Parasol Records : Labels : Mud : The Beauty Shop : Yr Money Or Yr Life

The Beauty Shop - Yr Money Or Yr Life

Artist: The Beauty Shop Title: Yr Money Or Yr Life Catalog#: Mud-CD-044 Price: OUT OF PRINT	Tracks on this CD:
	Death March
	Lies
	Denver
	I Got Issues
	To Keep You
	Dutch Courage
	Yr Money Or Yr Life
	Bloody Nose
	Shell Game
	Caramel Apple
	Art Project
	803 W Nevada
	Science Lights

Some bands put a picture of themselves on the cover. Some bands try to best express their visual image through the CD booklet art. The mannequin flashing gang symbols on the front of The Beauty Shop's debut CD Yr Money or Yr Life, and the accompanying faux horror show photos and fonts, give no indication of the trio behind the music. But maybe it is a window to the soul of The Beauty Shop's songwriter John Hoeffleur. The lyrics to "I Got Issues" have me believing:

I made a mountain out of coke/That I sniffed up my nose
I wrote fuck on all clothes/That's the life I chose

and

I open my big mouth/And let my hatred out
Just to see you pout/Girl that's what I'm about

My first taste of the Champaign-Urbana based The Beauty Shop was the band's self-released (y'know, burned 100 at home, then more, then more) Grief EP. The cover art was so disturbing I almost couldn't bring myself to play the CD. While the little man on my shoulder whispered "don't judge a book, blah blah blah" I held out for a few more days. When the local buzz got loud enough to drown out those aggravating voices I finally put in the CD and…well, it was quite good. And listening again it was great. It kind of reminded me of Johnny Dowd's first album. Stark, dark tales of death, or so they both sounded like to me. I forgot about "the cover" and at the urging of Parasol's headmaster Geoff, went to see them live. He was right. They were great. And, how to describe great? The singer, and de facto bandleader, John Hoeffleur, has some kind of charisma. It's the look in his eyes. The look of a guy who designed "the cover."

John picks up The Beauty Shop story in his own words: "The Beauty Shop is kind of a weird band. I mean, I'm a weirdo for sure, and it's weird that a regular guy like (drummer) Casey is in a band with me, because he's real nice and I'm mean, and he's vegan and my diet is beef, exclusively. It's an odd match. Casey can build Robots, I'm a wizard with cardboard. I built a few dogs to pick up girls with and a ten-foot tall piece of toast and two bong costumes for Halloween. And then you look at (bassist) Ariane, who's from Indiana (!), is a girl, is Filipino, is 4'11 I think, and we're all playing country-rock music or whatever it is. I use a beat up acoustic, Casey's got like two drums, and we're playing kind of sedate music, and that was something really new to some people or something. The Grief EP was recorded at a time of pretty dismal morale for various personal reasons, but one factor was certainly the slow death of Casey's cat, who during recording lost control of one front leg. We just watched this poor cat kind of limply slide its front limb across the hardwood floor."

Whew! Yr Money Or Yr Life contains tracks from the Grief EP, plus newly recorded material. The Beauty Shop has been compared to Leonard Cohen and Uncle Tupelo, and cites Chris Whitley and the Gun Club as influences. I stand behind the Johnny Dowd comparisons and love the ghost tales, the drinking tales, the death tales, all of them. "Death March" can be sampled on Parasol's Sweet Sixteen, Volume 2.

A message from John Hoeffleur:

Hello everybody, my name is John and I play guitar and sing and write the songs for my band, The Beauty Shop. We're a quiet little band from Urbana IL. Mud just put out our record, Yr Money or Yr Life, and hooked us up with all sorts of exposure we never even dreamed of. Our focus is on writing good songs that are a little more, shall we say, "handcrafted" than most popular music. For the most part, our sound fits in with this new alt-country whatever thing you may have heard about, maybe a little darker than most. But I should also add that lots of people that despise country music enjoy our record, too. Anyway, we're tying to keep it real, not a lot of stunts and garbage, I just want the band to sound good live and get the songs to feel right. We recorded everything ourselves and put out an EP called "Grief" about a year or so ago, which makes up about half of our new CD. A lot of people told us they like our record, and they really seem sincere, so if you have a chance you might want to check it out somehow. And if you can help us out getting a show someplace, than please let us know. Hell, we just like to hear from people, so please write us at mailto:thebeautyshop@hotmail.com or check our website at http://www.the-beautyshop.com

Thanks for your time and take care.

Sincerely,
John Hoeffleur

"[The Beauty Shop] deliver world weariness on an epic scale." -NME

"There are moments of tear stained beauty, but you can never relax enough to appreciate the lonliness that's mainlined to your heart because this is an astonishingly disturbing record, the kind of thing which gives drowning in Bourbon a good name." - Careless Talk Costs Lives

"Fuckin' excellent." -Time Out

“Cognitive dissonance is the order of the day on this intriguing melange of sweetness and dark, the first full-length from a trio with roots planted in the heartland - but not the bucolic stretch favored by most Americana-mongers. Devoutly minimalist and unsparingly brooding, the Illinois-based band can conjure up images of the Tindersticks (in the cryptic elegance of arrangements like the one that swaths the menacing ‘Death March’) or the Gun Club (thanks to ominous tales like the self-destructive ‘I Got Issues’). The mortar holding it all together oozes from the voicebox of frontman John Hoeffleur, whose sepulchral tones - imagine Leonard Cohen with a deeply ingrained Midwestern drawl - belie his youth, and lend undeniable heft to the dank, drug-sodden imagery that permeates the remarkably addictive disc. Still, by the time the last notes of ‘Science Lights’ ebb away, you can't help but feel like these wouldn't be bad folks to have over on a winter's night - provided the sharp objects were all squirreled away..” -RollingStone.com

“...a first-rate, sloppy acoustic album crawling with thoroughly morbid, mordant tunes about death, drugs, stalkers, tough times and bad love... Fans of straightforward acoustic-guitar pop will enjoy this album's bittersweet countryish ballads ‘Denver,’ ‘Shell Game,’ ‘Lies’ and ‘Bloody Nose,’ which owe as much to certain Williamses (i.e., Hank Sr. and Lucinda), the Reivers, the Violent Femmes and the Victor Krummenacher Band as they do to Leonard Cohen or ‘the blues.’ The slightly more up-tempo numbers - the title track and a nifty fuck-you anthem called ‘I Got Issues’ - rattle on in an engaging way, proving once again that you don't need Marshall stacks to whip up a frenzy. The real charmers, though, are the deceptively titled ‘Art Project’ and the exquisite closer, ‘Science Light’; these dry-eyed weepers have a stark, open-hearted intimacy that recalls Bruce Springsteen's pristine, pathos-laden Nebraska...” -Time Out New York

“...What makes them worth hearing is John Hoeffleur's voice, a gravelly baritone bringing to mind the likes of Merle Haggard or Johnny Cash; he translates the spirit of those old country singers into the language of shiftless twentysomething slackerdom, sneering and drawling his way through simple acoustic-guitar-based songs about lying, stealing, drinking, haunted houses, freezing to death, wandering the earth as a ghost, and generally being an unrepentant asshole. Perfect for late-night sour moods when you realize the only person worth hating is yourself.” -Monosyllabic

“...the whole indie-label country scene can also be a rather conservative one, filled with ultra-revisionist bands whose concept of country music has everything to do with the surface level things like what clothes you wear and which instruments you play. But for every theme-park-style re-enactment of the past (BR5-49, Beachwood Sparks, etc.), there’s a group with their own sound, one which takes the building blocks of country music and builds on them with their own perspective, groups like Marah, My Morning Jacket and The Beauty Shop.” -Pop Matters

"A dirty needle of delicious despondence shot through with rough, down-beat country. One hit will floor you for days. Overdose and you may slip into the Beauty Shop's murky world for good" - Slant

"Enchanting...one of the genre's most inspiring collectives" - Teletext

"Sparse, poignant and sincere" - Classic Rock

"This could make you believe you are listening to country rock's answer to Leonard Cohen" - Rock Sound

"Prowling through the darkest shadows of Americana, songwriter John Hoeffleur drawls his lyrics of bitterness, jealousy and downright orneriness over a battered acoustic and loping rhythm section...a solid debut." - Mail On Sunday

"With each of these tracks The Beauty Shop have hidden a piece of us." - www.bbc.co.uk

"Blessed with a natural sense of timing and harmony...satisfyingly downbeat but melodic" - www.americana.co.uk