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• Falling Stairs: Life is a Kick Trial: 1988-93

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  Falling Stairs was three Johns and a guy named Charlie from Queens and Long Island in the late 80s and early 90s who were obsessed by independent music coming from Minneapolis, Hoboken, Athens, Boston, Melbourne, Washington, D.C., Austin, Sydney, Detroit, Amherst, Seattle, and our hometown of New York. It inspired us to pick up guitars, a bass, and drums and make our own kind of noise.
  
  We played bars and clubs all around New York and surrounding states for several years, recorded an EP, recorded a couple of singles, then promptly imploded.
  
  The masters ended up in boxes and moved around with us for thirty years. Decades, and many children, later we gathered up 2” and 1” tapes and even a VHS, had them baked, remastered, and digitized. Upon hearing the songs for the first time in decades, we realized maybe this quad of misfits quit too soon.
  
  We were fans of Antietam, Belly, Big Black, Big Dipper, The Birthday Party, Black Uhuru, The Blasters, Buffalo Tom, The Celibate Rifles, The Clash, De La Soul, The dBs, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Feelies, The Fleshtones, Fugazi, Gang of Four, Go-Betweens, Jason & The Scorchers, Hoodoo Gurus, Hüsker Dü, Let’s Active, Lime Spiders, MC5, Meat Puppets, Mental as Anything, Metallica, Mission of Burma, The Minutemen, Naked Raygun, New Order, New York Dolls, Patti Smith Group, Pixies, Prince, Psychedelic Furs, Public Enemy, Pylon, Radio Birdman, The Ramones, The Replacements, R.E.M., Romeo Void, The Saints, Sonic Youth, Soul Asylum, The Stooges, Talking Heads, Television, They Might Be Giants, U2, Uncle Tupelo, Violent Femmes, Wall of Voodoo, X, Zeitgeist, and lots of others. You can hear a bit of all that in there. We all grew up with older siblings, too, so we had been hearing everything from rock to blues to metal to folk to disco.
  
  We played live at Brownie’s, CBGB’s, Downtown Beirut, The El-n-Gee, King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut, Lauterbach’s, Lismar Lounge, Maxwell’s, Nightingale’s, The Pool Bar, The Pyramid, The Right Track Inn, The Space at Chase, Tramps, and others we have forgotten. We did a few short tours in the south, sent out our EP to radio stations and got lots of plays. We sent more to fanzines and newspapers and got a bunch of nice reviews. It was a lot of fun and we wouldn’t change it for the world.
  
  In truth, very few people actually heard any of it.
  
  There may not be a big reunion tour, but all these many years later, this collection of songs a time capsule of an earlier era of American rock: angry, anthematic, hooky, poppy, noisy, and insistent. These well-constructed, well-performed, and well-recorded songs have stood the test of time, even if that was in a bunch of cardboard
  boxes.
  
  So, 30 years later, we present the debut album.
  
  Includes unlimited streaming of Life is a Kick Trial: 1988-93 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more
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