The Fat Angel Sings

Bruce Springsteen has announced details for his upcoming soul-covers album, “Only the Strong Survive”, and released the first single, an upbeat, joyous take on Frank Wilson’s “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do).”

The Ron Aniello-produced album will be released on November 11th. There will be two duets with Sam Moore (one of Springsteen’s biggest influences, as a member of Sam & Dave), on it.

According to a press release, the album features “contributions from The E Street Horns, full string arrangements by Rob Mathes, and backing vocals by Soozie Tyrell, Lisa Lowell, Michelle Moore, Curtis King Jr., Dennis Collins and Fonzi Thornton.”

Springsteen says in the press release, “I wanted to make an album where I just sang. And what better music to work with than the great American songbook of the Sixties and Seventies? I’ve taken my inspiration from Levi Stubbs, David Ruffin, Jimmy Ruffin, the Iceman Jerry Butler, Diana Ross, Dobie Gray, and Scott Walker, among many others. I’ve tried to do justice to them all — and to the fabulous writers of this glorious music. My goal is for the modern audience to experience its beauty and joy, just as I have since I first heard it. I hope you love listening to it as much as I loved making it.”

This is the album’s track listings, along with the song’s original artists:

“Only the Strong Survive,” Jerry Butler
“Soul Days (featuring Sam Moore),” Dobie Gray
“Nightshift,” The Commodores
“Do I Love You (Indeed I Do,)” Frank Wilson
“The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” The Walker Brothers
“Turn Back the Hands of Time,” Tyrone Davis
“When She Was My Girl,” The Four Tops
“Hey, Western Union Man,” Jerry Butler
“I Wish It Would Rain,” The Temptations
“Don’t Play That Song,” Aretha Franklin
“Any Other Way,” Jackie Shane
“I Forgot to Be Your Lover (featuring Sam Moore),” William Bell
“7 Rooms of Gloom,” The Four Tops
“What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” Jimmy Ruffin
“Someday We’ll Be Together,” Diana Ross & The Supremes

The album cover says “Vol. 1,” so presumably Springsteen plans to release at least one more album in this vein.

Atmos Bloom is the dreamy, gazey duo made up of Manchester-based musicians Curtis Paterson & Tilda Gratton. the project began as a means to escape from a lock-downed world… but later bloomed into something a little bit more special.

Through a desire to explore the indie duo’s shared love of dream pop and music they had written. Shortly after the band’s formation, Atmos Bloom’s debut and self-titled EP was released employing lo-fi recording techniques and offering a form of cathartic escapism during troubled times.

The band is heavily inspired by bands such as Beach Fossils, Castlebeat and Fazerdaze with their lo-fi recording techniques and soothing dream pop.

Offering a blissful lo-fi soundscape, Atmos Bloom is a perfect bedroom pop record to drift off to at night.

released July 15th, 2022

Parlophone Records proudly announces David Bowie “Divine Symmetry”, a four-CD, one blu-ray box set. This collection celebrates the twelve months running up to the release of the album “Hunky Dory” in December 1971 via home demos, BBC radio sessions and live and studio recordings.

“Divine Symmetry” contains 48 previously unreleased tracks/demos from the period, and new alternative mixes of “Hunky Dory” tracks by original co-producer Ken Scott.

As the title suggests, the set is an accompaniment to “Hunky Dory” in the same way that the Conversation Piece set was to “Space Oddity” and the The Width Of A Circle set was to “The Man Who Sold The World“.

Two books accompany “Divine Symmetry”, a 100-page hardback book featuring exclusive memorabilia and photos alongside a 60-page replica composite of Bowie’s notebooks from the era featuring handwritten lyrics, costume drawings, recording notes and set lists. The sleeve notes have been written for the release by Bowie expert Tris Penna, along with contributions from “Hunky Dory” co-producer Ken Scott, lifelong Bowie friends Geoff MacCormack and George Underwood, singer Dana Gillespie, guitarist Mark Pritchett, Friars Aylesbury promoter David Stopps, publisher Bob Grace and photographer Louanne Richards.

‘Kooks’, recorded by Bowie and guitarist Mick Ronson for the BBC’s Sounds Of The 70s presented by Bob Harris is available now for download and streaming single. It was recorded at Kensington House, Shepherds Bush, London, Studio T1 for BBC Radio on 21st September, 1971 and broadcast on 4th October, 1971. 1971 was a pivotal year for Bowie. He signed a record deal with RCA Records, he met Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop while in New York, became a father and penned the song ‘Kooks’ as a show of paternal pride, played live for the first time that June with Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey and Trevor Bolder, the band that would later be christened the Spiders From Mars and recorded the classic album “Hunky Dory”.

Teen Suicide have released their long-awaited new album, “honeybee table at the butterfly feast”, from Run For Cover Records. Having already drawn early attention from the likes of Stereogum, The FADER, BrooklynVegan, Paste Magazine, and more, the album offers some of the band’s most ambitious and varied work to date–even for a group who have always been known to keep listeners on their toes. Teen Suicide mastermind, Sam Ray, wrote the sixteen song opus while working through serious health issues and a very real sense of urgency permeates the album’s wide range of sounds and ideas.

What would an autumn playlist even be without at least one overly emo, slightly overwrought, yet astoundingly pretty acoustic guitar ballad?. The (in)appropriately named Teen Suicide managed to overcome their inconsiderate band name to create one of my favourite albums this year, and one of its many highlights finds singer Sam Ray pining for a lost love at precisely this time of year.

Recalling early Beach Boys ballads like “Your Summer Dream” and “Lonely Sea” he sings, “I fell in love with you the first time in spring/ So it’s only right we’re leaving now the leaves have changed.

Since forming Teen Suicide in 2009, Ray has led the project through endless sonic shifts and evolutions, always leaving listeners on their toes but completely along for the ride. From scrappy lo-fi punk to bombastic post-rock to ambient soundscapes, the most consistent thing about Teen Suicide–and its various permutations, like American Pleasure Club–is Ray’s intense creativity and the deeply compelling songwriting that results from it. “honeybee table at the butterfly feast” was written over the course of several years while Ray struggled with a mysterious respiratory illness, which made it very difficult to perform and record—and eventually led to a near death experience. Yet the album is still vibrant and wide-ranging with Ray’s artistic restlessness resulting in a genre-spanning journey that finds the songwriter beginning to unpack a new phase of life.

Teen Suicide has never been an easy project to pigeonhole, and that’s truer than ever on the mercurial “honeybee table“, as Ray embraces his and all of our everyday battles to find fulfillment, as well as an expansive sonic palette, with wide-open arms.” – Paste Magazine

“get high, breathe underwater (#3)” by Teen Suicide, from the upcoming album ‘honeybee table at the butterfly feast’ out August 26th, 2022 via Run For Cover Records

It could only be called alchemy, the transformative magic that happens during the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ most tuned-in moments in the studio, when their unique chemistry sparks opens a portal, and out comes a song like “Maps” or “Zero” or the latest addition to their canon, “Spitting Off The Edge Of The World ft. Perfume Genius, an epic shot-to-the- heart of pure YYYs beauty and power. A thunderstorm of a return is what the legendary trio has in store for us on “Cool It Down”, their fifth studio album and their first since 2013’s “Mosquito”. The eight-track collection, bound to be a landmark in their catalogue, is an expert distillation of their best gifts that impels you to move, and cry, and listen closely.

“To all who have waited, our dear fans, thank you, our fever to tell has returned, and writing these songs came with its fair share of chills, tears, and euphoria when the pain lifts and truth is revealed. Don’t have to tell you how much we’ve been going through in the last nine years since our last record, because you’ve been going through it too, and we love you and we see you, and we hope you feel the feels from the music we’ve made. No shying away from the feels, or backing down from what’s been gripping all of us these days. So yes we’ve taken our time, happy to report when it’s ready it really does just flow out,” says Karen O.”

Yeah Yeah Yeahs played two shows in the United Kingdom this summer. Playing the O2 Apollo in Manchester, England, on June 5th, At the O2 Academy Brixton in London on June 7th, with support from Dry Cleaning and Anika are also on the bill. Karen O and co. have promised to play new songs at the shows.

Whatever happened to Yeah Yeah Yeahs? While their peers in groups like The Strokes and Interpol have remained active since their early-’00s come-up, artists such as The Walkmen and The Moldy Peaches officially called it quits (more or less), and LCD Soundsystem has, uh, done both (to say nothing of the front people from this scene who have quietly pivoted to acting careers), there’s been little word on the YYYs front since returning to the festival stage in 2017 with a vague “watch this space” message circulating with news of those shows. 

Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ statement reads: OK UK! We are coming to lend our light to dark ages and holy shit are we ready to play our hearts out for you!! Yeah it’s been 9 years since we’ve graced your club stages! Yeah we’ve got some tunes so fresh and so new to try out on you! Yeah the bill is so MAJOR with Dry Cleaning and Anika in London and English Teacher in Manchester. Dress up! Make a night of it! Support your fave band that you may have seen debut at Brixton back in ’02!! Yeah let’s not wait another decade to see each other again! CANNOT WAIT! They don’t love ya like we do!! Luv YYYs

“Yeah we’ve got some tunes so fresh and so NEW to try out on you!” Alongside some festival sets this summer, including Primavera Sound, the dates mark the band’s live return for their first shows since 2019. 

“The Will To Live” was produced by Titus Andronicus singer-songwriter Patrick Stickles and Canadian icon Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Leonard Cohen) at the latter’s Hotel 2 Tango studio in Montreal. Drawing on maximalist rock epics from “Who’s Next” to “Hysteria”, Bilerman and Stickles have crafted the richest, densest, and hardest hitting sound for Titus Andronicus yet. All at once, the record matches the sprawl and scope of the band’s most celebrated work, while also honing their ambitious attack to greater effect than ever before.

“It may strike some as ironic we had to go to Canada to record our equivalent to “Born in the USA,” quips Stickles, “but the pursuit of Ultimate Rock knows no borders.” For his recent stretch of personal stability, he credits a newfound domestic bliss and steadfast mental health regimen (“Lamictal is a hell of a drug”) as well as the endurance of what has become the longest-running consistent line-up of Titus Andronicus, Liam Betson on guitar, R.J. Gordon on bass, and Chris Wilson on drums.

On the crueller side of the coin, however, “The Will To Live” was created in large part as an attempt to process the untimely 2021 death of Matt “Money” Miller, the founding keyboardist of the band and Stickles’ closest cousin. Stickles explains: “The passing of my dearest friend forced me to recognize not only the precious and fragile nature of life, but also the interconnectivity of all life. Loved ones we have lost are really not lost at all, as they, and we still living, are all component pieces of a far larger continuous organism, which both precedes and succeeds our illusory individual selves, united through time by (you guessed it) the will to live.

When Titus Andronicus made their long-awaited return to the stage in 2021, it was to celebrate the anniversary of their landmark breakthrough “The Monitor”, and the act of playing that material before an ecstatic audience left the band determined to deliver an album that would reach for those same lofty heights, relying this time less on the reckless fire of youth and more on the experience and perspective at which a band only arrives with a thousand shows under their belt. Through this golden ratio, Titus Andronicus have arrived at the peak of their creative powers. From its adrenalizing opening instrumental “My Mother Is Going to Kill Me” to its wistful closing benediction “69 Stones,”

“The Will to Live” conjures a vast landscape and sends the listener on a rocket ride from peak to vertiginous peak. Rock fans will find themselves a feast, whether they crave barn-burning rock anthems such as “(I’m) Screwed” and “All Through the Night,” rapid-fire lyrical gymnastics “Baby Crazy”, symphonic punk throwdowns “Dead Meat”, or an adventurous excursion into the darkness that delivers thrills as it breezes boldly past the seven-minute mark, “An Anomaly.”

As if that wasn’t enough gas for the tank, “The Will to Live” features sterling contributions from members of the Hold Steady, Arcade Fire, and the E Street Band, as well as duets with the aforementioned Betson, former Titus Andronicus drummer Eric Harm, and Josée Caron of the Canadian rock band Partner.

The album comes packaged with gorgeous triple-gatefold artwork by illustrious illustrator Nicole Rifkin, a Hieronymus Bosch–inspired triptych which mirrors the three-part structure of the narrator’s perilous voyage across the corresponding three sides of vinyl.

All together, this esteemed ensemble, with Stickles and Bilerman determined and defiant at the helm, have found “The Will to Live“—now, the question is… will you?

The forthcoming seventh studio album by Titus Andronicus, ‘The Will to Live,’ available September 30th from Merge Records.

The iconic Pixies forged an influential path for alt-rock during their first era, while their post 2004 reunion has seen them alchemize more sophisticated dark arts — a return which has them add another three U.K. Top 10 albums to the three they achieved on their first run. Now as fired up as ever before, Pixies will release their eighth studio album “Doggerel”, a mature yet visceral record of gruesome folk, ballroom pop and brutal rock, haunted by the ghosts of affairs and indulgences, driven wild by cosmic forces and envisioning digital afterlives where no God has provided one.

And all the while, right there on the news, another distant storm approaches. Guitarist Joey Santiago says, “This time around we have grown. We no longer have under two-minute songs. We have little breaks, more conventional arrangements but still our twists in there.”

Singer-guitarist Black Francis adds, “We’re trying to do things that are very big and bold and orchestrated. The punky stuff, I really like playing it but you just cannot artificially create that shit. There’s another way to do this, there’s other things we can do with this extra special energy that we’re encountering.”

the new album “Doggerel”, out on September 30th.

“The Blues Don’t Lie” is the amazing new album from Buddy Guy, and is the legend’s 34th studio album, and the follow up to 2018’s Grammy-winning album “The Blues Is Alive and Well”. Produced by songwriter/drummer Tom Hambridge, “The Blues Don’t Lie” features guest stars including Mavis Staples, Elvis Costello, James Taylor, Jason Isbell and more. The album will be released exactly 65 years to the day that Guy arrived in Chicago on a train from Baton Rouge in September of 1957, with just the clothes on his back an his guitar.

His life would never be the same, and he was born again in the blues. “The Blues Don’t Lie” tells the story of his lifelong journey. Reflecting on this body of work, Buddy says ‘I promised them all  B.B., Muddy, Sonny Boy — as long as I’m alive I’m going to keep the blues alive.’ He has indeed proven that again.

‘The Blues Don’t Lie’ is available everywhere September 30th.

Following the announcement about the September 30th release date of Rory Gallagher’s “Deuce” 50th Anniversary Edition Deluxe Boxset of his critically acclaimed 1971 sophomore album, two rare tracks will be available to stream from Friday August 19th. These include the never-before-released “Crest Of A Wave” (Alt. Take 2) and “Used To Be (50th Anniversary Edition).

Released in November 1971, just six months after his eponymous solo debut, Rory Gallagher’s second album “Deuce” was the summation of all that he’d promised in the wake of Taste’s collapse. Rory wanted to capture the feeling of a live performance, so he would look to record immediately after live concerts while keeping production to a minimum. He chose Tangerine Studios, a small reggae studio in East London, due to its history with legendary producer Joe Meek. With Gerry McAvoy on bass guitar and Wilgar Campbell on drums, the album was engineered by Robin Sylvester and produced by Rory. “Deuce” features many Rory highlights, from the blistering “Crest Of A Wave” to the Celtic-infused I’m Not Awake Yet.

The extensive celebratory release digs deep into the Rory Gallagher Archives and will include a new mix of the original album, twenty-eight previously unreleased alternate takes, a six-song 1972 BBC Radio ‘In Concert’, and seven Radio Bremen radio session tracks. The package will contain a 64-page hardback book with a foreword by Johnny Marr of The Smiths, unseen images by the late photographer Mick Rock, essays, and memorabilia from the album recording.

“There was one day when I was playing along with the “Deuce” album which was a complete turning point for me as a guitar player.” – Johnny Marr 

Released in November 1971, just six months after his eponymous solo debut, Rory Gallagher’s second album, “Deuce“, was the summation of all that he’d promised in the wake of Taste’s collapse. Rory wanted to capture the feeling of a live performance, so he would look to record immediately after live concerts while keeping production to a minimum.

He chose Tangerine Studios, a small reggae studio, in Dalston in East London, due it’s history with legendary producer Joe Meek. With Gerry McAvoy on bass guitar and Wilgar Campbell on drums, the album was engineered by Robin Sylvester and produced by Rory. “Deuce” features many Rory highlights, from the blistering “Crest Of A Wave” to the Celtic-infused “I’m Not Awake Yet“.

“There are a million guys who sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, but I never
heard anybody who could really pull off sounding like Rory Gallagher.” – Slash

” As soon as I heard “Cradle Rock”, I was hooked.
I thought, ‘This is what I want to be when I grow up.” – Joe Bonamassa

“I really liked Rory, he was fine guitarist and singer and lovely man.” – Jimmy Page

“He was just a magician, he’s one of the very few people of that time who could make his guitar do anything it seemed. It just seemed to be magic. I remember looking at that battered Stratocaster and thinking how does that come out of there?” – Brian May

“The man who changed my musical life was Rory Gallagher,
I picked up a guitar because of him.” – Johnny Marr

“A beautiful man and an amazing guitar player. He was
a very sensitive man and a great musician.” – The Edge

“An amazing player, very spirited… he had a particular sound using
that Stratocaster and he really got it because of the brute force in
the way that he played, he just had such a passion about it.” – Joe Satriani

The 2CD and 3LP will be cut down versions from the deluxe box and there will be a special D2C 1LP of the “BBC In Concert – Live at The Paris Theatre, 13 January 1972.”

The album “While Across a Crowded Room” isn’t considered among his best works, songs like the tension filled “When the Spell is Broken,” the spellbinding ballad “Love in a Faithless Country” and the harder-rocking “Fire in the Engine Room” are important to anyone’s Richard Thompson collection. He was still reeling from a contentious divorce from Linda Thompson at the time as titles of those songs and others such as “She Twists the Knife Again” make it clear. Of course Thompson isn’t known for cushy love songs, but this is yet another example of how his witty, incisive wordplay, stunning guitar work and knack for catchy melodies makes even the edgiest lyrics often sing-along worthy.

Thompson always has enormously gifted backing musicians, but this band, which includes the singing/guitar playing duo of Christine Collister and Clive Gregson (they also had a clutch of excellent albums together) along with the great Gerry Conway on drums was one of his finest. Collister’s vocals in particular are beautiful and pointed as they substitute for Linda Thompson on reprises of tunes recorded with his ex-wife and revisited here. Gregson is a wonderful second guitarist even if “Summer Rain,” his solo moment, slows down the set’s momentum as does Collister’s eight minute impressive but snoozy “Warm Love Gone Cold.” Thompson guitar is searing throughout, whipping off his typically inventive guitar on six-string showcases like “Shoot Out the Lights,” “Wall of Death” and especially a spectacular, nearly nine minute, concert closing, pre-encore “Tear Stained Letter.” He ramps up the drama on “For Shame of Doing Wrong” with wonderful harmonies from Gregson and Collister, the dark, yearning ballad “How I Wanted To” and a riveting “Love in a Faithless Country,” the latter performance alone is worth the price of admission.

As a teaser for Thompson fans, the final tune “Skull and Cross Bones” (an obscure rockabilly cover originally by Sparkle Moore) with a typically insane guitar solo, never appeared on any Thompson studio album. With its “you’re a jinx to my soul” lyrics, it seems like another kiss-off to his ex-wife.

Even with a few too many ballads, this is not only a long awaited expanded title to Thompson’s huge catalogue, but an essential addition to any fan’s collection and a reasonable place to start for anyone unfamiliar with his now-legendary talents.