Ugly Purple Sweater

Conventions: Available now.

2011-11-12T11:00:00.000-08:00

Our album is available to download here, and will distributed elsewhere in the coming weeks.

Come join us tonight at the Red Palace in Washington DC at 9PM as we celebrate albums release!

Album release show in two weeks!

2011-10-29T07:49:00.000-07:00

Take a listen to a couple of the new tracks!
Conventions by Ugly Purple Sweater

CONVENTIONS is coming!

2011-09-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

We're close....so close to tying the knot on CONVENTIONS, the new album.
Stay tuned.
Until then, ponder the above.

Live video of new song 'Ba Ba Ba'

2011-05-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Travis of Free Advice for taking and posting this video. This is one of the ones we're going to be recording in July. Enjoy!

Ugly Purple Sweater Live at The Paper Swan from Paper Swan on Vimeo.

April Shows

2011-04-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

We're playing a ton of shows this month--see the sidebar for links and details.

First, we'll be playing at the Kids Rock-n-Romp at the Fenton Street Market on Saturday, April 16. This is going to be so much fun we are going to pee our pants and then have a temper tantrum!

Then, we're the featured guest at the Iota Open Mic on Wednesday, April 20. We'll play for about half an hour right around 9:30.

And from April 28-30 we'll be taking a swing through the North Atlantic seaboard, playing DC, Boston, and New York on tour with Pearl and the Beard and Kingsley Flood. The tour is sponsored by the good folks at EscapeMaker.com,
who are hosting a Green Getaways Expo in Brooklyn, NY on April 30 in, apparently, this building:

Check out our facebook page for more details.

Mighty Fictions

2010-11-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

Our dear friend Casey took this video of us at the debut of the expansion band. Thanks to everyone who was there--the atmosphere was warm and fuzzy, the performances by Pearl and the Beard and Slow Machete and Aaron Thompson will spectacular, and Mike was unharmed when the mannequin fell on him.

Water's Edge up on myspace

2010-11-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

We just posted the first track from our forthcoming EP. Have a listen!

Sweater Showdown

2010-06-30T06:05:00.000-07:00

We're playing with DC's the Sweater Set and Ohio's Bearcubes tomorrow at Palace of Wonders in DC. Hope you can make it!

UPS Show at ARTSPACE DC

2010-05-03T13:14:00.000-07:00

We will be playing with none other than Sonya Cotton from San Francisco and Emily Hope Price from NY.

We're thrilled to be playing with them, and it will be an absolutely fantastic evening.

May 14, 2010
ARTSPACE DC
614 S St. NW, Washington DC (one block from the Shaw/Howard Metro stop)

8 pm - 11pm

$8 donation

Here's a preview of these fantastic musicians:

Hunters from Sonya Cotton on Vimeo.

And Emily Hope Price with a gang of female cellists this past Spring.

Don't you people ever work? Tour

2009-12-21T12:32:00.000-08:00

Here it is, officially official. If we can distract ourselves from the awesomeness of this poster, we are going to play a lot of good music with great people on this tour.

Please tell all your friends - especially in Boston, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Philly, and Baltimore to come out and enjoy the show.

And, please check out www.pearlandthebeard.com for the latest and greatest from our dear friends, and their great music if you haven't heard already.

Show at Rock'n'Roll Hotel - 12/18 - 8pm

2009-12-14T14:04:00.000-08:00

Fellow's and Fella's, we've got a show this Friday, Dec. 18th.

Rock'n'Roll Hotel - 1353 H St. NE, DC
8PM
$12

We will be followed by two DC bands who's music and video's we highly recommend:

Casper Bangs (www.casperbangs.com)

and

Army of Me (www.myspace.com/armyofme)

We'll see you there!

carrots+east coast tour

2009-11-29T12:48:00.000-08:00

we're very pleased to announce our mini-east coast tour dates:

Jan 7--Boston, MA w/ Pearl and the Beard

Jan 8--Brooklyn, NY

Jan 9--Princeton, NJ

Jan 10--Philadelphia, PA

Jan 11--Baltimore, MD

Details forthcoming!

(photo by Kristian Whipple)

District of Sound Review

2009-09-22T09:35:00.000-07:00

Hey friendlies,

We're playing a bunch of times in October, and here's my promise to you; we're going to have three songs that no one's heard before in time for the show at Madam's Organ. They are nearly done.

Also, the folks at District of Sound just reviewed our record. Check it out!

cd release show August 24!

2009-08-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

Mark your calendars: Ugly Purple Sweater will be playing a CD release show on August 24 at 8PM at the DC. If you're going to come out for a show, make it this one: we're playing with a whole team of talented guests, and openers Pearl and the Beard and Caitlin Schneiderman are sights to behold.

Hope to see you there!

If you've got a moment...

2009-07-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

Friends and folks, read this review of us!

http://camprevival.com

"You Are Alone But You Are Not Alone" Release Show in DC

2009-07-13T11:31:00.001-07:00

We're very excited to announce our official CD release show for You Are Alone But You Are Not Alone at the DC9 on August 24. We're very lucky to have a whole host of talented folks come and play with us, so it'll be Ugly Purple Sweater in it's full-band glory.

And Pearl and the Beard of Brooklyn, NY will be coming down to play the show with us. And holy smokes are they good. How good is this?:

Oh, and also, their new record kicks ass. You can hear it on their Facebook page.

Things will get underway around 8, the cover is $8.

some photos

2009-07-07T15:29:00.000-07:00

...of music/mischeif making:

Tear Yourself Apart

2009-06-17T15:31:00.000-07:00

Portland, OR has been good to us. Here's a video of us playing Tear Yourself Apart (a new song) at the house show we played here.

Also, you can watch us play Josh's song "Dirty Blind," which is about corneal abrasions.

Tour Constitution

2009-06-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

We're off! Played two shows in San Francisco yesterday. Met a lot of lovely people and fantastic musicians. StitchCraft's CD release party for Though the Hoolaboo. I never seen such violin shredding and pretty singing in my whole life.

After the show we stayed in the house of StitchCraft's violinist Anna and her bff, who are the two nicest people yet born. Much love.

In honor of the beginnings of our meanderings, we find it necessary to draft for ourselves some articles of confederation. So:

OUR CONSTITUTION:

Article One: No member of the JS-UPS tour shall, while looking into the trunk, say "Oh shit!" or utter any other expression of surprise, dread, or horror, so as to avoid invoking in his or her band mates the impression that any of our equipment has been lost, stolen or damaged; and thus to avoid causing in each any premature cardiac arrest.

Article Two: Easy on the booze. Livers aren't for sale on ebay. Yet.

Article Three: Rachel may not be referred to as "lovely," "pretty," "beautiful," "adorable," "cute," "ornamental," "delicate," "fragile," or, "a delightful hostess." Acceptable substitutes include, "hard working," "balls to the wall," "shit kicking," "take no prisoners," "the shredmeister," "environmentally aware," and "fair trade certified."

Article Four: No more than one greasy spoon per day.

Article Five: This constitution may be amended unilaterally by any member of the JS-UPS tour who happens to have access to this blogger account (sorry Josh.)

You Are Alone But You Are Not Alone

2009-05-28T13:47:00.001-07:00

Our new album, "You Are Alone But You Are Not Alone," is available for download here. You can name whatever price you'd like, including nothing at all, at least for a couple of weeks.

Thanks to all the people who leant their help and encouragement--too many to name. But in particular to Ivan Basuri for engineering, Mike Tasevoli for his drumming, Andrew McCornack for his bass playing, and Colm O'Reily for the album art.

MiddleMarch vs. Old Harriet

2009-05-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

If any of you have ever read Middlemarch you may remember the complex and sharp critique which George Eliot (aka Mary Anne Evans) makes about British Society and feminity. I have just begun to read this book, and at the moment I am anticipating her to narrate the political and social changes within a community, impacted largely by the rebellious female character, Dorothea. Already, within the first 50 pages Dorothea is bucking tradition, marrying an academic and taking on the challenge of improving the housing for the lower-class peasants. She is clearly bucking the social system and has shocked her neighbors with her preference for intelligence instead of aesthetics in her husband.

And, this may be a jump, but I will venture to say that Dorothea and Harriet (see interview below) take a similar position in society, stepping outside of their social bounds in order to accomplish what they would like to do in society: Harriet is called to rock'n'roll and Dorothea is called to moral philosophies.

We will see where this goes...if anyone has any help on understanding the underlying social conflicts in Britain in the 1820's, please feel free to write. And, if anyone has any opinions about Old Harriet, please do share.

And, on a band-note, we have our first shows on Sunday, in San Fransisco - see our show listing on the side!

Old Harriet

2009-05-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

The Old Harriet show last week at the student center on the campus of George Mason University was not a major campus event. Mason's graduation had already happened and the campus was nearly deserted. Summer term started yesterday, which means that the residential students have been replaced by commuters, who are less likely to show up at 10 PM on a weeknight to hear an obscure rock band. There was a small cadre of black-clad hipsters, drawn by the explosive debut EP by the Akron trio (which was, inexplicably, released only on vinyl.) And there were a few Mason students who'd come to see the novelty of an ensemble of three girls under the age of 16.

But Old Harriet are no novelty act. Nor are they a corporate package (eg The Jonas Sisters or something). Songwriter Harriet Anderson (guitars, harpsichord, occasionally vocals) fronts the band with a demeanor equal parts confidence and boredom. It's a good thing that she arranges her harpsichord parallel with the stage; otherwise you get the feeling that she'd wander off into the shadows and stay there for the entirety of the show. And the music, though dance-y in it's own deranged way, is dense, and structurally and harmonically complex.

Ten minutes into the set, the de Vocke sisters kicked off their single (insofar as this teenage noise-pop act has singles) "You Dastardly!" with a propulsive and mammoth bass and drum intro. Anderson leaned way out over her harpsichord ("It's a contemporary recreation of a 17th century model," she said later. "I leave the original at my mom's house.") and, holding chords on the keyboard with her left hand, used an ebow to generate an incredible series of overtones. As the harpsichord feedback faded gently down as Anderson removed the ebow, she leaned over to the microphone, and in a raspy alto sang,"You dastardly devil you/Is this as far as you'll go?"

The Mason students in the back watched for a few minutes, and went out to grab a smoke. After the set's final song, "Do You Do You/Will You Will You," an off-kilter 70's-punk inspired number, played at a furious pace and louder than God, Anderson kneeled down to her pedal rack and dialed up a blizzard of feedback. Then she put her guitar down on the stage and took the phone book off the harpsichord bench (Anderson clocks in at about 4 foot 9 inches) laid it across the sustain pedals and literally tossed the engaged ebow on top of the strings. It rattled and buzzed and hummed around inside the harpsichord shell, causing the sound guy to fly into a tizzy, fading back volume knobs to keep George Mason University within noise code.

I managed to track down Old Harriet after the show. They were sipping Coronas in what I guess passes for the dressing room at the Student Center--a small conference room off the coffee shop. The de Vocke sister rhythm section contingent sat in the corner in lazy boys texting and laughing. Anderson offered me a beer. I politely declined.

"The first band I was in was with my boyfriend," says Harriet Anderson. "He played guitar, and his friend Vijay had inherited his older brother's drum set, and I had been learning drums, and they needed a bass player. I had been taking piano lessons since I was little, so the bass came pretty easy."

UPS: "Who wrote the songs?"

HA: "Well. Rick did at first. My now ex-boyfriend. But mostly he and Vijay would smoke up in the backyard."

UPS: "You didn't smoke with them?"

HA: "No. It was the only time I got to play drums."

UPS: "Wait, how old were you at this point?"

HA: "12."

UPS: "Ah."

HA: "So but after a while, Rick quit writing songs altogether, so I started writing songs on the guitar but Rick wasn't crazy about them."

UPS: "Fear of emasculation, I suppose."

HA: "Well I don't know, I mean, my song writing has gotten a lot better. At the time songs were, you know, like two three-chord progressions and melodies that kind of lagged along behind. For the EP we were really focusing on melodies that drive, and harmonic progressions that are, I mean, certainly tonal, but disguised, I guess, through inversions and pedal tones and that kind of thing."

UPS: "And timbre."

HA: "Yeah, that's a big part of it."

UPS: "How did this band get together?"

HA: "Well after a while Rick and I broke up and so the band broke up. Hard to say which came first, really. There came this moment where Rick said something to someone like 'and my girlfriend's in my band, and she learned bass in like a week.' It can be hard to feel like you're being taken seriously when you're always being introduced as 'The Lovely Harriet.' So I've known the de Vocke sisters since they moved next door, so the day after Rich and I broke up, I marched over and told them we were starting a band, and they said they were going on a date with these guys that night and were busy. I ended up inviting myself along, and they actually wanted to go to Guitar Center to show off their Zeppelin riffs to the de Vocke girls, so while they were doing that, I managed to sneak a bass and most of a Pearl drum set out the side door."

UPS: "They didn't see you?"

HA: (laughs) "No. I think they were busy trying to get the boys to turn down their Marshall stacks. So for the next couple of weeks--this was during the summer--I spent a couple hours a day teaching the girls how to play. They really had an ear for it."

UPS: "I'd say so."

The de Vocke sisters: "Thanks."

UPS: "Here's a different question. I know for me, like 90% of being a musician is getting to know other musicians. You sort of cultivate this isolated genius thing on stage--you're the frontwoman, you write the songs, you and your gear take up all this space on stage. But it's also about relationships, and I know for me that mostly means sitting around at band practice drinking and talking about boobs. Was it hard to get into the scene, being so young, and being three teenage girls?"

HA: (thinks for a minute) "Yeah, I think so. I mean, luckily we have the drinking thing down. On the one hand it's kind of a novelty, like three teenage girls making all this noise, you know. But I think people are often expecting something different, which can work against us. And also it's sometimes hard to hang out with other musicians, which is crucial, obviously. I think we sort of interrupt their usual sex drugs and rock and roll banter, and so we have these really terrible halting conversations. Or they just proceed like normal and ignore us completely. Things are generally less awkward after we play because, luckily, we're really good."

UPS: "You are really good--"

HA: "--Thank you! I'm glad you liked the show!"

UPS: "I definitely did! And it's amazing because Old Harriet is the closest thing I've ever seen to this sort of abstract ideal of what pop music should be--danceable, accessible, infectious, but also contemplative, emotional, and serious all at once. I sometimes feel like I hear this stuff in my head, but then I sit down and try to play, and I get--well, something unrelated. It makes me feel like that music I have in my head isn't music at all, but more like my emotional attachment to music abstracted from actual sound. It's sort of like, when I was a teenager, I had this idea that you could become cool simply by playing good music. That it was literally possible to make undeniably great pop music, songs that no one could listen to and dislike. But that has to be incorrect, right? Doesn't it have to be about the scene and what's in fashion and that kind of thing? No matter how good you are? It just seems like the history of music is littered with people who were under-appreciated because they weren't the right race or in the right scene."

HA: "You're saying even though you were blindingly brilliant when you were a teenager, the cool kids still didn't like you?"

UPS: (laughing) "No, no, I don't mean that."

HA: "I'm kidding, I think I follow. Like Antennae--do you know them?"

UPS: "No."

HA: "They're this French band from the '70s, and they made this incredible fusion of Kraftwerk and Bossa, that's really compelling and fun and not at all cheesy. But they sort of got left in the dust because while they were turning towards their latin krautrock, the rest of the world discovered punk."

UPS: "Exactly, and then what does that say about music as any kind of meritocracy?"

HA: "No, you're right. But the thing is, you have to know that, and know that people think certain thins about you because you're a teenage girl or whatever, but if you love music, you have to do it anyway. And you have to believe that if you're good, and if you work hard enough and long enough, you can be successful. Because that's kind of the only hope we have."

shows we're excited about

2009-05-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

It's gonna be a busy concert going week for us here at Ugly Purple Sweater HQ. I'm most excited about Old Harriet, who are playing a ludicrously under-advertised show at George Mason tomorrow night at the student center at the Fairfax campus. Old Harriet are 15 year-old Harriet Anderson (guitars, harpsichord, vocals), Vicky de Vocht (15 yr, drums) and Leslie de Vocht (14 yr, bass). I saw them in Akron, their home town, a year ago, and they completely killed.

Also, Bonny Prince Billy is coming to town on Saturday at the Birchmere. I saw Superwolf perform when I was in college a couple years back, and they looked like a posse of recently foreclosed upon dust bowl Kansas farmers too weak to farm anymore, so they loaded their belongings into a rickity pickup truck and began touring the country, playing for their supper, stealing pies off windows when they couldn't find a soul who'd listen.

Couldn't find a good video of "My Home is the Sea" off Superwolf, so here's "Home by the Sea" by Genesis.

The new BPB album "Lie Down in the Light" is terrific. The lyrics and the cadence and the peculiar, graceful but sharp-edged melodies are immediately engaging. It isn't catchy, exactly--catchy is something that marches right up to you and slams you a big one in the kisser. "Lie Down" makes you lean in real close and listen hard, and try to sort out what's pretty from what's just a little bit unsettling.

Also exciting: Deleted Scenes will be at the Black Cat on Thursday (and why does a band with an album that got a 8.0 from the grinches at Pitchfork book the side stage in their home town?) with the gentlemen of Casper Bangs who'll be making the debut. Yes, Rob for some reason wants to look like he's in Vogue. But we can forgive him for that with a record this good. Have a listen.

Hope to see some of you all there.

West Coast Tour

2009-05-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Lot's of Ugly Purple Sweater news these days: we head out to California next week, where we'll practice frantically for a bit with cello/songwriting phenom Josh Stacy, and then embark on a month of shows from San Francisco up to Vancouver. Some preliminary dates:

June 7 Velo Rouge, San Francisco CA, 2P

June 7 Amnesia, San Francisco CA, 8:30P

June 9 Muddy's, Arcata CA, 8P

June 11 Grillabites, Ashland, OR, 11:30A

June 18 Silver Moon w/ THE ERINS, Bend, OR, 8P

June 26 The Summit w/ THE ERINS, Bend OR, 8P

July 3 Green Frog Acoustic Tavern, Bellingham WA, 8P

We're super excited to be playing a bunch of shows with The Erins, who have this lovely music video, featuring Erin C-B and Erin Z's parents:

Erin Cole-Baker "THE NEW" Music Video from FARfromEARTH Films on Vimeo.

Also very much looking forward to playing some house shows with some lovely friends in Portland and Seattle.