With only one week to go until Boy & Bear’s new album drops, the band has unveiled a new clip for title track “Suck On Light”. The new music video was captured on Super 8 film and takes fans behind the scenes of the sold-out Australian leg of the Hold Your Nerve Tour. After the most tumultuous period of their lives both personally and professionally, Boy & Bear are back with a triumphant new single, ‘Hold Your Nerve’, their first new music since 2015’s Gold-selling Limit of Love.
“The song is about hope,” frontman Dave Hosking said, after revealing in May he has been suffering from a debilitating illness since the release of Moonfire in 2011.
“The moment I personally started to feel like I was on the improve, the moment things started to look up. The choruses always felt like a celebration of life and I think that sentiment carries across the song as a whole.”
Band Members
Dave Hosking , Killian Gavin , Tim Hart , Jon Hart , Dave Symes
Big news from FMHQ: We’ve accidentally made a new album – it’s called “Making A New World” and it’ll be out for your delectation in January 2020. And…err…it’s pretty much a concept album about the aftermath of the First World War. Wait! Come back! It’s not THAT kind of concept album! Honestly!
The songs grew from a project for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The starting point was an image from a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, made using “sound ranging”, a technique that utilised an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918, and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of near-silence. “We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years,” says the band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath. If the original intention might have been to create a mostly instrumental piece, this research forced and inspired a different approach. These were stories itching to be told.
The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (“Coffee or Wine”). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, “A Change of Heir”), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. We see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of “A Shot To The Arm”). And then in the funk stomp of Money Is A Memory, we picture an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts – a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. A defining, blood-spattered element of 20th century history becomes a humdrum admi nistrative task in a 21st century bureaucracy.
We’ve done songs about ultrasound and about shooting yourself for the sake of art and about gender reassignment surgery and about Becontree housing estate. We’ve even done a party tune about sanitary pads, called Only In A Man’s World, which is now streaming in all of the usual places (huge thanks to Lauren Laverne and BBC 6 Music for giving it its first airing this morning.) If you want Only in a Man’s World with a side order of facts about the invention of sanitary towels head on over to our YouTube now.
Only In A Man’s World is taken from the new Field Music album “Making a New World”, to be released on 10th January 2020.
Making a New World can be pre-ordered on limited edition signed red transparent vinyl, CD, cassette and download from our shop along with the first ever FIELD MUSIC MUG (which you can dry with the Open Here tea towel). The usual discounted pre-order bundles are available; just look at these beauties:
Tourdates : 9 Nov – Dundee, Neon at Night 01 Feb – Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery 21 Feb – Nottingham, Rescue Rooms 22 Feb – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club 27 Feb – Whitley Bay, Playhouse 28 Feb – Manchester, Dancehouse 29 Feb – London, EartH
Alex Cameron’s newest and most musically expansive LP, the glistening “Miami Memory”, takes a surprising turn. Cameron’s flair for narrative and character are still on full display; yet Miami Memory’s most frequent narrator is, for the first time, Cameron himself—singing with stunning candor of his three-year relationship with his girlfriend.
“When you listen to these songs, and you’re waiting for the twist, or the joke, or any kind of discomfort, I can assure you none of those things were there when I wrote them,” says Cameron. “These are true stories, of actual events. Specific but never esoteric. And graphic but never offensive. Miami Memory is the story of a couple balancing sex with contemporary family values…It’s my gift to my girlfriend, a symbol to hoist on the totem of love.”
Though remnants of his synth-driven earlier work sneak in to unsettle the tone, the bulk of Miami Memory, produced by Jonathan Rado (Weyes Blood, Father John Misty) and recorded and mixed by Marta Salogni (Björk, Kelela), revels in the emotional overdrive of classic dad rock, its warm, anthemic songs driven by bass, guitar, sax, and layers of Vegas wedding chapel-ish organ.
Cameron’s dad rock funhouse of an album ultimately twists and subverts the genre: it recalls classics the white male ego has historically visited for its regular adrenaline injection, and morphs them into a singular “stepdad” rock that largely turns its lens away from the dads, celebrating the demise of old norms of gender and power. In his depiction of his relationship, Cameron reveals a striking honesty about love and sex in a time where a palpable fleetingness hangs over everything from relationships to human life on this planet—but also where constricting mores have deteriorated enough to let “family life,” in all its morphing forms, exist outside of social obligation. With arresting straightforwardness, Cameron now sings as himself, paying tribute to sex, female empowerment, family and responsibility, and, to his love.
’Stranger’s Kiss (Duet With Angel Olsen)’ from ‘Forced Witness’ out Sept 8th on Secretly Canadian
Kills Birds derive their name from the first verse on their album: “This flower / kills birds / When she dies / she rots like flesh.” It’s the whole album in a couplet — beauty, peril, mystery, anxiety — conveyed over throbbing, then exploding, post-punk/noise-rock primitivism.
The narrator is Nina Ljeti, a self-professed outsider, a filmmaker and a Bosnia-born Canadian whose parents fled Sarajevo as the city was on the precipice of war. She eventually matriculated to NYU to study drama and then to L.A. to further her film career. A few years ago, she befriended musician Jacob Loeb (of the band Golden Daze), and they intermittently began collaborating on music, at first with no serious intentions.
When the project did get more serious the band added bassist Fielder Thomas and drummer Bosh Rothman came on board — things did not immediately go smoothly. There was an ill-fated recording session, which fostered doubts. Then producer Justin Raisen, founder of KRO Records found them. “Kills Birds,” which comes out September. 20th, was recorded in virtually one eight-hour session.
The album is 26 minutes of exposed nerves. Ljeti’s speak-singing builds to primal caterwauls, then recedes again. The music’s paroxysms open a vein to her inner frustrations, even if they are only opaquely described in the lyrics. It’s visceral and physical music — as led by somebody who didn’t know punk rock until one fateful night after she watched “American Idol” (stay tuned for that story).
Charles Rumback and Ryley Walker are both known for their creativity and curious spirits. Rumback is a drummer in high demand in Chicago’s free-jazz circles, and a pillar of the second wave of improvisers in a scene first shaped by the legendary players like Sun Ra and the AACM. Walker draws deeply on other distinctly American styles, bringing a strong sense of folk tradition to his playing that is as arresting as his freewheeling performance style. Walker’s musical explorations are not limited to his own songwriting: the guitarist regularly collaborates in Chicago and now New York with innovators of every genre. Together, Rumback and Walker find common ground in their kinetic, intuitive playing and yearning creative outlook. “Little Common Twist”, their sophomore release as a duo, finds both players at their most adventurous. It compiles instrumental pieces that convey a striking range of emotions, at once introspective and expansive, with a delicate interplay that delights as they move with ease across a spectrum of styles. The recording has a pastoral quality that recalls Van Morrison’s classic album Veedon Fleece, and captures a remarkably dexterous performance by both Charles and Ryley that make this album so expansive and fresh.
Little Common Twist was recorded over several sessions throughout 2017 and 2018 with producer John Hughes, capturing the duo playing in the moment with minimal overdubs. The guitar and drums duo eschewed each instrument’s traditional roles of rhythm and melody, experimenting with texture and rhythm. Rumback and Walker remarkably paint in both broad, gestural strokes and intricate melodic details. “Half Joking” and “Self Blind Sun” are warm, deep songs that draw on structures from the American primitive guitar songbook. “Idiot Parade” leaps into more explorative territory, Rumback setting an urgent, rolling cymbal groove while Walker paints melodic sonic vapor trails across the sky. “Menehbi” experiments further with abstract forms, atomizing guitar and drums into an ambient haze where loose flourishes from Rumback hint at rhythm and structure, while a steady electronic pulse provides an anchor amidst the fog.
Little Common Twist is the culmination of a creative partnership that has seen Rumback and Walker constantly challenging each other. In stretching the bounds of their interplay even further than before, the duo created their most evocative and expansive work to date, conjuring the afterglow of sun-scorched landscapes and ethereal after-hours ambiance.
Close It Quietly takes the trademark Frankie Cosmos micro-universe and upends it, spilling outwards into a swirl of referentiality that’s a marked departure from earlier releases, imagining and reimagining motifs and sounds throughout the album. The band’s fourth studio release is a manifestation of their collaborative spirit: Greta Kline and longtime bandmates Lauren Martin (synth), Luke Pyenson (drums), and Alex Bailey (bass) luxuriated in studio time with Gabe Wax, who engineered and co-produced the record with the band. Recording close to home— at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Studios— grounded the band, and their process was enriched by working closely with Wax, whose intuition and attention to detail made the familiar unfamiliar and allowed the band to reshape their own contexts.
“41st” from Frankie Cosmos’ Close it Quietly (Release day: September 6th, 2019)
On opener Moonsea, an unaccompanied Greta begins, “The world is crumbling and I don’t have much to say.” Take that as a wink and a metonym for the whole album, as her signature vocals are joined by Alex’s ascending bassline and Lauren’s eddying synths, invoking a loungey take on Broadcast or Stereolab’s space-disco experimental pop. There’s much more than “not much” to say here, and it’s augmented and expanded by experimentation with synth patches, textures, and other recording nuances courtesy of Wax. As the lineup has solidified into the most permanent expression of full-band Frankie Cosmos, the bandmates have felt more comfortable deviating from their default instruments and contributing bigger-picture ideas to continue pushing the sound forward.
The band’s closeness and aesthetic consistency freed its members to take more risks, notes Luke: “Everything will sound like Frankie Cosmos because Greta has such a distinct voice (literally and figuratively). We have so much latitude to experiment with the instrumental music, and this time around we really took advantage of that.” Without losing any intimacy of prior albums, Close it Quietly is different, is outer. The album functions as a benign doppelganger, a shadow self of past releases; where other Frankie Cosmos records shine brightest looking inward, Close it Quietly refracts the self into the world, and vice versa, miraculously echoing Thoreau’s assertion that “when I reflect, I find that there is other than me.
Close it Quietly (Release day: September 6th, 2019)
Duran Duran would be proud of The Dantevilles. ‘Confessions’, following in the footsteps of their break through track ‘It Might Be Tomorrow’, has all the neon soaked sounds of the 80’s with the conviction and production of a modern classic.
They’ve been busy ‘Confessions’ spans close to 5 minutes long, a near life time when it comes to indie anthems. It’s an easy listening, colourful introduction to Jamie Gallagher’s mental journey to redemption.
A chorus full of apologetic lyrics and unashamed falsetto prove to be a sinfully good mix, like a hangover at Sunday Service. Dantevilles are desperate to see behind a deceitful love, and that plays directly to the second coming of the noise being made by Manchester (where the boys hail from). Gone are the days of moody songs about cigarettes – there’s a safe place for male fronted bands to talk about their feelings and ‘Confessions’ is a hymn sheet we can all sing from.
Dantevilles can be forgiven for being a little over-zealous with their backing vocals. To quote the single’s cover art: ‘Sin and risk go hand in hand for the human race to progress.’ The song teeters nervously on the line of sounding like just another synthy northern song, but fights off stereotypes based on it’s sheer likeability. If it’s better to seek forgiveness than permission, they needn’t have been so worried with such a heavenly outcome.
After two EP’s in 2018, Fuzzy Sun have been conquering the small corner of the world that houses indie-pop. The quintet’s latest single ‘I Ain’t Right’ is their first sign of new music this year, and it’s been worth the wait.
After only being together for a year, Fuzzy Sun’s achievements have been admirable. The band have bagged themselves the City Life award for the Best Breakthrough act, played as support on two tours with Blossoms and even held their very own headline tour in May. Now, Fuzzy Sun look to be expanding their accomplishments with more brand new music.
‘I Ain’t Right’ holds all of the standard Fuzzy Sun elements that made us fall in love with them last year. A driving bassline and groovy, sparkling synths create their classic disco-funk sound. Electric guitar licks can also be heard in all of the nooks and crannies, giving this song the energy to feel full of life. This makes the song joyous which is helped by the strong drumbeat with quirky fillers in all of the right places.
The upbeat, catchy chorus line ‘I’m just trying to love you’ is repeated throughout the whole song in a tuneful manner with striking harmonies running parallel. In fact, lead singer Kyle Ross’ vocals are particularly coherent in this track creating a well-gelled song. The strong chemistry between each separate component helps to pull the whole track together and give it Fuzzy Sun’s unique signature.
This limited edition and EXCLUSIVE bundle comes with a 14-track cassette featuring highlights from the box along with two additional unreleased tracks: the outtake “Asking Me Lies” and an instrumental of “I Won’t” (Bearsville Version). The cassette also features the original, unused cover art for Don’t Tell A Soul.
Back in 1987, Minneapolis rock and roll renegades The Replacements famously stole their Twin/Tone master tapes and threw them in the Mississippi River. A year later—while wrapping up work on their Warner Bros. album, Don’t Tell A Soul—the group absconded with a collection of their reels from Paisley Park studios. Thankfully, those tapes were spared a watery fate, and instead stashed away for decades by the band. Now they’ve been recovered to form the basis of The Replacements first-ever boxed set, Dead Man’s Pop.
Although Don’t Tell A Soul ultimately became the group’s best-selling effort, The Replacements were unsatisfied with the sound of the record. The band has radically reimagined Don’t Tell A Soul to create a 4CD/1LP set that features the album mixed as it was originally intended (Don’t Tell A Soul Redux), along with a collection of previously unheard tracks (We Know The Night: Rare & Unreleased), and a classic concert from 1989 (The Complete Inconcerated Live).
The box features a newly completed mix of the album by Don’t Tell A Soul producer Matt Wallace (based on his 1988 Paisley Park mix); a disc of unreleased recordings (including a session with Tom Waits); plus the band’s entire June 2nd, 1989 show at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In total, the box includes 60 tracks–58 of which have never been heard before.
Presented in a 12 x 12 hardcover book – loaded with dozens of rarely seen photos – the set features a detailed history of the Don’t Tell A Soul era written by Bob Mehr, who produced the box with Rhino’s Jason Jones, and also authored The New York Times bestseller Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements.
Mehr writes: “While it’s impossible to unhear a record that’s been around for three decades, this version, Don’t Tell A Soul Redux, is the album the band made and intended to release. In addition to Matt Wallace’s mix, Redux also restores several crucial elements from the sessions, including original drums tracks, vocal takes and tempos that were altered in post-production…[and] the band’s original sequence of the album.”
Wallace says: “The true spirit of The Replacements was always there on the recordings we did back in 1988, and now you can hear and feel it clearly…This was the project of a lifetime for me when we recorded it 30-plus years ago, and it’s even truer today as we’ve finally fulfilled our original vision.”
Paul Westerberg, Slim Dunlap, Tommy Stinson and Chris Mars started recording Don’t Tell A Soul in June 1988 with Tony Berg at Bearsville Studios, but the chaotic sessions were cut short and mothballed. Nine unreleased tracks from Bearsville appear on Dead Man’s Pop, including early versions of “I’ll Be You,” “Darlin’ One” and “Achin’ To Be” and the previously unheard “Last Thing in the World.” The collection also features tracks the band recorded with Tom Waits, five of which have never been officially released: among them, “Lowdown Monkey Blues,” “We Know The Night” and a cover of Billy Swan’s “I Can Help.”
The final two CDs of Dead Man’s Pop capture the band performing live in Milwaukee during the “Don’t Tell A Soul Tour.” A few songs from the concert originally appeared on the promo-only EP Inconcerated Live (1989), but the bulk of the 29 tracks included have never been released. The entire show has been newly mixed by Brian Kehew (Ramones, The Faces).
Additionally, Dead Man’s Pop will include Wallace’s Don’t Tell A Soul Redux mix on 180-gram vinyl.
As part of the ongoing celebration of their 50th anniversary, on September. 6th, the Allman Brothers Band Recording Company, caretakers of the original band’s unreleased catalog, in conjunction with distributor The Orchard will release a four-CD set titled Fillmore West ’71, culled from a weekend of live music recorded at the San Francisco venue. The band were the middle act playing between headliners Hot Tuna and the 24-piece opener Trinidad Tripoli Street Band.
This will be the debut release of these recordings. The packaging contains a front cover photo of Duane Allman from Jim Marshall Photography (taken at these shows) that has rarely been seen before.
From the press release announcing the collection: “Compiled from reel-to-reel soundboard masters, the January. 29th show that kicks off this collection reads like an Allman Brothers Band greatest hits, from opener ‘Statesboro Blues’ through the set-wrapping ‘Whipping Post.’ On the next night, the standard sequence of ‘Statesboro Blues,’ ‘Trouble No More,’ ‘Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’’ and ‘Elizabeth Reed’ was typically riveting, and then the blues-soaked ‘Stormy Monday’ was worked in, replacing ‘Midnight Rider.’ Gregg’s vocals were visceral and honest, while Duane and Dickey added down and dirty licks. ‘You Don’t Love Me’ showcased some run-and-gun guitar work, and a frenzied ‘Whipping Post’ closed out another solid night. The band—Duane Allman, Gregg Allman,Dickey Betts, Jaimoe, Berry Oakley and Butch Trucks—were loose and talkative and you can hear them really dialing their sound in at what would be a final tune-up for the seminal At Fillmore East album, recorded less than two months later. At Fillmore East would cement the band’s place in rock history.”
The announcement continues: “Always acclaimed for their explosive live shows, the ABB really ratcheted up the intensity and focus on January 31st. After hammering tightly through the reliable first four, the ABB placed ‘Midnight Rider’ back into the rotation, and then Berry Oakley stepped up to the mic for a wicked and nasty take on ‘Hoochie Coochie Man,’ with Jaimoe and Butch churning full-bore behind him. After an extensive workout on “You Don’t Love Me,” the group worked a relatively new song into the set, ‘Hot ‘Lanta.’ Conceived out of a loose jam at the Big House in Macon, GA, the band’s home base currently an ABB museum, this group composition was cutting-edge fusion, displaying the delightful musical diversity of the Allman Brothers Band. A superior ‘Whipping Post’ concludes the Fillmore West material, but Disc Four goes on to include a wonderful bonus track: a March, 1970 version of ‘Mountain Jam’ from the Warehouse in New Orleans which—at 45 minutes long!—showcases a band that loved to improvise and let the music take on a life of its own.”
Kirk West, who served as the “Tour Mystic” and official archivist for the Allman Brothers Band for over 20 years, played a pivotal role in re-acquiring the original live performance two-track, reel-to-reel tapes used for this release from legendary band crew members Twiggs Lyndon, Joe Dan Petty and Mike Callahan, who were the original caretakers of these recordings. The tapes had been stored in closets and attics for many years, necessitating careful transfers and several successive attempts at restoration, as technology continued to improve. Interestingly in 1971, however, Kirk was a 20-year-old counterculture entrepreneur who found himself at the Fillmore West during the last four days of January. “I was living in Palo Alto with a bunch of hippie kids who, by and large, were Dead Heads. I had moved to California from Chicago, and I already was a big Allman Brothers fan,” recalls West. “I was insisting that everyone in the house go up to the Fillmore that weekend—‘Let’s go, let’s go—the Brothers are in town, playing with Hot effin’ Tuna.”
The concerts took place roughly six weeks before the band performed the March 1971 concerts which became their famed At Fillmore East, considered one of the all time great live rock albums.
Well, I'm dyslexic so writing about something I love: Music, might help but it's most likely just full of mistakes. That title is also lyrics from The Drones song called I Don't Want To Change. Oh, my name is William and thanks for having a look.
