The Fat Angel Sings

From the teen emerging out of Britain’s mid-00s indie folk scene (alongside Noah & The Whale, Mumford & Sons and Mystery Jets), to becoming the preternaturally gifted heir apparent to Joni Mitchell, Laura Marling has subtly evolved her sharp examinations on life, love, and womanhood across seven albums.

On 2020’s excellent “Songs For Our Daughter”, she spun gentle tunes for an imaginary child. Last February, Marling actually became a mother and now her eighth album, “Patterns in Repeat”, finds the 34-year-old meditating on parenthood.

From the opener ‘Child of Mine’ one of the most gorgeous things Marling has ever made – to the title track, an ode to her kid to hear in the future, that new-found responsibility has seeped into Marling’s intimate, poetic songcraft.

The record was largely written and recorded while Marling’s baby daughter was nearby, inspiring a hushed atmosphere. As such, these beat-less songs augment Marling’s sublime voice and finger-picked guitar serenades with little more than delicate choral vocals and soft string arrangements (inspired by Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story).

The lilting piano of the tender ‘No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Can’ could rock an infant to sleep, then ‘Lullaby’ literally does what it says on the tin. The musical serenity is tempered with Marling’s sincere lyrics, in which parenthood has prompted a profound awareness of mortality and wider questions about lineage.

The aching ‘Looking Back’ was written more than 50 years ago by Marling’s father – then in his 20s – and concern an old man, “a prisoner in this chair”, keenly aware his best years and memories are well and truly behind him.

The death of one of her father’s close friends inspired ‘Your Girl’, which conflates concerns for the four daughters they left behind with Marling’s own deeper appreciation of her relationship with her parents.

‘Caroline’ has the air of Leonard Cohen or The National, sung from the perspective of an aging gentleman fondly remembering an old flame like some cherished, half-forgotten song: ‘It went la, la, la, la/something something Caroline’. It’s the kind of cheekily self-reflexive song writing that only an established professional of Marling’s calibre could pull off.

Peacefully paced and gracefully candid, this album is the sound of Marling embracing her transition from one life to another. She’s also gazing over the bigger picture and finding familial patterns that cycle through generations. Most poignantly, on the album’s musical siblings, ‘Patterns’ and ‘Patterns In Repeat’. On the latter track, Marling addresses her daughter in tessellating, tumbling melodies: ‘I want you to know that I gave it up willingly / nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me.’

It’s a heartwarming declaration from someone who has never compromised her independence or integrity.

In fact, Marling was initially ambivalent about having children at all, spooked by the stereotype that it would diminish her artistic freedom. “If you’ve ever been worried that your creativity will suffer if you have a baby — it won’t,” she’s plainly stated. That said, raising her daughter has shifted all other things in the singer-songwriter’s life to secondary priorities.

“I definitely, absolutely don’t want to go on tour again. I just didn’t realise I had this incredible, massive gift for care,” says Marling, who further asserts in interviews she’s entertaining the idea of winding up her career entirely. If that, tragically, proves to be true, then “Patterns in Repeat” would prove an idyllic swan song to an impressive body of work; a testament that instead of motherhood robbing women of their artistry, it can help it blossom.

This brief but impactful new EP embraces the sounds of ’60s and ’70s folk music across five instantly-timeless songs Joan Shelley has been relatively quiet in the public sphere since the release of her excellent 2022 album “The Spur”, and we’ve since learned that’s due in part to a couple major life changes: she gave birth to her daughter and moved from the place she was raised in rural Kentucky. Throughout all of that, she’s written five new songs that make up her brief but impactful new EP “Mood Ring“. Made with contributions from James Elkington, Nathan Salsburg, Julia Purcell, Lou Krippenstapel, and Jim Marlowe, the EP is the latest in a long line of instantly-timeless records from Joan, and it captures all the same magic that we’ve come to expect from her.

True to Joan’s usual form, it echoes ’60s/’70s folk singers like Joni Mitchell and Sandy Denny while fitting in nicely with a range of likeminded contemporaries–anything from Jessica Pratt to Bonny Light Horseman to Joanna Newsom–and the songs feel like classics that you’ve known your whole life. It’s a type of music that never really goes out of style, and every new Joan Shelley release reminds you that she’s one of this genre’s most reliably strong songwriters around.

After nearly a decade since her last solo album, Gillian Welch and her lifelong collaborator David Rawlings returned in 2020 with the Grammy-winning covers album “All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone)”–the first album officially credited to both of them–and four years later, they returned with their first joint album of original music, “Woodland”. Often times, “Woodland” fills the room with nothing more than the warmth of their acoustic guitars and voices. Other times, gorgeous strings and some light drumming help flesh things out. Throughout it at all, Gillian and David deliver a collection of folk songs as remarkable as anything on their timeless classics like “Time (The Revelator)” and “Soul Journey“. Coming off an album on which some of the material was written over a hundred years ago, the original music of “Woodland” captures a similar feeling, sounding like the past and the future all at once.

Almost three decades after their first, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings make a record that takes what they’ve learned in song writing, what they’ve listened to, and a bit of life experience too, and turns it all into an album of many, many highs.

released August 23rd, 2024

Allegra Krieger has been busy; her fifth album, “Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine” arrived just over a year after last year’s great “I Keep My Feet On The Fragile Plane”, and less than a year after its collection of b-sides. It’s also a clear step forward from “Fragile Plane“, incorporating a wider range of sounds and collaborators into her sombre, ’70s-folk-inspired sound, from the fully fleshed out indie rock of “Never Arriving” to “How Do You Sleep”, which is scorched with noisy guitar. Krieger’s juxtapositions of NYC as a place where beauty and tragedy live side by side are sharp as ever — she calls the city “my favourite place in the whole wide world” on “Into Eternity,” but it’s also where she escaped a fire in her Chinatown apartment building that killed four of her neighbours last summer, inspiring “One or the Other.” Her incisive observations have the same quiet staying power of her melodies, and both stick around long after you’ve first heard them. 

Allegra Krieger (vox, guitar, piano) Kevin Copeland (bass), Jacob Matheus (guitar), Will Alexander (drums)

released September 13th, 2024

All songs written by Allegra Krieger and recorded at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, New York. November 2023

Broadcast’s last release, “Distant Call” opens with appropriate poignancy, with a demo version of ‘Tears In The Typing Pool’ from “Tender Buttons“, the band’s third album. Coloured by dreamy melancholy, the song centres on the idea of letting go – the key theme to its parent album, which was released shortly after the death of singer Trish Keenan’s father. 

Delivered through the pink noise of four-track tape, the lulling ballad takes one to a fluid temporal realm where serotinal 60s baroque pop fragility merges with the urban balladry of Elliott Smith. The undulating pace, punctuated by soft downstrokes on acoustic guitar, is steady, just like the ticking clock or the passing time. 

Broadcast ceased to be in 2011 when Trish Keenan died from the H1N1 flu. We’ll never truly know what might’ve been, but “Spell Blanket” collects demos she and bandmate James Cargill had made from 2006 – 2009 following their final studio album, 2005’s “Tender Buttons”. Most of these 26 songs fall firmly into “song sketch” territory, not more than Trish and a guitar or keyboard, and sometimes it’s just her singing into a tape recorder (or answering machine) but her voice and melodies still have the power to bewitch even without Broadcast’s full sound lab at full power. “Distant Call“, meanwhile, offers up demos from 2000 – 2006, with skeletal versions of songs fans would come to know and love. Any chance to hear more from Keenan is welcome and worthy of cherishing.

“Distant Call” follows May’s “Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006-2009“, which looked into what would be the collective’s fifth album, built out of the demos that Keenan left after her tragic passing in 2011 at the age of 42. The singer had contracted pneumonia during the band’s tour in Australia. Though the band understandably ceased to be, Broadcast co-founder James Cargill announced that the demos left by Trish would form a new album. The resulting record was built of sonic ephemera from seance-like recitations and sketches, featuring everything from cut-up lyrics to more developed compositions that showed a quirky psych and freak-folk flavour. “Distant Call“, however, reflects on previously released tracks as relics from an unreachable and, indeed, distant past. The ghostly sound of demo recordings emphasises the record as a farewell to the band and a memorial to Keenan. Notably, “Distant Call” is released on the singer’s birthday, 28th September.

Trish Keenan’s softly intoning vocals were the defining stylistic element of Broadcast’s sound, where pagan folk sensibility meets quirky psychedelia. Originally from The Future Crayon, ‘Still Feels Like Tears’ is more instant, channelling the vulnerability and tenderness of Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day and nursery rhymes. The combination of psych and folk is best captured on beguiling ‘Come Back To Me’, a hypnotic arpeggio-led chant of a song, bringing to mind The Mock Turtles’ cover of ‘The Willow Song’ from The Wicker Man. This is one of the two previously unheard tracks. The second is ‘Please Call To Book’, recorded by Keenan in the wake of the Let’s Write A Song project where Broadcast fans were encouraged to send lyrics on a postcard. 

Whilst it is somewhat overused in the contemporary culture framework, the term hauntology inevitably comes to mind for those entering the realm of Broadcast. Having initially emerged as a vehicle for their appreciation for the futuristic music of the 1960s, Broadcast boldly traversed temporal dimensions. Both Cargill and Keenan had attended a psychedelic revival night at Birmingham’s Sensateria Club where the two heard the first and only album by The United States and America, originally released in 1968 and later described by Keenan as a “bible”. 

The core of “Distant Call”, however, is the material from the band’s most mature albums “Haha Sound” and “Tender Buttons”. Both were more experimental and less retro-oriented than their debut Noise Made By People, making references from John Barry to the Doctor Who soundtrack. Talking to Stool Pigeon, Keenan said that unlike the first album “Ha Ha Sound” was like a jewellery box, full of sparkling things”. It is therefore remarkable to hear charmingly plain versions of initially lush sounding ‘O How I Miss You’ and the dizzyingly ecstatic waltz of ‘Ominous Cloud’. 

Still, the minimalist folky sound recalls another earlier project of Trish Keenan – her duo Hayward Winters also featuring Birmingham musician Jude Owens. Given that the narrative of folk music disobeys the concept of time, this too is intrinsically ghostly. The haunting nature of these stripped-down demo versions is reinforced by the spectral presence of the singer, whose persona has inevitably undergone mythologisation akin to other prematurely deceased artists. Keenan’s interest in the occult, her unusual childhood (in an interview with Ben Cardew of Stool Pigeon the artist said that she had been brought up by a sex worker) and her retromaniac stance come to the fore. It’s interesting to see how the media’s image of Broadcast transformed after Keenan’s passing – changing from cult band to something “quietly beguilingly influential,” as The Guardian’s obituary of Keenan put it, citing tributes from Graham Coxon and The Decemberists’ frontman Colin Meloy. 

Nevertheless, in juxtaposition with the complexity of Broadcast’s studio albums, “Distant Call” is a reminder of how different the image an artist offers through their music can be from their personality. “Keenan would send her friends CDs of music she’d discovered or TV shows she had enjoyed”, wrote Stephen Worthy in The Guardian a few days after the singer’s death. “Life was an exercise in discovery, and she wanted to share it with everyone”. After her passing, a link to a freshly-made compilation of psych and world music was posted to the public on Twitter. Keenan had made it for a friend who received it before the band went to Australia. The existence of these demos suggests that she treated her audience, too, as friends with whom she was eager to share, whether via songs, memories or her physical presence.

This Jingle-janglin gypsy tornado of sound hailing from Charleston, West Virginia.

No Depression says, “No one, and I mean no one, is doing what Sierra Ferrell is doing, be it in her songwriting, arrangements, or delivery,” with her spellbinding voice and time-bending sensibilities, Ferrell makes music that’s as fantastically vagabond as the artist herself. On “Trail Of Flowers”, her highly-anticipated follow up to, “Long Time Coming“, Ferrell shares a dozen songs beautifully unbound by genre or era, instantly transporting her audience to an infinitely more enchanted world. 

The decade-long surge of non-mainstream country artists has been decidedly dude-heavy—it’s Zachs and Jasons and Tylers just about all the way down. How refreshing, then, to experience the steady rise of Sierra Ferrell, a distinctive singer, skilled songwriter, and downright ancient soul originally from West Virginia. For years, she has made music that sounds like it should be crackling out of an antique radio: vintage jazz and ragtime, old-time fiddle tunes, rockabilly, blues, murder ballads, the occasional yodel, and so on. “Trail Of Flowers” offers more of the same, but the song=craft is sharper, the arrangements fuller and the production crisp and crystal clear. It’s a record that just sounds incredible, which only brings out all the colourful charms of Ferrell’s tunes—like precious family heirlooms polished up and properly displayed for all to see. 

Produced by Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss, Dwight Yoakam, Gillian Welch) and Eddie Spear (Zach Bryan, Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton) Other musicians featured on the album include Aksel Coe, Geoff Saunders, Billy Contreras, Joshua Rilko, Oliver Craven, and Mike Rojas, plus Nikki Lane and Lucas Nelson on background vocals for two tracks. 

Now more than ever, we need love. That’s more or less the message behind the music of Willi Carlisle, a folk singer and songwriter originally from the American Midwest, though he sounds like he’s from another time entirely. On his stunning third album “Critterland”, Carlisle empties his distinctive artistic arsenal—banjo, squeezebox, encyclopedic knowledge of old-time musical styles, even seven minutes of spoken word—and spins deeply moving tales of anguished hearts, broken families, discarded dreams, and, importantly, the beauty and deliverance of a life lived in the presence of love.

Now more than ever, we need each other. Now more than ever, we need Willi Carlisle.

For their second album, Chat Pile have zoomed out. Their 2022 debut LP “God’s Country” saw them taking a look at the dark underbelly of American society, and “Cool World” goes global by looking at disasters all around the world and how they affect each other and, ultimately, us. It’s a theme that hit especially hard this year, and Chat Pile match their global dread with a backdrop that’s even bigger, heavier, and harder to pigeonhole than their beloved debut. It ranges from somber, gothy moments to sludgy noise rock to straight-up extreme metal, with lots of other ground covered in between. In a time where it feels like things just keep getting worse, this album makes for a perfectly bleak soundtrack. 

Cool World had its work cut out, following in the footsteps of “God’s Country“, one of the most lauded noise-rock records in recent memory. With its thundering mix of sludge, metal and post-punk – centred around eerie, dissonant riffs and the guttural, anguished vocals of Raygun Busch – the album channels emotion in a more widescreen format than its predecessor. Songs like “Masc” are haunting and cathartic, blending a deepening exploration of surreal lyricism with raw, unfiltered energy.

The production is deliberately claustrophobic, intensifying the sense of unease while offering only fleeting moments of relief. “Cool World” is an unsettling, thought-provoking trip that continues Chat Pile’s exploration of existential dread, delivering a sonic experience that is as challenging as it is compelling.

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has struck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift – a portrait of an American rock band moulded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

The indie-folk-er is back with a rollicking roll of the dice – this picks right up from where ‘Down In The Weeds’ left off and slots right in amongst classics such as ‘Lifted’ and ‘Fevers & Mirrors’.’Five Dice, All Threes’ is a record of uncommon intensity and tenderness, communal exorcism and personal excavation. On the self-produced album, Bright Eyes embrace the elusive quality that has made them so enduring and influential across generations and genres, bringing their homespun sound from an Omaha bedroom to devoted audiences around the world. In Conor Oberst’s songwriting lies a promise that our loneliest thoughts and feelings can take on grander shapes when passed between friends, blasted through speakers, or shouted among crowds.

This time around, the band invites such like-minded voices onto the record with them, with notable guest appearances from Cat Power (“All Threes”), The National’s Matt Berninger (“The Time I Have Left”), and Alex Orange Drink, the frontman of the New York punk band, The So So Glos, who co-wrote several songs and shares a climactic verse in the surging “Rainbow Overpass.”

When they hit the studio with Oberst’s longtime bandmates — the multi-instrumentalist and producer, Mike Mogis, the keyboardist and arranger, Nate Walcott — they opted for a fast-paced approach that drew inspiration from formative influences like The Replacements and Frank Black. They sought textures that burst from the mix like gnarly splashes of paint on a blank canvas; they opted for first takes and spontaneous decisions. ‘Five Dice, All Threes’ thrashes and squirms and resists classification. In the brilliant expanse of “El Capitan,” they blend a galloping rhythm you might find in a Johnny Cash standard with a swell of funereal horns, shouted vocals, and lyrics that read like a sobering farewell between twin souls. “So they’re burning you an effigy,” Oberst sings. “Well, that happens to me all the time!” For every striking turn in his lyrics, the band knows just how to complement him.

On one level, ‘Five Dice, All Threes’ may be the most fun album in the Bright Eyes catalogue, filled with singalong hooks and buzzing performances. And yet, sitting alongside these adrenalized rockers that sound beamed in directly from the garage, you will find contemplative, psychedelic material like the heartbreaking “Tiny Suicides” and “All Threes,” a song whose jazzy piano solo and free-associative lyrics feel totally unprecedented in the Bright Eyes catalog. As per usual, the music comes loaded with subtext that invites deep listening—the signature touch of a band who has always honored the album as its own exalted work of art. In the game of threes, the titular move would indicate a perfect roll. Perfection, however, means something different in the world of Bright Eyes, where our flaws are what grants us authority and finding meaning is only possible if we bear witness to the dark, winding journey to get there.

On ‘Five Dice, All Threes’, Bright Eyes embrace these beliefs with music that feels thrillingly alive, as if we were all in the room with them, shouting along and gaining the strength to move forward together. It doesn’t just sound like classic Bright Eyes. It sounds like their future, too.

released September 20th, 2024

Bright Eyes is: Conor Oberst (vocal, acoustic and electric guitars, baritone acoustic guitar) Mike Mogis
(pedal steel, electric guitar, manjo, dobro, mandolin, banjo) Nathaniel Walcott
(piano, trumpet, synthesizers, organs, mellotron, electric piano, celeste, glockenspiel, string and horn arrangements)

All songs: Produced by Bright Eyes