PRAIRIE CARTEL - EP 1 (CLEAR VINYL EP)

The Prairie Cartel EP 1 on Clear Vinyl! 

The Prairie Cartel began in Chicago when some ex-musician friends began DJing. After spinning a few house parties they started to make their own tracks to fill in some gaps in their DJ sets. These songs soon were getting requested and gave the guys the idea of hooking up a mic and performing the vocals live over the backing tracks here and there during their sets. The band soon deeply missed the instruments they had callously abandoned in the previous months. However, this brief experiment on the underground DJ circuit gave them a taste for nontraditional venues. The local press called the Prairie Cartel “a crazy electro ruckus,” a “hedonistic roughed up take on disco,” “sizzling,” and a “three-headed electro-rock beast.” Eventually the Prairie Cartel were fortunate enough to open for the likes of The Klaxons, The Presets and Simian Mobile Disco. Around the same time the phone rang; it was the makers of Grand Theft Auto IV asking if they would like to be in the game on the same radio station as LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture and The Black Keys. They didn’t have a label, or any music available for sale for that matter, so they said yes. They would have said yes anyway.

Their first releases—a pair of EPs simply titled EP 1 and EP 2 were surprisingly well recorded in the band’s basement studio. They have one foot in the grimy parties and warehouses of their conception and the other in something else entirely. Spread over two pieces of clear vinyl, these EPs have been described as “an unholy mix of Modular and Wax Trax.” From the Giorgio Moroder meets Modern Lovers groove of “Cracktown” to the WTF freak out of “Fuck Yeah That Wide,” this record captures the anarchy and spirit of a midwestern band giddy to warp their electronics with the necks of their guitars.

The Prairie Cartel EP 1 Track Listing

A Side:
1. Fuck Yeah, That Wide
2. Keep Everybody Warm

B Side:
1. Homicide
2. Keep Everybody Warm (Acid Jacks Rejack)