Almost everything I have ever accomplished has either been motivated by spite toward someone who told me I couldn’t do it, or because I saw an opportunity to actually improve on someone else’s failure. In the case of Jolly Dream, a little bit of both lead to its creation. Really, though, it begins with Creamers. As a guy who’s been booking shows since he was in his teens, I’ve been turned to stone by the slabs of butt-fuckingly awful garbage I’ve been forced to endure. Rarely do I encounter something so exceptional that it chisels through the exterior I’ve developed in order to maintain my sanity. Creamers happen to be in that thimble full of bands that have done that. It was just good, pure Bloodstainsy punk. The kind of punk that existed before white guilt crept in and everyone started scrambling to justify their angst. At some point, the standard arose that in order to be truly pissed off you have to have some sort of problem that’s globally relevant. Refreshingly, Creamers' do not struggle to produce a rhyme or reason to the fury. It is simple nature. Plus, they’re catchy as fuck.
Few local bands have captured something inside of me before, but Austin is the kind of city that plateaus people. It’s easy to carve a niche and play the same set to the same people for years, and it becomes so comfortable that you don’t ever really have a reason to leave your bubble. You don’t tour. You don’t write new shit. And doing a record almost becomes an afterthought because it’s just going through the motions, like everything else. So ultimately, most of the records put out by local bands I actually like are so shabby that they obliterate any chance of creating a legacy.
Over several months of watching Creamers win new faces over with their shows, I decided that this was a band that deserved to be preserved. Good friends and fellow witnesses Orville Neeley (Bad Sports), and Chris Engberg (Play Pinball Records) felt the same way. So, we all pooled our resources and decided to put out something we feel is truly special in every way. The very blood of our label though would be based around the phrase, “quality control.” If it sounded like shit or looked like shit, we’d send it back to the drawing board. We truly want to produce records that we would all want to buy ourselves.
So, Orville recorded the band and produced a recording that truly capture’s the bands energy. Seth Gibbs did a brilliant job of smoothing everything out with his mastering. Kyle, the band’s frontman, did a beautiful job creating the actual face of the record – a detail which I feel is often overlooked by bands. Lucky Lacquers did their thing with a beautiful cut. Stan at A&R, a wonderful Dallas-based vinyl plant, showed dedication and care you will not get at any other plant while seeing our job through. Michael Dickinson of Chicken Ranch and Ben Tipton of Burger City helped out with kick starting this thing. Certainly not least of all, we owe a lot to Gerard Cosloy of Matador and Matt Clarke of Tic Tac Totally, who provided invaluable guidance to help ensure that our first release wouldn’t fizzle out in our faces. Ultimately, it’s been a great community effort that’s sort of rejuvenated my interest in music, which had been on the wane for a while. We’re all super proud of it.
The Creamers’ “Modern Day” 7” should be hitting distros and stores this May, and we have a slew of other releases in the pipeline, including releases from Useless Eaters, OBN IIIs, and The Terrible Twos.
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