Steve Shiffman & The Land Of No is a rock and roll band based in NYC. Hailing originally from Toronto,Canada, Steve began his recording career auspiciously by completing a class project while attending college in London, ON. The resulting 5-song EP credited as Boatman received regular airplay on local college radio station CHRW and ended up cracking the top 20 on the national college radio chart. Seeking a fully-realized band, Steve put together indie-rock trio 4-Star Movie. The Toronto-based band enjoyed more college radio airplay.
After the first and then second permutations of 4-Star Movie, Steve moved down to NYC and began playing at open mics around the city, slowly piecing together the Land Of No. The first incarnation was a guitar-and-drums duo along with longtime Figgs’ drummer Pete Hayes. Over time they added Kent Heine (The Holy Ghost) on bass, and guitarists Dave Hollinghurst (Small 23, Nicole Atkins) and Alec Ferrell (The Holy Ghost, The All-Things, Skeleton Key). Their eponymous 1st record, recorded at Brooklyn’s famed Seaside Lounge and released on Tiny Beast Records, garnered strong reviews. The band then welcomed drummer Dan Mintzer (Moonraker, Nicole Atkins) into the fold.
The group’s second record “Mon Dieu” was recorded and mixed largely at their own Sunset 7 Studio with guitarist Dave Hollinghurst as engineer. The full-length record was released on vinyl through the band’s own Later Records.
Steve Shiffman & The Land Of No’s third full-length record “Double Life”, also recorded and mixed at Sunset 7 Studio, will be released on Friday February 2nd as a joint release on Later/Clearly Records.
Upon being informed that the title of Steve Shiffman & The Land Of No’s new record is “Double Life” most people have an immediate reaction that seems to leap out before the person catches it; a knowing nod or smile. Apparently, everyone has a double life. While expanding on the themes of mortality and madness found on their previous records, “Double Life” has a more divided feel to it; more immediate, yet more stark.
‘Double Life’ is their first full length album recording and it’s one that makes you sit up and take notice right from the start. Sitting somewhere between Indie & Art rock the band’s sound is one of jangly guitars and strident drums; at times dissonant and sometimes even discordant, it’s an album that challenges and fascinates almost in equal measure. Perhaps the track that best sums up the album is the second track in, ‘We’re A Mess’, based on a heavily distorted guitar sound and lines like “Strung out in a Hotel room on stuff. That’s a lie but at least that’s what it feels like”it perfectly sums up the mood of the album and the music of this band.
El Tee is Lauren Tarver, an American born musician residing in Melbourne. Tarver started performing solo in 2013, simultaneously playing in post-punk goth band, Parisian post-punk band Gomme and most recently in jangly grungers, Club Med. Having grown up in the punk scene, El Tee applies that foundational musical grit while delivering songs via reverberated melodies and emotionally steered lyrics, capturing a ethereal-yet-dark style.
Although now accompanied by a backing band when playing live, the El Tee sound is often pretty minimal, just Lauren’s soaring vocal, country-tinged vocal and gently, strummed electric guitar.
Although originally from Northern California, El Tee now calls Melbourne home. Australia’s second largest city, Melbourne well established as the countries cultural capital, and one of the world’s finest musical cities, with more music venues per head than even Austin, Texas. Arguably the city’s most famous musical offspring is the irrefutably brilliant Nick Cave, although Kylie Minogue has probably sold more records. In recent years the city has seen something of a boom with acts like Gabriella Cohen, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard and Alex Lahey all making waves both in Australia and overseas.
Lauren has been performing solo since around 2013, but only released the first El Tee offering, Rough Light, in February this year, a collection of demos of songs written throughout 2017. Lauren recently showcased something more polished sounding in the shape of new two track EP, Radio Silence, which was released at the back end of March. The latest in a string of excellent, alt-country indebted songwriters emerging from Australia in recent years, El Tee wouldn’t sound out of place alongside the likes of Julia Jacklin, Gabriella Cohen. Thankfully though, all easy comparisons aside there’s plenty about Lauren’s songwriting to make her stand out, even from that impressive crowd.
Take Radio Silence’s lead track, Hold On; a throb of bass and gentle, barely there drum beat aside, it’s just Lauren to the fore. Her lightly strummed, warm electric guitar meanders gently around the fret board, as her vocal, distant and echoing carries much of the melodic weight. The quiet simplicity of the music allows the track to ebb and flow with the passion of the voice, and allows the lyrics to shine out, as Lauren spells out a story of finding failure through freezing in the face of possible success, as she sings, “are you here? Are you waiting for the moment to arise?”
Although in terms of instrumentation it is even more stripped bare than Hold On, the EP’s other track, Inside, is a darker, more brooding beast. Recalling the same over-driven guitar meets soaring vocal combination Magana used so memorably, Inside is an emotional and almost insular piece of songwriting. Lauren has suggested it is a study of loneliness even in the presence of others, how we can all at times become engulfed by the safety-net that our internal monologue can provide.
Radio Silence is a hugely promising introduction, but it is just that an introduction. The next step, a debut album is already in the works, will be the moment of truth. If Radio Silence is anything to go by, it could be spectacular.
In 1972, Stephen Stills formed a new band called ‘Manassas’ and on April 12th they released their debut double LP of the same name.
The album debuted on the Top LP’s chart for the week ending April 29th, 1972 and eventually peaked at #4 in June. Stills‘ album shared the Top 10 with an album by David Crosby and Graham Nash(Graham Nash David Crosby) and an album by Neil Young (Harvest), and as you know, all were members of the quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Manassas marked a critical comeback for Stills, calling it a “sprawling masterpiece” and Rolling Stone saying it was “reassuring to know that Stills has some good music still inside him”.
By 1972, what we call classic rock was pretty much peaking—though nobody at the time knew it. Except maybe Stephen Stills. The band and double-album he piloted and released that year—both named Manassas—now seem pivotal. Manassas brilliantly summed up the remarkable 1960s creative surge that revitalized rock’s roots and encouraged experimentation just when it was at its crest.
The top-flight outfit Stills assembled in late 1971 and named for a bloody two-part Civil War battle (the album’s cover shot was taken on that battlefield) could nimbly navigate damn near every polyglot style rock was evolving– from blues “Jet Set” to bluegrass “Fallen Eagle”, country rock “Don’t Look At My Shadow” to Caribbean beats “Medley”, folk-rock “Johnny’s Garden” to metal “Right Now”. Jamming out complex, textured arrangements in the studio, they successfully translated them to stages in Europe and the US. But Stills always felt that Manassas struggled for recognition because his handlers wanted him back in the gold rush that Crosby Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young) generated.
So it all begn when Hillman and Stills accidentally crossed paths in Cleveland, they both glimpsed opportunity. Stills’ bounteous talents and fierce competitive drive almost ensured he would overshadow nearly any setting he was in, but he was discouraged by his solo ventures. He needed a creative ally he respected, someone who’d push back but not combust or split.
A few weeks later, Stills called Hillman and invited him down to Miami’s famed Criteria Studios, where engineer-producer Tom Dowd had shepherded Derek and the Dominos‘ monumental jam-fuelled Layla sessions the year before. As it happens, the producers for what would become Manassas worked on it too.
The stage was set to replace the sterile studio feel Stills hated with the onstage improvising looseness he loved. He had his co-pilot.
Chris Hillman, who may be rock history’s best-ever second banana after dealing with McGuinn and Parsons were hard-to-beat baptisms of fire was secure enough in his own creativity to deliver. He would co-write two songs for Manassas (Both of Us, It Doesn’t Matter), help Stills wrangle others into shape, and supply his subtle, pure-toned harmonies throughout.
As StephenStills explained, “I basically wanted a partner, somebody who had a sense of songs. Chris invented the phrase ‘lyric police,’ and was a tremendous help. But I was still on that real powerful, energetic ‘Let’s go, I know what I’m doing’ kinda thing. Chris realized it was my band, and that was OK for him.”
From the shambling Burritos came two key talents.
Violinist Byron Berline was a bluegrass vet who’d clocked time with stars like Bill Monroe and Dillard and Clark. Fallen Eagle, a breakneck bluegrass protest song against ranchers killing our endangered national symbol, puts his dazzling, keening fiddle and Hillman’s virtuoso mandolin in the forefront.
Al Perkins learned to play Hawaiian steel guitar at nine, mastered the dobro and pedal steel, performed with country and western bands, then shifted gears to tour his native west Texas as a rock guitar slinger. He supports or duels with Stills on all his axes. On Jesus Gave Love Away For Free, his aching steel solos swell and sigh; on Don’t Look at My Shadow, they glide with glee. On “Jet Set,” he plugs into effects to go grungy and deliver slashing, whiplash blues in Duane Allman fashion to counter Stills‘ gurgling wah-wah. He plays both steel and guitar on Song of Love.
Perkins, Stills, and Hillman take their guitar army acoustic for “Johnny’s Garden”, where their loosely braided, ever-shifting lines gently nudge Stills‘ yearning vocal.
The rest of the cast came from Stills‘ solo albums and tours.
Bassist Calvin “Fuzzy” Samuels brought the Caribbean feels Stills craved, as the burbling line on “Song of Love” demonstrates. But he could nail the bottom hard on blues-rockers like “Jet Set.”
Keyboardist Paul Harris, a session vet, could play almost any style; with Hillman’s adept rhythm guitar, his keys became the session’s sonic glue. Latin percussionist Joe Lala co-founded Blues Image (Ride Captain Ride) and sang with gritty, soulful conviction. He vocally challenges Stills on Cuban Bluegrass, and delivers the pulsating Latin rhythms Stills adored throughout.
Drummer Dallas Taylor was Stills’ running buddy—and a wild card. He played on CSN’s first two albums and tours; they fired him because his substance abuse rivaled the Grievous Angel’s. But this bad boy had exactly what Stills wanted on drums: he could float, dance, or slam it home.
What was slated to be Stills’ third solo album had morphed completely. The band’s chemistry clicked almost instantly, and its boundless energy and chops meshed with Stills’ vision and discipline. A few weeks of jamming out arrangements fused the wildly diverse material and sounds into a sum greater than its parts. They came out of it as a fierce, tuned machine.
No wonder Bill Wyman, who co-wrote Love Gangster with Stills and played bass for the track, said he’d leave the Stones to join Manassas. Hillman understood why: “We were always more of a band than people thought. Stills wouldn’t have been the same without us, that’s for sure. Manassas was the best band Stills ever played in.”
The album ends with a final stark jolt. Blues Man finds Stills alone with an acoustic guitar, like the host of a wild party sitting amid the wreckage after it’s over. He channels everything he ever absorbed from his revered blues masters into his gritty, anguished vocal and nimble fingerpicking to sketch a raw, painfully dark elegy for three of his friends. Jimi Hendrix, Al Wilson (Canned Heat), and Duane Allman had all recently died.
On stage, Manassas gained fame for its nearly three-hour shows opening with an opening rock set, followed by Stills playing solo acoustic, Hillman and Perkins playing bluegrass, and the band then returning for country, more rock and an acoustic finish. After touring, Hillman took several weeks away to record a reunion album with the Byrds, his pre-Burritos band.
Brooklyn’s Las Rosas have announced their sophomore LP, Shadow By Your Side, due out May 11th via NYC’s Greenway Records. The album is currently available for pre-order digitally and on CD & limited-edition vinyl.
Shadow By Your Sidecomes as a follow-up to last year’s Everyone Gets Exactly What They Want, and showcases the band’s lean, pop-infused mix of psych and garage rock. Lead single “Christa” features twangy guitars, chugging rhythms, and playful, luminous vocal harmonies, and its accompanying video has mystical, otherworldly vibe that perfectly captures the band’s aesthetic
Las Rosas Announce Sophomore LP Shadow By Your Side, Out May 11th via Greenway Records
‘Circle The Sun’ is the new LP from Melbourne’s sonic-indie-rock charmers TV Haze. It’s the trio’s third full-length album in just 18 months! Lead by the infectious Byrds-esque single ‘Maple Leaves’ and closing with expansive master piece ‘Circle The Sun’, the Melbourne trio have showed they can dial back the fuzz while still keeping the urgency and raw beauty of years gone by. “It’s a powerful first statement for an album that stretches beyond the band’s admitted ’90s sweet spot into rough-and-tumble college rock and ’70s power pop and country.”
If 2016’s self-titled debut and last year’s Scrap Museum tapped the ragged, flannel-draped glory of bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Buffalo Tom, ‘Circle The Sun’ sees the Melbourne trio expanding their sound bringing forth a distinctive 70’s influence with 12 string guitar textures.
Lump is a collaboration between singer songwriter Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay, the founding member of Tunng and Throws. Their self-titled album will be released on 1st June via Dead Oceans Records.
The record is a heady blend of wonked-out guitars, Moog synths and pattering drums, set against droning, coiling clouds of flutes and voices.
The duo have shared the first track from the record. A somewhat cynical examination of the new age, Curse Of The Contemporary has a steady, pulsing bassline and divines a road snaking off towards the horizon, which gives a sense of gazing out of a car window as mountains and palm trees rush by.
Watch the excellent video below and the single will also be available for Record Store Day on hyper-limited 12” translucent green vinyl.
Norwegian experimentalist Jenny Hval has unveiled a new song ‘Spells’, the captivating lead track from her upcoming EP collection The Long Sleep. Replete with pulsing electronic grooves, ‘Spells’ conjures a dreamy soundscape of heart-tugging pianos, playful saxophones and Hval’s weightless vocals. Wading into balearic dance-pop territory, the song’s cascading melodies cast listeners adrift in whirlpools of sound as the artist cryptically sings
“You are your own disco ball hovering above you, like a comforting reminder that not even you belong to you.” The intoxicating track follows Hval’s winning recent collaboration with fellow Norwegian artist Lindstrøm‘Bungl (Like A Ghost)’, listen to ‘Spells’ .
BOYTOY announced their debut full-length album, Grackle, will be arriving soon through PaperCup Music, and premiered lead single, and lead track from the record, “Postal”, via Soundcloud. The Brooklyn trio will be previewing material this month with a run of tour dates .
BOYTOY emerged in 2014 with a ferocious live show, and a self-titled debut that caught the attention of fans and critics from outlets such as Noisey, Stereogum, SPIN, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, NYLON, and Rolling Stone. The band headed into the studio in Philadelphia this spring with producer Al Creedon (Eternal Summers/Bleeding Rainbow) to record, resulting in 11 tracks of no nonsense, rock n’ roll bangers, with three-part vocal harmonies, and melodic hooks galore.
With some buzz in their sound, and hints of ’90s alt-rock, this Brooklyn trio wouldn’t hesitate to lean out of the convertible and yell funny insults at the goons who were too stupid to talk to them at last night’s party. (Which, coincidentally, is another one of power pop’s recurring themes.) Bruising riffs and soaring hooks abound.
Sub Pop has something special on their hands with Melbourne’s Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. Yeah, this is surf rock, but RBCF sounds nothing like American surf rock bands. Each member of the quintet takes a turn on the mic and songs from the released The French Press EP were as great as we had hoped. Singles “Julie’s Place and “French Press,” with thick basslines, vocal harmonies and sticky guitar melodies.
In early 2016, the release of Talk Tight put Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever on the map with glowing reviews from Spin, Stereogum, and Pitchfork, praising them as stand-outs even among the fertile landcape of Melbourne music. Chock full of snappy riffs, spritely drumming and quick-witted wordplay, Talk Tight was praised for the precision of their melodies, the streamlined sophistication of their arrangements, and the undercurrent of melancholy that motivates every note.” The band was born from late night jam sessions in singer / guitarist Fran Keaney’s bedroom and honed in the thrumming confines of Melbourne’s live music venues. Sharing tastes and songwriting duties, cousins Joe White and Fran Keaney, are brothers Tom and Joe Russo, and drummer Marcel Tussie started out with softer, melody-focused songs.
The more shows they played, the more those driving rhythms that now trademark their songs emerged. Since then, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have rode that wave from strength to strength. Touring around the country on headline bills and festival slots all the way to Bigsound, the entrenched themselves with their thrilling live shows while prepping their next release. The French Presslevels up on everything that made Talk Tight such an immediate draw. Multi-tracked melodies which curl around one another, charging drums and addictive bass lines converge to give each track its driving momentum. Honed through their live shows, this relentless energy carries the record through new chapters in the band’s Australian storybook. Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s songs have always had all the page-turning qualities of a good yarn and The French Press is no different. Somewhere between impressionists and fabulists, lyricists Fran Keaney, Tom Russo and Joe White often start with something rooted in real life – the melancholy of travel on French Press, having a hopeless crush on Julie’s Place – before building them into clever, quick vignettes. The result is lines blurred between fiction and reality – vibrant stories which get closer at a particular truth than either could alone. Blending critical insight and literate love songs, The French Press cements Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever as one of Australia’s smartest working bands.
‘Sorry is Gone’ is available everywhere . The whole record is about me taking my life back, without really realizing it. I realized I’m the only person that is going to look out for me. I have to be my main person. No one else. I have to sing about things and write about things that have happened to me as therapy. That’s what connects me to other music I listen to. I want music to make me feel things. This is my inner dialogue, and my chance to get the last word.
Jessica Lea Mayfield might make some people uncomfortable with the level of honesty she projects on her forthcoming LP, “Sorry Is Gone”, but she’s not going to apologize – for that, or for anything else on her complex, confessional fourth album. Recorded with producer John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Kurt Vile, Phosphorescent and Dinosaur Jr.), Sorry Is Gone is a raw document of a woman in progress; one weathering cruel storms but finally able to blame the rain itself for the flood. Written as the truth of her own poisonous marriage unfolded before her eyes, Sorry Is Gone is a record of permission. Permission to create freely, to escape what is no longer safe and to stop bearing responsibility for things done to her, not by her. As Mayfield sings on the title track, “the sorry is gone.” Indeed, it is; kicked to the curb with every strum of her guitar.
Written in the years since her last solo LP, Make My Head Sing, in 2014, and her 2015 collaboration with Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield Sing Elliott Smith, Sorry Is Gone became the soundtrack to a highly personal and traumatic story. The Ohio-born Mayfield was quietly enduring years of domestic abuse, smiling and touring while she hid a brewing tempest – and the bruises, too. But lyrics don’t lie even as bruises fade, and they started to tell the tale of her marriage before she was even able to; songs often dark and dangerous and ready to confront and claim her life. Written primarily on an acoustic baritone guitar – out of necessity at first, in her thin-walled apartment – Mayfield started to process the years of hurt and uncertainly through words and melodies that helped her see the light in the darkness.
Though much of Make My Head Sing was written music-first, Sorry Is Gone began with those lyrics, and, so often, a path forward unfolded itself as the songs formed. “The cold hard truth is you love me too much,” she sings on “Meadow” a moody, echoey moment about finally realizing someone’s true colors. “The cold hard truth is you couldn’t love me enough.” It’s a brutal line from someone who refuses to be victimized. Evoking the pathos of nineties grunge, the folk confessions of her idol, Smith, and the cool blasé of bands like Luscious Jackson, the tracks that comprise Sorry Is Gone aren’t devised to make anyone comfortable but herself – but they are there to help share an emotional journal and a certain kind of healing that can only come through music.
“I have to sing about things and write about things that have happened to me as therapy,” says Mayfield, who shaped so many of these songs in the isolation of the small apartment she shared with her husband while their marriage fell apart in her hands – in many ways, those songs pointed to the way out before she could get there herself. “That’s what connects me to other music I listen to. I want music to make me feel things. This is my inner dialogue, and my chance to get the last word.”
Recorded with Agnello at Water Music and Electric Lady Studios, Mayfield recruited a stellar group of musicians for Sorry Is Gone, including Avett on backing vocals and keys, drummer Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth, Sun Kil Moon), bassist Emil Amos (Grails, Holy Sons), guitarist Cameron Deyell (Sia, Streets of Laredo) and Patrick Damphier (The Mynabirds, Field Days, who produced and played on “Offa My Hands”). Together, they worked to create an ominous take on love, where hope can exist among heartbreak and the end is only as finite as we make it to be. On songs like the title track and “Bum Me Out,” Mayfield bends the angelic notes of her voice over off-kilter orchestration, building an environment of warrior-style triumph; on “Safe 2 Connect 2” she takes stock of the digital world to a haunting, acoustic backdrop that gives a subtle ode to her bluegrass roots.
“Been though hell, there’s no telling what might happen in my future,” she sings. “All I can do is be thankful for each moment that’s my own.”
Mayfield has paved an unconventional lifestyle – playing in her family’s bluegrass band since the age of eight, she didn’t have any traditional schooling and released her first album at the age of fifteen, when she was discovered by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. Influenced by everything from that mountain sound to the modern garage, Mayfield has been able to come at songwriting from a pure perspective, lead more by her heart than any textbook. It’s what makes the tracks of Sorry Is Gone so striking and visceral – there is no filter on the emotions, no rulebook and certainly no excuses for anything she’s been through or the candor she fires.
“I’m not going to bite my lip on anything,” she says. “If there is one thing I am going to do, it’s talk and sing about what I want to. No one is going to manipulate me.”
The sorry is gone, once and for all – and Sorry Is Gone is a permission slip for anyone who wants to stop apologizing for others, and start living for themselves. ●
