The Who has shared another new original single to appear on the veteran rock band’s forthcoming studio album, simply titled Who, which is set to arrive on November 22nd via Polydor Records. Titled “All This Music Must Fade”, the new recording follows the previously-shared “Ball & Chain” as the second single which will appear on the band’s first studio effort since 2006’s Endless Wire.
The recording starts out hot with a burst of sonic energy which is followed by singer Roger Daltrey‘s cheeky and honest opening lyrics of, “I don’t care, I know you’re gonna hate this song/And that’s it, We never really got along/It’s not new, not diverse/It won’t light up your parade, It’s just simple verse.”
While many older artists of the “Classic Rock” era take pleasure in the shower of praise which critics and fans offer in regards to their hit singles of the past, The Who share more of a realistic, selfless point of view on their new music, as Daltrey is also heard belting out the repeated chorus lines of, “All this music will fade/Just like the edge of a blade.”
According to a statement shared by The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, “All This Music Must Fade” is “Dedicated to every artist who has ever been accused of ripping off someone else’s song. Seriously? Our musical palette is limited enough in the 21st century without some dork claiming to have invented a common chord scheme.”
‘All This Music Must Fade’ from The Who’s new studio album WHO, released on 6th December 2019.
Bold, weird, wild, wired, sonically luxurious yet never losing touch with its DIY-‘til-I-die roots, Thumb World is a voyage to the outer rings of Pictish Trail’s mind at its darkest, funniest and most inventive – a plugged-in, fuzzed-out, fucked-up contemplation on, as he puts it, “life repeating and gradually degrading, the inevitable cyclical nature of things, and the sense of their ultimately being no escape.”
Expect alien abductions, thumping beats, Trump-haired pigs, paternal panic, astronaut sex, bad acid trips, worse hangovers, lashings of distortion and a lot of anthropomorphic thumbs. “Our opposable thumbs are the things that separate us from most other animals on Earth,” Pictish explains, of the fat digit symbolism, “they are also the things that we use to swipe on screens, to separate ourselves from our normal lives, but which in turn trap us within an artificial reality.”
Produced and mixed by Rob Jones, featuring string arrangements from Kim Moore and drumming from Alex Thomas (Squarepusher, Anna Calvi, Air), Thumb World is Pictish Trail’s most collaborative album to date.
An audio-visual dialogue with Swatpaz, AKA Scottish artist Davey Ferguson – the man behind the Turbo Fantasy series and an entire episode of cult TV phenomenon Adventure Time – furnished Johnny with not just a graphic aesthetic for the album, but even helped him to shape the sound of the finished record. “I sent Davey a work-inprogress mix of the album,” Johnny says, “he came back with sketches in which he had reimagined Thumb World as an 80’s arcade game. Some of the songs are centered around specific visual images, inspired by Davey’s sketches.”
Due for release on Fire Records on February 21, 2020. Four years in the making, Thumb World is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Scottish Album of the Year Award public vote winner Future Echoes.
Toy, who released Happy In The Hollow, their fourth, and by far most acclaimed album to date, in January of this year, have announced details of “Songs Of Consumption”, an 8-song collection of unique interpretations of tracks which have inspired the band.
Taking on a varied musical range from The Stooges via Amanda Lear to Soft Cell, the album, released on Friday 15th November 2019, will be available on LP, CD and digital formats. A hand-numbered edition of 300, 180gm seafoam green vinyl is available exclusively via Bandcamp and the Tough Love website.
Self-produced and recorded at home studios, the track listing of the album is as follows:
1. Down On The Street
2. Follow Me
3. Sixty Forty
4. Cousin Jane
5. Fun City
6. Lemon Incest
7. Always On My Mind
8. A Dolls House
Talking about the album, TOY said: “Songs of Consumption sonically is a continuation and development of the themes conceived on Happy In The Hollow and it will show people where we are going towards musically. The DIY approach was explored further utilising more of the electronic elements that we touched upon before. Drum machines, stripped down arrangements and rudimentary production give a primitive sound that we thought suited the choice of songs. Some of the songs have very big sounding production, so we wanted to experiment with them by going in a different direction.
Music is consumed voraciously now whereas these songs came from a time when the song was of the most important thing and that’s what was appreciated. Stripping them back to the essence of what they are was also something we wanted to explore. Also, we wanted to make a covers record with songs by people that influenced us in the past few years and it’s as much about the way they dealt with their ideas, and how they put themselves in uncomfortable situations in order to make something that in the end is simple. It’s a homage to the spirit of these people, that helped us to untangle ourselves from our inherent complicated nature and create a new space where we can exist.”
Additionally, having played a sold-out tour of the UK in February, including a mesmerising show at Village Underground in London, the band have announced a couple of very special shows at the end of the year.
Playing under the banner of ‘Hollowed Out – A night of strange sighting and unhabitual ritual’ the shows will see them re-imagining songs from Happy In The Hollow.
“Four of Arrows” is the incredible new album from Seattle based indie rockers Great Grandpa.
A departure from the playful nods to pizza and zombies on 2017’s Plastic Cough, this beautiful collection of 11 songs weaves through the pains of familial divisions, partnership, internal and external forgiveness, and the struggles of mental illness, going headfirst into the darkness but escaping from the other side with their most transparent and accomplished work to date. A must-listen.
FFO Big Thief, Hop Along, Better Oblivion Community Center
“Four of Arrows”, a creative turn toward introspection and Great Grandpa’s collective result of rest and solitude. Undoubtedly, the 11 songs comprising Four of Arrows. The writing and recording process had evolved – less Seattle garage jams and more vulnerable solo songwriting sessions. Most of the songs on Four of Arrows were written in isolation by Patrick and Carrie Goodwin while traveling and living in the Midwest.
The band instantly found common threads between their individual contributions, citing mutual love and admiration for vulnerable and emotionally resonate music. Four of Arrows embraces subtlety and pays close attention to the quiet. From the methodical dirge of “Dark Green Water” into the haunting and howling guitar of “Digger” – Great Grandpa try something new by letting the acoustic guitar and piano lay the foundation for many of the album’s tracks. ‘Four of Arrows’ is out October 25, 2019 via Double Double Whammy.
For a band that’s typically so meticulous and exacting in their sound and process, Wilco’s 2016 album Schmilco seemed like a rushed and pieced-together work that followed its predecessor, Star Wars, a little more than a year later. The strain was evident.
Ode to Joy is the bands the 11th studio album from the pioneering Chicago band Wilco – released via dBpm Records. The album features 11 new songs written and produced by Jeff Tweedy and recorded by Wilco at the bands’ own Chicago studio dubbed The Loft. The group went on a break, while leader Jeff Tweedy released three solo albums in succession, with the last, Warmer, arriving less than six months before Wilco return for their 11th LP, Ode to Joy.
A lot has happened in the relatively short three years between Wilco albums and, obviously, not all of them on the personal front. It’s been a rough period for a lot of people; anger, disillusionment and hopelessness seem to be at the core of a lot of lives these days. So, it’s no small thing that the record is called Ode to Joy. The somewhat winking title notwithstanding, there’s light in the darkness of these songs. You just have to dig a little to find it.
That’s a lot to ask, even from Wilco’s most devoted fans. Especially when the opening “Bright Leaves” barely works up a melody to lift spirits. But then the next two songs – “Before Us” and “One and a Half Stars” – proceed at a similar pace, and Ode to Joy begins to find strange comfort in its melancholy. “Now, when something’s dead, we try to kill it again,” Tweedy sings on “Before Us,” striking a sense of nostalgia for a lost past that eventually settles for resigned coziness.
The album is like that, creeping up on you with unexpected pokes you’re not really expecting to find in the sad-sack nature of many of the songs. By the time “Love Is Everywhere (Beware)” rolls along during the last third of the LP, Ode to Joy sounds like the most organic Wilco album since 2004’s A Ghost Is Born.
At times, the moody atmospherics underlining the songs amount to no more than mere hums; other times they become another instrument, pushing the tracks along. These sonic textures add haunting rumbles, fleeting noise bursts and the occasional melodic upswing.
But turmoil is always around the corner. The album’s opening lines – “I don’t like the way you’re treating me” – signal a theme that shows up throughout the album, even at its most uplifting moments. But there’s reserved hope, a tentative grasping for purpose in humanity, even when the chorus of a song called “Citizens” goes “White lies, white lies” and another one slyly titled “We Were Lucky” plays at a funeral-march pace.
Ode to Joy, like the best Wilco albums, can be oblique. That’s always been a draw, and it’s no less so here. The time away from each other has sharpened some of their ties. Tweedy is still in charge, but Nels Cline’s guitar cuts through the occasional clutter to expose the soul that’s not always surface evident. And the band’s focused interplay on standouts like “Everyone Hides” takes on a life-force of its own, even if the overall result seems a little slight compared to past masterworks like Being There and Summerteeth.
As with the band’s accidental post-9/11 meditation and career high-point Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – which was supposed to be released earlier in 2001 but didn’t come out until 2002 – Ode to Joy sounds like a reflection of the times. Art can’t help but to react, but maybe reading too much into the album shifts its intent and position.
Then again, maybe not. When Tweedy declares, “I’m freaking the fuck out / I’ll try to do my best, I guess” on “Hold Me Anyway,” it comes off like a summation of both the record and 2019. This isn’t a record to change the world or even Wilco’s place in it, like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot did. But in trying to make sense of it, Ode to Joy finds a sort of strength. And we’ll take what we can get these days.
Wilco are back with Ode To Joy, a decidedly optimistic collection of new tunes of really big, big folk songs, monolithic, brutal structures that these delicate feelings are hung on.
The eleven tracks on Never Not Never Not Never Not go deeper than just twee sincerity, though. “Lauren” is a funny and heartfelt ode to a former roommate who used to hear Tucker’s songs through the wall and sing them back. But it’s presented as a fleshed-out, rip-roaring rock song that’s such a far cry from the acoustic, bedroom origins the lyrics reference. It’s a subtle, and perhaps unintentional writing technique. But it creates a real sense of time and place that nudges the listener to wonder if Lauren ever did write those songs that “queer kids with cute haircuts wanna tell their moms about.”
If I were Wolfy I’d know how to deliver a disarmingly funny & deceptively heartfelt thank you in ten words or less. Given that I’m stuck being myself, bear with … thank you to Wolfy for being objectively good at art, to Jessica Reed for being one take wonderful, to Anna Arboles for being the Tegan to my Sara and the Brandi to my Carlile. Greg Katz, thank you for insisting that these songs are worth the work. It’s all too good. Rosie Tucker is a clever, optimistic, rock-and-roll storyteller and each track has something to totally love
Rosie Tucker seems like someone who’d be really good at writing letters. The L.A. artist writes vivid, emotionally rich songs about the things they couldn’t say in person, but still feel the unquenchable desire to etch permanently into music. Sometimes, it’s the stinging regret of not flirting with their laundromat crush (“Spinster Cycle”), or feeling too silly to acknowledge the celestial beauty of their dance partner (“Gay Bar”). Other times, it’s the dull pain of wanting to apologize long after an interpersonal fallout, but holding back because of the perceived futility in trying to amend something that’s permanently broken. That latter song is called “Habit,” and the titular routine is in fact that tongue-holding instinct of theirs.
This album wouldn’t exist without Lauren Bruer, Sapphire Jewell, Talicat, Cecilia, Traci, Katherine and Chris’s Red Hook kitchen table, Oil Can Harry’s, Keith Armstrong, August, Daniel Oldham, Tyler, or the support of my wonderful family. This album wouldn’t have reason to exist without listeners like you. -Ro
Written and performed by Rosie Tucker
Produced by Wolfy
Guitars by Anna Arboles
Drums by Jessica Reed
Mixing on “Spinster Cycle” and “Fault Lines” by Daniel Oldham
Additional production on “Fault Lines” by Deanna Romo
Recorded at PieTown Sounds in Burbank, CA with additional recording at Defend Music, Inc in Los Angeles, CA. “Never Not” was produced and recorded by Tyler McCarthy & Rosie Tucker in Sylmar, CA.
Wilder Maker is a band that I feel like I’ve been meaning to post about it for a while now. Anyway, here’s some info on the two tracks.
“Infinite Shift” is a track brimming with the churning, unending energy of NYC, propelled by Sean Mullins’ drums and full of a teenage sense of yearning for something more, some entry into the mysterious adult world of taxis gliding through Manhattan streets in the early morning. It’s about being drunk on new york, drunk on the future, and builds to a shattering and euphoric instrumental climax.
“Black Wood Shine” is dreamy and moody, composed of only vocals (run through guitar pedals for extra disorientation) and one electric guitar. Black Wood Shine is the moment when a relationship between two people is over even as they remain seated next to each other, feeling the rift. What if love is not enough? “I love you / but I’m killing you / I can see / it’s you or me.”
Band Members
Gabriel Birnbaum, Sean Mullins, Katie Von Schleicher, Nick Jost, Adam Brisbin
Wilder Maker makes down home Americana music for the city streets and walk-ups that frame them. Wry lyrics[…]that are buoyed by CCR grit and lurch, with enough no-wave sax/Television guitar touches to make sure the band’ll get beat up when it gets past Cleveland.” – Noisey
“The Wilder Maker crew seem to be distinguishing themselves in the Brooklyn indie-rock landscape by embracing their natural penchant for deceptive complexity.” – SPIN
If your PR piece touts Sharon Van Etten and Bob Boilen as big fans, there’s a good chance I’ll (eventually) open that email. And I’m glad I finally got around to Kate Davis. In a nutshell, this is wonderfully executed mid-tempo indie sung by someone with a lovely voice. “Trophy” is out on 11/8 on Solitaire Recordings. Here’s some more info on Kate.
Kate Davis’ story is one of elegant artistic evolution. Having grown up in the spotlight as a jazz prodigy, she performed in the Grammy Jazz Ensemble, won ASCAP’s Robert Allen Award, played slots at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and collected fervent endorsements from Herbie Hancock, Ben Folds, Alison Krauss and Jeff Goldblum among others. But — Kate outgrew her accolades. Days spent practicing and performing standards became nights spent writing — cathartic indie rock. Forbidden chord progressions emerged like diary entries, documents of an internal reaction to routine. Time intended for technique slipped into secret listening sessions of Beach House, Elliot Smith and TV On The Radio.
In the same bright, arresting croon that ignited her youthful stardom, Davis created confessionals. Now 28 and audibly matured, Kate is prepared to properly share the artifacts from her late night craft, a full length reaction to ritual required of perfection, an outburst from the pedestal. Throughout twelve tumultuous tracks, she poetically reflects upon the intricacies of what it is to live, ruminating on topics too close to her heart — identity, self-worth, loss.
With an elegant, nuanced and emotionally affecting singing style (Cerys Matthews described her as having a voice that can “trickle back over centuries”) Josienne Clarke has frequently been compared to the great Sandy Denny, but present too are elements of Nina Simone and Gillian Welch; all three are important influences on her work.
In recent years, Josienne has supported the great Richard Thompson on a dream-come-true tour of the UK and opened for the legendary Robert Plant across Europe, as well as performing at some of the UK’s best-loved festivals, including Latitude, Larmer Tree and End Of The Road. She also found herself in demand as a writer and broadcaster, contributing to Standard Issue magazine and appearing on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb to discuss her pet subject melancholy, alongside poet Simon Armitage.
Expanding beyond the folk music for which she was first known, Josienne has partnered with rising star jazz pianist Kit Downes to release the Such A Sky EP. And her friendship with London-based Scottish singer songwriter Samantha Whates bloomed into the group PicaPica, whose debut album was released by Rough Trade in 2019.
Her latest solo album In All Weather is the result of an enormous upheaval in Josienne’s life. Putting an end to toxic personal and professional relationships, she moved to a Scottish island to write and record 13 songs that stand as a manifesto of how to leave and how to change. Music critic Tim Cumming described the new work as “not so much about heartbreak as about knowledge. There is no one to match her in that regard, perhaps in any genre.”
Jeff Lynne will release the 14th Electric Light Orchestra album, From Out of Nowhere, on November 1st via Columbia Records. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee previewed the LP , the second billed under the moniker “Jeff Lynne’s ELO” following 2015’s Alone in the Universe — with the dreamy title track.
“From Out of Nowhere” conjures vintage ELO, minus the symphonic edge of the band’s layered keyboards and strings. “Let me go, let me fly to a place that I love,” Lynne croons over a jangling, descending guitar progression and steady, choppy drums. “Let me fly away and start anew.
ELO recently concluded their second North American tour since 1981, featuring Dhani Harrison as opener. Lynne, the band’s singer-songwriter, performed virtually every instrument on the new record — just as he did on Alone in the Universe. Accordingly he played “nearly every note of the music on guitars, bass, piano, drums, keyboards and vibes, as well as singing all of the lead and layered harmony vocals,” with engineer Steve Jay “[adding] some percussion.”
“From Out of Nowhere — that’s exactly where it came from,” Lynne said in a statement. “That’s the first one I wrote for this album, and it’s kind of like that.” He noted that he was aiming to spread optimism with both the song and album: “Everybody’s got to have a bit of hope.”
