The Fat Angel Sings

Formed in Austin, Texas, Sun June released their first full-length album in 2018 titled “Years” released via Keeled Scales. In October 2020, the group announced their second full-length album. The group released that album, “Somewhere”, in 2021 again through Keeled Scales and Run for Cover. In 2023 they released their third album, “Bad Dream Jaguar”, The third album was created while Colwell and Salisbury lived 1,300 miles apart, sending demos back and forth.

Sun June’s music often feels like a shared memory – the details so close to the edge of a song that you can touch them. And as an Austin-based project, their music has also always felt strangely and specifically Texan – unhurried, long drives across an impossible expanse of openness, refractions shimmering off the pavement in the heat. Originallybased in Austin, TX-based five-piece make unhurried, expansive indie-rock songs that are delicately, almost psychedelically stretched out; time, for them, is less a constraint as much as it is a new instrument to play with, a form to bend and subvert.”

Colwell has an ear for restraint, for editing it down and embracing emptiness; Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy sounding in the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured foundation in a sense of ease. 

Years

Initially formed by Laura Colwell and Stephen Salisbury, Austin’s five-piece band successfully released their debut album “Years” in 2018. The 10-track record is about to get a second pressing on Keeled Scales 

Colwell and the band’s other primary songwriter and lyricist, Stephen Salisbury, met while working on the production of Terrence Malick’s 2017 film, Song to Song. “Stephen was an editor and I was a production assistant,” Colwell explains. “Ryan Gosling was in the movie and was bringing his guitar around when they were editing some songs. So Stephen and I usually worked late and started writing joke songs using the guitar,” “and thought ‘Let’s just keep doing this, it’s fun.’”

Younger EP

Sun June unveiled “Younger”, a 4-track digital only EP including two new songs.

Co-produced by Evan Kaspar, the first single was “Monster Moon” is already available. Warmful and mid-tempo, the regret pop song showcases a dreamy self-reflection on a failed relationship.

Somewhere

Though the group trades on the “regret pop” tagline, Colwell explains that her and Salisbury’s songwriting has turned to their own current relationship as romantic partners and their future. “You can’t really regret the present or the future,” she says. “We are trying to live more in the moment. I deal with grief and Stephen deals with sobriety. And then there’s our relationship in the middle of that.”

One of “Somewhere’s” central songs, “Karen O,” seems to deal in the past of a night spent wandering around New York City. Catching a Karen O live set, ambling across the Brooklyn Bridge to the city, missing phone calls from a parent, and climbing the stairs to an ex-lover’s apartment are palpable in their detail. Aside from admitting that Cat Power’s “Manhattan” was a blueprint for the album, Colwell says the remainder of “Karen O” is purely fictional. “I’m sorry. It’s a dream,” she admits. “The song is about heartache and having a hard time letting go. And I’ve done that in New York, but we never saw Karen O. A friend of mine has and heard the song and said, ‘Were we at the same show?’”

The album’s opener, “Bad With Time,” also has cinematic images, borrowing Neil Young’s line from “Unknown Legend” about a woman set free on her Harley Davidson out on the desert highway. Colwell admits that her and Salisbury’s time spent in film has impacted their writing. “I was realizing the other day that all of our songs are a little montage-y,” she says. The way they put the listener into the set of the song makes this particularly evident.

Bad Dream Jaguar

There’s a constant push-and-pull in Sun June’s songwriting. Vocalist and band leader Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury have always shared song writing duties since the band’s inception, but “Bad Dream Jaguar” is the first time that they collaborated from afar. Salisbury left Texas for North Carolina in 2020, shifting the way the band recorded, and beginning a long-distance relationship between him and Colwell. It gave more room to Sun June’s other members – lead guitarist Michael Bain (whose lithe guitar parts Colwell credits as imparting that “dust ol’ Texas sound”), bassist Justin Harris, and drummer Sarah Schultz – to explore other projects. And for Colwell, it made it easier to explore song writing as an individual, living and writing songs alone.

It also meant there was a newfound privacy to these songs, as Colwell and Salisbury wrote songs for and about one another some 1300 miles apart. The distance strained their relationship, and they poured those struggles into songs. When Salisbury sent the first iteration of “Washington Square” to Colwell, it felt like a gut punch – a, “Damn, he’s really going through it” moment. It felt heavier to be collaborating and songwriting in this way, not inhabiting the same room but instead the same lonely sadness. But it also allowed for a new type of intimacy. And it was a comfort in some ways, to be allowed into someone else’s psyche and pain.

Colwell left Texas in 2022 for North Carolina. The record was recorded in spurts, the first Sun June LP that wasn’t just born out of five musicians in a room. It took five or six sessions across a number of studios, with the bulk of it coming together at producer Duszynski’s Dandy Sounds. They also invited in more collaborators to flesh out their cinematic, spacious sound. Here, the existing line-up of Colwell, Salisbury, Bain, Harris, and Schultz, alongside guitars/vocals from new touring member Santiago Dietche, is built out with woodwinds from Alexis Marsh, Justin Morris’ pedal steel, and Duszynski’s guitars and synths. It required trust in new collaborators, and in each other, in a new process.

The bulk of the record was written after the release of 2021’s “Somewhere”. “Bad Dream Jaguar” is the most disparate yet, a collage of soundscapes, of fever dreams. It toes the line between country and pop, like putting on a cowboy hat and sitting in your bedroom alone, or getting all dressed up in glitter and just staying home.

Colwell has an ear for restraint, for editing it down and embracing emptiness; Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy sounding in the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured foundation in a sense of ease. The layers on “Bad Dream Jaguar” don’t tangle they float, sheaths of divergent and luminescent sonics hanging together as the sun goes down, darkness seeping in.

“Bad Dream Jaguar” exists in the chasm between giving up and going all-in. And a flicker of quiet confidence powering through, a small hopeful glow at its core.

• Years (2018, Keeled Scales)
• Somewhere (2021, Keeled Scales, Run for Cover)
• Bad Dream Jaguar (2023, Run for Cover)

The definitive documentary on legendary metal icon Ronnie James Dio.  Dio’s story transcends the standard rock documentary. Beautifully highlighting both his powerful voice and his gentle heart, “DIO: Dreamers Never Die” delves deep into the singer’s incredible rise from ’50s doo-wop crooner to his early rock days in Ritchie Blackmore’s RAINBOW, replacing Ozzy Osbourne in BLACK SABBATH, and finally cementing his rock star status with DIO.

The first documentary to be authorized by the artist’s estate, the film incorporates never-before-seen footage and personal photos from Dio’s archives as well as offering intimate scenes with his closest peers, family, and friends, including Wendy Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, Vinny Appice, Lita Ford, Rob Halford, Sebastian Bach, Eddie Trunk and Jack Black, as they bring viewers inside the life of one of rock and roll’s true heroes.

Taking inspiration from the likes of Mazzy Star and The Smiths, Bleach Lab have fused their own introspective yet emotionally frenetic soundscape, After forging their trio of explorative indie-rock EPs during the isolation of lockdown, Bleach Lab found the recording of their debut album ‘Lost In A Rush of Emptiness’ live in a room together to be a transformative experience, which garnered them critical acclaim from Clash, Dork, DIY and fans alike upon its release in September 2023. 

Bleach Lab are now back with ‘Drown’, produced by new guitarist Louis Takooree alongside drummer Kieran Weston. Bassist Josh Longman describes, “We spent a lot of time writing to try to progress our sound, whilst also staying true to what we love. We wanted to challenge ourselves to write something a bit grungier with this one.”

Lead vocalist Jenna Kyle adds, “’Drown’ is about being stuck in a toxic cycle of going back to the same person, or always ending up with the same person even though they may not be that good for you. It’s trying to break out of that cycle and find the confidence to move on”.

Further elevating their reputation with their dynamic live shows – which have included a headline show at London’s Scala and international festivals across the US and Europe – Bleach Lab are gearing up for a special show in London on 19th February at the Lower Third, to showcase the new music the band have been working on.

released November 13th, 2024
Produced by Louis Takooree & Kieran Weston (Bleach Lab)

A uniquely patient and indifferent artist setting out to serve The Music, not The Machine, Sacramented: Extended (2024) is an extension of 2023’s “Sacramented”, produced by Micah Tawlks in Nashville. This extension includes a lost track from the Peptalk sessions, remixes by Boston’s drab and LA’s Benjamin Lazar Davis, as well as 4 voice memos floating in and around the record.

Molly Parden’s third full-length album, “Sacramented“, feels wholly realized in the way that only the lengthy and deep passage of time can bring about. With the ideation of some cuts, like single “Dandy Blend,” dating as far back as 2016, the singer-songwriter’s lush yet gentle voice tiptoes through the 39-minute collection with gravity and grace as she vulnerably persists at the one thing anyone can ever meaningfully do when one thinks and writes about love—ask questions. In full collaboration with Nashville staple Micah Tawlks (COIN, Hayley Williams, The Brook & The Bluff), “Sacramented” earthy and playfully poignant textures bubble up while tasteful breakbeats and expansive string arrangements reveal themselves with purpose.

Alongside Parden’s carefully constructed lyrical contributions, each song grounds and envelops itself in a clarity and warmth that becomes essential, much like an every-morning cup of coffee.

released December 13th, 2024

Sometimes the human voice is all you need, communicating something essential about our drive to exist together as a species, to sound our internal worlds in union, at volume. Named after an Irish term for a cloak for protection, a breastplate and a hymn, this Irish quartet’s second album is incredibly simple on paper: a collection of 10 songs about bold women featuring four exceptional female singers (Méabh Meir, Lily Power, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch). But these interpretations of songs such as “The Newry Highwayman”, “Blackwaterside” and “Death and the Lady”, produced by John “Spud” Murphy (who also produces Lankum), are astonishingly mighty and moving.

Landless are Lily Power, Meabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinead Lynch. Formed in 2013 and based in Ireland, they sing unaccompanied traditional songs in four-part harmony.

Occasional, minimal accompaniment by pipe organ, clavichord, shruti box and strings only lifts the weight of their harmonies higher.

Released 7th June on Glitterbeat Records. Traditional, arranged by Landless Recorded, mixed and produced by John ‘Spud’ Murphy

Ian Hunter continues to rock against the dying of the light. Now 85 years old and still wearing his rock’n’roll attitude like a battered badge of honour, the ex-Mott The Hoople frontman casts a weathered eye over the madness that surrounds him. ‘Am I the last man standing? Seriously…’ he barks on “Everybody’s Crazy But Me”, a pounding, Stones-ish rocker that provides the perfect framework for his eternally delinquent voice.

Surrounded for the second time by a cast of legends, including the late Jeff Beck and Taylor Hawkins, Hunter vents his spleen with heroic disdain on tracks including “Fiction”, “Kettle Of Fish” and “Weed” – ‘Humans are stupid, expensive to breed, so let them smoke weed’. But then, accompanied by Lucinda Williams, he dives into “What Would I Do Without You”, a plain-spoken love song full of tender emotional riches. He’s still the ultimate dude – young or old.

The second act to Hunter’s 2023 album “Defiance Part 1” once again finds him collaborating with his many disciples and friends: Queen’s Brian May, Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, Johnny Depp, and the late Jeff Beck and Taylor Hawkins, among them. At 84, the former Mott the Hoople frontman isn’t out to change the rulebook: “Defiance Part 2: Fiction” continues along the path Hunter has charted since the late ’60s with brimming confidence.

DEFIANCE PART 2: FICTION. AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE NOW.

The Black Crowes’ reunion couldn’t have been more badly timed. Announcing the news in late 2019, the Robinson Brothers, who hadn’t spoken to each other for six years before burying the hatchet, confirmed a continent-straddling 45-date tour of North America, scheduled to kick off the following June. Following the announcement, Chris and Rich Robinson were asked and among other things if there were plans for an album after the tour.

“I don’t know,” Chris told us. “Yeah. Maybe. I definitely think Rich and I will write songs together in our future. I don’t know how, when and where. But if Rich has songs, I’m down to hear them and do what I do. But I don’t think we can do that until we see how this goes.”

The tour was shelved and, given the often fractious and historically fragile nature of the siblings’ relationship, fans could be forgiven for wondering if the band might ever resurface. But, in late July 2021, The Black Crowes finally got the “Shake Your Money Maker” tour under way. Over the course of the next two years they played more than 100 shows. It did go well. And they did record that album.

“Happiness Bastards” is our love letter to rock’n’roll,” said Chris, announcing the news in January this year. “This album is a continuation of our story as a band,” Rich added.

It sounds like both. The Black Crowes’ first album of new material since 2009’s “Before The Frost… Until The Freeze” is an absolute peach. It’s lean, an album of real purpose. Bands usually stretch out and relax as they age, but this collection of songs is fierce. Songs get to the point quickly; no messing around. And they rock.

Opener “Bedside Manners” rattles along like the Faces playing Saturday night at the rowdiest of roadside honky-tonks. “Rats And Clowns” winds into gear quickly before propelling itself along like an out-take from “Highway To Hell”. “Cross Your Fingers” begins with deftly picked acoustic guitar, but by the 40-second mark it’s transformed into a taut rocker, wrapped around the kind of riff that might result if you put Jimmy Page and Joe Perry in a room and told them not to come out until they’d come up with something truly worthwhile.

The ghost of Malcolm Young appears again on “Wanting And Waiting’s” glam-shuffle verses, before the chorus arrives and takes it to the church. “Dirty Cold Sun” struts and swaggers. “Bleed It Dry” is hauled along by the filthiest of overdriven slide guitar riffs, a blues teetering on the edge of chaos and collapse. “Flesh Wound” is genuine power-pop, as if The Replacements have hooked up with Andrew W.K. to cover Cheap Trick. In a bar. During a riot. “Follow The Moon” swoops and swaggers, powered by the slinkiest of riffs, enlightened by a slide guitar worthy of Gregg Allman and lifted towards the heavens by the most celestial of choruses.

Honestly, it’s a miracle. Just when you think you’ve picked your favourite track, along comes another. Only on the lovely “Wilted Rose” – featuring vocals from country star Lainey Wilson – and poignant closer “Kindred Spirit” do the band do their more relaxed, ‘side two of Sticky Fingers’ thing.

You’ve heard all this before. The Stones. Zeppelin. Free. Aerosmith. The Allman Brothers. Etc. But throw in the handclaps, the gospel backing vocals, the Hammond organ, Chris Robinson’s gift for a vocal delivery that’s both ragged and righteous, and an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm, and you’re left with an album that doesn’t land too far short of their first two. It crackles with an electricity that belies the age of those involved (the band formed 40 years ago, do the math), and is a genuine return to form, in an age when many releases described as such are nothing of the sort.

“Happiness Bastards” is the sound of men getting stuff out of their systems, and having a ball as they do so. And for all the plaudits afforded the Robinsons’ post-split, pre-reunion bands, Rich’s The Magpie Salute and the Chris Robinson Brotherhood always felt like stopgaps, however sincere the ambition of those involved. The reunion is proof, if it were needed, that some things are truly more than the sum of their parts.

And therein lies the miracle of “Happiness Bastards“. After all those battles, all that rancour, all that violence, all that arguing over “horrible, stupid shit”, all those years lost to acrimony and bitterness, The Black Crowes sound completely undiminished. And everybody should know it. 

For over 20 years, The Decemberists have been one of the most original, daring, and thrilling American rock bands. Their distinctive brand of hyperliterate folk-rock set them apart from the start, releasing nine full-length albums that are unbound by genre and highly ambitious. Now the beloved indie band is back with their first new album in six years, “As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again” – not only the longest Decemberists album to date (and their first intentional, proper double-LP) but also their most empathetic and accessible, its 13 songs like semaphores of mutual recognition for our fraught times and faint hope.

Reuniting with producer Tucker Martine (R.E.M., Neko Case, Sufjan Stevens) who began working with the band on “The Crane Wife”, the album features R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, The Shins’ James Mercer and Lizzie Ellison on background vocals. This, songwriter Colin Meloy will tell you proudly, is the best Decemberists album and perhaps the ultimate realization of 22 years of work.

In many ways, “As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again” feels like an aptly titled renewal for The Decemberists. The first full-length release on YABB Records, the band’s own label, after a run of nearly two decades with Capitol. As they were once, here are the Decemberists again, now an independent band empowered by singing stories that sound instantly familiar and convey some bit of hard-won wisdom.

Produced by Chris Coady and written by DIIV (pronounced Dive), “Frog in Boiling Water”, the band’s fourth full-length LP is a collection of snapshots that explores the brutal realities of end-stage capitalism and overwhelming technological advance. Across 10 dark and dazzling tracks, DIIV documents the collapse from various angles with unusual sensitivity and depth of purpose while expanding their grand, hypnotic shoegaze, to create a transportive, sensual work of hope, beauty and renewal.

“Frog In Boiling Water”, produced by Chris Coady, was a four-year process that nearly broke the band before the album was completed. With an aim to push their sound, make a record that challenged them, and treat the band as a democracy for the first time, DIIV began an ambitious journey, both individually and collectively. This journey left their relationships with one another fraying, with the many complex dynamics of family, friendship and finances entangled, coupled with suspicions, resentments, bruised egos and anxious questions. They ultimately found their way through, and the result is 10 songs that mine a new lyrical and musical depth, those two halves mirroring one another inside a reflective and immersive whole. It is a mesmeric testament to enduring, to envisioning anything else on the other side while you remain here, in the slowly heating water of right now.

“Frog in Boiling Water,” both the title and the themes of the record, reference “The Boiling Frog” in Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B. The band explains, “If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.”

“We understand the metaphor to be one about a slow, sick, and overwhelmingly banal collapse of society under end-stage capitalism, the brutal realities we’ve maybe come to accept as normal. That’s the boiling water and we are the frogs. The album is more or less a collection of snapshots from various angles of our modern condition which we think highlights what this collapse looks like and, more particularly, what it feels like.” 

released May 24th, 2024

Wussy are an American five-piece fronted by songwriters Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker & backed by Mark Messerly, Joe Klug & John Erhardt. Bridging the gap between The Band & Sonic Youth, Wussy continue in the tradition of bands with multiple writers & singers. Cleaver & Walker offer radically different perspectives that blend in seamless fashion – usually blanketed inside layers of noise.

Wussy are back with their first LP in six years. The aptly titled “Cincinnati Ohio” – out November 15th on Shake It Records – is the first album from the five-piece since 2018’s “What Heaven Is Like”. Wussy are known among critics and their loyal fanbase for releasing albums of lyrically deft pop songs awash within a blanket of noise – a sound that critic Robert Christgau has described as “merging the Velvet Underground and the Flying Burrito Brothers” (SPIN, 2013). And it seems “Cincinnati Ohio” is no exception – punctuated with many of the familiar Wussy sounds: a jangly mix of electric and acoustic guitars; the duelling lead vocals of Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker; Joe Klug and Mark Messerly’s driving rhythm section; and warm rolling waves of pedal steel – this time split between late Wussy guitar player John Erhardt and newest member Travis Talbert. On “Cincinnati Ohio” the band leans heavily into its penchant for cinematic Americana landscapes, drawing stylistic inspiration from influences such as Calexico, Mazzy Star, R.E.M., Sun Volt, and the Mekons (whose Jon Langford painted the album’s cover art). This Midwestern wall-of-sound method clearly works for Wussy, who according to The Ringer, has been “quietly crafting one of the great rock catalogue’s of the decade.”

WUSSY IS
Chuck Cleaver – guitar, vocals, piano
Lisa Walker – guitar, vocals, synth
Mark Messerly – bass, accordion
Joe Klug – drums, percussion, synth
John Erhardt – pedal steel, guitar (tracks 8, 9)
Travis Talbert – pedal steel (tracks 2, 3, 4, 5)

with John Hoffman – synth on tracks 3, 5

released November 15th, 2024