“Thrasher” is one of Neil Young’s greatest songs, a highlight from “Rust Never Sleeps” that documents Young grappling with the incessant need to get back on the road. In a later verse, he famously takes a shot at his CSNY bandmates: “So I got bored and left them there/They were just dead weight to me/Better down the road without that load.”
“Parts of it were. Just dead weight,” he said in a 1985 interview with Bill Flanagan. “Well, at that point, I felt like it was kind of dead weight for me. Not for them. For me. I could go somewhere, and they couldn’t go there. I wasn’t going to pull them along, they were doing fine without me. It might have come off a little more harsh than I meant it, but once I write, I can’t say, ‘Oh, I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings.’ Poetically and on feeling, it made good sense to me, and it came right out. I think I’d be doing a disservice to change it based on what I think a reaction would be. I try not to do that.”
“Thrasher” follows “Bright Sunny Day,” a previously unreleased track off the 10th disc “Sedan Delivery” (1978): Neil Young with Crazy Horse. “Bright Sunny Day” is one of the 15 tracks unreleased in any capacity until “Archives III”. Overall, the anthology boasts 28 hours of 198 tracks over 22 discs.
Next month, Neil Young will perform at Farm Aid, which will take place this year at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he serves on the board. The appearance marks his return to the stage since canceling all concert dates due to an unspecific illness.
Horse Jumper of Love thrive on patient and uncompromising songs. Thanks to frontman Dimitri Giannopoulos’ evocative lyrics and arrangements that suddenly turn from delicate to blistering, their music is full of intensity. While the Boston trio, which also includes bassist John Margaris and drummer James Doran, has stretched the fringes of indie, their latest is their most immediate yet. Out August 16th via Run For Cover Records, “Disaster Trick” tackles self-destructiveness with healing and heart.
Where Horse Jumper of Love’s last release 2023’s “Heartbreak Rules” excelled with quiet, bare-bones songwriting, “Disaster Trick” cranks up the volume while keeping the no-frills intimacy of the band’s catalog. Recorded at Asheville, North Carolina’s Drop of Sun Studios with producer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Indigo De Souza), the recordings soar with searing guitars and an unshakeable rhythm section. “I tried the quiet thing on the last album and I realized there’s definitely two parts of me: I like really heavy music, and I like really gentle music,” says Giannopoulos. “The two albums I listened to the most while we were in the studio were Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room and Hum’s Downward is Heavenward.” This contrast between quiet and loud exists throughout “Disaster Trick” but it’s animated by stark emotion and straightforward, timeless song writing.
“Disaster Trick” feels like a creative reset. It’s also Horse Jumper of Love distilled to their purest essence, which is partly due to Giannopoulos’ recent sobriety. “This was the first album I’ve ever done where I went into it with a very clear mind,” he says. “In the past, we would just show up at a studio, drink, and record. Here, everything felt purposeful.” With newfound energy, the band revisited old, unfinished material like “Gates of Heaven,” which dates back nearly a decade. Originally written during a period Giannopoulos describes as full of immaturity, he sings, “I am late to work again / I’m always missing something / when I walk out the door.” By focusing on a mundane moment, he highlights how self-defeating behaviors can linger.
For the band, the album marked an opportunity to strip down their songwriting to the essentials: urgent, accessible arrangements full of catharsis. “This album helped me realize that a lot of the time, simplicity is the answer,” says Giannopolous. Lead single “Wink,” captures this perfectly. When Giannopoulos sings over hushed guitars, “And your arms have never looked / More empty than they do from here,” his delivery exudes a remarkable earnestness. As the track hits a boiling point in its thunderous chorus, it’s disarmingly raw.
Other songs like “Today’s Iconoclasts” are imbued with wry humour, referencing both “the Amazon Basics Bible” and playing “fuck, marry, kill” in consecutive verses. Whatever the mood, Giannopoulos’ lyrical directness anchors “Disaster Trick”.
While in Asheville, the band enlisted collaborations from Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman as well as Squirrel Flower’s Ella Williams.
Opening track “Snow Angel” kicks off with a growling, shoegaze-tinged guitar riff. It’s a heavy song that’s grounded by wistfulness. “Would you pull me a feather / From your pillow – I want to dream like you,” sings Giannopoulos. Throughout, “Disaster Trick” navigates uncomfortable, dark thoughts with a subtle grace. On the downtempo and compelling “Word,” Giannopoulos finds lightness in relationship malaise: “Last night we had a fight / You blamed it on the moon / But that’s not very fair to the moon.”
“Disaster Trick” is a dark record but there’s a glimmer of hope throughout. As he sings on “Death Spiral,” “I know it sounds dramatic / But I must describe / The way that it felt.” This gets to the core of the album: looking back on mistakes with the grace and clarity that comes from growing up. “A lot of the songs came out of this point where things in my life were going well but I couldn’t accept it,” says Giannopoulos. “I was being a brat. “Disaster Trick” is me cleaning up my act and reflecting on it.”
released August 16th, 2024
Dimitri Giannopoulos – Vocals/ Guitars James Aloyseus-Charles Doran – Drums/ Percussion John Theodore Margaris – Bass/ Backing Vocals/ Piano
Karly Hartzman – Vocals on “Wink”, “Today’s Iconoclast”, “Wait by the Stairs” & “Heavy Metal” Ella Williams – Vocals on “Snow Angel” & “Lip Reader” Jake Lenderman – Guitar on “Snow Angel” & “Curtain” Maria Gelsomini – Synth on “Heavy Metal”
Happy to finally announce my next album ‘Evergreen’ is out on 25th October I wanted to change things up a bit on this one and play around with some more organic textures. It was really important for me that the song writing shone through everything and came to the forefront. These songs are very close to my heart and I hope they become close to some of yours as well! First single “M” is out now
This was the first song I wrote for this album and I feel like it really gave me the direction I needed.
“Evergreen” was made by Allison in Atlanta’s Maze Studios with producer Ben H. Allen III (Deerhunter, Animal Collective, Youth Lagoon, Belle and Sebastian).
Punk-turned-prophet Nick Cave often describes music as “sacred”. Performance, for him, is an act of communion with the audience. But “Wild God”, his 18th album with The Bad Seeds, feels more like a baptism: an ecstatic immersion in the rushing, pooling waters of love and loss that the sexagenarian artist has experienced since the death of his sons Arthur Cave (15) and Jethro Lazenby (31) in 2015 and 2022, respectively. “Wild God” is the followup to “Ghosteen“, which peaked at No. 2 in 2019. Cave’s 2021 collaboration with Dirty Three leader Warren Ellis, “Carnage“, also reached No. 2.
Ahead of its release, Cave stopped byThe Late Show With Stephen Colbert, for an intriguing discussion which covered grief, artificial intelligence and his experience recording with Johnny Cash.
AI he warned will “take the creative act from us.” Computer learning programs would “create music as a product” and the creative process would be reduced “as an impediment.”
Across nine swelling, sinking, swirling soundscapes, the album’s imagery plunges listeners into the lakes and seas of a “swimming god” before bringing us up for air to gawp up at the stars (“bright, triumphant metaphors for love”) and then grounding us on a warm Earth where “the country doctor whistles across the meadow” and rocking us to sleep with the muffled piano ballad “As the Waters Cover the Sea”.
Cave has described each song on this record as an individual conversion – one track is titled as such – but you don’t need to subscribe to any religious faith to buy into the transformative power of love that is hymned here.
As a vocalist, Cave has long honed a pacing, praying preacher-man’s style that allows his stories to ramble passionately across the contours of the music. It is put to use once again on “Song of the Lake”: a humble parable of an old man beside the shore, mesmerised by the sight of a woman bathing in the golden light. This transient pleasure leads Cave to allude to his bereavement as he quotes from the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” (about the egg who fell to his death like Arthur).
The original line runs: “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again”, but Cave abandons it halfway through: “Ah, never mind, never mind.” The old man on the shore finds peace, instead, in the inevitability of mortality: “He knew he would dissolve if he followed her [the bather] into the lake/ But also knew that if he remained upon the shore he would, in time, evaporate.” A chorus raise their voices behind him as our hero repeats the consoling refrain of “Never mind” like an “Amen”.
Cave is great at balancing his wordy grandiosity with casual vernacular like this. He’s likewise brilliant at shifting from fiction and metaphor to blunt truth, as on “Joy”, where he flips from a classic blues opening lyric – “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head” – to the brutal reality of “I felt like someone in my family was dead”. The only lyrically duff moment comes when he clumsily rhymes “panties” with “scanty” on the otherwise lovely shuffle of “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”.
Swinging between doubt and faith, Cave picks up the pace with the rockier title track, on which an ailing deity flies through a “dying city like a prehistoric bird” over the brittle bones of a harpsichord effect. “Wild God” soars into triumph as the chorus throw themselves into a jubilant refrain. The collective crescendo, though, is soon washed away by the more intimate, fluidly bowed rains of “Frogs”, on which the titular amphibians are pictured “jumping in the gutters/ Amazed of love/ Amazed of pain/ Amazed to be back in the water again/ In the Sunday rain”. Close your eyes and you can see the splayed, wet-webbed feet and the slick giddy leaps. Later in his holy bestiary, Cave invokes rabbits on “Joy” and “Cinnamon Horses”.
Many people find Cave’s recent output too ambient and rambling – the songs lacking traditional hooks and structure. This album doesn’t try to win over any of those doubters. In three “Making of Wild God” videos on YouTube, the band are seen joking about writing “yoga music” – but the films, shot live at the spacious Miraval studios in the south of France, help make clear the big-hearted humanity they pour into their music. Cave stalks about in black and white like a pipe cleaner, while co-producer Warren Ellis chuckles into his wizard’s beard as they search for the moments of spontaneity that spark these songs into life.
Throughout “Wild God”, the rattling fire of Thomas Wydler’s drums and the rolling undertow of Martyn Casey’s bass keep up the heat beneath the gracefully meandering, melodic arcs of Cave’s piano, Ellis’s violin, synths, flute and loops, Jim Sclavounos’s spine-tinglingly resonant vibraphone, and GeorgeVjestica’s tender guitar. Melodies flood through the music and then disappear like currents. “Wild God” can feel fathomless, but it leaves you buoyant.
’Psychoderelict’ is Pete Townshend’s sixth studio album, and is his most recent album to date. Originally released on CD back in 1993, it is now being released without dialogue and only vinyl for the first time ever. The storyline draws on elements and ideas from ‘Lifehouse’, and features character ‘Ray High’, a washed up rock star who has lived as a recluse for a couple of years dreaming about a musical project that he abandoned years before called Gridlife.
“Psychoderelict” is a concept album written, originally produced and engineered by Pete Townshend. Some characters and issues presented in this work were continued in Townshend’s later opus The BoyWho Heard Music, first presented on the Who’s eleventh studio album “Endless Wire” (2006) and then adapted as a rock musical. The follow-up to “The Iron Man” (1989), but despite having recorded several demos, a bicycle accident in September 1991 forced him to delay work on the album until his wrist was able to heal properly. It is structured more like a radio play than the more “traditional” rock operas Townshend had recorded in the past.
Reissued on black vinyl, and without the spoken word, experience the album for the first time ever in this new half-speed master format. Pre-order for release on 18th October.
I might be the only person in London who is excited that we’ve woken up to a rainy September morning. In 1991, this was the backdrop to which I fell in love with “Astronauts” by The Lilac Time. The opening steal from Joni Mitchell’s Free Man In Paris sets the scene for a vignette of ecstasy and passion in the West London locale of the title North Kensington navigates Stephen’s narrative gaze through a fug of unreliable memoir, a syncopated psychogeography of plans hatched in the height of passion and mislaid in the cold sobriety of morning.
In a break from previous albums, accordions, banjos and mandolins are suddenly out; jazz guitar is in. The filigree work of guitarist Sagat Guirey on the outro of “A Taste for Honey” acts as a sublime parting shot to a lyric which acts as a wiser, wistful companion piece to Stephen’s 1985 hit “Kiss Me“. Like the camera retreating to reveal the years elapsed between the time depicted and the present day. Sagat’s presence is no less revelatory on “Sunshine’s Daughter“. Alongside fellow “Astronauts” highlights “The Darkness OfHer Eyes and Hats Off Here Comes The Gir”l, it’s a song about a dream of a girl; a chimeric vessel of desire and idealism, elusive enough to keep its creator writing more and more songs in the hope of making her real: ‘The more materialistic the world becomes/More angels I will paint for her/I’ve rechristened the Statue of Liberty/I’m calling her sunshine’s daughter.’
“Astronauts” is a transitional album – almost certainly more so than Stephen could have possibly realised. Having recently turned thirty, he experienced something we all encounter as we leave our third decade behind. We start to take stock and attempt to understand why we became who we became. “Grey Skies And Work Things” aches with exquisite yearning, recalling as it does the cruelty with which the week thwarts the sweet stolen adventures of young love.
Here and on “Finistere”, Cara Tivey’s inspired piano playing works alongside Sagat’s guitar to confer an incandescent fluidity upon the finished recording. The distance between the carefree youth of pop stardom and the first intimations of mortality can be measured between the first and second verses of the quietly devastating “Madresfield“; from the depiction of the deserted cricket pavilion obscured by fresh snowfall to the sudden shift in perspective from subject to protagonist: ‘No one ever told me/That killing time is harmful/For time cannot recover/What soon the ground will offer.’
And so Stephen and all of us at Needle Mythology are indescribably proud to announce that we will be releasing a super deluxe remastered three-album edition of “Astronauts“. For this release, Stephen has mined his personal archive. The resulting haul yielded enough music to fill two extra albums. “Any RoadUp” is an album of live recordings taken from The Lilac Time’s final shows with Sagat Guirey, revealing the full extent of the group’s evolution with the new guitarist. “Softened By Rain” is an album of demos which highlights the profligate creativity that resulted in what would be The Lilac Time’s final album before 1999’s return “Looking For A Day In The Night”. Featured on “Softened By Rain” are two newly unearthed, previously unheard songs. In keeping with the special place “Astronauts” holds in fans’ affections, this triple album edition also comes with an extensive 11,000 word oral history of “Astronauts”, lyrics and liner notes. All three discs have been mastered for vinyl by Miles Showell at Abbey Road and will be housed in a triple gatefold sleeve with a colour inner sleeve and new artwork for each disc, especially created by designer Mike Storey. The main sleeve for “Astronauts” itself will replicate the original artwork but with the four distinctive orbs rendered in a red “foil” texture.
Only 1000 of these will be created. There will be no further pressings. There will also be a triple CD release of “Astronauts“, again with no further pressings.
Finally, a word about the price. This is a triple gatefold record in which every album has its own distinctive artwork, using premium materials, and the best mastering, design and manufacture options available to us. The retail price at which this release has been set will be enough to cover our costs, with Stephen generously insisting that he forfeit a royalty until enough records have been sold to cover those costs. Our intention with this release of “Astronauts” was to create an artefact that you will want to keep close to you for the rest of your days. We think we’ve succeeded. We hope you do too. Pre-sale starts tomorrow (Friday Sep 6): at https://needlemythology.bandcamp.com from 8.00 am BST.
Following her acclaimed new solo album, “Bow To Love”, Isobel Campbell announces the reissue of “Ballad Of The Broken Seas”, the debut album by Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, via Cooking Vinyl.
The album garnered widespread acclaim, with the duo being hailed as a modern day Nancy & Lee, and went on to be shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. From the brooding opener “Deus Ibi Est” to the melancholic “The False Husband” and the poignant title track, “Ballad Of The Broken Seas” resonates as powerfully today as it did upon its initial release.
Commenting on this reissue, Isobel Campbell says: “I have such fond and special memories of writing and producing this album – ‘Ballad of The Broken Seas’ is so very dear to my heart and Mark is very much missed”.
Originally released in 2006, ‘Ballad of The Broken Seas’ has remained a touchstone for fans of folk and Americana, revered for its haunting melodies, rich storytelling, and the captivating interplay between Campbell’s ethereal vocals and Lanegan’s gravelly baritone. The album was the first in a celebrated trilogy of albums that Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan recorded together, being followed by “Sunday at Devil Dirt” in 2008 and “Hawk” in 2010.
Hippo Campus were sitting in the green room of a sold-out amphitheater show at the start of the Summer of 2023 when they realized they had a major problem. Their fourth LP simply wasn’t good enough. Singer Jake Luppen had been listening to the band’s work as they rolled around the country, trying to tease out how much work remained. All of it, he soon decided. The soul wasn’t there, obfuscated by the need to sound sophisticated and the overwhelming ambition to make the best Hippo Campus LP ever, a deeper and more profound record that reflected how their lives were changing.
They’d committed to that vow with long time producer and collaborator Caleb Wright a little more than a year earlier, soon after a party where they celebrated the release of LP3. That very night, the call came that a long time friend had unexpectedly died. They started this band as kids and enjoyed quick momentum, their thrill-a-minute live shows and charismatically experimental pop albums creating almost-instant, avid attention. But this was Hippo Campus’ first close brush with death; as adulthood encroached, the actual call of mortality reminded them of the stakes of art, friendship, and life.
So they committed to doing something major, even if it meant taking five years to do it. They took the task seriously, too: getting sober for an entirely improvisational session at North Carolina’s Drop of Sun months later, regularly attending therapy as a full band, writing more than 100 songs in only a year. That was all well and good, until Luppen and, really, all of Hippo Campus decided they didn’t actually like what they were making. Life and work had been dark in their orbit for a second—death and dejection, addiction and anxiety. This uneasy epiphany wasn’t helping.
So that night, in the dressing room, they called an audible. They were going to start over. Three months later, the four-member core of Hippo Campus rendezvoused with Wright and producer Brad Cook at Sonic Ranch, a playground-like studio complex on the Texas border. They gave themselves 10 days to cut the tracks they liked best, to make something to which they could commit at last. And Cook, in turn, gave them an edict of no second guessing or listening back, only forward momentum. Less than two weeks later, they emerged with what they’d given themselves half a decade to make—“Flood”, or the best album Hippo Campus has ever made.
You can immediately hear as much in a pair of wondrous songs toward the end, when the love-lost-and-found sing-along “Forget It” fades into the bittersweet and beautiful ache of “Closer,” a gem about trying and maybe failing to surrender your trust to someone else. This is a band that has learned to grow up by learning to let go. When Hippo Campus finally stopped trying to force the issue of making a masterpiece, they tapped intersecting veins of vulnerability and urgency, walking away with 13 tracks that reckon with their uncanny lives through at least that many totally absorbing hooks.
During the last several years, Hippo Campus has had to navigate the tougher wages of success. They are, of course, grateful that a pop band they named on the lark of some psychology lesson blew up, but it certainly eliminated the segue from adolescence to adulthood that most of us enjoy in relative privacy. How could they survive inside and alongside this thing they had created and had outgrown them? And what’s more, how could they endure the vagaries of the music industry, so that they didn’t let a disappointing tour or disspiriting release demoralize them? Or, to ask the cumulative question, how do four people connected so intimately for so long grow as individuals while preserving the bond that makes what they do so special? Or is that actually too much to ask?
For a minute there, the answer seemed possibly like yes. But soon after that improvisational session, the band returned to its own Minneapolis studio and dug in.
They stumbled upon “Everything at Once,” with Nathan Stocker’s tricky little guitar lope becoming the basis for the slowly rising rhythm of drummer Whistler Allen and bassist Zach Sutton. Stepping outside for some space, Luppen quickly penned a thesis of self-criticism and self-forgiveness. Being less than the expectations of an industry, a family, or a faith are totally normal, he suggests in an anthem of empowerment that is almost casual. He gives himself the grace of being human: “You gotta lay down sometimes, be patient sometimes,” Luppen sings, layers of lean vocals crisscrossing one another like light beams. “And feel everything at once.”
That is precisely what Hippo Campus do best on “Flood” feel everything and transmute it all into songs that are inescapable. Take “Brand New,” three minutes of brilliantly coiled pop, its spring-loaded rhythm lifting a guitar line built from pin pricks skyward. It’s about being ruined by the letdown of a failed relationship and then finding a way forward, toward something so good you haven’t even imagined it yet. It sounds that way, too.
There’s the completely compulsive “Tooth Fairy,” a quick-moving meditation on the confusion of interpersonal dynamics. Hippo Campus smear bits of gentle psychedelia around a rhythm, riff, and hook that have the sleek lines of a sports car; the result is a dynamic wonder, a song that feels emphatic at the start but reaches full triumph by the end. Inspired by staring down cycles of addiction too long without taking steps to break them, “Corduroy” finds the space between a bummer country blues and a sweetly devotional waltz. Its vows of love, trust, and doubt are buoyed and also undercut by its slow rises and falls, a musical portrait of trying to take that difficult next step.
The sentiments on “Flood” are raw, real, and unguarded, a testament to Hippo Campus dropping preconceptions of how they had to sound after so many failed attempts to re-record these songs. They wiped the slate clean, starting over without beliefs about what Hippo Campus or this record needed to be. Still, sophistication lurks in subtle key and tempo changes, in the almost innate shifts that a band of long time best friends can tap after so much time spent helping to shape one another’s musical language. Flood doesn’t need to tell you it’s important or interesting; it simply is, just by virtue of how it’s written, built, and rendered, a map of what it’s like to feel everything at once. This rebirth is accompanied by a crucial career shift for Hippo Campus, too, as they exit the traditional label system to issue LP4 via Psychic Hotline, a truly independent imprint run by peers and pals. If you’re working to let go of expectations, why not jettison them all? There’s a bravery to that, and you can hear its revivifying spirit in every second of LP4.
Early into the endlessly propulsive “Paranoid,” where stunted acoustic strums undergird an inescapable jangle, Luppen asks an existential question: “Is there something waiting out there for us at the finish line?” For the next three minutes, the band cycles with him through his woes, from the title’s overwhelming worry to notions of dislocation and loneliness.
(Also, is there any other refrain ever that manages to make the phrase “so god-damned fucking” sound so catchy and natural?) But in the final verse, with his voice breaking through a scrim of distortion, he stumbles upon a new credo: “Wait, I wanna give this life all that I have in me.” That is precisely what Hippo Campus have done with “Flood” after realizing it doesn’t take a lifetime—or, well, five years—to do just that.
Christopher Paul Stelling’s latest album, “Forgotten But Not Gone & Few and Far Between,” released in 2024, has been well-received for its emotional depth and raw storytelling. This double LP was written and self-produced by the singer songwriter Stelling at home, following a painful divorce from his partner of 13 years The album is described as a life-raft, capturing the essence of his personal struggles and growth
The album spans a variety of genres, including folk, blues, and indie rock, showcasing Stelling’s versatility as a musician Tracks like “Better Days” and “Fire On The Moon” highlight his poignant lyrics and intricate guitar work. Critics have praised the album for its authenticity and emotional resonance, making it a standout in Stelling’s discography
Live Performance of “Lay By Your Side” by Christopher Paul Stelling from the Double LP “Forgotten But Not Gone & Few and Far Between“. Shot in the artists living room in Atlanta Georgia by filmmaker Ethan Payne.
Forgotten but Not Gone & Few and Far Between released March 22nd, 2024
The Fat Angel Sings 