(It's Alive!) Independent record label Independent Project Records (IPR) announced today that 1983, the first-ever release from Stockton's Torn Boys, the now legendary band featuring Jeffrey Clark, Kelly Foley, Duncan Atkinson and a 19 year-old Grant-Lee Phillips, is set to be released in the first part of 2024.
The comprehensive archival ten-track set of rare, unreleased studio and live tracks documents the short but eventful life of Torn Boys, a group comprising future members of Shiva Burlesque, Gary Young's Hospital and Grant Lee Buffalo. It will be available on digital formats as well as compact disc and black, white and green vinyl (coming with a bonus DVD of previously unseen live recordings and newly made music videos).
Tomorrow, IPR will release the first single and video, "See Through My Eyes" from 1983 on all DSPs.
Formed in 1982 by IPR co-owner Jeffrey Clark (vocals, electric guitar) and Kelly Foley (vocals, acoustic guitar) and disbanded by late 1983, the Torn Boys lived out their one and a half summers fusing dreamscape lyricism with ultra-'80's synth rhythms and Fripp-meets-Carl-Perkins electric guitar textures, leaving behind a scant recorded legacy before dissolving.
Local musician Duncan Atkinson started helping out as sound engineer before joining the band live on Pro One synthesiser and drum machine. In the Spring of '83 nineteen-year-old Grant-Lee Phillips was recruited on lead guitar, where his Chet-Atkins-plays-Scary-Monsters sound added an indelible and unique ingredient to the band's alchemy.
"What Jeff (Clark) and Kelly (Foley) were doing, you just didn't see that kind of thing happening in Stockton", says Grant-Lee Phillips. "So we connected right away over a mutual obsession with the alluring fringes of music, art and film".
Forty years after the fact, the Torn Boys recordings still fend off basic categorization, conjuring the darker corners of neo-psychedelic California, infusing New Wave-era sensibilities with the moodier angle of home-grown, art-punk-surrealism. Full track listing below:
1. See Through My Eyes
2. Radio intro
3. Mystery (Live, KDVS)
4. Fountain of Blood
5. New Drums
6. May Day
7. Mack The Knife (Live, KDVS)
8. Torn
9. And Now (Live, Blackwater Café)
10. Lady Luck
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]