After blowing us away with the release of Sprained Ankle, her debut full-length in 2015, singer Julien Baker is back with a follow-up called Turn Out The Lights. The first single, “Appointments,” is an inward-looking meditation on disappointment and doubt in the wake of a failed relationship. Turn Out The Lights is due out October. 27th on Matador Records.
Those of us who fell in love with her debut album, Sprained Ankle, have been hungering for more of Miss Baker’s sparse, confessional songs — brutally honest and cripplingly insecure, self-deprecating but laced with just enough hope to keep you hanging on — since the album’s 2015 release (only briefly sated by the release of “Funeral Pyre,” a one-off single, in January).
Baker is back with “Appointments,” the moving first single from her upcoming sophomore album, Turn Out The Lights. It gently treads over well-worn ground for Baker: hopefulness and hopelessness, mental health, emotional estrangement. The song is suspiciously optimistic, in Baker’s way: “Maybe it’s all going to turn out alright / And I know that it’s not / But I have to believe that it is,” she cries out over piano and twinkly guitars in the song’s climax.
This quiet compassion undergirds Baker’s music and allows her to write songs that are incredibly sad, without ever becoming maudlin or overwrought. You can trace hints of its source in Baker’s frequent invocation of the divine, and her deep faith in the holy sound of rock ‘n’ roll; regardless, it makes both her self-loathing and her moments of stability infinitely believable. “Appointments” is this way, too; it’s rooted in pain and the fear of failure, but it sounds like driving late at night, trying to convince yourself — and maybe whoever else is listening — that the small steps towards healing are worth it.
Turn Out The Lights will be Baker’s first album for Matador Records.
Robert Plant, who just turned 69, recently announced he’ll release his eleventh studio album this fall called Carry Fire. “The May Queen,” Plant’s first single from the record, is a sweetly innocent reflection on staying inspired and embracing love while growing older. ‘Carry Fire’, the new album from Robert Plant, will be released on 13th October through Nonesuch Records. www.robertplant.com
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart’s frontman Kip Berman says he wrote “My Only” a long time ago, but that it never felt finished. “I still don’t know if I’m old enough, but it’s finished. The song is the opposite of what a single should be — it’s sprawling and unconcerned with immediateness, because it’s about something that isn’t immediate. So many young bands sing idly of absolute devotion, and that’s cool. But I am not young anymore. There’s something about my life now that makes this song feel honest in a way it didn’t before.” The Echo Of Pleasure is out September. 1st on the band’s label Painbow.
When Kelley Stolz made the jump to Castle Face with his 2015 album, “In Triangle Time” he got weird. Or maybe he already was. Either way, something about the way time and space coincided meant that Stoltz made the loosest, oddest record of his long, mostly buttoned-down career as a pop craftsman. He added synths, played around with structure, and made choices he may not have in the past. For his next album on the label, 2017’s “Que Aura” he took another leap, this time a deeper dive into the sounds of his beloved ’80s. An Echo and the Bunnymen fan to the point where he recorded a version of Crocodiles, Stoltz actually did join the Bunnymen as their touring second guitarist.
This gig seems to have unleashed something within Kelley Stoltz, and along with his trademark ’60s-inspired shaggy pop, plus side trips into space rock, warped synth pop, psych, and even some off-kilter disco. Through it all, Stoltz’s way with a hook means that no matter what sounds he dresses the songs in, they are always one sharp hook away from slicing up the speakers. Slick, keyboard-heavy tracks (“Feather Falling”) and insistent synth-driven songs (“Same Pattern”) sound just as good as the jumpy rockers (“I’m Here for Now”) and oddball pop tunes (“Walking Against the Greenlight”), and even the total left turn, the slinky disco number (“Empty Kicks”) ends up sounding really good.
Stoltz has always been a first-rate arranger and producer, but with his last couple records he really seems to have hit his stride. Que Aura is the richest, most diverse, and interesting-sounding album he’s done yet, with the songs to match.
Allah-Las release the first cover track from their forthcoming Covers EP #1, adding their take on Kathy Heidman’s “The Earth Won’t Hold Me.”
The EP will be released on Mexican Summer on November 3rd, 2017 as a limited edition 10” encased in a high quality embossed jacket and through all digital formats. This is the first in a series of EPs exploring tunes near and new to the group, featuring covers of Kathy Heideman’s “The Earth Won’t Hold Me,” George Harrison’s “Fish On The Sand,” Further’s “JO Eleven,” and Television’s “Hard On Love.”
Sketches Of Brunswick East is a collaboration with Mild High Club frontman Alexander Brettin.
“[Mild High Club] came over and played Gizzfest with us in December and [Alex] just stayed at my house for a few weeks. We were sending each other these really rough, vague ideas before that…usually just a chord progression or a melody.” McKenzie told Triple J that while Brettin was staying with them they worked on about 15 recordings. McKenzie explained in an interview last month how this process led to the title of the album: “Alex from Mild High Club, they came over and played Gizzfest in December, and ended up just staying at my house for a few weeks. We had really, really vague ideas before we started, a handful of iPhone voice memos to each other, which we ended up calling sketches. Mostly they were just a chord progression or some melodic part with a chord thing underneath it. It was just simple stuff. They really were just jump off points, and when we finally got together, we sort of fleshed these songs out together.”
This week on McKenzie said the worked on the album almost every day Brettin was staying with them in December 2016. He previously described the sessions noting the casual manner the material developed. “A lot of the time Alex and I sitting on the couch in my living room with two unplugged electric guitars, just sort of noodling, until we kind of felt like we were somewhere. Going to the studio just like, I don’t know, whoever was around, usually there were four or five of us and we would just get together and kind of try and make these little sort of doodly things into songs, which is probably not that uncommon of a way to try and make music, but there is a certain pressure that was there when you know that Alex or you know that the person that you are working with isn’t going to be there for very long.
We were just making these bizarre recordings that weren’t songs by any stretch, though some of them felt like they were more songs than others, and there were a lot of pieces of music that were like, “okay that’s something, but what is it?” And it took a long time, up until now really, to feel like… We’ve been kind of going back and forth, sending each other overdubs and recording vocals and flushing out these songs and just getting all the sort of disparate… a lot of them were, at the time, improvised somewhat jazz-inspired pieces of music, and try to make them into what felt like a record or a cohesive thing that was worthy of being a record, and I think we got there in the end, but it took a long time.”
Since the December 2016 sessions Gizz and Brettin “spent up until a month ago going back and forward, changing them, cutting things out… [and] finished the record that way.”
“I wasn’t sure if this was going to take another year, or if we needed to get together again and work on this a little more, but I think what we came up with is really interesting and it’s funny to me, maybe not to anyone else, but it’s funny to me that when I listen to the record it actually kind of does sound like in between Mild High Club and KingGizzard, so I’m not sure if that was just always what was going to happen, but it’s funny that that was kind of the end result, to me at least.”
McKenzie described the material as “interesting, chilled, jazzy, loose improvised pieces.” it’s a lot more relaxed than Murder of the Universe obviously, and there are more sort of individual songs, but a lot of the songs segue to other pieces of music and there are a lot of interlinking things and there is some fun instrumentation on the record. Alex and I were saying to each other when we were making this record because Alex has been working on another Mild High Club record as well and we just kept saying to each other, ‘This is the record where we just do weird stuff. This is the record where we just do anything, Let’s just make some weird music, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. It’s just a strange record. It just is it’s own thing, let us stretch our limbs and just see what happens. We have three weeks, let’s make some bizarre music,’ and funny enough it didn’t end up that bizarre, but it’s something.”
The title of the album is a nod to Sketches of Spain, Miles Davis’ classic 1960 collaborative LP with Gil Evans. A Heavenly Recordings first revealed Sketches Of Brunswick East is “a jazz-based, improv- leaning collection entitled Sketches Of Brunswick East, whose name alludes to both Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain, the notion of sketches as outlines for ideas and all- round sketchy behaviour.”
Stu Mackenzie explained, “it’s jazzy, it’s definitely not a jazz improvisation album. As much as I’d like it to be a jazz improvisation album, I think that would be fairly flattering. There is improvisation on this record. It’s a weird record, it’s all over the place, and the nature of it being collaboration and the nature of the way we made, caused it to be a certain thing.”
As for the two albums to follow Sketches Of Brunswick East and complete Gizzard’s ambition of five studio releases in 2017, at last update Stu admitted they’re “sort of distant at the moment, but we’ll see. We’ve got a little bit of time at home, so I think we’ll do it. But who knows.” Note the aforementioned Heavenly Recordings April press statement that revealed Sketches of Brunswick East’s album title and jazz inspirations also confirmed “two more albums will follow that in 2017.
Tracklist
Sketches Of Brunswick East I
Countdown
D-Day
Tereta
Cities, Planes, Migraines
The Spider And Me
Sketches Of Brunswick East II
Dusk To Dawn On Lygon Street
The Book
A Journey To
Rolling Stoned
You Can Be Your Silhouette
Sketches Of Brunswick East III
Note the tenth track’s title is incomplete. It appears to be a “A Journey To” somewhere, but the writing of the end of the line is illegible.
King Gizzard drummer Eric Moore (founder of the band’s Flightless Records) that the LP is now released and it will be issued though he stopped short of announcing a release date. “We’re just gonna drop it at any point,” Moore said. “It’s just coming out, straight up.” Rumor has its release will be a random day within the next two weeks. the title of the album is Sketches Of Brunswick East. Aside from being released on Heavenly Recordings in the United Kingdom, it’s expected on ATO Records in the United States and Moore’s Flightless Records in Australia.
The newly shorn Oh Sees waste no time in racing headlong into nightmarish battle with the mighty ORC, and wouldn’t ya know it, they’ve clawed even farther up the ghastly peak last year’s A Weird Exits stormed so satisfyingly. The band is in tour-greased, anvil on a balance beam, gut-pleasingly heavy form, nimbly braining with equal dashes of abandon and menace on this fresh batch of bruisers and brooders, hypnotically stirred into to the cauldron of chaos you’ve come to expect from, ahem, Oh Sees. Fresh blood Paul Quattrone joins Dan Rincon to form a phalanx of interlocking double drums, alternately propelling and fleet footing shifting ground to pinion Dwyer’s cliff-face guitars to the boogie. Tim Hellman keeps it swinging like a battle-axe to the eyebrows. The tunes veer towards the violence of their live shows, with a few tasty swerves into other lanes…heavy to lush, groovy to stately…throughout it remains sinister in its swaggering skulk, manic in its fuzz-fried fugues…they hit all the sweet spots the heads foggily remember, and there’s plenty to sweat over if you just hopped into the sauna. Ew. More evil….more complex…more narcotic…more screech….more roar….more whisper…there’s even more Brigid. Less “Thee”, but more of everything else, it’s out on Castle Face Records August 25th.
With a band like Oh Sees (née Thee Oh Sees, née OCS, née any other variations of the name), you keep waiting for the inevitable dud to be dropped, especially with the prolific output the band has gained a reputation for. Orc marks the band’s 19th release in this project’s 20 year existence, and with it, comes another hyperbolic batch of praises and huzzahs. The record is an absolutely evil stunner from front to back, top to bottom, head to toes and everywhere in between, and whips up the same kind of radiant, strange awe that the band’s overdriven catalog has so generously perpetrated album after wicked album.
Orc is immediately manic, overdriven, and intense on the roiling opener “The Static God,” forming a pounding fist of screeching guitars that give way to a wordless chorus that pogos in stop-start guitar clangs, and continues to shape-shift and waggle in bizarre back roads of experimentation. Liberated somewhat from the jammy tendencies they explored on the likes of Castlemania and Floating Coffin, and venturing further into the loopy explorations of last year’s A Weird Exits, the band has simply decided to take cues from any twisted source they so desire, smashing it all into an approximation of a rollicking garage-rock basement party.
Giving Oh Sees songs your undivided attention typically yields the best results, and with so many aural wormholes to traverse, its in your best interest to give in to the wild panorama of Dwyer’s rock ‘n’ roll vision quest.
FOAM are a three-piece garage rock band from Perth, WA. Their heavy live performances deliver a filthy wall of sound reminiscent of the alternative rock boom of the late 80’s/early 90’s. With influences including Nirvana, Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, The Breeders, The Drones and anything Steve Albini, FOAM tread the line between infectious melody and vicious punk.
The fourth and 12″ repressing of High Visceral {Part Two} in Transparent Pink. Limited to only 250 copies. This is the second release of Part Two by What Reality? Records
With two albums to their names, Perth rockers Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have also shared the stage with King Gizzard, Dune Rats, Black Mountain and Skegss. Band member Jack McEwan says the band started out as my uni-branding project. I wanted it to sound absurd and nonsensical, but as colourful as possible so I could create some outlandish designs. ‘High Visceral, Pt. 2’ is the current album… still enjoying this cycle of songs or have you guys moved on to the next batch of tracks for the back catalogue?
For our live set, we mix up between tracks from ‘Part One’ and ‘Two’ and throw in a couple of b-sides from those albums. We’ve started working on new material and the third album is in the works.
I’ve been playing a lot of acoustic guitar lately and meandering around this Grizzly Bear emotional stuff. It’s not going on the third album and I don’t really know what to use them for as it would be weird cutting out of ‘Ergophobia’ and then hearing harps and flutters of flutes.
With two albums to their names, Perth rockers Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have also shared the stage with King Gizzard, Dune Rats, Black Mountain and Skegss. Band member Jack McEwan says the band started out as my uni-branding project. I wanted it to sound absurd and nonsensical, but as colourful as possible so I could create some outlandish designs.
The fourth and 12″ double LP repressing of High Visceral {Part One} in Transparent Orange and Blue. Limited to only 250 copies. This is the second release of Part One by What Reality? Records.
Absolutely outstanding records…not a bad song on either part 1 or 2. Don’t be put off by the admittedly strange name…maybe something in the Perth water? One of the best records of 2017
