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Merchandise is a band fighting against the easy categorization reserved for abbreviated biographies. The project is equal parts punk misanthropy, maudlin balladeering, fine art, low humor, classical study, psychedelic spacecasing, mad science and pop genius.
Formed as a trio in Tampa, Florida in 2008, the band has undergone ceaseless revision and reinvention. After putting out numerous records and tapes on independent punk labels and touring the underground, the band truly hit its stride with the release of their second LP "Children of Desire" in April 2012. In addition to a very warm reception from fans, the record received praise from the likes of Pitchfork, NME, Spin, and numerous other critics and journals.
2013 saw the band releasing a new 12″ on Iowa City's excellent Night People label and touring extensively throughout America and Europe.
In 2014, Merchandise released their album 'After The End'.
Gun Outfit
The story of Gun Outfit begins with the wide diffusion of hominid life forms across what is now Africa, Europe and Asia eons ago. Some of these hominids, we now know, were wild freaks. They loved to munch and browse around nonetheless, and as far we can tell were desperate to persist despite the apparent superiority of Homo Sapiens, who was proud of caring for the lame and especially of its various babies and who consumed dung-grown psyche mushrooms heartily for hunting purposes only, so that they could kill and explain and love themselves for all time. The Homo Heidelbergensis, the Homo Sp, Steinheim and Swanscombe and all the Erectus's, these strange precursors with odd braincases filled with weird souls and mandibles for grinding bark types, had much difficulty keeping on and instead were commanded by time to vanish into mud embankments and genetic tracings. Homo Sapiens, meanwhile, fell in love with talk and important scribbling and wondered why it wanted to kill itself.
Thousands of years of later, with wild and flamboyant lineages proudly twisting through only a fraction of their conceivably possible experience, Homo Sapiens made Gun Outfit. The entity was bound by the constraints of the actual existing world at birth, and as a result appears conceptually misshapen and physically clothed in pictures. With unprecedented access to technology Gun Outfit duplicated itself and appeared in the marketplace, and was thus deformed. Hints of self awareness, insinuations of worldly indifference and overall positivity of intention were no match for the organizing principles of this world and soon Gun Outfit witnessed itself building a website to represent itself. The organism adjusts as circumstances shift within the flux of overdetermined possibility. History rushes to explain itself, but its lessons are only quaint in their particulars and ridiculous in their epic generalities. The entity persists.
Predictably, some struggling. The idea of perfection and the ease of exploitation contribute to the ruin of all minds. Reality lazily undermines attempts to represent it accurately in its entire fullness by performing insignificant miracles. By the effort of many years, we approach a meager crumb and are turned away. It returns as we panic and shows us what we should have known.
Trust not:
the self satisfied
the self
the satisfied
every other
But honor the dead and the dying in song.
ROUGH SLEEPERS
http://roughsleepers.bandcamp.com/releases
