We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Repeat Performance 377 (2021 c47, Cost Of Living)

by People Skills

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app.
    Purchasable with gift card

      name your price

     

  • rp377
    Cassette + Digital Album

    Includes unlimited streaming of Repeat Performance 377 (2021 c47, Cost Of Living) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

about

"Thrilled to announce the second release on Cost Of Living. Philadelphia's People Skills brings us Repeat Performance 377. This tape pools a wide collection of late 20th century self-indulgent classics, Jesse's signature warped songcraft the tie that binds. A covers album presented through budget synthesizers, detuned guitar, tape hiss and the occasional rhythm box. All of which are slowed down enough to make DJ Screw smile. A deconstruction of pop hits in the most endearing terms possible.

Comes in screen-printed recycled cardstock case in a hand-numbered edition of 100, classy."

-Digital Regress

credits

released December 15, 2021

All songs performed and recorded by Jesse S. Dewlow between 2016 and 2020. Compiled and mixed fall 2021.
All songs originally written by other people.

Repeat Performance photo series from the Alfred P. Sebastian Archives 1969-1995.

Thanks to Jim Strong and Jeff Johnson and Mark Rice @goatmother for the printing.

****************************************************************************

"Jesse Dewlow’s long-running, Philadelphia-based project People Skills seems less and less interested in using whatever Dewlow possesses of those eponymous skills to reach out, communicate or otherwise glibly connect with a mass audience. Since Gunshots at Crestridge (2016) — the last People Skills record to be released by anything like a widely recognized, hip or broadly distributed label (Blackest Ever Black) — his small-batch cassettes and intensively curated vinyl output have gotten progressively stranger, more in-bent and localized. See for instance Mount Moriah Tocsin (2019), most of which was recorded by night in a West Philly graveyard. The resulting songs and compositions have been challenging, sometimes pleasurable, oftentimes forbiddingly obscure. And they’re always worth listening to closely.

Looking at the track list of People Skills’ latest release, Repeat Performance, you could be forgiven for anticipating a change of trajectory, or at least a more genial set of sounds: among other titles, you’ll see “Standing Outside a Broken Phonebooth with Money in My Hand,” “Pets,” “Semi-charmed Life.” It’s a covers record — or (ahem) tape. The cassette turns out to be a well-chosen medium. Most of the songs on Repeat Performance originated in the early 1990s, when mall stores like The Wall and Sam Goody still sold lots and lots of music, and the CD hadn’t yet rendered the cassette a largely obsolete commodity form. A few of the songs share that period but occupy aesthetic spaces decidedly far-flung from People Skills’ weirdo tape-manipulated fringe: Massive Attack’s “Hymn of the Big Wheel,” the Cranberries’ “Linger.” Still, you may start to think you’ve got a bead on what Dewlow’s up to. Downbeat, distorted renditions of songs that circulated briefly through a specific moment of the American consciousness, just within the horizon of the living culture’s memory. Bands like Third Eye Blind and Porno for Pyros. Then you’ll notice that he has also included “White Rabbit” and a song by Pearls Before Swine. Say what?

To be sure, much of Repeat Performance is downbeat and distorted. As ever, Dewlow’s sweet baritone is heavily reverbed and seemingly suspended under a layer of slowly congealing warm milk. A melodic but dolefully strummed guitar is a frequent presence, which threatens to draw the cassette toward stylistic consistency. But the song list is characteristic of People Skills: mysteriously supernal and a little queasy, sliding into the irrationality of dreams. There’s the sense that the configuration and order are deeply meaningful to Dewlow, but for the rest of the world, they’re like hieroglyphs: clearly a language, but one that very, very few people can read. As also happens when looking at hieroglyphs, you’ll want to spend some time pondering the performances in spite of their inscrutability. The resulting pleasures can be potent. The versions of “Translucent Carriages” (the Pearls Before Swine song) and of Beck’s “Cyanide Breathmint” are as interesting as they are enjoyable, veering from bummer beauty to mordant mirth. You won’t know quite what to do with Repeat Performance, save to play it again. And again. Sounds like a People Skills record."

- Jonathan Shaw ( dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/673291169159151616/people-skills-repeat-performance-cost-of )

"My first instinct when scanning the tracklisting of this covers tape from shop favourites People Skills was that we were being trolled - it opens with Semi-Charmed Life and closes with Linger. This is dismal London 2022, not an Alpha Epsilon irony party... And yet and yet, i must park my skepticism at the door, because it's clear from a few tracks in this is a wholly worthwhile and possibly sincere(-ish) affair, the kind of slo-mo, lo-fi pop deconstructivism Jesse Sinclair Dewlow seems especially adept at. The 90s AM radio bookends disguise some very affecting and lovingly rendered takes on Linda Smith, Pearls Before Swine and Kevin Ayers, which remind me a fair bit of the submerged noise pop of Flying Saucer Attack, while the take on Massive Attack's Hymn for the Big Wheel feels quietly apocalyptic, trip hop reimagined through the lens of 90s underground US cassette culture. We're fond of our pisstaking around here no doubt, but to couch it in such wonky charm? Well, my friend, you've hit the jackpot. Edition of 100 and a whole lot more fun. Smile, won't you goddamnit? "

- World of Echo ( worldofechomusic.com/collections/recommended/products/people-skills-repeat-performance-377 )

license

tags

If you like People Skills, you may also like: