Thirty Days of Yes is a subscription mixtape that will release a song a day over 30 days. Developed in response to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, to drive the ‘Yes’ message and show support for the LGBTQI+ community, particularly the youth community who don’t have a voice in this public debate. 100% of the profits will go to LGBTQI+ youth organisations, Minus18 and Twenty10.
The project brings together artists such as Beaches, Body Type, Cub Sport, Courtney Barnett, DARTS, Fortunes., Hockey Dad, Jen Cloher, Jess Ribeiro, Laura Jean, Leah Senior, Lucianblomkamp, Marcus Whale, Oisima, Rainbow Chan, Shining Bird, Sui Zhen, The Murlocs, Terry, Twerps, Two Steps on the Water, and more to be revealed.
Thirty Days of Yes is made possible by 37 Adventures, Aarght Records, Barely Dressed, Chapter Music, Farmer & The Owl, Flightless, Future Classic, Good Manners, Inertia Music, Milk! Records, [PIAS], Remote Control Records, Rice Is Nice Records, Spunk Records, Stop Start, & more. Thirty Days of Yes is supported by Heaps Gay.
Lydia Loveless has become one of my favorite female artists around today. Her brashness combined with her heart-on-the-sleeve lyrics always reminds me of songwriters like Paul Westerberg. Bloodshot Records just re-released the EP where it all began, Boy Crazy, along with six other tracks including covers of Prince, Elvis Costello and Kesha. Nothing filler about any of this. If you are a fan of Lydia, this is a must own.
Boy Crazy is Lydia Loveless’s “rock and roll tribute to baseball pants and youth.” Featuring sun-washed, rebel-powered pop songs presenting a conversation about judgment and loss of innocence, as one transitions from good old American naivete to you-should-know-better “wisdom.” These songs see Lydia and her incredible band roping in their signature twangy, pedal steel-laden rock beat-em-ups and tying them tightly with the crisp Southern air of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Damn the Torpedoes and the snarling-but-sweet delivery of Juliana Hatfield’s heyday. It’s a summer set that arrives a little tardy this year, just in time to prolong those long, buzz-chasing July days when you hang out where you know you aren’t supposed to. This time, you just don’t care about getting caught.
Hookworms have announced their first new work in over three years after unveiling plans to release their new record Microshift in February via Domino Recordings. The Leeds band have given fans a teaser of their new album.
There’s plenty of synths at play on this lead track ‘Negative Space’, from the forthcoming new album announced by Hookworms today. The album marks a seismic shift in their sound, dynamic, songwriting and production, whilst still bearing all the ferocious energy, intricate musicianship and bruised but beautiful song-craft of the previous releases which have quietly made them one of the UK’s most revered young bands.
This is the band’s third studio album technically but arguably the first in which the studio has been central to its creation. Pearl Mystic and second LP, The Hum were heavily informed by the band’s live sound, Microshifton the other hand came to life in the studio, formed out of loops, modular synthesizer sequences, drum machines, homemade samples etc. which were jammed around and layered until the songs began to emerge.
The record was written and recorded in full following a complete rebuild of the band’s Suburban Home Studio after the River Aire floods in Leeds in the winter of 2015 which devastated the studio.
‘Microshift’ is set to arrive on February 2nd 2018 through Domino Recordings, and you can hear its first cut streaming below. Hookworms will two solo shows before Christmas, followed by a UK tour early next year.
Directed by Jonny Look and Scottie Cameron, Montreal post-punks Ought share the lead single from their forthcoming ‘Room Inside The World’ album, due out on February 16th 2018 via Merge Records.
This album has a whole mess of love and care and fire in it. We put a lot into this one and hope you enjoy it. Like our other records there are many sound-worlds and layers to peel back and we look forward to sharing them all with you. Today, start with “These 3 Things”, a dance track with lyrics about forgetting the ills of the world for a moment and finding communion in sweat, in short.
Watch the clip above to ‘These 3 Things’ which features some surreal scenes with a mannequin.
Ought are:
Tim Darcy: voice and guitar Tim Keen: drums, viola, vibraphone, and synth Matt May: keys, guitar, and synth Ben Stidworthy: bass
Nicolas Vernhes: guitar, keys, and noise box
James Goddard: saxophone
Eamon Quinn: clarinet
Choir Choir Choir: additional vocals on “Desire”
On Rock Island, their second LP, Palm produces evidence of a distinct musical language, developed over time, in isolation, and out of necessity. On the island, melodies are struck on what might be shells or spines. Rhythms are scratched out, swept over, scratched again. Individual instruments, and sometimes entire sections, skip and stutter. There is the sense of a music box with wonky tension or a warped transmission in which all the noise is taken for signal.
Like other groups so acclaimed for their compulsive live show, Palm has been burdened by the constant comparison between their recorded material and their touring set. On Rock Island, they render this tired discussion moot, using the album form to present that which could never be completely live, reserving for performance that which could never be completely reproduced.
Despite appearing behind the instruments typical of rock music, Palm trades in sounds of their own making. On these songs, one of the guitars and the drum kit are used as MIDI triggers, producing an index that can be combed through later and replaced with new information. The percussion is sometimes augmented so as to suggest a multiplication of limbs. The strings are manipulated to choke, crack, and hum like other instruments, or other bodies, might.
Working again with engineer Matt Labozza, the band spent the better part of a month in a rented farmhouse in Upstate New York. With the benefits of time and space, Palm recorded the various elements piecemeal, only rarely playing together in groups larger than two or three. While some members tracked, others holed up in the next room, experimenting with quantization, beat replacement, and other methods borrowed from electronic music. Even accounting for the many labors that brought them to be, these materials seem produced by an organic logic. Their complex friction forms a habit of thought, scores a network of grooves on the floor of the mind.
This is music with dimensionality. Sonic objects are deployed, developed, and dissected in various states of mutation. The listener flits about between the field and the lab. The tone is warm in a way only the sun could make, the pace as forceful and as variable as a gale. Whether one locates Rock Island in a sea or in a refinished attic (as in Greg Burak’s album cover), whether one escapes to there or is banished, its psychic environs are charted clearly enough. Only at this remove from the mainland can we sense the conditions necessary for such a strange species of sound.
Willy & the Poor Boys is just a fun record, perhaps the breeziest album Creedence Clearwater Revival ever made. Apart from the eerie minor-key closer “Effigy” (one of John Fogerty’s most haunting numbers), there is little of the doom that colored Green River. Fogerty’s rage remains, blazing to the forefront on the track “Fortunate Son,” a working-class protest song that cuts harder than any of the explicit Vietnam protest songs of the era, which is one of the reasons that it hasn’t aged where its peers have. Also, there’s that unbridled vocal from Fogerty and the ferocious playing on CCR, which both sound fresh as they did upon release.
“Fortunate Son” is one of the greatest, hardest rock & rollers ever cut, so it might seem to be out of step with an album that is pretty laid-back and friendly, but there’s that elemental joy that by late ’69 was one of CCR’s main trademarks. That joy that runs throughout the album, from the gleeful single “Down on the Corner” and the lazy jugband blues of “Poorboy Shuffle” through the great slow blues jam “Feelin’ Blue” to the great rockabilly spiritual “Don’t Look Now,” one of Fogerty’s overlooked recording gems.
This is an anti-establishment song of defiance, both anti-Washington and against the Vietnam War. John Fogerty and Doug Clifford (drummer) both enlisted in the Army Reserves in 1966 (to avoid being drafted and shipped to Vietnam) and were discharged in 1968 after serving their military commitments.
John Fogerty: The thoughts behind this song – it was a lot of anger. So it was the Vietnam War going on… Now I was drafted and they’re making me fight, and no one has actually defined why. So this was all boiling inside of me and I sat down on the edge of my bed and out came “It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son!” You know, it took about 20 minutes to write the song
“The song speaks more to the unfairness of class than war itself,” “It’s the old saying about rich men making war and poor men having to fight them.”
This is one of three political songs on the Willy And The Poorboys album. The others were “It Came From the Sky” and “Don’t Look Now (It Ain’t You or Me).”
Richard Nixon was president of the US when group leader John Fogerty wrote this song. Fogerty was not a fan of Nixon and felt that people close to the president were receiving preferential treatment.
This song spoke out against the war in Vietnam, but was supportive of the soldiers fighting there. Like many CCR fans, most of the soldiers came from the working class, and were there because they didn’t have connections who could get them out.
The covers don’t feel like throwaways, either, since both “Cotton Fields” and “The Midnight Special” have been overhauled to feel like genuine CCR songs.
It all adds up to one of the greatest pure rock & roll records ever cut.
Luppi’s follow up to his concept album about Rome is a concept album about Milan, but weirdly enough it could also be a tribute to some of the great bands that have come out of NYC. Featuring Karen O and the Parquet Courts’ member Andrew Savage, the songs tell tales of the misfits of that great Italian city but they come on sounding like Television, Talking Heads and James Chance, as well as later Yeah Yeah Yeah’s and the Courts themselves. A killer pop record on Dangermouse’s label.
Australia’s psych/garage cult quintet Sacred Shrines will release its debut album, “Come Down from the Mountain” on November 17th via Rogue Wave Records. The Brisbane-based group delivers juicy psychedelic and garage-inspired tunes with fuzzy guitars and driving rhythms wrapped in gorgeous reverb and a rare authenticity
‘Collisions’ is one of the earlier tracks we worked on when we formed the band and I think it’s a good example of the more garage end of where our sound sits. The song is about that moment where you find yourself at the edge of making an important decision and the feeling you get when you’re standing at the precipice before you push the button. This track was mixed by Michael Badger from The Demon Parade and he definitely nailed the sound we were shooting for. The exploding backwards guitar solo does it for me every time.”
After nearly a year of waiting, details on U2’s Songs of Experience, album release which is confirmed for a December. 1st release, with a tour to follow beginning in May of 2018.
In addition, the band has released a third song from the album, “Get Out Of Your Own Way.” the full Songs of Experience track listing below, including bonus tracks that will appear on the deluxe edition. Like any great rock ‘n’ roll anthem, the song builds and builds from start to end, and features a chorus that anyone, even the rest of the band, can sing along to. The track is laced with words of encouragement—”Fight back / Don’t take it lying down / You got to bite back”—and, as if it wasn’t already powerful enough, culminates in a spoken-word outro from Kendrick Lamar, The album’s title, along with its 2014 companion Songs of Innocence, draws inspiration from Songs of Innocence and Experience by 18th-century English poet William Blake. Lyrically, it serves as a collection of intimate letters to places and people near and dear to Bono’s heart after he received advice to “write as if you’re dead.”
U2 had already released two songs from Experience, “The Blackout” and “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” and performed a third, “The Little Things That Give You Away,” live on tour. “Get Out of Your Own Way,” “The Blackout” and “Get Out Of Your Own Way” will all be immediately available for streaming with advance orders. The album has been produced by Jacknife Lee and Ryan Tedder, with Steve Lillywhite, Andy Barlow and Jolyon Thomas. The cover image (by Anton Corbijn) features band-members’ teenage children Eli Hewson and Sian Evans.
The band will kick off their U2 eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE Tour in May 15 dates have been announced, concluding June 29 in Newark, New Jersey.
Details of the album match the previously reported rumors. The record is a companion to 2014’s Songs of Innocence. It was close to completion prior to America’s most recent Presidential election, but the band chose to pause work on it while focusing on their 30th anniversary Joshua Treetour and reconsidering the ramifications of the vote. It was also impacted by an unspecified health scare for Bono, the band recently said.
U2, Songs of Experience Track Listing
1. “Love Is All We Have Left”
2. “Lights of Home”
3. “You’re the Best Thing About Me”
4. “Get Out of Your Own Way”
5. “American Soul”
6. “Summer of Love”
7. “Red Flag Day”
8. “The Showman (Little More Better)”
9. “The Little Things That Give You Away”
10. “Landlady”
11. “The Blackout”
12. “Love Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way”
13. “13 (There Is a Light)”
Deluxe Edition Bonus Tracks:
14. “Ordinary Love (Extraordinary Mix)”
15. “Book Of Your Heart”
16. “Lights of Home (St Peter’s String Version)”
17. “You’re The Best Thing About Me (U2 vs Kygo)”
The release date coincides with World AIDS Day, in conjunction with Product RED, an organization co-founded by Bono that raises funds and awareness to help eliminate AIDS in African countries.
Typhoon frontman and songwriter Kyle Morton released a solo album, What Will Destroy You, in September. The record’s a collection of compact and beautifully-recorded songs that get at different kinds of love, from the romantic to the twisted. It’s a far cry from the bombast and catharsis of Typhoon’s music, but very much in line with a recent project Morton made with his friend, filmmaker Matthew Thomas Ross, called “Book of Matches.” That series of films, each a minute long, required Morton to compose miniatures to match each film, and with an added limitation he gave himself: to write each one within a day.
For the new album, Morton wrote many of the songs in extended moments of ordinary life: waiting for his phone to charge, or while taking a walk. In our interview, he spoke about it in contradictory terms, calling this a “minor release” (free of the production demands or structure of a Typhoon record) and poking fun at himself for writing so much about death. But however simple, the record doesn’t play as a throwaway extra. In the more intimate spaces of these songs, Morton’s knack for small details, reach for meaning and ever-present sense of mortality, and bits of black humor make for a powerful listen.
To hear more about writing these songs — the romantic “My Little Darlin Knows My Nature,” and darker songs “Survivalist Fantasy” and “Poor Bastard” — plus news about the upcoming Typhoon record in 2017.
The debut solo album by Typhoon frontman Kyle Morton available everywhere now and on vinyl via Bug Hunt.
