Typhoon is an American indie rock band from Oregon. The band has eleven members. They have released four albums, two EPs, a split 7-inch record with Olympia-based band Lake, and have contributed to a number of compilations. The band’s fifth album Offerings is scheduled for release on January 12th, 2018. The band originated in Salem, Oregon in 2005 but is now based in Portland, Oregon. They are signed to the indie record label Roll Call Records.
Typhoon is back with their LP Offerings. There are currently two variants. A blood red 2xLP which looks to be gone soon (19 left on the webstore) and the other is an indie exclusive gold edition limited to 1400 copies verified through Rough Trade as a 2xLP. This record sounds monumental, so get your hands on it before it slips away. Enjoy!.
Typhoon’s Kyle Morton performs an acoustic, piano version of “Prosthetic Love”, off of their album White Lighter
Pink Flag was “perhaps the most original debut album to come out of the first wave of British punk” and also “recognizable, yet simultaneously quite unlike anything that preceded it. Pink Flag‘s enduring influence pops up in Hardcore Post Punk Alternative Rock and even Britpop, and it still remains a fresh, invigorating listen today: a fascinating, highly inventive rethinking of punk rock. The albums a brilliant 21-song suite. It’s a brief, intense explosions of attitude and energy, the band coming up with a collection of unforgettable tunes
Who says you don’t learn anything from art school?, Tell that to Colin Newman and see how long it takes you to get a fist to the face or a mouthful to the ear. As singer, songwriter, and guitarist of the band Wire, the art-school graduate opted for the six-string over his easel, but he didn’t stop painting. The wildly subversive “Pink Flag” album suggests, his art was in taking a minimalist approach to punk rock and hitting the genre with broader strokes. Like his contemporaries, there’s volume to his sound and angst to his songs, but it’s splattered across every facet to the music in wildly unpredictable ways. That’s why you can leap from the crunchy pop of “Ex Lion Tamer” toward the plodding psychedelia of “Strange” and over to the doo wop bliss of “Mannequin”. Basically, you never get the sense that they’re leaning on any one thing in particular, and that’s one of the many distinctions of post-punk.
Initially broadcast in 2001, these sessions capture Jack and Meg with famed BBC DJ John Peel and are arguably the best document of the White Stripes at the time. These have been widely bootlegged since the original broadcase, but this is an official and authorized repress of the 2016 release in celebration of their 15 year anniversary. This double vinyl set includes both live White Stripes recordings – one from July 25th, 2001 and the second from November 8th, 2001.
Canadian singer-songwriter Terra Lightfoot is making a name for herself internationally as one of the rock talents to watch right now, her third album New Mistakesshowing off not only the power and versatility of her vocals, but also an array of chunky riffs to tie it all together.
Lightfoot, a multi-octave mezzo soprano singer, first started out as part of a country-folk group in her hometown of Hamilton, before picking up her signature Gibson SG and moving into heavier roots-rock territory. New Mistakes, however, introduces wonderful elements of soul and blues to form her strongest work to date.
“I think the songs tell the perfect story of where I’ve been and where I would like to go,” she explains. “And I don’t want to apologize for any of it – I’m proud of it, mistakes and all.”
If those mistakes are what led to this record, it’s hard to argue, and she’s certainly put in the hard yards to get here, backing her music up with some serious graft on tours around the world – including supporting none other than Canadian icon Gordon Lightfoot (no relation).
Before the year was even two weeks old in 2015, we were greeted with the wonderful, news that Sufjan Stevens had an album on the way, a return to his “folk roots.” It was about time! After a run of three classics in three years — 2003’s Michigan, 2004’s Seven Swans, and 2005’s Illinois — Stevens wandered around the wilderness for a decade, reporting back only with sporadic news . It was easy to imagine we’d lost him forever.
When “Carrie & Lowell” arrived in early 2015, though, we realized it wasn’t a return to anything. Like so many soldiers, convicts, and mystics, Stevens had been irretrievably altered in his time away. The guy who made Illinois was gone. On that record, Stevens occasionally tackled subjects such as substance abuse and mental illness and mortality (all three in the same song on “John Wayne Gacy”),
On Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan Stevens is directly singing about his own mother’s drug addiction, her schizophrenia, her death from stomach cancer. He’s singing about his own terror and sadness and loss — his own childhood, his own grief. There’s no glockenspiel, no grand concept; there’s little more than a finger-picked acoustic guitar and a whispering, quivering voice. And that voice doesn’t just sound haunted; it sounds like a fucking ghost. Listen to Carrie & Lowell on headphones, it doesn’t feel like Stevens is singing to you; it feels like he’s singing inside you.
It’s a discomfiting experience. Stevens’ most obvious musical touchstone here is Elliott Smith — another damaged person who wrestled with demons his whole life — but Carrie & Lowell is somehow even more devastating than any of Smith’s records. That’s partly because Stevens‘ soft voice is so prominent in the mix. Elliott Smith buried his vocals in layers, tangled them in knots; you can listen to an Elliott Smith record and just get lost in the loveliness of the sound if you don’t want to think about the ferocious pain conveyed in the words. Carrie & Lowell refuses you that option: You get trapped in the loveliness of the sound.
But Carrie & Lowell isn’t a morbid record, like the moments of Sun Kil Moon’s Benji, it is meditative, honest, and open. It claws at the world. It fights back at the darkness. It rips you to shreds and moves you to tears, but it’s not asking you to dwell on death — it is forcing you to experience life. And when I immerse myself in Carrie & Lowell, I’m engaging with every single verse, but here, now, I will engage only with this one, which closes “Eugene”:
“What’s left is only bittersweet/ For the rest of my life, admitting the best is behind me/ Now I’m drunk and afraid, wishing the world would go away/ What’s the point of singing songs/ If they’ll never even hear you?”
Carrie & Lowell captures a life full of bittersweetness — several lives, really. And in the music, all those voices, the living and the dead, are reflected, amplified.
The best is not behind Sufjan Stevens. He has never been better than this, never really even been close. He can push the world away and walk off into the woods if he wants . Not anymore. Carrie & Lowell forces us to hear everything, to feel everything. Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell was released a few years ago, and while some records lose their luster over time, this one remains stunningly, painfully intimate to this day. The record details Stevens’ troubled relationship with his mother, and also marks his return to a more traditional folk sound. Full of intricate guitar picking and ghostly vocals, listening to Carrie & Lowell is like bearing witness to one person’s beautifully rendered emotional wreckage.
Ryan Pollie is gearing up to release his second album as Los Angeles Police Department, also called Los Angeles Police Department (just like the first), and so far we’ve heard “Grown” and “The Plane 2” from it. Today, he’s shared another new song called “If I Lied,” and it’s a plaintively-strummed and twangy song that sees Pollie playing with different perspectives (he says it’s “the story of a train hopper in denial of how he’s mistreated the love of his life – unsure if he’s losing her or if he’s lost her already”), and it’s a sorta pathetic but desperately sweet plea to engage in a conversation: “There are still so many things to say that day/ And if I walk, then you might run away, no way,” Pollie sings with a backing drum that sounds like the rumble of the train tracks.
With Snowon the horizon, Angus & Julia Stone are building momentum with the new video for “Chateau,” Directed by Jessie Hill, the cinematic clip follows two young rebels as they embark on a journey through Mexico City. Our heroes, played by actors Dacre Montgomery, a lead in the new season of Stranger Things, and Courtney Eaton of the Oscar-winningaction flick Mad Max: Fury Road, explore the capital by boat, visit a club and hit a wedding where everyone’s glass is charged.
“Chateau” is the second track lifted from the Aussie sibling duo’s self-produced album Snow, The LP, the duo’s fourth, was cut in the home studio on Angus’ farm, Belafonté, in the Byron Bay hinterland. On this occasion, Angus and Julia wrote all its songs as a partnership. “Snow is both of us. We sat down and wrote it together,” Angus says. The sessions, adds Julia, were “quite magical because Angus and I have never spent that much time together, just the two of us. There’s always at least an engineer or tour manager but the last phase of writing and recording was just eight weeks of him and me and the quiet of the land. It was a beautiful time.”
Zappa Records is to issue a new box set, Halloween 77 , which features all six shows that Frank Zappa performed at The Palladium in New York City at the end of October 1977.
This set includes all six shows in their entirety chronicled in the concert film BabySnakes although they’ve chosen to put the audio (24-bit WAV files) on a USB stick, rather than give you CDs. So it’s hi-res (good), but not physical (not so good). If you find that annoying, then the fact that the USB stick is shaped like a shaped like a ‘Zappa’s Oh Punky!’ candy bar might not sway you. Incidentally, the audio was mixed in 2016 from original vault masters.
There are 158 tracks in total and you do get a 128-page ‘digital booklet’ with photos and sleeve notes from co-producer Joe Travers, musicians Adrian Belew and Ed Mann, tour manager Phil Kaufman and famous fan Janet “The Planet” Walley.
As you can’t have failed to notice from the images, you do also you get a Zappa mask and costume. Obviously.
If USB stick and fancy dress don’t constitute your idea great music box set, you can opt for a three-CD edition, although annoyingly, that only delivers the actual Halloween show from 31st October 1977 (plus a few bonus tracks from the previous evening’s show). That’s 32 tracks – 126 less than what’s on that USB stick.
Frank’s son Ahmet Zappa said “This box set was a very special experience for me to work on. I wanted to make sure we honoured these legendary shows, so it was important to me that this box set felt of the era. It was a blast working with our partners to create the late ‘70s-inspired Frank Zappa mask and costume and the candy-shaped USB stick filled with tons of Zappa goodness. It was yet again a labor of love gathering up all the archival materials, reading notes by people who were there, and most importantly making sure the audio was up to par. All of us at Zappa Records are mighty pleased with it, and hope that fans of Frank Zappa and of Halloween will be too.”
There is going to be a digital download version of the fancy (dress) box so I guess buying the CDs for ‘casual’ listening and the download for an archive of the whole thing might be an option.
With a stadium-sized statement that cuts through the fragile count-in strum. A burst of crunchy guitar grandeur that’s short-lived as an equally-striking stab of self-deprecation steps up: “I hate myself for feeling like I’m burning up”. So goes the opening thirty seconds of Robert Muinos′ new song “Weeks At All” The opening track from his latest EP3 from the Melbourne singer-songwriter’s forthcoming.
Recalling both the bare-boned expression and burst/settle contrast of Jason Molina, “Weeks At All” is a raw, cathartic-chasing journey through pain, pity and frustration. In a constant state of flux between knife-edge fragility and worry-weighted collapse, Muinos steers the song through both recalled scenes and blunt pick-me-downs, aimed both indirectly (“let it out”) and as more targeted blows (“your hate comes pouring like a waterfall”). All leading to a line that equally serves as a smirk-and-a-shrug that undos all before it and as a brutally poignant self-summary: “I run away and sing my little songs.” then the huge guitar break, in this amazing release. Muinos — who is also currently a member of soul outfit Saskwatch and pop-weirdos Dorsal Fins.
All songs written by Robert Muinos. Drums and backing vocals by Jim Lawrie. Bass guitar by Tom Pettit. Keyboards by Olaf Scott. Guitar, singing, recording and mixing by Robert Muinos. Rocorded at The Curtin in March 2017.
When we first heard of Madeline Kenney, there was always a preface summarizing her curious range of expertise aside from music — modern dance, baking, neuroscience. Then more new music kept arriving, and though those biographical facts remain curious trivia, the songs overshadow everything else. Produced by Toro Y Moi, Kenney’s full-length debut Night Night At The First Landing arrived at the end of the summer.
True to its nocturnal name and cover, it’s an album for solitary, meandering nights, flitting between painterly dreamscapes and ‘90s alt-rock catharses. Songs like “Rita” and “Always” are big distorted guitar monuments that drown rather than pummel (in the best way) and the album as a whole is frequently gorgeous. It’s a promising beginning: Kenney’s built her early career on taking well-worn touchstones and managing to wring something new out of them, making them her own in the process.
