BKO: Awesome City Limits (LP)

Free MP3 download & GTRNR Sticker

BKO’s (Bradman Kerner Overdrive) debut, Awesome City Limits, was recorded in a Holiday Inn hotel room in Missoula, Montana over several days in late November of 2004. The making of the album was an unforeseen creative high point in an otherwise bleak Fall of touring by Brad Swinairski and Joachim Kearns as supporting players in the Brooklyn-based indie rock outfit, The Natural History. The songs herein embody a self-proclaimed “long reflective wheeze” in the annals of American folk music. To quote Kearns, Awesome City Limits marks “an attempt at self-preservation in the face of the daily absurdity of traveling from state to state in search of ever elusive validation from an unimpressed public and bandmates alike.”

With little more than a couple of guitars and the inspired harmonies of true camaraderie, Awesome City Limits is a journey through the American landscape of the early aughts from a dirty van window on a road to nowhere. These are the musings of a life spent eating cold soup out of a can, playing hours of flip-phone bowling, stuffing pockets with gas station condiments, and cooking rice and beans in an electric frying pan in club parking lots. The tragic resignation heard in songs like “Another day, Another Dollar” and “Hard and Mean” is the result of too little money and too much time.

Long celebrated by a handful of devoted admirers who were lucky enough to get their hands on one of the original cdr's, this new vinyl edition promises to give Awesome City Limits a long overdue introduction to a new audience. Simply put, this overlooked gem of a record is food for the soul, or maybe better yet, our daily bread. As Swiniarki put it in his timeless lyric, “bread is meat when you have no cheese,” eighteen years later we can finally rejoice that it's chow time; bread, meat, and cheese.

Brad Swiniarski - Vocals, Guitar, Bass, Suitcase, Organ

Joachim Kearns - Vocals, Guitar

Recorded on cassette 4 track and digital 8 track. All songs written by Brad, except for, Young Life, and, A Good Run, written by Joachim