Asteroid No. 4’s trip into druggy space rock, but its sophomore release is the band’s ode to ’60s garage. The “Psychedelphia” quintet’s rock is stripped down from its effects-laden guitars, drawing from the likes of the Kinks, Nick Drake, and the Who. Several tracks, such as the upbeat “Monday Morning Gloom,” are closer to traditional rock & roll, while “Poor Man’s Falls” avoids electric guitar altogether, opting for flute-assisted folk. Of course, there are still psychedelic elements in the band’s agenda (perhaps encouraged by the production of the Lilys’ Kurt Heasley). These constants come in the form of gleeful harmonies, Byrds-esque guitars, and Mellotron. Surely enough to fulfill the needs of the psychedelia enthusiast.
Check out Brooklyn’s, NY’s BOYTOY and their latest album, “Night Leaf”.
Formed in 2014, BOYTOY combine luscious vocal harmonies and wavy bass lines for a sound that is equal parts surfer waves and dusty trails. On their sophomore full length, Night Leaf, released earlier this year on Stolen Body Records, the band exhibits polished and cohesive songwriting that is both fun and strong, while also betraying raw emotional edges.
The album’s opening track, It’s Alright, may chronicle the messiness that comes at the end of love, but it makes it feel so right. Mary Anne instantly grabs you with its plaintive appeals to the title character, while I Get Distant offers its perfect counterbalance with a chorus of “Dying alone. Make up my mind, I need you I don’t”. Echoing with late 80s/early 90s power pop influences, other highlights include Static Age, Pretty One, Juarez,and Cold Love.
Snail Mail’s EP debut (originally released on cassette July 2016) is now available on black 12″ vinyl, 45RPM. First pressing of 1000 copies with download code included. Habit, the debut 6 Track EP from Baltimore’s Snail Mail, is a perfect, late-summer record. Lindsey Jordan, who is 17-years-old, wrote Habit in her suburban Maryland bedroom between shows and school. She teamed up with her friend and drummer Shawn Durham and bassist Ryan Viera to record the six-track EP in DC. The result is six really amazing indie-pop tracks that will be loved by fans of Best Coast, Alvvays and Veronica Falls.
We’re so excited to introduce you a new band fronted by the wonderful singer songwriter Julia Jackin and the newest signing to Transgressive Records the band are called Phantastic Ferniture! with Julia taking vocal duties Julia Jacklin, who you hopefully know already, and is made up of old friends, Elizabeth Hughes (subject of the song Elizabeth on the album Don’t Let The Kids Win), Ryan K Brennan and Tom Stephens.
The music of Phantastic Ferniture is feel good and made for dancing, and their first song made available is out today – “Fuckin ‘n’ Rollin”. Watch the video, filmed in Glebe’s Blackwattle Bay below.
They’ll be releasing their debut, self-titled, album on 27th July through Transgressive Records
A reference to the Jungian idea of synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidences,” Cosmic Winkis as much a reflection on inspired companionship as it is a rebirth. Jess Williamson fell deeply in love, and then her life was uprooted; she left Texas for California, leaving behind the roadworn verses of her previous albums for brighter, bolder songwriting. The Byrds-ian jangle of album opener I See The White airbrushes halos around the brain with an immortal pop hook. When Williamson asks her listener to “tell me everything you know about consciousness,” it’s an invitation down a two lane blacktop, both vessels heading the same direction. The Rhodes-soaked Wild Rain begins with a ghostly air until a swell of synths gives way like the heavens parting. Williamson’s voice emerges from the clouds promising that she will “treasure your patience / from you I learned what it means to make a family.” Concluding withLove On the Piano, Williamson’s new musical and lyrical mind declares “Love is my name now / Love, Darlin” over an evolving acoustic guitar line and lightly pressed upright piano notes. Vulnerability can feel something less vulnerable when love – true, deep love – creates a latticework to hang the frame of our humanity, which in many ways is the message underlying the entire album.
Jess Williamson – Wild Rain From the upcoming album “Cosmic Wink” Available May 11th via Mexican Summer Records
LUMP was born of good timing and predestined compatibility. It began when Tunng’s Mike Lindsay – a prolific, Mercury prize-winning producer – was introduced to Grammy-nominated, Brit award-winning singer-songwriter Laura Marling after her show supporting Neil Young in London. LUMP is a heady blend of wonked-out guitars, Moog synths and pattering drums, set against droning, coiling clouds of flutes and voices. The lyrics are inspired by early-20th-century Surrealism and the absurdist poetry of Edward Lear and Ivor Cutler – a bizarre but compelling narrative about the commodification of curated public personas, the mundane absurdity of individualism, and the lengths we go to escape our own meaninglessness. The composers are keen to stress that LUMP is a creation that passed through them, and they look upon it parentally. It is their understanding that, now it has come into being, LUMP is the artist, and it will continue to create itself from here on. Lindsay and Marling will assist it as necessary.
Taken from the self-titled album Out June 1st, 2018
Protomartyr release a new EP Consolation, which they recorded in part with friend Kelley Deal. Two of the four songs feature Deal on vocals alongside singer Joe Casey. The EP was recorded by Deal’s R.Ring bandmate Mike Montgomery and expandeds Protomartyr’s arrangements with strings and woodwinds.
The video for the Deal-featured track “Wheel Of Fortune” is five minutes of confusing chaos that I can’t turn away from. Directed by Yoonha Park, who handled the band’s also-strange “Don’t Go To Anacita” video, “Wheel Of Fortune” is an amalgamation of bleak, violent imagery paired with an equally jagged, experimental sound. A pulsing skull, a charging, electrified sword, a girl coloring in her entire face with cherry red lipstick, roughly scrapping your knuckle against a brick wall, punching yourself in the face, giving a thumbs up while your hand is on fire flash; these visuals grace the screen all while frontman Joe Casey and Deal repeatedly shout the lyrics “I decide who lives and who dies.” It’s a lot to handle, but aesthetically exciting.
The general vibe is spooky Halloween apocalypse. There’s a solace brought on as the video switches to black and white. The music slows and a hypnotic groove ensues. Though, all that is ended quickly by the chanting of “Hands around their own throats.”
Limited edition of the EP on yellow/white starburst vinyl, includes 12”x24” fold out poster, and MP3 download card.
EP Tracks
01. Wait
02. Same Face in a Different Mirror
03. Wheel of Fortune (feat. Kelley Deal)
04. You Always Win (feat. Kelley Deal)
Protomartyr – “Wheel of Fortune (feat. Kelley Deal)” taken from the new ‘Consolation E.P.’ out 15th June 2018 on Domino Record Co.
After a frenetic schedule back in 2015, Eagle Rock’s Rolling Stones‘From The Vault’ series has slowed down in recent years, with only one release – 2017’s Sticky Fingers at the Fonda Theatre in the last two and a half years. But the series continues in July, with No Security. San Jose ’99which is available in the usual variety of formats.
The No Security tour of 1999 was in support of the No Security live album (issued in 1998) which itself used performances from the Bridges To Babylon tour. The ‘Stones were certainly keeping busy during this period, becausethe Bridges To Babylon tour ended in Sep 1998, only four months or so before they started the No Security tour!
Two shows in San Jose in April ’99 ended the US leg of the No Security tour before the band moved to Europe for nine concerts in June. The band made a point of playing arenas (not stadiums) on the No Security tour, playing to much smaller crowds than they had in ’98. While still not exactly intimate, the idea was to lose some of the special effects and let the music do the talking.
The set list features some sixties classics (but no Satisfaction) and includes songs like Midnight Rambler, Out of Control, Some Girls and Saint of Me.
No Security. San Jose ’99 will be issued as a 3LP vinyl set, a 2CD+DVD package and on blu-ray and DVD on 13th July 2018.
Before playing their final show on May 5th, 1968, Buffalo Springfield released three studio albums on ATCO during an intense, two-year creative burst. Those albums – Buffalo Springfield, Buffalo Springfield Again, and Last Time Around have all been newly remastered from the original analog tapes under the auspices of Neil Young for the new boxed set: WHAT’S THAT SOUND? THE COMPLETE ALBUMS COLLECTION.
The set includes stereo mixes of all three albums, plus mono mixes for Buffalo Springfield and Buffalo Springfield Again, and all will be available on June 29th from Rhino Records as a five-CD set. High resolution streaming and downloads will be available through www.neilyoungarchives.com.
On the same date, the albums will also be released for the first time ever on 180-gram vinyl as part of a limited-edition set of 5,000 copies . The 5-LP box features the same mono and stereo mixes as the CD set, presented in sleeves and gatefolds that faithfully re-create the original releases.
Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Richie Furay, Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin played their first show together as Buffalo Springfield in 1966. The same year, the band recorded and released its self-titled debut, which included the iconic protest song, “For What It’s Worth,” featuring lyrics as poignant now as they were then, in addition to standouts like “Burned,” “Do I Have To Come Right Out And Say It,” and the band’s first single, “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.”
The group spent the first half of 1967 making Buffalo Springfield Again, which was the first album to feature songs written by Furay (“A Child’s Claim To Fame.”) Stills and Young both contributed some all-time classics with “Bluebird” and “Rock And Roll Woman” from Stills, and “Mr. Soul” and “Expecting To Fly” from Young.
When Last Time Aroundcame out in July 1968, the band members were in the midst of transitioning to new projects: Stills famously joined David Crosby and Graham Nash in CSN; Young went solo; and Furay started Poco with Jim Messina, who produced Last Time Around and played bass on two of the songs. Highlights abound on the album with Young’s “I Am A Child,” Furay’s “Kind Woman” and Stills’ “Uno Mundo.”
L.A. musician Sarah Tudzin makes fizzy, self-deprecating power pop under the moniker Illuminati Hotties. “Paying Off The Happiness,” like a few other unlikely rallying cries before it, plays off the very real, very troubling issue of financial insolvency among the millennial set with with a joyful sigh and shrug, The hook, sung breezily over some chintzy dissonance, might be the catchiest outpouring of debt-fueled anxiety since Alvvays sang about student loans in 2014. Illuminati Hotties were The Best Band That Almost No One Saw at SXSW: Sarah Tudzin is the project’s mastermind…She has a malleable writing style that feels ripe with potential, and she seems comfortable doing just about anything. The album’s lead single, “(You’re Better) Than Ever,” is a surf-pop shredder by way of Courtney Barnett, but its follow-up “Cuff” is a masterful blend of heavy-soft dynamics that shows off the many sides to this project. Tudzin’s songs vacillate between humorous and cutting with ferocity.
Despite the pluralized nom de guerre, illuminati hotties is the creative outlet of Sarah Tudzin – a producer and engineer hailing from the sprawl of Los Angeles. illuminati hotties has been lighting up stages across SoCal since Fall 2016 with playfully interweaving guitar lines, relentless rhythmic momentum, and strikingly self-aware vocals.
With its chorus that swells before spilling over, “Patience” is a plea and an appreciation that demonstrates the dichotomy of virtue. It also highlights the duality of Illuminati Hotties, a playful project that balances heart-on-sleeve sentiments
At first listen, illuminati hotties is a sun-drenched, irreverent volley with the onset of adulthood, but as the listener dives deeper, they will find an earnest consideration of musical phrasing and deliberately crafted wordplay regarding the complexity of love, loss, and skateboarding. Lauded as local “tenderpunk pioneers,” illuminati hotties has perfected the blend of sweetness and ferocity, of celebration and despondency, in their debut album, Kiss Yr Frenemies.
Taken from their debut album, which will be released later Tiny Engines, new track “Cuff” is indicative of that warped journeying, the track slowly introducing itself with a hazy, foggy opening minute or so, the subtle production and half-buried vocals conjuring a sense of embedded melancholy, a drifting sadness that is soon wiped out, to some degree, as the whole thing bursts in to a bristling, raucous life you never saw coming.
“Cuff” is a musical reminder that we can truly never have a band figured out. Last summer we were introduced to illuminati hotties and their sunny single “You’re Better Than Ever.” Since then the band has signed to Tiny Engines and will release Kiss Yr Frenemies on 5/11. While their first single offering was bright and a total blast, “Cuff” is more subdued; a quiet single of introspection and stunning beauty.
