Well, hot from the ashes of our favorite Baltimore noise-poppers, Teen Suicide, we finally have the first track from Sam Ray’s new self-described pop band, Julia Brown. “Library” takes the hookier inclinations of Ray’s former project and does away the maelstrom of guitar fuzz in favor of a production aesthetic more in the realm of early Casiotone for The Painfully Alone work. It finds its roots in the smallness, stringing together little evocative images in the way that Ray’s best Teen Suicide work always did.
In somewhat related news, for the past two months, Ray has curated an online songbook of sorts called 420 Love Songs. Aside from the obvious play on the Magnetic Fields album, it has functioned as a collection of mostly lo-fi demo recordings from Ray and friends like Alex G, Coma Cinema, Little Spoon, and Happy Trendy. That songbook just reached its 40th entry with a Julia Brown b-side entitled “Dizzy.” Check out that track below, alongside “Library” and head over to the blog to give all the tracks a listen or to Bandcamp to download the first batch of 40 songs.
