D.C. indie-poppers Unrest, as far as I'm concerned, made two unimpeachable classics in the early 1990s. The first, 1992's Imperial f.f.r.r., got a lush reissue in 2009 via the band's label, Teenbeat. Doing justice to the other one, 1993's Perfect Teeth, is a bit more complicated: The original Teenbeat release was an awesomely over-the-top collection of six 7-inches.
Good [...]

I don't remember as much about Teenbeat Records as some dudes might, but I definitely was in college in 1992, and I do remember student reports like this one about Greg Allen of Sexual Milkshake:

Indie rock was still super-weird at that point (relative to everything else), but mainstream college journalists generally covered it straight-up, because [...]

TeenBeat Records had its big reunion do at the Black Cat on Saturday. (Before the show, BYT interviewed the label’s founder, Mark Robinson, Deborah Solomon-style.) Aaron Leitko was at the gig, as was J.L. Fischer, and pretty much every other D.C. music geek. The verdict? Leitko’s review for WaPo was tepid. Fischer said it [...]

Teenbeat Records has been based in Cambridge, Mass., for some time, but the Arlington-formed label is essential to D.C. musical DNA. Over the past 26 years, the label has documented a rich supply of scrappy, lo-fi pop. It's a large body of work, but like any good label, Teenbeat numbers its releases obsessively—it also also [...]

Good morning! Seems like it's de rigueur these days to begin a roundup with some musing on the weather, but I'm an indoor kid.
David Quammen's patrons aren't, though, and that's the problem: The subject of my colleague Amanda Hess' column this week runs the MOCA DC gallery in Georgetown and is facing eviction—partially because a performer, [...]

There need not be any foppish scuffles between Unrest purists this summer—three eras of the influential D.C. pop-underground band will perform in East Coast cities as part of Teenbeat Records' 26th anniversary shows this summer. There'll be the latter-day trio of label head Mark Robinson, Phil Krauth, and Bridget Cross, which in the early and [...]

"The Orange Line Revolution," Aaron Leitko's December 2009 story about punk houses in Arlington, has been selected for inclusion in Best Music Writing 2010. The piece takes a look at Kansas House, as well as some group homes associated with local indie labels and movements, such as Dischord, Simple Machines, and Positive Force. As Leitko [...]

In his cover story for this week's Music in Review issue, Aaron Leitko notes the shuttering of the DIY venue Kansas House, and laments that an era of punk and indie-rock houses located in Arlington has finally ended. He writes:
DIY record labels like Teenbeat, Dischord, and Simple Machines, as well as activist groups like Positive [...]

Over the last 15 years, Kansas House, a tiny four-bedroom home in Arlington, has seen members of bands that recorded for almost every D.C. record label—Dischord, Teenbeat, Slowdime, Simple Machines—crash on its floors, perform in its living room, or be thoroughly revolted by its rat-infested basement.
Kansas House is not a club. Shows happen there once [...]

Teenbeat has announced that, for the first time since ’92, the label has re-pressed Unrest's Imperial f.f.r.r. as a vinyl LP. It's a nice gesture for those of us who missed it the first time (myself included). There are a few critics out there who imply that Imperial f.f.r.r. was the band's breakthrough—the moment when [...]