The Horrors return with their fifth album and it’s full of synth pop and futurism – produced by Paul Epworth and released on his label. There’s darkness, windswept melancholia and self destructive noise. The Horrors have raided the 80’s closet and deliver a thrilling and substantial pop album.
With their fifth album, The Horrors have delivered their best batch of songs to date, a further refinement of the formula—Simple Minds-esque new wave meets baggy Madchester meets shoegaze psychedelia—that the British group has been perfecting ever since 2011’s Skying officially shrugged off the group’s gothic, shriek-punk origins. These songs are also their biggest: There isn’t a moment on V that doesn’t sound tailored for arena stages (where the group’s lately been playing with Depeche Mode, an obvious influence on roiling industrial cuts like “Machine”), yet minus the pomposity that so many groups tend to affect at that level. It’s a perfect distillation of The Horrors’ slow and deliberate evolution over the years. It will be hard to top.
Patient fans who’ve been on the hunt for a copy of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ “Fever to Tell” are in luck. The band has announced that their 2003 debut album – known for its distinctive subway-inspired graffiti cover – will be reissued in a variety of formats.
Fever to Tell hasn’t been available on vinyl for a decade. Along with that standard LP edition, there will also be deluxe box, digital deluxe and standard re-mastered versions of the album, which is approaching its 15th anniversary. They’re due in stores on October. 20th via Interscope Records / UMe.
“A friend of a friend kept asking if we were ever gonna put Fever To Tell out on vinyl as it hasn’t been on vinyl in 10 years,” the band wrote in a statement. “That’s not right. So here it is on vinyl for the first time in 10 years, plus a time capsule of photos, demos (first ever recorded), a mini film documenting our near downfall and other fun memorabilia, from the turn-of-the-century New York City – made with love and the usual blood, sweat and tears of Yeah Yeah Yeahs.”
To celebrate the reissue, Yeah Yeah Yeahs have released the song “Shake It,”.
Ahead of an expected reissue of their acclaimed 2003 album Fever To Tell, Yeah Yeah Yeahs have put out a previously unreleased recording under the title “Phone Jam.” Social media posts in the last few days from the band have been tagged with #FeverToTell, leading many to suspect a reissue is imminent. “Phone Jam” would seem to support that—its cassette artwork sports a handwritten “2002” on it, suggesting that it comes from a FeverTo Tell recording session.
Australian Courtney Barnett and AmericanKurt Vile may be separated by entire oceans and continents, but they’ve found a way to turn the story of their long-distance friendship into a sweet little melody—that is, the newest single from their forthcoming collaboration album Lotta Sea Lice, “Continental Breakfast.”
Accompanying the track is a video that features rare footage of each of the slacker-rock idols in their respective natural habitats: Barnett exchanges kisses with her partner and her cat, tends to her garden and plays basketball with her friends, while Vile chugs four beers, goes on a nature walk and hangs out with his family.
To shoot the video, director Danny Cohen spent time with Barnett and Vile in Melbourne and Philadelphia while they had time off from recording and touring: The Video is Shot on 16mm, the mini-documentary captures honest moments that show the loving and playful nature of both Courtney and Kurt. It was such a treat to experience life with Courtney and Kurt in their natural habitats. It really left me feeling like part of the family and hopefully fans can feel that too.”
‘Continental Breakfast’ is taken from Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile’s upcoming album ‘Lotta Sea Lice’
As backstories go, the one for Comatose Hope is rather unique and literally life-altering: as a result of gender affirming surgery, Julia Weldon slipped into a coma. Across 11 songs, Weldon chronicles the sensations, feelings, emotions, and experiences of the year she spent recovering from that trauma. The result is a rich, organic, and independently released album bursting at the seams with ebullient energy that’s firmly rooted in the folk and Americana traditions while delivering copious nods toward pop accessibility.
The genius of Comatose Hope comes from how Weldon and producer Drew Gordon were able to cobble together familiar alt-country and alt-folk signifiers into a recognizable whole, while still creating ample space for Weldon’s own ideas and personality to shine. She wields a clear-eyed alto with equal parts grace and strength, though she’s comfortable flipping into falsetto or permitting some dust and dusk into her vocal tone when the song calls for it.
The rhythm section is sublime and understated, providing the base around which the various keyboard and synth sounds can swoop and swirl. The edges of the music are frequently rounded out by small string swells, but they’re introduced to the arrangements only when necessary, instead of feeling like a cheesy and cliched element.
While most classic singer-songwriter types certainly “write what they know,” these tunes are packed with the additional emotional resonance that comes from Weldon knowing that she almost didn’t get to make this album. Also, most records that contend with dense themes like life, death, rebirth, redemption, grace, and forgiveness don’t comes from a place of intimate familiarity with the “what ifs” and “what could have happened” like this one.
“Kaleidoscope” embraces the initial rush of passion when you first fall in love with someone, mixed with the nerves of learning how to express those feelings. On “Comatose Hope,” Weldon croons a blissful thank-you note to all of her family, friends, and fans who loved, cared for, and supported her during her coma and recovery.
With “Take Me to the Water,” we hear an artist use the theological metaphor of baptism to great effect as she seeks a fresh start post-coma. But my favorite tune might be “Cursed and Blessed,” complete with a description of post-surgery hospital life that is refreshing in its honesty and lack of sugarcoating. I specifically love this stanza:
“I watch my heart beat on a machine
Faces come with tears between
A Post-It note says I’ll be here for a while
I hope that’s a promise I can’t keep.”
Comatose Hope is both an affirmation of the power of hope and a testament to the growing talents of JuliaWeldon. She has effortlessly fused the world-weariness of Emmylou Harris with the pop adornments of Shawn Colvin and in-your-face attitude of Ani DiFranco to create a record that’s emotionally aware and unafraid. And that’s all I really want out of a confessional folk record – it can be adorned and well-appointed with all the trappings of classic folk, but what I really need it to believe you.
And I believe in the hope that sustained Julia Weldon during and after her coma.
thanks to Adam Newton for the words and bringing this artists to my attention,
Composed for choreography, Gordi’s first full length release is full of dramatic, sweeping gestures, quiet, tender pleas, and grand, longing emotion that would make it a waste not to use in modern dance setting. I dub her under folktronica, the convergence of acoustic guitar, vocal harmonies, and electronic elements. She’s not the first to put these parts together, but she’s one of this year’s best examples of how to do it well.
On the farm in rural Australia where Sophie Payten – AKA Gordi – grew up, there’s a paddock that leads down to a river. A few hundred metres away up the driveway of the property named “Alfalfa” sits another house, which belongs to her 93-year-old grandmother. The rest, she says, “is just beautiful space. And what else would you fill it with if not music?”
And so she did, first tinkling away in her hometown of Canowindra (population 2,381) on the out of tune piano her mother had been given as a wedding present, and then on the acoustic guitar she got for her 12th birthday. As it turned out though, space wasn’t a luxury she’d be afforded for long. At the school she went to just after that same birthday, she shared a dorm room with 26 other girls, listening to Aled Jones on her Discman at night to drown out their chatter. Not that she minded. “It was like a massive sleepover every night,” she says. And besides, her love of music didn’t take long to follow her there.
Gordi’s first foray into songwriting came in the form of performances at the school’s weekly chapel. She’d tell her friends they were written by other artists to ensure they gave honest feedback – though given she was pulling lines from One Tree Hill for lyrics about experiences she was yet to actually have, that feedback wasn’t always glowing. It wasn’t until she started writing about what was happening around her, the friendships she was building and, as is inevitable in the tumult of growing up, breaking, that the chrysalis of the music she’s making now – a brooding, multi-layered blend of electronica and folk, with lyrics that tend to avoid well-trodden paths – began to form. “I often find that writing about platonic relationships,” she says, “can be a great deal more powerful than writing about romantic ones.”
“Heaven I Know,” the first taste of Gordi’s debut album Reservoir, is an example of just that. With the breathy chant of “123” chugging along beneath the song’s sparse melody and melancholic piano chords, “Heaven I Know” gazes at the embers of a fading friendship. “Cause I got older, and we got tired,” she sings, as synthetic twitches, sweeping brass and distorted samples bubble to the surface, “Heaven I know that we tried.”
“I have a really close friend, and she moved to New York last April,” explains Gordi, “and I was absolutely devastated. I sort of don’t have anyone else like that in my life. A few months in, it was just getting so hard, we both had so much going on. Amongst all this, I had a really vivid dream – not that we fought dramatically, I simply got older, and we stopped calling each other, stopped writing to each other and we slowly grew apart. I was struck by the tragedy and simplicity of it and how it happens to everybody at various stages of life. With a friendship, you almost throw more at it than you would a romantic partner, because when a friendship breaks it’s so much more heart-breaking. So it was sort of like we’d thrown everything at it, and in this alternate reality that I dreamed about, we just gave up.”
The ramifications of loss ripple throughout the album, which the 24-year-old wrote and recorded in Wisconsin, Reykjavik, Los Angeles, New York and Sydney during snatched moments while finishing a six year long medicine degree and international touring commitments. Payten produced two of the tracks herself (“Heaven I Know” & “I’m Done”), and co-produced the rest alongside Tim Anderson (Solange, Banks, Halsey), Ben McCarthy, Ali Chant (Perfume Genius, PJ Harvey) and Alex Somers (Sigur Ros).“Long Way,” on which her contralto vocals are layered on top of each other as the sound of a ticking clock lurks underneath, begs of someone, “Can you hear my voice in your bones again? Can you be with me like you were back then?” It’s the first track on the album, and the last song she wrote in the green notebook her parents gave her when she was still at school. There’s a sense of loss too on “I’m Done,” though this time it’s something she’s come to accept. “It feels good to say I’m over you / and mean it more and more each time. / Lock my secrets behind open doors / ‘cause without you I’ll do just fine.” It’s about as close to a stripped-back acoustic song as Gordi’s willing to create, though it sits comfortably alongside beat-heavy electronic numbers. Her songs shift and mutate just as you think you’ve got a hold of them. You’re as likely to hear the squeak of her finger sliding down a guitar fret as you are a shuddering sample, and an organic trumpet sound will be injected with a jagged vocal loop.
But it’s not just loss which comes under the microscope in Reservoir. More so, it’s the journey that particular theme takes when aboard the vehicle of time. The interaction of time and loss is explored throughout, starting with album opener “Long Way”. “Myriad”, a delicately layered track which reaches a drumless climax, delves further, “Dissolve your sorrow / In my skin and bone / Take my tomorrow / It is yours to own”. Even the infectious single “On My Side” questions the prolonging of grievances because of a hesitation to communicate, which ultimately stems from a fear of loss. “Can We Work It Out” similarly opens up on inner conflict.
Boiled down, the running thread of the album is its lyrics, the importance and impact of which cannot be understated. “Lyrics to me are everything,” says Gordi. “Music is kind of what encases this story that you’re trying to tell. The music is obviously what makes people fall in love with a song first, but what eventually speaks to people, whether they know it or not, is the actual words that are being said.” Gordi’s lyrics are stark, honest and soul-searching, which are elevated by the album’s intricate and careful musical arrangements. Like the contemporary artists such as Fleet Foxes, Beth Orton and Laura Marling as well as “the trifecta” of Billy Joel, Carole King and James Taylor that she listened to with her mum growing up – she’s unafraid to sit in contemplative melancholy. It’s what the album title is about. And in the contemplative melancholy remains a conviction that manifests itself through Gordi’s memorable melodies and ambitious production, mastered by pioneers like Peter Gabriel, Cat Stevens and Sufjan Stevens.
“The name Reservoir, it’s that thing that you can’t describe, that space that anxious people would probably live their life in. It’s actually an expression my friend and I use. If I’m really down one day, I’ll say, ‘Oh I’m a bit in the reservoir today’. You’re mulling everything over, and you’re sitting in all these thoughts and feelings. In order to be able to write a song I need to go to that place, but I couldn’t live a functional life if I spent all my time in there.”
Writing music, in fact, is the way Gordi lifts herself out of the Reservoir. “Writing music has always been and will remain my therapy, my process and my way of communicating,” she explains. “I don’t write songs by someone else’s prescription, I write to fill my own need. I get this tightness in my chest, and nothing will make it go away other than trying to write lyrics or sitting down at a piano and playing it, and it’s like a medicine. If I have a good session of that, then that tightness and that weight just totally lifts. It just centers me, and gets the things that are riddled through my mind out on paper. And then I can leave them there.”
“Bitter End” off of Gordi’s debut album ‘Reservoir,’ out August 25, 2017 on Jagjaguwar Records.
There needs to be a word for “love at first sound,” because although rare, it has happened more than once over the years. And it’s always late at night, when I find myself scouring the internet in search of humanity. I found it in album by Lemolo Also on Kyle Morton at the end of sometime last year , and now in Tomberlin, as “You Are Here” softly announces, “I am here and nowhere else and you are all I want.” Musician Owen Pallett proudly calls this work, “absolutely the most beautiful record I’ve ever worked on,” which he contributed to, mastered and produced. It’s the product of a one Sarahbeth Tomberlin, from Louisville, Kentucky, and like the others on this list, she’s only a fifth of a century old. It echoes and sways, ebbs and flows, lingering long into the night and hopefully in the genre of ambient folk.
She’s forever friends with Julien Baker and Ryan Adams has called her “the Next Bob Dylan” – but this dark folk singer-songwriter isn’t intent on shining in anyone else’s spotlight. Yet you’ll hear Baker and Elliott Smith and Sharon Van Etten and so much more when you listen to her music, as she falls in line with one of the most beautiful genres as much as she defines a niche for herself.
There will be a twang of Van Etten, the talk-sing of Dylan, angst of Adams, bawl-inducing emotion of Baker, and understated timelessness of Smith as Bridgers sonically bridges the divide between the best of the best in her debut full length. Not many other musicians can master that feat by their early 20s. And I’m pretty sure I’ll still be listening to her and this album in particular when I’m in my 60s.
Hailing from Rochester, a city on the Southern shore of Lake Ontario in New York state, Anamon are a three-piece led by frontwoman and songwriter Ana Emily Monaco. The band are set to put out their debut album, Stubborn Comfort, in November, and have this week shared the title track from it.
Stubborn Comfort is in some ways a song of two halves, the opening finds Ana alone in an almost folky setting with just a twanging guitar for company, but as the drums roll in and the pulsating bass takes flight you’re taken into a world of lo-fi country-rock. It’s a track that seems to touch on various familiar musical ideas, but fuses them into a sound that is unmistakably Anamon’s own. The story behind their upcoming debut album goes thus: the band went into the studio at 7pm carrying an 8-track recorder and left at 5am with a mix of the album. Keep up this prolificy, and quality, and Anamon are going to win over an awful lot of people in no time at all.
When checking out a mere week or two ago the band’s latest single, “Far Gone”, the forthcoming new album from Das Fluff “should be very highly anticipated”, as too for newcomers the source of the single, their current and third full-length which recently had its vinyl release. Having heard and devoured Flower With Knife, that intrigue and hunger is now greedily lying in wait for that new album currently being created.
Das Fluff is the brainchild and creative vehicle of Berlin/London-based vocalist/writer/producer Dawn Lintern. The project’s first two albums, in 2011 debut Would You Die for Me? and Meditation And Violence two years later potently built the reputation for highly danceable and inventively dramatic propositions with songs never accepting the predictable. Fair to say though it was Flower With Knife which saw Lintern’s writing and sound blossom into an invigorating trespass infesting body and imagination like a lustful virus. Linking up with guitarist Steve May, and the electronic experimentation of Christian Ruland, Lintern brought the richest drama and deepest tapestry of sound to the Das Fluff psyche; the result a release which plays like an aural psychological movie whilst grabbing the listener like a puppet forcing feet and hips to indulge.
Flower With Knife opens up with “Popstar User”, a track featuring a different guest guitarist as too upcoming album songs in Nothing and Pleasure, which prowls ears with seductive menace as Lintern vocally pouts and entices. The throbbing bassy electronics similarly tempt as synths simmer and flame as the guitar spins its own inviting web. It all colludes in a riveting slice of electronic rock providing the perfect doorway into the following shadow clad, noir lit, and creatively mercurial adventures.
The furtive gothic/post punk walk of Fuck The Trees swiftly has its grips on attention and thoughts next, Lintern purveying the raping of beauty by the intent of modern thought and deed. The pulse of the song is accusation, its gait almost predatory before Someone I Adore out does both the first pair of tracks with its striking electro punk saunter. Again there is menace in the air, an Au Pairs meets Siouxsie and the Banshees scent tempering yet equally adding to that confrontation within the senses arousing treat.
In turn it is then eclipsed by Pleasure with its gorgeous Slits meets again Au Pairs like dub lit temptation. Within moments the hips of song and listener are swaying in unison, thought locked up in the provocative turns of voice and word as music infuses its own inventive dance into ears and appetite. More than living up to its name, the track is the pinnacle of the album’s theatre but closely matched around it and indeed by that recent single Far Gone. Almost unnerving in its psychosis fuelled canter, bass tones and scything key bred strings cinematically Hitchcock like, it is the driving rhythms and intensity of the song which brings it all gloriously together for another mighty incitement.
Through the mellower but just as dark and rapacious Enemy, a song tempering its threat with open reflection and emotion, and the hauntingly enchanting jazz kissed beauty of The Stars, the album’s adventure evolves and turns down new avenues again. As the tracks before them, each is a new adventure to sink into, all connected by shadow clad risk and perilous influences. Both songs beguile with the second especially bewitching, while the grittier growl of Love and Peace snarls and intensely throbs like a predacious temptress bred from the thickest tempest.
Throughout Lintern’s voice magnetises as it reveals an array of depths and expressions, her bold and magnetic tones seeded in the similarly adventurous writing at the heart of songs and the trio’s creative imagination as epitomised in the heavier rock of Nothing, a track embracing a host of styles to its melodic and electronic bosom. It simmers and boils with energy and emotion second by second, Lintern the vocal ringmaster within shaping song and thoughts breath by syllable.
The album concludes with the electronic asylum of Strip Down, a proposal which harries thoughts with dark flirtations and sinister airs as pulses and melodies suggestively invade and swim the senses. The track is pure drama, an irresistible fire of emotion and intensity borne of daring imagination…and that pretty much sums up Flower With Knife as a whole; a release which stretches the listener as much as itself as a kind of psychosis hugs its heart. Most of all, it is a release which has the body bouncing and pleasure brimming…roll on the next album.
Proper Ornaments is the project of James Hoare (Ultimate Painting, Veronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold (Toy, Pink Flames). The band germinated slowly from their friendship, which began when Max distracted James from shop-keeping, as his then girlfriend attempted to steal shoes. Max was freshly arrived in London from Buenos Aires; helped out by Andrew Loog Oldham as it happens, to escape a drug-lead implosion of a previous band and a family member’s plan to have him sectioned.
The chance meeting blossomed into an epicurean riot of luminous highs and cold, dismal crashes that conversely produced music that was very well ordered and faintly angelic. It was so much deeper and more refined, serious, simple and affecting than anything suggested by the bare facts – a guitar band in East London, ten years into the infancy of a millennium that had so far freighted those five words with plenty of horrendous mental associations.
They released a single on San Francisco’s Make a Mess and an early E.P. with London’s No Pain in Pop in 2011 – then a collection, “Waiting for the Summer” (Lo Recordings) in 2013, which bore the influence of past UK guitar music: The Beatles, Felt, Durutti Column, Television Personalities, Teenage Fanclub – framed by West Coast psychedelia and sunshine pop. Tape recorded and unpretentious in all sorts of ways, it seemed bound to slide around the sides of a snow globe-like mainstream, into that ambivalent fate of being a bands’ band: Real Estate, Woods, Crystal Stilts, and Metronomy solicited them for support slots.
Debut LP “Wooden Head” came out in July 2014 and was heard more widely. Perfecting the unique slant of their previous work and polishing it, the album crackled with hints of something majestic behind what could at first be heard, a secret sotto voce world inside. It was as quietly sly and mercurial as it was driving and accessible, and its masterly crafted simplicity drew extensive critical praise. The sweetness of the record, unless you took to a certain track with the lyrics, in fact belied their circumstances. They were living in Whitechapel on slender means and debauched psyches, crawling through the remains of homelessness, unemployment and divorce. Unpredictable, violent acquaintances that were occasionally made band members orbited and crashed. The album was made in a whirlwind of chair-breaking, knife-drawing chaos.
James and Max started out writing the follow-up in January 2015. On “Foxhole” they’ve sliced away a whole stratum of their sound, removing some distortion and lowering the frequency of plectrum strokes to allow more nuanced, piano-led ideas to emerge. The title isn’t a reference to Television’s jaunty proto-punk record but seems to be more of a dark, protective interior, a head space sketched out on “Jeremy’s Song.” While their particularly recognisable production style (a bright, frozen counterpoint to the airless mixes one encounters more often) remains, three things stand out as likely reasons for the shift in mood. By the time they got around to recording again in James” bedroom in Finsbury Park that Summer, the instability around the recording of “Wooden Head” (and the five years before) had slid into a deep and seething acrimony. Second, they both bought pianos. Third, when the band, with Daniel Nellis and Bobby Syme joining on bass and drums went to record at Tin Room in Hackney in June, the pinch wheel on the 8 track machine was broken and somehow no one noticed. All but one recording, “Frozen Stare,” was hopelessly warped, so they went and did it all again from scratch back at James“.
“We ended up doing the whole thing there as the atmosphere suited the direction of the foxhole and we were more comfortable working on it in our own time,” says James, “We wanted to move in a slightly different direction from “Wooden Head,” away from the distorted guitars and into a more peaceful area.”
The mechanical blow out that had wasted weeks of their time and money coincided with a thaw in their friendship, and by the time they were re-recording they were both being treated conspicuously gentler by life.
“That’s why the record has a laid back, conversational, not imposing or anxious feel in my opinion,” Max says about their rapprochement, “There’s also the technical limitation of doing it on an 8 track which gives the songs a more sparse sound.”
Themes of their previous work have been picked up again and honed. The sense of being overlooked and isolated, inevitable change and drift particularly set in terms of age, predominates. Undercutting the feelings of forward movement are ones of a gnawing permanent stasis and confusion wrought by memory. It’s a sombre but also more direct and open effort, from its first number “Back Pages” (“See me on the back page/of last year’s modern age”) onwards.
If “Always There” was the most melodically fluid but dimly lit point of the first record, there are another half album of songs here at least that are as strikingly gorgeous and unsettling. “Memories,” “Just a Dream,” “Frozen Stare” and “When We Were Young” are in this mould, as is the icy, slightly devastated goodbye that closes the record “The Devils,” filled out with piano reminiscent of Big Star’s “Third” or Lou Reed’s “Berlin” and cracked double bass. What was in evidence in two of their earliest songs – “You Still” and “Are You Going Blind?” – an understated, poetic play of moral sensitivity against a callous distance, of warmth and hostility, has reached its most sustained expression yet and gives their pop moments of a haunted love song quality along the lines of Del Shannon, Lesley Gore or Roy Orbison.
“Bridge by a Tunnel” and “When You Wake,” on the other hand, share in the breezily abstracted character of 2014 single “Magazine,” the later laying a sardonic (non)apology – “I know you know, things could’ve been different/but they’e not” over careful daubs of slide guitar. “Cremated” is also guitar-lead, and reaches an early apogee of morbid oblivion baiting, while “1969” is a really perfectly recorded grand sweep of sound that recalls Serge Gainsbourg and “Harvest”-era Neil Young.
Proper Ornaments hold the attraction of seeming to not try very hard at all and achieve something outstanding nonetheless. Quite apart from our attachment to laziness and chance which make this seductive, textures of dappled drums, softened-out guitars and vocal harmonies that slide along as effortlessly as this, any evidence of conscious construction spirited away, are in themselves totally ecstatic to listen to.
