The Fat Angel Sings

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood talk the past, present and future of The Rolling Stones. “Hackney Diamonds”, pop and blues, the band and the establishment, Bill and Charlie (did he really punch Mick?) and more. Also in this issue: Bob Dylan’s archive treasures; Peter Gabriel checks in; Sly Stone’s peak madness; Joni Mitchell’s mid-’70s; Carly Simon speaks! Plus: Joe Walsh, Thurston Moore, Black Pumas, Graham Parker, Talking Heads, Micky Dolenz sings R.E.M., Mike Stoller, Meat Puppets, Jimmy Buffett, Suicide and more.

A little groggy from MOJO’s 30th birthday celebrations last month, it’s sobering to be reminded of what longevity can really mean. The Rolling Stones have now existed for over twice as long as MOJO, and while other artists of their vintage have grappled with the ageing process for a good couple of decades, Messrs Jagger, Richards and Wood mostly remain impervious to such trifling distractions as mortality. “It’s a weird feeling to be an elder statesman,” Keith Richards tells us in a notable new interview this month, though most of us would’ve called him as much since about 1989.

Mick Jagger, meanwhile, confesses to a few “slightly tongue-in-cheek references to ageing” on “Hackney Diamonds”, the 24th Rolling Stones album and the pretext for MOJO’s chat with the core three, their pugnacious new drummer Steve Jordan, and their young producer Andrew Watt. It is, hand on heart, the best Stones feature you’ll read in years: one that’s as strong on historic myth-busting as it is on unpicking the new record, and which – amidst a justifiable blizzard of namedropping – has a superb Hoagy Carmichael anecdote.

 “raising the middle finger to death,” Peter Gabriel tells us all about his forthcoming album, i/o, plus mind-reading, “grandad-dancing” and why he had to be present at the last Genesis gig.

Unveiled… Bob’s secret treasures! MOJO digs ever deeper into the Dylan Archive and, via new book Mixing Up The Medicine, finds rare pics and exotic artefacts to surprise even the most obsessive Bobcat.

THIS MONTH’S COVERMOUNT CD is “Love In Vain”, a collection of the spooky country blues embedded in the Stones’ DNA. Stars Robert Johnson, Sleepy John Estes, Charley Patton, Skip James, Geeshie Wiley and more.

19-year-old hyper-pop sensation Jane Remover continues to impress, and her sophomore album might just cement her budding stardom. Look no further for that truth than in the title track, “Census Designated.” The six-minute song slowly unfurls into its own immersive world; crass and visceral but utterly celestial.

Written and produced entirely by Jane herself, the song blends her typical fuzzy, industrial glitch with gossamer keys and a smoothly robotic vocal performance—one that is comforting, not off putting, to the more terminally online of Jane’s fans (which, in all honesty, is likely most of them). She sings, “I’m young blood, fresh meat, and I like that,” ushering in a tongue-in-cheek awareness to the genre while remaining beholden to no limits in which the sounds her work can subsume.

Songs like “Holding a Leash” and the seven-minute epic “Idling Somewhere” conjure the same feverish, distorted digital footprint.

The world on this record is grand, pixelated and harmonic, industrial yet sublime. On “Census Designated”, Jane Remover knows exactly what she is doing—and she’s doing a damn good job at it.

You won’t hear another album like “Census Designated”, the sophomore effort by Jane Remover, this year, or most years: the singer-producer, who reconfigured her sound (as well as came out as a trans woman) following 2021 debut “Frailty”, has mastered a singular blend of shoegaze, noise rock, pop melodies and indie balladry across these 10 tracks, while also prodding at her personal evolution and identity. Parts of “Census Designated” work best during a late-night headphones listen, while others beg to be blasted from car speakers; conceptually, the album begins at sundown and ends at dawn, but Jane Remover’s latest will affect you in any setting.

“Bad Dream Jaguar” is a collection of songs threading their way through the uncertainty. The Austin band made the album during a period of dislocation: guitarist Stephen Salisbury moved from Texas to North Carolina in 2020, changing the nature of his creative (and romantic) relationship with singer and bandleader Laura Colwell until she joined him in 2022. The dozen tracks on “Bad Dream Jaguar” seek to make sense of that distance, their solitude and, in an overarching way, a fractured nostalgia for what had come before—and the often painful work of letting it go.

The first two minutes of Sun June’s third album, “Bad Dream Jaguar,” is a reverie – Laura Colwell’s voice floats above a slow-burn, sparse synth sound, conjuring a tipsy loneliness, a hazy recollection, a disco ball spinning at the end of the night for an empty dancefloor. Sun June’s music often feels like a shared memory – the details so close to the edge of a song that you can touch them. And as an Austin-based project, their music has also always felt strangely and specifically Texan – unhurried, long drives across an impossible expanse of openness, refractions shimmering off the pavement in the heat.

But on “Bad Dream Jaguar”, Sun June is unmoored. The back drop of Texas is replaced by longing, by distance, by transience, and aquiet fear. The only sense of certainty comes from the murky past.It’s a dispatch from aging, when you’re in the strange in-betweenof yourself: there’s a clear image of the person you once wereand the places you inhabited, generational curses and our fami-lies, but the future feels vast, unclear – and the present can’t help but slip through your fingers.

There’s a mix of hi-fi and lo-fi; some songs, like “Texas,” whichthe band had to learn at a breakneck pace ahead of their record-ing session, was recorded on a first take, live in the room, while “Eager” and “Easy Violence” feature early vocal takes from Colwell, the final songs built atop the demos. The latter track details staying up all night, being a menace to society, falling into bad patterns, but is followed by “John Prine,” a drumless, piano-based ballad, a mash of pedal steel manipulated to sound closer to synths.

Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy sounding in the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured foundation in a sense of ease. The layers on “Bad Dream Jaguar” don’t tangle but they float, sheaths of divergent and luminescent sonics hanging together as the sun goes down, darkness seeping in. The record exists in the chasm between giving up and going all-in. And a flicker of quiet confidence powering through, a small hopeful glow at its core. 

It’s a subtle album, built around gentle, dream-like musical arrangements that belie the tougher sentiments underpinning these songs. The narrators here are often trying to figure out where they stand, in relation to a significant other, themselves, the past, the future. “You were searching for a reason to be mad / Babe, I got plenty of them,” Colwell sings on “Mixed Bag,” her soft voice wrapped in layers of guitar, ghostly backing vocals and a piano vamp that lands just so between lyrics.

Befitting an album that took shape around a long-distance relationship, there’s a lot of road imagery on “Bad Dream Jaguar”. Colwell sings about long drives and headlights in the distance, and the lyrics often play like the reveries that blossom between the highway lines on road trips. She lets her mind wander through remembered scenes and settings that have the feel of creased snapshots she found tucked away in the glove compartment. Colwell is fighting to stay awake behind the wheel, and true to herself, while singing along in the car on “John Prine.” On “Washington Square,” her narrator is remembering when she and a partner were young and foolish “back when all the things to come hadn’t yet,” while “Sage” finds her holding tight to glimpses of the past while staving off the melancholy of a solitary present

Released 20/10/2023

After collaborating together for more than a decade, Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden released their first album under the Lost Girls moniker in 2021: “Menneskekollektivet”. The record received rave reviews, including a Best New Music mark at Pitchfork. Now the duo release their second album “Selvutsletter”.

This the second album from Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden’s collaborative project Lost Girls, “Selvutslette”r is eight songs packed to the brim with avant-garde pop music and post-modern reflections on pleasure, dancing and experimentalism. It’s as primitive as a Bjӧrk record, as intoxicating as Hounds of Love-era Kate Bush. It’s not quite as immediately accessible as the pop radio workings of Hval’s own solo work, especially her 2022 album “Classic Objects” but “Selvutsletter” is relentless in its own pursuit towards organic electronica. Guitars and synthesizers flicker and haunt, as Hval and Volden solidify the magnetism of their own creative partnership.

Songs like “With the Other Hand” and “World on Fire” sound like they’re straight from a time capsule but, like the standout track “Ruins,” “Selvutsletter” sounds unlike anything Hval and Volden have ever made. It’s one of the best electronic albums of 2023. 

Where “Menneskekollektivet” was about exploring club beats, and expanding and trying out structures, “Selvutsletter” is about disappearing in experiences. It combines the intuitive, late night feel of Lost Girls’ previous work with experimental rock music as its object. The result is more adventurous than nostalgic: A fiery, bilingual whirl of colours, words, vegetation and electricity.

“A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night” is Brooklyn singer/songwriter Katie von Schleicher’s first full-length album since 2020, and it’s punctuated, psychedelic and beautiful at every turn. Her melancholic, angelic singing is just as spectral as ever here, though a song like “Every Step Is an Ocean” breaks her out of her comfort zone a bit—as she conjures avant-pop and electronica in confident and sublime ways. Elsewhere, von Schleicher delivers piercing ballads (“Texas” and “Jeanine”) and collaborates with Lady Lamb to make groovy, folk-inspired bliss (“Elixir”). 

“A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night” is magnetic and unavoidable, boasting the bravado of a musician at an immaculate apex. Album standout “Overjoyed” is one of the best songs von Schleicher has ever written, as it soars on a delightful, buoyant instrumentation that flirts with the gray area between twang-pop and Laurel Canyon folk rock.

Produced by Katie von Schleicher and Sam Griffin Owens (Sam Evian) – “A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night” was recorded with a bunch of poker buddies the two accumulated during the pandemic. Lyrically wry and classically lush with strings and horns, it’s a songwriter album that nuzzles up to the Arthur Russell and Kirsty MacColl LPs in one’s record collection. In narrowing the gap between her personality and her songwriting, von Schleicher has made her most untroubled album.

“A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night”, out October 20th on Sipsman.

Neil Young has announced a new album titled “Before and After”. The 13-track LP will arrive on December 8th and will feature solo acoustic re-recordings of songs from throughout Young’s catalogue. There’s also one previously unreleased track, “If You Got Love.”

Set to arrive on December 8th via Reprise Records, the album will see Young structure the trac-klist so that the songs blend together and create one continuous flow from beginning to end.

“The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece — designed to be listened to that way,” said Young of the new album. “This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organisation, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.” “Songs from my life, recently recorded, create a music montage with no beginnings or endings,” Young said in a statement posted to the album’s preorder page.

Neil Young’s new release called ‘Before & After’, out now via Reprise. But instead of writing and recording a batch of new material, the singer-songwriter took a cue from the Taylor Swift playbook, re-recording select songs from throughout his career. ‘Before & After’ is described as “a trip into his music history,” with Neil having picked some of his own favourite songs from his catalogue to re-visit. It’ll mostly be solo acoustic re-recordings, sequenced so its 13 songs blend seamlessly together from front to back.

“The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece — designed to be listened to that way,” Neil said in a statement. “This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organization, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.”

Tracks in the album include his earliest Buffalo Springfield appearance, ‘Burned’, and his more recent track ‘Don’t Forget Love’, taken from 2021’s ‘Barn’. The previously unreleased song titled ‘If You Got Love’ is featured too.

Neil Young recently broke his four-year touring hiatus. Over the summer, he embarked on a solo acoustic tour of the West Coast in which he performed songs he had never played live before.

“I don’t want to come back and do the same songs again,” Young said at the time . “I’ll feel like I was on some sort of carnival ride. I’d rather be doing these other songs I haven’t done. … I won’t have to compare how I’m doing ‘Heart of Gold’ to [how I played it in] 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020.”

“It’s over. The old days are gone,” he said in a message posted to his Neil Young Archives website. “Artists have to worry about ripped-off fans blaming them for Ticketmaster add-ons and scalpers.”

So far, no further tour dates have been announced, and Young has emphasized that performing live in today’s industry is strenuous for both artists and concertgoers. “Before And After’ was produced by the singer-songwriter, alongside Lou Adler. Young took on the role of mixing the album too with the help of Niko Bolas – recognised as The Volume Dealers.

Neil Young teamed with legendary producer Lou Adler (The Mamas and The Papas, Carole King’s Tapestry, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) for an album unlike any other he’s recorded.  “Before and After” features Young revisiting some of the lesser-known gems in his discography, arranging them into a 48-minute suite meant to played continuously.  The sequence is career-spanning, from his first Buffalo Springfield appearance “Burned” through “Don’t Forget Love” from 2021’s “Barn”.  One previously unreleased song, “If You Got Love,” debuts.  The album will be available in four formats: vinyl LP; clear vinyl LP (available only from independent record stores and Young’s Greedy Hand online store), 

Neil Young recently posted a New Year’s thank-you message on his official website to those who helped him out in various aspects of his life and career in 2023. Nested in the note was a news tidbit that should excite fans—the folk-rock legend will be mounting a new tour in 2024.

In addition, Young expressed his gratitude for producer Lou Adler for co-producing his latest studio album, “Before and After”, with me. He added, I love that album. “It feels good to me.”

Before and After was released this past December 8. The album is a collection of newly recorded stripped-down acoustic renditions of 13 songs from throughout Young’s 50-plus-year career. The album boasts a mix of deep cuts and better-known tunes.

On Thanksgiving, a couple weeks prior to the release of “Before and After”, Neil Young premiered a new video dubbed “Stand for Peace.” The clip featured him performing a solo instrumental version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” reminiscent of the one Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock in 1969.

2023 also saw Young return to the stage after a three-year hiatus. His Coastal Tour 2023 featured 15 concerts, running from a June 30 performance in Los Angeles through a July 24 show in Stateline, Nevada.

Young also performed at Stephen Stills’ Light Up the Blues to Benefit Autism charity show on April 22 in L.A., and at the 2023 Farm Aid concert on September 23 in Noblesville, Indiana.

For her third album, “Bobbie”, Dutch singer-songwriter Pip Blom decided to rip it up and start again. After making her name as one of the brightest indie rock singers around through two albums – 2019 debut “Boat” and 2021 follow-up “Welcome Break” – and a lauded live show honed over gruelling years of touring, the new album sees her take a delightful left turn into thumping, carefree synth pop.

While admitting to the cliché of a guitar-orientated band “grabbing the synths” for album three, this new direction had a real and genuine draw for Blom and foremost in her mind was cult 2010s English pop band Micachu and the Shapes. For their previous albums,

Blom wrote songs on the guitar, hoping that the studio process would then allow her to live out her pop dreams through final flourishes added during the recording process. “But we were always then running out of time,” she remembers, “and they ended up as just guitar-y albums.” For “Bobbie”, work with synthesisers and computers began from the very beginning, and she recruited producer ​​Dave McCracken in a co-writer role to make sure the vision was fully realised.

To immerse herself in this new way of working, Blom worked on the album in separate, intensive bursts of creativity, based around a series of non-stop five-day studio jaunts in her native Netherlands. The songs were then sent to McCraken – whose credits include Jay-Z and Kanye West – to gain a little more “clarity” and be trimmed into the tight, punchy pop hits that make up the new album

Pip Blom shared ‘Get Back’, the track taken from their forthcoming third album, “Bobbie”, which is out this month! The single follows high profile collaborations with Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand on ‘This Is Love?’ and Dutch indie act Personal Trainer on ‘Kiss Me By The Candlelight.’

Talking about the track, Pip said: “One of the things I am most happy with on this album is the vocal sound. My voice sounds warm and intimate, but also punchy and fierce at other times. During the recording of the vocals in the chorus, we laughed a lot because it turned out to be quite difficult to say “Get Back” so many times in a row. I love how “Get Back” is both a rock song but still sounds very produced. A recurring phenomenon on “Bobbie” is the vocals with a lot of autotune, which can also be heard in the bridge of this song. “Get Back” may be one of the loudest songs on the album, yet Claudius managed to give it an even bigger lift in volume and intensity in the last chorus.

This 12-track collection features collaborations with Personal Trainer and Alex Kapranos.

Release Date: 20/10/2023

Wednesday premiere a feature video for Rat Bastards of Haw Creek, a documentary directed by Zach Romeo showcasing their quiet, rural lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina and how that existence stands in contrast with the raucous, kinetic energy of their captivating live shows and the rapid pace of their newfound success.

Wednesday’s breakthrough album “Rat Saw God” was released earlier this year to unanimous critical praise. It has been named one of the best albums of the year so far by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Vulture, SPIN, Stereogum, Paste, Consequence, Nylon, The AV Club and Brooklyn Vegan among others, making it one of the best reviewed albums of the year so far.

Across the album’s ten tracks the band builds a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, with distorted pedal steel and Karly Hartzman’s voice and observational lyrics slicing through the din.

Dwight Twilley, one of the musicians who pioneered the rock subgenre known as power pop, died on Wednesday. He was 72 years of age. His death was confirmed by the Church Studio in Tulsa, Okla., where Twilley recorded many of his best-known songs, including his signature hit, “I’m on Fire.” The Facebook announcement read, “He peacefully departed this world, surrounded by the love of his life, Jan, and close friends … Dwight’s musical prowess touched countless lives, leaving an indelible mark on the hearts of many. We are profoundly thankful for the enduring musical legacy he has bestowed upon us all.”

According to his hometown newspaper Tulsa World, Twilley suffered a stroke Saturday while driving and crashed his vehicle into a tree. He died at a hospital four days later. He was a lifelong disciple of the Beatles who also harboured an enduring love for Elvis Presley, Twilley devoted his career to hooks, harmonies and ringing guitars, a combination designed to evoke the platonic ideal of a hit pop single. Twilley achieved one of those with “I’m on Fire,” the debut single from the Dwight Twilley Band, a group he co-led with his old friend Phil Seymour, which shot into the Top 20 upon its release in 1975.

With its accompanying album “Sincerely” garnering positive reviews, including a rave from Rolling Stone, the Dwight Twilley Band seemed poised to follow a similar trajectory to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, label mates at Leon Russell’s Shelter Records and kindred spirits who also updated the jangle of 1960s garage rock for the slicker 1970s. But sucked into the vortex of the collapse of Shelter Records, the band couldn’t capitalize on “I’m on Fire,” leading to internal tensions that ultimately led Seymour to leave Twilley behind.

On his own, Twilley did earn a second chart hit in 1984 with the insistent “Girls,” but he ultimately embraced his role as a cult act. In Tulsa, he opened his own studio and launched his own record label, spending the last half of his life releasing collections of bright, effervescent tunes that adhered to the artistic standards he initially essayed with “Sincerely.” Occasionally, one of his old songs surfaced in unexpected places — “Looking for the Magic” sounded effectively ominous in the 2011 horror film “You’re Next” — but Twilley largely played to a cult audience who shared his passion for immaculately crafted pop-rock.

Born in Tulsa on June 6th, 1951, Dwight Twilley displayed an affection for the arts before witnessing the Beatles play on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, but that particular performance inspired him to form a group called the Intruders when he was in middle school. The Beatles were also the catalyst for his introduction to Seymour. The pair both attended a matinee of “A Hard Day’s Night” in 1967, a screening intended for children. Twilley remembered, “If you brought a kid with you, you got in for free. I brought my little brother, and Phil brought somebody. So, it’s like, here’s this line of little tiny toddlers and there’s only two people that are tall enough to pass through the turnstile.” Once the film was finished, the pair headed over to Twilley’s house, where they immediately started writing and recording songs together.

Initially, Twilley and Seymour called themselves Oister, splitting the lead vocal duties on originals written by Twilley. Working in Twilley’s garage and Seymour’s bedroom, they finished an album, pressing acetates of “Oister Presents Swirling Clouds,” but they soon felt limited in Tulsa. Lacking the funds to move to either coast, the pair headed to Memphis in 1969, walking through the doors of Sun Records without realizing it was the label that gave Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins their starts. Jerry Phillips, the son of Sun founder Sam Phillips, pointed the duo in the direction of Ray Harris, one of its old signings who was then one of the owners of Hi Records. Harris introduced Twilley and Seymour to rockabilly, igniting a love of Presley within Twilley that helped give his pop a leaner, harder-edged sound.

Returning to Tulsa, the pair brought guitarist Bill Pitcock IV into the fold. Late in 1974, Oister headed to Los Angeles where the band wound up signing with Shelter, the imprint run by Russell and Denny Cordell that was based in Tulsa. Shelter insisted the group change its name to the Dwight Twilley Band, a move that suggested Seymour was a hired hand, then brought the band members back to Tulsa, setting them up at the label’s studio in a renovated church. The band promptly cut “I’m on Fire,” a song that blended their love of Beatles harmony with a rockabilly swagger.

Released early in 1975, “I’m on Fire” climbed its way onto the Billboard singles chart, but the Dwight Twilley Band wasn’t able to ride this momentum because of the implosion of Shelter after a falling out between Russell and Cordell. Cordell told Twilley to keep recording, so the group amassed a surplus of material for its debut album, “Sincerely,” which appeared a year after “I’m on Fire.”

“Sincerely” arrived too late to capitalize on “I’m on Fire,” so the group rushed out a second album, “Twilley Don’t Mind,” in 1977. At that point, there was a nascent roots-rock revival coalescing around the Dwight Twilley Band and Petty and the Heartbreakers. Twilley and Seymour both sang on Petty’s eponymous 1976 debut, with Petty returning the favor by playing guitar on “Looking for the Magic” on “Twilley Don’t Mind.” Where the Heartbreakers wound up weathering Shelter’s collapse, the Dwight Twilley Band split months after the release of its second album.

Twilley soldiered on as a solo act, hiring producer Noah Shark, who helmed Petty’s “You’re Gonna Get It” LP, for “Twilley,” a well-crafted 1979 album that steered the singer-songwriter toward the middle of the road. It took three more years for Twilley to release “Scuba Divers,” a record that didn’t attract much radio attention, but a vocal assist from Petty on “Girls” helped in 1984, as did a video that nodded to the locker-room fantasies of the hit teenage comedy “Porky’s.”

“Girls” gave Twilley his final hit single, peaking at No. 16, the same position “I’m on Fire” reached a decade earlier. After “Wild Dogs” in 1986, he left major labels behind, but Twilley wasn’t forgotten. His ballad “Why You Wanna Break My Heart” appeared as Tia Carrere’s show-stopping moment in “Wayne’s World” in 1992. He had his catalogue reissued during the CD boom of the 1990s, including “The Great Lost Twilley Album,” a collection filled with material Twilley and Seymour recorded in the mid-1970s.

Toward the end of the 1990s, Twilley started releasing home recordings he made over the years. He’d punctuate collections of rarities with records concentrating on a particular theme — he put out a Beatles tribute album in 2009 — and he compiled highlights of these efforts on “The Best of Dwight Twilley: The Tulsa Years, 1999-2016, Vol. 1,” a collection released digitally in 2023.

Ducks Ltd. return with urgent, shimmering new single “The Main Thing” featuring backing vocals from Dehd’s Jason Balla.

“The Main Thing” sees Ducks Ltd. embark on their most collaborative effort to date. Featuring Ratboys’ Julia Steiner on backing vocals alongside Dehd’s Jason Balla and Moontype’s Margaret McCarthy, the track is propulsive, jangly and as hook-laden as any in the band’s catalogue. Written by singer Tom McGreevy, it concerns growing apart from a person whose views you once shared, and may be the first jangle-pop single to make reference to both professional baseball and ritual magick.

Lead guitar, drum programming: Evan Lewis
Lead vocals, rhythm guitar, keys, bass: Tom Mcgreevy
Drums: Marcus Nuccio
Background vocals: Jason Balla, Margaret McCarthy, Julia Steiner

released October 19th, 2023

“The Main Thing” is out now on Carpark Records / Royal Mountain Records.