Following the release of her critically acclaimed sophomore album, ‘First Flower’, last October, Texan chanteuse Molly Burch returns with two heart-stopping tracks. Entitled ‘Ballads’ in homage to the strong and powerful female vocalists that she admires, this 7” EP embodies what Burch loves to do and what she does best: crafting music with emotion, drama and romance, giving her voice all the room it needs to burn bright.
Pinegrove’s new album begins with a breath and ends with a shimmering exhalation. In between is “Marigold”, an urgent, multivalent meditation—and an expanded take on the blend of alt-country, indie rock and cerebral humanism that’s inspired the band’s ardent fan community. Marigold marks their Rough Trade Records debut, offering what songwriter Evan Stephens Hall calls a “heart-first” perspective.
Those familiar with Pinegrove will recognize signature elements of the band’s sound: literary yet conversational lyrics, geometrically interlocking guitars, the dynamic shifting shadows of rhythm and structure. But this effort marks the most spacious, bold, and well defined iteration of the project yet
Formed in 2010 by childhood friends Evan and drummer Zack Levine, Pinegrove have released three previous albums — Everything So Far(2015), Cardinal (2016), and Skylight(2018) — to massive critical acclaim, garnering them a widespread and devoted listenership.
They’ve described their sound as variously as introspective party music, or energetic music in the folk tradition; in any case they have combined catharsis and inventive structures with irrepressible melodies, resonant lyrics and emotive twang. Marigold finds the band expanding into the latter, spreading out over varying tempos and swelling pedal steel. But in surprising moments, the album can suddenly unfold into the band’s heaviest, most unbound offerings yet—a cavalier disregard of genre in favour of something honest and unique.
Pinegrove’s new album ‘Marigold’, coming January 17th, 2020 on Rough Trade Records.
Babehoven is the full-band vehicle for the songwriting of Philadelphia-based songwriter Maya Bon. The band are currently gearing up for the release of their upcoming EP, “Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height”, and have this week shared the latest offering from it, “Only So”.
On Only So, Maya seems to grapple with struggles both personal and global, finding similarities in the battles and attempting to find a way to carry on when things get too much. As Maya sings, “there is only so much I can take of this destruction”, attempting as she explains to, “draw a line in the sand, to set intentions for my healing and boundaries for my struggle”. Even if the tales here are deeply personal they can easily resonate with anyone wanting to find a path towards moving on and starting to heal the universal wounds. The whole thing is set to a subtly crunching musical backing, full of rattling cymbals and crunchy, flourishes of guitar, none of which gets in the way of Maya’s impressive cracked vocal delivery.
One of those songwriters who seems to instantly command your attention, Babehoven might be one of the year’s most important new musical voices. Demonstrating Visible Differences Of Height is out February 7th.
The Toronto punk quartet takes a giant leap forward on their second album, crafting noise rock that’s not just aggressive, but keenly self-aware. With an album in constant conflict with itself, Outer Heaven pairs the manic energy of punk with a probing intellect that reaches beyond the genre. Vocalist-guitarist Shehzaad Jiwani described the band’s sophomore effort as an attempt “to make the noise more melodic and the melodies more dissonant.” Over the course of just 10 songs, Greys oscillate between hard and soft, anxious and acerbic, but they never sound anything less than fully engaged.
Four years ago, I probably wouldn’t have included Toronto punk band Greys as a band I like. There were experimental inklings in their two 2016 releases, Warm Shadow and Outer Heaven, but they finally threw out the rulebook on their 2019 album Age Hasn’t Spoiled You. You’ll find noise-punk, post-rock, electronic and psychedelic drone wrapped up in a beautiful and shadowy package, but it’s not without moments of accessible anthemics either (“These Things Happen,” “Arc Light”).
It’s a dense listen that draws on everything from punk, noise and psych-pop to jazz, trip-hop and industrial. They sneak in unconventional influences in a way that doesn’t seem disjointed or immediately jarring. There’s a magnetic sprawl to this album, and each musical tangent is a new, charming landscape along a picturesque, spontaneous drive to nowhere in particular. Though that’s not to say this album is directionless. The driving seven-minute centerpiece, “Aphantasia,” holds the album together and seamlessly swings like a pendulum from one idea to the next.
Maybe it’s obtuse to include a genre-defying album like this in a genre-specific list, but if the point of punk is to push boundaries and question conventional wisdom, then Age Hasn’t Spoiled You seems like a noble inclusion. Greys traverse new frontiers, musical guile that make this album an immensely stimulating one.
Long unavailable solo albums to be reissued by Needle Mythology • Vinyl available with SIGNED lyric sheets • Remastered CDs with bonus tracks from Robert Forster, the ex-Go-Betweens singer-songwriter, is to reissue his first two solo albums this March.
The albums – Danger In The Past and Calling From A Country Phone – are the fourth and fifth releases from Pete Paphides’ Needle Mythology label. These were first issued in 1990 and 1993 respectively, and have been long out of print and indeed, this campaign also heralds the debut of Calling From A Country Phone on vinyl.
It’s been a busy old time for Forster of late, following a 2019 which saw a new album Inferno, and the release of the well-received box set G is for Go-Betweens Vol. 2.
1990’s Danger In The Past was originally recorded in Berlin with a cast of Bad Seeds alumni such as Mick Harvey (producer, multi-instrumentalist), Hugo Race (guitar) and Thomas Wydler (drums) while Calling From A Country Phone saw Robert return to Brisbane and the same studio where most of the early Go-Betweens gear had been recorded.
These vinyl reissues are issued on heavyweight vinyl (pressed at The Vinyl Factory), are housed in a gatefold sleeve and each comes with a bonus seven-inch single; Danger In The Past has ‘The Land That Time Forgot’ / ‘Falling Star’, and Calling From A Country Phone features ‘Lonely Boy’ / ‘Brookfield 1975’. The CDs append these songs to the albums as ‘hidden’ bonus tracks, and come with a 16 page booklet.
Forster himself has been fully involved on these reissues contributing new sleeve notes and unearthing old photographs.
Curator Paphides has been particularly effusive about the remastering undertaken by Sean Magee at Abbey Road, saying his work “dramatically revealed a depth and physicality to these recordings that casts new light on Robert’s intentions for these records. Calling From A Country Phone, in particular, is a revelation. It’s as though an invisible membrane between listener and songs has been removed.”
Both albums are now available to pre-order on either format via Needle Mythology’s official store. CDs come with a Needle Mythology badge pack while vinyl purchasers get the badges and a Signed lyric sheet. Bundles also available!
Danger In The PastandCalling From A Country Phoneare released by Needle Mythology on 27th March 2020
After spending years as a major presence in Brooklyn’s thriving music scene, Frankie Rose relocated to her familial home of Los Angeles for 18 months with the intention of establishing yet another moment in her storied indie rock métier. Gradually, she found herself short on sleep, funds and optimism. “I moved to LA, drama ensued and I ended up on a catering truck. I was like, how can this be my life after being a touring musician and living off of music. I had really lost my way and I thought I was totally done.”
Through sleepless nights of listening to broadcaster Art Bell’s paranormal-themed archives, Frankie’s thoughts had turned to “who am I, I’m not cut out for this business, it’s not for me.” She continues, “I was literally in my room in L.A., not knowing how I was going to get out. But out of it all, I just decided to keep making music, because it is what I love and what I do – regardless of the outcome.”
Towards the end of her time spent in Los Angeles, Frankie reached out to Jorge Elbrecht (Tamaryn, Gang Gang Dance, Violens) and began sketching what became the basic outline of what felt like a new album. Then, rather fortuitously, Frankie ended up back in Brooklyn with the realization that “in the end, I’m on my own. I have to do these things on my own.”
The months that ensued meant basically working with no budget and finding ways to record in-between days. This time enabled Frankie to experiment musically with a variety of people that ultimately changed the way she worked. “I got a lot of input from people like Dave Harrington (Darkside), who was helpful reconstructing the songs, adding dynamics and changing up the rhythms.”
The result of this existential odyssey is “Cage Tropical,” Frankie’s 4th album. It is awash with vintage synths, painterly effects pedals, upside down atmosphere and reverberating vocals. It evokes a new wave paranormality of sorts that drifts beyond the songs themselves. “My references aren’t just music,” says Frankie, “I love old sci-fi. They Live is one of my favorite movies ever, same with Suspiria. 80’s sci-fi movies with a John Carpenter soundtrack, with silly synths – that makes it into my file, to the point that I’ll write lyrics incorporating that kind of stuff. It’s in there.”
Beginning with the shimmery, cinematic and percussive sparkling of the album’s opening track “Love in Rockets,” the song’s refrain of “a wheel, a wheel of wasting my life: a wheel, a wheel of wasting my time” immediately alludes to those darker circumstances that led to the creative origins of “Cage Tropical.”“It’s all essentially based on what happened to me in Los Angeles and then a return to Brooklyn,” says Frankie. “Misery turned into something good. The whole record to me is a redemption record and it is the most positive one I’ve made”
“I feel like I am finally free from worrying about an outcome. I don’t care. I already lost everything. I already had the worst-case scenario. When that happens, you do become free. In the end, it’s about me rescuing myself via having this record.”
Patience is the name for the personal pop project of Roxanne Clifford, singer for the adored early 2010s band Veronica Falls. Clifford possesses one of those singing voices that will echo and linger in your head long after the record is done, which fits these songs well, considering how much they resemble the dance-party-life we each imagine for ourselves. This is lush synthpop that speaks to unrealized dreams and long-held secrets. The melodies and grooves carry within them a general sense of unfulfillment and a simultaneous, perhaps contradictory, unbridled joy.
Clifford’s imagery perfectly nailing that nagging regret that haunts every new adventure. With the first appearance of a guitar hook in a Patience song, it’s a classic pop moment enunciated perfectly by Clifford’s instantly recognizable vocal.
In the making of their new album “Darkness Brings The Wonders Home”, Smoke Fairies drew inspiration from mysteries both real and imagined: sea monsters, flocks of crows taking flight in extravagant formation, strange creatures dwelling in the mud near their new South London abode. With their mesmeric vocal presence and starkly poetic lyrics, singer/multi-instrumentalists Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies embed all that odd magic into songs that speak to the realities of modern times—isolation, insomnia, an overall unease with the state of the world—and ultimately uncover an unlikely sense of hope.
“Times of darkness are when people are often the most imaginative,” says Davies in reflecting on the album’s title. “It helps you to see all the wonders of the world you hadn’t noticed before—the things you’ve been blind to because you’ve been on autopilot for so long.”
Produced by Phil Ek (Fleet Foxes, The Black Angels, The Shins), Darkness Brings The Wonders Home merges Smoke Fairies’ musings and meditations with a decidedly guitar-driven sound, the duo’s unearthly harmonies endlessly floating atop lead-heavy riffs. Over the course of a rigorous month-long session in Seattle, Smoke Fairies adopted a purposely intimate approach to achieving that singular sonic tone.
‘We spent a long time trying to fathom the direction we wanted to take on this album. At times the options seemed overwhelming, but as new songs started to form we realized we needed to take them back to our core sound – our interplaying guitar parts’ says Davies. “So then we had to really step up and do it ourselves, without relying on a band to fill anything in, which was quite a challenge—physically, mentally, everything.”
While Smoke Fairies initially intended to return to the earthy folk of early work like 2011’s Through Low Light and Trees, the duo soon found themselves assuming a new boldness in their guitar style and, in turn, pushing into much wilder terrain. In doing so, Blamire and Davies spent much of their time perusing the guitar shop near Ek’s chosen studio, experimenting with countless guitars and amps to augment the album’s sonic palette. “It was like being in a sweet shop, getting to try all these guitars we’d normally never be able to afford,” says Blamire. “We ended up making friends with guitars we never thought to use before, like this weird vintage Kay that sounded great but was so hard to play—to the point where there were days when our fingers were bleeding, or we had blisters in places you didn’t even know you could get them.”
Opening with “On the Wing,” Darkness Brings The Wonders Home quickly proves the power of matching that pummeling guitar work with Smoke Fairies’ finespun songwriting. With its woozy intensity and spellbinding rhythms, the song also introduces one of the album’s most prominent themes: the often-futile attempts at true connection at a time when the most impetuous behavior tends to prevail. “When we were little my brother wrote a poem about waking up and finding he’d changed into a swan overnight, with feathers growing out of his arms,” says Blamire of the song’s inspiration. “To me that’s an interesting metaphor for how people can grow into becoming quite flighty, where they’re never really able to settle in one place or with one person.”
An album deeply informed by aberrations of nature, Darkness Brings The Wonders Home delves into a different kind of fascination on “Out of the Woods”—a song sparked from Smoke Fairies’ study of the overgrown pond behind their house. “There’s something magical about all these weird things living out there in the mud,” says Blamire. “We started to project onto that, like the idea of something unexpected and good coming from the mud of your emotions.” Another song attuned to the fear of the unknown, the hypnotically ominous “Chew Your Bones” mines inspiration from the titular beast of Sarah Perry’s novel The Essex Serpent and from a local urban myth involving a character called The Croydon Cat Killer. “For years people thought someone was going around killing cats—they put a proper police force on it and everything, and then realized it’s just foxes,” Davies notes. “I’d also recently read an article about how some people feel uncomfortable with the idea of bringing kids into the world at the moment,” she adds, “We needed to write about the growing feeling that the world is on the verge of real change, there is the sense that there is this scary, unknown future lurking just beyond us ’.
Despite its many wanderings into otherworldly territory, Darkness Brings The Wonders Home remains rooted in real-life anxieties, particularly on tracks like the fluttering and urgent “Don’t You Want to Spiral Out of Control.” “The modern way of interacting around love seems too empty to me—it feels like it makes us into much colder people than we ever were before,” says Blamire. “It’s like we’re missing that spontaneity, the ability to bind together over something more than an image on a screen. That song came from wanting to just shake people and go, ‘don’t you want to spiral out of control again? Don’t you want to just let loose?’”
Throughout Darkness Brings The Wonders Home, Smoke Fairies adorn their observations with so many exquisite flourishes: the swinging melodies and elegant shredding of “Elevator,” the girl-group harmonies and spiky riffs of “Disconnect,” the delicate tension between taut guitar lines and swooning vocals on “Chocolate Rabbit.
For Smoke Fairies, Darkness Brings The Wonders Home signals a strengthening of the inextricable bond they’ve forged through the years. “So many of the songs are about these feelings of disconnection, but the irony is that Jessica and I have each other, and that means so much more than any of the other relationships that come and go,” says Blamire. And because of that connection, the two found the courage essential for bringing such an emotionally trying album to life. “I think what we’re attempting to show is that, in all this chaos that’s so tumultuous and overwhelming, there are always ways to change your perspective,” says Blamire. “Making this album, we conquered so many worries and doubts and felt so much stronger at the end—we went right into the darkness, and somehow brought something incredibly positive out of it.”
“A Song for Me” is the third album by the British progressive rock band Family, released on 23rd January 1970 on Reprise Records.
The album was recorded in late 1969 at Olympic Studios in London. It was their first album with new members John Weider on bass and Poli Palmer on keyboards, flute and vibraphone. The past several months had been full of setbacks for Family. Rick Grech had left for Blind Faith, Jim King was forced to leave for getting too deep into drug addiction, and their first U.S. tour proved to be a disaster.
Although many of the songs had been written with King’s saxophone in mind, Charlie Whitney and Roger Chapman were able to rework them with Palmer’s instruments, and Palmer quickly made himself integral to Family’s sound. Because some of these songs had been debuted in live performances in the previous year, many Family fans found themselves getting accommodated to arrangements that sounded radically different from what they expected.
This might well be among the best of the early Family recordings. A combination of hard rock and wistful folk-rock (it sounds as if Chapman and Whitney were listening to a lot of Incredible String Band), “A Song for Me” veers toward early progressive rock, but isn’t as nakedly indulgent as some early prog-rock recordings, perhaps they wanted to sound like a rock band screwing around with jazz. Perhaps their most experimental record, it seems as though the credo in making this disc was that anything went. And on tracks like “Drowned in Wine,” it works quite well. Again, Chapman offers more proof of his vocal greatness, and again the record sells large quantities in England and nearly nothing in America.
Recorded at Olympic Studios in late 1969 and issued in January 1970, ‘A Song For Me’ marked a new chapter in the story of the band. The middle months of 1969 had been a period of trauma with the departure of bassist/violinist Ric Grech to join the supergroup Blind Faith and the dismissal of saxophonist Jim King. As a result, vocalist Roger Chapman, guitarist John ‘Charlie’ Whitney and drummer Rob Townsend recruited bassist and violinist John Weider (previously with Eric Burdon And The Animals) and multi-instrumentalist John ‘Poli’ Palmer (previously with Blossom Toes and then Eclection) joined on vibes, keyboards and flute.
As a result of the line-up change, the musical characteristics of Family progressed and ‘A Song For Me’ was a wonderful showcase for the reincarnated band. Upon its release the album reached number four in the UK charts and saw the band enjoy further success in Europe.
This new two-disc edition of this classic album has been newly remastered from the master tapes and also includes 14 bonus tracks drawn from singles and BBC Radio sessions from August 1969 and January 1970. This release also features an illustrated booklet with a new essay and is a fitting tribute to a much-treasured band.
“When the Tree Bears Fruit” is the debut album from Melbourne four-piece Parsnip. Following on from two 7-inches singles in the last two years, Parsnip’s first full-length album is playful, poetic, propulsive punk. An album perpetually in motion, When the Tree Bears Fruit is just over half an hour of absurd, understated energy. There’s an immediacy to the sheer joy, velocity and whimsy of Parsnip’s delivery.
The band formed in 2016, and played their debut show in a sharehouse living room. When the Tree Bears Fruit was recorded over three days, and truly captures the energy the group are known for live, of a cannily controlled chaos. This is an album that invites its listener to join in its celebration: the record’s title, inspired by the ideas of guru and poet Sri Chinmoy, refers to the idea that a tree will grow fruit and it will be offered for anyone and everyone to share in. The band see this principle as it applies to their work – to sharing their joy and nonsense with the world, and hoping people will enjoy it.
Off-kilter, absurdist, dream/nightmare, 1960s pop forms form the basis for Parsnip’s sound. The fresh Melbourne quartet’s debut album is a fun, funky jaunt that seems all about creative mixing-and-matching, in a minimalist style riddled with quirky organ and singy-songy, art-school nursery rhymes. Not to mention exuberant group singalongs, all four women seemingly joining together for a chorus of delightful weirdness. Parsnip’s been around just a few years, and seems to be having a blast.
Second single from Parsnip’s debut LP, “When The Tree Bears Fruit”, released August 9th in AU/NZ through Anti Fade and out worldwide August 30th through Trouble In Mind.
