A modern classic with a timeless sound! Filled with hooks and great lyrics the result is a 17 track beast of superb song-writing!, The shopping malls have closed down, the dressing rooms are filled with ghosts, and the carousel is covered in cobwebs. “Nobody Lives Here Anymore”, the latest and greatest from Max Clarke as Cut Worms, is the haunted reverie of an American landscape in-and-out of Clarke’s mind. Recorded between May and November 2019 in Memphis, Tennessee, the album is a snow globe of the mid-twentieth-century’s popular music filled with chiming guitars, honky-tonk pianos, and Telstar organs.
A constant creator – be it his Cut Worms alter-ego or his day-job illustration work (designing brand logos and beer labels with madhouse technicolour pictures) – writing and making records has always been Max’s driving force. So after an extensive eighteen-months of touring in support of 2017’s Alien Sunset and 2018’s Hollow Ground, he set about sifting through the fragment pieces and sketches of tunes he’d accumulated, along with a jet-stream of new compositions, mining his life-long devotion to the lost American songbook for inspiration. By the time he flew to Memphis to work with producer Matt Ross-Spang at Sam Phillips Studio, he’d stockpiled more than thirty new songs.
A loss of innocence lingers through this 80-minute opus as Clarke attempts to harbour love and meaning inside a world that sold itself out. He explores the wistfulness of the past in search of answers for tomorrow. And while his grand anthems overflow with timeless pop charm, his ability to dig deeper than lollipops and holding hands sets his work apart from the days of 45s and Top of the Pops.
Neil Young isn’t releasing his 10-disc collection Archives Volume 2: 1972-1976 until November 22nd, but paid subscribers of The Neil Young Archives website now have access to the previously unreleased song “Come Along and Say You Will.” The tune was recorded at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch on December 15th, 1972 with drummer Kenny Buttrey, bassist Tim Drummond, and pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith.
Young’s group of musicians were known as The Stray Gators, and also played with on the faultless Harvest in 1972 and the Time Fades Away record from 1973.
‘Come Along and Say You Will’ begins with the pounding lyric “come along and say you will / be the one to change the meaning / of the writing on the wall.” Young later goes on to sing, “I’ll never understand / why walk around a sinner / with a nail through your hand.”
They were weeks away from launching an extensive North American tour where Young would debut several new songs that ultimately wound up on the 1973 live album “Time Fades Away”. “Come Along and Say You Will” didn’t make the cut for Time Fades Away, but it was played at least 11 times during the first month of the tour and live tapes have circulated for years. Nobody has ever heard the studio version prior to this. It’s one of many unheard songs that will appear on Archives Volume 2.
The package begins with material the Stray Gators cut in late 1972 and continues through the Time Fades Away tour, the Tonight’s the Night sessions and tour, the On theBeach and Zuma sessions, and songs he wrote for the Stills-Young Band LP before wrapping up with his 1976 world tour with Crazy Horse.
On November 6th, Young is releasing the live album and movie “Return to Greendale”. Also in the pipeline is a 50th-anniversary edition of After the Gold Rush, official bootlegs taped during a 1970 show at Carnegie Hall and a 1974 gig at the Bottom Line, a 1990 Crazy Horse club gig he’s calling Way Down in the Rust Bucket, and a 2019 European show with Crazy Horse he’s dubbed Noise and Flowers.
Exact dates for most of these releases have yet to be announced, but he hopes they will come at some point in 2021. Young hasn’t played to a live audience since Farm Aid on September 21st, 2019. Earlier this year, he announced plans to bring Crazy Horse to North American arenas. The pandemic forced him to indefinitely delay those plans and he’s largely been holed up at the Colorado home he shares with wife and actress Daryl Hannah. She’s filmed a series of Fireside Sessions acoustic shows on her iPad that show Young playing a series of tunes from throughout his career. The last one was released on July 1st and focused on political songs. It was later released as an EP titled The Times.
After swapping hemispheres, Australian outfit Death Bells have found a new home in Los Angeles, emerging with a new album of fervent guitar-driven rock, stripped of gloom and punching through with a new sense of positivity. “New Signs of Life”, their debut for Dais Records, finds Death Bells using a DIY pedigree to plunder the conventions of “rock music” with a saxophone along for the mission. Rather than leaping genres or formats, New Signs of Life is refined and nuanced—a methodology built on process, craft, and perspective.
Following their 2017 debut, Standing at the Edge of the World, and follow-up single “Echoes,” Death Bells left their hometown of Sydney for the United States. Energized by impulse, extensive touring and exploration led to the formation of an ambitious six-piece band that eventually coalesced as a collaboration between founding members Will Canning and Remy Veselis. With Canning and Veselis becoming the engine, Death Bells began to employ several underground mainstay musicians to complete their live presentation, including Cortland Gibson (Dock Hellis), Colin Knight (Object of Affection), and on occasion Brian Vega (Fearing).
Revitalized and centered, Death Bells released the single “Around the Bend” in 2019, before workshopping material that would eventually comprise their second full-length effort. As much as Standing at the Edge of the World was an energized disclosure informed by fresh naiveté, New Signs of Life harnesses those initial sparks, cloaking the threads of Death Bells with authority, allowing each of the nine tracks which embody New Signs of Life to become lush streamlined vehicles.
The eponymous lead single is a grandiose statement, influenced by the theme song of HBO’s classic television program Six Feet Under. The lyrics are a shopping list of personal neuroses charged with wry optimism, dressed with jagged guitars, brass, and percussion providing a deliberate pace for Death Bell’s new chapter. As method gives way to melody, New Signs of Life exudes an urgent hope laced with drive and verve.
The first track for New Signs of Life, “Heavenly Bodies,” signals Death Bells’ point-blank delivery of a laconic truth: “We all vanish, anyway.” Sombre and cool, it eases into hushed staccato hypnosis while still finding the tenets of guitar-driven rock. ”A Different Kind of Happy” and “Alison” push the edge of convention, speaking to the power of love in a world gone mad. A nod to their homeland and new city’s surf heritage, “Shot Down (Falling)” pivots playful to a sun-soaked beach strum, layered with shimmer before the horizon fades. As a new statement of purpose, New Signs of Life subverts the band’s moniker, offering breath during suffocation; optimism in chaos with sound over sinking.
It seemed as though there was something in the Blue Mountains water. And that Cloud Control had sole keep over its supply, judging from the magical wanderlust emanating from their debut Bliss Release. ‘Meditation Song #2’ prepares you for adventure with its soft drone and acoustic guitar which give way to the intertwining of Alister Wright and Heidi Lenffer’s voices, who gently insist, ‘make my head a pool of water now’.
The water theme continues with ‘There’s Nothing in the Water We Can’t Fight.’ Wright was inspired to write the song after a trip to India. “Yeah, I went there over Christmas” in 2010. “I was in a hotel room looking out over this alleyway and there was like a funeral procession. “They’re all just walking down the street, banging their chests and screaming out. It was such a passionate kind of celebration of someone. “I just thought it was really cool. And the lyrics aren’t really literal. Like, I’m not describing something, but I just tried to put that kind of feeling into the performance.”
There’s an eerieness playfully conveyed in ‘Ghost Story’ and a sunny bounce between Jeremy Kelshaw’s bass and Wright’s skipping guitar on ‘This Is What I Said’ and ‘My Fear #2’.
“We were all really young, it was a great time,” Wright says. “We played so many shows around bars and clubs in Sydney, we really put the songs together in venues and playing them live. “Seeing how many people resonated with it is really humbling and is a dream come true.”
The sound of Cloud Control caught the attention of Hollywood filmmakers and ‘Just For Now’ ended up on the saucy soundtrack for Channing Tatum’s Magic Mike in 2012.
Whilst it was an exciting opportunity, the experience left a bitter aftertaste for Wright, with the low fee offered for the use of the song being a trade-off for the potential for “lots of exposure”.
“It was cool to be recognised, and I wanna acknowledge we have had a privileged career, but I think we always had a bit of a shrug reaction to this one,” he says. “Artists should be paid fairly for their work. “I think people see us as a band that really made it, and in the ways that matter we did! But we always made less than minimum wage, you know, always scraping through with just enough for the next album.
“I mean, people will always find a way to express themselves. But that doesn’t mean we should exploit them, right?. “Especially now, COVID-19 is making a lot of people quit or not even start because it seems impossible. “Culture is a way of caring for the future, so this is a big loss. I think it’s like the creative version of ignoring climate change.”
Across the album’s textured songs, it’s evident that there has been a great deal of care invested into crafting Bliss Release as a wholly rewarding adventure. ‘The Rolling Stones’ brings in beautiful dappled light and treads a hypnotic rhythm that seems to turn everything in the periphery into slow motion. And there’s the album’s shining centrepiece ‘Gold Canary’, which features a multitude of layers of incredible sounds.
There’s deep chanted vocals, an inebriated tambourine, handclaps, twisted keyboards, steely guitars, ponderous bass, and Ulrich Lenffer’s fabulously steady drums earthing our senses amid the head spinning joy of it all. Bliss Release is an album that fully delivers on the promise evoked by its title. It’s lush and meditative, with touches of menace and mystery, and ultimately uplifting and deeply blissful.
Perhaps it’s a testament to their childhood bonds, or their secluded upbringing in the open spaces of the Blue Mountains, that Bliss Release feels so wonderfully realised. Especially from a group who’d only started writing songs together a few years before its release. “From writing them in the mountains at the Lenffer family home to touring the world, it was really somethin’,” Wright says of the band’s early days.
“Nowadays it seems like Bliss Release was a road trip album for a lot of people. I still love it and thinking about the fun we had at this time is wonderful.”
Following Brutalism (2017) and Joy as an Act of Resistance (2018), two releases that garnered global critical acclaim, IDLES return with their highly anticipated third album – “Ultra Mono”. Sonically constructed to capture the feeling of a hip-hop record (including production contribution from Kenny Beats), the album doubles down on the vitriolic sneer and blunt social commentary of their past work. Not far beneath the surface of their self-admitted sloganeering lies a deeply complex and brutally relevant album that chews up clichés and spits them out as high art for the masses. This is momentary acceptance of the self. This is Ultra Mono.
Since their 2017 debut Brutalism, British punks IDLES have seemed like a band on a mission. Release a record, tour hard, write more songs, make another album, do it all again. Their new record Ultra Mono is their third in four years, which is impressive when you see the band’s immense pre-pandemic touring schedule. “We never stop writing,” says frontman Joe Talbot,
The band have a method for writing an album that goes well beyond standing in a room and playing. They are organised and focused, which ensures their records remain centred on a theme. “With every album, we start with the title – and artwork normally comes to mind – with a theme around it, and then I kind of build the idea around the album,” Talbot says. “Then we start writing the songs specifically to those ideas, with the idea that if we’ve got boundaries, we can all work within them and work together better, because we’re very different people.
“It’s important for us to understand each other moving forward, because we write democratically. We don’t want it to be some sort of autocracy. We all pitch in.m This time around, Talbot wanted to write about internal struggles. The frontman admits to struggling with certain sides of fame, notably the understanding that his work will now be noticed by more people than ever. Such a profile comes with pressure, and feelings that threaten to inhibit creativity. “I was going through a lot of self-doubt around writing,” he says. “There’s a lot of eyes and ears on us, way more than before Joy… [2018 album Joy Is An Act of Resistance] came out.
“So, I just wanted to focus on that idea of self-awareness as a way of progress and understanding what self-care really meant.” So, Ultra Mono became a record about accepting yourself for who and what you are.
KEXP.ORG presents IDLES sharing songs recorded exclusively for KEXP and talking with Kevin Cole. Recorded Thursday, October 1st, 2020. Songs:
Model Village
Mr. Motivator
War
Grounds
If you’re a Something For Kate fan, you should already be suitably excited about the imminent release of their first new album in over eight years. ‘Come Back Before I Come To My Senses’ is the fourth track we’ve heard from the album and it’s yet another reminder of the power of Paul Dempsey’s song writing and the band’s ability to make those songs, In the year of 1994, from the diverse city of Melbourne, Australia, alternative rock band Something For Kate formed. Starting in high school, the band originally consisted of vocalist and guitarist Paul Dempsey and drummer Clint Hyndman. In 1998, Stephanie Ashworth joined as the new bassist and the three have stuck together ever since.
Something For Kate released their first studio album, Elsewhere for 8 minutes in 1997, a year before Stephanie joined. Their second studio album, Beautiful Sharks (1998) was Stephanie’s first album with the band. To date, the band have released seven albums, including one B-sides, a best of and one live. The band are due to release a new album The Modern Medieval in November this year. The album will feature recent singles “Supercomputer” and “Situation Room”. Something For Kate have been nominated for 16 ARIA’s, achieved six gold and platinum albums and received several awards such as Best Single, Best Live Band and Best Album from various music outlets such as Rolling Stone Magazine, Triple J and iTunes.
Something For Kate’s seventh album The Modern Medieval will be out next month.
Melbourne band Quivers have released the music video for their cover of R.E.M.’s ‘Losing My Religion’. The cover is the first track off Quivers’ complete re-imagining of the iconic group’s 1991 album ‘Out Of Time’. Quivers initially released the cover last week after being asked by Seattle label Turntable Kitchen to remake a classic album. The full album of covers will be released on vinyl later this year.
The music video was filmed by Ursula Woods in southern Tasmania earlier this month. Watch the clip below: “The middle era of R.E.M. is the one I grew up hearing through the next room – where this opaque angular jangle band becomes an MTV monster,” Quivers’ Sam Nicholson said in a statement. “We spent four days in a rehearsal studio with our producer Matthew Redlich (Holy Holy, Husky), and made it up as we went along. We all sang, and Bella [Quinlan] takes the lead on our next song out – ‘Texarkana’.”
As for the music video, Nicholson said the clip makes him feel “homesick” for Tasmania. Their dog looking at an albino wallaby is all I need to get through a few more weeks before we can hopefully record music together again.”
This is the 1st song from Quivers’ song by song re-imagining of R.E.M.’s classic Out of Time (1991) for Seattle vinyl label Turntable Kitchen. Out now through their vinyl club. https://www.turntablekitchen.com/2020…Their full album cover of R.E.M.’s “Out of Time” flips the script on tracks like “Shiny Happy People,” reimagines classics like “Losing My Religion,” and transforms the cult classic “Country Feedback” into a gorgeous and stripped down piano ballad.
Having earned a mercury music nom for their stunning lp earlier in the year, Lanterns on the Lake are back already with a 5-track ep of dream-pop bliss. if you’re new to them & yet to hear what all the fuss is about, this’ll be the perfect snapshot of a band whose understanding of engrossing melodies & captivating atmospheres is second to none.
The ep includes four brand new tracks as well as a new reworked stripped-back arrangement of the single “Baddies”. of the track and ep vocalist Hazel Wilde says: “the realist is a song about being a dreamer, clinging to a vision and following your heart – even when that path can seem deluded to others. it was one of the songs that didn’t make it onto the album spook the herd as it didn’t fit sonically or narratively. it felt like it came from another place. so we began putting together this ep. we wanted to sculpt an intimate “Headphones” record. one for the introverts and dreamers, the ones that still find beauty and magic in things. recording some of the songs over lockdown in our homes helped in creating that world.”
Taken from The Realist EP out 11th December 2020 on Bella Union Records.
The Psychedelic Porn Crumpets continue to assert their status as one of Australia’s hardest working bands – pandemic be damned – in announcing the release of their new album, “Shyga! the Sunlight Mound”, set for release in February 2021. for the Perth group, creativity and production hasn’t stopped in 2020. Despite much of this year’s tour plans being put on pause, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have used their time off road to continue preparing for the release of their fourth studio release, and an eventual blistering return to stages around the world.
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have already given fans an early taste of the forthcoming “Shyga! era, with ‘Mr. Prism’ in august. the creation of “Shyga! the Sunlight Mound” especially off the back of 2019’s huge album and “Now For The whatchamacallit”, came together in a different environment for McEwan and the results speak to the band’s evolution and McEwan’s evolution as a songwriter. “for the first time in a long time i was home without any tours booked, no work, no deadlines and I felt free to create. my writing process became ritualistic; every morning starting with a small walk to the local bottle shop at 11am and writing whatever flowed, allowing myself to design in all styles without boundaries, and not trying to theme the album early on. I haven’t had the luxury of writing this way since the first record, which i spent almost a year working on. it felt like I was myself again, creating without opinion or constraints. gliding through weeks with a day seeming to pass.”
I’m chuffed with how the album has turned out. For me the goal was to create something that effortlessly flowed from track 1-14 while shifting moods, gears, tempos and styles without losing energy. I wanted the overall vibe sounding like a cohesive piece that swirls with glitched out 70’s-inspired guitars, Zeppelin-esque drums and a booming P-H phat litmus sturdy fuzzy bass tone that hopefully you can crank with the old folks over a coupla cold frothies.
They’ll be limited edition colour vinyl releases for each territory – details coming later on! Keep your eyes open.
And our brand spanking-new tune ‘Tally-Ho’ gets it’s first spin on Future Sounds with @anniemacmanus on @bbcradio1 tonight at 7pm(UK).
Can’t wait to share the new tunes with you, we’re extremely proud of this one!
“Does anybody living out there really need me?” is what Cloud Nothings wonder on their new single, “Am I Something,” from their forthcoming album “The Shadow I Remember”. It shows that, even though the ten-year anniversary is approaching for their debut album, not much has changed about the bands’ insecurities and contemplations. “I became familiar with Lu Yang’s work through her exhibit in Cleveland, Ohio at MOCA Cleveland in 2017,” vocalist/guitarist Dylan Baldi noted about the music video in a press release. “I was really drawn to her approach of tying religion into gender and various gendered bodily functions.
The animation style of some of her work is also exactly on my wavelength—like a psychedelic genderless Sims game. Very excited to be able to work with Lu!”
On January 29th, we are reissuing our debut album, The band can’t believe it’s been 10 years since it was originally released! reissuing Turning On for its anniversary. The Shadow I Remember arrives February 26th via Carpark Records. Listen to “Am I Something”.
