Real Cool Rain

10.2.09

mother of god...

from their virb.com page
"We existed from 1993 - 1996 in the DC suburbs on the Virginian side of the Potomac.
Everything we released is long out of print and this site is an attempt to make at least some of that available again...in all its obscurity and imperfection.
We hope you enjoy.

Love,
Nathan
Anthony
Emre
Brian"


i can't even begin to tell you how excited i am right now. so let's flash back to when i was a young lad, around 19. that was 1994 for those keeping score at home. i used to go to this great record store called Vinyl Ink in DC (it's were i picked up the Verve-Voyager 1 blue vinyl). i was way into the Durutti Column at the time, granted i'm always way into the Durutti Column, but i was looking the local and DIY indie section and saw a cassette that said something to the effect if you like the Durutti Column you'll love this. i asked the guy at the counter how he felt about that and he tried to sell me Windy and Carl. I passed on the Windy and Carl for Real Cool Rain. i was blown away by it. very raw yet beautiful and perfect. i'm no wordsmith, i'll be the first to admit, but i absolutely loved it. over the years the tape deteriorated because i played it so much and the fact that it lived in my car, which was not safe for animal nor human. plant life maybe... one day it broke and i was crushed. never heard anything about these guys ever again.
flash forward to the internet...
every couple years i'd do a search for Real Cool Rain when i was bored or started to think about awesome songs i hadn't heard in a long time. well tonight i struck gold. sure enough i typed it in and there it was on virb.com of all places. (i love the fact that they don't have a myspace page. so perfect.) and 9 songs free to download which you can also listen to here and download if you choose. i also found one of the members flickr pages with some posters of their old shows. since there's such little information about them i'm posting the captions to them as well. here we go...
snagged from Anthony's Flickr page...





"This is ancient history, just about 10 years ago now if not slightly more. I'd actually forgotten we'd played there. I have now vague recollections of the performance. It was fun putting together these flyers with Nate. Leka was a good band, a 3 piece. Nice people. I wonder where they are now."







"Sarina Simmom was this great band fronted by an extremely talented Jennifer Herbst. They totally blew us off the stage."




"Always ones for variety, we made a couple different flyers for each of the shows we did. As a band we recorded 4 albums (actually, slightly more) worth of material but only managed to play 10 shows total due to half the band being in university. The only time we had was holidays and summers and it actually was easier to record than to try to get shows. We'd practice for upwards of a month for just one show and I don't think we ever had more than 3 shows in a single month."



and now a selection of tunes that they made available for free on virb. i hope you enjoy them as much as i do...it's great to have the old tracks from my driving days and hear some that i hadn't...

A Deserts Warning to a Late Night Tr.mp3
Afterlife.mp3
Am I In You.mp3
Can I Get One of You Smiling.mp3
Circumstance.mp3
Eros.mp3
Fountain of Youth.mp3
How to Say Goodbye in the Future.mp3
Restless.mp3
Thanatos.mp3

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

unbelievable - I had never heard of them before; lovely stuff

Afterlife said...

Hi, I'm Anthony from RCR. Nate just forwarded your link to me and I'd like to thank you for your massive enthusiasm. I totally dig us being on the blog circuit as I've recently discovered them myself. For the record, MAJOR influences on us were (perhaps "are") The Sound (Adrian Borland & company), The Chameleons, Felt, Cocteau Twins (obviously), Talk Talk, and the list goes on. Plus we loved all kinds of stuff. Great you had our cassette! I have one left. Did you ever frequent Record Convergence? I worked there as did Nate (several years after I did. I actually have sealed copies of our Restless CD if you'd like a copy, email me at the.end.of@gmail.com. thanks for your enthusiasm. Just in time for our reunion world tour...