Flyte first touched down last summer with some new songs ahead of a forthcoming album when they unveiled their video for “Losing You,” which was directed by award-winning filmmaker Mark Jenkin, and have since unveiled a new album titled “This Is Really Going to Hurt”, which releases this Friday. Arriving on the tail end of vocalist Will Taylor’s eight-year relationship, the LP piles more emotional heft onto their already dramatic rock sound.
Even for their stripped-down “Neighborhoods” session, the trio pack a punch into vocal harmonies on album tracks “Trying to Break Your Heart” and “Everyone’s a Winner,” with the band members crowding around Taylor’s single acoustic guitar. Shot in tight close-up as the wind blows in London’s St Dunstan-in-the-East, watch their performance of both tracks below.
The UK band play two tracks from their forthcoming LP “This Is Really Going to Hurt.”
The highly-anticipated second album “This Is Really Going To Hurt”. Recorded in LA last year with collaborators Justin Raisen (Angel Olsen, Yves Tumor), Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver) and mixing engineer Ali Chant (Aldous Harding), the record is a lucid documentation of lead singer Will Taylor’s formative relationship break-up, and follows the ending of a relationship through the stages of grief and acceptance. The title is evocative of knowing the decision you are about to make will change your life forever. The first singles from the album, ‘Easy Tiger’ and ‘Losing You’, served as stunning introductions.
We are so excited to announce the official Record Store Day release of Frankie and the Witch Fingers’ fourth album “Brain Telephone !” For the first time via Greenway Records, the record is newly re-mastered and re-packaged with brand new art, the jacket features a UV-Gloss treatment like we’ve never seen before. Totally re-imagined for Record Store Day 2021 and available on June 12th!, I have been waiting for this album to pop up and I was not disappointed. The groovy baselines mixed with funky smooth guitar riffs, sick organ/piano solo’s and harmonica will have you dancing wherever you hear this album. The fuzzy lyrics add to the 60’s vibe this album gives off and I highly recommend it!!
This heavy dose of ebb-and-flow rock ‘n roll now looks and sounds better than ever before! Run to your local record store and make sure they order a copy! Record Store Day exclusive “Brain Matter” Splatter will be available in the US, Canada, UK, EU and Australia while supplies last.
Let us be quite clear from the start: This is a minor masterpiece. The 2017 debut Cobalt Chapel album was already moody and strange, but the strangeness quotient is upped several notches here, such as with the nightmare circus atmosphere of ‘Cry A Spiral’ that leads into the apocalyptic dance of ‘It’s The End, The End’.
Conceptually, the album focuses on Yorkshire. The titular track is about the 1970 Krumlin music festival, which was a complete disaster due to bad, stormy weather. It was staged on a hillside in Yorkshire, and that is also the location of the cover photo; the orange synthetic blankets in the shot replicate those seen on old photos from the festival.
Cobalt Chapel are a duo consisting of Jarrod Gosling and Cecilia Fage. Their music combines psychedelia with folk and touches of kraut. It is inherently rhythmic and primarily keyboard driven – Jarrod is a collector of vintage synths and uses all of them here. But despite the amazingly layered analogue sound, the songs themselves sound like the future rather than the past, not least thanks to Cecilia’s stately vocals. Her voice is paradoxically both passionate and somehow slightly aloof.
Compared to earlier albums, ‘Orange Synthetic’ is also closer in style to the sound of Jarrod Gosling’s “prog” band Regal Worm, whose new album is expected later this year!
I was never a fan of East India Youth although that was William Doyle in everything but name. However, his first proper solo album ‘Your Wilderness Revisited’ totally and absolutely floored me, Whereas that was a perfectionist album in every sense, William Doyle is now back with something quite different.
His hard disc crashed and he then had to piece together the album based on cassette copies that he had made. Or at least that is how the story goes, because who really backs their recordings up on cassette these days? Whatever the truth is, these songs are definitely more spontaneous, and definitely represent something that is a bit muddier timewise. Initially, you don’t notice, as the two opening tracks are crisp and pretty great pop songs. But then you are thrown into something that sounds more like a collage. There are more good pop songs further into the album but there are interspersed with more experimental – or maybe I should rather say unfocused – pieces.
Apart from the track ‘Semi-bionic’, which literally starts out sounding like a hard disc crashing, the sound quality on the album isn’t muddy or full of tape hiss, but you definitely get the feel that some of tracks aren’t still finished. While that does lend the album an air of spontaneity, it also makes for a somewhat stumbling listening experience. But when it clicks, it is clear that Doyle’s sense for melody combined with ambient drama is intact!
It’s nearly a decade since William Doyle handed a CD-R demo to the Quietus co-founder John Doran at a gig, who loved it so much he set up a label to release Doyle’s debut EP (as East India Youth). Doyle’s debut album, “Total Strife Forever”, followed in 2014, as did a nomination for the Mercury Music Prize. A year later, he was signed to XL, touring the world and about to release his second album – all by the age of 25.After self-releasing four ambient and instrumental albums, Doyle’s third full-length record – and the first under his own name – “Your Wilderness Revisited” arrived to ecstatic reviews in 2019: Described it as “a dazzlingly beautiful triumph of intention” and Metro declared it an album not only of the year, but “of the century”. Just over a year later, as he turns 30, Doyle is back with Great Spans of Muddy Time.
Born from accident but driven forward by instinct, Great Spans was built from the remnants of a catastrophic hard-drive failure. With his work saved only to cassette tape, Doyle was forced to accept the recordings as they were – a sharp departure from his process on Your Wilderness Revisited, which took four long years to craft toward perfection. “Instead of feeling a loss that I could no longer craft these pieces into flawless ‘Works of Art’, I felt intensely liberated that they had been set free from my ceaseless tinkering,” Doyle says.“The album this turned out to be – and that I’ve wanted to make for ages – is a kind of Englishman-gone-mad, scrambling around the verdancy of the country’s pastures looking for some sense,” says Doyle. “It has its seeds in Robert Wyatt, early Eno, Robyn Hitchcock, and Syd Barrett.”
Doyle credits Bowie’s ever-influential Berlin trilogy, but also highlights a much less expected muse: Monty Don, presenter of the BBC programme Gardener’s World, Doyle’s lockdown addiction. “I became obsessed with Monty Don. I like his manner and there’s something about him I relate to. He once described periods of depression in his life as consisting of ‘nothing but great spans of muddy time’.
When I read that quote I knew it would be the title of this record,” Doyle says. “Something about the sludgy mulch of the album’s darker moments, and its feel of perpetual autumnal evening, seemed to fit so well with those words. I would also be lying if I said it didn’t chime with my mental health experiences as well. ”Lead single “And Everything Changed (But I Feel Alright)” is representative of the album as a whole: eclectic and unpredictable, but also playful and properly danceable. On top of the gently pulsing electronics, soothing harmonies and glowing melodies, there’s a ripping guitar solo that ricochets around the song like a pinball. “I wanted to get back into the craft of writing individual songs rather than being concerned with overarching concepts,” Doyle says. Elsewhere there’s the synth pop strut of “Nothing At All”, pulsating static on “Semi-Bionic”, incandescent synths and enveloping soundscapes in “Who Cares”, and the ambient glitch groove of “New Uncertainties”. Great Spans of Muddy Time is a beautiful ode to the power of accident, instinct and intuition. The result, however, is far from an anomaly: this celebration of the imperfect album is one that required years of honed craft and dedicated focus to achieve, “For the first time in my career, the distance between what I hear and what the listener hears is paper-thin,” Doyle says. “Perhaps therein reveals a deeper truth that the perfectionist brain can often dissolve.”
Ed’s first album came out in 2017 on Lost Map Records. His music has regularly appeared on BBC6 Music and BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, which included The Uncle Sold in their Top 12 albums of 2017. His 2nd album, “The Obvious I” is out now on Needle Mythology.
It has been four years since Ed Dowie’s debut album ‘The Uncle Sold’. I liked that very much and although maybe his new album is a little less experimental, I like it every bit as much. With arrangements very much designed to lift Ed’s strong voice to the fore, it plays like a synth pop album for those of us who never liked synth pop albums. It is all here, sampled instruments, blips and blurbs, programmed drums and more. But done with restraint and a sense for the rather straightforward songs on the album. In 2017, Ed released his feted debut album ‘The Uncle Sold’, prompting The Quietus to hail him as a “bold and starry-eyed visionary” and The Skinny to praise his “beautiful… stolen snapshots of glimpsed futures and lost pasts.” and BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction made the record one of their albums of the year. Now, four years on, Ed is to return with an album that will surely find him new followers alongside long time fans such as Lauren Laverne, who described its predecessor as an “absolutely extraordinary” achievement.
And while there are many layered sounds here, they never unnecessarily take over the soundstage, allowing for much space between instruments, sometimes even creating a cavernous yet simultaneously clear sound for the vocals to inhabit.
So whereas there are clear homages to the sounds of the 80s here, and the 8-bit cover art had me worried, Dowie has delivered a powerful album of gentle pop that really shines.
‘The Obvious I’, the second album from Ed Dowie, is the second new master release from Needle Mythology, the label founded by music writer, author and broadcaster Pete Paphides. “The Obvious I” was co produced by pioneering British experimental musician and sometime member of Polar Bear “Leafcutter John” Burton “John’s become something of a hero of mine over the years. Way back when he was in Polar Bear, I approached him after a couple of gigs, and he’d remembered me from those days. And really, his presence on the record was invaluable. He lent me equipment and gave me advice, then when I finished recording, I sent him the stems and he mixed the album.”
Aerosmith hit their stride on their third album, perfecting the nasty guitar licks and powerhouse performances they were honing onstage almost every single night. They carried this momentum to their next record, ‘Rocks,’ but ‘Toys in the Attic’ is the one album that defines Aerosmith in all their sleazy rock ‘n’ roll glory. “Aerosmith” was a different band when we started the third album. They’d been playing Get Your Wings on the road for a year and had become better players – different. It showed in the riffs that Joe [Perry] and Brad [Whitford] brought back from the road for the next album. “Toys in the Attic” was a much more sophisticated record than the other stuff they’d done.”
Aerosmith got off to a solid start with their debut album and avoided the sophomore jinx with their second. They truly took off when their third album arrived on April 8th, 1975.
“Toys in the Attic” found the group working to maintain its rock audience while making another bid for the crossover success that, to that point, had continued to flit just out of reach. Reconvening at the Record Plant in New York City during the early winter months of the year, the band members were under the gun in terms of delivering new material — but after years of live performance, they were now better prepared than ever.
Perhaps the most ambitious recording on the album is “You See Me Crying”, a complex piano ballad that was heavily orchestrated. Jack Douglas brought in a symphony orchestra for the song, which was conducted by Mike Mainieri. The song itself was written by Tyler and outside collaborator Don Solomon. Some of the band members became frustrated with the song, which took a long time to complete, due to the many complex drum and guitar parts. The band’s label, Columbia Records, was nonetheless very impressed with the song and the recording process.
“Toys” was the first record where we had to write everything pretty, much from scratch,” guitarist Joe Perry said. “And also, we had to do it after having been on the road for a while. And, though we were still playing a lot of gigs, we took a couple months off to make this record. So this was our first real studio record. And we would write a lot of the material in the studio. So we’d rehearse them and then go into the studio in the morning with a couple of guitar riffs, and we’d build all these songs out of them.”
Crediting an offhand remark from producer Jack Douglas during the Get Your Wings sessions with sending him into an emotional tailspin, bassist Tom Hamilton admitted in Walk This Way: The Autobiography of Aerosmith that the band’s ability to, as Perry put it, “could afford better dope” allowed him to embark on a cocaine-fuelled practice regimen in order to impress Douglas when they started Toys in the Attic. “When we started Toys, I felt better about my playing for once,” said Hamilton. “It was up to this higher level where the rest of the band had already progressed.”
Hamilton’s increased confidence and instrumental dexterity paid off in the studio, leading to the bass line for future Toys in the Attic classic track “Sweet Emotion,” among other things. But the band members weren’t entirely starting from scratch. All their touring helped road-test some of the new material, Perry later noted, saying that “We had an idea of what songs were working for us live at that point, and so we kind of had an idea of what direction we wanted the songs to go in. We knew we wanted to play some uptempo songs, some shuffle songs and some blues rock. But though we knew what kind of songs we wanted, we didn’t really know how it was going to turn out.”
Acknowledging the building pressure on Aerosmith to deliver a hit, Perry also openly credited producer Douglas with accentuating the band’s strengths and encouraging them to deliver their best songs and performances. “Jack really helped us a lot in that department,” noted Perry. “He really became the sixth member of the band and taught us how to do it.”
As far as singer Steven Tyler was concerned, whatever pressure the band might have been feeling was decidedly secondary to his growing belief that Aerosmith could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any of the greats.
“I knew we’d made it,” he wrote in Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir. “I was the kid who put my initials in the rock ’cause I wanted the aliens to know I was there. It’s a statement of longevity. The record will be played long after you’re dead. Our records would be up there in the attic, too, with the things that you loved and never wanted to forget. And to me, Aerosmith was becoming that. I knew how the Beatles, the Animals and the Kinks did it — with lyrics and titles. I saw reason and rhyme in all the lunacy that we were concocting.”
Looking back, it isn’t hard to see why Tyler was so confident. Toys in the Attic marked a quantum leap forward for Aerosmith, in terms of writing as well as performance, and the band’s artistic growth was soon matched by a sales boom: Toys soared to No. 11 on the chart, sending “Sweet Emotion” into the Top 40 and “Walk This Way” all the way to No. 10 — their biggest hit to that point.
“Walk This Way” starts with a two-measure drum beat intro by Joey Kramer, followed by the well-known guitar riff by Perry. The song proceeds with the main riff made famous by Perry and Brad Whitford on guitar with Tom Hamilton on an early 1960s Fender Jazz bass. The song continues with rapid-fire lyrics by Steven Tyler. The song originated in December 1974 during a sound check when Aerosmith was opening for the Guess Who in Honolulu, Hawaii. During the sound check, Perry was “fooling around with riffs and thinking about the Meters”, a group guitarist Jeff Beck had turned him on to. Loving “their riffy New Orleans funk, especially ‘Cissy Strut’ and ‘People Say'”, he asked the drummer “to lay down something flat with a groove on the drums.”The guitar riff to what would become “Walk This Way” just “came off [his] hands
Saying it evolved from a riff he had “in the back of my mind” that arose out of a desire to write “something funky,” Perry recalled “Walk This Way” evolving slowly, from that first guitar part to a demo in progress that producer Jack Douglas helped nudge across the finish line after a viewing of Mel Brooks’ film Young Frankenstein.
There was this one scene where one of the movie characters says ‘walk this way,'”said Perry . “Jack began fooling around with that line and did this imitation of it from the movie, and so it became a great title for the song. Then Steven went ahead and wrote the eventual lyrics.”
“Walk This Way” launched Aerosmith firmly into the ranks of crossover rock acts, and they continued to broaden their fan base as they pounded the arena circuit as a headliner and/or opening act alongside a growing list of artists that included Ted Nugent, Foghat and REO Speedwagon. They’d score even bigger hits later in their career, but Toys in the Attic marked the point of no return, setting them up for the superstar status they continue to enjoy.
“At the end of Toys, I had become a different player and Aerosmith was probably a different band,” Hamilton said in Walk This Way. “We knew this album would launch the band like a missile. I’d written two of the songs and finally was able to feel like I wasn’t fooling anybody anymore. It was an incredible time.”
“This was the year it all changed for us,” Tyler wrote in his memoir. “The album got good reviews and people started taking us more seriously — about fucking time!” But for Perry, Toys in the Attic’s success wasn’t necessarily a sign that Aerosmith had made it; instead, he seemed to feel a responsibility to try harder than ever.
“I wonder if I’m doing it right. If I’m actually contributing. Are we doing something good, or are we just followers?” Perry told Creem. “I don’t know. We can go the BTO route, be a really commercial band, do the road trip. But to satisfy my own artistic needs, I wonder if the things I write … maybe I’m not getting better on guitar. Maybe I’m no better than your average guitar player. But I’ll tell you — if I find out after a year or so more that I’m not improving, I’ll just quit touring and work on my cars.”
Andy Bell’s new single ‘Skywalker’ is out now and filmmaker Jean De Oliveira has made an incredible psychedelic colourburst video to accompany it. ‘Skywalker’ occupies the middle ground between Revolver-era Beatles and Neu! and is one of the highlights of Andy’s acclaimed debut solo album, “The View From Halfway Down”, which was released late last year. “It is dedicated to my daughter, Leia, who was named after the Star Wars princess,” explains Andy of the song. “It’s about being a parent, watching your children grow up, reach adulthood, and live their lives, and feeling unbelievably proud of them. It’s for all my kids, but inspired by my eldest. Musically, I was channelling Michael Rother and Neu! and the Roland synth reminds me of World Of Twist.”
The single includes a stripped down acoustic version and an incredible, euphoric banger of a remix by Pye Corner Audio,
During the #TimsTwitterListeningParty for Andy’s album, just after its release in October, none other than Luke Skywalker himself, aka actor Mark Hamill, got involved in the discussion about this track. No surprise, as the Force is strong with this one…Andy Bell has a new EP, a reworks 10″ and a limited 7″, all released between April and June.
“See My Friends” EP
Limited edition 10” vinyl version of the See My Friends EP, featuring two remixes by Pye Corner Audio and the two tracks from Andy’s debut single, Plastic Bag, remastered by Heba Kadry. Pressed on yellow vinyl. The sleeve is reverse board with an inside print.
Limited edition 7” vinyl version of the “All On You” EP, featuring four acoustic tracks originally recorded for radio sessions, including a cover of Paris Angels’ classic Perfume. Pressed on green vinyl. The sleeve is reverse board with an inside print.
Written and performed by Andy Bell (Copyright Control) except track 4: written by Paris Angels
Five tracks from Andy Bell’s debut solo album The View From Halfway Down reworked by Pye Corner Audio, with one re-edit by Andy himself in his Glok guise.
People often wonder why Philadelphian band Nothing are so damn loud. In the case of many artists, the volume stems from a preoccupation with negativity, misanthropy and the human condition, drawn from the band’s own personal experiences. In the case of Nothing, that volume, rather than a selling point, is the only way the band has been able to translate the difficulty of real-life into musical form.
Philadelphia’s Nothing – ‘Tired Of Tomorrow’, their beautifully profound follow-up to 2014’s widely-acclaimed ‘Guilty Of Everything’. Recorded over the course of a month at Studio 4 with Will Yip (Circa Survive, Title Fight), ‘Tired Of Tomorrow’ is a modern, nihilistic take on the triumphant fuzzed-out guitar rock of the 90’s, replete with huge hooks and brooding melodies. Much like the events it’s based on, the album displays an unparalleled balance of opposites and contradictions, rife with sweet-and-sour themes, downcast grooves, infectious choruses, and blissfully expansive washes of sound. With ‘Tired Of Tomorrow’, Nothing have worked the deepest influences of their youth and maturation into a confident, memorable album that is sure to soothe old wounds while simultaneously opening up new ones.
“Wish Goes On” soundtracks the (re)birth of a band called Milly. It is something new emerging from something old; something old from something older, made new again. In 2019, Milly hit the road with labelmates and fellow fans of fuzz, Swervedriver. At the time, their line up was rotating consistently as Brendan Dyer, Milly’s principle songwriter, searched for permanence in the form of a live band. It was on this tour that something clicked for Dyer, who recalls the feeling as nothing short of cosmic. He remembers thinking one day, simply, “This is the band,” and so it was. Spencer Light on guitar, Yarden Erez on bass, and Zach CapittiFenton on drums, with Dyer playing guitar and singing the songs.
The dynamic that burst into existence on this tour only deepened in the following months. “So much of it for me are those in-between moments,” Dyer says about the band’s blossoming friendships, “driving in the car listening to music, or being on break from rehearsal getting something to eat from Lassens.” Dyer would bring sketches of songs to the group, most of which he’d already been developing for years. “This release marks the transition from Milly as a solo project to Milly as something more unified,” Dyer explains. CapittiFenton, Erez, and Light were invited to dissect and rework his demos a process that continued right up until the time they found themselves in rural Colorado actively recording Wish Goes On with Gleemer’s Corey Coffman. Coffman, who engineered and produced, also became involved in the song writing process at this point, offering ideas the band would take home and play with before returning to the studio the next day.
The result is five songs which complement one another artfully. By the time Dyer sings, “But it’s different now, feels like the same old town but I know it’s not” on the EP’s second track, “Denial,” it is not only a hometown that has disappeared in change, but also the sordid illusion of US supremacy as it is incessantly propagandized, especially to children — a notion which opener “Star Spangled Banner” openly unsettles. Dyer wrote “Denial” and the three songs that follow at around the same time in his life, with “Star Spangled Banner” coming significantly later, sometime after Milly’s formative tour in 2019. There is something to be said about these conversations across time, the album receding in a sense into the past even as one advances through it. Maybe it has something to do with the idea that longing, wishful thinking, and hope are always reaching both backwards and forwards. Maybe when Dyer sings that he “can’t get past denial,” he’s referring in a sense to the denial of anything but the present moment. Maybe, in the way of Alan Watts, Wish Goes On furthers the idea that “The only way to make sense out of change is to plug into it, move with it, and join the dance.” Dyer describes something to this effect when he says he’s been “trying to keep my head down and follow my path, knowing things will work out.” In the same conversation, he openly acknowledges that “even if that’s not true, it still feels helpful,” which is to say, of course, “Wish Goes On.”
DIY kitchen pop project of Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, Art Museums etc). The new LP “Uncommon Weather”, due April 2021 via Slumberland (US) & Tough Love (UK).
From the many musical lives of artist Glenn Donaldson emerges The Reds, Pinks and Purples, a project that sifts out the purest elements of pop music and in the process chronicles the point of view of an assiduous songwriter. His new album “Uncommon Weather” is both an elusive portrait of San Francisco –– during one of its fluctuations as an untenable place for musicians and artists –– and also a self-portrait of a songwriter who has dispatched another treasured collection of timeless sounding DIY-pop songs.
Self-recorded and mostly self-performed, the music on “Uncommon Weather” continuously reckons with the influence of The Television Personalities’ Dan Treacy, whose own forays into drum-machines, echo, and reverb in the early 1990s is an important reference point. Paul Weller, Robert Smith, and Sarah Records also come to mind. The album arrives with grateful timing, quick on the heels of the recent EP “You Might Be Happy Someday” and alleviating, for a brief window at least, whatever it is that keeps us coming back to this elemental music. Donaldson imagines his listeners are just like himself: fascinated and addicted to the spiritual power of uncomplicated pop classics.
The Fat Angel Sings 