RELEASES

Heartbreak Scene "The Szabo Songbook" TT01

Franklin Bruno "Local Currency: Solo 1992-1998" and "Zero Return" 7" TT02 and TT03

Heartbreak Scene "The Szabo Songbook" TT01
$8 ppd

"In a world crowded with songwriters clamoring for 'unheralded master' status, Mark Szabo is the real thing. His understated melodic sense brings Robert Forster to mind; his lyrics tuck all their barbs into phrasings that tail off at the ends of the lines, so that by the end of the song you feel like somebody's just whispered a handful of secrets into your ear. Any spotlighting of his work is cause for celebration." (John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats)

"If you've heard some or all of these songs before, you don't need me to tell you how good they are. And if these are the first versions you'll hear, you'll find out soon enough." (Franklin Bruno)

The Szabo Songbook is the first album from Vancouver, B.C.'s Heartbreak Scene, but as the title suggests, it's a self-effacing debut. In 2003, singer Marcy Emery (The Choir Practice, Capozzi Park) called some of her friends together to record interpretations of songs by another friend, Mark Szabo.

Multi-instrumentalist John Collins (producer of Tegan and Sara and producer/member of The New Pornographers) was one enlistee, along with his New Pornos bandmate Dan Bejar, whose other project is the brilliant, sui generis Destroyer.

All involved were fans of Szabo's and thought the Vancouver-based songwriter's work deserved wider attention. For years Szabo had been mixing ramshackle arrangements with sophisticated melodies and surgically precise lyrics, both solo and with his now defunct band Good Horsey.

Imagine an autodidact songwriter as attuned to down-and-out humanity as Springsteen, only far subtler than the Boss and steeped in art pop from the ESP- DISK label through Slapp Happy all the way to Drag City, with songs that are off-handed in execution but very, very deliberate in composition, and you're getting the right idea about Mark Szabo.

Marcy Emery and Heartbreak Scene tease out Szabo's melodies and hooks, and the improved recording fidelity holds a jeweler's loupe to the carefully wrought lyrics. Many of Szabo's characters are desperate for someone to salvage them, but defiant about their need for salvaging. The same might be said for the songs themselves, and on The Szabo Songbook, Heartbreak Scene answer that conflicted call with grace and ingenuity.

Franklin Bruno "Local Currency: Solo 1992-1998" TT02
Franklin Bruno "Zero Return" 7" TT03
$10 ppd

Franklin Bruno's songs are intricate in all the right ways, and emotional in a lot of the less obvious ways, and melodic in several gentle ways that you don't get to hear very often. I have been feeling personally inadequate while listening to them for over a decade. (John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats)

21 Songs: Milkcrate/ In a Sourceless Light/ News From Cupid/ About You I'd Ask/ Wholly Heavy Heart/ Winter's Just a Word/ Medium of Exchange/ Keeping the Weekend Free/ Purity Test/ Shooting Past Me/ Cat-Scratch Fever/ The Irony Engine/ Pointless Triangle/ The 101st/ No. 119/ Fond Icicle/ Soggy Girl/ Sleeping Through the Jane Pratt Show/ Rice King/ Coupon/ Dream Worth Dreaming

Local Currency (Solo 1992-1998) gathers songs from long out-of-print 7" singles and compilations by songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and sometime music critic Franklin Bruno. If you already know Franklin's work from his collaborations with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats (both as a key sideman on the acclaimed albums The Sunset Tree and Get Lonely and in the duo The Extra Glenns), his six albums of inspired power pop with Nothing Painted Blue, or his three previous solo albums, you have a good idea of what to expect: richly melodic songs that, even at their most lo-fi, resound with sly wit and a huge heart.

In the early 1990s Franklin released two cassette-only collections of four-track recordings on the venerable Shrimper label (an early home to the Mountain Goats, Lou Barlow/Sentridoh, and Refrigerator, and still relevant with its recent support of Brooklyn's Woods). These enigmatic, individually dubbed tapes filtered through the post-Nirvana independent underground, winning admirers with their balance of rawness and craft, as if Loudon Wainwright III had signed to K Records.

Those early tapes are prized by a cadre of devotees, but Franklin saved his best solo material for the releases collected here. Pressed in small runs on labels like Walt, Sing, Eunuchs!, Baby Huey and Germany's Little Teddy, the highlights include "In a Sourceless Light," which weds sumptuous lyricism to electric-acoustic jangle; "Milkcrate," a poignant, catchy breakup song; and Bruno's de facto signature song, "Irony Engine" (frequently covered live by the Mountain Goats, and included on a recent Rough Trade Shops compilation alongside tracks by Elliott Smith, Nick Cave and PJ Harvey).

Local Currency includes track-by-track notes by Franklin, and an essay by poet and Nation columnist Ange Mlinko. Purchasers of the CD will receive a code for a free five-track download-only EP, featuring covers of songs from across Franklin's career by friends: Lou Barlow, Laura Cantrell, Mac McCaughan, Jennifer O'Connor, and Mecca Normal; the first 150 orders include Zero Return, a limited-edition 7" of vintage recordings of three previously unreleased songs: "Waterweight", "Medal" and "I'm Not Ashamed".

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Local Currency Free Companion EP

Free companion EP features: Lou Barlow, "Sit Back and Watch"/ Jennifer O'Connor, "Clean Needle"/ Portastatic, "Tableaux Vivant"/ Laura Cantrell, "Lies On Your Lips"/ Mecca Normal, "Coupon"