To put it simply, these are a few of our favourite things. 
Jason is a Montreal songwriter and poet. His poetry collections include The Animal Library (2000), Attention All Typewriters (2005) and The Debaucher (2008).
 
Musically speaking, Camlot played drums in the SF punk outfit The Tuning Knives, led by Robert McNiell (thereafter of The Softs, and now of The Country Teasers). He has collaborated with superb finger-style player and songwriter Kenny Smilovitch for years in the folk noir duo Letterbomb. He also plays bass with the Montreal based Rawk Group Puggy Hammer as well as his 4-Track distortion-pop project JC SPED.
Back in the mid-1990s, while oscillating between San Francisco and Montreal, Jason released three amazing cassette albums in quick succession: O Glee (1994), Mr. Fedora (1995) and the aforementioned duo record Letterbomb (1996).  
 
UM dude Dan Bryk was an intern at Canadian folk underground label and mail-order distro Amatish Records when the stark photocopy-on-cream-paper sleeve of O Glee caught his eye in a demo pile. When it didn’t catch the ear of Amatish’s fearless leader Bill Monahan, Bryk took it in the car and listened. Over and over. This was amazing stuff. It took a while (every band didn’t have a myspace page back then) but Bryk finally located a copy of Mr. Fedora. 
 
These were quiet records, released in the midst of nineties overproduction and grunge bombast. Camlot’s intimate, opaquely confessional songs went completely unheralded. Recorded sparely, superficially “folk”, yet filled with bravura fingerpicking, monstrous, angular hooks and intense wordplay that verges on incantation, where did Jason Camlot fit in? Eric Matthews was dabbling with orchestras. Elliot Smith was still playing grunge in Heatmiser. (Leonard Cohen? he was that old guy playing synth pop and dating that blonde twentysomething actress… you know, the guy Don Henley and Trisha Yearwood covered.)
 
Fortunately, Camlot’s tapes traveled by word of mouth through the Canadian indie-rock underground over the following decade, to the point where they had been traded and burned enough times that we decided it was time to get them above-ground. We found Jason in Montreal at his job teaching Victorian literature at Concordia. Duly impressed by such punk-rock cred, we asked if we could re-release O Glee and Mr. Fedora. He obliged, pulling an amazing batch of full band and Letterbomb tracks out of a shoebox and fitting them in at the end of the original track lists. 
 
We tweaked the covers and pushed the project forward. We look forward to releasing two more collections of recorded but unmixed tracks, as well as a proposed album of brand new material.
 
You can buy O Glee and Mr. Fedora direct at CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon or your favourite download store of choice.
 
Or don’t just take our word for it, check out tracks at Jason’s myspace page and his blog “All Types”.
 
 
 

Listen to the entire album NOW and share Luke’s E-Card with your friends!

Here’s a message from Luke’s blog

Dear friends,

It’s just a few days until my big album launch show on Thursday night (November 6th) at The Rivoli in Toronto.



This is the only scheduled local show, and surely the only show I’ll do with a band and a string quartet for a long time, so you really don’t want to miss it.



The album comes out tomorrow (Tuesday the 4th) all over North America. Theoretically, you can buy it in any bricks and mortar record store in North America, but in reality, if you like to support your local record store (and I love you if you do), you’ll probably have to order it. Just tell the store that the album is distributed by Darla (in the States) or F.A.B. (if you’re in Canada).



If you want to order the CD online, there are many options. Our own Popsicle Webshop has the CD and LP versions of the album as well as the Come Tomorrow 45/DVD/hidden download package. Not Lame is a long-time favourite vendor of superlative pop music, as is KoolKatMusik. You can also buy the CD at the ubiquitous CD Baby, and if you’re in Japan, Apple Crumble Records and Fastcut Records both carry the CD and the Come Tomorrow 45/DVD.



If you like to click and download, every major seller of zeroes and ones carries the album, including itunes, amazon, emusic, and rhapsody, and you’ll be able to download the booklet as a PDF file as soon as lukejackson.com goes live (any day now!)



All the best,



Luke

 

 

Luke Jackson‘s second UM release …And Then Some will be our very first release on glorious half-speed mastered, 180-gram audiophile 12″ vinyl, in a snazzy gatefold sleeve of naked children traipsing about Dunluce Castle… no, wait, that’s Houses of the Holy. But we can assure you it has a photo of the world’s most photogenic labrador retriever.

…And Then Some’s lead-off single “Come Tomorrow” will be available as a fetching 7-inch vinyl single (also in a gatefold sleeve!) with a bonus DVD of the song’s music video to boot. 

Both are released in association with Luke’s own Popsicle Recordings, with whom we also released Favorita, the self-titled, posthumous debut album by the nineties Swedish pop phenoms of the same name.

No coincidence, then, that Favorita frontman Magnus Börjeson (of the much beloved Beagle and more recently Metro Jets) is the bassist on Luke’s new record, which was recorded in Sweden with pop wünderkind Christoffer Lundquist…

Release date on both releases imminent.

Just found on YouTube, a chill-inducing video for Lee Feldman’s On The Moon:

 

Video directed by Chris Tokar.

UM’s YouTube roundup: Diner Scene from Starboy | I’m A Mathematician from Starboy | She Doesn’t Mean A Thing To Me Tonight video | I Can Change The World video | Dan Bryk Live at WE Fest XI | Kobe Meetup….kkajapan, Kainsai PJ,and Busan Kevin hangout(!)

Urban Myth is proud to announce digital reissues of O Glee and Mr. Fedora, two classic albums by celebrated Canadian songwriter/poet Jason Camlot.

Recorded in San Francisco and Montreal, and originally issued on cassette by Camlot’s own Tonguespoon Music, O Glee (1994) and Mr. Fedora (1995) are two prime examples of Camlot’s formidable songwriting and intense, compelling solo performance.

Jason will be reading from his new book of poetry The Debaucher (Insomniac Press) and performing songs old and new (accompanied by Kenny Smilovitch) at Pages bookstore/café in Montréal this Thursday, August 7th at 8pm.

Pages: 3255 rue Saint-Jacques at Atwater, Montréal.

Ten Questions for Jason Camlot: Open Book Toronto external link

Jason Camlot’s previous poetry collections include Attention All Typewriters (2005), The Animal Library (2000, an A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry finalist), and Lines Crossed Out (2005), a limited edition chapbook with illustrations by Canadian artist Betty Goodwin. His poems and articles have appeared in such journals and anthologies as New American Writing, Court Green, Queen Street Quarterly, Rampike, Matrix, Poetry Nation (Véhicule), Book History, English Literary History, and Postmodern Culture. He is an Associate Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

 

Down By Avalon return to The Cave in Chapel Hill this Sunday, July 13th, with labelmates Dan Bryk and Chris Warren (who will also be making his Triangle debut in support of his forthcoming album Night For Day.)

Down By Avalon’s own self-titled debut disc is finally available from CDBaby and a variety of online stores (including iTunes, amazon.com, eMusic, Napster, Rhapsody, as well as ringtones and downloads directly to your phone from Bell, Sprint, T-Mobile, Rogers and Verizon…)

Down By Avalon has quietly been picking up some fantastic reviews:

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Dan Bryk’s long-threatened Pop Psychology takes a few steps away from myth this week. In the past month, Bryk has mixed 6/11ths of the album at his Flabby Road abode, finalized the cover art and even settled on a track listing.

Bryk insists that the album, five years in the making (even accounting for some large periods of procrastination and uh, suicidal ideation) will be finished by the end of the month because “I have to return some audio gear to its rightful owners before they send people over to the house to fuck me up.”

 

Here’s the cover:

 

 

 

 

Here’s the track listing:

 

1. Treat o’ the Week
2. Discount Store
3. The Next Best Thing
4. Apologia
5. Horizons, In My Way
6. City Of…
7. I Won’t Make That Mistake Again
8. My Own Worst Enemy
9. Street Team
10. My Alleged Career
11. Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Can Still Make You Cry

Here’s everything else we know about the record (according to Bryk):

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