BBsitters Club – Joel’s Picks Vol. 2

To be released on cassette, CD and digitally on August 16th, 2024. C66 – yellow cassette with black imprints, an XL 4-panel J-Card and artwork by HausMo Max. CD packaged in a 4-panel digipak with printed inner CD pocket. This is the catalog page with album information and artwork. To purchase, head to our Bandcamp page.

BBsitters Club is a rock band based in Chicago that features Doug Kaplan on MIDI guitar and vocals, Charlie Olvera on guitar and vocals, Max Allison on bass, and Paul Birhanu on drums. As the label’s de-facto in-haus band, BBsitters Club satisfies Hausu Mountain co-founders Allison and Kaplan’s urge to remain connected to the rock and roll they grew up loving and playing in bands as teens — far across the spectrum from the experimental electronics featured on the lion’s share of HausMo releases. The band came to life in a basement practice space in 2015, but didn’t emerge from their rehearsals until years later, opting to woodshed and sculpt their songs to the point that they could perform live as a fully realized project — loose around the edges and improv-minded by design, but dialed into their tight instrumental interplay and on-a-dime transitions between styles and genres.

A solid four years after the one-two-punch releases of BBsitters Club & Party, the band’s 2020 debut studio album, and Joel’s Pick’s Vol. 1, the first volume in a series of audience-recorded live takes from shows around Chicago, we find the BBs reviving the Joel’s Pick’s series with Vol. 2. The album presents live cuts from five shows at Cafe Mustache, Cole’s Bar, and Sleeping Village between 2019 and 2023, including two new songs and one cover of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s “Kandy Korn” (Mirror Man, 1971) that haven’t seen the light of day on any studio or live BBsitters Club release to date. The material that the band first presented on their studio album evolves into new fractal permutations of live chaos and time-honed precision on Joel’s Picks Vol. 2, with tracks often segueing into each other as multi-part suites or extending into more ambitious improvised passages. Charged with the energy of a close-knit group of friends willing to follow along with each other’s most outlandish ideas both in composition and live performance, Joel’s Picks Vol. 2 offers us a bewildering yet always tongue-in-cheek palette of ideas cherry-picked and mashed together into amalgams that both embrace “rock traditions” and defy them with a cherubic grin. BBsitters Club’s amorphous compositions land somewhere between the world’s most baked prog band and a jamband that’s never content to lapse into wheel-spinning complacency. Shades of the Grateful Dead hang heavy over the band in shared elements of both their sound and the projects’ overarching ethos, as every BBsitters show has been recorded in an ongoing band-endorsed live taping process spearheaded primarily by Kaplan and dear bud Joel Berk (namesake of Joel’s Picks, and also of the band’s multiple songs whose only lyric is the word “Joel.”)

On Joel’s Picks Vol. 2, BBsitters Club cartwheel between eras and styles of rock music with abandon — a CRT TV stuck flipping from channel to channel after your dad falls asleep with one leg on the remote. We encounter the elliptical dueling guitars and autumnal atmospheres of midwest emo / math rock, the gregarious stomp of electrified country rock, blues rock that has melted from ingesting one too many hallucinogens, and fried Devo-style art punk that breaches into the realms of ska before melting into free-form noise rock flecked with the bizarro imitative instrument tones of Kaplan’s MIDI guitar. Previously unreleased song “Party in My Chevy” floats in an upbeat yet vaguely wistful headspace with its evocations of “party[ing] every single day” all summer long, dialing into a strain of late 90s’ / early 00s’ rock radio that adapted classic rock and grunge into a more palatable presentation for the masses. Meanwhile, the other new song “West of Your State” mines sounds from California rap-rock and funk-punk with its rapped near-nonsense Anthony Kiedis-core non sequiturs (“gonna take your nonna to the hot dog factory”) and follows the trail across the boundary into nü-nü-metal. No matter what rabbit hole they fall into, BBsitters Club maintains their bonkers sense of humor borne out in spontaneous transitions between far-flung styles and lyrics that specifically pay homage to or skewer the rock references that they channel. When the jukebox arm of Joel’s Picks Vol. 2 lands on the boys covering Captain Beefheart’s “Kandy Korn,” we get a sense through the lens of the song of what motivates them as a band: the fusion of technicality and absurdity, the instrumental interplay that veers between locked-in precision and spiraling cacophony, the grooves that sound moments away from crumbling away with the landscape in a mudslide.