Gustaf is a throwback art punk band from Brooklyn currently getting rave reviews. They’ve opened for many high-profile acts, including Beck, even though their debut single, “Mine,” is less than four months old. Fans of bands like Talking Heads and Television, Bodega, Patti Smith will want to keep an eye on this band. From: Brooklyn in New York City , USA
The have Impossible-to-resist grooves matched with the performance style of a former improv comedian. You’re going to love them: If super serious scene bands send your eyes rolling to the back of your head, Gustaf will win you back around. The Brooklyn five-piece might only a couple of singles to their name so far, but they’ve cultivated a reputation as one of the most fun new bands across the five boroughs (and, perhaps, beyond) thanks to their enthrallingly joyful live shows and inability not to inject everything they do with a playful spirit.
A song about the overly entitled and underwhelmed. Hi!! Produced and mixed by Chris Coady
released October 8th, 2020 Written and performed by Gustaf.
Gustaf is Lydia Gammill (vocals) Tine Hill (bass) Melissa Lucciola (drums) Vram Kherlopian (guitar and vocals) Tarra Thiessen (vocals and percussion)
We’re thrilled to announce that at long last our first single/music video “Mine” is out today! It’s part of a 7inch vinyl that’ll be available December 4th 2020 on Royal Mountain Records.
As part of her ongoing reissue series, PJ Harvey has announced a vinyl reissue of her fifth album, 2000’s Stories From the City Stories From the Sea. It will be released alongside Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea – Demos, a collection of unreleased demos of every track on the album. Both sets arrive February 26th 2021. Listen to a demo of “This Mess We’re In” below.
Later this month, Harvey will reissue Is This Desire?, also with a new demo collection. Over the last year, Harvey has reissued her albums Dry, Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love, and Dance Hall at Louse Point. Her documentary film A Dog Called Money, which followed the creation of her 2016 album The Hope Six Demolition Project, will be released later this year following screenings last December.
Coming from Britain’s most chameleonic musical export, the shouted lyric “I want a pistol! I want a gun!” remains a jarringly American sentiment. Heard at the outset of PJ Harvey’s fifth album “Stories From the City Stories From the Sea”, this line was then Harvey’s most U.S.-evoking to date. Musically, though, her prior albums were rife with American musical influence: On her clamorous 1992 debut album Dry and her third album, 1995’s varied and biblical To Bring You My Love, she respectively built grunge and blues backdrops for bracing tales of despair. The album between the two, Harvey’s uncompromisingly abrasive 1993 pinnacle Rid of Me, pulled equally from both genres. Though she mined the distinctly British influence of trip-hop for 1998’s often-underrated Is This Desire?, one of that album’s music videos took place in the heart of the Big Apple. That’s exactly where Stories, released twenty years ago today, gets its start.
Of course, despite the gun-toting salvo of Stories’ storming opener “Big Exit,” New York isn’t a haven of American gun culture in the same way that, say, Virginia is. Instead, New York is all in Stories’ presentation (Harvey wrote much of the album while living there for nine months in 1999). On the album’s artwork, Harvey is clearly in Manhattan and well-dressed for the part. Her love of legendary New Yorker and punk poet laureate Patti Smith pervades her unprecedented mostly-not-gloomy guitar work, and the vocal vibrato of “Good Fortune” is supreme Horses-core. It remains debated whether Harvey’s newly upbeat guitars and lucid vocals were attempts to recapture the mainstream success she almost achieved with To Bring You My Love, but what’s clear now is that her unabashed enthusiasm for turn-of-the-21st-century New York hides a much darker interior.
Released just weeks before the Bush vs. Gore presidential election, and less than a year before 9/11, Stories is an unsettlingly prescient view of how the Bush era would accelerate the dystopia in which we currently find ourselves. Revisited just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the album is a striking referendum on the terrors that accompany city life under proto-fascist rule. After 9/11, lyrics about planes and helicopters eternally overhead resembled New York’s understandably paranoid state; twenty years later, it’s still easy to close your eyes in major American cities and hear those same choppers above multiple times a day, seemingly patrolling (or just searching for) another anti-fascist demonstration.
In Harvey’s Clinton-era dream of New York, these disturbing details were just background noise. “The planes keep winging,” she mutters over a rollicking, starry-eyed eighth-note wash of guitars during the glowing chorus of “A Place Called Home,” which is otherwise a strong plea to a romantic partner. The first lyrics on the Thom Yorke–featuring rock ballad “This Mess We’re In” are Yorke singing “Can you hear them? / The helicopters / I’m in New York,” but it, too, is otherwise a love song. It’s a reminder that even as the police and military fly overhead, even as chaotic cities buzz and bristle and never sleep, everyday romances continue. It’s 2020 city life in a nutshell.
Harvey continues to unintentionally predict a future much closer to Stories’ setting throughout the album. The power-chord blast of “Kamikaze” is a prime example: It’s full of references to, as its title suggests, suicide pilots. Sure, in the song’s proper context, “How could that happen again? Where the fuck was I looking? When all his horses came in / And he built a whole army of kamikaze” is ostensibly about her partner continuing to surprise her, but when she describes her setting as “another war zone,” it’s hard not to connect her suicide pilots to the men who flew two planes into the Twin Towers. She might have meant to say that love is a battlefield, but she accidentally forecasted just how literally New York would become one.
Twenty years and more after Stories’ release, it remains fascinating and disturbing to see how well PJ Harvey’s most accessible, joy-filled album (when Stories survived Rolling Stone’s revisions to its 500 Best Albums of All Time list last month, the newly written blurb still expressed surprise about the LP’s felicity: “Polly Jean Harvey happy?” accidentally predicted some of its setting’s darkest times. Its twentieth birthday is also its first big-number anniversary to arrive after Harvey’s failure to work through American politics when she intended to do so. Her most recent album, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, rightly received backlash for engaging in Washington, D.C. poverty tourism and describing American political problems with minimal context and no solutions. Whereas Stories songs such as the ghostly arena-rock highlight “One Line” are ever more chilling for casual mentions of “This world all gone to war,” Hope Six’s “The Community of Hope” is…well, let D.C. politicians tell you for themselves.
But this reflection on Stories, not Hope Six, right? Well, sure, but now that the latter exists, it’s impossible not to consider its version of America when analyzing the former’s. The albums’ contrast suggests that the best way to get to know a place, its culture, and its people is pretty easy: Fully immerse yourself in it. As Harvey wrote songs about the whirlwind romance that defines Stories, she couldn’t help but detail New York—it’s where she was. That the helicopters, planes, guns, and war are peripheral only makes them more significant; they’re constantly in Harvey’s descriptions becausethey’re part of everyday life there.
What would such a world look like? It’s not the dystopia Harvey paints on “Big Exit” when she wants a pistol: “Too many cops / Too many guns.” Like much of Stories, this complaint isn’t just a story from the city told after ample time immersed in its lifestyle—it’s a vision and a solution for a place called home. “I live with hope that things can change,” Harvey said in an interview shortly before releasing Stories, which, for the first time in her career, showed this hope—and, in classic PJ Harvey form, the darkness threatening to crush it.
Inspired by classic rock, Carpool Tunnel serve old-fashioned grooves fitting for a slow dance at a ’70s prom with “Empty Faces.” Taking influence from social media and how through it we can feel connected to people we’ve never met, the track mixes the perfect amount of surf riffs and contemporary breaks. Swinging beats hold down the tempo while a slightly distorted guitar leads the rest of the band through each verse. “Empty Faces” was the fourth in a string of singles from the band in 2020. The group are expected to drop their debut LP early this year via Pure Noise Records.
Hailing from the indie rock haven of San Francisco, Carpool Tunnel is an up-and-coming band with a relaxed yet engaging sound. The group’s distinctive musical expression can’t be nailed down by a single genre.
Well, it’s been a long time coming but it is finally here. Our debut album, “Bloom” is coming out February 26th!
Irish poet Sinead O’Brien has shared her debut EP “Drowning in Blessings” today via Chess Club Records. It follows the release of previous singles “Roman Ruins” and “Strangers in Danger,” the latter of which was named an essential art rock track of 2020. The EP was produced by none other than Dan Carey, known for his work with Fontaines D.C., Kate Tempest and more.
Sinead O’Brien has also unveiled a video for “Most Modern Painting,” the opening song on this four-track release and the one that spawned the EP’s title. The video was directed by Saskia Dixie and shot on 16 mm film. “Most Modern Painting” is another carefully threaded art rock track, with O’Brien’s thoughts—both uninhibited and calculated firing quickly.
O’Brien says of the new single: “Most Modern Painting” is about the creation and maintenance of “the self” – the most epic task we are faced with in our lives. I wanted to work with structure in an unconventional way, linking the movements together using various voices from the narrative. The lyrics are voiced through a dialogue between the conscious and unconscious, through dream recall, memory, the individual and the ego.
“It’s about the creation and maintenance of the self. We never talk about it, but it’s the task that you were faced with from the minute you’re born – to create and develop yourself, forever.”
Limerick artist Sinead O’Brien’s sprechgesang-meets-post-punk poetry spills over with evocative literary references and captivating everyday observations. The Vivienne Westwood fashion designer started out penning poems and performing them with the musical backing of her regular contributor Niall Burns of whenyoung, with a style that’s since grabbed the attention of Chess Club and Speedy Wunderground.
Sinead O’Brien – Drowning In Blessings EP, out now:
When Ela Minus first surfaced a few years ago with a series of gorgeous EPs that culminated with 2017’s Adapt., there was something unusually striking about her synthesized productions alongside her vapory vocals. Perhaps it’s because Ela Minus’s Gabriela Jimeno forgoes the use of computerized sounds in favour of those emanating from synths that she builds and designs herself. The Colombian-born, Brooklyn-based producer and singer just released her debut LP, “Acts of Rebellion”, via Domino Recordings, and is maintaining the analogue approach to her compositions. On tracks like “they told us it was hard, but they were wrong.” and “el cielo no es de nadie,” (translation: “heaven belongs to nobody”) Jimeno ruminates on purposeful solitude with an unwavering club sensibility. Ela Minus is a necessary Latinx voice in indie electronica.
Ela Minus’ debut album is a collection about the personal as political and embracing the beauty of tiny acts of revolution in our everyday lives. Throughout, a sense of urgency and a call to arms is mixed with this love and appreciation for reality—because even revolutionaries need to leave space for simple human interaction.
Ela Minus – “megapunk” from the new album ‘acts of rebellion’ out now on Domino Record Co.
On his opulent debut album “Giver Taker” Anjimile’s most powerful and enchanting instrument is his voice. The project which serves as a testament to the different stages of healing is a sparse nine-track undertaking that reveals just how resilient our protagonist truly is. Anjimile’s story is an uncommon one, but an uplifting one nonetheless: A trans person in the midst of battling his own demons excavates the most troubling parts of his past and ultimately seeks out catharsis. Giver Taker is captivating in its detailed storytelling, luscious harmonies and admirable vulnerability. On Giver Taker, the gorgeous debut album by Anjimile, death and life are always entwined, wrapping around each other in a dance of reverence, reciprocity, and, ultimately, rebirth.“Giver Taker” is confident, intentional and introspective. Anjimile Chithambo (they/them, he/him) wrote much of the album while in treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, as well as while in the process of living more fully as a nonbinary trans person. Loss hovers over the album, whose songs grieve for lost friends (“Giver Taker”) and family members (“1978”) along with lost selves (“Maker,” “Baby No More,” “In Your Eyes.”) But here, grief yields an opening: a chance for new growth. “A lot of the album was written when I was literally in the process of improving my mental health, so there’s a lot of hopefulness and wonder at the fact that I was able to survive,” says Chithambo. “Not only survive but restart my life and work towards becoming the person I was meant to be.”
Each song on the album is its own micro-journey, adding up to a transformative epic cycle created in collaboration with bandmate Justine Bowe of Photocomfort and New-York based artist/producer Gabe Goodman. “1978” and “Maker” both begin as Sufjan Stevens-esque pastoral ballads with Chithambo’s mesmerizing voice foregrounded against minimal instrumentation and swell into the realm of the majestic through the addition of warm, steady instrumentation (informed by the mix of 80’s pop and African music Chithambo’s Malawi-born parents played around the house) and harmonies by Bowe. “In Your Eyes” starts out hushed and builds to a crescendo via a mighty chorus inspired by none other than The Lion King. The allusion is fitting: each song encapsulates a heroic voyage, walked alone until accompanied by kindred souls. The choirs present throughout are equally deliberate. Chithambo grew up as a choir boy himself, and several songs (notably “Maker”) grasp not only towards reconciliation between his trans identity and his parents’ strong religious beliefs, but towards reclaiming his trans identity as an essential part of his own spirituality. (“[Less] Judeo-Christian, more ‘Colours of the Wind.’”) There is a boldness to this borrowing and shaping, a resoluteness that results from passing through hardship and emerging brighter, steadier. As a closing refrain on “To Meet You There” might sum it up: “Catalyst light of mine / now is your time.”
Giver Taker was recorded in Brooklyn, Boston, and New Hampshire by Goodman, thanks in part to the Live Arts Boston Grant by the Boston Foundation. All songs written by Anjimile Chithambo
“Maker” by Anjimile From the album, Giver Taker, out now. released September 18th, 2020.
Jordana released a new album titled “Something to Say to You”, out digitally on December 4th and physically in January 2021, via Grand Jury Music. The album combines her Something to Say EP ( named one of the best of the year so far on various bloggers) with the recently announced ...To You EP for one full-length LP. Jordana also shared a new single, “I Guess This Is Life,” alongside an accompanying video. “‘I Guess This Is Life’ is a song about the motions of everyday life and how experiences, no matter big or small, make up the person that you are and how you both perceive and are perceived by the world,” Jordana says of the new single. “I want to be the multi-genre queen, for real. I don’t just want to be this indie girl. I just want to make a lot of cool shit.” Whilst some (us) may have vegetated courtesy of their self-isolated 2020, others – namely singer-songwriter Jordana had a very productive stint. What began as the release of her debut album Classical Notions of Happiness soon developed into the release of two new EPs, Something to Say and To You, later combined as her sophomore outing Something to Say to You (smart). Dropped in the middle of the year, “Big” is a perfect introduction to the Kansas artist’s quirky sound with its bubbling beats and chunky, gurning bassline. Think Warpaint at their poppiest, and you’ll dig it.
Jordana shared an EP titled Something To Say via Grand Jury Music in July. It was the first of a two-part EP series, with her follow-up To You arriving shortly after. Her debut album Classical Notions of Happiness has plenty of folk and lo-fi pop moments as well as stripped-back indie-pop ones, and Jordana’s music has only become more dense since then. Something To Say is full of richly produced, hooky indie-pop—each song brimming with intriguing textures.
Fried synths and warm guitar tones hover over bulky, glitchy beats, and there’s never a flat moment. The six-track EP’s sonic magnetism is due in part to producer MELVV, who also worked on “Crunch,” a standout track from her re-released debut album. Jordana’s stylish, airy vocals have never sounded better as they float effortlessly like plush clouds.
“I Guess This Is Life” from the To You EP and the Something To Say To You LP.
West Lothian’s The Snuts have been creating a buzz throughout this previous year, capping off the year with a run of sold out dates. They issued their “Manhattan Project” single in September and have already lined up shows at Austin’s SXSW . The Snuts released their raucous, hook laden debut album, W.L. on Parlophone Records.
Hailing from Whitburn, West Lothian, The Snuts have well and truly found their stride on W.L.. Produced by Tony Hoffer (Beck, Phoenix, M83) and recorded at the Firepit London, the album encapsulates the band’s journey from four working class kids growing up with a dream in Whitburn, to becoming one of the UK’s most exciting and vital bands of the new decade. The album opens with the poignant track ‘Top Deck’, winding through a voyage of genres including the raw, rousing, hip-hop driven ‘Elephants”, heart-wrenchingly honest ‘Boardwalk’, the undeniable pop banger ‘Somebody Loves You’, the hauntingly heartfelt anthem ‘Always’ and the main stage festival ready hymn, ‘All Your Friends’.
Guitar music may be out of fashion, but Scottish band The Snuts are on course for success in 2020 with their fluid brand of blues and hip hop-driven rock. The four-piece’s debut EP reached number 14 in the charts back in March but, of course, their live dates and release schedule were halted by coronavirus. But now their debut album, WL, is slated for release in March and they have a sold-out gig at legendary Glasgow venue Barrowlands in the diary, things seem brighter.
Their debut EP, titled Mixtape, was overseen by Inflo, the producer behind Michael Kiwanuka’s Mercury Prize-winning Kiwanuka and Little Simz’ Grey Area. This should be a hint towards their evolving sound – experimental, atmospheric, raucous. Adored up and down the country for their uninhibited, sweat-drenched live shows, the band have also announced a UK tour for May/June 2021.
The only context I really have for awakebutstillinbed is seeing them open for Joyce Manor, Jeff Rosenstock, and AJJ at the Hollywood Palladium last January, an evening with a haha-what-the-fuck energy radiating from each of the bill’s four DIY punk bands as they took to the historic stage in front of a sold-out crowd. While they still seemed pretty confident onstage, the opening single to the EP awakebutstillinbed dropped on Christmas morning oozes uncertainty, with vocalist Shannon Taylor punctuating verses with “I don’t knows” before erupting into punky rasps—a considerably more existential scenario than the party vibes I first experienced the band in, though just as engaging.
Recorded in Shannon’s house, the twins’ house, the art boutiki and ally’s basement in december 2020. Thanks to chillwavve for inspiring me to write “leave” for their christmas comp, as well as martin and eric for helping us with this release. thanks to everyone who has ever supported this project, love you all, thanks for listening.
songs by Shannon. arrangements by Shannon with help from Brendan.
the following people contributed to this release: Ally Garcia – bass Brendan Gibson – guitar, synth Jpegstripes – drums, synth, piano Cat Egbert – drums Jason Hallyburton – drums Shannon Taylor – guitar, bass, vocals
Most often, forgetting can feel like a failure—a missed birthday or a neglected anniversary. But forgetting can also mean freedom, an unburdening from past twinges of pain. On her debut album, “The Joys of Forgetting”, Allegra Krieger embraces the idea of forgetting as relief.
Growing up in suburban Florida, Krieger was raised staunchly Catholic. Much of her childhood was spent in a church, where she also studied classical piano and sang in the choir. Although she was encouraged to pursue a consecrated life, she chose a different path, dissociating from religion. The following years brought continual transitions of personhood and place. From housekeeping at a Death Valley motel, to tree-planting in Georgia, she explored different sides of herself, chasing ideals yet avoiding certain truths. As she reckoned with her own malleability, she came to understand the value of leaving something behind. The solitude and disenchantment that accompanied this lifestyle gave way to introspection, yielding the songs that became the Joys of Forgetting.
Like memory itself, Krieger’s personal growth ebbs and flows across The Joys of Forgetting. She makes for an inviting companion as she connects the nonlinear dots on her journey. She lays her feelings and desires plain as she unfolds them: to find someone to confide in, to talk on the telephone, to catch up with a friend. She learns to seek comfort in patience, finding that affection is easy, but loving takes time. Her arrangements are elegant and unobtrusive, skirting her crystalline voice with acoustic guitar, curling strings, and percussion that gently tumbles. And though Krieger makes a strong case with her Joys of Forgetting, her songs leave a lasting imprint that’s a pleasure to recall over and over again.
I came to this record through the photographer of the cover and they didn’t steer me wrong here. This record starts off slow but truly builds to blow you away by the time you reach “Forgot”. Allegra’s voice is a wave of joy in a rough year. On “Welcome” her self harmonizing is gorgeous and plays well off the string section that comes in to overtake the track halfway through before it becomes a western waltz again. The arrangements of these songs are stunning. “Telephone” shimmers and glides along while Allegra calls for human connection rather than interacting through devices. The album floats along delicately until “Forgot” which just comes at you harder than anything up to that point. It ends in a glory of mashing up off-kilter drumming, an echoing of voices and slashing guitar chords that just cut right through you. “Rot” brings some welcomed rock and roll vibes to the record that continue into “Come In”, which ends in another great loud convergence by the musicians. The string section in “I’m Gonna Drive” swell as Allegra cries out “thing things you’ve been after” is heartbreaking. Allegra has a bright future ahead, this was her first LP, and it will be great to hear where she takes her arrangements and writing next.
Released August 7th, 2020
The Band: Rob Taylor on Bass Jacob Matheus on Electric Guitar Eladio Rojas on Drums
The Fat Angel Sings 