Archive for the ‘CLASSIC ALBUMS’ Category

SIDNEY GISH — ” No Dogs Allowed “

Posted: December 21, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Technically, Sidney Gish’s No Dogs Allowedcame out in 2017; the Northeastern student put the album up on Bandcamp on December 31st “mainly due to panic rather than intention,” as she explains it, having intended to finish it sooner, but only finding the proper amount of time to do so during the lull at the end of the year. That’s a fitting entry point into Gish’s state of mind: a distinctly millennial (post-millennial, ) strain of near-constant worry underscores her music, but  there’s almost always a joke right there behind it.

“Every other day I’m wondering,” she considers on “Impostor Syndrome”—just one of many songs on No Dogs Allowed that you will decide is your “favourite” at one point or another—“What’s a human being gotta be like? / What’s a way to just be competent?” But before she’s even caught her breath after that existential aside, she’s already laughing it off: “I don’t blend in at PetSmart / That truth holds true at the WalMart / In either case they say to me / What the fuck is lost in aisle 3?”

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Gish is a triple threat—besides being a crack lyricist able to invite you into her own world while also managing to relate to yours, she’s a stellar guitarist, and has an extremely gentle melodic touch to boot. Also, she managed to mix the whole damn album using just Apple earbuds and a car stereo. Every song on No Dogs Allowed is a joy, even when Gish is singing about the terrors of adulthood—because, god, how could you hear a song like “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and be afraid of anything at all? It’s all going to be OK, even if it isn’t.

THIS WEEKS ESSENTIAL NEW RELEASES Friday 21st December 2018

Posted: December 21, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC, THIS WEEKS ESSENTIAL PURCHASES
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So, we’re in the final home straight on the lead-up to Christmas, we’ve had some last-minute releases that might just be perfect for that special someone. plus, there is loads to look forward to for next year, back in the present (pun intended), the album at the top of your want list this week ‘Popcorn Lung: a Polytechnic Youth Collection’, which collects rare and exclusive tracks from some of this label’s brightest artists.

If you’re in the mood for something loud, the ever-active Ty Segall has a scuzzy treat for us that’ll blow the winter lurgy clean out of our systems. teaming up with wife & caustic vocalist, Denee Segall, The C.i.a.’s debut leans towards the heavier, punkier side of Ty’s work & features more than enough guitar freakouts to keep us elated. The always brilliant Decemberists’ aptly-timed December ep release features a delicious set of b-sides from the ‘I’ll be Your Girl’ recording sessions. You also get a cheeky little surprise from Aliment’s latest instalment: Barcelona’s answer to Meat wave & Menace beach – noisy & nice punk in equal measure.

The Wave Pictures’ ‘Look Inside Your Heart’ is on cd & vinyl. have a wonderful Christmas & a Happy Vinyl new year,

John Mellencamp, Other People’s Stuff

Other People’s Stuff is a new collection of covers that shows Mellencamp applying his knack for storytelling to ten staples from the American music canon. The material is culled mostly from his own albums, hard-to-find compilations, and documentary soundtracks. Mellencamp also recorded a brand-new version of “Eyes on the Prize,” a standard that he had performed at The White House for the 2010 Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement at the request of President Obama.

Image of The Felice Brothers - The Felice Brothers (10th Anniversary Reissue)

This reissue marks the 10th anniversary of the release of their seminal Self Titled album. This special re-issue includes two never-before-heard outtakes from the Self Titled recording sessions: Baltimore, and Watersider... included on a 7” with the LP (180G), and as bonus tracks on CD.

Cherished by fans and critics alike, this fifteen track opus by the Catskill Mountain based band of brothers boasts classics like Frankie’s Gun, Wonderful Life, Whisky In My Whisky and Don’t Wake The Scarecrow, and remains one of the most influential works of this century’s indie-folk-rock revival.

Hailing from upstate New York’s Catskills Mountains, the Felice Brothers look like their entire approach was based on staring long and hard at the Band’s second album cover: Beards, white shirts, hats and ill-fitting suits. The comparisons to Big Pink/Basement-era Dylan are also inevitable.

Yet this second album proper from the three siblings and their bass player Christmas (an ex-travelling dice player, apparently) is so chock full of whiskey-soaked, ramshackle bonhomie that it’d be a hard-hearted music critic indeed who didn’t succumb to the charms contained therein. The group have somehow taken Americana and wrung out some more good times. It’s time to visit the bar again…

With most of the numbers croaked out by brother Ian, whose vocal chords draw most of the Zimmerman comparisons, this is a collection of songs that are equal parts travelogue, shaggy dog story, drunken lament and filched traditional fare. They’re all captured in gloriously scratchy lo-fi (complete with ambient chat, phone conversations and other audio verite) as befits a band whose last recordings were supposedly completed in a chicken coup on a two-track.

Like Dylan, their self-mythologising puts them not in the modern age, but somewhere in the early part of the last century. Jaunty, piano-led ballads like Greatest Show On Earth or Take This Bread are lifted by parping brass and rollicking choruses, like a night out in a riverfront bar, filled with unfaithful women and gun-toting men (guns are mentioned in just about every song) bent on drunken revenge. Elsewhere the waltz time of Ruby Mae approaches a Tom Waits-like pathos. Whiskey In My Whiskey sounds like a murder ballad that’s centuries old.

Yet all these tales are shot through with a red-eyed humour that sounds as authentic as their beards. This is how they manage to convince the listener. Frankie’s Gun! With it’s truck driving narrative and wheezing accordion is particularly hilarious. Rather than some studious authenticity, they sound like they’re just having a good time. And that’s just about the only recommendation you need to seek out this fine album…

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The CIA – The CIA

“This record is an encapsulation. The omnipresent fear and anger. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? And what is really going on? Consternation…today… There is difficulty, frustration, strain and a large snake. You can feel the pressure of it breathing on the streets, in media, and in your lunch. This s/t, by The C.I.A., is an urgent musical notice. I feel it immediately. The pointed vocal cadence and lyrics of Denée Segal is a sharp scythe, and the actual time is…now. “I feel the same distress call and disposition from Crass records like Penis Envy or DIRT. In fact, if you took that, mixed in “Black Silk Stocking” by Chrisma and a touch of early Nic Endo (Atari Teenage Riot) and even Dinah Cancer (45 Grave) Autopsy era, you can get a feeling. And, similarly to those mentioned, Denée is putting a time stamp on this time. The spirit and her viability is strong in many a corner, and in many a heart. The alarm is ringing. “This is survival sound, put on record well backed by Ty Segall and Emmett Kelly, who have added anything-musthappen, mercurial, constantly moving instrumentation. The sounds, consistent with unique monochrome, move like an engine, made gas-tight by piston rings. Sonic rings moving in tight machine patterns. And at the vocal helm is Denée, steering this machine in vocal directions across an exclamation point motorway. No salt, all salt. Traction and reaction. They built a sound machine with, and for each other. Survival sound lifts its head up when it needs to. Thankfully it gets put on record and released when it needs to.” —Tim Presley

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The Yardbirds – 1964 – 1966 Live at the BBC (Vol 2)

Broadcasts from the BBC archives and beyond. Recorded between 1964 and 1966. It features seminal performances by guitarists Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

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Estrons  –  You Say I’m Too Much, I Say You’re Not Enough

The hotly-tipped Welsh alt-rock outfit Estrons release their much-anticipated debut album You Say I’m Too Much, I Say You’re Not Enough. The record is the culmination of over two years hard touring and honing of a sound that has become theirs and theirs alone.

thanks everyone for your views and support,

FLASHER – ” Material “

Posted: December 20, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Washington D.C. trio Flasher released their debut album Constant Image earlier this year via Domino Records and it made its way into our albums of the year list. “Material” is one of the album’s most infectious, vibrant cuts as Flasher’s ping-ponging, overlapping pop vocals make for possibly the most satisfying vocal tradeoff you’ll hear all year. Bassist Danny Saperstein’s snotty, playful vocal delivery circles around Emma Baker’s snappy drums as guitarist Taylor Mulitz joins Baker for an unparalleled, ethereal shoegaze vocal rapture (“Construct / Interrupt / Material”). The video is a post-modern, late-capitalist deconstruction of Internet culture, and its surreal humor sheds a light on just how pervasive and crazy that culture has become. Twenty seconds in, they purposely freeze the video—spinning onscreen circle, cursor, groans and all—before clicking onto a fake lyric video of the song and resuming the tune. What follows is a series of absurd Internet parodies of the band performing the track—an a cappella version, an instructional dance video, a cringeworthy karaoke version and a behind-the-scenes clip.

They even make a satirical advertisement for socks so high they can’t fall down and a fake conspiracy theory video that accuses the band of having Illuminati ties. It closes with the band being devoured by a devil-like creature—perhaps a reference to the real-life, often ignored ramifications of constant entertainment, connection and sensory overload.

Flasher – “Material” from ‘Constant Image’, out now on Domino Record Co.

CHORUSGIRL – ” Shimmer and Spin “

Posted: December 20, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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With the release of Shimmer and Spin, the second album by London-based janglers Chorusgirl. A record that chronicled a particularly difficult year in the life of chief songwriter Silvi Wersing, and in some ways served as an anchor, through which she was able to pull herself through.

Ahead of the album’s release, the band have this week shared the video to new single, In Dreams. The track is musically something of a departure for the band, the underrated rhythm section are to the fore, with prominent bass and a frankly brilliant drum beat creating a base around which skeletal guitar lines and vocal melodies flourish and bloom. If musically it’s Chorusgirl as you’ve never heard them before, lyrically it’s something of a companion piece to an older track, This Town Kills. It deal with small town anxieties and the power of dreaming to inspire you to escape a place you never fit in. As Silvi sings, “Sunday afternoon forever, waiting for the brighter weather, rainy doom and gloom forever inside this small town torment”, it’s the sound of staring out the window, lost in your own thoughts, knowing one day you’ll find a way to belong. It’s accompanied by an excellent handmade video courtesy of animator Ruth Barrett, created using over 2500 manually cut out paper prints. More challenging, more intriguing, more themselves than ever, Chorusgirl might just be turning a tumultuous year into a musical triumph.

Shimmer and Spin is out 16th November via Reckless Records 

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FIGHTMILK – ” Not With That Attitude “

Posted: December 20, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Formed back in 2015 from two friends becoming simultaneously, “romantically redundant”, Fightmilk have gone on to become among the DIY-scene’s most loved bands. Their nostalgic take on the alternative angst of the 1990’s, was previously shared in the shape of two well received EP’s, however they didn’t really prepare any of us for just how good their debut album would be. The album, Not With That Attitude, was written not in the full-blown malaise of relationship breakdown, but with the hindsight that only time to process can produce; a record about reflecting on your past, sometimes with sadness, and often with a wry smile at why you were ever that bothered by it in the first place.

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Musically, Not With That Attitude walks a line between the seriousness of classic jangling indie and the more playful end of pop-punk, it is a record that can do seriously sad, then throw in a riff so bombastically joyful that Fall Out Boy might consider it a little too much. The many musical faces of Fightmilk were given a cohesive flow by the record’s one constant, Lily Rae’s vocal; whether channelling Blondie fronting Bloc Party on Dream Phone or perfecting a British take on Diet Cig on Summer Crush, Lily was the perfect counter point to the band’s varied musical sketches. Possibly the most tantalising sketch on the record was penultimate track, Solving Crimes In Sweden, an anthemic, arena worthy pop-song, its rich production adding piano and even swells of brass to a track that feels like a band finding their feet, and showing no fear of experimenting or taking their audience with them on this intriguing journey. With that attitude, Fightmilk’s music could take them anywhere their imagination will let them.

Band Members 
Lily sings and plays guitar.
Alex plays guitar and sings.
Adam plays bass.
The drums play Nick.

Extremely loud and incredibly gross. “Not With That Attitude”, our debut album, is out on LP/DL on 2nd November!

MOTHERS – ” Render Another Ugly Method “

Posted: December 20, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Mothers attempt to exist in two places at once – both singular and collaborative, sprawling and concise, present and distant. Kristine Leschper, songwriter and founding member of the project, explains that it is in the space between opposites that she finds herself. The multifaceted is, by nature, fragmented – each facet a slightly different perspective of the whole. On their latest record, Render Another Ugly Method, the band attempts to gain an expanded view of its surroundings through splintered sound, thought, and image Listening to Render Another Ugly Method, Mothers’ second record, the pain, anger and anguish remains as poignant as ever, yet it’s delivered with both a complexity and an excellent dose of noise.

in opening track, Beauty Routine, like a number of tracks on the record, it seems to deal with the difficult relationship between our physical and emotional characteristics, concluding in the bruising final line, “brush my teeth as an act of desperation, show me a beauty routine, to erase me completely”. While the track isn’t one of the record’s louder moments, it is none-the-less dense and complex; with wavering pulses of guitar, twitching drum beats and sudden bursts of brutal, beautiful noise, that rapidly fall in and out of place.

Leschper began exploring songwriting when she moved to Athens, Georgia as a teenager. Inspired by the growth that studying art allowed her and energized by the buzzing southern town, she started to perform publicly in 2013 and quickly developed local acclaim for her stark, un inchingly vulnerable songs.

During this time, she met many local artists and musicians, among them Matthew Anderegg, whom she quickly recognized as an artistic kindred spirit and friend. The following year they began working together to esh out and arrange a collection of songs she had written, which would become the project’s 2016 debut release, When You Walk A Long Distance You Are Tired. 

Released in 2016, the album kicked off a sprawling eight months of touring across the US, UK and Europe, as the group honed their take on left-of center indie rock with an explosive and surprising live show that displayed how forceful the songs translated to a full-band setting.

Within Mothers, Leschper and Anderegg have remained a creative constant, with other collaborators changing over time. Render Another Ugly Method sees the remnants of Leschper and Anderegg, Chris Goggans and Drew Kirby in musical conversation, through cut-up songs that were torn apart and rebuilt over and over again.

LUCIUS – ” Feels Like a Curse ” Live in Portland

Posted: December 20, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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It’s easy to overlook the latest album Nudes by Brooklyn indie-poppers Lucius. On the surface, it’s a stopgap release, a quickly recorded acoustic album of previously released songs and a few covers – the band’s Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig have been touring as Roger Waters’ backup singers and have no time to make a more involved record. But Nudes shows a stunning new side for the group. Songs like “Tempest” and “Something About You,” which were buried under heavy rock back beats and layers of synthesizer on their original LP versions, are reborn as rousing vocal showcases. Their cover of Tame Impala’s “Eventually” allows Wolfe and Laessig’s voices to cascade and blend into beautiful harmonies; and on “Million Dollar Secret,” previously a one-off single for HBO’s Girls, they let their voices build until they explode for a fiery finale.

Lucius performs “Feels Like a Curse” at The State Theatre in Portland, ME on March 16th, 2018.

ED SCHRADER’S MUSIC BEAT – ” Riddles “

Posted: December 20, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Ed preformed solo for 3 years traveling the country with his voice and a drum. He was asked to play a rave in Baltimore. Looking to expand his performance, he asked Devlin to join him onstage with his bass. Since then the two have been making rock music of the finest variety, with their sights on the world.

There are hundreds of songs about the struggling artiste, but few of them get heard when the artist in question is presently in those trenches of obscurity. Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, a wily punk duo from Baltimore, have nothing to lose and that’s why their third album “Riddles” is bursting with heart in all different ways — from the rubbery rattle of “Dunce” and “Rust” to fluttery, New Romantic numbers like “Kid Radium” and “Seagull.” These are anthems about perseverance, for people who deserve a little beauty at the end of a graveyard shift, by a guy who literally wrote the lyrics from the back of a restaurant kitchen washing dishes. The title track is a luminescent piano-driven gem (thanks to producer Dan Deacon) about breaking into a country club with your poor, weird friends, but the way Schrader and Rice perform, it’s straight-up “Thunder Road” from the gutter.

Band Members
Ed Schrader,
Devlin Rice,

MERCURY REV – ” Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited “

Posted: December 20, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Mercury Rev is an American indie rock group that formed in 1989 in Buffalo, New York. A band committed to experimentation and reinvention, their music has run the gambit from neo-psych and noise rock, lush pastoralism, and 4/4 electronica.

It slipped out of a Mississippi of hot biscuits, genteel table manners and working-class sense, suddenly overturned by a grave sinning and suicide. Carried on an evening breeze of strings and a supple, foreboding voice like sensually charged breath, “Ode to Bilie Joe”—Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 debut as a singer-songwriter and a Number One single for three weeks in the late Summer of Love—was the most psychedelic record of that year not from San Francisco or London, as if Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Brian Wilson had conspired to make a country-rock Pet Sounds. Except Gentry, just 23 when she wrote the song, got there first, in miniature.

Gentry’s hit was a revolutionary act, a quietly thorough feminism in vision, deed and success amid the strict, paternal order of the country-music industry. And it was her license to thrill again. In October, 1967, while “Billie Joe” was still in the Top Five, Gentry began recording The Delta Sweete, a connected set of a dozen songs that extended the narrative dynamics of that single with personal reflection and set her folk-siren charisma in a richer frame of dream-state orchestration, swamp-rock guitars and big-city-R&B horns.

In her eight original songs for the album, Gentry drew from her childhood and church life on her grandparents’ farm in Chickasaw County, Mississippi: the girl-ish craving for a beautiful dress in “Reunion”; the rise-and-shine of “Mornin’ Glory”; the stern Sunday lessons in “Sermon,” based on a traditional hymn also known as “Run On.” The covers were boldly chosen: Mose Allison’s chain-gang blues “Parchman Farm”; “Tobacco Road”’s litany of trial; the Cajun pride in Doug Kershaw’s “Louisiana Man”. Gentry also turned them to new purpose and even gender. “Gonna get myself a man, one gonna treat me right,” she sang in Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” with heated assurance.

But The Delta Sweete—released in March, 1968, only three months after Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and right as the Byrds came to Nashville to cut Sweetheart of the Rodeo—was too soon in its precedence. Gentry’s LP, the first country-rock opera, was ignored on arrival, not even cracking Billboard’s Top 100. It was as if Billie Joe had risen out of the Tallahatchie River and thrown that record off the bridge instead.

This Delta Sweete is her long-delayed justice—Mercury Rev’s committed and an affectionate resurrection of an album that anticipated by three decades their own pivotal expedition through transcendental America, 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. From their recording lair in New York’s Catskill Mountains, the founding core of Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper with Jesse Chandler (previously in the Texas group Midlake) honor Gentry’s foresight and creative triumph with spacious invention and hallucinatory air. And they are not alone. Gentry’s stories and original resolve are brought to new vocal life and empowerment by a vocal cast of women from across modern rock and its alternative paths: among them, Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval; Laetitia Sadier, formerly of Stereolab; Marissa Nadler; Margo Price, the fiery new country star with a punk-rock heart; and Norway’s Susanne Sundfør, who cuts through “Tobacco Road” with arctic-Nico poise. Phoebe Bridgers, whose first record was a softly stunning 2015 single for Ryan Adams’ PAX AM label, hovers through the acid- western suspense of Gentry’s “Jessye’ Lisabeth” with floating calm, like a comforting angel.

Bobbie Gentry, 1968 (NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

On the 1968 LP, Gentry opened with a call to jubilant order, “Okolona River Bottom Band,” like she was leading a barn-dance union of the early Rolling Stones and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five. Norah Jones takes that entrance here with her own sultry command, like Sarah Vaughan at the head of a slow-blooming choir. In “Sermon,” Price—who has known real struggle up close—sings like a survivor through Mercury Rev’s explosion of color and groove: a specialty throughout the band’s history as recently as 2015’s The Light in You, going back through All Is Dream in 2001, the whirling iridescent soul of 1995’s See You on the Other Side and the sumptuous turbulence of the 1992 single “Car Wash Hair.”

Gentry is still very present in the changes. Her seesaw of pride and hurt in the melancholy blur of “Penduli Pendulum” (“When goodbye serves as/My one amusement”) is even more explicit with the seasoned intimacy of Vashti Bunyan—a once-elusive voice from Britain’s psychedelic-folk boom—set against the younger, brighter arc of Kaela Sinclair, now in the electronic project M83. And in “Courtyard,” a despairing finale of strings and guitar arpeggios on Gentry’s LP, Mercury Rev build a striking Delta Krautrock in which the English singer Beth Orton wanders, like Gentry, through a ruin of profound loss and treasured memory.

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“Ode to Billie Joe” was not on the ‘68 Delta Sweete. But Mercury Rev go back to that dinner table with Lucinda Williams of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and it is an inspired bond, calling up the ghosts and questions of a South still very much with us. Indeed, Gentry—who retired from recording and performing in the Seventies—reportedly lives only a couple hours’ drive from the bridge that made her famous, while the spirits she set loose in The Delta Sweete are as restless and compelling as they were 50 years ago. This album is a loving tribute to that achievement, one of the greatest albums you have never heard. It is also a dozen new ways to walk that land.

releases February 1st, 2019

MARISSA NADLER – ” Said Goodbye To That Car “

Posted: December 20, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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I hope you are all having a nice winter so far and staying warm as the cold sets in. I directed and animated a video for my song “Said Goodbye To That Car,” off of my newest album For My Crimes. You can watch it below.  For My Crimes is out now on Sacred Bones Records and Bella Union Records. 

Guitar, vocals, background vocals- Marissa Nadler String arrangements Janel Leppin

I’m contributing to Mercury Rev’s recreation of the Bobby Gentry album Delta Sweete. including it’s insane lineup of contributors.  It’s out February 8th via Partisan/Bella Union. Each song features a different singer. Guest vocalists include Margo Price, Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval, Vashti Bunyan, Lucinda Williams, Phoebe Bridgers, Norah Jones, Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, Stereolab’s Lætitia Sadier, Marissa Nadler, M83’s Kaela Sinclair, and more.

From the album For My Crimes

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