Sugar Still Melts In The Rain is Sarah Mary Chadwick’s 4th solo work. It was recorded and mixed by friend, musician and filmmaker Geoffrey O’Connor in Vanity Lair and Phaedra Studios in Melbourne. The album came together so quickly partly as a result of the duo’s commitment to efficiency and partly due to Sarah’s lack of attachment to the idea of “the perfect vocal take.” She knows she isn’t a virtuoso; tongue firmly in check, she is quick to reference those limitations mockingly. Yet, it’s within those boundaries that she thrives, disinterested in the perfect take in lieu of her best take – unique, somber and raw.
Fourth album release from Sarah Mary Chadwick ‘Sugar Still Melts In The Rain’. This pre-order comes with a limited edition art print by Sarah Mary Chadwick.
Neko Case is releasing her first solo album since her 2013 record The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. Her new album is titled, “Hell-On”, due out on June 1st, it is a 12-song, self-produced LP. Case has given listeners a taste of the new record with tracks “Bad Luck” and “Hell-On,” and now with “Curse Of The I-5 Corridor,” Case has left a final bread crumb before the release of the full-length.
The seven-minute song winds like the long interstate it references: I-5 runs along the West Coast of the U.S., from the Mexican to Canadian border. A duet with Mark Lanegan, who is known for his solo work in addition to collaborations and his work with Queens of the Stone Age, “Curse Of The I-5 Corridor” is a haunting combination of lyrics and sound. The song reflects on the past, and uncovers an unsureness of the future and what it could have brought. Lines like “in the current of your life I was an eyelash in the shipping lanes” and “I fear I smell extinction in the folds of this novocaine age coming on” reveal these aspects. Lanegan’s voice at times becomes an eerie echo to Case’s, lurking in the background, and adds to the tension the song’s instrumental breaks carry.
“Curse of the I-5 Corridor” by Neko Case from the album ‘Hell-On’ available June 1st Anti Records.
“All That Remains” is the fifth album by Walthamstow’s finest duo The Left Outsides since at least the halcyon days of Bevis Frond’s Inner Marshland.
Hard to pin down with any certitude, the music created by The Left Outsides varies from track to track and even moment to moment. Alison Cotton’s vocals, harmonium and viola blend with Mark Nicholas’s voice, bass, guitar, piano and drums in ways that recall everything from Kendra Smith and David Roback’s drony duo, Opal (on “Down to the Waterside”), to PJ Harvey covering an old Blondie tune as a dirge (on “Naming Shadows Was Your Existence”).
But the basic pulse of All That Remains most often reminds me of either current work by Massachusetts’ estimable Damon and Naomi, or the sound of Pearls Before Swine around the time of their third LP, These Things Two. Like those combos, The Left Outsides manage to swap and mix male and female vocals without altering the elegiac dream-heft of their overall sound. They do this while maintaining a vibe that feels indebted to the mists of wood and dale far more than the bustle of London.
And the instrumental arrangements are never too far from the light touch of the folk-rock classicism perfected in the UK and Holland as the ’60s slid into the ’70s. Most of the sounds seem more like meditations upon this period than any attempt at recreation, however, which also aligns the band with certain threads that emerged in the ’80s uk psych underground just before raves took over.
All of which makes this a beautiful and outstanding record, and one that especially rewards the deep concentration of what is euphemistically called “late night listening.” It’s a very special spin.
The Brooklyn-via-Omaha indie-pop quartet are set to release their debut full-length album,”Poach”, later this year on Modern Sky USA. The 14-track LP was mixed and mastered by none other than guitar maven Delicate Steve, who was an early champion of the band. In 2016, Navy Gangs released a self-titled EP highlighted by the punchy guitars and beautiful vocal interplay of “Special Glands” and the hazy, relatable jangle pop of “Mondays.”
At first, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes Our Girl so special, or why the Brighton-formed, London-based trio’s music stands out within a busy crowd of fellow guitar-wielding-types. But if an explanation didn’t jump out when they first emerged with a debut EP of mighty fuzz-soaked songs in November 2016, it surfaces with ‘Stranger Today’, a debut album of personal, emotional juggernauts that could have only been made by these three people: Guitarist / vocalist Soph Nathan, bassist Josh Tyler and drummer Lauren Wilson.
This fantastic debut captures this dreampowertrio evolving from startling noisiness to sweet songwriting excellence, we’ve known that something special happens when these three get together ever since we first laid ears on their early, startlingly noisy live shows. that surprising volume still explodes at times here, for this is a band still in thrall to the racket that stirs when they lock horns. it makes for a thrilling and gorgeous ride through a set of songs with heft, hooks, and heart. a blissful, dreamy haze that you’ll want to relive again and again. indie that whips and swirls with uncompromising force.”
Since forming in Nathan and Tyler’sBrighton home four years ago – Wilson joining as a late recruit when she was wowed by a demo of their self-titled debut track, and ‘Stranger Today’’s opener – Our Girl’s members have only had pockets of time to work together. A day booked in a local studio here, a soundcheck there, full-time jobs and other projects meant the three rarely had a concentrated, collective patch. This changed in September 2017, when they stayed in Eve Studios in Stockport for a week, recording with Bill Ryder-Jones. Their week in Stockport became a crucial catalyst for what would follow. Ryder-Jones is a guitar virtuoso himself (“He did stuff neither me or Soph had ever seen anyone do before,” Tyler remarks), and he became an unofficial fourth member of the group.
‘Stranger Today’ is a special debut for several reasons: First, because it’s the sound of a band beginning to grasp their own value and place in the world. Secondly, because you can hear the trio’s hunger to finally get in the same room and put to tape years’ worth of scrapbooks, half-finished ideas, and a slowly-forming feel for how their first album would actually sound. “What band isn’t itching to make their debut? But it’s quite frightening, knowing you’re about to do it,” Wilson remembers.
The real clincher, however, is Our Girl’s dynamic, and how it plays out across ‘Stranger Today’. Best friends in person, the trio share the same close kinship and chemistry on record. On one side is Nathan’s visceral lyricism, which has a habit of detailing and chipping away at precise moments; the first heart-flutter of a new crush; the moment a long-term friendship begins to ebb away. Around her, Tyler and Wilson’s rhythm section carefully mirrors each feeling Nathan conveys. When she sings pointedly about love (‘I Really Like It’), she’s backed by a major-key afterglow. When the subject turns on its head (‘Josephine’), out steps a wall of taut, earth-shaking noise. They each “serve the song,” in Wilson’s words, moving in sync but with their own personal slant. Not least on the closer ‘Boring’, where all restraint is thrown aside and the trio let out one final, violent thrash. They inhabit a space bigger than the first loves, sleepless nights and growing pains that define this record.
Nathan remembers being in Brighton four years ago, shortly after Our Girl formed, and realising, “I was finally in the band I wanted to be in.” Almost half a decade later, and this eureka moment is sewn up on ‘Stranger Today’. It’s the sound of three friends totally at ease in their own space, discontent with being anywhere else; a vibrant document of what it’s like to be young, invigorated and amongst people who feel the same.
Dave Matthews Band have announced they will return with a new album, “Come Tomorrow”, due out June 8th, marking their first studio release since 2012’s Away From the World, and their ninth overall.
Come Tomorrow was recorded in Seattle, Los Angeles and in the band’s hometown of Charlottesville, VA, with producers Mark Batson, Rob Cavallo and Rob Evans. When the Dave Matthews Band returns to the road in May , they’ll be playing without longtime member Boyd Tinsley — the latest change in a decade that’s also seen the death of saxophonist LeRoi Moore.
For Matthews, the upcoming tour represents a step further into uncharted territory for the famously freewheeling group, and he admits to mixed emotions about moving on without another of his bandmates.
“I have a deep love for Boyd,” Matthews said regarding Tinsley, who announced earlier this year that in order to “focus on my family and my health for a while,” he’d be sitting out this tour. “He has to deal with his stuff. In many ways I’m sure it would’ve been a lot easier for him to just say, ‘I’m good. Let’s go play.’ But you can’t just throw yourself away, your wellness away, because you play violin in a band. I’m going to miss having that whirling-dervish Adonis-Muppet over there on my right. I know the audience is too. But we can’t serve that desire.”
Dave Matthews Band are set to release their new album Come Tomorrow on June 8th, and today the band has shared another preview of the effort in the form of new single “That Girl Is You.”
The track, which pairs a plaintive, drum-and-plucked-acoustic-guitar beat with some raw upper-register vocals from Matthews, follows lead single and live DMB staple “Samurai Cop.”
Listen to “That Girl Is You” below. Dave Matthews Band are currently on the road in support of their new album and have already shared a couple live debuts, including the title track and promising new rocker “She.”
The Dave Matthews Band’s ninth studio album, Come Tomorrow, is scheduled to arrive on June 8th check out the new set’s first single, “Samurai Cop (Oh Joy Begin),”DMB will be playing some of the songs from Come Tomorrow during their previously announced batch of summer tour dates, which kick off May 18 in Texas. Every ticket purchased before May 17 will come with a physical CD or digital download of the new album upon its release.
Among the best albums of 2016 was singer songwriter Mitski, She has now announced her fifth studio LP, “Be The Cowboy”, out on August. 17th via Dead Oceans Records. The acclaimed indie rock singer-songwriter has also shared a video for lead single “Geyser,” directed by Zia Anger.
Whereas Mitski’s previous work has been characterized as emotionally raw and confessional, Be The Cowboy, recorded with her long-time producer Patrick Hyland, “introduces a persona who has been teased before but never so fully present until now a woman in control,” per a press release.
Mitski herself explains, “For this new record, I experimented in narrative and fiction,” creating characters including “a very controlled icy repressed woman who is starting to unravel. Because women have so little power and showing emotion is seen as weakness, this ‘character’ clings to any amount of control she can get. Still, there is something very primordial in her that is trying to find a way to get out.”
As for how “Geyser” fits into that narrative, the album opener “introduces us to a woman who can’t hold it all in any more. She’s about to burst and unleash a torrent of desire and passion that has been building up inside.” Anger’s cathartic visual accompaniment finds Mitski alone on a secluded beach under gray skies, beginning with thrumming synths and exploding in sound at its halfway point, as the singer takes off running down the shore.
“I had been on the road for a long time, which is so isolating, and had to run my own
business at the same time,” says Mitski. “A lot of this record was me not having any feelings, being completely spent but then trying to rally myself and wake up and get back to Mitski.”
Mitski’s “Geyser” from Be The Cowboy. Out Aug 17th on Dead Oceans Records.
Dreams are an essential element of Floating Features, which achieves a far more lush, glowing production than La Luz’s previous records, 2015’s Weirdo Shine and 2013’s It’s Alive. “Mean Dream” is breezy indie rock with vivid and bizarre imagery, while “Lonely Dozer” is a spaghetti western-stomper featuring a wayward protagonist who is “alone inside at night.” Shana Cleveland makes impressive use of surrealism in lyrics for songs like “The Creature,” a grim and gorgeous ballad, and “Greed Machine,” which playfully casts the idea of being broke (the eternal musician struggle) as a classic movie villain, constantly lurking around the corner to get you. “Oh no, not again!” Cleveland sighs. “Just when you thought you’d got ahead/ It always finds you where you live.”
Katie Crutchfield’s southern roots are undeniable. The name of her solo musical project Waxahatchee comes from a creek not far from her childhood home in Alabama and seems to represent both where she came from and where she’s going.
The votes are in and singer-songwriter Gary Louris’ Vagabonds Expanded to a 2LP set is now available to order. This edition includes the entire acoustic VAGABONDS EP making its debut on vinyl as well as outtakes and demo recordings that have never been released on any physical format. ROG only manufactures one numbered edition so “Get ‘Em Before They’re Got!”, now through June 7th.
Vagabonds manages to sound grand and organic at once, with the arrangements and production capturing a sense of the wide open spaces of Hollywood Town Hall and Rainy Day Music, especially on the beautifully heart-tugging “She Only Calls Me on Sundays,” while also encompassing the more ambitious melodic conceits of Smile and Sound of Lies on tracks like “Black Grass” and “Omaha Nights.” … the result is an album that sounds full-bodied but natural and uncluttered, and gives Louris’ fine songs plenty of room to reveal their virtues. Anyone who has followed the Jayhawks’ career knows that Gary Louris is a major talent, and Vagabonds demonstrates he’s still capable of making remarkable music outside the framework of the band.
