The
Beauty Shop - Yr
Money Or Yr Life
 Artist:
The Beauty Shop
Title: Yr Money Or Yr Life
Catalog#: Mud-CD-044
Price: OUT
OF PRINT
|
Tracks
on this CD: |
| Death March
|
| Lies |
| Denver |
| I
Got Issues |
| To
Keep You |
| Dutch
Courage |
| Yr
Money Or Yr Life |
| Bloody
Nose |
| Shell
Game |
| Caramel
Apple |
| Art
Project |
| 803
W Nevada |
| Science Lights
|
| |
|
|
Some
bands put a picture of themselves on the cover. Some bands
try to best express their visual image
through the CD booklet art. The mannequin flashing gang symbols
on the front of The Beauty Shop's debut CD Yr Money or
Yr Life,
and the accompanying faux horror show photos and fonts, give
no indication of the trio behind the music. But maybe it is
a window to the soul of The Beauty Shop's songwriter John Hoeffleur.
The lyrics to "I Got Issues" have me believing:
I made a mountain out of coke/That
I sniffed up my nose
I wrote fuck on all clothes/That's the life I chose
and
I open my big mouth/And let my hatred
out
Just to see you pout/Girl that's what I'm about
My
first taste of the Champaign-Urbana based The Beauty Shop was
the band's self-released (y'know,
burned 100 at home, then more, then more) Grief EP.
The cover art was so disturbing I almost couldn't bring myself
to play the CD. While the little man on my shoulder whispered "don't
judge a book, blah blah blah" I held out for a few more
days. When the local buzz got loud enough to drown out those
aggravating voices I finally put in the CD and…well, it
was quite good. And listening again it was great. It kind of
reminded me of Johnny Dowd's first album. Stark, dark tales
of death, or so they both sounded like to me. I forgot about "the
cover" and at the urging of Parasol's headmaster Geoff,
went to see them live. He was right. They were great. And,
how to describe great? The singer, and de facto bandleader,
John Hoeffleur, has some kind of charisma. It's the look in
his eyes. The look of a guy who designed "the cover."
John
picks up The Beauty Shop story in his own words: "The
Beauty Shop is kind of a weird band. I mean, I'm a weirdo for
sure, and it's weird that a
regular guy like (drummer) Casey is in a band with me, because
he's real nice and I'm mean, and he's vegan and my diet is
beef, exclusively. It's an odd match. Casey can build Robots,
I'm a wizard with cardboard. I built a few dogs to pick up
girls with and a ten-foot tall piece of toast and two bong
costumes for Halloween. And then you look at (bassist) Ariane,
who's from Indiana (!), is a girl, is Filipino, is 4'11 I think,
and we're all playing country-rock music or whatever it is.
I use a beat up acoustic, Casey's got like two drums, and we're
playing kind of sedate music, and that was something really
new to some people or something. The Grief EP was recorded
at a time of pretty dismal morale for various personal reasons,
but one factor was certainly the slow death of Casey's cat,
who during recording lost control of one front leg. We just
watched this poor cat kind of limply slide its front limb across
the hardwood floor."
Whew! Yr Money Or Yr Life contains
tracks from the Grief EP, plus newly recorded material.
The Beauty Shop has been compared to Leonard Cohen and Uncle
Tupelo, and cites Chris Whitley and the Gun Club as influences.
I stand behind the Johnny Dowd comparisons and love the ghost
tales, the drinking tales, the death tales, all of them. "Death
March" can be sampled on Parasol's Sweet Sixteen, Volume 2.
A message from John Hoeffleur:
Hello everybody, my name is John and I play guitar and sing and
write the songs for my band, The Beauty Shop. We're a quiet little
band from Urbana IL. Mud just
put out our record, Yr Money or Yr Life, and hooked us up with all sorts of exposure
we never even dreamed of. Our focus is on writing good songs that are a
little more, shall we say, "handcrafted" than most popular music. For
the most part, our sound fits in with this new alt-country whatever thing you
may have heard about, maybe a little darker than most. But I should also add
that lots of people that despise country music enjoy our record, too. Anyway,
we're tying to keep it real, not a lot of stunts and garbage, I just want the
band to sound good live and get the songs to feel right. We recorded everything
ourselves and put out an EP called "Grief" about a year or so ago,
which makes up about half of our new CD. A lot of people told us they like our
record, and they really seem sincere, so if you have a chance you might want
to check it out somehow. And if you can help us out getting a show someplace,
than please let us know. Hell, we just like to hear from people, so please write
us at mailto:thebeautyshop@hotmail.com or check
our website at http://www.the-beautyshop.com
Thanks for your time and take care.
Sincerely,
John Hoeffleur
"[The
Beauty Shop] deliver world weariness on an epic scale." -NME
"There
are moments of tear stained beauty, but you can never relax
enough to appreciate the lonliness that's mainlined to your
heart because this is an astonishingly disturbing record, the
kind of thing which gives drowning in Bourbon a good name." -
Careless Talk Costs Lives
"Fuckin' excellent." -Time Out
“Cognitive dissonance is the order of the
day on this intriguing melange of sweetness and dark, the first
full-length from a trio with roots planted in the heartland
- but not the bucolic stretch favored by most Americana-mongers.
Devoutly minimalist and unsparingly brooding, the Illinois-based
band can conjure up images of the Tindersticks (in the cryptic
elegance of arrangements like the one that swaths the menacing ‘Death
March’) or the Gun Club (thanks to ominous tales
like the self-destructive ‘I Got Issues’). The mortar
holding it all together oozes from the voicebox of frontman John
Hoeffleur, whose sepulchral tones - imagine Leonard Cohen with
a deeply ingrained Midwestern drawl - belie his youth, and lend
undeniable heft to the dank, drug-sodden imagery that permeates
the remarkably addictive disc. Still, by the time the last notes
of ‘Science
Lights’ ebb away, you can't help but
feel like these wouldn't be bad folks to have over on a winter's
night - provided the sharp objects were all squirreled away..” -RollingStone.com
“...a first-rate, sloppy acoustic album
crawling with thoroughly morbid, mordant tunes about death,
drugs, stalkers, tough times and bad love... Fans of straightforward
acoustic-guitar pop will enjoy this album's bittersweet countryish
ballads ‘Denver,’ ‘Shell
Game,’ ‘Lies’ and ‘Bloody Nose,’ which
owe as much to certain Williamses (i.e., Hank Sr. and Lucinda),
the Reivers, the Violent Femmes and the Victor Krummenacher Band
as they do to Leonard Cohen or ‘the blues.’ The slightly
more up-tempo numbers - the title track and a nifty fuck-you
anthem called ‘I
Got Issues’ - rattle on in an engaging way, proving once
again that you don't need Marshall stacks to whip up a frenzy.
The real charmers, though, are the deceptively titled ‘Art
Project’ and the exquisite
closer, ‘Science Light’; these dry-eyed weepers have
a stark, open-hearted intimacy that recalls Bruce Springsteen's
pristine, pathos-laden Nebraska...” -Time
Out New York
“...What makes them worth hearing is John
Hoeffleur's voice, a gravelly baritone bringing to mind the
likes of Merle Haggard or Johnny Cash; he translates the spirit
of those old country singers into the language of shiftless
twentysomething slackerdom, sneering and drawling his way through
simple acoustic-guitar-based songs about lying, stealing, drinking,
haunted houses, freezing to death, wandering the earth as a ghost,
and generally being an unrepentant asshole. Perfect for late-night
sour moods when you realize the only person worth hating is
yourself.” -Monosyllabic
“...the whole indie-label country scene
can also be a rather conservative one, filled with ultra-revisionist
bands whose concept of country music has everything to do with
the surface level things like what clothes you wear and which
instruments you play. But for every theme-park-style re-enactment
of the past (BR5-49, Beachwood Sparks, etc.), there’s
a group with their own sound, one which takes the building
blocks of country music
and builds on them with their own perspective, groups like Marah,
My Morning Jacket and The Beauty Shop.” -Pop Matters
"A dirty needle of delicious despondence
shot through with rough, down-beat country. One hit will floor
you for days. Overdose and you may slip into the Beauty Shop's
murky world for good" - Slant
"Enchanting...one of the genre's most inspiring collectives" -
Teletext
"Sparse, poignant and sincere" - Classic
Rock
"This could make you believe you are listening
to country rock's answer to Leonard Cohen" - Rock Sound
"Prowling through the darkest shadows of
Americana, songwriter John Hoeffleur drawls his lyrics of bitterness,
jealousy and downright orneriness over a battered acoustic
and loping rhythm section...a solid debut." - Mail On Sunday
"With each of these tracks The Beauty Shop
have hidden a piece of us." - www.bbc.co.uk
"Blessed with a natural sense of timing
and harmony...satisfyingly downbeat but melodic" - www.americana.co.uk
