Australian heartland rock/alt-country-leaning punks Amends have shared a new single off “Tales of Love, Loss and Outlaws”, and this one finds the band harmonizing and duetting with Against Me vocalist Laura Jane Grace, whose voice is perfect for a song like this,
Starting in the mid 2010s as an emo-rock revival outfit, Amends have expanded to incorporate a sound more focused on alt-country, heartland rock and folk-punk. Building their style across EP’s and their debut album ‘So Far From Home’, led them to support acts such as Lucero, The Menzingers and Luca Brasi. The strong development of the band’s style and sound is evident in their new record, ‘Tales Of Love, Loss and Outlaws’.
Joining in on the record are Murder By Death Cellist Sarah Baillet and Against Me! leader Laura Jane Grace. The former contributes strings on the ballad “I Gave My Heart Away A Long Time Ago,” while the latter duets on “Walking Backwards.”
‘Tales of Love, Loss, and Outlaws’ demonstrates and solidifies Amends status as one of Australian music’s most unique and endearing prospects.
Taken from our album “Tales of Love, Loss and Outlaws” Out on the 23rd of April via Resist Records.
Remastered version of the debut Palace EP. The blues is one of the most distinctive, instantly recognisable forms of music around. Yet this can often make it difficult to musicians to truly impact their own personality, their own beliefs over its legacy. Slowing down the tempo to a codeine funk, London newcomers and latest buzz band Palace have their own defiant take on the blues. Stumbling as if caught in syrup, the group have a spectral, sparse sound. It’s darkly beautiful, with twilight seeming to break through every note.
‘Lost In The Night’ Is Palace’s debut EP originally released In 2014. Now on Lewis Recordings The vinyl has been remastered and the CD comes as a gatefold. Whilst not a blues band in the traditional sense their blend of blues space rock is undeniably british with bluesy and soulful vintage overtones. Leo’s sublime voice perfectly complements the dreamy ambient electric guitars creating a timeless sound, drawing comparisons to early Kings Of Leon, Foals and past greats like Buffalo Springfield.
Now Signed To Fiction Records The band released two albums both critically and commercially acclaimed. Bassist William Dorey left Palace after their first album and now records under the name Skinshape. “It’s darkly beautiful, With Twilight Seeming To Break Through Every Note.”.
“It’s A Romance-Bloomed Introduction Of The Highest Order.” DIY. “Londoners Palace Riff On Local Natives And Grizzly Bear’s Spacious, Swooning Sound.
The blues structure is in there – from the deft triples on the drums to the slide guitar solo – but the group utilise this to craft something new, something strange and unerring. Think a mix of Buffalo Springfield and Come.
Wand moved further away from the garage-psych beginnings on 2019’s great Laughing Matter, and now frontman Cory Hanson takes his songcraft in subtle, but no less awe-filled directions on his second solo album. Inspired by country music and the classics (Neil Young, Bob Dylan, David Berman), “Pale Horse Rider” is an absolutely gorgeous record that is heavy with sadness while still floating off into space. Things get only a little twangy, but pedal steel plays a huge part in the album’s sound, creating an otherworldly, angelic yearning that is felt even without paying attention to the lyrics. An atmospheric swirl surrounds Hanson’s simple but affecting folk/country melodies, and it’s big, lonely and beautiful.
Made just before the pandemic, at a desert home studio surrounded by six-foot tall sculptural psychotropic cacti, “Pale Horse Rider” is an impressionist look at the state of our nation. Hanson is using water colours, not a fine-point pen, letting its intent seep in via osmosis, but it’s not that obtuse either. On the elegiac chorus of the album’s best song, “Angeles,” Hanson sings about his hometown — “I’ve been driving through darkness / Through the smoke and fire / On the ground / Risin’ like a phoenix or a bird of paradise” — as the harmonies and pedal steel rise like that phoenix.
Pale Horse Rider is full of sublime musical moments like that: the ethereal chorus of voices on “Limited Hangout”; the ragged solo that rips up the pretty “Another Story From The Center of The Earth”; and that weepy pedal steel that tugs at your heartstrings on “Vegas Knights” as Cory mixes gambling metaphors with thoughts of loss. “Can I turn back the turnstile? And parachute us back to the paradise we left.” Hanson dedicates the album to David Berman and, while Cory’s style is nothing like Silver Jews‘, you can feel his ghost all over the record. On “Birds of Paradise,” another album highlight, he sings, “I’ll find you in the end alive in the mirror / Your eyes painted on with dots / Yet hold me in your heart,’ as his delicate guitar arpeggiations intertwine with the pedal steel into the cosmos. The words are moving but it’s that musical lift that really gets you.
Wand frontman Cory Hanson releases a new album Pale Horse Rider, via Drag City Records. Myths and truths of a country on the way down, viewed through a deep-focus lens trained on the city from the deserts on the east; a terminus of unoccupied residential parks and streets fading into craggy footpaths to nowhere, where our passage is seen as diligent, ephemeral and grotesque by turns, forgiven and made beautiful again by the sound.
“Pale Horse Rider,” to be released on LP/Cassette/CD/Streaming on March 12th, 2021, from Drag City Records.
Cold Moon the jangly indie rock band with members of pop punk bands The Story So Far and Set Your Goals — have shared another song off their upcoming Jack Shirley-recorded debut LP “What’s The Rush?” (due 5/7 via Pure Noise). It’s closer to Real Estate or Turnover than to the members’ more famous bands, and they do this kind of thing very well.
By mid-2018, the Northern California-based quartet—vocalist/guitarist Jack Sullivan, bassist Will Levy, guitarist Kevin Ambrose and drummer Mike Ambrose—were deep into the writing of their debut EP, “Rising”: a collection of instrumental indie-rock songs that culled influences from legendary emo acts including American Football and icons like Wilco, as well as more analytical post-rock impulses.
Musically, the songs Cold Moon wrote were miles removed from where the band came from (Levy plays guitar in pop-punk stalwarts The Story So Far, while Mike Ambrose was a long time member of the hardcore-tinged Set Your Goals), but they still carried the same intrinsic urgency and emotional resonance that coloured their other projects.
After demoing Rising and preparing to hit the studio to track the final versions, the childhood friends soon stumbled upon the power of Sullivan’s voice, as well as the influence singing could have on their song writing. It immediately changed everything for the band, who began using vocal parts not to define their music, but rather drive it—adding yet more melodic textures to their songs
“I don’t know if it was the right approach to song writing,” Sullivan says with a laugh, “but it felt good. It was like a nice coat of finish on a completed piece of art.”
As such, Rising (released May 10th via Pure Noise Records) is the sound of band painstakingly placing every instrument and note, both played and sung, alongside one another to build intricate, at-times dense and mathy soundscapes. This attention to detail gives Rising’s six songs—from the hypnotic, ominous riffs of “Stevie” to the acoustic-based pitter-patter of “Green Eyes” and cascading guitar movements on the set-closing “Lessons” a cinematic quality, while the tracked-to-tape nature of the EP imbues the songs with breaths of authenticity and humanity a digital process would have sorely lacked.
Throughout its songs, Rising tackles themes of change and vulnerability, looking out into the vast expanse of the unknown and mustering up the courage to face it head-on. In many ways, it mirrors the approach the band took while writing it: Life’s big moments—and, perhaps more often, the small ones, too—disrupt our comfortable state of equilibrium and force us to examine who we are and what we really want
Ultimately, it’s only by fearlessly following them that we’re able to arrive at our final form. Chasing that inspiration is what brought Cold Moon together, and it’s what changed the band’s direction forever during the making of Rising. It’s steeled them both personally and professionally, and they’ll carry this forward-thinking mindset with them throughout the course of their career.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen when we got in a room together, but it was a real safe, comfortable space,” Sullivan says. “It was a positive atmosphere for all of us, where we weren’t worried about making mistakes. We just let the music happen.”
Come on a journey of kaleidoscopic and sinister whimsy with the new album from Australia’s Dom & The Wizards. Catchily titled The Australian Cyclone Intensity Scale, we have album opener Cellophane Aeroplane for your listening pleasure. Following from the frantic slur of the Ana’s Little City 7″ and the paranoid mysticism of the vinyl-only release ‘The Ongoing Adventures’ LP, comes Dom & the Wizards’ latest inter dimensional translation – The Australian Cyclone Intensity Scale. Band leader Dom Trimboli, of renowned Adelaide / Kaurna Country based group Wireheads, takes the listener on a staggered journey through tales of sinister whimsy, as though playing to an audience of sedated accountants, standing hand in hand humming nonchalantly as the world burns around them. The Wizards retreat from the world of increased chaos and the mathematicians that attempt to bring it to order, to unearth the simple pleasures of colourful, irreverent narrative. Trimboli takes us back to a world of fanciful tales, mystical heroes and kaleidoscopic exaggerations.
On The Australian Cyclone Intensity Scale, the Wizards’ playbook takes iconic form, becoming a clearer patchwork quilt of myth, literature, theology and anecdote, resembling a psychedelic late-night Wikipedia hole. Yearning for the times of the high renaissance, the molasses like glue of the album urges its listener to park their cars and write love letters to their neighbours they have never spoken to. Recorded in the grape vine dressed Adelaide Hills on Peramangk country at Milestone Studios by engineer Tom Spall.
“Cellophane Aeroplane” from Dom & The Wizards · Domenic Trimboli “The Australian Cyclone Intensity Scale” Tenth Court Records
As amazing as Low’s last album — 2018’s more electronic-oriented Double Negative — is, quarantine-induced dreariness has had me in the mood for the more bare bones sound Low had in the ’90s, which sent me back to this ACTV session from 1996. That’s the year they released their EP with their inventive cover of Joy Division’s “Transmission,” and they played that here, alongside a nice selection of originals from the era. Even with Low as established as they are now, it’s incredible to see how emotionally devastating they sound with such a small, stripped-back setup.
The sheer amount of talent needed to make music like this is insane. This is the epitome of “less is more”. Low are subtle on a level that other bands can only dream of.
Lord Huron have shared the title track (and third single) off their upcoming album “Long Lost”, and this one finds them combining their trademark indie folk with sweeping, string-laden, vintage balladry. Lord Huron announced the new album, Long Lost, and so far, the group has shared a pair of songs from it: the driving single “Not Dead Yet” and the breezy “Mine Forever.” Now they’re back with another preview of the album (which is set for release on May 21st), the title track.
“Lonesome Dreams is the album from rising pop experimentalists Lord Huron, led by Michigan-born songwriting prodigy Ben Schneider. A joyous collision of Appalachian percussion, rustic guitars and sumptuous harmonies lit up by lens-flare flashes of electronics, it’s a record inspired by the rust coloured canyons and characters of the Wild West, with the emphasis on wild. Tales of the great American outback have always been an inspiration, according to Schneider. “Sometimes I feel like I’m living in one of those stories,” he confides. “I wanted to look at my life and lives close to me as though they were tales from some frontier novel.”
Los Angeles’s La Luz have released a new Numero Group 7″ single where they cover “Tale of My Lost Love” which was originally written and performed in 1966 by Female Species. The flip side features the original song and it’s out to promote the new Female Species compilation the label just released.
Our Los Angeles friends La Luz just cut this cover of “Tale Of My Lost Love,” originally written and performed in 1966 by Female Species. The surf and undertow-inspired La Luz are one of the best in the business right now—check their three albums on Hardly Art if you don’t know. Their compelling version of “Tale” is the first fresh take on a Female Species original in many a moon. We suspect it will not be the last.
Behold the Female Species! A once-in-a-decade discovery of two sisters, married to music for life, always charging forward, indefatigable, indomitable, at last seen and heard. From their origins as the archetypal mid-’60s southern California girl group to their destiny as top-flight songwriters in the ’80s and ’90s Nashville country-industrial complex, Vicki and Ronni Gossett have never been much further than 20 feet from stardom. Fifty-five years into their remarkable story,Tale Of My Lost Love was the Gossetts‘ debut album – an ode to what could have been, and still might be.
Tale Of My Lost Love (Cover) · La Luz released through Numero Group on: 2021-04-16
Tegan and Sara join Beach Bunny for a new version of the track “Cloud 9” from their 2020 debut “Honeymoon”. “We’re massive fans of Beach Bunny, and when we heard ‘Cloud 9’ for the first time fell in love with the brilliant lyrics and addictive melody,” the say. “We love that Lili was up to let us experiment with changing the pronoun in the chorus to she. The efforts made to make the song relatable to everyone, isn’t just about inclusivity, we think it’s a great indication of the flexibility and creative spirit of the band at its core!”. The new version of ‘Cloud 9’ not only features Tegan And Sara but has also been updated to include gender-neutral and feminine pronouns in its lyrics.
The original version of the track was released on Beach Bunny’s debut album ‘Honeymoon’ last year.
Cloud 9 (feat. Tegan and Sara) ℗ 2021 Mom+Pop Records Released on: 2021-04-16
“Life in this industry can be incredibly isolating and difficult,” Alanis writes. “Backline provides a safe, private, and immediate place to go for help. Available for free to artists, managers, agents, crew, producers, labels, and their families, Backline programs offer case management, support groups, and wellness programs to meet the needs of this unique community.” Her new ballad “I Miss The Band” benefits the organization, which provides mental health and wellness resources for the music industry.
Alanis Morissette is aching to play live music again. But, of course, she can’t do anything about it for now given the hellish pandemic. For the meantime, the Grammy-winning artist released a new single titled “I Miss The Band.” There’s a wistful quality to the piano-decked new song from the “Ironic” singer.
In it, Alanis romanticizes being on the road and travelling around the world with a band and playing music. She croons, “We’re on a plane, we’re in Japan / in baggage claim I ask, what city we just landed in / the paper slips under the hotel door / I’m shaking all hands as the hum-of-the-road keeps me happy.”
Yes, the song is about her yearning to play live again.
I am deeply yearning to play live music again….the sweat, the rapture, the movement, the love…i miss seeing your faces & being with my bandmates soon…we’ll be back together.
A sample of the song’s lyrics goes: ‘Inside joke, well understood / the nudge nudge wink wink and finishing each other’s harmonies / the late night drive through Italian roads / trains pulling out and we’re all in on the secret.”
Alanis’ lyrics are straightforward, singing “I miss the band,” and later admits “I am imploding without you / and there’s not a day that goes by / where I don’t hear our music in my head / where I don’t miss traveling in your company.”
Alanis was supposed to play in Manila back in April 2020 for the 20th anniversary of “Jagged Little Pill.” But as Covid-19 loomed and became a full-blown world pandemic and lockdowns became the norm, her concert at the Mall of Asia, which supposed to have been her first time back in Manila after her album “Jagged Little Pill” became a worldwide phenomenon back in the late 90’s, was cancelled along with every other show and concert around the planet.
“I Miss The Band” and ‘Such Pretty Forks in the Road,’ out now
The Fat Angel Sings 