Releasing a new single on Lost Map Records (Pictish Trail, Kid Canaveral, Rozi Plain). It’s a song called ‘Build A Building’, and it’s about seeking release from feeling like a cog in a machine.
The band are Mike Cranny, Laura Copsey, Martin Thompson, Giles Littleford and Tom Hargreaves. Together they write lyrical alt-pop songs which are filtered through joyous surges of collective noisemaking and bursts of electronic sound from synths and guitars. The debut album ‘Never Closer‘ came out at the end of 2014 and the new album ‘The Year Dot’ will be out on Lost Map Records in early 2018. The first single taken from it ‘Build A Building’ is out now.
For The Rabbits blog premiered it and described it as: “a lush flourish of sound – breezy guitar lines combined with sun-dripped melodies and bursts of textural electronic noise”.
As part of the “Let Go” 15th anniversary we’re releasing “Standing at the Gates: The Songs of Nada Surf’s Let Go,” an album benefitting the ACLU and The Pablove Foundation (which helps children with cancer). The album features covers by an incredible group of artists including Ron Gallo, Aimee Mann, Manchester Orchestra, Ed Harcourt, Rogue Wave and many more. A full track listing is below.
To ring in the announcement, the band has shared Ron Gallo’s cover of the song Happy Kid. Of his version, he says, “I first heard Nada Surf on a mix CD a friend made me in high school that was pretty life-changing. It was 20+ songs from bands I had never heard of before. It opened the door to “underground” or “indie” music for me, and also the door to actually good songs being written by weirdos in the present day, which I didn’t know existed from listening to mostly south jersey pop-punk and hardcore music. I’m pretty sure it was the song “Paper Boats” from Let Go. I really sucked at making music back then so it’s cool to have this resurface many years later and be able to be apart of the compilation.”
Car Seat Headrest, aka Will Toledo, has re-imagined and re-recorded his excellent 2011 Bandcamp masterpiece, Twin Fantasy, and it will come out on 16th February via Matador Records. It was a record Toldeo always knew he would return to (in fact it was part of his original deal with Matador), so far from a conventional re-recording, the follow up to 2016’s seismically brilliant Teens of Denial is a wholly revelatory, epic and visionary new work. With a seven-piece band in tow (including members of Naked Giants), Car Seat Headrest will bring its explosive and revelatory live show to Australia, Europe, and select West Coast cities through the first half of 2018.
The album announcement comes with the release of Nervous Young Inhumans and its accompanying video, which can be seen below. It is a frenetic, anthemic, split-screen choreographed crescendo that perfectly mirrors the album’s theme of duality.
Toledo always knew he would return to ‘Twin Fantasy’. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.
Even so, even awkward and amateurish, ‘Twin Fantasy’ is deeply, truly adored. Legions of reverent listeners carve rituals out of it: sobbing over “Famous Prophets,” making out to “Cute Thing,” dancing their asses off as “Bodys” climbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feel everything: his hope, his despair, his wild overjoy. He’s trusting you – plural you, thousands of you – with the things he can’t say out loud. “I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends,” he sings – and then, caught between truths, backtracks: “I never came out to my friends. We were all on Skype, and I laughed and changed the subject.”
You might be imagining an extended diary entry, an angsty transmission from a bygone LiveJournal set to power chords and cranked to eleven. You would be wrong. ‘Twin Fantasy’is not a monologue. ‘Twin Fantasy’ is a conversation. “You know,” he sings, “that I’m mostly singing about you.” This is Will’s greatest strength as a songwriter ; he spins his own story, but he’s always telling yours, too. Between nods to local details – Harper’s Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat – he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.
“It was never a finished work,” Toledo says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.
It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Toledo, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those “apologies to future me’s and you’s,” there is more forgiveness than fury.
This, Toledo says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.
Another Amazing record from Portland’s Mo Troper. It’s a well crafted slice of power pop where every song has it’s place and no tune overstays it’s welcome. More people should be striving to write the kind of timeless and insanely catchy music this guy seems to throw out like it’s as easy and automatic as putting pants on in the morning
This is Mo Troper’s second album it may not change the world, but it’s pristine orchestral pop will restore your faith in it. This is wide-eyed, wide-screen beautiful stuff likely influenced by albums by Jellyfish, Jeremy Egnik and Kay Kay and his Weathered Underground. released November 17th, 2017
The Low Anthem have announced their newest LP, The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea, along with an album trailer for the work. The Rhode Island natives come back in 2018 inspired by a car accident that changed the band.
“One second you’re dozing off in the passenger seat on the way to a gig, and the next, there’s fire and hell flames and black smoke and your face is bleeding and you can’t see, and you can’t process information, and you think it’s all over.” These are the words of Jeff Prystowsky, a founding member of the band, who describes the car accident that resulted in the cancellation of The Low Anthem’s 2016 tour after just four days on the road.
On the way to a show in Washington, D.C, The Low Anthem’s tour van crashed, wrecking a lot of the band’s gear and instruments in the process, and putting Prystowsky out of commission for several weeks as he receoved from minor injuries. The accident was said to be a driving force behind the band’s new album, created while Prystowsky was in recovery.
The album, conceptualized by Low Anthem cofounder Knox Miller, was inspired by John Cage biography Where the Heart Beats, written by Kay Larsen. The book tells the story of a salt doll who goes to the sea in search of herself. Each time, the salt doll puts a piece of her inside the ocean—she gains the wisdom that the ocean brings, but dissolves herself little by little until every part of her is lost in the sea. The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea is a concept album following the narrative of the salt doll in her quest for self-discovery.
From the album’s sound, we can count on the usual harmonic voices of the band accompanied by guitars and “subtle yet immersive” electronic ambiance. Miller had to record the album using stripped-down instruments, since most of the band’s gear was lost in the accident. What we can expect from this album is a band that’s matured far beyond their conception in 2006. With their collective life experiences and the band members’ personal highs and lows,
The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea is set to release February. 23rd
American alternative-rock heroes The Breeders have announced the details of their first new album in 10 years, “All Nerve”, out on March. 2nd,
The band’s classic lineup of Kim and Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs and Jim Macpherson will return for their new album. The Breeders returned to the stage in 2013 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their LP, Last Splash, and have been working on new material since then. A 2018 album release was confirmed back in November.
Lead All Nerve single “Wait in the Car,” released back in October, is a vindictive alternative-punk track featuring The Breeders’ trademark bratty lead vocals and a “Teenage Kicks”-like guitar riff. “All Nerve” itself is a dynamic track that ping-pongs between subdued verses and crunching choruses.
Revisit “Wait in the Car” and check out venues for The Breeders’ world tour dates.
The Breeders have released two albums since the turn of the century, but their forthcoming record will be the first made with the lineup of Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs and Jim McPherson since 1993’s Last Splash. They recruited Steve Albini to help out recording drums on a few tracks, and the album promises to feature a contribution from Courtney Barnett, too. If last year’s raucous “Wait in the Car” is any indication of what to expect, it should be a good time.
Just try not to get The Beautiful Monument‘s Disorder stuck in your head. The Melbourne group have been busy this year with the release of their debut album and touring around the country. They wowed crowds at BIGSOUND, with one The Music reviewer noting that with their ability to balance “both raw energy and an impressive stage presence, the Melbourne band dig deep”. In a scene that can be set in its ways, The Beautiful Monument are a much-needed change and certain to influence a new wave of acts.
David Byrne has announced a new solo album, “American Utopia”, set for release on March 9th via Todomundo/Nonesuch Records. The effort will mark the former Talking Heads frontman’s first full solo record since 2004’s Grown Backwards.
Byrne made the announcement in a presentation he gave today at New York’s New School, which was also broadcast live via his Facebook page and can be viewed below. The event came as part of Byrne’s Reasons to Be Cheerful series, in which he presents a number of optimistic findings he has uncovered over the past year.
“Is this meant ironically? Is it a joke?” Byrne writes in a press release of his new album’s title. “Do I mean this seriously? In what way? Am I referring to the past or the future? Is it personal or political? These songs don’t describe an imaginary or possibly impossible place but rather attempt to depict the world we live in now. Many of us, I suspect, are not satisfied with that world—the world we have made for ourselves. We look around and we ask ourselves—well, does it have to be like this? Is there another way? These songs are about that looking and that asking.”
Byrne has shared a track from American Utopia, “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” which was co-written with Brian Eno . Byrne will also set out on a number of live dates in support of the record, including a run of Northeast US shows in March, appearances at 2018 fests like Coachella, Shaky Knees and New Jersey’s XPoNential, and a European tour this summer.
Soccer Mommy is the stage name of Nashville native, 20 year-old Sophie Allison, and today as well as sharing her brand new track ‘Your Dog’ she’s also announced her new album Clean will be out on 2nd March.
We’ve featured Soccer Mommy for a while now and her ability to make relatable and challenging music that hinges on the melodrama of normality has made her one of our ‘ones to watch’ for 2018.
It seems we were right to be keeping an eye on her output as she’s given us a belter of a new track. ‘Your Dog’ has one key line that boils with tension and underlying fury, it’s this “I don’t want to be your fucking dog,” and it sets the tone for the whole track.
The song menaces and meanders across emotions, Allison says “The song comes from a feeling of being paralyzed in a relationship to the point where you feel like you are a pawn in someone else’s world. The song and the video are meant to show someone breaking away and taking action, but at the same time, it’s only a quick burst of motivation. It’s a moment of strength amidst a long period of weakness.”
Speaking of her first full length proper Allison said “I’d never made a full album before, just EPs and random tracks thrown together. I wanted it to be a lot more cohesive than the rest of the stuff that came before,” explains Allison. “I wanted to make something that was a full piece of my life, that addressed similar themes and held together as a whole.”
Sophie Allison – Guitar, vocals, bass
Julian Powell – Lead guitar
Nick Brown – Drums
Gabe Wax – Piano, synth, mellotron, bass, guitar, drum programming, percussion
The result is Clean, an album that presents Soccer Mommy as a singular artist, wise beyond her years, with an emotional authenticity of her own. Clean will be released on March 2nd via Fat Possum She’s also due out on a UK tour in the Spring, the dates of which are below.
But for now, take a moment to enjoy ‘Your Dog’
March
2nd – London, UK – Rough Trade East
3rd – Leeds, UK – Headrow House
4th – Manchester UK, The Castle Hotel
6th – London, UK – Moth Club
7th – Brighton, UK – The Hope
Drift is the seventh full-length by NYC rock polymaths The Men, and it marks their 10th anniversary as a band. The Men’s last album, the self-released Devil Music, was the sound of a band who had been through hell hitting reset and looking to their roots to rediscover themselves. On Drift, The Men return to their longtime label Sacred Bones Records and explore the openness that Devil Music helped them find.
The immediately evident result of that exploration is the experimental quality of much of the material on Drift. Songwriters Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi chase their muses down a few dozen thrilling rabbit-holes over the course of the album’s nine tracks. The songs on Drift veer in a number of directions, but notably, almost none of them feature a prominent electric guitar. The lone exception, “Killed Someone,” is a rowdy riff-rocker, worthy of the finest moments of the band’s now-classic Leave Home and Open Your Heart albums. The rest of the album drives down stranger highways. “Secret Light” is an improvisation based on an old piano riff of Perro’s. “MaybeI’m Crazy” is a synth-driven dancefloor stomper for long after last call. “Rose on Top of the World” and “When I Held You in My Arms” are paisley-hued, psyched-out jams with big, beating hearts.
We’re so stoked to announce that Brooklyn rock lifers The Men are back with their most eclectic and deeply satisfying collection of songs yet. Drift marks not only the 10th anniversary of the band, but their return to SacredBones following the self-released Devil Music. The songs on Drift veer in a number of directions, but notably, almost none of them feature a prominent electric guitar. Lead single “Maybe I’m Crazy” is a synth-driven dancefloor stomper to be played long after last call.
