Growth with no reward. Finding strength in your less desirable traits. Coming up with the perfect comeback hours later in bed, glaring at the ceiling. Asking yourself: am I improving, or am I just changing into something unrecognizable? Chicago quartet Ganser probe the futility of striving for self-growth during the chaos of our times for dark comedy and jagged sounds on their potent new album “Just Look at That Sky”, released July 31st on Felte Records. Co-produced with Electrelane’s Mia Clarke and engineer Brian Fox, this is an assured, fully realized triumph of a record from an art-punk band that’s figured out how to focus on making great art, even if everything else around them falls apart.
The album drew critical praise from the likes of The Quietus, Sound Opinions, Bandcamp, Brooklyn Vegan, CLASH Magazine, and more. The quartet is back now with a series of remixes, the first being album closer “Bags For Life,” remixed by Andy Bell of shoegaze legends Ride, under his dance moniker GLOK.
Their remix EP, Look at the Sun, will contain remixes from artists the band admires, has played with, or met online during quarantine and drops in full in the spring of 2021. Who will be next?
Jim Ghedi’s profoundly unique and moving In The Furrows Of Common Place. He really is one of the most arresting young voices around, breaking folk out of the traditional. Whilst Ghedi’s previous idiosyncratic take on folk has often been instrumental, exploring the natural world and his relationship to it through his music as seen on 2018’s A Hymn For Ancient Land. His new albumIn The Furrow Of Common Place is a deeper plunge inside himself to offer up more of his voice to accompany his profoundly unique and moving compositions.
The decision to include more of Ghedi’s vocals was a conscious one and driven by a need to say something. However, this isn’t a brash raging political polemic. As is now customary with Ghedi’s work, it is rich in nuance, history, poetry and allegory. Musically, the album is equally locked into this ongoing sense of evolution. Ghedi’s intricate yet deft guitar playing still twists and flows its way through the core, weaving in and out of gliding double bass, sweeping violin, gentle percussion and vocals that shift from tender solos to overlapping harmonies.
As with much of Ghedi’s work, there’s a rich connection between the past and the current. Musically, he continues to sit in a singular position of sounding distinctly contemporary yet also with a touch of traditional flair. This expands itself into the lyrical terrain here too.
For all the socio-political and historical backdrop to the record it is not one that feels overwhelmed by it. Much like Ghedi’s work when it was largely instrumental – and some of it still is here – it flows and unfurls thoughtfully, with space still being utilised masterfully, creating room to pause and reflect. It’s another inimitable record from an artist that truly sounds like nobody else right now.
“A Common Turn”, the spellbindingly profound and deliciously honest debut album from the London-based artist, Anna B Savage. Produced with fellow Dinker William Doyle, this really feels like quite a special release, there is such power in her, even when she whispers. In a week of epic releases and massive noises, it was those whispers that really blew our minds,
The debut album of London based singer-songwriter Anna B Savage! Her 2015 EP was deeply intriguing and quickly drew the attention of Father John Misty and later Jenny Hval, both of whom brought Savage out on European tours. Anna B Savage’s first full-length record A Common Turn is question mark music. Her songs are heavy with unanswered queries, with dilemmas and insecurities, or often just with wondering.
Savage’s voice is endlessly warm, but producer William Doyle (East India Youth) consistently finds the iron in it. Even the darkest moments in this music don’t stick in their devastation, though – Savage’s fire burns too brightly. Her voice can drop to a whisper, but then it will open all the way up in a flash flood of cavernous guitar, echoes, and swelling strings that expand and then vanish just as suddenly as they arrived. “Baby Grand’ is part of Anna B Savage’s debut Album “A Common Turn”, out the 29th January 2021 on City Slang Records.
Savage’s music is deeply vulnerable, without being submissive. She lays claim to her own fragility, and the stories she tells are of taking up space, finding connections, and owning the power in not knowing all the answers. Hers are songs for anyone who thinks hard, feels deeply, and asks big questions.
Produced by William Doyle (East India Youth), “A Common Turn” presents us a nest of fully-formed and room-filling artistry.
Rats on Rafts’ upcoming album is called “Excerpts From Chapter 3: The Mind Runs A Net Of Rabbit Paths” a title as labyrinthine as the music meticulously recorded by this iconic Rotterdam post-punk quartet. The record resonates like a living painting in which motifs disappear and return like characters in a puppet show. Music so immersive and unique, it was more than worth the half-decade wait. The third album from Dutch punk-laced noiseniks Rats on Rafts adds new maturity and a conceptual feel that pulls the extremes of their sound together. A psyche-fuelled journey into the id punctuated with rhythmic kabuki modal mood swings, thunderstorms, digital beeps, traffic noise, and just plain old beautiful cacophonous reverb-drenched sound when needed.
Left of the Dial is a yearly showcase festival held in the heart of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Unfortunately, the pandemic made it impossible for this year’s edition to go ahead as planned. Instead of it’s real life version, Left of the Dial’s Parallel Universe went ahead as a live stream. The full live stream, including lots of cool and upcoming bands can be watched here: youtu.be/IYwKM3p_KvM Did Rats on Rafts get you excited.
The band swear spiritual allegiance to the Rotterdam’s New Wave, Pop and Punk scenes with one proviso, the weirder the better. Rats have been together for a few years and, after boring themselves into finally getting good, they embarked on a phase which is slowly seeing them recognized as something a bit special by their own countrymen.
The third album from Dutch punk-laced noiseniks adds new maturity and a conceptual feel that pulls the extremes of their sound together. A psyche-fuelled journey into the id punctuated with rhythmic kabuki modal mood swings, thunderstorms, digital beeps, traffic noise, and just plain old beautiful cacophonous reverb-drenched sound when needed.
The ‘third chapter’ refers to the last five years that the Dutch band have spent creating their “difficult” third album. Each song spins a yarn; there are plagues, dreams, wind and fire, ‘mythical’ characters, and the search for the secret government warehouse. Lead single, “Tokyo Music Experience”, resonates with a conveyor belt-propelled modal guitar, reflecting the halcyon days of Japanese super-productivity; a mesmerising mantra, infected with news bulletin on-the-hour bleeps underlining its time-sensitive nature; a pristine super-commercial anthem to drive loyalty and reinforce solidarity with the party!
Having been described as creating “underground noise with a bracing, warped pop appeal” (Mojo), their new album is a coming-of-age post-classic with a unique worldview – inspired by Van Dyke Parks (Song Cycle) Scott Walker (3 & 4), Moondog (Elpmas), White Noise (An Electric Storm) and Beach Boys (Smile).
If their previous effort (Tape Hiss) was their very own sketch of a sketch for an incomplete concept album, a noisy reaction to their previous life, then ‘Excerpts From Chapter 3..’, with all its interlaced intricacies, is the realisation of their transition from punk-spiked-pop to psyche-pop protagonists. Evolving, testing, infectious… Rats on Rafts’ upcoming album is called Excerpts From Chapter 3: The Mind Runs A Net Of Rabbit Paths, a title as labyrinthine as the music meticulously recorded by this iconic Rotterdam post-punk quartet. The record resonates like a living painting in which motifs disappear and return like characters in a puppet show. Music so immersive and unique, it was more than worth the half-decade wait.
Releases January 29th, 2021
“One of the great contemporary European rock bands” Louder Than War “Recalling Brix-era Fall at their most-pop leaning” ★★★★½ Uncut “Rats On Rafts have that same righteous fire that makes A Silver Mt. Zion so compelling.” Norman Records “A mélange of The Fall circa Container Drivers and Motorpsycho suggesting a very angry Go-Team” Mojo “Animated by a myriad of experiences over the years, fashioning this modern new wave collection of gems imbued with the experimental 80’s, Scott Walker, reverb-soaked guitars and pop culture.” Narc “A record that I – even though it’s very early in the year – will pencil in the top 3 of albums of the year”
From the many musical lives of artist Glenn Donaldson emerges The Reds Pinks and Purples, a project that sifts out the purest elements of pop music and in the process chronicles the point of view of an assiduous songwriter. His new album “Uncommon Weather” is both an elusive portrait of San Francisco –– during one of its fluctuations as an untenable place for musicians and artists –– and also a self-portrait of a songwriter who has dispatched another treasured collection of timeless sounding DIY-pop songs.
Self-recorded and mostly self-performed, the music on “Uncommon Weather” continuously reckons with the influence of The Television Personalities’ Dan Treacy, whose own forays into drum-machines, echo, and reverb in the early 1990s is an important reference point. Paul Weller, Robert Smith, and Sarah Records also come to mind. The album arrives with grateful timing, quick on the heels of the recent EP “You Might Be Happy Someday” and alleviating, for a brief window at least, whatever it is that keeps us coming back to this elemental music. Donaldson imagines his listeners are just like himself: fascinated and addicted to the spiritual power of uncomplicated pop classics.
In 2012, country singer Margo Price wrote the soul-searching anthem “Hey Child” shortly after the death of her baby boy, Ezra. After being encouraged to re-record the song, The song touches on her past struggles with substance abuse and mental health when she was dealing with the loss of her son. Price shares that she and her husband, Jeremy Ivey, 42, delved into drinking and partying to cope with their loss. The country singer opens up about battling inner demons after the loss of her son.
We had begun hanging with a rowdy group of degenerate musician friends and partying harder than The Rolling Stones,” says Price, 37,. “The song was about how many of our talented friends were drinking and partying their talents away, but after a few years had passed, we realized it was just as much about us as our friends.” Back in 2018,after an unfortunate night of drinking, she ended up in Davidson County jail for three days. “When you lose a child you cope differently,” she said, praising Ivey with providing stability during that difficult time. “I think it’s amazing that our marriage lasted after that because the statistics are not in our favour. But he’s been there right beside me.”
With this new music video, Price recounts this exact night. The visuals show a “gritty depiction” of her facing her inner demons, crashing her car, going to jail and then beating the darkness that she had found herself in. I know so many people who struggle with substance abuse,” says Price. “I just lost a family member to alcohol. My second cousin Tammy locked herself into a hotel room and drank herself to death two months ago. In another life, that could have been me.”
Price says that originally she did not want to revisit the song “Hey Child” after having written it all the way back in 2012, but the encouragement from the producer for her album “That’s How Rumors Get Started”, and her band, helped her to do it.
“Funny enough, I initially didn’t want to re-record ‘Hey Child,’ But Sturgill was producing the record and he convinced me to. When I brought it in to play for the band they were all blown away by the song — that made me fall back in love with it.” With bringing the song back to life today, Price finds a whole new meaning to it as she reveals that she recently decided to stop drinking.
“I just found it’s not serving me in any way. At first, it was just going to be a break, like when folks do ‘dry January’ — I’ve done that so many times,” says Price. “But after reading Holly Whitaker’s book Quit Like a Woman I’m seeing alcohol in a completely different light and may never drink again. Maybe that’s why I feel connected to this song again and wanted to make a video, to paint a picture of where I’ve been in my past lives. Sometimes you have to accept and forgive yourself for the mistakes and the failures you’ve made in your life in order to shed the layers and move on.
On this road of recovery, there is more to smile about as she and Ivey were blessed with a beautiful baby girl, Ramona Lynn, in 2019. She joined Ezra’s twin brother, Judah, now 10.
Carla Geneve is a singer songwriter from Perth, Western Australia, Her new album will also include previous singles ‘Don’t Wanna Be Your Lover’ and ‘The Right Reasons’, both of which were released last year. In an additional statement, Geneve described the album as “very much a way for me to make sense of and explain my emotions to myself”. “These songs came at a time that I was coming to terms with the positives and negatives of medication, as well as the reality of having to gather the mental strength to push through hardship,” she explained.
The new track, ‘Dog Eared’, is a scorching rock number inspired by the enthusiasm of Geneve’s music students.
“I was driving home one night and I felt so excited and full of energy for music, and I guess life in general. I didn’t really know why but I realised it was because I had been in a room of teenagers playing music with the pure, raw emotion that most people grow out of as you enter adulthood,” Geneve said in a statement. “I had taken some of that recklessness and it felt incredibly nostalgic. I dictated the words to ‘Dog Eared’ into my phone. It took me a while to finish the music because I really wanted to get it moving a bit more than my other songs. Capture a bit of that violence that I mostly stay away from on this record.” “Dog Eared” is a crushing piece of rock that sits in perfect contrast to recent single, “The Right Reasons”.
Geneve crafted “Learn To Like It” over a couple of years in between prolific touring and a period that was marked by adolescence, heartache and coming to terms with mental illness. The 22-year old says writing the largely biographical record was a method of processing and finding strength through vulnerability, saying it was “very much a way for me to make sense of and explain my emotions to myself.”
“These songs came at a time that I was coming to terms with the positives and negatives of medication, as well as the reality of having to gather the mental strength to push through hardship.”
The Magnetic Fields’ three-disc album “69 Love Songs” is a staggering achievement, a cultural landmark, a monument to romantic, yet urbane misery. Calling it a concept album seems inadequate. At once theatrical and literary, it’s a dazzling kaleidoscope of pop and Americana, a pageant of queer (or at least sexually ambiguous) and not-that-queer heartbreak, with occasional flurries of happiness. From track to track the several voices on the album whip from tender sincerity to extreme camp, adding up to 69 mostly great songs that worship, mock and interrogate love by turns, released just before the turn of the millennium.
That said, not all of the “69 Love Songs” are of equal quality, but perhaps deliberately so. To borrow a line from “The Book of Love” on disc one, some if it is transcendental; some of it is just really dumb. Some are captivating love stories with melodies that worm their way into your heart some are maudlin little ditties, some are bad gags, some are booby trapped. Really, though, that’s part of the charm of the album when taken as a whole. It’s unnecessary, quixotic, excessive, relentless, sometimes grotesque, even occasionally genuinely romantic.
The album is an overwhelming text on its own and more still has been written about it, but an album like this demands a thorough inventory, the kind that can only be done one song at a time. The challenge, of course, is that this three-disc album contains a much higher percentage of great songs than most albums of more standard length.
Released in 1999, 69 Love Songs is a brilliant, sprawling, three-part record by The Magnetic Fields, the lo-fi indie collective formed in 1989 by Boston-born, New York-based songwriter Stephin Merritt with a revolving cast of male and female vocalists (plus author Lemony Snicket on accordion). Early albums included tributes to Phil Spector, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Cole Porter. Pop snobs loved the layers of reference: the songs were always about songs.
A caustic and cerebral character (so relentlessly condescending that I gave up interviewing him in 2008), Merritt originally conceived the band’s sixth release as a Sondheim-indebted theatrical revue for four drag queens. The subject, he says, is not love, but love songs. With all the cynical wit of a modern Dorothy Parker, he planned to pick apart all the cliches of the canon while showcasing his ability to mass produce catchy melodies like a vintage Brill Building jangler.
To keep things fresh across almost three hours of music, Merritt dressed his ditties in every genre going: folk, rock, country, indie, gospel, punk, jazz, synth-pop and little outbursts of daft experimentalism. The use of different singers, flipping gender and register, keeps you on your toes. Who’s playing what game now? Who’s telling the truth and who’s lying to you?
Merritt threw every sentimental trick in the book at this record: big swoops and swirls up and down the octave, tear-jerking minor chords, and an attic full of sepia-tinged pop-culture references. One song finds an abandoned spouse seeking refuge in dreams staged by the legendary Hollywood choreographer Busby Berkeley: “Whining and pining is wrong and so/ On and so forth, of course of course/ But no, you can’t have a divorce”. Another spurned lover seeks solace in his Billie Holiday records: “Some of us can only live in songs of love and trouble/ Some of us can only live in bubbles”. This pretty tune is offset by a suicidal mindset and a discordant piano.
Each of Merritt’s emotional sucker punches is delivered with one eyebrow raised at listeners who buy into his “fraudulent authenticity”. This means that anybody going through a traumatic experience can use the music to flush out all the messy feelings – or consider them from a strangely dispassionate distance. “The book of love has music in it/ In fact, that’s where music comes from/ Some of it is just transcendental/ Some of it is just really dumb”, he sings in a bone-dry baritone, over a guitar that sounds like he’s strumming it with a nail brush.
In the weeks directly after my partner left, I struggled to rock my one-year-old daughter to sleep while repeatedly herding my four-year-old son back into his bedroom. My tears would splash onto his Hungry Caterpillar duvet as I sang along with the romantic lullaby tune of “Come Back from San Francisco”, sung by Claudia Gonson in a rich, open alto. The part of me that joined Merritt in observing the feelings from afar had nothing but contempt for a woman who yearned for the return of a man who could do this to her.
Although almost all the widely cherished songs on 69 Love Songs are delivered like demos, few have been covered. Despite the catchy, FM-friendly melodies and delectable lyrics, they’re so perfect as they are that to flesh them out would be as crass as daubing Dulux over ancient Greek statues. The spaces in the production are reminiscent of the unanswered questions at the end of a good short story. Some days I find the countryfied electric guitar of “No One Will Ever Love You Honestly” gains truth as it echoes.
Merritt’s sepulchral tones on “I Don’t Want to Get Over You” made me hoot. Too busy fixing washing machines and meeting concerned teachers, I had certainly never been through a period during which I could “dress in black and read Camus/ Smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth/ Like I was 17/ That would be a scream/ But I don’t want to get over you…”
This is a murder ballad, a Punch and Judy show, definitely not a love song, and therefore doesn’t belong on an album called 69 Love Songs.
Du Blonde has shared a video for “Medicated” featuring Garbage’s Shirley Manson. The grungy alt-rock track will appear on the singer-songwriter’s forthcoming LP, ‘Homecoming’, due out in the spring, though an exact date is still to be confirmed. Discussing the part computer animated, part live action clip, they said: “I shot the video in my childhood bedroom using a green screen Girl Ray gave me at the start of lockdown.
“The spiders are a reference to a hallucination I had in my early teens where I pulled back my bed covers to see thousands of spiders writhing around in my bed, which now I see as a result of extreme anxiety. A lot of the scenarios in the video are a celebration of the things about me that I feel people might feel shame about.
“There’s so much stigma around taking medication in order to ease mental health conditions, so I wanted to express my feelings on the subject which is basically ‘I take medication and I’m stoked about it because thanks to that I’m still alive’.”
Du Blonde’s last album, ‘Lung Bread For Daddy’, landed in 2019.
The Fat Angel Sings 