Pretty cool show going down tonight at Great Scott via the crew at Eye Design, who I believe last time did up the Allston rock club was for the Color Channel record release party. Tonight’s edition of Treat Yo’ Self is a four star rock banger, led by the dream-pop post-punk glory of ORCA ORCA, who had a pretty good show last month with Beach Fossils, as well as the chill vibes of Kid Mountain, and the noisy-pop of BEDROOM EYES, who the Phoenix named Best New Band in New Hampshire last summer. They have since validated our claim by moving to Allston.
But I’m mostly jazzed up to catch the record release party from the wacked-out PERSONAL FINANCE, a trippy experimental band who drop I.O.U. Mania tonight.
“We recorded the EP entirely at home in my bedroom instead of in a studio like all the other sutff we’ve done,” Personal Finance head dude Patrick Orr (no relation to Bobby) tells Vanyaland. “Our mission was to combine German psychedelic music (or krautrock) with country music. “Christmastime in Peru” [is] an improvised jam that nobody in the band even knew was being taped… then I went back and overdubbed some harmonies and synthesizer and whatnot. But all the lyrics on that one are straight off the dome. We’re going to be recording a new full length album this summer.”
Word is they made anywhere from 8 to 11 cassette versions of the release. Good thing the internet exists.
I.O.U. Mania by Personal Finance
A while back I wrote up Personal Finance’s crunchy jam “Fact Addict” for le PHX, and here’s what became of it:
There’s a lost passage in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho where Patrick Bateman, dining at a highly coveted table at Dorsia, reflects on his wasted time spent in an artsy post-punk band while still attending Phillips Exeter Academy in the late ’70s. Actually, okay, that doesn’t really exist, and Ellis never made Bateman musically savvy beyond an obsession with Huey Lewis. But had the famed fictional serial killer started up a band before attending Harvard, it could have been called PERSONAL FINANCE and sounded much like the two-year-old Jamaica Plain quintet. “Fact Addict,” off last year’s Chump Change EP, is a crunchy modern-rock romper right out of 1982; vocalist and Personal Finance CEO Patrick Orr growls about blueprints, measurements, and US presidents. All that’s missing are mergers and acquisitions. This is not an exit.