Since forming in 1996, Martyn Leaper and the Minders have morphed from Elephant 6 darlings to twee-pop anarchists, throwing love bombs and denouncing nothing. Most non-fans remember the Minders’ auspicious 1998 debut, Hooray For Tuesday, and its unfairly derided follow-up, 2001’s Golden Street, but the band was active until 2006’s slight-but-lovely It’s A Bright Guilty World. The Minders’ only interim release has been the second web-only iteration of their odds-and-sods Cul-De-Sacs And Dead Ends. In the gap, Leaper wrote and demoed new songs when he could crowbar it into his 40-hour work week. Along with renowned producer Larry Crane (Elliott Smith, Sleater-Kinney), Leaper began finding the thread of Into The River, the first actual Minders studio work in a decade. Leaper will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Minders feature.
Leaper: Seeing the petrified remains of fallen trees from the Triassic period is a little like looking at dead stars that shine in the evening sky. The 225 million-year-old remains of a prehistoric forest lay scattered about the colorful painted dessert of the Navajo and Apache counties. If you are travelling across the United States, and you find yourself on I-40, by all means pull over and take a few hours to visit this park. Vistas of sediment-lined buttes and plateaus go on for miles. The sedimentary rock layers of limestone, claystone and mudstone make up colored bands of violet to red-orange with burnt sienna and ash in between. While taking in the spectacular views, it is hard to fathom how this part of Arizona used to be situated near the equator on the southwestern edge of Pangaea, the super continent of the Triassic period. Seeing once living objects from the distant past laying on the desert floor looks and feels better than any religion.
