The Fat Angel Sings

“King of America” became Rhino’s penultimate reissue Of Elvis Costello in 2005, With a front cover sticker cheekily hailed it as “the album that fans, critics and Elvis Costello all agree on.” Perhaps that’s why it’ll be the next of his classic albums to receive a deluxe box set later this year. Elvis Costello will release a sprawling new box set on November 1st, titled “King of America & Other Realms. As its name suggests, the six-disc set includes a newly remastered edition of Costello’s 1986 album “King of America”, originally co-produced with T Bone Burnett. The remastered 1986 album is paired with a disc of demos and outtakes (six of them previously unreleased), The deluxe release follows the super deluxe, vinyl-and-digital-only of The Complete Armed Forces box set.

Additionally, it features a previously unreleased live concert recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1987, plus more unreleased demos, outtakes and live recordings, a 35-page essay by Costello himself and rare photographs. As a press release succinctly puts it, the set “celebrates and explores the songwriter’s lifelong love, fascination and influence of American music.”

There will also be a two-disc CD version containing the remastered “King of America” and a second disc of highlights from the collection.

Costello’s 10th studio album was a marked departure from his last two records: “Punch the Clock” (1983) and “Goodbye Cruel World” (1984) were slick pop affairs overseen by producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. “Congratulations! You’ve just purchased our worst album.” Undaunted, the singer/songwriter embarked on a tour with American musician T-Bone Burnett under the moniker “The Coward Brothers,” releasing a single, “The People’s Limousine,” in 1985. (Both sides of the single bookend the box’s second disc, “Le Roi Sans Sabots – Demos, Outtakes & Other Realms.”)  The album’s sole worldwide single, a cover of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” was a minor U.K. Top 40 hit, though album cuts “Brilliant Mistake” and “Indoor Fireworks” remain among the most-beloved (and most-played) selections from the album. 

The 12″ x 11.5″ package, produced by Costello and Steve Berkowitz, includes 57 pages of liner notes, including a lengthy essay by Costello on the making of the album plus rare and unseen photos. (A 2CD cut-down will be issued as well.

A complete track listening for the deluxe edition is available along with the newly remastered 2024 version of “Indoor Fireworks.”

Adding to the recent string of indie pop songs that the Death Cab for Cutie frontman has been featured in, this brooding and grungy track from Seattle’s Sea Lemon—aka Natalie Lew—is a meeting point for both musician’s distinct indie rock eras. Ben Gibbard’s trademark low, whispery vocals fuel the song’s darkness, and Lew’s voice is shrouded in an airy mystique as she sings of using manifestation and looking for signs in nature as a way of coping. But while Lew’s verses are more lighthearted and abstract, Gibbard balances the optimism out with a stark dose of a straightforward, traditionally emo mentality—“It seems that all I wanna do is sleep these days / And wake up in about a year and not feel this way.” This meeting of the minds makes for a dreamy and fuzzy blend of the greatest parts of the genre, both new and old.

Seattle-based Natalie Lew has always had a creative mind, whether through designing, writing short fiction or, most recently, the dream-pop concoctions she records as Sea Lemon. Lew’s deceptively luminescent sonic world often hints at darker textures beneath the surface, and debut 2023 EP ‘Stop At Nothing’ balanced a cinematic clarity of vision with undertones of fear and longing. For driving new single “Crystals,” her first of 2024, Lew tapped Death Cab For Cutie frontman Benjamin Gibbard, a preexisting fan of Lew’s who had previously reached out to duet at a benefit show in Seattle both artists were playing. The resulting collaboration sounds both weightier and more exhilarating than anything Lew has released before: in a rousing arc, the duo’s complementary verses are a perfect pairing alongside a whirlwind of shimmering guitar and the joy felt with finally letting go.

Sea Lemon’s new single “Crystals (feat. Benjamin Gibbard)” is out now on Luminelle Recordings.

For the last, but certainly not least, in a string of excellent singles from their 4th LP “VIVA HINDS”, the Spanish duo have teamed up with Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten on “Stranger,” a track that taps both artists’ most whimsical inclinations. A head-in-the-clouds indie pop rock ballad that rides on a heart-skipping beat, “Stranger” is cute without ever becoming cloying. Listening to the final chorus, you can almost picture Ana Perrote, Carlotta Cosials and Chatten singing to themselves on a screen split in thirds, each lost in their own heads, finding unexpected joy in loneliness and giving their daydreams room to breathe.

As the sixth Half Waif album, “See You at the Maypole”, is set to arrive next month, Nandi Rose has unveiled the project’s latest single: “The Museum.” As is custom for a Half Waif tune, it’s a sombre four minutes aimed at the passing of time and the sentimentality we all hold for what’s been lost. “The Museum” is a nostalgic song that doesn’t wash the past with inauthentic remembering. Rose is far more interested in a kind of recollection that comes from sharing “give it another year” with a loved one.

Our perpetual forward-motion does not cease its direction; drama and laughter are both habits, but it’s up to us to decide which one to kick. “I still go to the movies, and I think that it’s beautiful,” Rose sings. “Fake lights making everything look like glitter. And when I go to my high school, I see that the view has changed. All the apple trees they planted have finally grown up.”

the upcoming album ‘See You At The Maypole’, out on October 4, 2024

Produced with Mark Ralph, who previously worked with them on their 2013 album “Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action”, the album showcases Franz at their most immediate, upbeat and life-affirming, unashamedly going for the pop-jugular in classic Franz style.

The Scottish alt-rockers are returning with a new album, “The Human Fear”, and lead single “Audacious” is a triumphant call-to-action for both the listener and the band itself. It’s noisy and guitar-driven with a slight twee angle, calling back to the more theatrical and bold acts (think The Hives) of the 2000s indie era that Franz first found a home in. There’s a montage of sounds that play out in the track’s several arcs—from surfy and jangle guitar moments to a surprising piano ballad—and new drummer Audrey Tait brings a quick, peppy tempo to the song’s fast-paced stylistic shifts. “Audacious” is unflinching and brave—“There’s no one to save us, so just carry on,” singer Alex Kapranos declares, as the band steps into a new era filled with adrenaline and bravado.

Recorded at AYR studios in Scotland, the 11-songs on “The Human Fear” all allude to some deep-set human fears and how overcoming and accepting these fears drives and defines our lives.

releases January 10th, 2025

2025, Domino Recording Co Ltd

Former member of Stanley Marsh 3′s Dynamite Museum, born and raised in The Children of God, Christopher Owens is an American song writer born in 1979.

On “This is My Guitar,” the third single from his forthcoming solo album “I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair,” The ex-Girls songwriter Christopher Owens talks of turning to his instrument during times of strife and isolation. As he continues to establish his newest era as a solo artist through shreds of airy jangle-pop, he finds solace and release in the music he’s creating. The chorus is a whispered wail, as Owens repeatedly begs: “Help me please.” Yet, the hopeful curve of “This is My Guitar” hints that this is one of the first steps in moving forward, telling the story of a musician piecing themselves back together by picking up the instrument they love, and using it as a baton that connects them to the rest of the world again.

releases October 18th, 2024

Written and Performed by Christopher Owens

Guitar hero Eric Clapton has announced the release of a new live album and concert film documenting the 2023 edition of his Crossroads Guitar Festival. The title, available in various configurations, including 4-CD/2-Blu-ray, 6-LP vinyl, 2-DVD (and streaming with Dolby ATMOS mix), arrives on November 29th, 2024, via Rhino.

Clapton hosted and curated the seventh installment of his festival on September 23rd and 24th, 2023, at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. It notably marked the event’s return after a four-year break, selling out on both days. Once again, Clapton carefully assembled a powerhouse cohort of influential guitarists representing various eras and styles. The impressive lineup joining Clapton included Stephen Stills, Joe Bonamassa, Gary Clark Jr., Sheryl Crow, Eric Gales, H.E.R., Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Los Lobos, John Mayer, The Marcus King Band, Taj Mahal, Roger McGuinn, John McLaughlin, Santana, The Wallflowers, and many more. Bill Murray served as the evening’s Master of Ceremonies.

The two evenings’ sets rotated between blues staples, American Songbook classics, and generational rock ‘n’ roll anthems including “Layla,” “Eight Miles High,” “I Put a Spell On You,” and “I Shot the Sheriff.”

Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival continues a legacy of its own, beginning with the first iteration in New York in 1999 and carried through Dallas, TX in 2004, Bridgewater, IL in 2007 and 2010, New York in 2013, and Dallas, TX in 2019. As always, all profits benefited The Crossroads Centre Antigua, a treatment and education facility for chemically dependent persons founded by Clapton.

Nilüfer Yanya formally announces her new album “My Method Actor”, out September 13th on Ninja Tune. The news arrives alongside the release of her new single, the near-title track “Method Actor,” and follows her recent single “Like I Say (I runaway),” which the New York Times described as, “reveling in contrasting textures” and The FADER called, “a jolting return.” Putting herself in an unnamed character’s shoes, “Method Actor” portrays a mini-life story in under four minutes. The accompanying visualiser was shot in an old hotel in Benidorm, Spain and is a one take video capturing Nilüfer sitting down to share the song’s story.

“It feels like it’s still there — I just don’t know what it is,” Nilüfer Yanya tells me from her home in London, a hand grazing her forehead as her eyes sail to the top left corner of the Zoom window.

We’ve reached an ebb in an otherwise easy, volleying conversation, the subject of faith slipping between whatever words we toss its way.

Questions of faith and destiny have always lived in Yanya’s music, and never more so than on “My Method Actor,” her luxurious paint box of a third full-length album. In her previous work, faith was always misplaced, destiny a bright-red inevitability; a plummet from the skies or rapidly approaching car wreck. On “My Method Actor”, Yanya’s heart rate has slowed alongside her compositions — rather than a pulley dragging her over the cliff’s edge, belief in something more has become a potential guide rope.

“I hadn’t really grown up religious, but there’s been religion in my family. Like, my dad’s Muslim. My mom, she’s not practicing, but she’s Catholic,” Yanya explains. “So I feel like I’ve grown up around religion, but not really being part of anything. And I kind of felt disconnected, in that way of feeling like you don’t belong.”

She continues, “So it kind of makes sense, that maybe I’d crave a kind of… everyone else is doing this, what is it that I can do? And I think maybe it’s just trying to create your own sense of faith or belief in something. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

“I think a lot about what / I’m destined for / I’m dreaming of the end,” she sings on the shapeshifting “Made Out of Memory,” perhaps the cleanest summation of Yanya’s obsession with the forked path toward oblivion. As the climate catastrophe burns entire cities off the map and bombs wreak genocidal havoc, Yanya’s previously insular writing has cracked open, her firing synapses illuminating places far outside her own head.

“There are horrible things happening, and you have to keep believing and keep trying to challenge those things and make something good happen as a response,” she says.

If writing these songs is what Yanya is destined for — and if I’m destined to be here writing about them — it can be tough to square. How do you continue to create when creation feels so small in the face of material suffering, of apocalyptic enormity?

“It kind of feels more frivolous and less frivolous at the same time,” she says, laughing. “Like, it must mean something! But then it’s like, ‘Oh, of course it doesn’t mean anything,’ don’t be ridiculous.”

While Yanya is responsible for the melodies and lyrics on “My Method Actor”, the music was largely written by Yanya’s longtime creative partner and producer Will Archer. It’s a testament to the pair’s synergy that Yanya building her songs atop Archer’s compositions hasn’t discoloured her singular voice, though she says she sometimes gets hung up on the two’s evolving roles.

‘My Method Actor’, released September 13th, 2024 on Ninja Tune

The War on Drugs have steadily emerged as one of this century’s great rock and roll synthesists, removing the gaps between the underground and the mainstream, between the obtuse and the anthemic, making records that wrestle a fractured past into a unified and engrossing present. Led by Adam Granduciel, The New Yorker called them “the best American ‘rock’ band of this decade.”  

Recorded on tour between February 2022 through December 2023 in America, UK, Europe and Australia, “Live Drugs Again” follows 2020’s “Live Drugs” and represents The War On Drugs at their ragged, righteous best. Bandleader Adam Granduciel comments, “Live Drugs Again” chronicles the evolution of these songs from the studio to stages all over the world; documenting our continued growth as a live band. This series ensures that these versions, and some of our favourite moments on stage, will live on.”

released September 13th, 2024

Produced by The War On Drugs