“What to do with a spud like you?” Melbourne post-punk wags Terry return this summer with their new EP ‘Who’s Terry?’ (July 19th). You can just make him out in his hobnail boots, peering from behind the sandwich board, wink, wink. Following on from last year’s huge-sounding ‘I’m Terry’ album, this third EP from the band brings you right up to date with their wobbly politico-pop.
Single from upcoming 7″ out through Upset the Rhythm soon..
Trash Kit are Rachel Aggs (guitar, vocals), Rachel Horwood (drums, vocals) and Gill Partington (bass). Three deeply creative individuals who play in a multitude of other groups including Bas Jan, Sacred Paws, Shopping and Bamboo, united by a shared decade of spry musicality that surges through their bodies, hearts and heads with Trash Kit. Their songs once succinct, patchwork post-punk numbers of an honest diary-like nature now tussle more with long-form songwriting, expeditious polyphony and cascades of sung-spoke vocals. This new focus began with their last album ‘Confidence’ (2014) and has now grown into something exhilarating and rapturous.
New songs like ‘Disco’ have had their very fabric stretched into smart new shapes, allowing the band to run away with refrains and unlock the dancefloor. Although Trash Kit have their forebears in bands like Sleater Kinney, The Ex and The Raincoats, their sound is still very much their own take on facing forwards and relies as much on the naturalism of an internalised folk music as on their sincerity of vision.
They make their most majestic move yet with their resoundingly huge “Horizon” album. For this album, carefully crafted through years of playing out live, the band have chased down the distance between what they wanted the record to sound like and its realisation. They’ve augmented these songs with choral arrangements, piano, saxophone, harp, viola and cello. Pulling ideas from everywhere between the earth and sky, to push themselves further, to go beyond. Aggs‘ guitar playing for this album was informed by her love of guitar music from Zimbabwe, her cyclical motifs billow with lean Mbira rhythms. Horwood has similarly approached her drumkit with an untamable freedom, allowing it to breathe as a vivid lead instrument. Trash Kit’s music is woven with silence and punctuation, and this is where the resonant, driving bass of Partington fits in. The bass has become now central to shaping the melody of this new collection of songs.
‘Horizon’ by Trash Kit, taken from their forthcoming album ‘Horizon’. Released through Upset The Rhythm on LP. CD and digitally on July 5th.
“Beware Of The Dogs”feels like the embodiment of a movement of young artists in Australia who are refusing to let this oppressive behaviour slide. What a debut from Perth’s Stella Donnelly! She combines witty, intimate, hyperlocal songwriting – which more often than not takes down hierarchical power structures and toxic dudes, see opener Old Man – with slack, shoegazing guitar lines.
There are subdued moments, like Mosquito, where her girlish vocals come to the fore, only for songs like the title track to build to a loud, impassioned – and funny – call-to-arms:”There’s no Parliament worthy of this countryside/All these pious fucks taking from the 99,” she cries. Let ‘em have it, Stella.
Stella Donnelly latest album ‘Beware of the Dogs,’ out March 8 on Secretly Canadian
Few bands have captured the same excitement for rock as well as Fontaines DC do on “Dogrel”.
At its heart, Fontaines DC’s debut is about a city losing its spirit to gentrification, an attempt to document Dublin’s culture and character before the times plaster over the craic and move on.
With that romantic goal in mind, Dogrel is full of literate lyrical sketches. Frontman Grian Chatten’s drawled pub poetry captures Irish Republican cabbies (“He spits out ‘Brits out’ only smokes Carrolls”) as easily as the emptiness of capitalist pursuits (“Money is the sandpit of the soul”) and the band colour it all with raucous post-punk and garage rock.
Fontaines DC are a cracking new band from Ireland who’ve really excited me this year. Their debut LP Dogrel is full of intense, dynamic, rocket fuelled post-punk. It sounds inquisitive and passionate, like a band with a deep love of musicianship still exploring the edges of their sound.
Fontaines DC also love poetry and sing about James Joyce, which feels very romantic, especially since many of their songs are about life in Dublin. It’s thrilling, gritty rock from a band with infinite possibilities ahead of them. The result is universal, despite the record being as intrinsically linked to its hometown as a gold harp on a pint glass.
‘Sha Sha Sha’ is taken from the debut LP ‘Dogrel’ by Fontaines D.C. Out now on Partisan Records –
If Jess Ribeiro can make a dud record we’re yet to see it. On this her third album, the darker, Australian gothic reverberations of Kill It Yourself are mostly gone, Ribeiro appears to be moving towards pop to detail the life cycle of love. Ribeiro’s first two albums, My Little River (2012) and Kill It Yourself (2016) received a great deal of critical warmth but not a lot of exposure. The first was a dark acoustic folk-blues record with a minimum of instrumentation. Kill It Yourself, produced by former Bad Seed Mick Harvey, added strings and percussion, but still, the songs stood almost alone.
That they did is a testament to Ribeiro’s talent. But whereas those records are sepia-toned, Love Hate is an all-electric technicolour lunge towards pop, backed by guitarist Jade McInally and drummer Dave Mudie (the latter a member of Courtney Barnett’s touring band). The results are vibrant and clearly aimed at introducing the Melbourne singer-songwriter to a bigger audience.
A mess of emotions fuse together within love and hate, and Ribeiro has the scope to tackle all of them. Love Hate starts with the excitement and tension of a new crush, moving down through lust and contentment, anger and grief, detachment and acceptance. Each is examined through Ribero’s killer lyrics and an almost dissociative cool that only magnifies the peaks and troughs.
It’s not a strictly autobiographical album, but it is very true.
Named after opposing ends of emotional states, Jess Ribeiro‘s third album is however dedicated to extrapolating the in-betweens and nuances on which relationships can be built.
There are haunting shades and enticing textures which throw light on the side glances, sweaty palms and nervy awkwardness we sometimes wrestle with when a deep connection strikes.
Guitars waver and warble before joyously lifting off in ‘Stranger’, there’s the pulsing pensiveness of ‘Chair Stare’ and the expectant beat and sinewy synths of ‘Young Love’ make for a heady hormonal haze. Ribeiro easily jumps from sounding forlorn to alluring, from devotion to dejection, but always able to spare us a sly wink of the eye.
At all points LOVE HATE feels like a collection of characters and their tales of romantic intrigue told with a cinematic eye.
The bright spangles of guitar that burst through the dream-pop haze of opener (and single) Stranger, indicates Ribeiro is out to get your attention. Produced by New Zealander Ben Edwards, who has worked with Aldous Harding, Marlon Williams and Julia Jacklin, Love Hate is arguably more immediately arresting than any of their records.
RY X has a truly stunning voice, and the judicious production on Unfurl means that every aspect – strings, percussion, organs, synths – is given space to breathe. Space to sound as beautiful as it should. He’s not experimental, but you still feel the heart behind what he does.
Some songs, like the driving ‘Foreign Tides’ or the almost-dancefloor-ready ‘The Water’ threaten to become big, grandiose epics. But the restraint kicks back in eventually and, before you know it, everything has settled back down.
The power of quietly intense, passionate music to pull audiences in to an intimate space is something this Australia-born, LA-based singer excels at. After the break-out success of his minimalist EP “Berlin”, Ry notched up a string of sold-out shows across Europe, the US and Australia including both the Union Chapel and Shepherds Bush Empire in 2016 alone. Ry honours and expands on his vision with his second album. Between its rippling beats, mellifluous guitars, poised piano and questing vocals, Unfurl does what its title suggests: develops as if organically from Ry’s previous work, blossoming in delicate new directions while holding firm to its roots. “I think my mission statement was simply to remain vulnerable and to capture that within this album,” says Ry. “The inspirations change each time, and I always want to allow that process to be free, to draw on new ideas and sounds and instrumentation. But what feels consistently important to me is keeping a sense of rawness and honesty in the work.”
This is a hypnotic, meditative album that you should surrender yourself to.
“Time Is a Dark Feeling” threads together fragile, echoing acoustic strumming with Emily Sprague’s gentle, unguarded vocals, freeing melodies and harmonies, and other beautiful things to whirl around her as the song dwindles down to its repeated refrain: “Time is a dark / Time is a dark feeling.”
The concept of time is so rigidly ingrained—from daily routines to monthly bills to milestone birthdays—that even suggesting it might not exist can be disorienting. On “Time Is a Dark Feeling,” the latest single from her upcoming album as Florist, Emily A. Sprague presents her defense against the clock. Sprague recognizes the essential role time plays but chooses to delineate her life in memories and emotions instead. “It’s not about time anymore, it’s just about feeling,”
Florist – “Time Is A Dark Feeling” from the album Emily Alone, out July 26th via Double Double Whammy Records.
In February 2017, Twin Peaks took fellow Chicagoans Post Animal on a short tour of Michigan. Within a month, and on the tails of their budding friendships, Cadien moved into a home with all five members of the band:
Now roommates, Cadien and Javi wrote songs together, experimenting with open tunings and finger picking in ways neither had in their other bands, channeling John Fahey and Nick Drake through a lens more familiar to them. They quickly recorded a few instrumentals on a 50s’ portable reel to reel tape machine, with Wes playing drums, Matt playing bass, Jake playing synthesizer and guitar, and Dalton triggering nature sounds. And so Column was born.
It wasn’t until January of 2019 that the words were written and swiftly tracked. Mixed and mastered by good friend R. Andrew Humphry, “I” & “II,” the first entries in the Column story were written.
Chicago band Column is made up of Cadien James of Twin Peaks and all five current members of Post Animal (Dalton Allison, Jake Hirshland, Javi Reyes, Matt Williams, and Wes Toledo) who all live together in the same house. Their debut 7″ is out August 17th via Grand Jury and you can check out one side of the that, the very mellow, laid-back “II” right now.
COLUMN is Cadien James, Dalton Allison, Jake Hirshland, Javier Reyes, Matt Williams, and Wes Toledo. Debut 7″, “I & II,” coming from Grand Jury Music August 16th.
Modern Nature, the new band from Jack Cooper (Ultimate Painting, Mazes) and Will Young (Beak>, Moon Gangs), will release their debut album later hits later this month, and they’ve just shared the video for the gently motoroik new single “Footsteps.” Directed by Jake McGowan, the video follows Jack as the camera flips over and over, changing scenes along the way. “One of the threads through the album is a journey from the chaos of the city to the sanctuary of the country, so we wanted to condense that idea down over the course of ‘Footsteps’ with the final scene being a baptism… washing everything away,” says Jack. “There were a few films that felt very present when writing the album, so there’s some references to Mike Leigh’s Naked, Withnail And I, Tales From A Hard City, Emily Lloyd in Wish You Were Here and The Rise And Fall Of Reginald Perrin.”
Taken from the new album ‘How To Live’ released on 23rd August via Bella Union Records
There is a stately magnificence about this album which sees Weyes Blood building ornate orchestral pop symphonies for listeners to drift on, as captivating layers of strings and synths swirl to dramatic effect.
Weyes Blood has come up for air with her fourth album Titanic Rising – a poetic image, considering the album artwork shows her submerged in water.
It’s a dignified and celestial body of work which has us floating in the Atlantic. Look out for Andromeda and Movies to transport you to another world, but from start to finish, it’s a beaut.
“Movies” taken from Titanic Rising, was released April 5th, 2019 on Sub Pop Records. http://www.weyesblood.com
Weyes Blood aka Natalie Mering is now four albums into her career. This is an excellent starting point for the uninitiated. Echoes of George Harrison, Carpenters, Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren, Philip Glass, and even Enya (in the voice layering department, she admits) all come ringing out of various songs.
This album could have happily lived in any decade across the past 50 years, yet it still feels so connected to today. By processing her memories, ideals, and other layers of her subconscious, she lands on at outlook that only spells survival and strength to me. It’s a beautiful record, in all senses. Beautifully strong, vulnerable, open, reassuring, and to pun on her name, wise.
‘Titanic Rising’ (Released: April 5th, 2019)
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