Okay, good news: Shrimper is celebrating its 25th anniversary as a record label and I’m here to tell you about it. Maybe you’re all like “wait, what’s a Shrimper,” and well, besides literally being someone who collects shrimp from the ocean, it’s also a small label run by Dennis Callaci run out of California, which found its start back in 1990 because Callaci was “in a band that was never going to put out any kind of music otherwise.” That was Callaci’s band with his brother Allen and few other collaborators. They were called Refrigerator. They are as good as they are difficult to Google.
Like a lot of people who are only two years older than the label itself, I came to Shrimper’s back catalog by way of my boy John Darnielle in The Mountain Goats. I was probably scouring the liner notes to Bitter Melon Farm, or listening to “The Rain Song” in particular or something and I noticed a seafood-related trend and so I set out in search of comps and tapes various digital castoffs from the likes of Franklin Bruno, Nothing Painted Blue, Refrigerator, WCKR SPGT, Furniture Huschle, and Sentridoh — Abridged Perversion in particular was a pretty thoroughly clutch intro. Not gonna lie and say “I was there when it all started,” because I obviously wasn’t, but I can tell you for certain that I got there once everything was underway and that this shit continues to hold up. Case in point, the celebratory sampler up on SoundCloud right now that collects tracks from throughout the label’s run, including The Babies, Dump, Woods/Amps for Christ, and “Certain Dance-Circumstance” from Sentridoh which is maybe my all time favorite Lou Barlow-sourced track in existence. You can listen to the whole thing below — it’s great.
That’s not all, either. There’s a new Refrigerator album coming out February 17 — order it here. It’s called Temple City and it follows 2011’s demos collection Dangerous. Dennis Callaci says he wrote the song “This Woman Here” (also embedded below) for a “false started R&B project,” and you can heart that just a little in the lilt of the structure, though overall it’s Refrigerator’s shambolically sparse textures that creep out to the fore. The band plans to tour a bit behind the album in conjunction with vocalist Allen Callaci’s book tour behind his Heart Like Starfish.
Temple City tracklist:
01. Your Hometown
02. As Advertised Please Don’t Touch
03. The Real Thing
04. This Woman Here
05. Pocket Thousandaire
06. Cul De Sac
07. Friendloverwhatever
08. Secret Knock
09. Ozu
10. Thinking Man’s Fool
11. Rest of the Lonesome
12. Run Down Rings
13. Percy Sledge
14. As I Was Before
15. No Fun
16. Sophia Loren
17. Smile Kid
• Shrimper: https://midheaven.com/label/shrimper#.VN4Tzi473j0
• Refrigerator: https://midheaven.com/artist/refrigerator
More about: Refrigerator, Sentridoh, The Mountain Goats
