The Reverberation Appreciation Society is proud to announce the release of a new collection of Holy Wave tracks, titled The Evil Has Landed Part II. To be released December 11th and pressed on 10″ clear vinyl (limited to 1000 copies worldwide) and digital formats.
Holy Wave are from Austin, Texas and uphold the Lone Star State’s long-standing reputation for top-notch lysergic sounds. The band consists of multi-instrumentalists Joey Cook, Ryan Fuson, Kyle Hager, Julián Ruiz, and Dustin Zozaya. Holy Wave released their first LP in 2011, Knife Hits, followed by The Evil Has Landed EP in 2012. Both albums were were paired up on a 2013 collection called Evil Hits, their first release on The Reverberation Appreciation Society. The track is all summery yearning, charmingly blasé vocals, and slowly unfurling surf licks. There’s a touch of melancholy lurking under all the sepia-drenched warmth, but make no mistake–this is asleep-in-the-sunlight bliss
2014 brought their second LP Relax, produced by Erik Wofford (The Black Angels, Explosions In The Sky, My Morning Jacket), which took the band on extensive U.S. and European tours.
The Evil Has Landed Part II collects b-sides from the Relax sessions and demos from their upcoming LP, Freaks of Nurture, which the band is preparing to release in Spring 2016
TRACK LISTING
01 SUEÑOS
02 HOOD DREAMS
03 CRYSTAL BLUE P
04 SON OF SOUND
05 LADY MADONNAʼS OPERATION
06 OUR PIGS ONLY HAVE ONE BAD DAY
One of these is the eponymous debut from the Nashville four-piece, COIN. It’s feel-good radio-worthy music, perfect for soundtracking all your road trips and beach days. Part of its genius is that it will have you dancing and singing along, whether it’s your first or 1,000th listen.
COIN flows together seamlessly, keeping the listener entertained with 35 minutes of wicked guitar riffs, clever and playful lyrics, and wild, youthful energy. The first track, ‘Atlas’ starts off the party, sampling the adrenaline rush of the album. Singer Chase Lawrence’s lyrics are cheeky and enticing, making this a stand out song. Lawrence has a gift for creating songs that anyone can love, whether they can directly relate to the listener’s current life or remind someone of their exuberant past. ‘Atlas’ is one of the best examples that COIN offers of this crowd-pleasing quality. Of course, their lead single, ‘Run’ is fantastic in its own way, but for similar reasons. It’s insanely catchy in the best sense and showcases their talent for creating a fun and exciting narrative set to wonderful melodies.
The album overall is fast-paced, without losing songs along the way. Not a single track is skippable and it definitely doesn’t feel like an album that’s just singles and fillers, which seems pretty rare now. Each song feeds into the next seamlessly, mainly because COIN stick to what they know for the most part, and it definitely pays off. Their formula of beachy guitars layered with strong percussion and upbeat synthesizers makes them unique from other brands of indie pop we’ve heard this year. Lots of artists included guitars and synthesizers, but not like this band has. Breezy guitars and percussion are usual, but COIN add their heavy, Walk the Moon-esque synthesizers to create one of the most distinct mixes of sounds this year. ‘Holy Ghost’ is the pinnacle of their style, mixing 80s inspiration with beach guitars. The progression between the two styles makes it a joy to hear as it moves from airing on the laid-back side to total overdrive at the finish.
Although COIN is an ambitious endeavor on the whole, the band really push themselves with the final two tracks and go into some more experimental territory. They retain the signature COIN vibes, but push it to something a little less predictable. The two are less upbeat and tell of sadder stories than the rest. The instrumentation maintains the synths and California-esque vibes, but still matches the downcast lyrics. It’s entirely unique how those two songs can keep the beachy sound that COIN has worked to create in the first eight tracks, but change the lyrical story to something sad without losing the listener or becoming bizarre. ‘It’s a Trap’ tells of a deteriorating relationship with summery guitars in the back, and somehow they make it work in a splendid way. The final track, ‘Lately’, is an unexpected way to finish such a happy album, but it leaves an impression that is hard to forget. It’s dramatic, more so than any of the other songs, but it also showcases what COIN can do when they step out of their comfort zone.
Part of COIN’s magic comes from is its wide appeal. It’s not just for any one demographic and its refreshing to hear something that can be so widespread. No matter whether you’re reminiscing about rebellious youth or actually living it, its still carefree and fun music that’s meant to bring you back to that spirited energy. COIN has gifted us with a wonderfully bright combination of songs in an already spectacular year for sugary pop.
Things have been a little manic over here. Namely recording a Christmas album which is so nearly done and I’m so excited for ya’ll to hear it.
Talking of which; if you happen to be reading this from London or within close proximity, I’d love to invite you to our album launch party. It’s going to be super fun. There’ll be music from 4 wonderful acts who appear on this year’s album. Flyte & Lisa Mitchell have thus far been announced, special guests will be announced on the day. The wonderful Femme will also be spinning some tunes on the decks later on. There’ll be mince pies and maybe some fake snow. You’ll only know if you come along. Tickets are just £8 (bargain if I may say so myself) and all proceeds will go direct to the ever wonderful breast cancer awareness charity CoppaFeel!
It would mean the world to me if you were to come along, bring your friends, the more the merrier I say!
This years album will be released on Friday, December 11. ‘It’s Coming On Christmas’ is complied by Hannah Daisy of Daisy Digital. The digital album was mastered at Crypt Studio, in London by Anthony Leung and is available now via. pre-order – www.daisydigital.bandcamp.com.
Proceeds from both ‘It’s Coming On Christmas’ and the launch show, will once again be donated to CoppaFeel! a charity that helps breast cancer awareness, educating young people on the importance of checking their boobs regularly and knowing the signs and symptoms of breast cancer.
As usual, it’s available to pre-order via. Bandcamp.
The release follows the success of last year’s album, which featured the likes of Marika Hackman, Slow Club, RaeMorris, Lucy Rose, The Districts, Summer Camp and Billie Marten, in addition to gaining support from BBC6Music, XFM, Radio 1, NME and Stereogum.
The album will be released digitally on December 11th, 2015. For the first time, we’ll be celebrating with a launch show on December 10th at Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre (Crouch End).
Daisy Digital have assembled some truly stellar artists for their third It’s Coming On Christmascompilation.
Marika Hackman, FEMME, Blaenavon, Flyte, The Big Moon, Pesky, D.I.D, Lisa Mitchell, Max Jury, Flawes, Sivu, and George Cosby are all among the 24 artists taking part.
Tracklist:
1. Marika Hackman – River
2. FLYTE – In The Bleak Midwinter
3. Lisa Mitchell – The Coldest Night of The Year
4. Max Jury – Blue Christmas
5. The Big Moon – It’s The Most Wonderful Time of The Year
6. Sivu – The Christmas Song
7. FLAWES – Christmas Lights
8. Whinnie Williams – Stay Another Day
9. George Cosby – Untitled
10. FEMME – Santa Be Good To Me
11. Blaenavon – Christmas Time
12. Only Girl – This Time of Year
13. D.I.D – TV Christmas
14. Adam Cleaver – Sister Winter
15. Pesky – Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)
16. HART – That Was The Worst Christmas Ever
17. Amy Yon – Winter
18. Bacchus – Santa Baby
19. Eva Stone – You Still Believe In Me
20. Cape Cub – Only You
21. Tenterhook – O Holy Night
22. PRIDES – Driving Home For Christmas
23. Allman Brown – The Holly and The Ivy
24. Tom Speight & Friends – Jingle Bells
You canpre-order the album on Bandcamp ahead of its release on 11th December. Itching to get festive? You can grab the first compilation(featuring Layla, Fyfe, PINS, and more) and the second one (Rae Morris, Lucy Rose, Slow Club, Summer Camp, and more) already.
Care to share a ride with Lucius? Then hop in, but only if you don’t mind making stops to pick up some “friends,” taking a quick detour when the cops show up and hearing their new single “Born Again Teen” along the way. Don’t worry: There’s time for an ice cream break. With a new album “Good Grief” schuleded for next March 2016 and a UK tour , Members: Jess Wolfe Holly Laessig Dan Molad Peter Lalish Andrew Burr.
“Hey, You’re Mine” taken from the forthcoming double ep PLANNING WEED LIKE IT’S ACID / LIFE IS LOSS, came out in November, These intercontinental shoegazers A Sunny Day In Glasgow released their double and earned a spot on our list of best of EP’s from 2015, and they’re supporting it with a brief East Coast tour of America right around New Year’s. A Sunny Day In Glasgow vocalist Jen Goma was featured on much of the Pains Of Being Pure At Heart’s 2014 indie-pop pleasure “Days Of Abandon” album release she sang lead on their recent “Laid” cover, and now The Pains have returned the love in the form of a new remix of sparkling EP highlight “Hey You’re Mine” (Lengthily-named bands have got to stick together!) The Pains Of Being Pure AtHeart’s version is just as vibrant but injects a new rhythmic pulse, turning the song into something that most resembles a dance party on a cloud.
Tamara Lindeman is a Canadian folk singer who writes gentle songs that scan more like marginalia a wise reader left on a poem than poems themselves. They are sumptuous enough to recall the sweeping, gilded discography of Joni Mitchell, but only the laziest listener would draw that comparison based solely on nationality and gender. No, Tamara is more her own woman, her music is air-tight, like a study in the art of inverse, or an experiment with passion’s ability to remain austere. Explorations of love aren’t limited strictly to romance, either, but encompass friendships with other women on “Like Sisters” and “Shy Women”–two of the album’s standouts–or parse artistic admiration on “Tapes” and “Life’s Work.” On all of these, the album’s title comes through as a guiding principle, not quite commandment as much as personal chosen tenet. work reminds us that sometimes the quietest voice is the one most worth listening to, the slowest moments might be the most brilliant, and the most valuable qualities are not visible to the naked eye.
Tradition-spanning contemplative folk that captures rare beauty in both lyrics and melodies,On her third album, Loyalty, Toronto-based songwriter Tamara Lindeman’s poetic reflections are set to minimalist combos of acoustic guitar, keys and just enough percussion to add bite to her words. For the album, she worked closely with Feist engineer Robbie Lackritz and Afie Jurvanen (a.k.a. Bahamas). “Lately, I’ve outsourced my boundaries to other people,” she says. “I require someone or something to tell me when to stop.” In the case of Loyalty, she found out with two months to spare that she was going to record at La Frette Studios in France. When she arrived, she was still rewriting, and had to sing scratch vocals on a few tracks. “There were still one or two words, or like one line that I was going to change,” she recalls. “Everyone just loved the scratch vocal. My two collaborators were like, ‘You’re not allowed to sing it again.'” In turn, her low, rich voice brings out the textures of dry grass, the cityscape, and relentless rain in intimate fashion. My style of songwriting is I tend to play guitar and daydream and sorta sing stuff. I tend to record it to remember. In that phase, I tend to sing all the same stuff anyone else sings. I sing about rain and the moon. My tendency over time is to refine that into something that feels really meaningful and I can hang onto it for a long time.”
The Weather Station’s “Loyalty” will be released May 12, 2015 on Paradise of Bachelors.
Deafheaven – New Bermuda
Released October 2nd ANTI Records) remember that Deafheaven is a substantially different band than the one that churned out “Sunbather” two years ago. the sense of urgency derived from a dire economic situation that permeated the band’s critically-acclaimed breakthrough album may be subdued, but this is a creative force bent on melding genre confines into a fluid product. at the very least, New Bermuda will not fall short on intrigue. Yet again fusing shoegaze, post-rock, and several strands of metal, the passion that Deafheaven had searched for was right before them. The box others have created for the band is ravaged by the beast that is George Clarke when he screams for the world to surrender to blackness (“Brought to the Water”). New Bermuda is a land with the blackest nights and the most beautiful suns
It’s one thing to have your profile raised by a Mercury Music Prize nomination, it’s another thing entirely to be able to present an album with the subtle complexity of Architect, and the undoubted quality of Chris Duncan’s music will also last longer than any industry accolade. The strength is found in its depth, the layers of vocal harmonies and instrumentation create an entirely unique sound out of recognisable parts, something we can relate to and enjoy like it’s the first time every time.”
Musician born and raised in Glasgow, On his breathtaking debut album Architect, The 26-year-old Glaswegian composer Christopher Duncan sings, “I’ll take you everywhere I go… I’ll take you everywhere I know. It’s all so wonderful.” That’s exactly what the Mercury Prize-nominated multi-instrumentalist does over the course of 49 minutes, and it’s anything but hyperbole to declare that “wonderful” is quite the understatement. From delicate, pastoral dream pop to intimate, electronic-tinged folk, Duncan’s luxuriant vocal harmonies and intricate compositions dazzle with ingenuity. For over a year the singer-songwriter isolated himself within his bedroom studio as he crafted the album’s 12 songs. Unencumbered by time constraints or the influence of outside producers, Duncan painstakingly layers guitars, synths, handclaps, found objects and vocal lines on top one another. The resulting product is astonishing, not simply because of how disarmingly beautiful it all is, but more that the record is the result of one man’s labor of love, not the work of an entire studio full of musicians. These songs breathe with life. Timeless, genre-defiant, and endlessly inventive, Architect is as accomplished a debut as any.
Born in Buffalo, just a few blocks from U.S. Route 62, Peter Case made his way to San Francisco to busk on the streets, then to Los Angeles where he spearheaded the late-70s power pop movement with the Nerves and Plimsouls. He’s since taken a more solitary road, touring with just his songs and guitar, gathering stories for his writing. Though not literally itinerant – he’s still homed in Los Angeles – his travels have traced the trails of those who inspire him. His latest collection of songs is titled after the northeast-to-southwest highway that runs through his hometown, and that his childhood eyes saw as a “connection to the world I wanted to live in, the American West”
The productions step back to a folkier vibe from the electric blues of 2010’s Wig!, but retain the underlying power of drummer D.J. Bonebrake, and add the instrumental voices of guitarist Ben Harper and bassist David Carpenter. The songs wind through a variety of musical landscapes, just as Route 62 winds through Bobby Fuller’s El Paso, Buddy Holly’s Lubbock, Sonny Throckmorton’s Carlsbad, Woody Guthrie’s Okemah, Ronnie Hawkins’ Fayetteville, the Everly Brothers’ Central City, and Phil Ochs’ Columbus. The social consciousness of Guthrie and Ochs’ are evoked in the opening “Pelican Bay,” as Case questions the industrialization of America’s prisons and the particular harshness of solitary confinement.
A broader palette of social injustice is on Case’s mind as “Water From a Stone” segues between the travails of undocumented aliens, corporatism, global warming, the appropriation of Native American lands, rising eviction rates, crushing educational debt and outsourced manufacturing. Justice is called into question again in both “Evicted” and “All Dressed Up (for Trial),” with the latter suggesting that final judgment isn’t necessarily a mortal matter. That same leveling in the afterlife provides redemption for the existential lament “The Long Good Time,” and turns the gravesite of “Bluebells” into a pastoral place to leave behind one’s foibles.
Case is often described as a troubadour – a wandering singer who collects and transports stories – and the slow blues “Waiting on a Plane” takes this role into the jet age. Though the lyric describes a thief whose escape is blocked, one can’t help think this was written during an unintended tour stop in an airport terminal. A more scenic view of blue highways and club dates is painted in “New Mexico,” with Harper’s electric guitar painting a shadowy late-night mesa. Case’s songwriting is in fine form, but his most full-throated passion comes on a cover of Dylan’s “Long TimeGone,” closing out the lyrical portion of this excellent (and long overdue) new album.
I recorded Little Martha in one day with Simon Trought at the old Soup Studio, underneath the Duke of Uke ukulele shop on Hanbury Street, just off Brick Lane in East London. There are no overdubs on the album, which was recorded live with one microphone. Franic Rozycki stopped by to play mandolin on a couple of tracks, but otherwise it’s entirely me playing acoustic guitar. There are no vocals on the album.
I love guitar players. For every songwriter I like, there are a hundred guitarists who impress me. There are too many that I enjoy listening to to mention them all, but there are a few key influences on this particular record that are worth naming: American guitarists like Reverend Gary Davis, Leo Kottke, Blind Blake and Ry Cooder. JohnFahey, who started recording in 1959, was one of the first guys to get me hooked on instrumental fingerpicking guitar. He plays with a simple thumb-and-two-fingers right hand technique, nice and slow. His music contains tremendous power and mystery, yet it is easy to grasp exactly what he is doing. He called himself an ”American Primitive”, which in technical terms I suppose is true, but his ideas are very strange and sophisticated, particularly in his synthesis of 20th century European classical music and (American) folk and blues. I cover a number of his tunes on the album, and I clumsily attempt to copy his style a little on the ones I wrote. More than anyone else, the album is a tribute to Fahey and to my love of his music, which I have listened to for 20 years now and still find fascinating. We even copied the simple black-on-white style of Fahey’s Blind Joe Death LP cover when we made the sleeve.
From the age of 9 until I was about 16, this was all I played: acoustic guitar instrumentals like the kind on this album. I abandoned this practise when I started writing songs and formed The Wave Pictures. It was really nice for me to go back to this way of playing that means so much to me, after 14 years playing rock music. I had a lot of fun learning the tunes, developing big blisters on my fingers again, practising for hours in the bathroom where the acoustics are better. And it was a pleasure, as always, to record with Simon. It’s nice to show a different side of yourself every so often. I am so happy I got to make this record and that WIAIWYA records kindly decided to release it.
