SIPSMAN News

Shelf Life is the vibrant new album from Kevin Micka's ever-evolving vehicle for musical exploration, Animal Hospital. Full of alien textures and bursting with riffs, its four maximalist epic compositions are
performed solo, as a trio, or for upwards of thirty musicians that play on the perimeter of venues, recreating the components of each song with the audience encircled. Shelf Life works as The Most Animal Hospital Record to date and a gateway into the project’s universe for the uninitiated.

Produced by Katie von Schleicher and Sam Griffin Owens (Sam Evian), A Little Touch of Schleicher in
the Night was recorded with a bunch of poker buddies the two accumulated during the pandemic.
Lyrically wry and classically lush with strings and horns, it’s a songwriter album that nuzzles up to the
Arthur Russell and Kirsty MacColl LPs in one's record collection. In narrowing the gap between her
personality and her songwriting, von Schleicher has made her most untroubled album.

Krill's debut album Alam No Hris is celebrating its tenth birthday in 2022
With assistance from actual label Sipsman, the band's fake label Sren Records
has remastered Alam No Hris for the occasion and pressed it to vinyl for the very
first time, available November 18 worldwide. Simply put, Alam No Hris is a baker's
dozen of nervy, charming, lofi missives disguised as garage pop songs. Whenever
I think about Alam No Hris the repetitive, incoherent joy on display in many of the
songs I think of it as ecstatic', bassist/ vocalist Jonah Furman says. The whole
thing is like someone stammering to express themselves in a moment of
overwhelming emotion. Ecstatic in the full sense, of standing outside of yourself.

I’m Sad as Hell and I’m Not Going to Fake It Anymore is the best, sharpest, briefest, and fourth record from Paper Castles, the band fronted by Jericho, Vermont’s Paddy Reagan. In one way, it’s a simple and modest collection of nine fuzzy guitar-led pop songs. The title, a play on the iconic scene from Network (written by Paddy Chayefsky), can be clocked as nothing more than that at first glance, playful. But like the music behind it, Reagan thinks you can sit with the title if you want.

I'm Sad as Hell... was tracked by Benny Yurco (Michael Nau, Lily Seabird, Robber Robber) in a little over eight hours across two days, a testament to the quartet’s perfection of these songs on stage, and to Yurco’s comfortable Little Jamaica Recordings in Burlington.

Tompkins and Mangan lock into a wonderful foundation for Kitz’s lolling guitar lines on “Clean + Organized,” while on “Avalon,” the band sings harmony for the most ironic line in the waltz (“We don’t really want company”) before their instruments explode into technicolor. “Lying Here” showcases PC deftly navigating washed out verses and tight knit, twangy choruses, all in a tidy, under-three minute package.

Lyrically, Reagan is at his finest: playful and savage, biting and beautiful. Double entendres and clever wordplay abound—a line like “it's not the ideals but the high heels that’ll make you a man” from “Modern Myth” will make you wish John Prine was still around to hear it. On “Name Changer,” when Reagan sings “I’ll never change my name again / Got a real good handle and I don’t want to give it in,” what kind of “handle” is he referring to? I’d like to think Elvis Costello would smile at most lines in the Attractions rave-up “Content Creator.”