For her third album Quiet Signs, Jessica Pratt offers up nine spare, beautiful & mysterious songs that feel like the culmination of her work to date. “Fare Thee Well” and “Poly Blue” retain glimmers of On Your Own Love Again’s hazy day spells, but delicate arrangements for piano, flute, organ and strings instill a lush, chamber pop vim. The record’s B-side, meanwhile, glows with an arresting late-night clarity; the first single, “This Time Around,” pairs the Los Angeles artist’s intimate vulnerability with a newfound resolve. Ultimately, this confidence is what sets Quiet Signs apart from Pratt’s previous work, the journey of an artist stepping out of the darkened wings to take her place as one of this generation’s preeminent songwriters.
Releases February 8th, 2019
Jessica Pratt – “This Time Around” from the new album ‘Quiet Signs’ Released by Mexican Summer and City Slang Records.
Fleet Foxes’ “Icicle Tusk” from The Fleet Foxes EP in First Collection 2006–2009, out November 9th. The special edition First Collection 2006–2009 honors the tenth anniversary of Fleet Foxes’ eponymous debut album. It features content spanning the early days of the band’s career, including the self-titled full-length debut album on 12″ vinyl, as well as the Sun Giant EP on 10″ vinyl, and the first vinyl releases of both the very limited-edition, previously only self-released The Fleet Foxes EP on 10″, and B-sides & Rarities on 10″. Also available in a four-CD set. In addition to its musical offerings, the special edition features a 32-page booklet with show flyers, lyrics, and artwork from band’s early history.
Fleet Foxes’ debut album made a tremendous impact on the international musical scene, topping numerous “best of” lists, including Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Albums of the 2000’s and Pitchfork’s 50 Best Albums of 2008, and earned the band Uncut’s inaugural Music Award Prize. Fleet Foxes is certified Gold in North America and Platinum in both the UK and Australia.
Fleet Foxes‘ most recent release was the critically acclaimed full-length, Crack-Up, released June 2017 on Nonesuch following a six-year hiatus. Additionally, the band sold out notable venues including Red Rocks Amphitheatre and the Hollywood Bowl, performed on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert as well as CBS This Morning, and earned year-end recognition from Esquire, Consequence of Sound, Paste, Uproxx, Vulture, and more.
Richard Ayoade, the BAFTA-nominated film director (Submarine, The Double), actor (IT Crowd, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace), TV presenter (Travel Man, The Crystal Maze) and comedian, has been a long-time fan of The Breeders.
As a young teen in 1990, Ayoade recalls travelling from his Ipswich home to London to buy the band’s first album Pod. Today, nearly 30 years after making that journey, he has teamed up with his favourite band to create an eerie short story for their latest single, ‘Space Woman’.
Described by The Breeders’ Kim Deal as “a sci-fi thriller with the soul of [deceased fiction writer] Harlan Ellison,” Ayoade’s visual treatment depicts Deal in a spacesuit navigating a woodland landscape. Shot on 35mm film and in one seamless take, she encounters fellow Breeders members Jim Macpherson, Josephine Wiggs and Kelley Deal in various states of trauma.
New album, ‘All Nerve’, featuring ‘Spacewoman’ is out now:
‘Space Woman’ is taken from The Breeder’s latest album All Nerve, their first album in a decade and their first in 25 years reuniting the iconic Last Splashline-up of the aforementioned Deal sisters, Wiggs and Macpherson. Also featuring the singles ‘Wait In The Car’, ‘All Nerve’ and ‘Nervous Mary’, It’s the band’s fifth studio album
The 12-track new album Gallipoli started life in the winter of 2016, with Condon returning to his old Farfisa organ, the same one used to write the first two Beirut albums (2006’s Gulag Orkestar and the following year’s The Flying Club Cup). Following recording stints in New York and Berlin (where he now calls home), Condon settled in Sudestudio, a studio complex deep in rural Puglia, southern Italy. It was here that he rediscovered the old joys of music as a visceral experience which became the founding principle for Gallipoli.
Available now, Gallipoli’s title track is a cathartic embrace of old and new. Condon says, “We stumbled into the medieval-fortressed island town of Gallipoli one night and followed a brass band procession fronted by priests carrying a statue of the town’s saint through the winding narrow streets behind what seemed like the entire town. The next day I wrote the song entirely in one sitting, pausing only to eat.”
Zach Condon, the mastermind behind Beirut, will release his fifth studio album Gallipoli on February 1st 2019,
How do you describe an album out of time, concerned with the disappearance of culture, of humanity, of nature, of logic and emotion? Why make this album in an era when attention spans have been reduced to next to nothing, and the tactile grains of making music have been further reduced to algorithms and projected playlist placement. Why wake up in the morning? Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?
Deerhunter’s eighth LP forgets the questions and makes up unrelated answers. It gets up, walks around, it records itself in several strategic geographic points across North America. It comes home, restructures itself and goes back to bed to avoid the bad news.
From the opening harpsichord and piano figures of ‘Death in Midsummer’, it is impossible to tell where the record came from. Is ‘No One’s Sleeping’ an outtake of an aborted Kinks recording session in 1977 Berlin with Eno producing? No. That is nostalgia. If there is one thing Deerhunter are making clear it is that they have exhausted themselves with that toxic concept.
What they spend their time doing instead is reinventing their approach to microphones, the drum kit, the harpsichord, the electromechanical and synthetic sounds of keyboards. Whatever guitars are left are pure chrome, plugged straight into the mixing desk with no amplifier or vintage warmth.
The result is as thrilling, haunting, and unpredictable as anything in their roughly 15-year career.
Deerhunter have made a science fiction album about the present. Is it needed right now? Is it relevant? Perhaps only to a small audience. DADA was a reaction to the horrors of war. Punk was a reaction to the slow and vacant 70’s. Hip Hop was a liberated musical culture that challenged the notions presented wholesale about the African-American experience. What is popular music today a reaction to?
Deerhunter are:Bradford Cox, Lockett Pundt, Moses Archuleta, Josh McKay, and Javier Morales
From the new album ‘Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared’ out January 18th, 2019 on 4AD Records.
David Bazan’s been reliably releasing music and touring under his own name for nearly a decade; his most recent record, Care, came out last year. But before that, he was Pedro the Lion. He retired the name in November 2005, and after that, it felt off-limits: For Bazan, that designation belonged to a band, even if he was its only constant. Although Bazan was writer, arranger and principle player on all the Pedro the Lion records, he performed with a full band on tour. His self-titled material, however – whether recent synth-based pop experiments or acoustic reflections on big-picture questions – was often played solo.
“Yellow Bike,” the first single from Phoenix.The song begins with Bazan recollecting a childhood Christmas scene in his warm, worn tone. The titular gift under the tree makes his heart race, a kick drum thump animating the excitement. Over insistent bass and ascending guitar, he connects those childhood bike rides to an adulthood on the road. Its lived-in video, rendered in washed colors and grainy textures .
For both fans and Bazan himself, there was a sense of resolution in the reclamation and return to that name, which explains the excitement last year when he announced a handful of Pedro the Lion tour dates, a full U.S. tour. And now, there’s Phoenix, the first new Pedro the Lion record in 15 years. Out January 18th, Bazan recorded the album joined by Erik Walters on backing guitar and vocals and Sean Lane on drums.
Phoenix comes out January. 18th via Polyvinyl Records.
Gliding past ghostly statues of mythic entities and through the mist into the present world, Tim Presley‘s White Fence shed their multicolored-shroud for a heartfelt yet enigmatic, cycle of songs about losing the thing that’s killing you that you love in order to gain the thing that makes you love what you love, with loads of Heartbreakers and other new pop classix.
I quit the Temptations in Los Angeles, and got an apartment in San Francisco.
I now live on a street surrounded with blurry characters & walking human clouds of static.
The ground on my street is glass, nails, needles and pins/piss.
There are beautiful flowers though.
The sound of buses, cars and voices iron my brain to a nice hum.
This city, is now a bull constantly poached by the bullfighter. The Torero keeps chipping. It’s alright for me… now…despite this.
I can actually feel this city, and what it has said to so many others.
As a human, and as a ghost.
I started writing songs for this album in a small rural town in the UK called Staveley.
I was staying with Cate Le Bon there during winter. While She was there going to school learning how to build & design furniture out of wood, I started writing on her piano. Staveley is in the Lake District (Northern England) and everywhere you look is the most beautiful serene British landscapes.
I came back to SF to record, but first.. I had a fervent dream that Johnny Thunders asked me to be honest & simple with this album, and why dolphins were not given arms. I booked studio time with a very talented fellow named Jeremy Harris and we worked together out of a studio in the Dogpatch district of SF (owned and run by Paul from the UK band “The Bees” (or in US…. “A Band of Bees”). Because I can only play the piano like a 5 year old, Jeremy was able to learn the songs on piano, keys and finesse the parts, including most drums and also record/engineer the whole album.
Also playing on the album, is S.F. Mission district native Dylan Hadley who plays drums on two songs: “Until You Walk” & “Forever Chained” and H. Hawkline adding guitar and vocals on “Phone”
I have to re-learn how to walk. The poppy stomp. I’ve been tethered to a hawk, that I must feed on the dot. Many people get, and many people need. I can’t believe what I now hear and what I now read. It’s funny how the human moves, it’s desperate how the fog seeps through. San Francisco the city, is an artist that had become rich off one masterpiece painting, but still conflicted & inspired, trying to shake the blue. I needed to remember my heart is plausible, and not a closet of hornets & flies. Even though closing my eyes can still bring me to my knees, I think love and inspiration will lead me to free. Through life’s cycles and movements you get re-taught, but still everyday I must feed Larry’s hawk.
“Lorelei” is from Tim Presley’s White Fence’s 2LP/CS/CD “I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk,” out January 25, 2019 on Drag City Records.
It was only January and there was a good chance The Royal They had already released one of the year’s best albums. Even though we are near the end of the year nothing has changed. From the colossally heavy beginning of Foreign Being through to the wildly energetic end, the Brooklyn based trio’s sophomore album is all smash hits. Power pop songs buried in heavy punk slime and surging post-hardcore deviations, The Royal They blur the lines between sweetness and primal fury, writing songs that are bright and hooky with enough muscle to shake the foundation of any DIY venue. There’s not a moment wasted throughout Foreign Being, a record that shifts between ominous and immediate with explosive grace.
Floating Room’s sophomore album is stunning at every turn, in both it’s shimmering atmospheres, gentle moments of reflection, and it’s nuance for swarming, muscular, shoegaze done-to-perfection. The Portland quartet navigate heart yearning sentimentality and brawny noise pop in simultaneous bursts, the force of their blanketing guitars only aiding Maya Stoner’s beautiful lyrics and floating melodies. False Baptism is a testament to everything they do so well, balancing blistering leads with dreamy haze, an approach that manages to retain aggression without compromising any of it’s delicate emotional heft. Layering guitars, synths, vibraphones, and beyond, Floating Room’s wall of sound is lush and dense, but light and accessible, the perfect come down to get lost in.
False Baptism is full of epiphanies: Maybe love shouldn’t make you weak. Maybe the bravest love doesn’t ask you to surrender your whole self. Learning to float is always more difficult than letting yourself fall, but—as Floating Room proves here—there’s tremendous power in doing so.
Released June 22nd, 2018 The Band
Maya Stoner – electric and acoustic guitars, vocals, synths, samples
Kyle Bates – guitar, vocals, synth, sound manipulation, vibraphone
Alec van Staveren – bass, vibraphone
Sonia Weber – drums, percussion
FACS features Noah Leger and Brian Case of Disappears, and Alianna Kalaba. Using minimalism and space, FACS make abstract and modern art rock.
From out the ashes of Chicago’s beloved Disappears comes FACS, a new band that features three of the experimental luminaries four members. Their sound remains hypnotic, dark, and sleek, a sinister futurism that comes in electronic minimalism. The songs are bleak but iridescent, blinding when pointed in the wrong directions and melting with a radiant sort of corrosive post-punk expanse. There’s little of FACS that really feels human on Negative Houses, a record that draws an alien experience from us all, with cold, calculated mesmerization and a triumphantly focused numbness in its clinical precision. It’s a great debut that doesn’t feel at all like a debut, this is merely the next chapter.
This is one of those albums that have a very unique own sound and it’s getting better and better with every new listening. It‘s the stuff I am finding interesting and could be amomg my favourite releases in 2018!
