Originally released in 1999 on Merge Records, The Albemarle Sound, the third full-length LP by Brooklyn, New York’s The Ladybug Transistor, exists just outside its fixed point in time and space. Perhaps the last great pop album of the 20th century, The Albemarle Sound is like few records from the turn of the millennium, its attention turned to the intricate arrangements of late 1960s pop and the strange and familiar environs of home.

The notion of home is important to The Albemarle Sound, not just lyrically and thematically, but in the fact that the album was recorded, mixed and produced in a Victorian house in Flatbush named Marlborough Farms. The Ladybug Transistor was formed in 1995 as the home recording project of singer and trumpeter Gary Olson, and by 1999 the group had swelled to include siblings Jeff Baron (guitar) and Jennifer Baron (bass), Sasha Bell (keyboards and flute), San Fadyl (drums), and Julia Rydholm (violin), who lived together at Marlborough Farms, a home filled with instruments, recording equipment and a piano room where the group made demos.

“The instruments and recording equipment around the studio seemed to have stories that were woven into the fabric of the house or its prior inhabitants,” recalls Jennifer, the sense of history and community evident in the warmth of The Albemarle Sound. Recorded entirely analog on a 16-track machine, the album invites the listener in by invoking place with an impressionist’s attention to detail and a surrealist’s curiosity. Moments at Sheepshead Bay and Prospect Park are transfigured in the light through the windshield of a car as tears are transubstantiated into summer rain and canals take the place of asphalt streets.

Musically, these scenes are given voice by Olson’s rich baritone and animated by arrangements that meld elements of the kind of baroque, orchestral pop practiced by Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach with the sweeping cinematic vistas of Luis Bacalov, imbuing their surroundings with California sunshine and an occasional bit of western swagger. Each of The Albemarle Sound’s 12 songs are soundscapes unto themselves, entire neighborhoods built by the careful employment of voice and instruments, every part exquisitely placed to prick the ear and pull the heartstrings at just the right time.

The lineup that shaped The Albemarle Sound weaved in and out of each other’s projects over the years that followed the album’s release, including Gary’s solo output, Jeff and Sasha’s band The Essex Green, Jennifer’s band The Garment District, and The Sasha Bell Band.

The Ladybug Transistor released one album following the 2007 passing of drummer San Fadyl, 2011’s Clutching Stems, and in the time since, The Albemarle Sound has grown in stature, hailed as an essential release in the deep catalogs of Merge Records and the universe of bands adjacent to the Elephant 6 Recording Company alike. The album’s 20th anniversary prompted shows in New York City and Norway featuring a reformed lineup of Gary, Jeff, Jennifer, Sasha, and, Julia. A tour followed in 2023, focusing on songs released during the band’s most productive period, 1999-2003,that welcomed Derek Almstead (Giant Day) on drums and included a special engagement at The Andy Warhol Museum.

For the 25th anniversary of The Albemarle Sound, the record has been lovingly reissued on silver vinyl by Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records. The CD includes 12 bonus tracks which break open the year-long recording process with the inclusion of rare B-sides, four-track demos, instrumentals and alternate mixes, further highlighting the band’s mastery of songcraft while teasing out the intricate worlds those songs contain, making a case, as fans of The Ladybug Transistor have known for decades now, that The Albemarle Sound is as infinitely rewarding to return to as it is to visit for the first time.

This fall, The Ladybug Transistor will embark on a tour in celebration of the 25th anniversary of “The Albemarle Sound,” supported by Elephant Six artists Giant Day on the East Coast.
------------------------
On October 10, 2025, The Elephant 6 Recording Company releases Alarm, the second full-length album by Giant Day. Their first, 2024’s Glass Narcissus, bore a unique weight — it wasn’t just a debut album, it was the debut album by the first official Elephant 6 band in more than 15 years. With the 2023 wide-release of the documentary The Elephant 6 Recording Co. codifying the E6 “sound” for some and introducing it to others, what Giant Day — the duo of Derek Almstead (The Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, The Glands, of Montreal) and Emily Growden (Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits) — conjured into being on Glass Narcissus was, if not against type, notably darker than the lysergic, sun-drenched pop associated with their former Athens, Georgia home.

The word “former” is important to Giant Day’s origin story. In 2020, Almstead and Growden moved from Athens to rural Pennsylvania, where they became caretakers of a family farm. They converted the horse stables into a studio and continued to write and record music, but they were dislocated from their sense of the world, let alone anything resembling a “scene.” That lack of place — what Almstead and Growden refer to as the “dissonance” between the beauty of their new home and the reality of the world beyond it — crept into their songs, a desperate signal emanating from off the grid.

On Alarm, that signal is stronger, more urgent. With the momentum of Glass Narcissus at their back, Giant Day returned home from tour and poured themselves into making new music. The alluring, paranoid throb underpinning their songs is keener now, more lived in, as if the veil between the fears of characters whose points of view Almstead had written from on Glass Narcissus and his own had dropped. “It’s the first time I’ve ever put out a record that’s concurrent with what’s going on in the world,” he says, “where everything, music and lyrics, has that weight bearing on it.”

Growden’s voice, a glassy siren’s call shimmering on the horizon of Giant Day’s songs, also finds new resonance on Alarm. Her singing remains cool and precise, but as with Almstead, there is less distance between her and the material now, reflecting her expanding role in composing these songs. When Almstead toured with The Ladybug Transistor in late 2024, she stayed home in Patience, writing lyrics and melodies in the dead calm of winter — more than imagining isolation, she offers up her own. “I’m proud of it, but it was hell,” she says with a laugh. “Being alone for it took me to a pretty dark place, but it forced me to be confident about the decisions I was making, the direction I wanted to go.”

The result is unsettling — at turns furious and blissful; danceable, but in the way where what compels you to dance isn’t joy, but the need to purge oneself of emotion at the end of the day for the sake of making it through tomorrow. It’s a looser sound, not for lack of craft, but because the frayed nerve they’ve exposed is their own. Growden breathes the opening line of “Devil Dog,” “Is it painless,” with a determined chill, but the deliberate spacing of the phrase, breaking between “it” and “painless” is a line cracking through a sheet of ice that’s about to break. Instead, her focus snaps around Almstead’s bassline, and it’s as if the two of them are white-knuckling it together through a haunted house on the B-52’s “Planet Claire.”

Horror is a prevailing theme of Alarm: the shock of it in newness, the way one grows numb to it, the brief respite we find from it, and the cycle that results. What Giant Day capture at their poppiest — as on “King of Ghosts,” a propulsive psych-funk raver in which Growden shrugs “I’ve guess you’ve got your reasons” to a rising swell of apocalyptic images — is very of this moment, the strange way in which the world feels like it should stop to redress any number of issues but instead hurtles ceaselessly towards oblivion, “Steady at the wheel / no distractions.”

In “Golden Times,” Almstead and Growden find shelter in each other, a glittering soundscape of stacked harmonies, synths that tower into eternity, and reverb that slows time to a crawl. Like their home in Patience, it’s a bubble, one Almstead and Growden know they can’t occupy forever, and that could burst at any time. What’s so brave about Alarm is that Giant Day break down this fortress themselves, allowing birdsong to burst through the walls of synthesizer when they’ve turned sour and dystopic, letting a beam of sunlight in when things are at their darkest. “One minute closer to midnight,” Almstead sings on “Good Neighbor,” referring to the ticking of the doomsday clock.

The world is terrifying — existence of the doomsday clock is proof enough of this — but in its last moment Alarm offers up something more than paranoia as a response: “Call if you need anything.” What ends up breaking on Alarm is not ice, but spiritual winter — there is something green, something verdant, something hopeful in that final note, however unwritten the future beyond it is. One aches to hear something so tender. Almstead and Growden ache in finding it. But that ache is like a muscle knitting more tightly together, growing stronger, more resilient — something will survive into the future, no matter how hostile that future is.
------------------------
Great Lakes formed around the songwriting partnership of Dan Donahue and Ben Crum. The band's history goes back to 1990 when Dan and Ben began collaborating on songs while still in high school. Years later they met Jamey Huggins. When the three moved to Athens in 1996, the band came together and played its first live shows.

2000 saw the release of their self-titled debut. An adventurously-undertaken production, it blends epic soundscapes with catchy pop songs. MOJO called it "Very cool," and Uncut praised its "gorgeous stereophonic experiments."

Their 2nd LP, 2002's The Distance Between, was selected as one of the top overlooked albums of that year by Magnet Magazine, which noted the bands' ability to "spew out a fuzz-laced garage assault" and complimented their "knack for fusing melancholy with feats of ballroom levitation."

With their 3rd LP, Diamond Times, which came out in the fall of 2006 (UK/Europe in Spring 2007), the band's sound has evolved into what Uncut magazine called "powerful, accomplished pop music", and "utterly great".

The Avalon Lounge

The Avalon Lounge

The Avalon Lounge