The Shivas are a rock and roll band from Portland, Oregon formed in 2006. In the years since forming they have brought theirraucous dance party to almost all 50 states, and over 25 countries worldwide, meanwhile releasing five full-length albums and three EPs on labels such as Tender Loving Empire, K, and Burger Records.
“Better Off Dead” is The Shivas 5th studio album and was recorded in January of 2015 at Dub Narcotic Studio in Olympia, Washington.
The Band
Jared Molyneux – Vocals, Guitar, Piano, Organ
Eric Shanafelt – Vocals, Bass Guitar
Kristin Leonard – Vocals, Drums
Ian Hartley – Vocals, Percussion
It’s not easy for bands to change direction when you seem to have hit a winning formula but that’s exactly what The Rails have done on their third album ‘Cancel the Sun’.
Kami Thompson is part of the legendary folk-rock dynasty headed by her dad Richard, and her husband James Walbourne has been playing guitar for loads of bands, including Son Volt and The Pogues. So perhaps it’s not that surprising the duo’s previous albums were more than a little folk-tinged, but the new one has a much broader musical palette, and definitely a harder edge to the writing.
“It’s funny our first album was lighter, so it’s tough to make that transition, we’ve done it in steps and degrees in the last three records, and we’ll maybe do some metal for the next one,” laughs James.
“The record we did, the ‘Other People’ album, was a step in that direction, but we wanted something that was a true reflection of ourselves. It is harder-edged and reflects the music we listen to a little more.”
Even though the album does contain the single, Mossy Well, which has a folk feel, and the dreamy Dictator has a deep baroque feel to it, Kami agrees their bigger sound is part of a natural progression for a band still firmly rooted in the English tradition, often citing The Kinks as their benchmark.
“I think it is definitely not as much of a folky record but if anything is just more English just in a modern way, muses Kami. “All the influences were always there with us but when we were making a folk record we obviously narrowed it down to that.
“I think we let ourselves have free rein this time without pigeon-holing anything, so we just felt liberated to do what we wanted to do.” Another big difference on this record is that Kami and James started to write songs together. It is always tricky for any writing partnership – you only have to ask Morrissey and Marr – but when you are married it can add an extra layer of tension.
“Something had to give as it wasn’t really working how we were doing it before, it was a bit competitive, and a bit tit for tat,” says Kami. “You can’t really see the wood for the trees, and you need someone to go that’s a terrible idea. “The main split is probably that I wrote the lion’s share of the lyrics, and James probably wrote more tunes than me. If I’m writing is it is invariably going to be a bit darker, I’m a grumpy cow.”
That darkness has crept into Kami’s lyrics which focus much more on the big issues of our time, including the global climate crisis. On Save The Planet she puts forward the provocative idea that only mankind’s mass suicide can save our planet from inevitable destruction.
“I think that song was just meant as a thought prompter, and you look around as people are labouring away at one tiny point at how this is all going to work out, in reality, everybody would have to take 18 steps back and make huge, huge life changes,” puts forward the defiant lyricist.
“We just wanted to make people think, and it’s obviously a slightly absurdly statement, but it would fucking solve the problem. I’m playing devil’s advocate, I’m obviously saying something absurd, but come on, give me how are you going to make it work?”
The Rails have previously been hands-on in the studio, but this time they recognised they needed to take a step back and get an experienced hand on the faders. They put in a call into legendary Britpop producer Stephen Street, who has worked with Blur and The Smiths, not expecting him to say yes, but he agreed to join them in Damon Albarn’s studio.
“I think the guitar should always be fucking loud in the mix and on a lot of records it is never loud enough,” asserts James as only a guitarist can. “It was great to have Stephen Street producing the record as he is all about guitars, so it worked.
“He’s very hands-on, but we handed the reins over to Stephen as we wanted to someone to produce for a change as we’ve had quite a lot to do with the production in the past. On this particular record, we wanted to get that Stephen Street sound, that thing that he does, and we trusted him every step of the way.”
As well as his day job James remains in demand as a guitarist currently playing with The Pretenders as well as helping write their forthcoming album. He must have picked something along the way sharing the stage with Chrissie Hynde who as well as being a top guitarist in her own right is a master of creating classic pop songs.
“We’ve just signed off on the next Pretenders record, and weirdly we’ve just done it with Stephen Street. It has rubbed off in more ways than just songwriting really as the first gig I ever had with them I realised ‘oh fuck, you’ve got to step up and be a guitar player’, and you can’t hide away as it is ‘oh, fuck here we go.’
“We talk endlessly about songwriting, what’s great in music and bands. It’s become a big part of my life and Kami’s, and it has rubbed off on what makes a great pop song.”
The other big difference is before doing this record James decided to stop drinking, and he has seen the positive impact of that decision on his work both in the studio and on the road.
“You know, it hindered the work for me, and I would say this record, and the writing of The Pretenders album, are down to giving it up as it is the biggest thing I have ever done really. It is a totally different lifestyle as it catches up with you eventually, but now I get things done.”
Acerbic yet winsome Scottish indiepoppers The Just Joans return with the dazzlingly maudlin “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of the Just Joans”, a deeply personal collection of songs that hazily recall the past and contemplate the futility of the future.
A titular twist on the classic gothic horror novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by compatriot James Hogg, the new album is the follow-up to 2017’s You Might Be Smiling Now… and contains the kind of melodies and mockery that led Uncut to class the band as the point at which “Stephin Merritt lies down with The Vaselines.”
At the forefront remain the mischievous lyrics and heartfelt vocals of siblings David and Katie Pope, aided and abetted by Chris Elkin on lead guitar, Fraser Ford on bass guitar and Jason Sweeney on drums. Yet it is the recruitment of multi-instrumentalist Arion Xenos and guest appearance of Butcher Boy’s Alison Eales to arrange strings that have helped elevate the band’s music to new heights.
Their progression is most noticeable on lead single “Dear Diary, I Died Again today”, a painfully beautiful admission of everyday anxiety and “When Nietzsche Calls”, the triumphant cry of a spurned lover revelling in the misery of their ex to a backdrop of trumpets and violins. The juxtaposition of the fragility shown in these tracks with the menace of “Wee Guys (Bobby’s Got A Punctured Lung)” – an observation and understanding of the casual violence that once cast a shadow over the band’s hometown – highlights The Just Joans’ ability to seamlessly flip between sensitivity and danger, and sums up why Highway Queens described them as the “perfect Glasgow kiss.”
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of the Just Joans is a veritable smorgasbord of misery, longing and unrequited love; stories of small town resentments, half-forgotten school friends, failing relationships and awkward workplace conversations. As David explains: “It’s a collection torn from the pages of the diary I haven’t kept over the past 25 years. There are songs about places and people I vaguely remember, feelings I think that I once may have felt and the onset of middle-aged ennui.”
Despite entering new territory with the addition of brass and strings, they have nevertheless maintained the DIY ethos that made them darlings of the underground indie-pop scene, with each song on the album recorded and produced by the band in various gloomy bedrooms around Glasgow.
Releases January 10th, 2020
The Just Joans are David Pope, Katie Pope, Chris Elkin, Fraser Ford, Arion Xenos and Jason Sweeney.
All songs written, recorded and produced by The Just Joans.
Cherry Red will release a much expanded, four-CD edition of Mercury Rev‘s All Is Dream album, in November.
The album was the follow-up to the acclaimed Deserter’s Songs and features the singles ‘Nite And Fog’, ‘The Dark Is Rising’ and ‘Little Rhymes’. The album was issued in 2001, breaching the top 20 in both the UK and the USA.
The new four-CD deluxe edition has been “compiled and coordinated” in conjunction with the band’s Jonathan Donahue and Sean ‘Grasshopper’ Mackowiak. As well as the original ten-track album this set offers a bonus disc of 20 B-sides, outtakes and demos, half of which are previously unreleased. The third CD offers previously unissued concert recordings while the final disc delivers a French radio session which was only previously available as a promo CD.
The All Is Dream four-CD set is packaged as a hardcover book with lyrics and sleeve notes by Keith Cameron.
Rufus Wainwright teams with acclaimed producer Mitchell Froom (Los Lobos, Crowded House, Suzanne Vega) for this single he’s calling his first pop release since 2012’s Out of the Game.“Trouble In Paradise” is about the fashion world but also applies to the state of the planet,” says Rufus, adding that it’s got “a sense of sophistication and an animalistic instinct.” Stay tuned for more in 2020.
Meet Stimmerman, a punk-infused solo artist who knows how to combine heavy guitar riffs and a whole lot of attitude. It’s not hard to see what we’re talking about if you listen to, for instance, her latest single “It Shows,” which has one of the sickest, distorted, punk rock guitar riffs you’ll hear this year, The song comes from Stimmerman’s forthcoming “Goofballs” album which just so happens to be the first full-length released under the Stimmerman moniker.
The album traverses the subjects of loss and survivor’s guilt, related to her experience seeing a good friend pass away due to a fatal drug overdose at a young age. Side A of Goodfalls is about looking back at the environment in which her relationship began with the friend, a reality filled with the pressures of children having to reach a certain level of success, mature faster than they should be, and the general difficulties of being an adolescent living in Brooklyn. Side B is more of an introspective look at grief and culpability, and coping with her friend’s passing. The name of the album Goofballs has a double meaning, where from one point of view, the album explores more of Stimmerman’s sense of humour, but on the other hand, it also is a reference to the meaning of goofballs within the drug culture where it’s meant to describe the class of drug barbiturates.
Stimmerman, real name Eva Lawitts, is a native New Yorker, active in the music industry for many years. She has played on various records by various artists and toured with many musicians, including Vagabon and Princess Nokia. She is also half of the team behind the creation of Wonderpark Studios in Brooklyn and previously released the debut EP Pleasant Vistas In a Somber Place.
British experimental musician Anna Meredith has released a new album, “Fibs”, via Black Prince Fury . Now that the album is out, we can highlight one of our favorite album tracks that wasn’t already a pre-release single: “Killjoy.” The eagerly anticipated second studio album, Fibs, due for release on 25th October via Moshi Moshi/Black Prince Fury.
Arriving three and a half years on from the release of her Scottish Album of the Year Award-winning debut studio album Varmints, FIBS is 45 minutes of technicolour maximalism, almost perpetual rhythmic reinvention, and boasts a visceral richness and unparalleled accessibility.
Previously Meredith had shared Fibs’ first single, “Paramour,” via a hypnotic video for the track featuring a Lego train traveling around Meredith and her band as they perform the song. It’s surely one of the best music videos of the year. Then she shared another song from the album, “moonsmoons,” as well as an Augmented Reality app for the song that uses Spatial Audio so that you can place various instrumental parts of the song in various areas in whichever space you are in. Then she shared “Inhale Exhale,” in which she sang the song in a carwash.
FIBS is the follow-up to her acclaimed 2016-released debut album, Varmints. Since then she has kept busy, doing the soundtrack to the Bo Burnham-directed film Eighth Grade and working as a classical composer. And, a press release points out, that she “was recently named a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s birthday honors list for services to music, making her Anna Meredith MBE.”
Of the album title FIBS, in a previous press release Meredith said fibs are “lies – but nice friendly lies, little stories and constructions and daydreams and narratives that you make for yourself or you tell yourself.”
Dan Bejar returns in January with his latest album, “Have We Met”, which he’ll support with an extensive 2020 tour.
Destroyer came to be when, in 1996, Dan Bejar released the influential lo-fi compilation “We’ll Build Them a Golden Bridge”. Despite the poor sound quality of the recordings on the album, it managed to garner critical success thanks to its catchy melodies and Bejar’s use of obscure and sometimes downright confusion lyricism.
The follow-up, 1998’s “City of Daughters”, saw Bejar joined by John Collins. who complimented the record, and noted that it still managed to sound “homespun” despite the fact that the band had used a professional recording studio this time. Also praised was the return of Bejar’s trademark poetry, something which would become a recognisable constant throughout the band’s later output.
In 2000, they released “Thief”, an album which saw them attempt to deliver their trademark songwriting style with the help of a backing band. The album’s lyrics, many believe, conveyed Bejar’s thinly-veiled feelings of the music industry. Again, the album received generally positive reviews from major outlets.
Since then, the band has continued to progress as an entity; first by developing their character sound with “Streethawk: A Seduction” in 2001, and then returned to their roots with the rougher-sounding “This Night” in 2002. The album was mixed in less than a week and polarised critics, although Bejar himself credits it as being his favorite Destroyer record.
Many of the band’s diverse and unique influences have managed to make their impact on Destroyer releases, including Miles Davis and Roxy Music. Over the span of their nearly twenty-year career, this has allowed them to produce wildly different and adventurous works, while still managing to keep them firmly tied in to Destroyer’s philosophy and style.
From the album “Have We Met,” out January 31st, 2020.
Coldplay are releasing a new album, “Everyday Life”, on November 22nd via Parlophone/Atlantic and this week they shared its first two singles: “Orphans” and “Arabesque.” The album was announced via postcards sent to fans and has been touted as an experimental double album, with one side titled “Sunrise” and the other “Sunset.” “Orphans” is a bit Coldplay-by-numbers, but “Arabesque” is much more interesting. It’s nearly six minutes long and has an Afrobeat vibe, which makes sense considering Fela Kuti and is band contribute horns to it (it also features Stromae). If the rest of the album sounds more like “Arabesque” than “Orphans” then it could turn out to be pretty experimental by Coldplay standards.
We’ll have to wait and see. But for now “Arabesque” is one of their coolest, most interesting songs the band has released in years.“Orphans” and “Arabesque” are available now on a seven-inch single via Third Man. Coldplay will be performing on Saturday Night Livefor the sixth time on November 2nd.
The album’s cover art is “based around a 1919 photo of guitarist Jonny Buckland’s great-grandfather’s band.”
Coldplay released their last album, their seventh, A Head Full of Dreams, back in December 2015 via Parlophone/Atlantic and released a follow-up EP, Kaleidoscope EP, in July 2017,
Taken from the new album, “Everyday Life”, out November 22nd.
We are very excited to report that Coldplay’s eighth album, Everyday Life, will be released on Friday, November 22 on CD, vinyl, cassette and digital formats. The 53-minute double album is divided into two halves, Sunrise and Sunset. The album’s cover image is based around a 1919 photo of Jonny’s great-grandfather’s band.
King Princess the songwriter Mikaela Straus, now aged 20, launched her recording career early last year with “1950,” a hit that begins with a blunt statement about her sexual orientation: “I hate it when dudes try to chase me.” Then it delves into an infatuation “tell me why my gods look like you” while imagining the repressed 1950s, when homosexuality was expected to stay closeted.
The music had the same dual perspective, melding current and retro. King Princess is signed to Zelig, the label run by the producer Mark Ronson; she sang on his album, “Late Night Feelings,” and she shares his penchant for blurring past and present. In “1950,” subterranean bass throbs and digitally tweaked drums and backup vocals merge with the vintage warmth of hymn like piano and reverb-heavy guitar chords, while the song’s structure could have come out of a 1960s pop factory like the Brill Building. King Princess, who describes herself as genderqueer and placed her sexuality upfront even more so on the songs that would join “1950” on her 2018 EP, “Made My Bed” and exulted in the enduring power of desire and love.
She carries that approach candid and forthright while grounded in past generations’ pop onto her full-length debut album, “Cheap Queen.” She sings about self-doubt and self-confidence, passion and longing, connection and betrayal; barely out of her teens, she’s a young person sorting things out for herself, and human inconstancy isn’t bound by gender. While King Princess writes about 21st-century romance one new track is “Watching My Phone” — the music places her songs on a longer timeline, full of ghosts from previous pop eras.“Cheap Queen” is King Princess’s debut album on Mark Ronson’s imprint, Zelig.
In “Homegirl,” the singer is captivated by a woman who also draws male attention: “We’re friends at the party/I’ll give you my body at home,” she promises. The tune is a waltz, set in King Princess’s huskier lower range; strummed acoustic guitar and simulated vibraphone make the song hover and sway like K.D. Lang looking back to Patsy Cline. In “Prophet,” minor-key electric piano chords, distant chimes and a film-noir backbeat gently push King Princess’s breathy confession: “I can only think about you.”
She reaches back to folk-rock for “You Destroyed My Heart,” which decides, “Now I want somebody good.” And “Ain’t Together” about an iffy long-distance relationship echoes late-1960s baroque pop, with a relaxed tempo, backup voices going “doo-doo-doo-doo” and major-to-minor-to-major harmony shifts as King Princess insists, “I can’t let this fall apart.” While the lyric video toys with masculine and feminine roles — football player, cheerleader the music is all about yearning.
Straus is the daughter of a recording engineer, and she grew up around studio equipment and musicians. Ronson is credited for some post production work in two songs, but throughout the album, King Princess is her own producer (with collaborators including the guitarist Nick Long and the engineer Mike Malchicoff) as well as a major part of her studio backup band; she programmed beats and played keyboards, bass, drums and guitar. Most of the songs are midtempo, keyboard-centered ballads, harking back to Fiona Apple (with whom Straus has remade one of Apple’s songs, “I Know”) and perhaps Stevie Wonder, Carole King and the piano-centric moments of the Beatles.
She also knows her way around the hip-hop arsenal of loops and samples. The title song on “Cheap Queen” revolves around sampled movie dialogue with looped keyboard chords and programmed drums as King Princess considers her ascending career and its new ethical quandaries: “Since everyone wants me it’s harder to be myself,” she sings.
