Cut Worms is the nom de plume of songwriter Max Clarke, whose debut LP will seduce you right off the bat with its sparkling opening track, “How It Can Be.” With his intimate indie voice and facility for instantly memorable melodies and guitar lines, Clarke conjures a kind of garage-tested Everly Brothers, reminiscent of early Shins, with breezy pop ballads just tart enough to soundtrack lonesome summer days. Hollow Ground was recorded in the L.A. home studio of Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, and in New York with Jason Finkel at Gary’s Electric. Check out the animated video for “Don’t Want To Say Good-bye,” and prepare to hum it for the rest of the day.
“Don’t Want To Say Good-bye” from debut LP “Hollow Ground” out May 4th on Jagjaguwar
Tons of Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly in Hollow Ground, which flies in the face of present day music. What’s wrong with this one man band Max Clarke and his compulsion of a bygone era? Who cares, when it sounds this good.
Limited 12″ Edition. Standout tracks from Parquet Courts’ latest album Wide Awake! get the dancefloor treatment in a collection of remixes available on 12” vinyl. The A-side features a re-work of the danceable title track by legendary first wave NYC disco pioneer Danny Krivit, who has delivered classic vinyl re-edits of tunes from Visage, James Brown, Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, and many more.
The B-side features remixes of two tracks by prolific Australian producer and engineer Mikey Young, known for his work in Total Control and Eddie Current Suppression Ring. “Mikey has always impressed me as a musician and person,” says Parquet Courts’ A. Savage, “but he’s developed a remarkable talent for producing electronic music, as evidenced by projects like Lace Curtain and Total Control. He has a skill of impressing his genius and personality into a track and elevating it to something more.
SadBad was written in Chicago then carried back to upstate NY where it was subjected to TOTAL INSTRUMENTATION courtesy of Angela Devivo and Kyra Skye. SadBad was then further illuminated via guests Sheer Mag’s Kyle Seely & multi-instrumentalist Curt Oren.
SadBad! Finally someone has created a word to describe how so many of us are feeling on a day to day basis. Sometimes a bit sad, sometimes a bit bad, sometimes a combination of the two. Izzy True named their sophomore album SadBad, a record that takes the sound of their debut and expands into new territory. Due out on August 3rd via Don Giovanni Records, the album takes True’s earnest lyricism and adds some twang, confessional sparseness, bursts of jazzy jubilance, and emotional beauty that’s both optimistic and heartbreaking. Themed with death, break-ups, and the end of the world, you might not believe there’s much optimism to be found, but True works hard to find that comfort in the darkness. There’s a lot of moods and dynamic songwriting throughout SadBad, a terrific growth of all that was already great about Izzy True’s music.
The first single and title track, “SadBad” captures an Americana spirit to True’s usual heartbreaking pop. It’s a passionate and soulful track, built on a slow and dusty progression that just rolled in with the breeze. True’s voice is soft but powerful, quietly proclaiming “you can’t stay” before the repetition of “it’s the wrong time”. The song’s guitar twin melodies intertwine with a jangle and harmonic warmth, the perfect compliment to the relaxed rhythm and True’s gorgeous Angel Olsen reminiscent voice. Joined together by Angela Devivo, Kyra Skye with guest appearances from Sheer Mag’s Kyle Seely and Curt Oren, Izzy True and company have made a record that only gets better with every listen.
The Lemon Twigs‘ most ambitious project yet, Go To School is a concept album about a chimpanzee named Shane who is adopted by childless aspiring musicians and raised as a human. Written, Recorded, Produced and Mixed By Brian and Michael D’Addario in their Long Island home studio, the album features Todd Rundgren and their mother Susan Hall’s vocals as Shane’s adopted parents, as well as Jody Stephens of Big Star on drums, Natalie Mering of Weyes Blood providing backing vocals and a host of string and horn players, some of which taught the Brian and Michael in school.
The Lemon Twigs new album is their most ambitious project to date: their second album, Go To School , released on 24th August 2018 . A musical conceived by brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario, the 15-track opus was written, recorded, produced and mixed by the pair at their home in Long Island.
Go To School tells the heartbreaking coming-of-age story of Shane, a pure of heart chimpanzee raised as a human boy as he comes to terms with the obstacles of life. Todd Rundgren and the D’Addario’s mother Susan Hall play Shane’s parents. The album features contributions from Jody Stephens (Big Star) and their father Ronnie D’Addario. The album drops on August 24th, and follows the breakout success of their technicolour debut full length ‘Do Hollywood’.
The album is dazzling in its ambition, not least because the Lemon Twigs are in earnest. Go to School seems at first to have a lot in common with the music of Sparks, which features another pair of brothers. Ron and Russell Mael also have a theatrical streak and an impressive command of musical sounds and styles, along with a propensity for sardonic lyrics and a deadpan delivery. The D’Addarios, by contrast, seem genuinely interested in sussing out the motives of their characters, and they work to make them more than caricatures. That is, for an operetta where no one questions why the protagonist is a chimpanzee passing for human and attending high school. Anyway, the bully, Shane, his parents: they’re complicated people, and the D’Addarios are sympathetic storytellers. True, it’s a batshit crazy story, but the Lemon Twigs make it compelling, highly tuneful and undoubtedly more memorable than an album of indie-pop songs would have been
The material will be previewed at a select batch of fan only shows, Referring to the contents of the record Brian and Michael D’Addario hint: “Something now, then, big, small, bleak, and hopeful. All in under an hour.”
‘If You Give Enough’ from The Lemon Twigs‘ new album, ‘Go To School’, out on 24th August.
Moody, rich and dark. Pigs of the Roman Empire croon songs of love and hate in the sparse Post-Punk atmosphere of Melbourne.
With roots in the heavier side of music, Pigs have sculpted the thick tonal resonance of Stoner and Doom and applied it to the dissonant world of Joy Division and The Birthday Party.
A lovely big slab of twangy, swampy doom, guaranteed to make your ears ejaculate the words, a song that truly deserves to be described as epic. The twanging eight minute long track “Hitchcock” from Melbourne duo Pigs of the Roman Empire sounds like Nick Cave fronting Southern Death Cult and is the best 8 minutes you’ll spend this week. It builds and builds into a wall of sound that’s more Spectre than Spector.
The Dirty Nil play rock and roll. Loud, distorted, and out of control, they play like it’s a fever they’re trying to sweat out. Reveling in the din of distorted guitars, pounding drums, and desperately howled vocals, the Hamilton Ontario three-piece makes music for turntables and hi-fi’s – music for dive bars and house parties – for beer drinking and joint smoking – for road trips and barbecues – for fighting and yelling and shouting and singing and screaming and howling – for sweating and bleeding – trying and failing and trying again anyways. Gravel-in-your guts, spit-in-your-eye, staggering, bloodthirsty rock and roll. They have two 7″s available that capture the snarl and destructive noise they create. The Dirty Nil play rock and roll – cause they couldn’t do a damn thing else if they tried. The Dirty Nil present their second single Pain Of Infinity from their upcoming album Master Volume, out September 2018 on Dine Alone Records.
With a heart – stopping voice & wide – ranging instrumental talent, Odetta Hartman carries cowboy soul into an era where country can clash with computers, and bluegrass isn’t afraid of bass. Her debut LP 222 – an experimental, bedroom-produced hybrid of folk, musique concrète and psychedelia – was released on Northern Spy Records in 2015 to critical acclaim. Alongside her partner, sound artist & radio producer Jack Inslee, Odetta continues to explore the sonic vernacular created by their uncanny collaboration: badass banjos, detuned violins, field recordings, superstitious soundscapes, and vocal stylings ranging from sensual to spooky. A new album, Old Rockhounds Never Die, is slated for release on Northern Spy Records / Memphis Industries on August 10th, 2018.
This NYC art-punk/new wave group is one of the most interesting new bands I’ve heard in 2018. At times I’m reminded of The B-52’s, Pylon, X, Cake and Lithics. They are an exciting live band too:
That image-heavy universe which Bodega operate in is essential to their make-up. They talk of their on-stage light boxes as “the sixth member of Bodega, while their sound – equal parts Matrix-esque futurism (they all walk on stage later this evening clad head-to-toe in black and copious amounts of leather and PVC), and dusty, New York-indebted post-punk – occupies the kind of stylistic realm that art students dribble over.
“I think we were all really excited about a kind of rock minimalism,” says Ben, “which can mean a lot of different things. For example, not having cymbals in the drum set, or doing anything frilly in the guitar parts; not repeating parts or lyrics, just in and out.”
It’s easily picked up on ‘Endless Scroll’, and its brittle, brilliant lead single ‘How Did This Happen?’, a track that’s all sharp angles and cutting pontifications on consumerism – “This machine? You know it don’t kill fascists? / This machine, it’s just a guitar,” Ben quips at one point. He calls that stark approach to music-making their “sonic mission statement”, while also referring separately to an ethical one.
The first moment of Endless Scroll’s winkingly-titled second track, “Bodega Birth,” states the album’s thesis: “I use my computer for everything / Heaven knows I’m miserable now.” In both its content and its monotone delivery, the line addresses the ways our technological access leads to a kind of internal deadening. “Bookmarks” is even more direct: “All day at work / Stare at computer/ Come home from work / Stare at computer,” drilling down on the banality of constant access. It’s not all screens, though: On opener “How Did This Happen?!,”Bodega A lament how technology has led to political complacency and “slacktivism”; “Can’t Knock The Hustle,” with its quips about nine-dollar smoothies and hourly salaries—and a sardonic chorus that goes, “You can’t knock the hustle / When the cats are making capital”—is an anti-capitalist anthem that socialist organizations could adopt as their fight song.
Such straightforward lyricism demands music that’s equally unflashy, and Bodega’s simple, wiry arrangements rise to the occasion. The songs are built from little more than slightly overdriven guitars, simple, driving drums, and Belfiglio and Hozie’s yelped vocals. Just as Bodega’s lyrics plainly and boldly analyze our current state, so too are the songs striking in their direct, yet incisive, arrangements.
Band Members
Ben Hozie
Nikki Belfiglio
Montana Simone
Heather Elle
Madison Velding-VanDam
Chelsea Wolfe’s steady descent into goth-metal territory has produced some of the most wicked iconography in music video history. Her latest, “The Culling,” is an eerie barrage of gothic symbols: a sea of candles, white roses, red cloaks, a dead pig’s head, and Chelsea caked in face powder and smoky eye shadow, choking up black entrails. It’s all shot in a serene, collage style that’s both calming and overwhelming all at once. Overall, it’s some oppressive stuff.
Chelsea Wolfe’s “The Culling” from the album “Hiss Spun,” released September 22nd, 2017 on Sargent House Records.
Alice Bag’s Blueprint album is a lesson in archetypes. In the 1970s, the Chicana L.A. punk pioneer of The Bags proclaimed herself a “Violence Girl”: a woman who, like certain chrome alloys, becomes only moreunbreakable when tempered with fire. On Blueprint, Bag paints complex portraits of nameless (brown by default) individuals with characteristic pith and violence-girl riffs. On “Invisible,” a man who drinks too much holds himself together for his daughter and craves invisibility, a state many immigrants inhabit to survive, only to remain invisible to the American public eye. On “The Sparkling Path,” Bag alludes to escape by suicide, urging a message of survival beyond the kind of Maslow-diagnosed magical thinking for the oppressed who seek fulfillment beyond a lack of food, water and, most pressing of all, shelter. And on “77,” she enlists the help of Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill) and Alison Wolfe (Bratmobile) to inhabit the working women of 9 to 5 and tie up their male boss.
In other songs, Bag is herself again, defending her blue hair against chismosas on “Se Cree Joven” or delivering the starkest gut punch against self-loathing in “Etched Deep”: “All that rubbing at the pages / Won’t make them white,” she says to us and to our history. There’s no performative Twitter-shock at the plight of brown people on this album. There’s only the solemn self-vindication of a woman too long kept in the dark by ostensibly radical punk. “White justice,” after all, “just isn’t just.”
