Heaven is Humming has been a long time coming. Three years coming, to be exact: singer/guitarist/songwriter Kenny Becker, singer/guitarist Drew Eccleston, bassist Caleb Wicker, and drummer Christian Koons started work on the album in the summer of 2016, right around the time Goon’s debut EP Dusk of Punk came ripping in from the Los Angeles sky, spilling from the brim with monster riffs and deep hooks.
Heaven is Humming is fearlessly weird, but it’s also comforting and familiar at the same time, taking the sounds of foundational groups like Pixies and Boards of Canada and contextualising them through a modern lens, placing Goon alongside contemporaries like Forth Wanderers, METZ, Young Jesus, and Partisan label-mates Dilly Dally. Becker croons like Michael Stipe one minute and snarls like Frank Black the next, but you never lose the sense of who these four guys are making a beautiful racket right in the here and now.
Following the release of a new single, an album announcement, and new upcoming US tour dates, the beloved New Orleans indie-rock duo Generationals are back today with their latest single “Gatekeeper”. A fusion of classic indie rock sound, charming vocals, and shimmering pop melodies, this latest single is another statement that the band is back and better than ever.
The Generationals new full-length album, Reader As Detective, is proving to be a testament to a band that has clearly been refining their skills over the years. “Gatekeeper” is a shimmering display of indie-pop sound that warms the soul but with clear attention to production that has us especially excited. A catchy percussion kick, a classic indie-rock guitar riff, and a charismatic bassline gets the listener hooked right from the start. From there, a slight distortion helps deliver a warming vintage vocal sound that hits that falsetto at just the right moment to make “Gatekeeper” prime to being this summer’s true indie-pop gem.
The indie-rock vocals never overpower that shimmering and pulsating pop melody and it’s that kind of mindfulness that only comes from seasoned musicians who truly been refining their sound. TheGenerationals this is their latest release since 2009 release ‘Con Law’ and “Gatekeeper” dances beautifully between catchy synth work, animated guitar riff breaks and a summery indie-pop beat that has us thrilled for this new full-length album and upcoming tour.
British experimental musician Anna Meredith has announced a new album, “Fibs”, and sharing the first single, “Paramour,” via a hypnotic video for the track featuring a Lego train travelling around Meredith and her band as they perform the song. Fibs is due out October 25th via Moshi Moshi Records.
The album 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 press Meredith says fibs are “lies – but nice friendly lies, little stories and constructions and daydreams and narratives that you make for yourself or you tell yourself.”
The album is heralded by the release of ‘Paramour’, its first single and spectacular accompanying single-take video, featuring 1200 pieces of LEGO track, and a song that forbids you from turning away – its sweeps, jerks and wrong turns pinning your ears to the speakers whilst heading for warp speed at a blistering 176 BPM before rounding the journey out with an (utterly unexpected) tuba-led half-time rock-out.
Seattle based band Chastity Belt have announced a new self-titled album and shared its first single, “Ann’s Jam,” via a video for the track. Chastity Belt is due out September 20th via Hardly Art.
The album is the follow-up to 2017’s I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone. The band consists of Julia Shapiro (vocals, guitar, drums), Lydia Lund (vocals, guitar), Gretchen Grimm (drums, vocals, guitar), and Annie Truscott (bass). Chastity Belt is their fourth album and it was co-produced by Jay Som’s Melina Duterte. The band took a several months hiatus in 2018 and then reconvened to work on the album.
“So much of the break was reminding ourselves to stay present, and giving ourselves permission to stop without saying when were gonna meet up again,” says guitarist Lydia Lund in a press release. “It was so important to have that-not saying, ‘we’re gonna get back together at this point,’ but really just open it up so we could get back to our present connection.”
“Ann’s Jam” is the lead single from Chastity Belt’s 2019 self-titled album.
Norwegian avant-garde musician Jenny Hval has announced a new album, “The Practice of Love”, and shared its first single, “Ashes to Ashes.” The Practice of Love is due out September 13 via Sacred Bones.
The album is the follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 album, Blood Bitch, and her 2018 EP, The Long Sleep. The album features guest vocalists Vivian Wang, Laura Jean Englert, and Félicia Atkinson. The title The Practice of Love was partially inspired by Valie Export’s 1985 film of the same name.
Hval had this to say about the album in a press release: “This all sounds very clichéd, like a standard greeting card expression. But for me, love, and the practice of love, has been deeply tied to the feeling of otherness. Love as a theme in art has been the domain of the canonized, big artists, and I have always seen myself as a minor character, a voice that speaks of other things. But in the last few years I have wanted to take a closer look at the practice of otherness, this fragile performance, and how it can express love, intimacy, empathy and desire. I have wanted to ask bigger, wider, kind of idiotic questions like: What is our job as a member of the human race? Do we have to accept this job, and if we don’t, does the pressure to be normal ever stop?”
From ‘The Practice of Love,’ out September. 13th, 2019.
Portland-born sisters and folk-pop harmony-makers Joseph are back after a three-year hiatus.
The band announced their third studio LP and second for ATO Records, Good Luck, Kid, is due out September. 13th. The news arrives with a fortified new single, “Fighter” . As ever, Natalie Schepman and her sisters Allison and Meegan Closner use harmony like an emotional conveyor belt, packaging their feelings up and pushing them out into the world through a warm vocal connection that could only be made by siblings. But “Fighter” is bigger and more anthemic than the often-subdued folk of their previous releases, especially their 2014 debut Native Dreamer Kin and 2017 EP Stay Awake. “Fighter” sounds like a loud-and-proud pop song in the vein of Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger,” but it’s actually a chronicle of inter-band struggles.
“The song’s about how our band almost broke up,” Natalie said. “It’s the story of the three of us wanting different things and dealing with that conflict, and eventually deciding to just keep going.”
While they’re embracing a more vigorous sound here, Natalie, Allison and Meegan are no strangers to pop. “White Flag,” from their 2016 album, is a catchy battle cry that would’ve fit right in on alternative radio. On Good Luck Kid, the band explore both sonic and personal change, as Natalie explains:
The through-line of the album is this idea of moving into the driver’s seat of your own life—recognizing that you’re an adult now, and everything’s up to you from this moment on. You’re not completely sure of how to get where you need to go, and you don’t have any kind of a map to help you. It’s just the universe looking down on you like, “Good luck, kid.”
Philadelphia four-piece Queen of Jeans are the band you didn’t know you were missing, shimmying around your ears with vibrant three-part harmonies and ‘60s girl group and doo-wop hooks you don’t hear on your typical punk rock bill. Queen of Jeans offers a rebuttal to that take in a few ways. First, their sneaky use of tried-and-true 50s arrangements, melodies, and song structures to critically comment the latent (or overt) misoginy of music that American society teaches us is canonical. Songs deemed “classic” by older generations that actually advocated a kind of unhealthy idea of what love is and what it should be
Their debut LP Dig Yourself(released on Topshelf Records) is an all ‘round winner, and now, they’ve given the cleverly-referential music video treatment to one of its true jukebox jams.
For all the upward motion suggested by its title, What a Boost basks in a cozy kind of groundedness. The subtle, psychedelic folk on Rozi Plain’s fourth album is as soothing and reliable as a mug of milky tea; these songs don’t rise and fall as much as they simply steep. The British singer-songwriter refined the record over the course of a year on the road, and it bears the marks of an itinerant existence: Worn grooves stretch on like the white lines of a highway, circular guitar figures convey a dutiful sense of routine, and Plain’s fragmented lyrics meander like backseat daydreams. On the hovering ”Conditions,” she sounds a bit like Charlotte Gainsbourg fronting the Beta Band as she sings “Is this the way for love?” with the nonchalance of a traveler asking for directions.
Tweaked and refined during a year spent touring the world playing bass in This Is The Kit, ‘What A Boost’ nurtures its homely roots and then blooms into a record that isn’t strictly about life on road but is undoubtedly, and beautifully, shaped by it. Textural, repetitive, propulsive, the whole piece plays out like a soundtrack to the world flying past the window; all of the shapes, colours, sights and sounds, flickering fast as we try to take as much of it in as we can.
The music of Rozi Plain has always felt like a freeze-frame. A colourful and graceful snapshot of the world, paused, suspended in time, and then gently toyed with, like stepping out of the linear world as we know it.
Chances are you’ve forgotten about the band Palace, the London rock trio whose 2016 debut LP So Long Forever landed not with a thud, but floated quietly across the Atlantic in a cloud of potential streams. Thanks to singles like “Live Well” and “Bitter,” the band have more than 400,000 monthly Spotify listeners—yet, they’d never be the first “British rock band” you’d name if prompted at a party. Unlike so many of the biggest English exports, they’re not punk. They’re something quieter and broodier, and their latest singles even seem to recall their poppier, acoustic beginnings, not too far off from Hozier’s roots-rock debut. It’s been a mysteriously silent few years for the band, but it sounds like our patience may have paid off.
With their sublime second album, Palace have pulled off a rare pop trick. Songs steeped in darkness emerge in to light, from bleak situations spring fresh starts. Bathed in the band’s atmospheric alt-rock, the future feels brighter and more optimistic Life After is both an album about loss and a manual to moving on. “I’m writing this song, to help you breathe again,” sings Leo Wyndham on the opening title track, a shimmering ode to survival. By the epic, seven minute-plus closer Heaven Up There, the theme of Life After is obvious. “Hope,” says Leo. “Hope and positivity – seeing the light at the end of a long tunnel. It’s about going through tough times and coming out the other side.” Palace didn’t start their second album with any plans in place. Buoyed by the reception of their debut, 2016’s So Long Forever, and near two years of sold-out shows and festival slots that won them fans worldwide, the London-based trio of former Dorset school friends had a new-found confidence that they were keen to capture on record.
The city and the country both have distinct, vibrant energies – but there’s something happening in between, too. As factories give way to fields, and highways drift into gravelly roads, the friction can be palpable, the aura electric.
The lines between city and country were on Jack Cooper’s mind when he named his new band Modern Nature. He took the phrase from the diaries of filmmaker Derek Jarman, written on the coast of Kent in his Dungeness cottage. Visiting Jarman’s home, Cooper was struck by what he calls a “weird mix of urban and rural” – such as the way a nuclear power station sits next to open grasslands.
On Modern Nature’s debut album, How to Live, urban and rural cross into each other. Plaintive cello strains melt into motorik beats. Pastoral field recordings drift through looping guitar figures. Rising melodies shine with reflective saxophone accents. Throughout this continuous work, where no song ever really seems to end, there’s an indelible feeling of constant forward motion. It’s as if the band is laying down a railway and riding it simultaneously, and you can hear all kinds of landscapes passing by.
The endless feel of How to Live was inspired by Cooper’s experience making his 2017 solo album Sandgrown. It was the first time he made a record with a defined theme – a suite of songs about his hometown of Blackpool – and imposing a narrative framework turned out to be refreshingly liberating. “When I started thinking about a new project,” he recalls, “going back to making an album of unconnected songs seemed as strange as making a movie with completely unconnected scenes.”
As he began writing songs, Cooper was also tuning to the vibes of Earth Loop, an instrumental solo album by BEAK>’s Will Young (under the name Moon Gangs). For a long time, Cooper had hoped to work more with Young, who almost joined his first band, Mazes, and was in the touring version of his next group, Ultimate Painting. So he decided now was finally the time, as he puts it, “to make good on hundreds of late night ‘we should really do music together’ conversations.”
“Over the next few weeks I started sending Will songs, and we began meeting up, working on ideas and formulating the bigger picture as it were,” Cooper recalls. “Approaching the album as a film or play made complete sense, and from that came the idea to have a very defined narrative, reoccurring themes and chord progressions, field recordings and a set palette of instruments and sounds. Each song came with pages and pages of notes, musical references, films, books, places, words and feelings.”
Cooper is hesitant to explain too much about How To Live’s story, preferring to let the listener to find his or her own narrative to fit what they hear. But he can offer some guideposts. “Broadly speaking, the album moves from an urban environment at the beginning to an escape at the end…whether that’s solitude or acceptance or isolation,” he says. “At the beginning the songs reflect a different type of isolation, the sort of isolation or disassociation one can only feel in a very crowded, hectic environment.”
The vibrations of these environments come across immediately on How To Live. The album’s first line is “There’s a hum in the street,” and the rest of the hypnotic “Footsteps” masterfully paints a picture: “the click repeats, repeats, repeats”….”Isolation, repetition, spark burst fission”…”turns loops to the point in which they meet.”
Throughout the remainder of the record, ideas recur and sounds return, often forming new shapes. A careful guitar pattern sprouts into the halting “Seance”, which ends with that same guitar pattern flipped into reverse. The beatific “Peradam” revels in the cycles of nature, as Cooper asks to be led “out of spirit worlds, let it whirl, out and in, swirling like fireflies. The pulsing “Nature” takes a darker view of our current environment, calling it “the great failure” and concluding with the imperative to “lock them up and don’t forgive them.”
The richness of the ideas in these songs is matched by the resonance of the music. Cooper and Young’s organic compositions gain skin and muscle through the thoughtful cello of Rupert Gillett, the insistent drumming of Aaron Nevue (of compatriot outfit Woods), and the expressive saxophone of Jeff Tobias, from Brooklyn jazz/rock juggernaut Sunwatchers. Each track on How to Live evolved as these creative forces joined the group, and it shows. The entirety of How To Live courses with both precision and vitality. The band is closely tuned to the core of each piece, but also unafraid to throw themselves into every moment.
The care that went into How To Live is clear in album notes, which map out impressionistic ideas behind each step – one block describes the song “Nightmare” as “the calm after the storm, nihilism, acceptance!! HOW TO LIVE??” – and include a list of the music and film that inspire Modern Nature. You can hear traces of those influences throughout the album – the subtle mediations of Talk Talk, the stirring folk of Anne Briggs, the searching melodies of Robert Wyatt, the atmospheric waves of Harmonia.
But ultimately, the music on How to Live speaks for itself. It’s a work of surprising layers and limitless depths, impressing more strongly with each listen. Modern Nature may have been inspired by the line between urban and rural, but with How To Live they’ve gone a step further, and created their own complete world.
