Beggar Weeds / The Cadets

"Beggar Weeds Beggar Weeds write songs about little tragedies: nothing as big as a presidential assassination, but more mundane injustices, more common disappointments. They find everyday tragedies in growing up (“Graduating”), suffering your family’s prejudices (“Daddy’s Little Angel”), reckoning with your roots (“Picolata”), and the accumulation of unwanted stuff at the local garbage dump (“Sunbeam Mountain”). Their songs sound like only these three young men from the Sunshine State could have dreamed them up.  Musically, the band are collectors and connoisseurs of the offbeat, taking parts from their favorite bands—the jangle of R.E.M., the almost-falling-apart-ness of the Replacements, the rumbling melodicism of Hüsker Dü—and combining them with hardscrabble country and rustic folk. Then they play it all loud and fast. “We want to do something different, play a little harder, chase our own ideas,” says Watson, who sings and plays guitar and harmonica. “We’re combining all those things, punk but also pop and country and folk. I remember someone described us as the Everly Brothers on speed.”  Opening for national acts that came through Jacksonville—including X, the Meat Puppets, the Dead Milkmen, and drivin n cryin—the trio very quickly developed a reputation for rambunctious shows where anything could happen and often did. They dance and shimmy constantly, switch instruments with each other, and emphasize volume, speed, feral energy. “We have to pick the right shoes,” says Leuthold. “We need to find shiny bottom shoes so we can move around more smoothly. On the strength of the live reputation and their EP, the trio toured around the South and further afield, often sharing the bill with their friends the Chickasaw Mudd Puppies. That Athens, Georgia, band was working on an album with Michael Stipe, and singer Brant Slay played Sure Pants Alot for the R.E.M. frontman. He was instantly smitten. The band holed up with Stipe and filmmaker Jim McKay at John Keane Studios in Athens, Georgia, where they recorded six songs. Songs like “Linden & Mary” (about the hoarders next door) and “Picolata” (about a town between St. Augustine and Jacksonville) retain their essential eccentricities, while “Ship” combines Cowart’s hoedown with Leuthold and Watson’s Byrdsy harmonies to create an unexpectedly majestic chorus.  Tragedy in U.S. History today sounds unique in its combination of sounds and personalities, the missing link between the underground music scene of the 1980s and the alt-country movement of the 1990. https://open.spotify.com/artist/4DBgyoGRUvjqfpcEqceomD?si=fUmlEzDnQbqpH361bqF83A The Cadets Rumbling away in a small garage, Cash built his frenetic, thundering drum style around Chuck’s fast-twitch searing lead rhythms and melodies fertile with nervous energy. Inside those urgent drums and angular chords came their melodic hooks, catchy and strong, laden with unexpected twists. They released a 7” record, an EP entitled The Search for the Edible Man (1997), and their first full-length record, The Cadets (1999). As the century drew to a close, Cochrane departed and the Cadets took on bassist Chad Matheny (Emperor X), a dynamo of creativity and sonic agitation. Also joining was Isaac Bear, brilliantly color washing in the open spaces with expertly placed keys and guitars. The result was a delicately balanced collage of daydreams and found sounds dangling on the hilt of a steel edge. They followed up with the full-length Conditions on Alpha Atoll (2001), and another EP, Finding the Straight and Level (2002). This lineup toured Japan and all along the US east coast until 2007, issuing their third full-length record, On the Death of Science as a Major World Religion (2006). The Cadets’ music continues to be delightfully peculiar and full of immediacy, arriving at your ear having skidded briskly across the table yet perfectly upright and nary a drop wasted. Their sonic experiments produce songs that possess a rare energy that conjures the early days of rock & roll, sci-fi adventures, and diary entries never intended for the light of day. Lyrics filter larger themes through a tilted and tinted lens of wide-eyed fantastic reverie. Brainwashed spies, mythical chimera, desperate refugees, and jilted lovers all become protagonists and truth tellers. https://s.disco.ac/goicihthxbmd "