Shop Regulars’ Matt Radosevich, Master Of Hypnotic Guitar Skronk, On His Band’s Mesmerizing Debut LP

I ran out of plays. Bandcamp wouldn’t let me listen to Shop Regulars’ self-titled debut LP anymore without buying it, and the album isn’t available to stream on the usual DSPs. Fortunately for cheapskates, there’s a band-approved YouTube upload of the whole inspired half-hour, but Shop Regulars is $7 well spent, especially if you’re acquainted with the joys of repetition. I’m not sure I’ve listened to anything more since I first encountered the album a month or two after its June release.

Matt Radosevich was still playing in his revved-up Portland rock band Honey Bucket in 2018 when he launched Shop Regulars as a recording project on the side. He had musical ideas that he did not want to subject to Honey Bucket’s collaborative dynamic — or, as he explained in a recent video chat, “I just wanted another project that I kind of fuck around and do stupid stuff without having to be embarrassed to show it to other people and kind of just do my thing.” When Honey Bucket came to an end in 2019, the solo gig became his main focus.

Shop Regulars took the raw, bashed-out, rhythmically charged qualities of Radosevich’s former band to a radical new extent. Inspired by artists like Can, the Fall, and Bo Diddley, Radosevich developed a simple, effective formula: Build a jagged, noisy guitar groove that pierces through the silence with attention-grabbing force, then repeat it endlessly, with occasional dynamic adjustments, sometimes narrated by droning vocal melodies or post-punk talk-singing. The results are slightly more song-oriented than, say, the droning post-rock soundscapes of Water Damage or your favorite hip-hop beat tape, but they have a similarly hypnotic effect.

“I’m not like much of a songwriter in the way that a Brian Wilson or someone like that is, and I found that out pretty early on,” Radosevich says. But his raw, unstable loops are as much a world-building exercise as Smile, a sonic environment to completely lose yourself in. For Shop Regulars, one repeated guitar chord can become both a rhythm instrument and a form of wordless incantation. “In Honey Bucket there was definitely a lot of one-chord type songs, especially as the band went on, and I think it was more just shedding the shit that I’m not good at and trying to focus on stuff that is more natural to me.”

Though Shop Regulars dropped their first LP this year, Radosevich has been building an impressive library of EP-length cassette releases on Bandcamp throughout the past half-decade or so. He’s done it with a range of collaborators who seem increasingly aligned with his vision. Drummer Patrick Barrett has been a mainstay since early on, but Shop Regulars have often featured a rotating cast of bandmates, especially early on when the band was rarely playing out. Including Radosevich, nine musicians are featured on the new LP.

Radosevich generates most of the ideas for Shop Regulars tracks on his own at first. Once he works up the riffs and fragments to the point he can share them with his collaborators, he turns his friends loose to improvise within his stated parameters. “I write most of the stuff, but also there’s a big element of whoever is playing with me,” he says. “Their instinct is in there too.” The approach lends a full-band dynamic to the skronking, clattering Shop Regulars sound, and it allows for further mutations when the band plays live.

Aside from closing track “I’m Going To Greece,” a studio experiment that hasn’t yet been performed onstage, the songs on the LP are largely ones that first appeared on a Shop Regulars tape but have transformed in the concert setting, the ones that became “different enough to justify releasing them again in like a new context.” For a while, Radosevich was a self-described “purist,” waiting to make a proper LP until he felt like the world was demanding it. But as Shop Regulars became a formidable live unit, he realized, “Oh, this is like a real band. Maybe we should make a real record.”

About those live shows: Right now they’re mostly confined to Portland, though Shop Regulars recently played Olympia and are heading out on a short California tour this month. Radosevich, a Michigan native who moved to the Pacific Northwest for a short-lived stint at Olympia’s famed Evergreen State College, would like to get the band to the Midwest and beyond, but it’s an expensive undertaking that doesn’t necessarily square with the homespun scale of Shop Regulars right now.

Shop Regulars is, after all, a limited-run LP unavailable to stream outside Bandcamp and YouTube. They don’t even have a band photo. Even in a year when Cindy Lee proved an album released outside the walled garden of Spotify can become an underground sensation, the prospect of expanding the band’s footprint is daunting and maybe even runs counter to the nature of the project and its architect. Radosevich does not own a smartphone and does not use a streaming service — “It’s just not really my world” — but he did not keep his album off DSPs as some kind of ideological statement.

“I wouldn’t say it’s like actively a philosophical thing,” he explains. “If pressed, I guess I would say fuck Spotify. But I mostly just don’t know how to put something on Spotify and don’t care enough to really find out.”