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We’ve something special for you all today: a “new” video by Toronto art-punk pioneers The Scenics!
Songwriters Ken Badger and Andy Meyers founded The Scenics in the summer of 1976. Inspired by the first wave of NYC bands, (early Talking Heads, Television, Patti Smith, etc) that moment offered them a launching point for five years of ever evolving creativity, free of the formalized idea of “punk” that took hold a year or two later.
The Scenics reunited in 2008 and released an album of new material, Dead Man Walks Down Bayview, in 2012. They are working on more new material but for now are dipping into the past with In The Summer, a new remaster of the band’s 1977/78 studio recordings.
“We were so knocked out by the remaster that [Victoria, British Columbia-based] producer Joby Baker did for the upcoming In The Summer vinyl (on Italian label Rave Up Records) that we decided to follow through with CDs and digital,” Meyers told The Big Takeover. “When I heard these masters, it took me back to hearing the original four-track reel-to-reels.”
“[The Scenics] filtered Lou Reed, and contemporaries Talking Heads, Richard Hell, and Television, adding Big Star’s picking power-pop funneled into early XTC’s vigor, via clipped guitars, busy, sharp-edged bass, rhythmic drums, & idiosyncratic, loopy vocals,” writes our own Jack Rabid in the upcoming issue of our print mag, “and made it all sound uniquely theirs, which is crucial.”
The video for “Do The Wait,” combines vintage live footage of the Scenics and creative commons footage from a mid ’70s art film by German director Lutz Mommartz. It totally rules. Dig it!
The vinyl release date is set for Nov 10. CD and digital pre-sales are happening now at Dream Tower Records for a November 3 release.
