Small Houses is a Austin, TX based indie/folk project featuring the songs and poems of Flint, MI native Jeremy Quentin. Artfully crafted finger-style guitar playing, and softly sung melodies describing the people, love, and homes of Quentin’s life. Tortured lyrics whip and wind their way around each other. They only let you see the knots and the grit, but something throbs inside there.
With clattering piano, Nile Rodgers-esque guitar chunks and a stomping horn section, the new Fort Frances single is a wake-up call for the information age. Atwood Magazine describes the song as “a lyrical journey of endless news cycles and social media feeds; of theoretically ‘massive’ stories that surrender to the next day’s trend overnight; of a deluge of push notifications, emails and texts.”
A newly expanded deluxe edition of “Our Endless Numbered Days”. This version will feature eight previously never before heard demos, new artwork, and a 12-page booklet including liner notes from author Amanda Petrusich.
Sam Beam, aka Iron & Wine, released Our Endless Numbered Days, his second album, in March of 2004. It followed his seemingly out of nowhere debut arrival, The Creek Drank the Cradle (2002) which was a quiet word of mouth treasure. Our Endless Numbered Days was recorded in Chicago and was the first in a string of releases to be produced by Brian Deck (Red Red Meat, Modest Mouse, Ugly Casanova, etc.).
The record, which has sold over 556,000 copies, marked many firsts for Beam both professionally and personally and as Petrusich so rightly calls it in her liner notes “Our Endless Numbered Days is a timeless record about the passage of time.”
Upon its release SPIN called the record a “masterwork” one that is “self-assured, spellbinding, and richly, refreshingly adult.” Pitchfork, which gave the original album “Best New Music,” had this to say, “An astoundingly progressive record: Beam has successfully transgressed his cultural pigeonhole without sacrificing any of his dusty allure.”
Luluc released their debut album, “Dear Hamlyn”, in 2008; the songs were written following the death of Randell’s father. Dear Hamlyn eventually gained a large group of influential admirers. Peter Blackstock co-founder of No Depression Magazine, wrote of the album, “The most beautiful album I’ve heard in ten years.” In 2011, Nick Drake’s producer, Joe Boyd, also taken by Dear Hamlyn, invited Luluc to feature in his Nick Drake tribute tour. They contributed the tracks “Things Behind the Sun” and “Fly” to the live tribute album, Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake in 2013.
Luluc went on to sign with Sub Pop Records and release the critically acclaimed albums Passerby (2014) and Sculptor (2018). This edition of Dear Hamlyn is the first time it has been available on vinyl.
The Wealthiest Queen from the Luluc album Dear Hamlyn. The film clip is a Lucy Dyson animation, inspired by the work of Busby Berkeley. Song written by Zoe Randell.
Given Cherry Glazerr’s long time KCRW fandom – the band name was inspired by our intrepid local Morning Edition anchor after all – it feels only natural that they would celebrate the release of their third album with us. And celebrate they did. Front woman Clem Creevy took to a mic festooned with Christmas lights with a palpable giddiness, and led her band through a breathless set of songs from the new album Stuffed & Ready. The band’s line-up has shifted a few times over the years, but Creevy remains constant in her growth as a vocalist and songwriter. She gave KCRW a peek into this process as she elaborated on the album title saying “Stuffed and ready is this idea that I had that when you’re stuffed you feel kind of ill-equipped to do anything, but like lie on the couch and it’s this idea that even when you feel ill-equipped you go and do it anyways, because if you’re sitting around waiting for perfection nothing’s gonna happen.”
In the best possible sense Clem doesn’t seem like an artist that has ever let perfection get in the way of her artistic expression, but it does sound like creating the particular batch of songs that would become Stuffed & Ready took a great amount of careful consideration in a way that was somewhat new. Creevy also stated “I felt the need to express my raw emotions in a way that I hadn’t done before, and I questioned myself a lot with the lyrics on this album, and sort of went through it a bunch, and went through every song 100 times trying to make sure the lyrics made sense and fit with the essence of the song which I had never done before. And it was… it definitely made me feel vulnerable in a lot of ways.” She also joked that she didn’t know how sad the album was until she was done with it, and everyone started telling her how sad it was.
This all feels greatly contradictory to watching Cherry Glazerr live though; the current band is a tight knit trio consisting of Creevy, bassist Devin O’Brien, and drummer Tabor Allen. All appeared to be having an absolute blast as they dove into each raucous number, particularly on the standout singles “Daddi,” and “Wasted Nun.”
Tales of past intense performances were shared, and Creevy still shows glimpses of the charmingly awkward high schooler that we first came to know her as – especially when asked to comment on the presence of billboards (!) for the album around town. She assured us that of course the band would continue partying like rock stars in honor of the day’s release. Kicking off the festivities in the dwindling days of our basement studio was a pure thrill.
Musicians:
Clementine Creevy – Lead Vocals, Guitar
Devin O’Brien – Bass
Tabor Allen – Drums
Austin psych-blues four-piece White Denim released their last album, Performance, less than a year ago, and they’re already dropping singles off their new one. ‘Shanalala’ is one of two new tracks they just debuted in the lead up to the release of their eighth album in 11 years, titled Side Effects. There are no words to express how lazy this paragraph makes me feel.
Taken from the new album ‘Side Effects’, out March 29th
Los Angeles psych-rockers Wand have announced the follow-up to their 2017 album Plum and 2018 EP Perfume. Their new album, Laughing Matter, will be released on April 19th via Drag City Records, they’ve shared the first single, “Scarecrow,” with an accompanying video directed by Gordon De Los Santos.
“Scarecrow” picks up where the understated psychedelics of Perfume left off with its rippling guitar line, downtempo rhythms, sparse piano and frontman Cory Hanson’s benevolent coo. Wand have always excelled at pretty, somber ballads, so if they decide to fill out the rest of their LP with a similarly quiet and majestic take on their transcendent sound, it should make for a soothing listen.
According to their Bandcamp page, “Laughing Matter offers bits of fuzzy parable, travel diary, pep talk and lullaby, amid a joyous, eclectic sense of pastiche and ascendant choruses. Wand form new music from the ashes of a world that can no longer suffer its human abusers, to inspire us to hold the spirit close and do what’s next.”
Listen to “Scarecrow” check out the Laughing Matter album artwork . You can preorder Laughing Matter on double LP, CD, cassette or MP3 via Drag City Records.
After releasing 2016’s critically acclaimed Apocalipstick, Cherry Glazerr spent the next 18 months touring the world on their own steam. Between DIY All Ages venues, rock clubs, large festival stages, and massive theaters with some of the world’s best and most beloved bands (The Pixies, Flaming Lips, Slowdive, and The Breeders, among others), the band has really only stopped to work on their follow up, “Stuffed & Ready”. While furiously building the band’s sound and ideas, front person Clem Creevy enlisted Carlos de La Garza to be the band’s studio co-collaborator as they evolved the songs and refined the recordings.
“Wasted Nun” from ‘Stuffed & Ready’ by Cherry Glazerr out February 1st, 2019 on Secretly Canadian
David Loca, also known as David Speck, has been making ’80s-indebted weird-pop under the name Part Time for a long while now. (We named the project a Band To Watch way back in 2011.) And now he’s teamed up with fellow ’80s weird-pop auteur Ariel Pink for new song “I Can Treat You Better,” the lead single from his forthcoming full-length Spell #6. The album finds Loca nudging his murky lo-fi songcraft into the light — he rerecorded the LP in his drummer’s studio, as opposed to keeping things in his bedroom — and “I Can Treat You Better” is a synth-flecked soft-rock jam with a killer sax solo.
Spell #6 is out 11/2 via Burger/Tough Love Records.
“I Can Treat You Better ft. Ariel Pink” Spell #6 Burger / Tough Love Records (2018)
In the first 15 seconds of his new video, Bob Mould tells the world: “Dictators, terrorists and tech companies have created an apocalyptic surveillance state. The Western world has fallen into a deep state of paranoia and disinformation.”
The video for Bob Mould’s new song, “Lost Faith” cuts to a scene of our protagonist, living in Germany, being interviewed by the media. From Mould’s paranoid point of view, all he can see are drones following him. And when the reporter asks, “What are you running from?” the music kicks in and Mould sings: “I’ve lost faith in everything / Everything, everything.” This could simply be the perfect song for our times, but what Mould does in “Lost Faith” (and elsewhere on his forthcoming album Sunshine Rock) is take the negativity and fear and locate the positive. “I know we all lose faith from time to time,” he sings. “You better find your way back home.”
New album ‘Sunshine Rock’ out Feb 8th, 2019!
Bob Mould is a legend, and his band Hüsker Dü informed a huge swath of music in the ’90s. These days, he is, in fact, living in Germany; it’s been a few years and he says he’s newly inspired. The new album is full of themes of sunshine instead of “black sheets of rain.”
Writing via email, Mould says of “Lost Faith” that “there’s a hint of migration, a dash of border security and a whisper of government surveillance, climaxing across the multicolored canvas of an abandoned NSA listening station perched atop the highest hill in Berlin. But at the end of the day, it’s a high-end music video for a catchy, inspirational, uplifting pop song.”
From the album Sunshine Rock, out February 8th, 2019 on Merge Records.
