“Walk Through Fire”, the debut album from Yola, establishes her as the queen of country soul from the first note. The Dan Auerbach–produced album is a contemporary twist on a traditional sonic tapestry of orchestral strings, fiddle, steel, and shimmering tremolo guitars. Walk Through Fire is a career-defining and genre-bending release from one of the most exciting emerging British artists in music today. Yola’s arresting vocals captivate with sincere tales of heartache and loves lost, forgotten, and broken.
From the first bars of the track ‘Faraway Look’, a glorious feeling of sublime calm takes over. Yola’s debut album Walk Through Fire takes you on a journey through classic 70s sounds with touches of soft country sensibilities.
It’s like a memory you can’t place. A reverie.
This British singer-songwriter will soothe you with her soulful lullabies as her voice melds around your ears and gently rocks you.
Listen to this album under the breeze of a shady tree on a sunny afternoon, on a tartan picnic blanket in the park. Perfect with soft cheese and full-bodied wine.
Yola’s “Walk Through Fire,” from her Dan Auerbach-produced debut album, Walk Through Fire, released February 22nd, 2019, on Easy Eye Sound.
Valiantly braving the rain (a rarity in Los Angeles), and a broken elevator, Sharon Van Etten and her band loaded into KCRW’s basement studio to deliver a dynamic set from her new album, “Remind Me Tomorrow”. A couple of those songs had previously not been available, including favorite “Memorial Day” which we are thrilled to share with you here. Four years after the release of her EP “I Don’t Want to Let You Down”, Sharon released her new album, Remind Me Tomorrow, to the masses. We are excited to host her in our basement studio where she’ll premiere some brand new music off her album release.
Though the melody of the song feels dark and moody, the backstory is very sweet. The chorus, “you will run,” was written before Van Etten became pregnant with her son who is now just under two years old. She described sitting down one day to work on the lyrics as her child was napping, and realizing that soon he would be able to run. It brought her to tears, and helped her to create that juxtaposition between the music and the lyrics.
“We love drama and we love KCRW,” Van Etten said as Jason Bentley described the ordeal involved in getting the band set up this morning. Given how much she appears to be managing on a day to day basis, a little weather and a few extra stairs probably don’t seem like that much drama in the grand scheme of things.
In addition to raising a toddler with her partner she’s pursuing a degree in psychology, and venturing into the worlds of acting and film scoring. Van Etten’s first professional acting gig was in 2016 on the Netflix series The OA. She told Morning Becomes Eclectic how much she related to her character on the show, and the fascinating differences between mining personal experiences to create a character vs. mining them to write songs. “I think the main difference is I’m drawing from a personal space to be somebody else whereas now for my music I’m drawing from a personal place to be myself,” she said.
Exploring the self, and enabling others to do the same is clearly very important to Van Etten. Her goal of becoming a mental health professional was sparked by interactions with fans who would share their stories with so much emotion, and ask her for advice. She said she wants to be able to help people find their outlet.
Morning Becomes Eclectic has long been an outlet for Sharon Van Etten, and the confidence that she’s gained as an artist over the years did not go unnoticed. When asked about it she gave us a perfect description, “It’s like when you go to karaoke and you pull out that Pat Benatar song and you own it.” Van Etten is obviously owning it across the board.
Remind Me Tomorrow out January 18th via Jagjaguwar Records
While I Know Leopard may wear their sequinned influences on their sleeves with pride, “Love Is A Landmine” has more than enough personality and promise to make it an exciting listen, rather than just a nostalgic one.
Sydney’sI Know Leopard have been around the block with their ‘70s-inspired synth-pop tunes but something seems to have clicked with their latest album Love Is A Landmine.
The 11 songs here impress as a debut and offer something new without falling into a rose-coloured nostalgia pool. Warm, catchy and damn-near irresistible, just like Heather, it makes us want to get our shit together.
Melbourne-based indie rocker Alex Lahey wasted no time on small-talk pleasantries with the release of her promising 2017 debut, I Love You Like A Brother. The Australian singer-songwriter’s follow-up, “The Best of Luck Club”, and it’s accompanied music video for lead single “Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself” to usher in the good news.
The Best of Luck Club, was released May 17th on Dead Oceans Records, picks up where Brother left off, returning all of the sardonic lyricism Lahey charmed listeners with before, but this time, with a more refined finish—think of it like a backhanded compliment with a really good beat. (Okay, maybe not backhanded, but definitely charismatically sarcastic. )
Citing inspirations ranging from Paramore to Bruce Springsteen, Lahey’s sound is something that hinges on the sunshine-y rhythms of surf rock with a ‘90s riot grrrl-inspired edge, producing anthemic pop-punk not meant for sitting still to. Whether she’s singing about self-doubt and breakups, mental health and moving in with a girlfriend, or vibrators and generational ennui, Lahey’s attention to detail zeroes in and locks a moment in place with self-assured precision.
Lahey notes that the dive bar scene in Nashville was her inspiration for the album’s catchy title. “Whether you’ve had the best day of your life or the worst day of your life, you can just sit up at the bar and turn to the person next to you —who has no idea who you are— and have a chat,” she says. “And the response that you generally get at the end of the conversation is ‘best of luck,’ so The Best of Luck Club is that place.”
Lahey released a music video for its peppy and optimistic title track, “Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself,” which features a return to her saxophone roots. If album #2 delivers anything like her latest single … consider us already dancing in anticipation.
Alex Lahey – Don’t Be So Hard On Yourself taken from ’The Best Of Luck Club’, the new album ,
Bob Dylan, live from the Hollywood Bowl, California on 3rd September 1965. Following the release of the album “Highway 61 Revisited” just days earlier, this historically vital concert captures Bob Dylan at a point of no return. For the first part of the set he holds the audience rapt on his own, without performing any protest material, then brings on his band to play iconoclastic, ragged rock’n’roll. Originally broadcast on WNBC, it’s presented here together with background notes and images.
A favorite show of Dylan’s. His voice was more powerful, controlled and crisp than in any other concert of his career, in my opinion. Every track is punchy and flawless, but a few of the favorites are “Desolation Row” (incredible pronunciation), “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” (unique guitar strumming compared to other versions of this period and tear-jerking singing), “It Ain’t Me, Babe” (super performance of the tune–his voice on “no, no, no” is just divine, and the electric piano and drums are grooving) , and finally “Ballad Of A Thin Man” the organ is hypnotic and again, Dylan’s voice is just spot-on). The Hollywood Bowl concert was an absolutely wild show. This was only a month after Dylan went electric at Newport Folk Festival, and the crowds were hostile. “Fans” were rushing towards the stage, heckling the band, and throwing things. That isn’t to say it wasn’t lively and fun.
Here are a few highlights: – Dylan hilariously responds to the piercing sound an airhorn coming from the audience. -At the conclusion of the Dylan epic “Desolation Row” (the second time he performed it in concert), a few girls shout at the top of their lungs, “IT’S SO GROOVY!”, before “Like A Rolling Stone,” Dylan pulls a 1965 Newport and asks the audience for a C harmonica (This was back when people just carry harmonicas around). The airhorn joke makes yet another appearance.
After the concert, Dylan hosted a massive party with over 300 guests and got to meet one of his idols Marlon Brando.
the Band Bob Dylan (vocal & electric guitar) Robbie Robertson (guitar) Al Kooper (organ) Harvey Brooks (bass) Levon Helm (drums)
Setlist: She Belongs To Me – To Ramona [CUT OUT FOR COPYRIGHT] – Gates Of Eden – It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – Desolation Row – Love Minus Zero/No Limit – Mr. Tambourine Man [CUT OUT FOR COPYRIGHT] – Tombstone Blues – I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) – From A Buick 6 – Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Maggie’s Farm [CUT OUT FOR COPYRIGHT] – It Ain’t Me, Babe – Ballad Of A Thin Man – Like A Rolling Stone
Kristian Matsson is a singer-songwriter from Dalarna, Sweden, who performs under the stage name of The Tallest Man on Earth. Matsson grew up in Leksand, and began his solo career in 2006, having previously been the lead singer of the indie band Montezumas. His music has often drawn comparisonsto the music of Bob Dylan.
“Last summer, Kristian Matsson lamented that steady touring had slowed the arrival of “I Love You. It’s a Fever Dream”., his fifth album as the Tallest Man on Earth. “I can’t write good stuff on tour,” he complained. “I can’t write about life on a tour bus.” Ironically, Fever Dream arrives as a focused and frequently lovely rumination on life lived on a tour bus. Songs unfold in hotel bars, on open roads, beneath vast blue bowls of rural sky. The rhythms of perpetual travel pulse beneath acoustic melodies that lie somewhere between Dylan and Sufjan—a few gentle, a few forceful. With depth and delicacy, Matsson explores the banalities and oddities of tour, like the phenomenon of performing for an adoring audience to whom you are a stranger.
Matsson’s music mirrors his lyrical themes. Though he remains devoted to sparse arrangements of guitar, banjo, and harmonica, these songs begin toveer into more adventurous territory. “Hotel Bar” introduces a horn section, and “The Running Styles of New York” is bookended by momentary blips of electronics. These new elements are deployed sparingly and selectively, a sprinkle of salt to draw new favourite from familiar sound. Tempos vary, too, from raucous stomping to slow, plaintive fingerpicking—as if he’s stretching, sprinting, growing fatigued, slowing down. As in his words, he wrestles with the quesstion of where to go, and how quickly.”
The Tallest Man On Earth’s album ‘I Love You. It’s A Fever Dream.’
Austin, Texas-based songwriter Christelle Bofale will be the first to tell you the importance of family roots and mental health, considering how much those things aided her own self-discovery. Being the first American born in her family, the rich heritage of the Congo is deeply rooted in her upbringing and relationship with sounds.From singing and dancing with her mother as a child, to praying to Congolese music with her grandmother, to her father, a soukous guitar player and musical director for the Congregation at his church, Bofale’s journey as a musician has been defined in tiny intervals throughout the course of her life. As a songwriter, she infuses hints of the Congo into various aspects of her music,
Christelle Bofale’s “Swim Team” is a sumptuous introduction to Bofale’s unparalleled sound. The Austin Texas based singer brings multiple influences to Swim Team—Bofale counts Joni Mitchell and Alex G as inspirations—including jazz, rock, soul, and the musical traditions of her family’s native Congo. “Moving On, Getting On,” the album’s opening song, pairs Bofale’s resonant voice with sweeping guitar riffs. On the soulful “Origami Dreams,”Bofale sings, “Make up your mind, I don’t have the time to wait on you.” Album standout, “U Ouchea” is a seven-minute narrative that merges Bofale’s steady voice, melancholy lyrics, and an expansive guitar melody. At its core, “Swim Team” is an album about mental health and serves as a keyhole opening to Bofale’s inner life and a primer for her unique voice.
Back in 1972, “postmodernism” was a rarely used term, much less “retro” or “vintage” – words now almost fetishised in their description of everything from fashion to music, gaming to boutique coffee shops. Without describing themselves in such terms, however, Roxy Music embodied postmodernism a full decade before the thought of cycling through styles and genres entered the mainstream.
Released on 16th June 1972, the same day as Bowie’s breakthrough The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, Roxy Music was a true raid on pop music’s past… and present… and a signpost towards its genre-blind, boundary-breaking future.
Roxy Music’s opener, ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’, blares out of the speakers as a perfect declaration of intent: a manifesto for the group’s assault on the pop world, reconfiguring and recontextualising old tropes, while presenting them as something utterly unique – futuristic, even. “Eno was always pushing the boundaries,” Manzanera recalled. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but there was a point where we used to be DIed [direct injection] into, through his synths, a mixing desk, and he’d be out in the audience mixing.”
Not that music was Roxy Music’s sole concern. As a song title such as ‘Ladytron’ suggests, with its hint of glamour welded to futuristic possibilities, Bryan Ferry (vocals, keyboards), Brian Eno (vocals, synths, tape effects), Phil Manzanera (guitar), Andy Mackay (vocals, oboe, saxophone), Graham Simpson (bass) and Paul Thompson (drums) were juxtaposing disparate elements from all over the pop culture spectrum.
Roxy Music themselves weren’t the only ones entering history with ‘Virginia Plain’: “Make me a deal and make it straight/All signed and sealed, I’ll take it/To Robert E Lee I’ll show it,” Ferry sings at the start, directly name-checking his lawyer. As with ‘2HB’ – and almost everything Roxy Music did – the reference is doubled: “The Bob” took its title from Battle of Britain (1968) and included a passage simulating the sound of gunfire.
Discussing the music, Andy Mackay later said “we certainly didn’t invent eclecticism but we did say and prove that rock ‘n’ roll could accommodate – well, anything really”
Still astoundingly modern today, Roxy Music remains not only one of the finest debut albums in history, but rock music’s first true postmodern masterpiece. What follows is an attempt to trace the influences and pop culture references in an album that continues to go beyond all expectations – not only of what a rock group can do, but what a true work of art can accomplish. The band’s penchant for glamour was showcased both in the lyrics and in the 1950s-style album cover. The photographer Karl Stoecker shot the cover, featuring model Kari-Ann Muller, who later married Chris Jagger, brother of Mick Jagger
Phil Manzanera recalls “sitting down with Bryan at the first audition and talking about Humphrey Bogart and all the films we loved”. For later solo albums and Roxy Music appearances, Ferry would adopt the image of Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca, suave in a white dinner jacket. On Roxy Music, Bogart is homaged in ‘2HB’, the lyrics directly quoting his Casablanca catchphrase: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
“The great thing is that we had friends who were great fashion designers, who were just beginning to make their mark,” guitarist Phil Manzanera recalled to this writer in 2009. Among them were painter Nick de Ville, who acted as the group’s art director; designer Anthony Price, who advised on clothing and make-up; and hairdresser Keith Wainwright. Each band member conferred with them individually, “never as a coherent, co-ordinated thing”, Manzanera recalled. The first time the band would see each other’s costumes was “literally just before going on the first gig of the new tour… and we’d go, ‘My god! Where did that come from?’”
That’s how you create a group that looks as though each member is performing in a different band – or on a different planet, as Brian Eno noted when he described some of the Roxy Music costumes as the sort of thing the president of the Galactic Parliament might have worn in a sci-fi movie. It was, as Manzanera recalls, a “wonderful coming together of random elements – but behind those random elements were people with a lot of learning”.
Originally released on Animal Records in 1982 and produced by Chris Stein of Blondie, “Zombie Birdhouse” is something of a lost classic. This album may just be Iggy’s Morrison Hotel; like that Doors classic, Zombie Birdhouse takes an almost novelistic look at the character of America that is by turns funny and angry, reverential and irreverent. It’s filled, too, with an almost mystical primitivism that brings out the shaman in Iggy’s soul. Throughout, Iggy’s collaborator, guitarist-keyboardist Rob duPrey, manages to produce some fascinating noise by altering, filtering and treating his instruments. A heady concoction of drones, Afrobeats and freeform lyrics, the album was Iggy’s 6th solo studio album and represents him at his freewheeling best.Chris Stein and Clem Burke of Blondie provide the exotic rhythmic spice that seasons this record to perfection. The sleeve notes have been written by long time Iggy fan Irvine Welsh.
A visual for lead single ‘The Villagers’ is unveiled as a taster of the album,
The reissue of Zombie Birdhouse has been remastered by Paschal Byrne at The Audio Archive, London. It features the singles ‘Run Like A Villain’ and ‘The Villagers’ along with rare photographs from the original photo-shoot by Esther Friedman.
The CD edition is Expanded with the addition of a Bonus Track in the form of the original version of Pain and Suffering, which features fellow Blondie band member Debbie Harry on backing vocals. The song was originally recorded for the ground-breaking animated feature film, Rock and Rule (Iggy provided the voice of the Monster From Another Dimension and Debbie Harry the voice for the character, Angel) but the OST was never released.
On their second album and first for Run For Cover Records, Horse Jumper of Love perfect their driving slowcore while discarding some of the moping that characterized their self-titled debut. This time around, the Boston trio’s desolation is mostly confined to the dejected guitars, which exude as much angst as a pop-punk chord progression, as much muscle as a metal riff and as much sonic weight as a shoegaze solo.
Memory looms large on Horse Jumper of Love’s hypnotic sophomore album, ‘So Divine,’ but it remains elusive. Throughout the record, tiny snapshots from the past float to the surface, baring themselves for brief moments before diving back into the ether. Like abstract collages, the Boston-based three-piece’s songs jumble richly detailed scenes and vivid imagery, papering over one moment with the next until each string of seemingly unrelated thoughts coalesces into a breathtaking work of art, one that reveals deep truths about ourselves and our psyches.
“A lot of these songs are about making small things into huge deals,” says guitarist/singer Dimitri Giannopoulos. “They all start with these very specific little memories that, for some reason or another, have stuck in my mind. Memories morph and change over time, though, and they become freighted with all these different meanings. We’re constantly adding to them.” Giannopoulos officially launched the group with bassist John Margaris and drummer Jamie Vadala-Doran in 2013, taking their moniker from a Latin phrase that had gotten more than a little lost in translation. The band would spend the next three years refining their studio craft and live show, garnering a devoted following playing DIY gigs around New England as they climbed their way into what Pitchfork described as “the top tier of the Boston house show scene.” In 2016, they released their self-titled debut to rave reviews, with NPR praising the band’s “slow, syrupy rock songs” as “cautiously measured and patiently curious” and Audiotree hailing the “soft spoken, contemplative trio” for their “unique sonic palette and precise compositions.” In 2017, the group released a vinyl and digital re-issue of the album along with a limited edition demo anthology.
“Nature” by Horse Jumper of Love from the upcoming album ‘So Divine’ out June 28th via Run For Cover Records
