The Fat Angel Sings

This track is like a big fat diner burger with fries: plentiful, familiar, satisfying, and designed to fill you up. Featuring cleanly arranged rock elements building to a full, rounded out chorus that’s just begging to be blared out of your car speakers, steering wheel drumming is absolutely mandatory on this one. Recent rock transplants from Connecticut to LA, Milly are the indie outfit your old stack of rock CDs have been willing into existence.

Milly make songs that simmer and spark. The Los Angeles-based band, led by songwriter Brendan Dyer, finds power in the slow burn: their music carries the tension of a lakes surface moments before a storm hits, or a cracking pane of glass moments before it shatters. 

MILLY is:
B. Reid Dyer – Guitars/Vocals
Yarden Erez – Bass Guitar
Conner Frankel – Drums

The new single, “Grab The Wheel”, out now on

The first bite of your favourite long-awaited dessert, the sight of your destination ahead after a long journey, a whiff of your lover’s perfume… these pale in comparison to the first listen of a band you just know is gonna be a new favourite listen. Fresh off of a tour with Built To Spill, Goon are the Los Angeles alti-indie group here just in time for all the fans of analogue rock to swoon over.

Click play for shoegaze riffs, solid fuzz, and chilled-out vocals couched in reverb. Official video for our new single “Emily Says” off our second album ‘Hour of Green Evening’ is out now!

Come along and wake up on the way,” sings Goon frontman Kenny Becker, “orange shapes arrange and change again/quiet Isaac in a mild dream.” The lyric evokes the hazy dreamscape spaces occupied by the band’s new album, “Hour of Green Evening”. It describes an in-between time, the pre-dawn quiet over a still-sleeping suburban neighborhood, insects buzzing and the creatures just stirring awake.

Goon began as Becker’s Bandcamp solo project in 2015. At a friend’s encouragement, Becker compiled the best of his tracks and released them as an EP, 2016’s “Dusk of Punk”. He recruited bandmates from his college buddies and released a second EP, all the while working on the band’s first full-length, 2019’s “Heaven is Humming” on Partisan Records, followed by the self-released “Paint By Numbers 1”, a collection of his mid-pandemic home recordings. After several band members departed for other jobs, cities, and life experiences, Becker recruited a new band Andy Polito on drums, Dillon Peralta on guitar, and Tamara Simons on bass—and set about recording a second LP, “Hour of Green Evening”, in Tropico Beauty studio in Glendale, California, working with producer and engineer Phil Hartunian. Alex Fischel from Spoon also sat in on the session, providing piano and keyboards.

“We tracked ten days in the studio to start, and ended up working a total of twenty,” says Becker. “For the first six or seven days we did it live, the four of us in the room, with Phil in the control booth, tracking straight to two-inch tape. It was isolated deep pandemic vibes. We felt like we had enough days booked away from the world to really take our time.”

The evolution of Goon has come to full fruition on “Hour of Green Evening”. It’s the band’s most complete statement, engaging all aspects of their sound to stunning effect. The album thrums with mystery, with the half-remembered past hazy as dreams, the mixed sense of comfort and longing for freedom so essential to youth. The world of “Hour of Green Evening” is lush and strange, populated by people dreaming, sleeping and waking, existing in that in-between space of the night time world.

The dew-soaked morning maw of “Angelnumber 1210” blurs the space between waking and dreaming as distorted guitars cut through the atmospherics. “In a past life you softly slept through waking hours” sings Becker, “and in the boughs beams of sound play a welcoming.”

The light, rangy “Ochre” is a deceptively dark song. Again, Becker calls to the imagery of the half-asleep times, singing, “I wandered out of bed/cuz there’s a firing line in my head/and it worked for a minute/opened my evil eye.” The calmness of the music and the ease of Becker’s delivery belies the anxiety at the core of the song, with images of fire, destruction, and pain drifting by, accented by Alex Fischel’s manic piano flourishes.

The quiet, beating heart of the record is “Emily Says.” The title references both the Velvet Underground and Becker’s wife, Emily. Distorted guitars alternately sludge and sparkle while Becker sings his best melody, gliding soft as a bird over the maelstrom, a strange, idiosyncratic take on the traditional love song. “It’s about how falling in love can save your life,” says Becker, “but it doesn’t fix any of your problems. The chaos of life will persist, but it’s a little bit better, because we’re not facing it on our own anymore. We’re together.”

“Hour of Green Evening” stands as the most powerful statement from Goon yet. The songs have a melancholy to them, but they never succumb to hopelessness, knowing at the heart of the darkest night there is still light, goodness, and maybe even someone else there to help you wander through.

Also check out The “Red Ladder” EP Unreleased B-sides, alternate versions and demos from “Hour of Green Evening” and it includes a re-vamped version of ‘Another Window’ Some sweet new takes on slightly less new tracks. “Flower Bell” is a painfully good (and short) track that captures the best of a “feel good” Boards of Canada track, while still being distinctly Goon. The production choices and lo-fi aesthetics combine to form a different-but-totally-valid take on what “sounds like nostalgia” actually sounds like.

The Del-Lords’ debut album, “Frontier Days”, sounded too sparse and didn’t kick hard enough, and the follow-up, “Johnny Comes Marching Home”, sounded too slick and was weighed down with clichéd 1980s drum and guitar sounds. In the grand tradition , the band’s third LP, “Based on a True Story”, was where they finally got the proportions just right. While Neil Geraldo returned as producer after “Johnny Comes Marching Home“, he applies a much lighter hand on “Based on a True Story”, and Frank Funaro’s drums sound a lot more natural and have regained their natural hard-swinging grace on this set. A number of guest musicians were brought in for “Based on a True Story”, but this time they add new textures rather than cluttering the arrangements, and Johnny Powers’ wailing harp on “River of Justice”, Lenny Castro’s beatnik bongos on “The Cool and the Crazy,” and the uncredited but wildly honking sax on “Whole Lotta Nothin’ Goin’ On” are welcome additions that help the songs come alive. Mojo Nixon’s addled preaching on “River of Justice” is both hilarious and kicks up the song’s righteous energy, and if Geraldo pushes Pat Benatar’s backing vocals too high up in the mix, hey, they were married and she was probably working for free.

And though Scott Kempner was always a fine songwriter, “Based on a True Story” is the most solid and consistent set of tunes he ever crafted for the Del-Lords, and whether he’s wistful “Cheyenne”, righteously pissed-off “Crawl in Bed”, taking a stand (“I’m Gonna Be Around”), or just getting goofy “Whole Lotta Nothin’ Goin’ On”, he brings his A game.

Hard touring had turned the Del-Lords into a tight, impressively powerful band, and they rarely sounded better than they did on “Based on a True Story”, with Kempner and Eric Ambel’s guitars roaring like a fine-tuned machine, and Funaro and bassist Manny Caiati laying down the rhythm with fury and precision. If they never made an album that quite captured the glory of their live shows, the Del-Lords never had a finer hour in the studio than on “Based on a True Story”, and it tells their story remarkably well.

The term “D.I.Y.” gets thrown around in music a lot these days, but London alt-folk singer-songwriter Rozi Plain is the real thing. Coming up through open-mic nights as a teenager in her hometown of Winchester, she quite literally forged her own sound through the electric guitar she built during a uni-mandated work experience program at a guitar shop. These days, you can still find her posted up at London’s Total Refreshment Centre, a recording studio/venue/cultural hub for the city’s emergent jazz vanguard — that is, when she’s not busy touring with the likes of Paramore, Devendra Banhart, and K.T. Tunstall as a solo artist, or making music as a member of Kate Stables band This Is The Kit.  

Community is central to the spirit of Plain’s craft, with a vast range of collaborators — from Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor to saxophonist Alabaster DePlume — contributing to songs that lull you in and keep you hooked with subtle layers of complexity. Plain’s fifth studio album “Prize” invites you onto its wavelength with light-touch production and instrumentation (plus plentiful jazz chords) that put her aural and lyrical storytelling front and centre. 

Constant through all of this (teen years included) has been her friendship with This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables. To this day, they each play backup in each other’s bands. 

In the spirit of sharing, Plain brought her band — Stables (bass and backing vocals), Lucien Chatin (drums), Michael Hilger (keyboards), and Jordan Blackman (guitar) — to make their U.S. radio debut with KCRW, featuring “Prize” cuts like “Complicated,” “Agreeing for Two,” and “Spot Thirteen.”

There’s basically two kinds of artists: There are the ones who follow in the legacies of the sounds we know and love and help move them forward. And then there artists who etch out new space in the aural universe, expanding the experience and possibilities of what music can be. 

Since helping pioneer shoegaze in the late ‘80s, Slowdive have been the latter, and have kept their eyes (and ears) set on the sonic unknown ever since.  The UK quintet stopped by KCRW’s Performance Studio on the heels of their acclaimed new fifth album — and their second since returning from a decades-long hiatus in 2014 “Everything Is Alive”.

The record ranked in most of the Best Albums of 2023, landing at No. 9 on Spotify’s global Top Debut Albums chart. Three decades into their tenure, Slowdive is selling the most albums of their career. 

Watch the performance video for expansive live renditions of “Everything Is Alive”

“On December 1st,1983 Pylon and Love Tractor played what we thought would be Pylon’s final show,” Vanessa Briscoe Hay, singer of Athens, GA post-punk greats Pylon, tells us in regards to video we’re premiering today. “Pylon were keeping a pact we had made at the outset of the band—to quit while we were still having fun. The concert was documented and packaged by local filmmakers The Aguar Brothers with funding from a local group of businessmen for a public TV pilot not unlike the fairly new at the time Austin City Limits. Athens Shows premiered locally in February of 1984 and quietly disappeared.”

Vanessa continues: “Years later the audio reappeared on the 2016 album ‘Pylon Live’ put out by Chunklet’s Henry Owings. Owings showed an unrestored version of this video at the release shows for that album in Atlanta and Athens. While working on the video “Flowers Everywhere” by my current band Pylon Reenactment Society, I reconnected with director Dan Aguar. Dan broached the subject of restoring The Athens Shows — if we could find it. I knew the 40th Anniversary for this show was coming up, so I contacted the parties involved in the 2016 transfer and, long story short, the video had been left behind at an Atlanta company who had gone under during the pandemic. It was retrieved by our friend Tom Branch and per Dan’s direction taken to another company in Atlanta who specialize in film restoration for entities like Turner Classic Movies. Aguar worked remotely with them on restoring the video. The audio mix was retrieved from Derek Almstead who had worked on ‘Pylon Live’ and then mastered by Jason NeSmith. My hope of having the full video ready in time for our 40th Anniversary obviously hasn’t worked out and it is still not finished. Dan will be going to Vietnam soon to work on a documentary about activist Chuck Searcy. Further work on finishing the restoration will have to wait until he comes back in March. In the meantime,we would like to offer this portion of the video as a holiday present to you all — ‘Beep.’”

“Beep,” of course, is one of Pylon’s classic singles (their last of their original run) and they sound great here — and the video looks (and sounds) great as well.

These days, Vanessa leads The Pylon Reenactment Society, who will release their new album “Magnet Factory” on February 9th via Strolling Bones. 

“Jason Isbell’s songs are filled with ghosts. They’re haunted by spirits both welcome and unwelcome, by the personal and historical legacies that make us who we are. Nowhere Is this more evident than on his 2013 breakthrough album “Southeastern”. Isbell offers confessions. reflections. and promises that confront and make communion with those who have come before and remain with us still. Its 12 tracks represent an extended meditation on the concept articulated by another celebrated southern storyteller, author William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

Jason Isbell opened an important new chapter with the release of 2013’s “Southeastern”, his fourth solo album. Ten years on, he revisits the album with an expanded set which includes a full performance of the record captured in Tennessee and demo versions of every track on the album. A booklet for the set features reproductions of some of Isbell’s original lyrics for the songs on the album as well as an essay written by noted country music expert Charles Hughes. Bringing things full circle, Isbell also posed for an updated version of the cover photograph.

2013’s ‘Southeastern’ is the fourth studio album from American alt-country icon Jason Isbell, and his second without the backing of his regular band The 400 Unit. Highly personal and deeply moving, addressing themes from cancer to childhood abuse, it’s often regarded as Isbell’s finest ever album, and this tenth anniversary edition comes with demo and live versions of these acclaimed songs.

Father John Misty occasionally releases official live albums, and a new one out today includes a previously unreleased song. Josh Tillman recorded “Live At The Sunset Cultural Center” just 10 days ago at the Sunset Cultural Center in Carmel-By-The-Sea, CA. The solo gig’s 18-song setlist featured “Corpse Dance,” a seven-minute epic that will presumably will appear in a studio iteration on some upcoming FJM LP. 

Recorded just days ago, on December 15th, the live album features an 18-song setlist, including the unreleased cut, ‘Corpse Dance’. The newly unveiled tracks clocks in at over seven minutes. On the track, Father John Misty – real name Joshua Michael Tillman – croons: “She is patient/ The act of creation / May one day produce a happy man / Won’t have to do the corpse dance with these arms”

released December 25th, 2023

Under the moniker Hibou, Seattle-born Peter Michel’s latest EP Arc is a nostalgic journey through shoegaze and dream-pop. The spiraling guitars and luscious sweep of lead track ‘Night Fell’ are wonderful, framed in shimmering guitars and Michel’s sighing vocals that recognise the pain of the past, observing the moments of nature, that make the struggle of a life worth living. Consumed by the rush of love he surveys the vastness of the vista the soaring glorious chorus, its the sound of birds spinning across the sky as the sun sets.

Hibou is the indie dream-pop solo project from Paris based Peter Michel. His latest release ‘Arc’ delivers 5 strong numbers of ethereal pop bliss. Self-engineered, self-produced, and solely performed by Michel save the drums provided by Jase Ihler; the project is a labour of love. Within seconds the opener “Night Fell” immerses listeners into a sonic palette of comforting textures and pulsing rhythm that consistently carries throughout the record. The drums pulse and push without being overpowering. Michel’s vocals function as a wonderful texture that blends beautifully with the instruments while still providing clarity in key moments to allow the songs to shine melodically. Standout track “Upon The Clouds You Weep”, features a thunderous drum performance from Ihler supporting a wall of lush distortion and glittery vocals from Michel. ‘Already Forgotten’ closes out the record in synth driven, heartfelt melancholy.

The lyric is a beautifully written and leaves one with a cathartic resolve. Michel notably sings: “I should’ve known, forever won’t take too long. Tomorrow’s almost gone. “Already forgotten”. We are honoured to be the first to present this release to you in the vinyl format. Enjoy” – Salton Sea Sound System

Reminding me tenderly of the mid-period lushness of M83‘s dream pop, or the anthemic ‘Regret’ by New Order. Fall under its spell.

Written and Produced by Peter Michel Performed by: Peter Michel – Vocals, Guitar, Bass
Jase Ihler – Drums

released January 13th, 2023

Lael Neale has released a new album, “Star Eaters Delight”, today via Sub Pop Records. She shared its fourth single, “Must Be Tears,” via a self-directed video. Neale had this to say about the video in a press release: “Even though I’ve lived through many springs, the season never fails to disappoint me with its lingering cold and dreariness. Flowers are nature’s apology.”

Previously Neale shared the album’s first single, “I Am the River,” also via a self-directed music video. Then she shared its second single, the over eight-minute long “In Verona,” via a self-directed video in which Neale plays a newscaster. The next and its third single, “Faster Than the Medicine,” also via a self-directed video.

“Star Eaters Delight” is the follow up to 2021’s “Acquainted With Night”, which was her debut for Sub Pop and was recorded in 2019. The new album was recorded after Neale moved from Los Angeles to her family’s farm in rural Virginia in April 2020.

“Acquainted with Night” was a focusing inward amidst the loud and bright Los Angeles surrounding me. It was an attempt to create spaciousness and quiet reverie within. When I moved back to the farm, I found that the unbroken silences compelled me to break them with sound. This album is more external. It is a reaching back out to the world, wanting to feel connected, to wake up, to come together again,” explained Neale in a previous press release.

The follow-up to Lael Neale’s folk fuelled and Omnichord driven “Acquainted With Night” is somehow even better. Though Neale set out on her own path with the preceding album, here she takes things further and wagers on risks that handsomely payoff. “If I Had No Wings” and “Must Be Tears” stick with her prior approach, but the album’s most stunning moments come on tracks such as the eight-minute single “In Verona.” Neale exudes a post-punk air of detachment in a chilling retelling of the tale of Shakespeare’s star crossed lovers.

“Faster Than the Medicine” has the bass thumping rush of New Order’s best. While, the closing track “Lead Me Blind” pushes a heartfelt and piano-driven ballad through layers and layers of tape hiss like some long forgotten outtake from the Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music.