Montevallo-based independent record label Happenin Records is having a big month.
On June 20, the label will sponsor Happenin Fest, an all-day music festival hosted by Good People Brewing Company, featuring performances by artists like the Black Lips, Nots and Turbo Fruits.
That event serves as the culmination of an even bigger month for the label, which is slated to release four new albums in June. Eleven Year Old’s American Lizards, Drew Price’s Heart Felt Candy (Extended) and Dommel Mosel’s Crybaby will all be released on cassette on June 13, while a new album from Plains, titled Delicate Living, will follow on June 19.
Chris McCauley, who co-founded Happenin Records in 2006 (and oversaw its revival in 2011), says that the decision to release all four albums in such close proximity to each other just made sense for the label.
“All four artists live in Birmingham, and for the most part, they collaborate on a regular basis,” McCauley said. “They play live together, they share show bills, they play instruments on each other’s albums and they often encourage one another. They create art together, which is rare and incredible, so we wanted to celebrate their work at the same time.”
“We are all constantly collaborating in one way or another,” added Price. “We have an expansive group of creative friends who all work in different mediums. We are in each other’s bands. Many people are naturally involved in this. It’s a real squad.”
That sense of collaboration extends to a sense of a shared aesthetic vision between the artists. All four albums being released this month might easily be described as “garage rock,” complete with fuzzy guitars and sometimes psychedelic production that seems to position a layer of haziness between the listener and the music.
Though the albums feature a remarkably continuous aesthetic, the processes that went into each of them reveal the specific creative voices of each artist.
Jacob Hethcox, who fronts Eleven Year Old, jokes that he started work on American Lizards with the goal of making a “biker rock” album, an intentionally meaningless genre tag that nevertheless helped to narrow down the sound of the record.
To hear Hethcox describe it, the process of writing American Lizards was akin to putting together a collage. “I’m not an active songwriter,” he said. “I don’t picture in my head, ‘This song’s going to be about this [subject].’ I either have a poem that I’ve already written or a piece of music that I’m applying a poem to. It’s usually two separate entities. I’ve got ideas and sketches floating around and I just slowly piece those things together.”
“That’s how most of the songs on American Lizards came together, just piece by piece,” he said. “That’s why a lot of them are kind of fragmented, without any hooks.”
But while Eleven Year Old’s new album won’t leave the listener with many catchy choruses to hang onto, the album is exceptional at creating a distinctively retro mood, with tracks like “A Hermit’s Blues” effortlessly reimagining the harmonies of 1960s pop through the scratched lens of heavily distorted guitars like they were always meant to be together.
The audio on American Lizards was mixed, in part, by Travis Swinford, the primary creative force behind Plains. His new album, Delicate Living, is the catchy obverse of American Lizards’ dissonant coin. With a jangle pop influence that recalls the recent success of artists like Mac Demarco, Swinford’s songwriting is dreamy and often a little lovesick. When he employs chaos, such as with the howling feedback that cuts into the subdued title track, it’s still manages to seem in service of the melody.
“It’s pretty straightforward,” Swinford said. “Musically, I feel like it’s a more colorful album than I’ve done before, because I’ve tightened it up and gotten better at recording. The album’s about being careful with being too comfortable, and never softening up and letting things die out that you really care about.”
Like Hethcox, Swinford based his songwriting upon ideas that he “had been bouncing around for a long time.” He worked on developing songs that he had “played while joking around on guitar,” which transformed into standouts such as “Lonely Heart” and “Freaky Teen.”
Similarly, Drew Price’s Heart Felt Candy (Extended) saw him revisiting old material, though in this case it was a four-song EP — the original Heart Felt Candy — he had previously released online for free.
“I really wanted to be a part of this cassette release with my Happenin boys, so I rounded up a bunch of random recordings that had no home and added them to Heart Felt Candy to make it a fun, silly little cassette. I’m happy they have a physical artifact to be on now,” he said.
Price, who last year collaborated with Swinford on The New Love Crowd EP, cites Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus as a primary influence for his music. He also says he has another album written that wasn’t ready in time for a June release.
Dommel Mosel’s discography is noticeably smaller than Price’s — Crybaby, in fact, will be the group’s first release. Singer Adam Measel, who heads up the group, says his music draws from a variety of influences including David Bowie, country music and Top 40 pop music. The results, however, feature the guitar work and puckish humor of some of the Police’s better B-sides.
Measel says he was drawn to Happenin Records because of the reputation they have drummed up in Birmingham over the past nine years. “They’re probably the best label in Alabama in terms of garage rock-type music,” he said. “A bunch of my closest friends are on Happenin Records. I’ve been going to Happenin Fest every year. Happenin was always the one I was hoping on getting on for this album for sure, and it’s cool that it happened.”
“We try to work with artists that have unique voices and create their own little musical worlds,” McCauley added. “We want to nurture a small community of like-minded artists that are being true to their artistic instincts. It’s worked out pretty well so far.”
Eleven Year Old’s American Lizards, Drew Price’s Heart Felt Candy (Extended) and Dommel Mosel’s Crybaby will be released with a special cassette release show at Seasick Records on June 13, where all three will be available together as a $10 “cassette brick.” Plains will celebrate the release of Delicate Living at the Happenin Fest pre-show at Saturn on June 19. Happenin Fest will take place on June 20 at Good People Brewing Company.