The Fat Angel Sings

In the age of streaming platforms and social media, stimulation is easy to come by. “Real Pleasure”, however—the kind that feeds our soul rather than draining it—is in shockingly short supply. The second LP by Thus Love is full of that kind of nourishing euphoria. It swoons, shakes, and swaggers with a combination of grit and sensuality that’s been hard to locate in music lately. It’s called, fittingly, “All Pleasure”. 

The album came out of a period of dizzying growth and transformation for the group. When they began work on it, vocalist/guitarist Echo Mars and drummer Lu Racine were still reeling from the runaway success of their 2022 debut “Memorial” a set of lush, elegant post-punk that brought praise from The Fader, the NME, and the Guardian—along with processing the departure of the founding bassist. 

With “All Pleasure”, the band re-formed with new bassist Ally Juleen and guitarist/keyboardist Shane Blank. The group convened in a barn in the woods that Mars had transformed into a recording studio, and kept one rule at the forefront: “If it’s not joyful, don’t do it.” What emerged from that mission is a stunningly gorgeous album, full of big, arcing melodies and a range of kinky stylistic twists that will surprise listeners who know the group just for “Memorial’s” chorus-drenched 80s style psychedelia. “Birthday Song” gives grungy glam rock with a transcendent hook that underlines Echo’s lyrical tribute to communal joy. “Get Stable” transmutes existential panic into sharp-angled punk pop. 

The anthemic title track is something like the album’s mission statement, paying tribute to the power of joyful creation. Mixed by Matthew Hall and Rich Costey and mastered by Bob Weston, “All Pleasure” was recorded as live as possible, capturing the sheer infectious ecstasy that comes from sharing space together and making a divine racket. Put on “All Pleasure“, tap into the energy that Thus Love is putting out, and you just might find an escape.

Samantha Crain returned with the new single “Ridin’ Out The Storm” and a sprawling solo headline tour. The latest offering from the acclaimed Oklahoma-based singer-songwriter continues a comeback initiated by “Dragonfly” in September, marking the first string of new studio cuts from the artist since her 2021 EP “I Guess We Live Here Now”. Crain will celebrate the occasion come 2025 with a massive 42-date headline tour and a seven-stop Europe sprint.

“Ridin’ Out The Storm” has a charm only Crain can conjure, balancing grit and wit in an ode to endurance. Her verses are hard-packed earth, built from dense imagery and strewn with life’s rocky trials that never break her stride. Her rambling, matter-of-fact delivery fits her prose perfectly, and she lets her vocal talents fly on the chorus. She sings, “No reason, no rhyme/ Your guess is as good as mine/ Wipe it off and go inside/ Batten down the hatches.”

“I was watching this TV show called The Great one night and this one line caught me,” Crain offers on the origins of the song. “I’m sure it is based on some older, canonical text but, basically, it was this: ‘Let it go. It is a storm. They will never stop coming, but pass through and away. They always will.’ To me, that seemed like the best way I could sum up the gist of living and I wanted to write an expansive song about how that has played out in my life.”

Crain’s latest track follows the propulsive “Dragonfly,” for which she steered further into indie rock territory and earned a shoutout from Iggy Pop on his BBC6 Radio program. These twin entries arrive as the Choctaw artist’s first offerings since her 2023 cover of “Time After Time” for a pivotal moment in Reservation Dogs, and her first original recordings since 2021’s “Pick Apart.”

Still a hell of a group name that the four men from Bolton Upon Dearne have chosen for their band. You can visit artifacts from the Bronze Age or start a music group in that village. Brothers Kiaran and Brandon Crook, along with Alex Procter and Trent Jackson, So far four albums have already been shared with the public, of which “Live For The Moment” from 2017 is by far the most popular. A new album is currently ready for release and “Bones” is the next single after “Death Of Me” and “Man On The Loose” that may convince fans to buy this future vinyl.

The new single is certainly convincing. The song starts with a mega fat guitar sound on which rock-hard, dry drums are immediately put. The song completely erupts after just under fifteen seconds and we are listening to a disc that is made to make an audience go completely on a crowded meadow or a packed arena. It sometimes seems to us to be a trick that only English bands know and can do: make anthems that are roared along by tens of thousands of vocal cords. The bulldozer that this fresh single actually is, resembles the pumped-up songs of Muse. After the third minute, the gear shifts from fifth gear to second gear, but the gear lever is quickly put back into the highest clutch to let the song expand into a short climax. This is very promising for soon when album number five appears on the horizon!

‘Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road’ features 12 Beatles songs that include classic hits such as ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ and ‘Something.

‘ Williams and her band also take on beloved deeper tracks such as ‘I’m So Tired,’ ‘I’ve Got A Feeling,’ and ‘Yer Blues.’ Being raised on the blues in the South, the latter is a song Williams was clearly meant to sing. Recorded at The Beatles’ legendary studio in London, the new collection serves as Vol. 7 of her celebrated ‘Lu’s Jukebox” series and is the first new volume in almost four years.

While many great artists have recorded in the hallowed Abbey Road Studios, as it turns out, Williams is the first major artist to actually record Beatles’ songs there aside from the Fab Four themselves. A master of Americana, Lucinda Williams has done a lot of great things in her career. Among the most prestigious is “Lucinda Williams Sings The Beatles From Abbey Road“, in which she covers tracks that the Fab Four originally recorded at London’s world famous Abbey Road studios back in the Sixties, from ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ to ‘Let It Be’. It also makes her the only artist to actually perform these songs within the studio’s hallowed walls other than The Beatles themselves.

As an acclaimed, award-winning singer/songwriter for more than four decades, Williams’ music has been highly influential and covered by a multitude of artists. Williams is also an extraordinary interpreter who, like all great interpreters, has the ability to inhabit a song and make it her own. She does just that throughout this selection of Beatles tracks, as she has done on each ‘Lu’s Jukebox’ volume.

Stephen Duffy and the Lilac Time were gloriously out of time as the 90s began. Their brand of soft pop with folky overtones and nimble guitar work wasn’t only out of fashion, it was barely a blip on the radar. Creation’s Alan McGee was still a fan though, and he signed the group to his label and set them to work on “Astronauts”. Fittingly, it made nary a nod to the prevailing gazes, grunges, or raves of the day. Instead, it featured Duffy and new sidekick Sagat Guirey – who had replaced Nick Duffy — unspooling a clutch of lovely tunes set to subtle backing made up of gently plucked Spanish guitars, gentle vocal harmonies, soothing synth pads, and the politest of drum beats.

The opening tracks are a bit of a red herring as “In Iverna Gardens” does indeed have insistent drums and some blippy synths, while “Hats Off Here Comes the Girl” sports some groovy backward guitar riffing. They are still far off the beaten track; far too pretty and sweet to compete with the baggy hordes.

Most of the album is pitched somewhere between the amorphous dream folk of tracks like “Fortunes”, the fragile storytelling of “Grey Skies and Work Things”, the loping country pop of “The Whisper of Your Mind”, and the restrained psychedelia of “Sunshine’s Daughter.”

Centered by Duffy’s reliably warm and welcoming vocals, it’s a set of songs that is easy to appreciate for their craft while also letting the gentle warmth flood in. Of course, this whole discussion of the album’s placement securely outside the mainstream ignores “Dreaming,” a soft pop song given a techno remix by labelmates Hypnotone. Even given the 303 squelches and funky drums, Duffy’s able to make it sound pastoral somehow, much in the way that Ultramarine was able to make thier synths sound like they were made of paper and wood.

It’s a neat trick that somehow doesn’t ruin the mood so precisely set by the rest of the album; it serves to enhance it. This was the last Lilac Time record for a few years, with Duffy feeling like maybe the band had run its course. This version of the band ends on a very high mark with “Astronauts“. [The 2024 deluxe reissue of the album features an album’s worth of demos recorded by Duffy solo at his house; mostly of songs that made the record but also two — ‘We Came From Anywhere’ and ‘You Come By – that didn’t. It also comes with a disc of live recordings made during the final run of shows for this edition of the band, pulling songs from throughout their career to date.

Housed in a lovely sleeve design and paired with a lengthy essay written by Needle Mythology owner Pete Paphides, this is a definitive look at an important, often glossed over album, of both Stephen Duffy’s career and the era in which it was issued.

Christopher Owens, the former frontman of 2010s indie figureheads Girls, returns with his new solo album. The tone here is profoundly impacted by the tragedies that struck Owens in the years prior, such as the loss of a bandmate and homelessness, a perfect partner to the melancholic, ’60s influenced jangle pop of Girls which the songwriter returns to.

“I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair” is the fourth studio album by American singer-songwriter Christopher Owens. available through True Panther Records. It is his first album in nearly a decade, following the release of “Chrissybaby Forever“ in 2015. Owens co-produced the album mainly in San Francisco with Doug Boehm. It was supported by three singles: “I Think About Heaven”, “No Good” and “This Is My Guitar”.

Released on October 18th, 2024,

Baby pink vinyl LP on True Panther.

The Clean‘s influence is everywhere. It always was. All the guitar bands from Rolling Blackouts to Ducks Ltd back to Pavement, back further to the Flying Nun scene all owe something to The Clean. Although they didn’t release an album during their first incarnation they more than made up for it later on. “Modern Rock” was their second album of the 1990s and now comes revamped for its 30th anniversary. 

LP on Merge. Remastered from the original tapes by Tex Houston.

Watch Gillian Welch and David Rawlings perform three songs from “Woodland” On Friday, November 8th, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ 10th studio album, “Woodland”, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Folk Album, and the lead track, “Empty Trainload of Sky,” received a nomination for Best Americana Performance. “Woodland” marks the 10th full-length studio album for the duo, who have been releasing their albums using alternating names based on “whoever was singing lead,” as Rawlings explains. With “Woodland”, Welch and Rawlings put both their names on it — along with the name of the studio where they not only record, but also the space they saved after it was struck by a tornado in 2020.

While in St. Paul for two nights of concerts at the Fitzgerald Theater, Welch and Rawlings walked over to The Current where Radio Heartland host and producer Mike Pengra welcomed them, along with bassist Paul Kowert, for a studio session. After playing a selection of songs from “Woodland”, Welch and Rawlings stuck around for a conversation with Mike Pengra.

Watch the performances above.

Songs Performed 00:00:00 Hashtag 00:03:43 Empty Trainload of Sky 00:07:10 Howdy Howdy 00:11:10 Interview with host Mike Pengra All songs from Gillian Welch & David Rawlings’ 2024 album, “Woodland”, available on ‪aconyrecords‬.

Musicians Gillian Welch – guitar, vocals David Rawlings – guitar, vocals Paul Kowert – bass

Forced into a rethink during the pandemic from his favoured jamming-it-out-in-the-studio process of creation, James Petralli reformulates White Denim on their twelfth studio album. Functionally titled “12”, it’s arguably the least spontaneous and most obviously ‘planned’ White Denim album, yet it’s of a piece with the band’s scuzzy, off-the-cuff garage/psych rock explorations of the past.

The songs on ’12’ are intricate, hi-tech and forward-facing, yet also somehow still of a piece with the questing ambition, rootsy swing and uplifting way with melody we’ve come to adore about Petralli’s music. It’s always been hard to keep pace with James Petralli’s group, ever since they first exploded out of Austin, Texas in ’08 with hyper-kinetic post-punk bangers like “Shake Shake Shake” and “I Start To Run“. There was delicious romance in the original trio’s MO, as they hatched intrepid sounds together via lengthy jams in a 1940s Spartan trailer parked up in woodland outside the city. James duly raced on through shifting line-ups and kaleidoscopic shades of soul, jazz and Southern rock, always with a feel of in-the-moment authenticity.

As for so many musicians, the pandemic forced Petralli into a radical rethink in both life and creative process. Going into White Denim’s twelfth long- player, he relocated his family to Los Angeles, and, barred from the usual workouts “on the floor” with his latest group members under COVID, he plunged deep into the science of assembling tracks digitally, with contributions from players he’d sometimes never even meet.

Shower Curtain are a New York group reviving the ’90s shoegaze trend in emotive new ways. Their debut album layers its dense, reverb-washed guitars around equally abstract and enigmatic vocals from bandleader Victoria Winter, who introspectively details early adulthood amid the tension of the bustling metropolis.

Cloudy clear vinyl LP on Fire Talk.

released October 18th, 2024