IJI WHATEVER WILL HAPPEN LP VINYL NEW (US) 33RPM
1. Cruisin USA
2. Cool Moves
3. All The Light
4. Hard 2 Wait
5. Parking Lot Palms
6. Something Else
7. Eastern Beach
8. Dark Session
9. Crumbs and Wires
10. Bound 2 Glory
11. They Play
12. Let Fire Come
I was walking to the post office a few months ago when I saw five road-dishevelled figures heading my way. As they got closer, I thought, I recognize these guys. They played at our gallery last month, fogged the windows up good and activated the crowd with their impossibly balanced creation of modern and classic, a blend of Steely Dan cool and General Public pop, Squeezish hooks and Aztec Camera guitar flair. It was like a crash course in 60s pop, 70s avant-garde, 80s new wave, and 90s pop kid charm, with that unmistakeable Puget Sound flavor. They were iji. I asked them what they were doing back in town. Apparently, after the Team Love show, the band had decided to go night swimming. Oblivious to the magical, secluded, moonlit refuges where the river bends wide or the lake meets the shallow cliff, iji wound up breaking into the local community pool, immediately getting apprehended by the local community cops, and spending the night in the local community clink. Now, rather than being out on tour in some distant state or country spreading their transcendental party music, they had routed themselves back up Hudson Valley way to appear in court and discover that their punishment was, essentially, all the cash in their merch box. A bummer; quickly diverted by throwing together a few last minute shows and cruising on. Shortly after this chance encounter Quarterbacks Dean came by the shop and said he had heard the new iji album and did I want to give it a listen. I said something like: fuck yeah, and that was that. - NK iji: preferably spelled in all lowercase letters to accent the “…†present within the band name. A band from Seattle, founded by lifer Zach Burba, the self-proclaimed ‘Poet Laureate of the Mini-Van,’ iji is a project that intends to be continued… They have put out numerous albums, singles, cassettes, and splits over the past ten years; touring coast to coast, playing DIY venues and houses where restrictions don’t apply. Iji’s own brand of pop pushes the genre comfort zone of a punk community and embraces a desire for rack-a-chack, ethereal and naivist sounds often unexplored by their contemporaries. They are “Seattle’s best pop band†according to the Seattle Weekly, and the Stranger says: “Open and laid-back, music made for no reason other than that music is the best…Uninhibited and original.†On Whatever Will Happen, iji has whipped a notebook full of travel poems into a full-length American Experimental Highway Pop Opus. The band’s eleventh of twelfth album is the first one recorded at Anacortes, Washington’s Unknown Music Studio with a solid line-up of the best players from the Seattle underground: Jake Jones and Curran Foster from Sick Sad World, Will Murdoch from Pill Wonder, Evan Easthope from Neighbors, in Birgy of Mega Bog, plus a handful of jazz horn players and some inspired back-up singers. Whatever Will Happen speeds past quiet beaches with soft-rock wind in the hair, through mountain passes with windows-down power-pop, into seedy cities with free-jazz flavor and shameless disco grooves. Team Love is proud to announce the release of Whatever Will Happen. Buy it at your favorite record stores June 2nd.