MKE Music Rewind: Farms In Trouble, “Like A Needle In Heaven” (2008)

In MKE Music Rewind we revisit notable Milwaukee music that was released before Milwaukee Record became a thing in April 2014. This week: Farms In Trouble’s “Like A Needle In Heaven.”

On April 9, Milwaukee band The Trusty Knife will drop by Bay View’s venerable Cactus Club and open for Ed Schrader’s Music Beat. We previously highlighted The Trusty Knife in a 2021 MKE Music Rewind article, soon after Dusty Medical Records reissued the group’s fantastic self-titled 2008 album. We said:

The Trusty Knife existed in that weird pre-streaming, pre-Bandcamp, pre-Soundcloud era of DIY music. Burnt CDs were the order of the day, sold mostly at shows and prone to eventual misplacement and deterioration. The Trusty Knife’s self-titled debut was released in this format in 2008; aside from a small run of 7-inch records for single “Natural Habitat,” that was it. The mists of time took over from there.

Fast-forward to 2020, when Dusty Medical Records plucked the album from near-obscurity, treated it to a Justin Perkins remastering, put it on modern streaming services, and reissued it on a vinyl LP. “Timeless pop music from one of the great overlooked bands of 2000s-era American Indie Rock,” reads the Dusty Medical description, which is spot-on.

But that wasn’t the only soon-to-be-kinda-sorta-lost music Trusty Knife head honcho Zack Pieper released in that era. Far from it. In 2008, Pieper teamed up with fellow Milwaukee musician Riles Walsh (The Candliers) to form Farms In Trouble. More of a home recording project than a live act, the group nonetheless featured contributions from a host of top-shelf musicians in the Trusty Knife/Candliers orbit: Anton Sieger, Emily Morrow, Brock Gourlie, Annie Killelea, Aaron Skufca, and more.

Farms In Trouble made themselves known with a sprawling 27-track debut called The Gas Station Soundtrack, released in 2008 on the DIY Activities label. Highly indebted to the low/mid-fi tinkerings of classic Guided By Voices, the record is an embarrassment of riches. In fact, we used one of those riches, “Empty Arrows & Exit Signs,” as the theme song to our old LiveSCREAM Theater show:

The Gas Station Soundtrack is stuffed with songs like that: incredible indie-rock earworms that somehow feel both effortless and meticulously crafted. For proof, feast your ears on another standout track, “Like A Needle In Heaven.” It’s a near-perfect song bursting with jangling guitars, punctuating horns, left-field lyrics (“I pulled up my jalopy on the sitcom set / They made about a billion on the internet”), and a grasp of melody that stands alone both then and now. Actually, scratch that: it’s a perfect song.

Farms In Trouble followed The Gas Station Soundtrack with a number of additional releases, including the equally sprawling Warp & Woof in 2012. (Hilariously, the ever-prolific Guided By Voices released an album called Warp And Woof seven years later, in 2019.) All of those releases—and much, much more—can be found on the Activities Archive.

In a 2016 article about the Activities Archive, we said it was “a treasure trove of out-of-print, unreleased, forgotten, and/or aborted projects from Milwaukee’s recent music past.” That barely scratches the surface of how wonderful the site is. If you have a few minutes—or, better yet, a few hours–poke around and find your own perfect songs. Hell, here’s another one:

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RELATED ARTICLES

• MKE Music Rewind: The Trusty Knife

• Activities Archive unearths lost treasures from Milwaukee’s recent music past