this day one of the best Canadian records of all time (“That first Bodega record is fucking great,” concurs Goldberg) that pretty much no one has ever heard. There’s Bionic, a punk-rock pseudo-supergroup originally of combined Doughboys, Change of Heart and, yes, Bodega extraction that could reliably melt your face from the get-go but ultimately proved too volatile to survive for long in any consistent form. There’s Hawaii, a duo whose eponymous 2003 one-off LP will easily satisfy your next desire for a late-night (Slow)dive into (Mazzy)stardom if you bother to sleuth it out. And there’s Yardlets, another duo that was so sardonically ‘meta’ in its expert appropriation of au courant 21st-century ‘psychedelic goth shoegaze punk’ trends across two albums released in 2012 and 2015 that it actually managed to make you feel uncomfortable for enjoying its own music.
Good company and a consistently high – indeed, often too-good-for-its-own-good – standard of quality all around, then. Goldberg even notched a high-profile Felix Prize nomination for “Producer of the Year” in Quebec in 2014 for his work on Kandle’s In Flames. But while one hates to invoke the “always a bride’s maid, never a bride” metaphor because Sam is a damn good catch and would look splendid in peach chiffon whether he was headed to the altar or not, there’s always been a sense amongst his friends, acquaintances and admirers that Sam Goldberg, Jr. hasn’t properly received his due.
LISTEN / SHARE “YOU LOCK THE DOOR, I BROKE THE WINDOW” HERE
BUY / STREAM “YOU LOCK THE DOOR, I BROKE THE WINDOW” HERE
So here you have Sam Jr., which is Goldberg taking a undiluted and unfettered deep dive into the black buzz-bin catacombs of the soul and having a bit of a laugh at his own expense while doing it, in much the same manner the Jesus and Mary Chain or Suicide were always kinda winking at you while they were wallowing. And it’s all Sam Jr., for the record, save some bongo-mad percussion work from Miles Dupire-Gagnon of Elephant Stone and Anemone, guest vocals from Toronto chanteuse Tess Parks and a sprinkle of cornet, sax and flute (yes, flute) here and there. Goldberg handled the rest of the instrumentation himself, observing a strict palette of sounds otherwise limited mainly to fuzz- and wah-wah-afflicted guitars, bass and a bit of synth. And he kept things strict for a reason.
“I’ve played with bands my whole life and I’ve been working with other artists or producing other artists forever and, y’know, I’ve had people for years asking me ‘When are you gonna make your own record?’ I just kept getting that. So finally I just went ‘Why not? I should just start a record,” says Goldberg. “So I started a record in 2018 that I finished at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. And I hated it. It took me quite a while to finish and by the time it was done, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the sound of the record, I was singing out of my register like Mariah Carey and there were just too many ideas - a zillion ideas - going on. And I didn’t like the songs. The songs just weren’t there for me, weren’t doing it for me.”
Despite suffering “that deep, disgusting feeling” of investing a lot of time and money and effort into something he couldn’t even trick himself into standing behind, Goldberg sucked it up, shelved the record and “started from scratch again.”
At least he’d deduced from that experience what he didn’t want to do the second time around. And so, after hearing from a friend with great interest about the amount of time Scottish electro-weirdos Boards of Canada would invest in deciding upon which highly specific set of sounds they would use for each recording, for Sam Jr.’s forthcoming “real” first album he decided he would take the same rigorously self-limiting approach. And that cracked the whole thing wide open. He had an entire record finished in months.
“Once I found that palette of colours that worked it came together so quickly. I was shocked at how fast it came together,” Goldberg recalls. “For some reason, I was loving the sound of the wah-wah. And I loved the sound of ‘fuzz,’ a really fuzzed-out rhythm guitar. And that was kind of it. But I would also try to limit myself to, like, five tracks. It would always just be ‘I’m gonna record the rhythm guitar, there’s only gonna be one rhythm, there’s always gonna be a wah guitar happening.’ That sort of thing. I really made an effort to minimalize everything. There are barely any elements happening. There’s just the rhythm, the bass, the guitar, there’s drums and there’s lots of percussion. And you know what? I love the sound of bongos so there’s a lot of bongos going on. Which is kinda weird, but I was just really into bongos.
“There are minimal elements, but when they happen they’re there for a reason. There’s no fluff there just to be buried in the mix. Everything’s there for a reason. I’m trying to keep people engaged, but I’ve also been listening to music and playing music my whole life so I just wanted to make something enjoyable for myself that, hopefully, other people might want to listen to, as well.”
Read the full biography by Ben Rayner : www.killbeatmusic.com/samjr
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
Mar 11 - Montréal, QC - Église St-Édouard
Mar 19 - Toronto, ON - Baby G
Album Artwork by : Walter Silver // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
SAM JR. TRACKLIST
01 You Lock The Door I Broke The Window
02 Sweet Face (feat Tess Parks)
03 Na Na Na Na Na
04 Keep It Buried
05 Quarter To Apocalypse
06 World Bangin On My Door
07 Dippp