Irish post-punk rockers God Is An Astronaut, Fronted by twins Niels and Torsten Kinsella, God Is An Astronaut’s sound is epic instrumental rock that puts in mind Tangerine Dream and maybe The Cure . There is stunning depth of emotion in their creations – some have been written in periods of immense grief after family losses – the result is a wall of sound that insists on breaking your heart.
God Is An Astronaut are a 3 piece band who hail from Glen of the Downs, Ireland.
Tracklist: 01. Fragile 00:00 02. All is Violent, All is Bright 04:33 03. Forever Lost 08:44 04. Fireflies and Empty Skies 15:05 05. A Deafening Distance 19:07 06. Infinite Horizons 22:55 07. Suicide by Star 25:20 08. Remembrance Day 29:53 09. Dust and Echoes 34:07 10. When Everything Dies 38:20
Australian psych-pop band Pond have just shared the new video for “The Boys are Killing Me” from this year’s march released album Tasmania. It was shot on the band’s recent UK/EU tour and you can watch that.
‘The Boys Are Killing Me’. Shot on Super 8 by Jay Watson, the footage sees the lads frolicking about during their tour through Sweden, the UK and France.
‘The Boys Are Killing Me’ Taken from the album ‘Tasmania’ out now on Spinning Top, Marathon Artists, Caroline & Interscope
Joseph Arthur will release a new album this autumn titled “Come Back World”, It is his first new solo album in three years, due for release on October 11th. The album features guest appearances by Ben Harper, The Black Keys’ PatrickCarney, Jesse Malin and Greg Dulli, and Joseph calls it “an album about rebirth and survival.” That’s the cover art above, and you can check out the title track right now, he’s crafted his most personal and powerful album to date.
“The interesting parts of our stories aren’t the famous people we meet,” Arthur remarked. Or the times when everything is basically working. Or when we get to lay in comfort with a partner watching Netflix and the world go by. The interesting parts are when all those things break down and you’re left in isolation to finally deal with the roots of whatever had been thwarting your existence all along. The interesting parts are when the world has turned its back on you and you have turned your back on it or them. When darkness could seemingly swallow you whole if it hasn’t already. When there is no such thing as hope and so you manufacture it from a dream which only angle is to survive. Come Back World is an album about rebirth and survival.”
The title track of Joseph Arthur’s new Album Come Back World, available everywhere October 2019.
Tegan and Sara have returned with the lead single “I’ll Be Back Someday” from their forthcoming album, Hey, I’m Just Like You, The infectious track is a reinvented version of what the sisters found on their old cassettes when they were digging through inspiration for their first memoir, High School . The cassettes were from the 1990s, recorded the two were between the ages of 15 and 17. That nostalgic, punk rock energy is definitely apparent on the catchy track.
“To the end my friend, oh what a lie/ If I could pretend, if I could lie,” they sing, emitting pure teenage angst on top of fiery electric guitars.
““We had been begging for an electric guitar, and on our 16th birthday, we got one,” Sara Quin said in a release of the time period “I’ll Be Back” dates to. “Of course, we had to share it, so it became a weapon that we stole from each other’s rooms, barricading ourselves behind locked doors with guitar in hand. Screaming over the small amplifier, we tested our voices by writing punk songs, shredding our thumbs on the strings.”
The rest of the album, which was recorded in Vancouver, BC earlier this year with an all-female team including producer Alex Hope, will consist of more reinventions of those ’90s tapes, showcasing the remarkable talent the “Closer” artists had even at such a young age.
Tegan and Sara also recently announced an acoustic, interactive North American tour that will pair with the album. For the first time in decades, the duo will play by themselves, and will hit more intimate venues, reading excerpts from High School.The Quins will play songs from the new album as well as catalog classics, and share video footage from their teenage years.
Hey, I’m Just Like You is set for release on September. 27th via Sire Records. Just a few days before that, High School will be published on September. 24th by MCD X FSG (USA) in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.
I’ll Be Back Someday – the first single from our new album Hey, I’m Just Like You – out Sept 27.
Opening their album with more fuzz than an exploded dustbuster, Bloomington, Indiana’s Frankie and the Witch Fingers are riding high on the hallmarks of the 2010’s pantheon of garage rock heroes. Adding to the sonic soup a heavy dose of witchy vibes, psychedelic shake and an incessant grind that makes it feel vital and raw as skin peeled back, their sophomore album for Chicago’s chief gutwrenchers, Permanent Records, is fueled by more than just paint by numbers rock. The band knows when to ride the tide of fuzz-addled freakout, knows when to break in the shake n’ shimmy and knows just when to tear all the good times down for a good old fashioned dark horse that draws the shades and draws a little blood in the process. A solid offering from this band, reportedly uprooting from the doldrums of the Corn Belt to LA. It’ll be interesting to see how the move affects their sound in the future, but for now these nuggets are more than worth the price of admission.”
Frankie and the Witch Fingers are a garage rock outfit and with one song, they’ve made their forthcoming self-titled album on Permanent a hot album to pine for in 2015. Aside from the “True Detective” vibes, I’m not sure what exactly is going on in the “sexy and dangerous witchcraft” video for “Vibrations” which is puzzling, creepy and yet, sustains fascination. Regardless, this song is at the top of the heap when it comes to garage pop tunes that could’ve thrived in the 1960s. You just don’t hear organ work like that anymore.
Frankie and the Witch Finger’s track “Vibrations” off their self-titled album.
This week sees the 10th anniversary of the release of Magnolia Electric Co’s ‘Josephine’. To mark this, Jason Evans Groth has kindly shared some of his thoughts and memories of creating the album:
Magnolia Electric Co’s‘Josephine’ was released ten years ago today on the 21st July 2009. Continuing the band’s collaboration with producer Steve Albini, the album was dedicated to bassist Evan Farrell who passed away in December 2007.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the album, Magnolia Electric Co’s guitarist Jason Evans Groth shared some of his memories of recording the album. “Josephine was cathartic for all of us, was a truly full-band record, was weirder in a lot ways and more accessible in a lot ways than other stuff we’d been doing, and is a testament to what a family can do if they stick together through the tragedies.”
Josephine, to me, sounds like a family celebrating and mourning something that had been loved and had been lost, and doing it together, all as one. Jason dedicated the album to and even said in interviews that it was about our dear friend and one-time bandmate Evan Farrell, who had perished in a fire in December of 2007, just a few months after the one tour he did with us. At the time I was a little uneasy about that dedication, probably because I knew many of those songs had been written before Evan, some had even been played with him. But Jason was right – songs change, feelings about their meaning change, and I was caught up in facts to help suppress the feelings I had about the tragedy. We made a shrine to Evan in the studio. We talked and thought a lot about him. Jason had taken it hard. In the three years prior to this, death had become a tragically common occurrence. In 2005 we were in the studio recording Nashville Moon with Steve Albini when Michael Dahlquist – Silkworm’s drummer and a dear friend of Steve’s – was killed in an incredibly tragic car accident; Jason lost his mother; our then-new European booking agent, Jens Pape, also died suddenly and unexpectedly; and Heath Ledger, who had been working with Jason on a documentary project, died. I know Jason was thinking about all of it – he told me he was – those few years. He told me he thought he was cursed, and cursing other people.
And then it was the fall of 2008, and it was time to make a new record. Jason and Mikey went to Denton, TX to make the Molina and Johnson record (where the original “Josephine” was recorded) and we hadn’t toured since Evan died, which was weird for us; more than a whole year off the road. Jason had played a smattering of European solo shows, some with another band. Around April Jason started emailing me with ideas. On tour, he said, he wanted to do anything we wanted to play – “the ancient stuff.” He was concerned about tunings but asked me to come up with versions we could use on the road. Tour would happen in the fall, and then we would make the record. Looking back through emails, we talked about tuning a lot. The tour was booked for mid-late October/early November, with recording starting on November 6th and going through the 20th.
Up until sequencing we all worked on it together. We brought the songs to life and we hung out and worked together and loved being around one another. I still get chills thinking about the hug Jason gave me after the saxophone solo I played for “O! Grace.” I’m really glad a lot of the session is captured, expertly, in Ben Schreiner’s Recording Josephine documentary.
Josephine was cathartic for all of us, was a truly full-band record, was weirder in a lot ways and more accessible in a lot ways than other stuff we’d been doing, and is a testament to what a family can do if they stick together through the tragedies. I love my Magnolia Electric Co family so much, and I miss Jason more than I can express. I especially miss him when I think about this session and this record, and how much we all felt like one making it.
We had heard nothing about songs. Eventually, the last week of September, Jason wrote and said he had been “pulling my teeth out here” to get us some demos. Those eventually came, early in October, and were ethereal, haunting versions of the songs that would show up on Josephine (and some that wouldn’t). And they were in weird tunings, just like Jason’s old days. I felt that he had been collaborating with me without me knowing it, using me as a way to summon up the courage to do things like he used to, things that he did out of necessity then and which seemed mysterious to him now. He told us “I’m not ignoring ELO type arrangements on this record.” He told me he wanted to make his version of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. He told me he wanted it to be “less Crazy Horse and more crazy.” And what we made probably had a little of all of that. We were working out songs together in the studio, recording them in one or two takes live, with the vocals being monitored through an amp in the room where we all were (which is why they have an extra-ghosty quality to them, I think). And then we were overdubbing like crazy, too.
My favorite dubs are the tambourine part in “Rock of Ages” (just describing what I wanted to SteveAlbini is a pleasant memory), watching Pete do amazing hand percussion, and seeing Mark play vibes. The “Whip-poor-will” recording – just thinking about it – brings tears to my eyes. Jason and me playing guitar on stools in the drum room at Electrical, with Mikey sitting next to us so we could do those live three-part harmonies, which sounded tighter at that recording than I thought they ever could. My Tele Deluxe – the guitar I played at 99% of the Songs: Ohia/MECo shows – had gotten really sick, and was getting a fret job in Chicago, so I was put in the position of using guitars I didn’t understand, and that made me play in a more wild, quiet, and careful way all at once. My favorite guitar tones on the record came out of my wife’s telecaster, including maybe my favorite recorded thing I’ve ever done, the guitar solo in “Shenandoah.”
Philadelphia-based indie quartet Strange Ranger’s lush-sounding third album, Remembering The Rockets, is pockmarked by the apocalypse; anxious moments poke through in the middle of lead vocalist Isaac Eiger’s verses, then recede from view. “I think he’s evil privately / Hold my tongue and do the dishes,” he sings over the summery pop-rock of “Sunday.” The breezy humming on “Pete’s Hill” is preceded by two troubled hypotheticals: “If I tried my best but killed again / If I hit your chest with gold cement.” On the fluidly synthetic “Living Free,” he thinks about a planet on fire and asks: “What if I just want a family?”
“It’s hard for me to write a song that’s about one event,” Eiger says over the phone from his girlfriend’s house in Philadelphia. “There are explicit references to wanting to have a family in a world that is not guaranteed to be the same, and latching onto that as a narrative is totally natural. But there are tons of lyrics on the album that are just about my relationships with the people in my life, just looking at the world. Climate change politics are a part of that.”
Recorded mostly at an ad hoc studio Eiger’s parents’ home in Montana, Remembering The Rockets — premiering in full below — upends the occasionally scuzzy and almost always fraught guitar rock that the band put out on their last two LPs, 2016’s Rot Forever (as Sioux Falls) and 2017’s Daymoon. A Korg M1 synthesizer finds its way onto most of the songs here, usually to warm the mix on instrumentals like “athens, ga” and “rockets” or to provide a dreamlike backdrop for the already uncanny lyrics. Bassist, keyboardist, and singer Fred Nixon creates drummer Nathan Tucker, and occasional vocalist Fiona Woodman distort, harmonize, and augment around Eiger’s guitar, turning most of these songs into delicate, miniature hallucinations.
That often beautiful detachment from reality fits with Eiger’s perception of reality — half rooted in the day-to-day, half off in metaphor. “Planes move through the sky / I walk to work in fading light,” he sings over the hum of “Planes in Front of The Sun” before again projecting forwards and scaring himself out of it: “Daddies with their kids / I still want that / I still feel sick.”
Listen to Remembering The Rockets below ahead of its release this Friday, July 26, via Tiny Engines
UK electronic duo Jadu Heart, who don’t seem to take their homemade masks off for anyone, will release their debut album, “Melt Away”, on August 16th. The new single is this moody, athemic cut that the duo say is “about seeing a bird fall from the sky and trying to bring it back to life. Life is full of these moments and I guess the song is a metaphor for trying to make the best out of a bad situation- which is obviously easier said than done. It’s a super emotional song to us and we always wanted it to be on the album, especially the ending where we sing together and the song ends with a really beautiful counterpoint of arpeggiators.”
Melt Away is the debut album from masked London duo Jadu Heart. Co-produced by Guy Sigsworth (Bjork, Imogen Heap) the record is a dark and dreamy collection of alternative electronic and guitar-led songs for fans of Jai Paul, Radiohead and Tame Impala alike. Despite the spectrum of sounds, throughout the 14 tracks you know you’re in Jadu’s world. It’s a world they have thought a lot about. Having met whilst studying music, Diva and Alex formed the band in conjunction with an extensive universe surrounding two supernatural cursed characters (Dina & Faro), who have become as much a part of them as their own identities.
It’s this supernatural jump-off that gives Jadu Heart the scope to explore raw topics (loneliness, love, sex, drugs, mental health) without clichés or confessions. With a depth to its narrative, Melt Away harks back to an era of concept albums like Ziggy Stardust and Sgt Pepper but the stories within it very much speak to the world as it is today. Despite having no established record label or significant promotion, the launch singles ‘U Never Call Me’, ‘The Cure’ and ‘I’m A Kid’ have already been streamed over 15 million times and their first 5 headline shows have sold out in days.
There seems to be a hunger for Jadu Heart’s brand of storytelling and this is only the beginning of their tale.
Jadu Heart’s new album “Melt Away” is out August 16th, 2019. We’re well excited to play for you, we will even scribble our stupid names over your nice new vinyl of MELT AWAY.
Jadu Heart will live be in-store at Rough Trade NOTTINGHAM to perform tracks from their debut album ‘Melt Away’, released 16th August on VLF Records.
Here’s another glammy rocker from Sheer Mag’s forthcoming “A Distant Call”. Says the band’s guitarist, Matt Palmer, of the song and its video: “In ‘Hardly to Blame’ we see the psychic landscape of Philadelphia transformed by the collapse of Tina’s relationship with her partner. The streets they used to walk together, the bars they used to drink at, and the friends they used to share have all been tainted by the lingering memories of their time together. Closing out side A of A Distant Call, ‘Hardly to Blame’ shows Tina spiraling further down and down. Unfortunately the worst is yet to come, but “Hardly to Blame” gives us a glimpse at someone who thinks they’ve hit bedrock, unaware that the bottom is about to drop out.”
Slowness was formed in 2008 in San Francisco by Julie Lynn and Geoffrey Scott. Their 2011 debut EP “Hopeless but Otherwise”was produced by Monte Vallier (Weekend, The Soft Moon, Wax Idols). The LPs “For Those Who Wish to See the Glass Half Full” and “How to Keep from Falling off a Mountain” followed and were supported by tours in America and Europe. “Berths” was released on June 7th, 2019.
Written by Julie Lynn and Geoffrey Scott
Lyrics by Geoffrey Scott Geoffrey Scott – vocals, guitar and keys Julie Lynn – vocals, bass and keys Christy Davis – Drums and additional vocals
