After 4 strange and bewildering years, I can confidently announce that my new album “Love, Death & Dancing” will be available May 29th. and watch the video for Time
Jack Garratt’s long-awaited return is just as powerful, meaningful, and spectacular as we could have imagined. Released this week, “Time” arrives (alongside “Mara” and “Return Them to the One”) as the first of three tracks taken off Garratt’s forthcoming album “Love, Death & Dancing” (out May 29 via Island Records). “Why is it not enough to be fine?” Garratt asks within the song’s first seconds, his emotive voice aligning with effusive, jumpy keyboards and frenetic guitars. A groove sets in as he begins a rhetorical pondering of big, existential topics for which he will never find a satisfying answer: “You’re overthinking, in a rut and terrified of giving in to who you are and losing your mind,” he continues.
At five and a half minutes in length, “Time” is demanding of its listener in more ways than one. An uptempo, pulsing track, the song encourages us to move and shake while we confront demons of self-doubt and inertia. A very personal, intimate song taken from what promises to be a very personal and intimate album, “Time” is a window into Garratt himself – of the depression he struggled with in the wake of his critically-acclaimed 2016 debut album, of the pressure he put upon himself and felt from others, and of the journey that took him from this dark space, into one that was perhaps a little brighter and healthier for the soul.
Black Belt Eagle Scout; the moniker of Portland-based multi-instrumentalist Katherine Paul released an excellent album titled “At the Party With My Brown Friends” in 2019. That seemed to get lost in the shuffle with all the other things in life, etc. After seeing it pop on a number of year-end lists and she really is something special. She’s heading out on a North American and European tour this year and has released an excellent video for I Said I Wouldn’t Write This Song
Its animated video was edited and directed by Chantal Jung (Inujuk Nunatsiavutimi), and is meant to raise awareness of the Alaskan coastline and its deep connection with Indigenous people and animals. “The video features Northern imagery that shows aspects of Inuit life, including cloudberry picking, animal relatives and Arctic landscapes,” describes Jung. “People often forget that our livelihoods are extremely connected to the environment, including the animals and plants that live among us. This video is meant to bring awareness of the land, the animals and the people who protect the land.”
On their debut album “Close Encounters”, Pocari Sweater pays homage to slacker rock giants such as The Replacements or Pavement through hook-heavy, jangly rock with more than a hint of Gram Parsons-esque Americana. The four piece band uses big, strutting riffs that shuffle and swirl, with lyrics that often reflect the halcyon days of the late-‘90s. But, singer Jake Tapley smartly subverts that wistfulness on the song “DeLorean,” on which he laments and ultimately lets go of the trappings of the past, crooning “Why would I want to go back in time?” On the title track, Tapley sings, “In the morning you can erase my mind,” another reminder to live in the now.
Pocari Sweater is Jake Tapley (guitar/vocals), Nigel Meyer (bass), Matt Filip (drums), and Jake Philley (lead guitar). Additional percussion by Matt Filip. Mellotron on “Adjacent” by Jake Philley. All songs written and performed by Pocari Sweater.
Recorded and mixed by Jim Marlowe at End of an Ear. Mastered by Andy Myers.
This album made my night. Such a beautiful, unexpected surprise. Just like everyone who has discovered Shakey Graves, his music has carried me through many trials & tribulations over the years.
“Live In Amsterdam 1969”. The Who’s performance at Amsterdam’sOpera House in September 1969 was remarkable in a number of ways. It was the first of a series of gigs in more formal surroundings and one of the longest live gigs the Who ever performed.
The recording was made by a Dutch radio/tv broadcast. It’s not 100% certain who did it, but it was probably done by the VPRO, who also did the Pink Floyd recording the same year at the same venue. And just like that Pink Floyd recording, this one was also bootlegged a million times from various very good to very poor sources. Alll of these sources were originated from radio broadcast/s. Back then, and today still, The Concertgebouw was not a place for rock bands but for opera’s and other classic music.
Mixed directly to 2-tracks, this may been one of the reasons why the mixing engineer had a hard time finding the right balance. The mix changes often, and sometimes the drums or the guitar just disappear or get buried for a while. It also must have been hard for the band to hear each other, because of the extremely reverbrating acoustics. Remember, this was 1969 and sound monitoring on stage was still a thing for the future.
When comparing this one to other Who shows from this period, this one probably isn’t the best. Roger Daltrey has once said that he didn’t think he sang very well this night. And playing the “Tommy” album on stage was obviously not a routine for the band yet. But, there is more than enough to enjoy here. It is the only complete soundboard recording from this year. It is also the only one with complete lineage, and it has the best sound. Beside that, all other Who ’69 board tapes are far from complete and don’t have most of Tommy.
Somewhere around 2000, a Pre-FM source of this show was unearthed. Funny enough, the same thing happended with the aforementioned Pink Floyd recording . They may have come from the same person though.
The recent boot “Amsterdam Journey” on the Hiwatt label is the one taken off his copy.
The Who, live at Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, Netherlands 29th September, 1969
Following the release of Tommy in May 1969, the Who embarked on a series of epic concerts, soon earning themselves a reputation as the finest live band in the world. This amazing set was broadcast on AVRO-FM, in Amsterdam’s most prestigious concert hall on 29th September 1969. The only complete soundboard recording of them made that year, it boasts astounding fidelity and captures them at the peak of their powers, playing not only most of Tommy but also numerous other classics from the length of their career to date. It’s presented here together with background notes and images.
The Who – The Complete Amsterdam 1969
Venue: Het Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Date: 29th September 1969
Wellington based six-piece band Tidal Rave continues a New Zealand (and Australasian) tradition of dark, compelling guitar and keyboard lead garage rock. There’s something slightly claustrophobic and unsettling at times about the churning dense weave of the three guitars and bass backed by ghostly organ and insistent drum pulse.
Add the character provided by the interchange between three songwriter-guitarist-vocalists, one with distinctive vibrato reminiscent of The Terminals’ ominous baritone proclamations, and it’s possible to imagine this album as the product of another era.
Tidal Rave started out of bedroom jam sessions in a Nikau St flat in the inner-Wellington suburb of Newtown, developing into 6-piece band which released a self-titled EP in 2017 and toured NZ and Melbourne, Australia.
“Heart Screams” is the band’s first album. The 9 tracks by guitarist-songwriters Ellis, Gedye Taylor, and Paterson, woven together with backing vocals by keyboard player Keating, are alternately dark and euphoric; universal themes touching on inner hopes and anxieties, external threats (real and imagined), all set against the monotony of day to day living in the narrow streets of NZ’s wind-rattled capital city.
Tidal Rave include members of Sweaty Betty, Kittentank, Echo Beach and Housewitches in a stellar lineup that features no less than three women playing loud guitars, driven by a tight rhythm section. With all the hallmark melody, chime and squall of excellent indie rock.
Releases February 28th, 2020
Emmie Ellis (vox and guitar), Esther Gedye Taylor (vox and guitar), Kristen Paterson (vox and guitar), Ann-Marie Keating (vox and keys), Frank Eggleton (bass), Scott Hakkaart (drums).
The long lost solo album “Love of Will” by the late David McComb, singer-songwriter for much loved West Australian band The Triffids, has finally received a release. Originally released at the end of 1993, nearly half a decade after the dissolution of the band with which he made his name, Love of Will was McComb’s final major release before his unexpected passing at the age of 36 in February 1999.
The album, which the NME later described as “a full-blown foray into country rock and reconciled his dark, almost Leonard Cohen-like songwriting with the Velvets-like psychedelia” was the only album that McComb recorded and released following the Triffids final album, 1989’s The Black Swan. The album originally appeared without much fanfare; remember The Triffids only received limited commercial success in their time, and their 2008 induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame would have seemed unimaginable in McComb’s lifetime. And it has disappointingly remained out of print for nearly two and a half decades, despite continued generational rediscoveries – and upgraded reissues – of McComb’s work with the Triffids.
Of course, that work with The Triffids includes classic albums like 1986’s Born Sandy Devotional and the now iconic minor hit “Wide Open Wide.” Hard works to live up to perhaps, but many of McComb’s fans believe Love of Will found McComb still at the peak of his writing and performing powers.
Although it was recorded from June to August 1993, and it was a return to something akin to The Triffids style after a couple of single releases that flirted with hip-hop, McComb reckoned the album was four and a half years in the making. His chosen band of musicians for the recording included some ex-Triffids, and members of the Black Eyed Susans, a group that McComb had formed and worked with part-time after The Triffids demise with a couple of old friends from Perth, Phil Kakulas (who had played in the original line-up of The Triffids) and Rob Snarski.
That band of musicians included amongst both Kakulas and Snarski as well as former Triffids Martyn Casey and “Evil” Graham Lee, and, on violin, Warren Ellis (who McComb described to Juice’s Toby Creswell as “the best musician in Australia”) who was then on the cusp of coming to prominence with the Dirty 3. Not long after the release of Love of Will, McComb and Ellis both appeared on Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Let Love In, and Ellis became a full-time Bad Seed alongside Martyn Casey.
Love of Will inadvertently caused the demise of The Triffids, who had initially stopped playing just to take a breather. Their final gigs in New York in 1989 weren’t meant to be the end (although Casey did join the Bad Seeds the following year.) According to Graham Lee: “We didn’t know they were final performances. Dave wanted to do a solo album, and we were due to get back together after that. Much to his chagrin, his solo album took longer than expected, and he kept writing songs that sounded like Triffids songs. Domesticity snuck up on most of us, poor health snuck up on Dave, a planned ’94 reunion tour was put on hold, and The Triffids faded into the mist.”
Let’s remember David McComb with a video made for “Setting You Free” from his solo album’s original release, and a 1994 live performance by David and his band the Red Ponies (Warren Ellis, Graham Lee, Peter Luscombe on drums, Bruce Haymes on keys and Michael Vidale on bass) from Later… with Jools Holland in the UK.
There’s a palpable joy and freedom to these recordings that make it the most appealing Son Little album to date. The songs themselves benefit from a lack of spit and polish, as Aaron Livingston has always been a bluesman at heart. His compositions here are raw, unvarnished extrapolations of old country-blues and early rock and roll tropes, and they’re all the better for sounding a bhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpcl0_4cPnsit shaggy. And if Livingston has an old soul, he’s by no means stuck in the past, something evident from the SoundCloud-style naming conventions in some of these songs (“bbbaby,” “about her. again”).
“Letting go can be a scary prospect,” says Son Little. “But there’s beauty in it, too. Everything you leave behind opens up space for something new in your life.”
That was certainly the case with Little’s remarkable new album, ‘aloha.’ Written in only eight days and recorded at Paris’s iconic Studio Ferber, the entire project was an exercise in letting go, in ceding control, in surrendering to fate. While Little still plays nearly every instrument on the album himself, he put his songs in the hands of an outside producer for the first time here, collaborating with French studio wizard Renaud Letang (Feist, Manu Chao) to create his boldest, most self-assured statement yet.
“I’d always produced myself in the past,” explains Little, “but it’s easy to get caught up in an endless quest for perfection when you do that. Working with Renaud let me see my work from an outsider’s perspective, and that helped me get out of my own way.”
When Australian music legends Kate Ceberano, Steve Kilbey and Sean Sennett announced that they were forming a new group together last year, fans were immediately curious.
It didn’t take long to conclude that this supergroup would be an impressive one following the release of their first single, “Monument City Lights, 1973″ , and today’s release of the debut record, “The Dangerous Age”, only proves this is no side project for the trio – this is the real deal.
“Creating [Monument City Lights, 1973] with Steve and Kate was a dream,” Sennett at the time. “You can hear where both of these artists came from in the grooves. To write with them – let alone sing and play with them – was a joy.”
To celebrate The Dangerous Age’s release the group have shared the exclusive music video for “Not The LovingKind”, recorded at David Bromley’s studio in Melbourne. “Not The Loving Kind is our power-pop song,” the trio said .
“Three or four chords … and the truth. Fittingly, it was written in a garage by Kate and Sean. For the clip, the boys weren’t around, so we roped in Alison and Jessie to play the guitars and had it filmed by a wonderful emerging director Tash Curato and edited by Cassie Chechinelli.”
Not The Loving Kind from the Kate Ceberano, Steve Kilbey & Sean Sennett from the album The Dangerous Age. Written by Kate Ceberano and Sean Sennett
If you are searching endlessly for new music and bands. So, let us save you from the hours of endless scrolling. We have your new favorite indie band right here. Pretoria is a four piece alternative/indie rock band out of Grand Rapids Michigan. Josh Bilisko (Guitar) met Rob Gullett(Vocals/Bass) and Ben DeWitt (Drums) in high school and they all decided to start playing music in and around the area. Soon after releasing their first EP they added Evelyn Timmis (Synth/Guitar/Vocals) to round out their new indie sound.
The band formed when guitarist Josh Bilisko and bassist Rob Gullet met in high school. After that, Ben Dewitt came in to play drums. The group bonded over their mutual music interests (Nirvana) and they immediately clicked. Pretoria already has an EP and a couple of singles under their belt. Now, they can add their latest “Cape Town” to their discography.
EP opener “You Can’t Explain” is the peak of the album (which implies that there are pits, but there really, really aren’t). Kicking off with high energy, good vibes, and just a taste of what else is to come is a great way to start off this EP. “Cody Maverick” has the funky, beach feel that the band seems keen on embracing. It’s meant to be loud, listened to with the windows down. “Laundry” takes on a more med-tempo beat, but instead of feeling slow, it feels sultry. “Don’t Forget Me” is the melancholy EP closer. It still keeps up the summer vibes, but it’s more toned down. It’s the kind of summer day where it hits you that life isn’t always like a movie, and sometimes you have to be introspective. Lead singer, Bilisko, begs “Don’t forget me” more desperately as the song starts to draw to a close, bringing the EP to a desperate end.
They just sound good. It’s a fun album, that offers something relatable when you need it, but something fun-loving when you don’t. “Cape Town” feels airy, summer-y, and shows something great in this tiny indie band.
Pretoria just released their EP, “Cape Town,” in June. The four track long EP is an indie music lover’s wet dream.
