A big Rough Trade tip for 2019! This jangly, buzzing, dreamy lot are just the right amount of grrrrrrl power that 2019 has been gagging for. Skirting between all kinds of lo-fi DIY punk with grace and glory. The songs channel the dream pop goodness of Lush/Alvvays and the joyous energy of a first listen to Big Moon. This gang’s (and they feel like a proper gang – I mean I’m not messing with them) first 2 EPs are now available on vinyl for the first time, and Rough Trade Exclusive slime-coloured vinyl at that.
This video was filmed in the Blue Mountains region. Body Type would like to acknowledge the Darug and Gundungurra people, who are the Traditional Custodians of this land. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded
“Uma” is lifted from EP2 out now via Partisan Records & Inertia Music:
What can you say about the new album from London’sUSA Nails? This is brutal. But also deftly melodic and catchy. Twelve tracks of pummeling, furious, joyous noise. ‘Life Cinema’ is an apt title. This is a cinematic effort, that aims to build the scope of the band. Personally, I’m hot for ‘Creative Industries’. What a jam.
So, seek this one out. It’s definitely one of the better noise punk/noise rock/no-wave/pigfuck/whatever you want to call it, albums released this year. Go see them live as they are touring with Metz, But then, you have this album to tide you over. Seek it out, it’s worth it.
On their fourth album,These London, noiserockers USA Nails unleash another barrage of their sharp, feedback laden noise punk. It’s a rush of jagged riffs, hyper fast drums and pummeling bass, topped off by sardonic vocals. Like an English version of Pissed Jeans (if that band were heavily influenced by Wire), their lyrics take dead aim and the annoyances found in modern life. So, on this one they take aim at such topics as dead end jobs, consumerism and social anxiety to just name a few. They approach it with a sarcastic wit and a mordant sense of humor. The music goes hard and fast, as almost every song is a two minute blast of feedback drenched invective. It provides quite the rush. Also, quite the catharsis for people trying to keep sane in a world that gets more insane every single day.
Melina Duterte, the artist better known as Jay Som, has announced a new record called Anak Ko (“my child” in Tagalog). The follow-up to 2017’s Everybody Works is out August 23rd (via Polyvinyl Records). she’s shared the record’s first single “Superbike.” It arrives with a video that features a behind-the-scenes look into the making of Anak Ko.
Melina Duterte recorded, produced, engineered, and mixed Anak Ko at her Los Angeles home. It includes contributions from Vagabon, Justus Proffit, Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott, and Boy Scout’s Taylor Vick, as well as her Jay Som bandmates Zachary Elasser, Oliver Pinnell, and Dylan Allard. According to a press release, the title was inspired by a text message from her mother, who often tells her, “Hi anak ko, I love you anak ko.”
“Superbike” hops and skips across the shoegaze spectrum, starting out jangly and pretty before winding up in a gauzy drone. The result is intoxicating, with all eyes on upcoming album Anak Ko.
“Superbike” is taken from Jay Som’s new album, Anak Ko, out August 23rd, 2019.
“Close the door to your mouth and get the fuck in the car!” It’s an order that Stef Chura half sings, half-speaks halfway through the chugging “Method Man,” a big fat rock song that embodies the rattle and swagger of the Detroit artist’s sophomore release “Midnight”, itself a big fat rock record that staggers and struts like a drunk trying to walk straight, its riffs as sticky as a dive bar’s beer-sloshed floor and Chura’s delightful yips and yodels bearing the slurry quality of just a few too many bottles of Bud. Though the record has its straightforward moments —“Lemme do a jumping jack over your heart,” implores Chura on giddy number “Jumping Jack”—this is not pop and the medicine isn’t going doing easy and rarely in less than 2 minutes. Like the old rock records of yore, Midnight rewards repeat listening, the better to savor the ways Chura and Will Toledo find to reshape her loosey-goosey song structures into songs with edges as sharp and polished as diamonds.
Though Chura’s always been a creative, exciting guitarist, she’s equally as inventive with her vocals on Midnight. On the chorus of tightly wound “Scream,” she sings, “If only you could hear me scream!” three times in a row, changing the inflection of the final word so it sounds like “scram” or “scree-yum,” playfully expounding upon the possibilities of language while her fingers explore the boundaries of the electric guitar. “My girl is 3-dimensional,” exclaims Chura joyfully on “3D girl,” and she is.
I have a new side-project, Droneflower, out on Sacred Bones Records with my friend Stephen Brodsky. Steve, a fellow Massachusetts native and member of Cave In and Mutoid Man, worked on this full length collaboration mostly at my old apartment in Jamaica Plain and some at his place in Brooklyn. We co-produce this album and I can’t wait for you to hear the whole thing!
Brodsky met Nadler for the first time in 2014 at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus Bar when he came to see her play on her July tour, and they quickly became friends. Both of them had been wanting to explore songwriting that didn’t fit into their existing projects, and they soon became energized by the prospect of working together. One of the first ideas they discussed was a horror movie soundtrack, and while Droneflower isn’t that, it is a richly cinematic album. It’s easy to imagine much of the record set to images, though it wasn’t composed that way.
The first song that came together was “Dead West,” based around a beautiful acoustic guitar piece Brodsky wrote while living on Spy Pond, just outside of Nadler’s home base in Boston. By the time they started working on the song earnest, Brodsky had moved to Brooklyn. Nadler added lyrics and vocal melodies remotely, and even from a distance it was obvious there was real kismet in the collaboration.
“It’s is a sprawling and expansive exercise in contrasts. It is the sound of the war between the brutal and the ethereal, the dark and the light, the past and the present, and the real and imagined.” The limited edition sold out really fast of this, but the vinyl is available at Sacred Bones. You can also order a limited edition by joining the Sacred BonesRecord Society : Edition of 150 hand-numbered copies, comes with alternate screen printed, wrap around sleeve, wax sealed LP pressed on Society-exclusive clear-and-yellow marble vinyl and with Society-exclusive mixed tape,
All the songs on Droneflower were recorded in home studios.
Though she conjures up an electrical storm of rockstar fireworks with her main gig, La Luz, Shana Cleveland settles into a more contemplative mode on solo LP “Night of the Worm Moon”. A mellow set of sci-fi lullabies written on acoustic guitar rank, the songs on Night rank among the most haunted recordings of Cleveland’s career. “Fingerpicking feels more meditative to me so I go to a more introspective place lyrically and thematically when I play acoustic guitar,” Cleveland said in an interview about “Night of the Worm Moon”, and certainly her fingerpicked patterns create a gentle rhythmic flow that becomes nearly ambient in its soothing tones and pensive unfurling. But what anchors Night isn’t just Cleveland’s accomplished musicianship, but how she expertly excavates wisdom from weirdness on songs that toe the line between what is real and what seems half-remembered from a dream. “Nothing’s the loudest sound in a house when no one’s around,” Cleveland sings on the title track, a truly spooky song wherein the artist imagines herself as a constant presence who watches from within the walls. Throughout Night of the Worm Moon, Cleveland uses the potent power of such psychedelic signifiers to illuminate bright emotional truths in a darkening world that will probably never make sense again.
what an exceptional collection of transcendental lullabies. Night of the Worm Moon was recorded during a rare cosmic occurrence: 2017’s solar eclipse. “We took a break from recording during [the] totality and looked at the sun’s image through a piece of cardboard projecting onto a garbage can,” Cleveland says. “When we came back inside the studio was covered in dozens of tiny crescent suns, refracted from a mirrored disco ball that [engineer Johnny Goss] had hanging in a window.” Abetting Cleveland during the recording process was a familiar gallery of co-conspirators: multi-instrumentalist Will Sprott of Shannon & the Clams, original La Luz bassist Abbey Blackwell,Goss, pedal steel player Olie Eshelman, and Kristian Garrard, who drummed on Cleveland’s previous solo effort (with then-backing band The Sandcastles), 2011’s Oh Man, Cover the Ground.
Carla Geneve’s self-titled debut album is a delightful listen. Introspective and clear, the songs on Geneve’s debut serve as an introduction to her honest and direct songwriting and grunge-influenced rock sound. The songs on this album deal mostly with love and identity. Geneve’s voice radiates over the guitar riffs. Carla explains the meaning behind latest single, ‘Yesterday’s Clothes’ is about falling out of love with someone and feeling guilty about it. I wrote it at time when I was burning the candle at both ends and had no energy left to try to deal with the end of a relationship. Most of the words came when I was doing a long drive back from some gig or another in regional WA. I’d been up all night and had to be somewhere the next day, so I hadn’t had a shower or changed clothes. When you’re on your own driving for hours and hours it’s hard to avoid thinking about stuff that you don’t want to, so I guess I wrote the song to try to come to terms with my thoughts and situation.”
On “2001,” Geneve sings, “I am not in touch with my emotions, I am a little kid going through the motions,” over a steady guitar melody in an ode to loneliness. On the pensive album closer, “I Hate You (For Making Me Not Want To Leave The City),” Geneve’s voice shines over the guitar ballad. Carla Geneve is a substantial debut from a singular voice.
With a captivating live show and relatable lyricism, Carla Geneve burst onto the WA scene in 2017. After being hailed by Pilerats as one of their ’18 Artists to Watch in 2018’, her debut single ‘Greg’s Discount Chemist’ was released to overwhelming support including love from triple j, triple j Unearthed and community radio.
Perth artist Carla Geneve released her debut self-titled EP on Friday 7th June via Dot Dash / Remote ControlRecords
This August, Texas bands’ Lomelda and Hovvdy head out on a U.S. tour together. Ahead of their trek, they’ve shared a new EP where they cover each other’s songs. “Covers” also includes a new collaboration called “🙂.”
A cassette edition of Covers is forthcoming (via Double Double Whammy). All proceeds from the cassette will go to RAICES, a nonprofit that provides low-cost legal services to immigrant children, families, and refugees.
Lomelda is the recording project of Silsbee, Texas musician Hannah Read. Her latest album, “M for Empathy”, came out this past winter.
Charlie Martin and Will Taylor comprise the Austin-based Hovvdy. They released their album “Cranberry” in February 2018.
The year is just halfway through, but 2019 has already been a big one for Alexandra Sauser-Monnig. The musician best known as one-third of Mountain Man, the folk trio who made their comeback with last year’s beautiful Magic Ship, announced earlier this year that her debut solo record was en route. Dawnbreaker arrives less than a year after Magic Ship, Mountain Man’s second album as a trio and their first after an eight-year hiatus. It’s a gentle 10-song collection of rustling folk-pop.
Dawnbreaker is the first album Alexandra Sauser-Monnig she has released under the name Daughter of Swords. To celebrate its release (it’s out today via Nonesuch Records) Sauser-Monnig broke the album down for us track-by-track.
“Fellows”
The guitar line of “Fellows” materialized while I was living in a beautiful, ramshackle old farmhouse in rural Virginia with a former partner, and the words later while camping high up a California mountain road on a break from touring with Feist many years ago. The writing of the song spanned the end of one relationship and the beginning of another, and it reflects on the futility of defining yourself through your relationship to a partner.
“Gem”
“Gem” was the first song that Nick Sanborn — who engineered, co-produced, mixed and played on the record — and I collaborated on arranging. He’s really good at following what’s fun, and pivoting to another song or idea or approach when the joy or the energy feels like it’s beginning to lag. After having recorded a couple of pretty spare demos and takes, this song ventured into new terrain and was the first time the breadth of the spectrum of sound and arrangement of the record became clear.
“Shining Woman”
I wrote this song when I was feeling wrapped up about what being an adult person with a womb means. Writing it felt like a reminder to myself that the world is full of inspiring people choosing to make their own paths through life liberated from the cultural and biological script. The main character of the song took up residence in my mind and served as a reminder to me that change is always possible.
“Fields of Gold”
Drummer Joe Westerlund, formerly of Megafaun and currently of Mandolin Orange, played a large role in shaping the feel of “Fields of Gold.” He is a wizard of aux percussion and has a library of things to make sounds with, from shakers and bells to custom made metal sculptures that you play with a bow to things nature made that happen to sound beautiful. He lived next door to the studio where Dawnbreaker was made, and for a couple of magical days made complicated, delicate percussive arrangements holding more percussion in his hands than seemed humanly possible before I saw him in action.
“Grasses”
“Grasses” is a meditation on acceptance. I wrote the words when I was sick with tick-borne illness. My body felt really wrong and I was having trouble getting any insight or advice, or even a diagnosis from doctors. So all I knew was that I felt terrible and that it wasn’t getting better. I sang “Grasses” to myself while lying in bed in an effort to comfort myself and to get down from the high ledges of fear and panic I was on in my mind.
“Easy is Hard”
Country was the first kind of music that made me feel something potent that I couldn’t name. It’s often where my songwriting begins, even if it doesn’t stay there. “Easy is Hard” follows its own logic, but feels like one of the songs on the record whose roots are most obviously in country.
“Rising Sun”
For a while I had an old worn out Sun Records tape of Billy Lee Riley songs in my car. I was in a very transitional phase of life and latched onto this tape and listened to it all the time in a way that gave me the tiniest sense of stability. I learned a blues shuffle off of it and wrote a different version of the song, which is “Rising Sun.” One of my favorite moments on the record is the end of this song — as the band fades out, the voices of Mountain Man fade in, humming like the highway and ending with all our voices and the sound of the room predominant in an unexpected way.
“Long Leaf Pine”
I had just moved to North Carolina and had been out blackberry picking and exploring the woods behind my house when I wrote “Long Leaf Pine.” I came back in and sat down and the song came out more or less complete. Recording it was equally magical — Nick Sanborn and I had been trying different arrangements of the song, and had started over again, making some kind of far out choices. It had started snowing outside when Amelia Meath and Molly Sarlé came over. They sang beautiful witchy harmonies while snow was falling outside the window and contextualized everything else beautifully within the realm of harmony.
“Human”
This was another song that appeared mostly formed very fast. I’ve had the possibly common but definitely surreal experience a few times of my subconscious delivering up verdicts on my life choices in song form before the rest of my mind is ready to acknowledge whatever it is, and that was the case with Human. We recorded the song, and then I left it alone for almost a year without even listening to it. There was a point that I didn’t want it on the record because it’s so raw. But now its presence feels crucial to me in the arc of the record.
“Dawnbreaker”
“Dawnbreaker” is a dive into the ways imagining possible transmogrification into a different life form sometimes feels preferable to facing the hard emotional truths of life with a human consciousness. This last track on the record was one of the first takes that we recorded, and it was recorded as a demo. For a while, I wanted to get a different take to use, but none of the subsequent takes had the same rawness and tentative energy that ultimately felt so right as a note to end on.
With the release of their self-titled debut album just over a week away (via Bella Union), The Soft Cavalry (the husband/wife duo of Steve Clarke and Rachel Goswell of Slowdive) have today shared a video for new single “Never Be Without You”, animated by James Bates.
Of the video Clarke comments: “I can’t quite remember how the idea for this one started but as it developed I could sense it was going to turn into something of a love song. I don’t really like writing love songs. I’ll leave that to the masters and the true romantics. All relationships are different and I therefore certainly don’t feel qualified to make blanket statements on the subject.The lyric had to be honest. About the importance of relationships as well as the struggles and responsibilities that are often created by other things in your lives. Rachel’s son Jesse downloaded an app (as he often does) on my phone. A game called Limbo. It’s pretty dark and depicts a little character making his way through a forest, coming up against all kinds of traps and weird creatures. This kind of kick started the idea for the video that James Bates has so brilliantly executed. We didn’t want the creatures to be too scary – hint at the idea of them as something to be concerned about… but equally playful in design.James drew every one of these characters by hand before animating them. A true labour of love.”
The self titled album from The Soft Cavalry is due 5th July on Bella Union Records
