Originally from Tijuana now based in Mexico City, two of the most exciting places for emerging music and art in Mexico, Mint Field is one of these bands that make it shine. Mint Field is guided by Estrella del Sol in vocal and guitar duties, and Sebastian Neyra in the bass. Mint Field explores the nostalgia and the melancholy of the daily life with loud guitars and vocals that are like sighs that give life to a unique and supernatural shoegaze.
With releases such as their debut album Pasar de las Luces and Mientras Esperas EP on Innovative Leisure, their sound has evolved over the course of this years of touring al over the world. With their debut LP In 2018 the band did over 100 shows in the United States, Mexico and their first two headline tours in Europe. At the end of such year they recorded in Long Beach, California their EP “Mientras Esperas”. In March 2019 the band released the EP. At the end of spring of such year they toured the US and Canada. Summer 2019 saw the band touring Mexico and closing said tour with two sold out shows in Mexico City.
The video for our third single ‘Delicadeza’ directed by our dear friend Santiago Arouesty. This song is one of the most special songs to us, it was the first one we recorded for our upcoming album ‘Sentimiento Mundial’ coming out September 25th.
This past 2019 autumn the band went on to record their follow up LP to London at Wilton Way Studios. The recording took place with help of producer Syd Kemp as well as the first time working with drummer Callum Brown, both members of Ulrika Spacek. In 2020 the band will release their second full length “Sentimiento Mundial”. A truly unique sound, passion and energy that takes us to unimaginable places.
Single taken from ‘Sentimiento Mundial’ by Mint Field
Los Angeles-based band Young Jesus have shared their new album, “Welcome to Conceptual Beach”, which follows 2018’s The Whole Thing Is Just There. They do a lot with just seven tracks their improvisational jams span jazz, math rock and haunting folk-rock, but nothing is set in stone. It’s blissfully conscious and unconscious, and at times, they sound more like conjurers than musicians. Their abstract, impressionistic lyrics heighten the beautiful recklessness of their music. Young Jesus met at Pea Soup Andersons and the rest is history.
Imagine a shoreline alone, carved from the continent, without land or water to border it, a rind of possibility, a moon-coloured border between land and sea, knowing and unknowing. This is Conceptual Beach, a place John Rossiter, vocalist/guitarist of Los Angeles-based Young Jesus, describes as his long-time mental refuge, where he imagines himself living. Their new album, Welcome to Conceptual Beach, first took form as a physical zine in 2016, when the four members of the band were on their first tour together. At that time, it was still somewhere Rossiter inhabited alone, protective of his solitude. Now, he is allowing others to join him there. “The reason it’s called Welcome to… [Conceptual Beach] is because I’m inviting other inner landscapes into it,” Rossiter explains as he describes the transformation of the beach’s terrain into a whole varied emotional world.
Coming in at over 10 minutes, “Magicians” is the latest single off of “Welcome to Conceptual Beach”, the newest Young Jesus album, out next week via Saddle Creek Records. “Magicians” acts as the larger than life closer for Welcome to Conceptual Beach, an album based on, well, the conceptual beach that is the mental escape of frontman John Rossiter.
“Faith,” the opening track, runs parallel to the album as a whole: dynamic and groovy and psychedelic and emotional. Each musician has a moment to shine and to speak. Opening with Kern’s version of the Purdie Shuffle, to Marcel’s polyrhythmic bass, to Eric’s organ solo, and held together by John’s whispered prayer that, “we just might grow,” Young Jesus offer a music uniquely in service to emotion. “(un)knowing” is a “meditation celebration,” a song about the confusion and pain of re-examining a life—of committing to a life of experience and curiosity. Mixing the spirit and experimentation of OK Computer with the sincerity of Bon Iver, “Root and Crown” is the first song that offers a way out of the traps and patterns of a life. A commitment to grieving, listening, and growing. A devotion to spring, sung from the depths of winter.
Young Jesus previously released two other singles from the album: “Root And Crown” and “(un)knowing.”Welcome to Conceptual Beach follows their 2018 release The Whole Thing Is Just There. The band also features bassist Marcel Borbon, keyboardist Eric Shevrin, and drummer Kern Haug.
On Welcome to Conceptual Beach, Young Jesus pries our sobs from parentheticals and wields them with a brutal but tender force. They take these elements and translate them into a spacious ground for growth, for ourselves, our communities, our world. They affirm that change starts with how we reckon with ourselves as individuals, that we are all magicians, as the closing track of Welcome to Conceptual Beach suggests, “making love and doing dishes,” capable of conjuring new worlds for ourselves, and to live in others’.
Release Date: August 14th, 2020
Band Members
John Rossiter (Guitar/Vox)
Kern Haug (Drums)
Marcel Borbon (Bass)
Eric Shevrin (Keys/Vox)
‘I, Jonathan’ is the fourth solo album by Jonathan Richman, released by the Rounder Records label in 1992. This is the first time it has ever been available on vinyl. As the founder of influential protopunk band The Modern Lovers, Richman had strived to convey authentic emotions and storytelling with his music. “I, Jonathan” continued this aesthetic with simple and sparse rock and roll arrangements, and straightforward lyrics about mundane topics. Songs on the album addressed topics such as backyard parties (“Parties in the U.S.A”), memories of neighbourhoods in which Richman had lived (“Rooming House on Venice Beach” and “Twilight in Boston”) and his admiration of his primary musical inspiration, the Velvet Underground (“Velvet Underground”). The latter song includes a brief interlude of the Velvet Underground song, Sister Ray.
The album helped increase Richman’s cultural profile, which would include a 1993 appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in which Richman performed one of the album’s songs, “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar”
In celebration of Rounder Records’ 50th anniversary, we’re pleased to announce the first-ever vinyl reissue of “I, Jonathan”, the 1992 lo-fi masterpiece from singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman.
I, Jonathan exemplifies Richman’s childlike ability to see the everyday–block parties, dancing, twilight walks–with wide-eyed wonder. The pop traditionalist’s familiar trademarks are all here: sometimes wobbly, but charmingly sincere vocals; crisply strummed guitars and simple, ‘60s-rooted rhythms. One of our most anticipated releases of the year is finally here! The first-ever vinyl reissue of I, Jonathan, the 1992 lo-fi masterpiece from singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, is out now. Due to demand, the first pressing is already sold-out, with a second pressing due back in stock mid-September. In the meantime, you can still reserve your copy at the Craft store!
I, Jonathan exemplifies Richman’s childlike ability to see the everyday–block parties, dancing, twilight walks–with wide-eyed wonder. The pop traditionalist’s familiar trademarks are all here: sometimes wobbly, but charmingly sincere vocals; crisply strummed guitars and simple, ‘60s-rooted rhythms
LOMA is Emily Cross, Dan Duszynski and Jonathan Meiburg. We met on tour and made a secret pact to start a band together. Then we made an eerie and beautiful album way out in the country in Texas. Then, we made another. Don’t Shy Away comes out 10/23/20.
There was never meant to be a second Loma record. The collaboration between Cross Record’s Emily Cross, Dan Duszynski, and Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg released their challenging and brilliant debut album back in 2018, which topped our list of our the year’s best albums, and drew near universal acclaim. The gruelling tour that followed culminated at Sub Pop’s SPF 30 Festival and ended with Emily leaping from the stage, and heading straight for the sea. That was originally meant to be that – no more records, no more Loma. As Emily recalls, “it was the biggest audience we’d ever had. We thought, why not stop here?”. As you can probably guess from the fact you’re reading this, that wasn’t quite how the story ended. Courtesy of Brian Eno loving their music, the members pursuing their own projects, and a return to Texas, Loma were inspired to keep going, and the result is Don’t Shy Away, the band’s second album, out in October through Sub Pop.
Ahead of the release, this week Loma have shared “Ocotillo”, the first single to be lifted from “Don’t Shy Away”. Lifting its name from a cactus-like plant native to the deserts around the border of Mexico and the USA, the band were inspired by the somewhat precocious nature of the plant.
Band Members
Emily Cross, Jonathan Meiburg, Dan Duszynski
“Ocotillo” by Loma from their album “Don’t Shy Away” Release Date: 23rd October 2020 on Sub Pop Records.
First 200 lps are hand numbered, first come, first served.
Though their music has often been tied to the traditions of americana and american roots music, holy motors were formed in Tallinn, Estonia in 2013, when founding member Lauri Raus (songwriter and one of the band’s three guitarists) recruited Eliann Tulve, who was just 16 at the time, to join the band as songwriter and lead vocalist. With Tulve’s gorgeously foreboding vocals serving as a ballast for the guitar section’s “infinity-pool-style shimmer” the band quickly became as un-ignorable as they were inscrutable, rising from the ranks of eager supporting act (for low, at SXSW) to sought after headliner (at NYC underground-meets-above-ground mainstay berlin) in just a matter of days during their first unofficial tour of the us in 2018.
That same year marked the release of their critically acclaimed debut LP, slow sundown, on New York City’s equally enigmatic Wharf Cat Records, an album that garnered praise and airplay not just in the band’s native Estonia (where it won Tallinn’s music week award and a nomination for debut album of the year by the Estoniain music awards), but also via a battery of publications west of the baltic, including stereogum (album of the week), bandcamp (album of the day), and the uk’s diy mag . All this momentum went so far as to capture the attention of one of the band’s very own idols, Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, who approached them after seeing a live performance in Berlin and would go on to produce a handful of tracks for the band in 2019 as well as join them for their set at Switzerland’s festival nox orae during a summer itinerary dotted with european music festivals.
But rather than being blunted and worn down by the tumultuous forces of success, Holy Motors’ incongruence has instead grown all the more prevalent and endearing. They remain musicians from an ex-soviet country producing music that has been described as “cowboy dream-pop with a dark side,”, “shoegaze that sounds like the old west” , and like “a twang-filled soundtrack to… Cowboy melancholy”. The resulting mystique is an inalienable part of the band’s dna, stemming from the shared infatuation with the American west that the members developed waiting out Estonia’s long, grim winters with the warm company of American western films (Badlands and Paris, Texas amongst their favourites) and their instruments. What began as an innocent fascination evolved into a sincere embodiment of that dreamy, melancholy cowboy aura, both in their music and persona as a band.
Now, at 22 years old, Eliann Tulve resembles Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval, reincarnated as an Estonian cowgirl. She is enigmatic as ever but stands more firmly alongside co-songwriter Lauri Raus, the solidification of their roles perhaps accounting for the more hopeful turn their song writing has taken of late. Their new album “Horse”, which is due out on Wharf Cat Records on October 16th, finds the band acknowledging the Americana and rockabilly strands of their musical dna without sacrificing any of the otherworldly mystique that keeps them from neatly conforming to the shoegaze and dreampop labels often applied to their music.
From the album’s opening moments, songs like “Country Church,” with its major key and classic rhythm and blues guitarline, and “Midnight Cowboy,” which sounds like a lost Buddy Holly 45 played at 33 rpm, make it clear that Horse — even if it may not accomplish the impossible task of demystifying this band of ex-soviet cowboys — will at least show you that there’s more to them than the near-impenetrable darkness of their work to date may suggest. Although tracks like “Trouble” and “Endless Night” gravitate toward the ethereal production and existential subject matter of prior releases, repeat listens reveal complex compositions and an empathy that is central to this eight-song album.
As a whole, Horse stands as a warmer, more human counterpoint to 2018’s celestial slow sundown, and showcases Holy Motors as a hypnotic force that draws listeners in and leaves them wanting more. This effect, paired with their ability to write lyrics and music that resonate with a deeply relatable feeling of isolation, has resulted in an album built to connect with people from devoted shoegaze and western psychedelia fanatics to dreamer cowboys, driving through wide open country roads under the stars.
“Endless Night” is from the album ‘Horse’ out on 10/16.
Chicago’s Slow Pulp make an excellent early name for themselves this afternoon with their latest single ‘Falling Apart’. Now in their third year, the outfit are gearing up for the release of their debut album “Moveys”.
Fresh and cooling to the brain and body during one of the hottest weeks of the year, ‘Falling Apart’ abounds with soft touch guitars and the vaguest hint of violin.
It’s all pulled together by the relaxing vocal of Emily Massey: The wellworn calm that emanates from the tune is remarkable considering that in the past two years, Massey has struggled with Lyme’s disease and chronic Mono, then dealt with her parents being in a severe car crash – all in the global landscape of a pandemic.
“It became easier to stay numb, and create a facade that I was doing ok, than it was to release any type of healthy emotion for a long time. Luckily I did allow myself to have a full on breakdown induced by a stubbed toe and confusion over taxes, sometimes it’s the littlest things that finally get you” she said.
“Why don’t you go back to falling apart? You were so good at that,” Emily Massey of the Chicago-based band Slow Pulp sings. (The group will release its debut album, “Moveys,” on October. 9th.) The atmosphere around her — lush acoustic guitar, lightly brushed percussion and the lulling violin of frequent Alex G collaborator Molly Gemer
“Falling Apart” is taken from ‘Moveys’ – out Oct 09 on Winspear:
“Sun Racket’ is the brand new album from legendary Boston trio Throwing Muses, consisting of Kristin Hersh, David Narcizo and Bernard Georges.
The follow up to 2013’s ‘Purgatory/Paradise’ is an outpouring of modal guitars, reverbed shapes, echoey drums and driving bass set behind Kristin Hersh’s well-thumbed notebook of storylines. a ten-song opus of suitably wrought tales set against a wall of sound that’s at once calm and ethereal before building into glorious cacophonous crescendos. when Throwing Muses wrote their last album, they were shattered. Pieces were coming and going, elements repeating and charging the whole. “it sounded beautiful jumping around like that”. two-minute songs reappearing as twisted instrumentals or another song’s bridge.
They mimicked the effect live which kept them on their toes. whatever was happening was already over in other words. “Sun Racket’ is the opposite. it refused to do anything but sit still. it says, “sit here and deal”. “all it asked of us was to comingle two completely disparate sonic vocabularies: one heavy noise, the other delicate music box. turns out we didn’t have to do much. “Sun Racket’ knew what it was doing and pushed us aside, which is always best. after thirty years of playing together, we trust each other implicitly but we trust the music more” – Kristin Hersh and so, they continue. business unusual. “a ground-breaking band who changed the face of alternative music rather than follow the rule book.” Mxdwn “pioneers of the 80s/early 90s college rock sound” pitchfork “one of America’s finest guitar bands”..
Taken from the new album ‘Sun Racket’, out on Fire Records 4th September 2020.
Oceanator aka Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter/guitarist Elise Okusami, is releasing her debut album, “Things I Never Said”, on August 28th via her own Plastic Miracles label. She has shared a new song from it, “Heartbeat,” which is about the anxiety that comes from having a crush on someone.
Okusami had this to say about “Heartbeat” in a press release: “This song is loosely about having a crush, and both the grounding feeling and the anxiety that feeling brings. We recorded it all together like a live performance, and then I went back and added the lead guitars and the vocals. Guitar and vocals by me, bass Eva Lawitts (they), drums Aaron Silberstein (he).
Things I Never Said includes“A Crack in the World,”. Then we loved the album’s next single, the more synth-poppy “I Would Find You,”. Things I Never Said was originally due to come out on Tiny Engines, but then that label pretty much imploded after it was revealed that it was having difficulty making royalty payments to its artists, so Okusami is putting out the album on her own label instead. Although the British label Big Scary Monsters has just announced that they have signed Oceanator and will be releasing the album in the UK.
Dublin’s indie-rock band Pillow Queens have released another track from their upcoming album, “In Waiting”. Their new single Holy Show explores feelings of remorse when reflecting on past situations.
On the track, the band share: “‘Holy Show’ is a song that relays the feeling of regret and insecurity about past words spoken and actions taken, even when they’re ultimately meaningless. The song tries to articulate the heavy burden of being the only person who is concerned about the minute details of how you present yourself to the world.”
Pillow Queens continue their collaboration with director Kate Dolan, who previously directed Handsome Wife and Gay Girls. Of the project, Dolan shared: “Myself and the girls are all queer so when they asked me to direct something for ‘Holy Show’ we all felt it was time that we made a video that had some positive queer representation. There are often depictions of queer women in the media that really upset me. We are often observed through a male gaze by male directors. They are often hyper sexualised. We wanted to create something that really captured the joyful intimacy between queer women through a female gaze.”
With their Australian fanbase growing with each release, the bands debut album is set for release worldwide on September 25th. After four years of perfecting their craft and creating music, the album is a representation of the band members lives. The record is set to be an exploration of love, particularly self-love and queer-love. However, to do so, the record will also explore family, spirituality and politics.
The band formed in 2016 and released their debut EP, Calm Girls. The release captured the attention of Steve Lamacq who called the four piece “deceptively infectious, with sharp hooks and sharp nails”. Since then, they released their follow up EP, State of the State, and have played festivals across Europe.
There are three versions of the Jefferson Airplane’s debut LP, each with a dedicated mono and stereo mix. The “first” (and rarest) version is the 12-track uncensored version, which was originally released on August 15th, 1966. This version was quickly recalled and the track “Runnin’ Round This World” deleted off side 1 due to the line “the nights I’ve spent with you have been fantastic trips”. Very few of these original copies have survived, and they usually sell for an awful lot of money.
Jefferson Airplane “Takes Off” is the debut studio album by the American rock band Jefferson Airplane, released in August 1966 as RCA Victor LSP-3584 (stereo) and LPM-3584 (mono). The personnel differs from the later “classic” line up: Signe Toly Anderson was iniatally the female vocalist and Skip Spence played drums. But both soon left the group—Spence in May 1966, Anderson in October and were replaced by Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick, respectively.
RCA executives found some of the lyrics too sexually suggestive. They had the band change the lyrics in “Let Me In” from “I gotta get in, you know where” to “You shut your door, now it ain’t fair”, and “Don’t tell me you want money” to “Don’t tell me it’s so funny”. In “Run Around” they had the end of the line “Blinded by colours come flashing from flowers that sway as you lay under me” altered to “…that sway as you stay here by me”. With “Runnin’ ‘Round This World” the executives insisted that “trips” in the line “The nights I’ve spent with you have been fantastic trips” referred to taking LSD, though the band insisted it was merely common slang. Even replacing the word “trips” with a guitar arpeggio did not placate RCA’s concerns with the line’s sexual connotations and refused its inclusion on the album, and the recording remained unreleased for the next eight years.
The “second” version to appear of this album happens to be exactly the same as the first version minus “Runnin’ Round This World”. However, these copies were also soon recalled, and two tracks replaced for the “Third”, final, and most commonly found version of the LP. The two tracks “Let Me In” (with lines “Oh let me in, I wanna be there/I gotta get in you know where” and “Don’t tell me you want money”) and “Run Around” (having “… that sway as you lay under me”) were re-recorded with censored lyrics.
The ”first” US pressing of the debut by Jefferson Airplane has three versions, released in both mono and stereo, the first two of which are extremely rare: 1) Six tracks on side A, the sixth being ”Runnin’ Round This World”. This contains the original versions of both ”Let Me In” (with the lyric ”Don’t tell me you want money”) and ”Run Around” (with the lyric ”That sway as you lay under me”). The backcover has no caption ”RE” in the top right hand corner.
2) Five tracks on side A, ”Runnin’ Round This World” is deleted. Still, the original versions of ”Let Me In” and ”Run Around” are included. The backcover does have the ”RE” caption.
3) Five tracks on side A. The re-recorded versions of ”Let Me In” and ”Run Around” are included with the offensive lyrics altered. Backcover identical to 2).
This second version has also become somewhat uncommon, and is discernible from the third version only by the etched matrix numbers or by listening to the record itself. Only the “third version” has been fully reissued on CD in both mixes, although a couple mediocre-sounding vinyl-sourced tracks appeared on the most recent remaster.
This transfer is from one of the 2nd version LPs (-12S / -3S) . I definitely prefer this original version, if for no other reason than it is clearly what the band intended to be released before they were censored by RCA Victor.
The album’s release drew little press attention at a time when mainstream newspapers did not normally cover rock releases and the rock press was yet in its infancy. Crawdaddy! magazine highlighted the album on the cover of its January 1967 issue, which included a three-page review by the magazine’s assistant editor, Tim Jurgens, who called the album “faulted” yet “the most important album of American rock” of 1966.
The Band:
Marty Balin – vocals, rhythm guitar
Signe Toly Anderson – vocals, percussion
Jorma Kaukonen – lead guitar
Paul Kantner – rhythm guitar, vocals
Jack Casady – bass guitar
Skip Spence – drums
Spencer Dryden – drums (on “Go to Her,” alternate version of “And I Like It,” and alternate version of “Chauffeur Blues”)
