Melbourne’s The Shifters are quite possibly my current favourite purveyors of your guitar-based rock-and-or-roll,” commented Captured Tracks label head Mike Sniper upon its release. “In fact, they come from the best scene of that genre, the one in mullet-ravaged young Australia”.
“Left Bereft” sounds like it could be set in a post apocalyptic world or today. According to the band it’s “an overly simplified rabble-rouser that people who maybe use English as a second or third language can understand and maybe feel a bit of solidarity. I like to imagine drunk students in France listening to it whilst wrestling on the kitchen table.” Their Fall-ism’s abound here, but it’s so good (and Mark’s gone) that I’m just happy there’s band doing similar stuff at such a top level quality while putting their own stamp on it.
Back in March, the band released a 26-track rarities collection titled ‘Open Vault’ comprised of unreleased studio material, early demos, live renditions and solo home recordings from between 2016 and 2019. The collection also features covers of songs by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Ray Davies and Death in June.
Melbourne, Australia. The Shifters released a new 7″ vinyl single – ‘Left Bereft’ – via New York label Captured Tracks.
METZ has shared a new video for their song “Framed by the Comet’s Tail”, directed by the band’s drummer, Hayden Menzies. The visual companion to a personal favourite track of Menzies’ from Atlas Vending was created within a set of self-imposed limitations; it was all shot by Menzies on his phone, edited at home, with no borrowed content. He says of the video “It’s not a literal interpretation of the song by any means, but a document of random firing synapses of the mind during isolation.” Watch the video now.
This week we also announced the first Atlas Vending tour dates and tickets for our 2021 European and UK tour are on sale now. If you can’t wait until 2021, join us next week for a very special livestream of Atlas Vending in its entirety from The Opera House in Toronto.
“Atlas Vending” is Metz’s most dynamic, dimensional, and compelling work of their career, and is now available worldwide from Sub Pop Records.
What people are saying about Atlas Vending: “Atlas Vending is the sound of a band fully confident in itself and delivering their biggest and best work yet.” ★★★★ – Upset Magazine
“The Toronto band maintain a formidable degree of power and velocity throughout their fourth album yet… provide more welcome respites from the ferocious barrage they’re otherwise highly skilled at delivering.” [8/10] – Uncut
” A record which draws on 35 years of North American alt-rock excellence, while still stamping its creators’ own identity firmly across its grooves.” [4/5] – Kerrang
”By gathering everything the group has done to date and mixing it together Metz manage to create a perfectly potent cocktail, one filled with nostalgia, sadness and grinding euphoria.” [8/10] – Loud and Quiet
“The expansiveness of the sonic palette on Atlas Vending just gives the band more room to paint outside the lines.” [8/10] – Under The Radar
“A record that feels both raw and refined, this will shake you to the core”★★★★ – DIY Magazine
Lael Neale is sharing an official video for new single “For No One For Now,” an uptempo lament set in Didion’s Los Angeles. The drum track of the Omnichord calls to mind the agitated beat of driving fast on the freeway against the backdrop of the San Fernando Valley with its bent palms. Lael offers this, “I’ve always loved these stretches of road where the magic of the city seems hemmed in by the mundane.” The song contrasts romantic idealizations with the banality of folding sheets and toasting bread. “For No One For Now” is available worldwide on Sub Pop Records.
Lael grew up on a farm in Virginia among acres of clouds, fields, and woods. It was writing and writers close to nature – Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Steinbeck, and Mary Oliver – that she most connected with. In 2009, she moved to California with a rising devotion to music and for nearly 10 years has now called Los Angeles home. She worked with countless musicians, producers and collaborators, making entire records and eventually stowing them away. Despite endless frustration, she never resigned. After discovering a new instrument, the Omnichord, she experienced a moment of illumination and began recording a deluge of emerging songs with the intention to capture them in their truest form. She remarks, “Guy Blakeslee who had been an advocate for years facilitated the process. He set up a cassette 4-track in my bedroom and provided empathic guidance, subtle yet affecting accompaniment, and engineering prowess.”
She returned to her family farm back in April 2020 and has taken advantage of the limitations imposed by this period. She resurrected her old Sony Handycam from high school and is using it to make impressionistic companion pieces to the songs she recorded in Los Angeles.
She continues, “I am enjoying the strong contrast between the songs I wrote and recorded in California and the videos I am making for them in Virginia. It offers something unexpected.” In this installment, starry-eyed fantasy is cut with dull reality and a touch of the otherworldly. It is at once dreamy and creepy. The sweetness is skinned by subtle humour as she pokes fun at her own romanticism.
Buildings burning in every direction; macabre unknowns in your friendly neighbour’s basement; under pressure we could call Kiwi Jr’s “Cooler Returns” “timely.” But what year is it, again? On their sophomoric smash-up album released world-wide by Sub Pop Records, Kiwi Jr troll through the recent zigs & looming zags of the new decade, forgotten and under-investigated small town diner fires, piecing together low-stakes conspiracy theories on what’s coming down the pike in 2021. Put together like a thousand-piece puzzle, assembled in flow state through the first dull stretch of quarantine, sanitized singer “Cooler Returns” materializes as a sprawling survey from the first few bites of what has been the terrible twenties.
Not so long since their debut “Football Money” in unending grey eons later in the years of quaran-time, spiritually Canadians Kiwi Jr return to disseminate this year’s annual report to the shareholders, burying the incriminating numbers in the endless appendices of a longform narrative record.
Opener “Tyler” builds a Frankenstein of all your musician exes; don’t you remember “falling apart in the green room while they drank half the headliner’s rider?” In “Waiting In Line” we’re still slumbering at the bar, We hear “it isn’t past until it burns,” in “Maid Marian’s Toast” but what explains the accompanying & extensive itinerary of incinerated Eastern Canadian eateries? Investigated off the clock by Kiwi’s Jr. Throughout these crises, histories, and head games Kiwi Jr. don’t expect you to be taking notes or checking dates – and on the back nine, when “Omaha” demands proof that “Woodstock ever happened in the first place,” perhaps the freewheeling guitar groove underfoot tells us all we need to know about who’s been flipping through the festival files, air-drumming along.
Kiwi Jr sing this song to an indoor audience, only song writing remaining to deliver engrossing tales to the populace, just how I imagine it worked in the old days. Best Wishes, Warm Regards, Good Luck? Cooler Returns.
Kiwi Jr. is Jeremy Gaudet (mic, guitar), Brohan Moore (drums), Mike Walker (bass), and Brian Murphy (guitar).
That wasn’t supposed to be the title, of course. In one of the most oft-told tales of happy mistakes in rock, Iron Butterfly member Doug Ingle was so drunk on cheap wine that when he played his new song, “In the Garden of Eden” for a band mate it came out as “In-a-Gadda-Da Vida.” The band decided to keep it that way, and a classic hard-rock song was born. The track, more than 17 minutes on the album of the same name, slashed down for the single, is often considered one of the seminal tunes of heavy metal ever.
The band formed in San Diego in 1966, with Ingle on vocals and organ, along with Jack Pinney (drums), Greg Willis (bass) and Danny Weis (guitar). Another singer, Darryl DeLoach, who also played tambourine, soon joined them, and Jerry Penrod replaced Willis on bass before they were signed to a recording contract. Ingle has said that the band’s name was supposed to indicate a contrast between weighty and light, but no one will ever accuse Iron Butterfly of being too soft. From the start, they were going for something louder and more primal and aggressive than other bands of the day, and they titled their debut album “Heavy”, released on Atco Records in 1968, just to get the point across.
That album reached #78 early in the year and by the summer of ’68 the group was already set to release its sophomore LP. “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida”released on June 14th, 1968, and featuring the quartet of Ingle, guitarist Erik Brann, drummer Ron Bushy and bassist Lee Dorman—took its name from its title track, which occupied all of Side B on the original vinyl LP. Most of that time was given over to a post-psychedelic jam that dovetailed with the improvisational music that was being played at ballrooms in the U.S. and abroad and would soon be taken to new extremes by groups that would fall into the just-emerging heavy metal category.
Lyrically, other than the misheard title phrase, there really wasn’t much to “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida.” It could have been a ’50s love song. They sang:
“In a gadda da vida, honey Don’t you know that I’m lovin’ you In a gadda da vida, baby Don’t you know that I’ll always be true”
The chorus, too, was hardly profound:
“Oh, won’t you come with me And take my hand Oh, won’t you come with me And walk this land Please take my hand”
But it was all in the presentation, and Iron Butterfly found their audience with their second album and its center piece. The album, recorded on Long Island, rose to No#4 on the BillboardLP chart, while the single, was edited down to a more radio-friendly 2:52, found its way to onto that chart. Not all rock fans were swayed: “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,” and Iron Butterfly itself, were divisive: you either loved the song or despised it. The single and album signalled a shift in rock away from the more flowery, psychedelic sound that flourished at the Monterey Pop Festival and San Francisco’s rock palaces toward something more head-battering.
Nonetheless, “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” quickly established itself as a rock classic and when the band performed the song live, they often extended it even beyond the 17-minute mark, reportedly reaching a half-hour at times. The In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida album has been certified multi-platinum, reportedly selling more than 30 million copies total. (Iron Butterfly was, in fact, the first-ever group to receive an RIAA platinum album award.)
Iron Butterfly continued to find success for some years after 1968. Their next album, 1969’s “Ball”, and the group was scheduled to play Woodstock Festival but missed the gig when the helicopter meant to transport them to the site failed to show up. The 1970 “Live” album included a 19-minute version of followed just a few months later by the album “Metamorphosis”.
But as the ’70s unfurled, and other trends and bands came into the picture, audiences moved on. Iron Butterfly disbanded in 1971 but by ’74 a new line-up had revived the name, and they’ve never gone away. To this day there is an Iron Butterfly band, featuring one early member, Ron Bushy—although there has been no new Iron Butterfly album release in more than four decades.
Announced is a 7CD Box Set “Anthology” of material by legendary acid prog band Iron Butterfly‘Unconscious Power – An Anthology 1967-1971’ features all of the albums issued on Atco, newly re-mastered from the original master tapes, plus rare mono mixes previously unreleased on CD, along with two CDs of recordings made at the Fillmore East in New York City in 1968. It also includes all of the band’s US non-album singles and single edits and a lavishly illustrated booklet.
Since the late nineties, Fruit Bats has been the music of Eric D. Johnson. including Bloody Marys, major 7th chords, Nashville tuning, tibetan singing bowls and many other things. On “Mouthfuls”, the Fruit Bats tone down the twang of their debut, Echolocation, and offer something closer to a mix of late-’60s/early-’70s folk and bubble-gum shot through with unpredictable electronic elements that, paradoxically, make the group’s music seem even more homemade and organic.
Most of the songs have sunny, winding melodies and arrangements that twist and turn until they end up in a completely different place than where they began; “A Bit of Wind” starts out as a simple, jangly singalong and gradually adds a brass band, strings, and flutes until it becomes a sweeping pop symphony. The lilting vocals and bittersweet harmonies on “Rainbow Sign” and “Magic Hour” call to mind the Fruit Bats’ labelmates, the Shins, at times although the Fruit Bats’ brand of summery, psych-tinged pop is much mellower. From beginning to end, Mouthfuls radiates laid-back contentment, but it’s to the band’s credit that this vibe rarely dips into laziness or complacency, even on relatively simple pastoral interludes like “Track Rabbits.” Actually, there’s a lot going on within the album’s serenity, especially on tracks like “Union Blankets,” which features an intricate mix of programmed and live percussion underneath its strummy acoustic guitars and close harmonies, and on “The Little Acorn,” which begins as a drifting,
Radar Brothers-esque ballad before adding sparkling synths and soft rock-inspired backing vocals. Toward the end of Mouthfuls, the Fruit Bats return to the country-folk fusions of Echolocation, and while they’re still very pretty, they don’t quite capture the imagination the way the album’s earlier, more experimental tracks do. Still, when an album is as effortlessly warm and pretty as this one is, it’s hard to begrudge the band a return to more familiar sonic pastures, and even more so when Mouthfuls suggests that the Fruit Bats’ next album will be even more winning in its ways.
Merge Records is an independent record label based in Durham, North Carolina. It was founded in 1989 by Laura Ballance andMac McCaughan. It began as a way to release music from their band Superchunk and music created by friends, and has expanded to include artists from around the world and records reaching the top of the Billboard music charts.
We live in North Carolina, where a racist Republican legislature has worked for a generation to undermine democracy through unprecedented voter suppression. Our neighbours in Georgia have successfully fought back, through the efforts of Fair Fight and other organizations. The voters who turned Georgia blue in November can now elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, take back power in the Senate, and make true progress possible in this country.
The Merge Records artists on this comp came together quickly, recording in various quarantine situations, to pay tribute to their favourite artists from Georgia, or maybe just record their favourite songs with “Georgia” in the title, and to support those working hard in Georgia to make sure everyone’s voice is heard.
Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys released a new album, “Welfare Jazz”, this week via YEAR0001 Records. Now that it’s out you can stream the whole thing here. It includes “Girls & Boys,” a new song they shared earlier this week. Since their founding in 2015, Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys have made a name for themselves burning up stages around the world. There’s a little Iggy Pop spit and seethe, a David Yow drunken stumble, and a bite of Nick Cave’s haunted bark. Add a dash of motorik groove, a pinch of post-punk grime, and a dose of no wave howl.
For every gruff and gritty croak in the outfit’s catalogue, they come back with a pair of bongos, squared-off synths, and a squonky saxophone, with songs that deftly lay waste to society’s normalization of toxic masculinity, racism, misogyny, classism, and self-obsession.
Viagra Boys’ Sebastian Murphy dreams about everyone hating his guts. A lot. “I kept having this recurring nightmare where my mom was crying and my friends were all pissed off at me,” he recalls, almost reverently.
Viagra Boys previously released a video for Welfare Jazz’s “Creatures” . They also shared the album’s cover of the 1999 John Prine song “In Spite of Ourselves” featuring Amy Taylor of Australian rock band Amyl and the Sniffers. The band’s most recent release was their Common Sense EP, which came out back in March 2020 again on YEAR0001.
The band’s new album, Welfare Jazz, doesn’t bargain with the anxiety in that defeated feeling, but rather a boiling certainty that nothing and no one is absolute. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and things are just a lot more interesting when you admit that you’re not always going to be nice, you’re not always going to pick the right words in a fist-fight. So why not keep moving forward, swaying and strutting into the night.
Shame are releasing a new album, “Drunk Tank Pink”, next Friday (January 15) via Dead Oceans Records. This week they shared another song from it, “Nigel Hitter,” via a video for it. Maxim Kelly directed the video, reworking archival footage to make it seem like babies are singing along to the song.
Frontman Charlie Steen had this to say about the song in a press release: “The song is at the heart of what Drunk Tank Pink is about. After we finished touring I was left with a lot of silence as I stumbled around trying to figure out the daily routine. On top of that, I was confronting my subconscious at night through a series of intense dreams which left me in a daze during the day. ‘Nigel Hitter’ feels like a cathartic expression of that period.”
Frontman Charlie Steen had this to say about the song and upcoming album in a press release: “A lot of this album focuses on the subconscious and dreams, this song being the pivotal moment of these themes. A song about love that is lost and the comfort and displeasure that comes after you close your eyes, fall into sleep, and are forced to confront yourself.”
Drunk Tank Pink includes “Water in the Well,” and “Snow Day,”Shame’s previous album, Songs of Praise, was released in January 2018 on Dead Oceans.
It’s tempting to think that you have all the answers, screaming your gospel every day with certainty and anger. Life isn’t quite like that though, and the debut album from London four-piece TV Priest instead embraces the beautiful and terrifying unknowns that exist personally, politically and culturally.
Posing as many questions as it answers, “Uppers” is a thunderous opening statement that continues the UK’s recent resurgence of grubby, furious post-punk music. It says something very different though – something completely its own. Four childhood friends who made music together as teenagers before drifting apart and then, somewhat inevitably, back together late in 2019, TV Priest was born out of a need to create together once again, and brings with it a wealth of experience and exhaustion picked up in the band’s years of pursuing “real life” and “real jobs,” something those teenagers never had.
In November 2019, the band – vocalist Charlie Drinkwater, guitarist Alex Sprogis, bass and keys player Nic Bueth, and drummer Ed Kelland – played their first show, to a smattering of friends in what they describe as an “industrial freezer” in the warehouse district of Hackney Wick. “It was like the pub in Peep Show with a washing machine just in the middle…” Charlie laughs, Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a precedent for introducing an album during a global pandemic, but among the general sense of anxiety and unease pervading everything at the moment, TV Priest’s entrance in April with the release of debut single “House of York” – a searing examination of the Monarchy – served as a breath of fresh air among the chaos, its anger and confusion making some kind of twisted sense to the nation’s fried brains.
It’s the same continued global sense of anxiety that will greet the release of Uppers, and it’s an album that has a lot to say right now. Taking musical cues from The Fall and Protomartyr as well as the mechanical, pulsating grooves of Kosmische Musik, it’s a record that moves with an untamed energy. Over the top of this rumbling musical machine is vocalist Charlie, a cuttingly funny, angry, confused, real frontman.
“Decoration,” Uppers’ center-piece, has a streamlined groove soundtracking Charlie’s lyrical vignettes that captures the absurdity and mundanity of life. Its opening and closing line (“I’ve never seen a dog do what that dog does”) is a misremembered quote by Simon Cowell about a performing dog on Britain’s Got Talent. Charlie says, “We often said it in the studio as a kind of in-joke when someone did something good or unexpected. Having already toyed around with the ‘Through to the next round’ line,’ this seemed too good to leave out.” And the chorus “It’s all just decoration” is credited to 2-year old niece of Alex’s fiancé, who reassured him after he pretended to be scared by Halloween decorations.
“Press Gang” is inspired by Charlie’s grandfather’s life’s work as a photojournalist and war correspondent on the UK’s Fleet Street from the 1950s to the early 1980s. The song is about the shifting role in the dissemination of information and ideas, and how the prevailing narrative that the “Death of Print Media” has contributed to a “post truth” world.
Album closer “Saintless” is the most personal and raw moment on Uppers. Charlie wrote a note to his son after his birth, following a difficult period his wife had faced during and after the pregnancy. The song is about how as parents we’re fallible and human, and while the world can be a difficult place at times the one thing that gets you through is giving your love to those that need and appreciate it. “Saintless” rides a motorik beat, with guitars, bass and synths building layers of intensity and emotion that replicate and swell with the message of the track.
Uppers sees TV Priest explicitly and outwardly trying to avoid narrowmindedness. Uppers sees TV Priest taking musical and personal risks, reaching outside of themselves and trying to make sense of this increasingly messy world. It’s a band and a record that couldn’t arrive at a more perfect time.
“Press Gang” is Out now – our new one from our album ‘Uppers’, out on Sub Pop Records next month. “Uppers” It’s about Charlie’s grandad, news cycles, truth, chip paper, and information. It’s also pretty loud. Lots of love to Joe Wheatly for another wild ride making the video & big love to all the crew who helped us out over a very cold weekend.
“Press Gang” by TV Priest from their album “Uppers” (Release Date: 02/05/2021)
The Fat Angel Sings 