Welcome to Daily Records.

We've cleaned up the shop and reduced unwanted clutter,  launching The Underlings debut, Operational Excellence....available now at CD World, Feinstein's Museum of Unfine Art, and House of Records in Eugene!  Also available at CD Baby and HERE.

The Underlings have followed up with a new 7" on Meth Bog Records.  It is a doozy, on kooky purple vinyl.

Dan Jones and the Squids have a live platter in the can--Live Joy '09.  Dave Snider played bass, Mike Last played drums, and it was a rocking night at Sam Bond's Garage last fall. 

Dan is working on a record with a new band, The Golden Motors.  TGM is Dan, Dan Schmid (bass) and Jivan Valpey (drums).  Produced by Jason Robbins at Big Timbre in Eugene.  Dan is also cutting a split e.p. with Peter Wilde and his band (Lew Longmire, Adam East, Jivan Valpey) at Type Foundry in early '09.

from The Eugene Register Guard's Ticket
by Serena Markstrom

The Underlings Operational Excellence

...I had to wonder at how many CD release parties for his friends’ bands I would have to see Underlings frontman Ed Cole attend before his group held its own.

The band has been around since 2006. Its debut on Dan Jones’ Daily Records label, “Operational Excellence,” lives up to the noun in its name with tight punk-pop songs from a working class point of view.

My one criticism of this solid project is that the songs are almost too perfect for their gritty content. That you can hear every word sung and bass line strummed makes it hard to swallow that these guys work at factories and such and not in professional studios.

This, from a news release, might explain it a little:

“After more than a decade on the Eugene scene in bands like Billy Jack, Activator, the Naysayers and White Hot Odyssey, Cole wanted a tight, aggressive three-piece, playing minimal, in-your-face arrangements inspired by the bands he grew up with: X, the Wipers, Dead Moon, the Meat Puppets and Mission of Burma.”

     Being crisp and high quality doesn’t bother me, but in the genre, a little roughness can be good. The quality makes sense if you look at the liner notes, which list a who’s who in local production. “Operational Excellence” was recorded at Big Timbre Studio by Jason Robbins (the Comforters), mixed at Gung Ho by Billy Barnett (Mood Area 52) and put out by Daily Records.

The Eugene Weekly
6.18.09

Standard Operational Procedure
The Underlings
By Vanessa Salvia

Someday, when everything in the world is right, Ed Cole’s pop will be the world standard. It’s not that what he’s doing is incredibly new; it isn’t. It’s that it replicates the glory of ’80s punk icons such as Minutemen and Hüsker Dü and combines it with brainy honesty, strength of character and energy derived from copious amounts of coffee and repeated listenings to the best pop and rock that the world of music has to offer.

And after a couple of decades of songwriting practice with numerous bands, he’s gotten pretty good at it. For three years now, Cole’s band The Underlings have crafted songs that thrive on riffs that evoke Television or the Stooges without sounding reductively retro. Cole’s songs often tell stories, like “Born in a Boxcar,” about a man born in 1903, “living a life that was brutal yet free.” The trio — Cole on vocals and guitar, Dave Peterson on vocals and bass, and Bryant Grace on drums — released a CD, Operational Excellence, on local songwriter Dan Jones' Daily Records in the fall of 2008. Next month, the Underlings will record three new tunes for a 7-inch, to be released on Eureka, Calif., label Meth Bog Records in September, followed by a short West Coast tour.

Make Way For The Underlings
The Eugene Weekly
1.10.05

When you advertise for a bassist and drummer influenced by “Television, Minutemen and Ted Nugent,” as guitarist Ed Cole did, the resulting music is bound to be an infectious mixture of ragged rhythms, guitar riffage and punk brevity. But while those respective bands deconstructed jazz, rock and funk and replaced it with white-hot desperation, The Underlings create charming pop gems out of the same material.

With Cole on guitar and vocals and a rhythm section of Dave Peterson (bass, vocals) and Bryant Grace (drums), the Underlings have just released a 7-inch — three songs on beautiful purple marbled vinyl — on Meth Bog Records, out of Eureka, Calif. The release was originally planned for October but, as Cole says, “things always tend to take longer than you think to come together.”

There’s a timeless quality to some of their songs, a stick-with-you-like-glue magic in the combination of melody and vocals, whether it be a track with a raw, straight-ahead garage rawk vibe (“Second Best”) or “Vice Squad,” which Cole says is “a tribute of sorts to the hazy, alcohol-driven days of my late 20s/early 30s.” Cole’s songs have always been inspired by personal experience, so it’s not a surprise that fatherhood informs a song or two. Cole describes “Black and White” as “a song about a T-shirt design as viewed by an infant who has no perception of color.” Musically however, it’s an itchy riff that recalls punk’s earliest days, as do most of their songs, in the best way imaginable. The Underlings, Dan Jones and Yoyodyne play at 10 pm Saturday, Jan. 16, at Luckey’s. 21+. $5. — Vanessa Salvia