news

August 17, 2007

Rebuilding the Rights of Radio…Re-TROS Featured on NPR!!! Yo, NPR? We dig you guys and appreciate the story you did on Re-TROS, but gee-whiz folks, seems like you would have gotten your facts straight before committing the story to American airwaves! The Cut Off! Ep was licensed to Tag Team by Modern Sky and is NOT, I repeat NOT a Modern Sky release in North America. If it is, then that’s news to us (and our pocket book) here at Tag Team Towers. Anyhoo, press is press right? No hard feelings, we just wanna set the record straight. That said, click here for a listen to the NPR story on Re-TROS, then go to our online store and buy the freakin’ record, or don’t. We think it’s pretty good though, that’s why WE released it! July 24, 2007 Hey, North Americans! Press Your Finger To the Pulse of the Chinese Underground and Buy Our Stuff…Right Now!!! Tag Team Records' much anticipated July releases are being collated, burnished and loving stacked THIS VERY MOMENT by teams of rescued unwanted baby girls for imminent US/Canadian releases (Street date, July 24). Strap on your headphones and prepare for a life changing conversion! Don't miss this chance to impress that hot girl at the record store with your impeccable, globe-spanning taste. Walk up to her with confidence and repeat after me: Lonely China Day: Sorrow And let’s not forget… Rebuilding the Rights of Statues: Cut Off! Ep If for some strange reason, the hot girl at the record store types a few key strokes into her Commodore VIC 20 and tells you something like, "We don’t have those titles…dude.", then you can retort with, "Can you please order them from Redeye Distribution…sweetie." She will say "Like, OK, hold your horses man!", or something to that effect, then slap that shitty grin off your face for calling her "sweetie"! So, don’t call her sweetie I guess, just be sure you get the records ordered. She’s most likely supporting some dude sporting a heroin-mullet who has "musical aspirations" and sells all her 7” Smiths singles on E-bay while she’s at work anyhow, so give her a break. You wouldn’t talk like that to your mom, would you? Yeah, you would, you sexist pig. Sheesh! P.S. If you're a girl, you don't need to impress anybody (you're already awesome and that clerk at the record store knows it), but you will still love these albums. P.P.S. If you're hip to the digital thing, you can snap-up the releases right now over at Amazon or iTunes...It's all just a click away! P.P.P.S. If you're SUPER RAD, you'll order both records (or at least one) directly from Tag Team Records + go to your local, indie retail outlet and bug "that hot girl" about ordering said releases via Redeye! Is that too much to ask? If you perform both of these tasks, we promise to send you a pair of official Tag Team chop sticks! Just send us an email with your story/ experience to info@tagteamrecords.com. Shit WILL get sent. We're cool like that. July 20, 2007 CH+INDIE FEST II: The Wrath of Khan Revisited/Chronicled By Ian Sherman…Sorta.    Okay, so the sun didn’t shine, it rained cats and dogs most of the day and a bunch of dirty French hippies tried to sneak into the festival grounds Glastonbury style, but nothing could stop CH+INDIE FEST II: The Wrath of Kahn from taking the crown as best Beijing music festival of the summer! Thirteen of fourteen bands put on stellar sets (yeah that’s right, fuck you Brain Failure!) for a whole bunch of sweat soaked, veggie kabob munching, booze swilling revelers on hand for both days of our not-so-little music fest. Everybody, and I mean everybody had big smiles on their faces and seemed to be having a genuinely good time, everybody except for longtime Tag Team contributor Ian Sherman, who just happened to chronicle his blue-ball oriented misery into a lengthy, though thoroughly cock-blocked CH+INDIE Diary. Paired with Sherman’s up-beat text are a bunch of rad photos by our bro Gabriel Mellan, who hasn’t worn a shirt in public since early 2003. Anyway, it’s all pretty fun stuff...so look at it already! Geeze. July 16, 2007 *This Photo Was Shot 45 Seconds After Venice Is Sinking Signed To Tag Team…Soon As We Saw It We Almost Backed Out. Tattoo’s Rad Though, So We Kept ‘Em Tag Team are pleased as punch to officially announce the addition of Athens, GA orchestral popsters Venice Is Sinking to our ever expanding Chinese roster. Look for a deluxe version of the of the band’s critically acclaimed debut album, Sorry About The Flowers (complete with bonus tracks and bilingual packaging) to street Chinaside in early 2008. Until then, you can pick up the U.S. version of Sorry via their American label, One Percent Press, if that so strikes your fancy + be sure to check out the band’s nifty myspace page, which is jam-packed with all sorts of ViS goodies, blogs and other relevant info pertaining to our fair boys and girl. Beyond brushing up on their Mandarin in anticipation of a China tour sometime in ’08, the Venicians are currently recording their sophomore effort with none other than the fish taco obsessed, analogue genius that is Mr. Scott Solter (The Mountain Goats, John Vanderslice, Spoon) over in North Carolina. The demos they sent us are so rad that we decided to put a moratorium on playing them in the TTR office as no one was getting anything done…which isn’t that uncommon to begin with. Oh yeah, Venice Is Sinking are also playing several shows this summer. So, if you live in the Southeastern U.S., well, you figure it out. Anyways, welcome aboard guys, the life preservers are located just below your seats and in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, please be sure to secure oxygen masks to yourselves before helping others, including children or the elderly…oh, and if you can score a white belt in Athens, please be sure and send it to the Tag Team Beijing office c/o Kyle P. Schaefer. Thanks. *photo courtesy of Courtnie Wolfgang July 6, 2007 CH+INDIE FEST II Is On Like Donkey Khan...Dude.    Let's face it Star Trek II sucked a huge amount of testicular matter. The fucking Klingons don't even look like fucking klingons, for christ's sake! I mean come the fuck on! Shatner's toupee being slightly out of whack with itself from take to take... that we can accept, but Klingons that look like Kagler with a suntan?!! Where the fuck was the continuity girl? Montobaln's cool though, we like him but we're not letting him anywhere near our mothers, who go for that creepy geronto-latin thing like hot indie chicks go for us... hard. So Star Trek II sucked balls, but that doesn't mean that CH+INDIE FEST II: THE WRATH OF KHAN will. Yup, we don't just churn out quality 'product', we fancy ourselves as promoters as well. For two beautiful, sun drenched days Tag Team (with a little help from Modern Sky Records) is lining the best bands in Beijing up and pushing them onto the stage on 2Kolegas' lawn one after the other. If you live in Rimjob, Nebraska or Arseville, Wyoming you may as well skip this bit. You don't live in Beijing - ain't our problem. Suck it up. For those of you who do, check out the above flyer for full details. Seriously, this should be very very good. If you're one of those pussies who stares blankly at the listings every month scared witless by all the bands on offer, this one's for you - all the best bands in town in one location. Unless you're into the metal, in which case you're shit out of luck. June 21, 2007 Attention Haters! Now You Know What We Look Like...So Beat Us Up Already!    Hippies used to dream of being on the cover of Rolling Stone and androgynous 80s types would have traded in all their hair products for the cover of NME. These days, we pity the fool who doesn't realise that the place to be is on the cover of Beijing's own City Weekend. Renowned tastemakers CW, listings mag of choice for those who haven't heard of Time Out, did a huuuuuge fucking photospread on us with a real photographer and everything and then they wrote some words to go with the piccies. It's all quite clever really, what will they think of next?! We're all pretending that, y'know, it don't mean shit and like, whatever, who gives a fuck, dude? Secretly, however, we've all sent the issue back home to our parents and that slutbag ex who didn't think we'd ever amount to anything. 'Huh, what's that, bitch?! Can't really understand you... oh, hang on it must be because you're choking on my MOTHERFUCKING MAGAZINE COVER!' That felt good to get out. June 13, 2007 White-Belted Hipster No More...Sigh.*    We’re not sure how to break this to you folks, but: Kyle has lost his White Belt. Fans and former lovers gathered together today at Tag Team Towers to mourn the passing of Kyle’s epochal hipster status. Now he’s just a dude with a good haircut. Honestly people, it’s like living with a parent stricken with Alzheimer’s. Where once stood a proud figure you loved and admired, now there’s only this shell of a man with girl jeans drooping off his slender frame. In his defense Kyle says, "Who needs a belt when your pants are this tight? In the front." Also that lazy bastard finally got around to giving us the second part of his tour diary. Read it here and weep. * photo courtesy of City Weekend May 1, 2007 Some Dude at 2K the Other Night Pointed Out That Tag Team Are Supposedly a Record Label or Whatever and That We Should, Like, Put Out a Couple More Records Pretty Soon. So, Here Ya Go Dingus… New EVERYBODY material is being forged and hammered—a glowing-hot EP will be drawn from the hearth the second week of August. A Beijing artist and dear friend of Jim's, Yan Wei, has been commissioned for the artwork. Packaging will be screen-printed and full of homemade goodness as delicious as your Grandma's blueberry muffins. A U.S. tour is also being made manifest around August. And can you believe how cute it'll be to have Caitlin Joy, Jim's violinin' singin' little sis, along for the tour? As fun as we know it is for Jim to drive-thru order half his weight in french fries for everyone's dinner—he'll be trying his darnedest to keep the band under ten people (so sad to leave all those poor little oboes, zills, and euphoniums behind!). Do enjoy the classic EVERYBODY tunes on myspace before the new ones chase them away… But wait! There's more! Arrows Made of Desire (aka Joewi Verhoeven) will be cold steppin’ into the studio to record the follow up to his genre-hopping debut album Songs That Sell Fish sometime next month. The album is tentatively titled Songs That Sell Out and will be produced at least partially by BBC legend Steve Barker, who agreed to the task after a buncha whiskey-cokes one fateful evening in Sanlitune. Thanks Steve and sorry for the raunchy fake alcohol hangover! Anyhoo, we don’t know how long those dudes’ll be in the studio, but we’d like to put out the result China-side sometime early fall if at all possible. Joewi’s demos made us all say “dang!” in unison, so…uhhh, whatever. Oh yeah, while we’re at it, somehow Kyle managed to keep a tour diary while we were Stateside with LCD/Re-TROS. Dude was NOT in a good mood most the time and talks more shit than that geriatric doosh from Pigface/Invisible Records…Yeah! So, if you want the dirt on our March tour click over to Excess Bloggage and check out Kyle’s 'Dear Tour Diary Pt. 1'…shaka! February 18, 2007 LCD/Re-TROS Go West... Seek Fame, Fortune, Tacos, Indie Chick 'Tang Hey there! So it may have seemed as if all was quiet on the Tag Team front, but in fact we’ve been as busy as bees on a sugar high. After wading through a sea of paper work and forms that needed to be signed in triplicate by some diplomatic deuchebag who’s on a permanent lunch break we are finally ready to announce our big ‘ol fat American tour. Yup! Lonely China Day and Rebuilding the Rights of Statues are coming your way, Yankees! Unless you live on the west coast, in which case you’re fucked. Starting in Des Moines, Iowa on 2nd March, LCD and Rebuilding will be winding their way across the right hand side of the United States, eventually ending up in Austin for South By South West. All you west/east coast hipsters are probably asking ‘Iowa?’ right about now. Well screw you! We lurve the flyover states - good solid American values, cheaper skag, corn-fed rosy-cheeked women, kids who still take Goth music seriously - what’s not to love? Anyway, check out the itinerary below and start planning your spring-break now. Daytona Beach? Fuck that shit! A few details are still TBA - we’ll let you know when we do. Suck it up. 03/02/07 - Des Moines, IA - Vaudeville Mews 03/03/07 - St. Paul, MN - Turf Club 03/04/07 - Madison, WI - High Noon Saloon 03/05/07 - Chicago, IL - Schubas 03/06/07 - Newport, KY - Southgate House 03/08/07 - New York, NY - The Cake Shop 03/09/07 - Brooklyn, NY - Southpaw 03/10/07 - Richmond, VA - Gallery5 03/11/07 - Boone, NC - Black Cat Burrito 03/12/07 - Columbia, SC - The (art) Garage 03/14/07 - Austin, TX - SXSW Tag Team Records Showcase @ Spiro's 03/15-18/07 - Austin, TX - SXSW Showcases/Day Parties TBA For more tour details, click here February 15, 2007 LCD/Re-TROS Showcase New Video Clips Right Here, Right Now...Spike Jonze Trashes Hotel Room In Jealous Rage Sometime ago, we took a few bucks out of the Tag Team savings account and hired a bunch of dirty Xinjiang dudes to kidnap Chinese film maker Shou Beite, lock him in the back room of our office and bitch-slap him Ol’ Dirty Bastard style until he agreed to make a video clip for Lonely China Day. Not to be outdone by Tag Team's torturous escapades, our bros at Modern Sky got all hopped up on pharmaceutical grade ginseng, ran over to German-based tree/house productions' office here in Beijing and asked them very nicely to craft a video clip for Rebuilding the Rights of Statues...guess that works too. Whatever, check out these rad new video clips. Jesus, did I just say rad? Video: LCD - 'One' Video: Re-TROS - 'TV Show (Hang the Police)' December 31, 2006 TTR 2006 Top 10 Lists! Like You Haven't Seen Enough Of These Already... Well, hey! It's list time! Isn't that exciting! Everyone likes lists. You like lists - go on, you know you do. We like lists. And to show you quite how much we do like lists, we've asked absolutely everyone even remotely connected to Tag Team Records to contribute one of their own. Hurry on over to Excess Bloggage right this instant and discover why your taste in music sucks [except for all those fine TT records now in your possesion] and why ours will be setting agendas for at least the next two weeks. November 23, 2006 Outbreak Of "Sorrow" Throuout China...Deng Pei Smiles For 10.4 Seconds.    Well, it's been a while since we posted any news up here on the site, but not because we've been kicking back on the sofa catching up on 24. Hell no! We've been workin' harder than the kids in the sweatshops who manufacture our product - and all on your behalf. All of which serves as preamble to the fact Lonely China Day's excellent long player 'Sorrow' is now - RIGHT THIS SECOND - available for sale in all fine Chinese record shops. LCD blew us and a vast audience away at last week's record release party. Indeed, at one stage luckless Tag Team interns had to gather around Kagler with buckets and mops in case he literally exploded with pride. But that's another story for another day. Meanwhile, Sorrow will be released Stateside on May 29, '07. Only a suggestion. Of course, those yanks able to utilize a mouse can navigate themselves over to the TT online store and score that bad boy immediately. Oh, and finally - a little advanced warning that LCD and Rebuilding the Rights of Statues will be touring the American midwest and east coast in March of next year. We're not sure what Kagler's beef with the west coast is... September 4, 2006 Break Out The Black Eyeliner, Hot Topic VIP Card and Disaffected Attitude...Tag Team Sign Re-TROS Those of you who are lucky enough to be on our Mailing List, will remember that in our recent newsletter we alluded to a potential new star in the Tag Team heavens. We didn’t mention any names, mainly because we’re teases like that. Well, allow us to draw back the veil and reveal...Rebuilding the Rights of Statues. That’s right, - Beijing’s postpunk saviours and longtime Excess Bloggage live favourites have signed to Tag Team for the American ‘market’ (as the suits call it) but will remain with Modern Sky Records here in China. Re-TROS are currently re-mixing and re-mastering their punishing debut EP - 'Cut Off!' - which will be released Stateside in May 2007 garnished with enough bonus tracks to get everybody moist. In the meantime, go check out their myspace page for free downloadable joy [or failing that, right here in our downloads section]. As if that wasn’t enough, Re-TROS will also be filming a video clip to accompany the release. Really, you Americans are so lucky, we’re tempted to cut off your feet and attach them to our key chains. May 10th, 2006 Tag Team Make Out With Like...EVERYBODY We love Everybody! No, not you - you who got diverted briefly to this website on your way to your favourite foot-fetishists site. And certainly not you - looking for a rather crap hip-hop act from the early nineties. We like those of you who buy our fabulous musical products and we’d probably stand you a drink or two if you were ever round our way [we might even snuggle with you if you fulfill certain requirements], but we love Everybody! Not in a snuggles kind of way, but in a musical sense. In case you hadn’t got the rather feeble play on words yet, Everybody are the newest band on Tag Team’s books. Imagine for a moment that Simon and Garfunkel, Olivia Tremor Control and The Animal Collective accidentally fell into Nick Drake’s blender [it’s a big blender]. Imagine further, if you will, that Gabriel-era Genesis happened to be hanging out in Nick Drake’s kitchen and accidentally flicked the switch on the blender. Add a strawberry and a dash of children’s literature. In reality, what you would have would be a big pile of gore, gristle, blood and shredded paper all over Mr. Drake’s recently remodeled kitchen. However, in this hypothetical blender the result would be the sublime sounds of Everybody. Expect quality [unnamed so far] product from Everybody sometime in late 2007, in the meantime get thee to the downloads section and check out Robotte and Aegean Arms. After blowing everyone away at the their first ever live show on April 29th, seemingly no amount of sedatives can keep Arrows Made of Desire off the stage... OK, OK, that’s a slightly hyperbolic way of announcing that Joewi Verhoeven and crew have a couple of gigs coming up. But seriously if you were there at 2 Kolegas a couple of weeks ago, you’ll know that hyperbole does not apply to Arrows Made of Desire. If not, here are upcoming chances to atone. First up is the 1st Anniversary Party of the superfabulous 2 Kolegas on 27th May, along with a bunch of other bands who aren’t on Tag Team but probably know how to carry a tune. Should be well worth going - summers here, so there’ll be all the usual lounging around in the mini-park outside eating kebabs and talking shit. D22, out in the badlands [Wudaokou], are popping their Tag Team cherry by hosting the Record Release Party for Songs That Sell Fish, Arrows Made of Desire’s excellent eclectic debut shiny plastic disc. This not-to-be missed hipster gathering is on June 3rd, with the ever luminous Lonely China Day supporting. March 13th, 2006 LCD EP Gets Pushed...Tag Team 'Patch' Everything Up. Hey! We're human. We may be the purveyors of some of the finest indie rock you're ever likely to hear - ever, but we're still human. We make mistakes, just like you. Remember that one woman you went home with? Yeah, you know the one we mean. That was a mistake, right? Did we give you a hard time about it? That's right, we didn't. Now, remember the morning after - prying your sticky eyelids apart - your arm numbed by the weight of the god-awful mistake you made the night before - do you remember that feeling? Well, that's exactly how we felt when we realised that there'd been a slight cock up with the release date for Lonely China Day's soon-to-be-era-defining EP. We may have alluded [several hundred times] to its being released last week... we were wrong - in actual fact the official official really real release date of the EP has been pushed back a week - to March 14th. It's only seven days. Basically, by the time this gets posted up, it will definitely be weighing down the shelves of your nearest music dealer [provided you live in what marketers like to call 'major' cities, otherwise... well, this is exactly why Al Gore invented the internet - navigate your arses over to our online store. Seriously though, sorry for the delay. To punish us, Kagler has cancelled 'Hawaiian Shirt Fridays' and ordered us to wear hair shirts instead. Tag Team Records is a family... not in the literal 'blood relations' kind of way (actually, some of us are…but anyway) but in the much more meaningful 'all drinking the Kool-Aid at the same time' kind of way. So when a member of the extended clan calls for our assistance, we check our diaries, finish our drinks and rush to their aid. Erstwhile Submissionaries' and current Arrows Made of Desire drummer Fredrik Lindell plied us with bathtub gin and made such a plea. Fredrik has been sweating over a hot console in his off hours - producing some really quite remarkable music. After hearing this, our first impulse was to hop on a 'plane to Scandewegia, where excellent musicians seemingly grow on trees. However, we checked the prices and frankly we're too cheap, so the next best option was to donate web space to Fredrik and his alter-ego Patch. March 6th, 2006 Tag Team/LCD Seek BFF's...Joewi V Rocks Out With Glenn B in NYC We at Tag Team Records have a proud luddite tradition of fear and suspicion when it comes to technology. Hell, even using a mechanical pencil makes us want to go hide in a darkened room for a while, so you can imagine why it took us so long to get our MySpace page up and running. When staring daggers at the computer whilst drinking plentiful bottles of Korean Soju didn't work, we finally fell upon the expedient of getting some tech-savvy friends round 'for a party' [i.e. Lao Kai & Becky La Mirada], locking them in the office and refusing to let them out until they'd produced something classy and consistent with our high standards of quality. So here it is, in all it's glory - www.myspace.com/ihearttagteam - go check it out. Now! And for the sake of all that is holy, be our friends! We like you, why can't you like us? No such technophobia problems for Sino-Rock standard-bearers and Tag Team dream team Lonely China Day. It probably took them all of half an hour to get their MySpace page off the ground. Bastards. We're pleased [with just a dash of jealousy] to see all the amazing friends they've managed to rack up in the space of a week. Bjork!? Is she your friend? I doubt it. She certainly ain't ours [yet]. Mind you, she's probably heard that LCD's EP will be on the shelves of all good music emporia states-side in two days, and want's to get on board before the rush. That's right, Yankees, the wait is over. As of Tuesday, March 7th Lonely China Day's earthshaking EP can be yours in exchange for just a few of your dollars. Camp out now, just to make sure you get a copy. Don't forget to bring your Swiss Army Knife, Darth Maul costume, a sixer of Coors Light Tall Boys and a bunch of zip-lock baggies to protect your Magic: The Gathering cards. In other news, ... [more]