Put Your Pants Back On: Stones Throw's Resident Recluse, James Pants Re-emerges with "Artificial Lover" (Savage)
"I just emailed [Peanut Butter Wolf]: "Would you like to go record shopping?" And I couldn't believe it, but he wrote back and said: "Sure." So, his show [in Austin] happened to be the night of my prom, so I took my date to his show, her name was Cindy Huckabee. I took her to the show and I met Wolf and was still wearing my tux and we just kind of hung out for the next few days," James Pants lamented to Red Bull Music Academy concerning his first chance meeting with Stones Throw label-head, Peanut Butter Wolf. Pants' debut album, Welcome (2008), which garnered famous fans such as Tyler, The Creator, Gary Wilson, and Mayer Hawthorne, more or less helped spearhead what I'd loosely refer to as Stones Throw's post-Jaylib "outsider artists" movement. James Pants' first album in four years, Savage, was reportedly "inspired by Martin Denny flourishes, royalty-free breakbeats, Gary Wilson, and Hamburg's infamous Golden Pudel Club" and was solely recorded using MIDI and Yamaha Porta-sound PSS-480 equipment and compiled as an indirect homage to The Residents' Commercial Album; "a 14-track record made of sonic vignettes that sounds as good on a stereo set-up in the Amazonian jungle as it does coming through laptop speakers" (as I'm assuming Savage sounds, in comparison).
Along with the album's press release announcement, Stones Throw additionally "leaked" Savage track "Artificial Lover," which sounds vaguely reminiscent of Pants' "Left-field, Abstract, Electro, Disco"-classified debut, Welcome. While compiling nearly 100 tracks for possible inclusion on the album over the past four years, James Pants has become something of a home-grown web-master, in his own right... sporadically uploading his unfinished creations onto rds.zone; "Instead of laboring months over one song, I like to move quickly onto the next," Pants simply explained. Ahead of Savage's forthcoming April 14-15th release, Stones Throw recently uploaded a 6-track "best of" James Pants collection to their Soundcloud page, conveniently compiling a mini-playlist culled from Rhythm Trax Vol. 1, Seven Seals, New Tropical EP, James Pants, and now, Savage. Roughly nine months ago, James Pants "paid a visit to the Red Light Radio studio for [the above] Converse Red Light Session and wowed everyone with his performance of the excellent new track "Artificial Lover," which at the time, wasn't attached to any sort of formal album release.