The Fat Angel Sings

On a night at SXSW in Austin two months ago, Ratboys members Julia Steiner, Dave Sagan, Marcus Nuccio and Sean Neumann sat together at a vegan BBQ truck stationed in front of Cheer Up Charlie’s. It was almost midnight, as the clear-skied night cracked open and an aperture of neon washed over the entire venue. but everything came together so perfectly under the sparkle of a Texan evening, as the light pollution ensconced the whole joint just right.

Ratboys began 13 years ago in South Bend at the University of Notre Dame, where Steiner and Sagan were studying. Making music together in dorm rooms, we thought sounded good and showing it to our friends.” Fast forward to a decade and nine drummers later, and you’ll find the quartet deeply immersed in their own mountainous groove. Sagan noted that a big part of the work now is building an infrastructure to play music they’re proud of and can make a living off of it, too.

“We’re definitely focused on trying to make it sustainable and do it as well as possible,” Nuccio, who’s been with Ratboys since 2017 and also drums in local groups Pet Symmetry, What Gives and The Please & Thank Yous, chimed in. It made sense that we were gathered at High Road’s showcase at that very moment, given how they became such an integral part of Ratboys’ evolution from a strictly DIY band six years ago. “We were still booking everything ourselves,” Neumann, who became the band’s permanent bassist in 2016.

Steiner had graduated from Notre Dame a year before Sagan—who was finishing a five-year program— taking shelter at her parents’ house in Kentucky before settling down in Chicago. Steiner was in the city, she and Sagan made the first Ratboys album, “AOID”. “We recorded sporadically, whenever Dave was able to come home,” she said. “We recorded “AOID” in a shared practice space, so [through the walls] you could hear other bands practicing. So I recorded all the vocals for that record in the middle of the night when no one else was there.”

Keeping company with peers like Dowsing, NNAMDÏ and Sinai Vessel, the band found a place within the local emo scene—eventually signing with famed emo label Topshelf Records—despite their tunes being a pastiche of pop-punk, indie-folk and outlaw country. In 2021, they celebrated that era by releasing “Happy Birthday, Ratboy”, an album where they re-recorded songs from their 2011 “RATBOY” EP and other origin-story-era gems.

Sometimes you gotta dig deep, but that’s how we started.” More than any other band working right now, Ratboys are emblematic of Heartland rock ‘n’ roll; a quartet more than comfortable staying put in the place they cut their teeth in, no matter what. Ratboys have now been together for more than a decade, a story that began in 2010 when frontwoman Julia Steiner and guitarist Dave Sagan met at Notre Dame freshman orientation and, soon after, recorded a cover of “Spiderweb” by the Champaign-Urbana slacker-rock project Easter. Since then, their band has evolved into a full-time four-piece line-up, and their marriage of noisy indie rock and alt-country has shifted and evolved. Their new album “The Window” is another stage in that evolution. It’s their first to be recorded collaboratively from start to finish, and the new coming-together lends it a triumphant, expansive sound.

For 10 years, the band’s lifeblood has been their impeccable live-show reputation.

“We’re all just deeply addicted to everything that goes into being a band. Playing live and having that connection with people over art, that shared interaction, is the best thing on Earth. Recording and making music that wasn’t there before is, literally, magic,” Steiner concluded.

Ratboys—are one of the few remaining acts of their time with so much left to give. They haven’t stretched their potential too thin by always being in the limelight with a gazillion releases. No, instead, they tour often and take their time making standalone albums that fuck exponentially.

“The Window”, Ratboys’ upcoming fifth album. It was on the horizon a month ago—and many critics had collectively clocked the band’s release of “Black Earth, Wi” and its “record on the way” energy—but things were still being kept under wraps when they took to Austin. Now, “The Window” closes the book on a near-two-year marathon of shows in America and Europe, as the band took to the road, once quarantine lifted, to give “Printer’s Devil” the celebration it deserved in 2020. Now more than ever, Ratboys are now on everyone’s radar; their pedigree vaulted even further into the echelons of Midwestern excellence after Walmart used their 2021 single “Go Outside” in a commercial.

The 11 tracks on “The Window” are something of a real majesty. Ratboys zero in on everything they do exceptionally well and put it in a blender. Steiner’s songwriting, in particular, is at a pinnacle—which says a lot, given how dense and heavy and immaculate “Printer’s Devil” was, the demos for which were tracked in the emptied rooms of her childhood home in Louisville after it was sold. Somewhere on the spectrum in-between Rilo Kiley and Wildflowers-era Tom Petty, Ratboys have made it to a place in their own artistry where they have ample reserves of courage to execute risks.

Steiner returns to window imagery on the album often, as it’s one of the few motifs that properly captures the helplessness and isolation of quarantine, which undoubtedly shaped much of this album. Being pent up inside, where else did we have to turn but towards our small glimpse at the hope still moving next to us? But, instead of looking over her shoulder and considering what’s growing beyond the panes, Steiner is on the outside peering in, still grieving and sketching the pieces of her past unshaken by the crumbling world encased all around it. And from those reflections comes sirens of hope. “So take this part of me / Carry it with you / Wherever it leads / Don’t be scared,” she sings during “The Window.”

Rather than adopting the steadfast, Ratboys sound by steamrolling through emo directions and country chords, Steiner takes those textures on “The Window” and uses them to embellish her own love for catchy pop music through elaborate, balmy and well-crafted choruses.

There is no overarching concept to “The Window“; it’s Steiner and the crew honing their craft by installing past doorways onto new frames: The infectious, raucous “Crossed That Line” was written for a friend’s short film about a fictional punk band (which didn’t end up getting made); “I Want You (Fall 2010)” is Steiner’s delicate ode to a decade-long companionship with Sagan that ends in a cheeky Midwest emo riff; “Morning Zoo” is the best country-rock song you’ll hear this summer; “Empty” features introductory, distorted vocalizations reminiscent of “Molly.”

“The Window” was produced by Chris Walla, the Death Cab for Cutie bassist When Foxing toured for their Walla-produced 2018 album “Nearer My God“, Ratboys opened shows for them—which is how they got linked up with Walla to begin with, at their gig in Montreal.

The warm, vintage, band-in-a-room rawness of “Black Earth, Wi” was not a one-off. All of “The Window” embraces that sonic presentation, as—per Walla’s guidance—Ratboys recorded the entire album straight to tape and built the foundational sound of the project off of that technique. “The songs themselves are pretty stylistically all over the map, but that fidelity makes any song sound better—whether it’s a rock song or a folk song,” Beyond Sagan’s absurd, career-defining guitar solo, “Black Earth, Wi” is the epitome of what Ratboys are.

“The Window” is out August 25th via Topshelf Records. 

Buck Meek is an integral part indie-rock act Big Thief a band one that’s courted fervid devotion, controversy, backlash, and backlash to that backlash. And yet none of that seems to extend to the aptly named Meek, who’s quietly been releasing impressive solo work over the last half decade to little fanfare. It’s the irony of Big Thief as a whole: They’re a band that practically demands a cultish following, but whose individual members resist the kind of cult of personality that surrounds performers like Mitski, Snail Mail, or any one of the boygeniuses.

This unknowability is at the heart of all of Meek’s work, including his new record “Haunted Mountain”, a collection of songs that weave the mystical and everyday while meticulously obscuring the reality of either. While, for all intents and purposes, Big Thief are a band from nowhere, Meek is very much a product of his Texas upbringing—most noticeably in the tumbleweed yodel that characterizes his vocal stylings, but also in the vast, open frontier obscuring the edges of his work.

Meek talked about the “balance between myth and…something very simple and grounded” that characterizes the Texas songwriters he admires, such as Townes Van Zandt, Blaze Foley, and Guy Clark. 

On “Haunted Mountain” ,Meek is obsessed with finding a way to live in both worlds. The record’s title itself is a testament to an unmovable sturdiness and the mystical spirits that may call it home, with each song existing somewhere on the spectrum between the two. Simmering mid-album highlight “Cyclades” is a study in how memory itself becomes its own shrouded apparition, especially when it’s repeated and passed down. “There’s too many stories to remember, too many stories to tell,” sings Meek It’s one of several times that Meek presents small moments of reality that quickly bloom into the fantastic, loosening the grip on either.

This isn’t the only moment where truth is hard to come by on “Haunted Mountain”. Meek doesn’t treat this so much as a problem to be solved as a reality to be accepted. “I’ll never know the secret life inside of you,” he sings on “Secret Side,” a slow-trotting folk song highlighted by lilting harmonies with “Haunted Mountain” producer Mat Davidson. Later, on “Where You’re Coming From,” Meek sings of rough-and-tumble specifics—weeds, grass, dirt, streams—providing a gritty contrast to the impenetrable mind and heart of another. It’s just as these kinds of musings come to a head that Meek and his backing band typically whip themselves into a frenzy, louder, harsher, and more rocking than anything in his catalogue, letting the music speak where words tend to fail. 

As in-step as Meek and his band are throughout the album, they don’t always excuse some of “Haunted Mountain’s” trite declarations (“Our first kiss felt like home,” “I knew the moment that I saw you that my life would never be the same,”), but even the most treacly moments are quickly hedged by walls of distorted noise or the wail of Meek’s benign mountain spirit. 

out 25th August via 4AD Records.

Soccer Mommy the project of Nashville-based musician Sophie Allison has announced a new covers EP entitled “Karaoke Night”. Allison initially began teasing the project last month when she shared a cover of Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun.” 

Out today is Allison’s version of Swift’s “I’m Only Me When I’m with You.” Allison said regarding the track, “I really wanted to cover this song because it’s one of my favorites from Taylor’s first album. I listened to that record so much when I was a kid and I think it had a lot of influence on me then.”

“Karaoke Night”, will be out September 22nd via Loma Vista, will also feature Allison’s takes on songs by Taylor Swift, R.E.M., Pavement, and Slowdive (not “Alison,” believe it or not).

Holy Wave are from Austin, Texas and uphold the Lone Star State’s long-standing reputation for top-notch lysergic sounds. The band consists of multi-instrumentalists Joey Cook, Ryan Fuson, Kyle Hager, Julián Ruiz, and Dustin Zozaya. Holy Wave released their first LP in 2011, “Knife Hits”, followed by “The Evil Has Landed” EP in 2012. Both albums were were paired up on a 2013 collection called “Evil Hits”.

2014 brought their second LP Relax, produced by Erik Wofford (The Black Angels, Explosions In The Sky, My Morning Jacket), which took the band on extensive U.S. and European tours.

“The Evil Has Landed Part II” collects b-sides from the Relax sessions and demos from their 2016 LP, “Freaks of Nurture”.

Originally released December 11th, 2015

When the grunge explosion of the early ‘90s elevated Seattle’s flannel-clad misfits out of the divey clubs of downtown and into the mainstream, a new generation of restless artists filled the void left in the Pacific Northwest’s underground music scene. Lync perfectly captured the spirit of that era, blending the passionate chaos of the DC and San Diego scenes with the rough-hewn DIY pop sensibilities of Olympia’s thriving indie community into one unified sound. Though they were only a band for two years, they helped define the next era of the Northwest underground, inspiring countless other artists and instigating the creation of beloved records from the region.

After being out of print for over a decade, the band’s sole LP “These Are Not Fall Colors” has been remastered and expanded into a 2xLP with the inclusion of “Can’t Tie Yet”—a compilation track from the album’s recording session—into a deluxe edition available courtesy of Suicide Squeeze Records.

Originally released on K Records in the summer of ’94 just a few months before the band called it quits, “These Are Not Fall Colors” is a boisterous collection of scrappy basement-show anthems played on duct-taped-together gear. Led by the off-kilter melodies of late singer/guitarist Sam Jayne and hammered into place by the driving bass of James Bertram and drum battery of David Schneider, the album’s eleven songs channel that undefinable sound of the early ‘90s before descriptors like “post-hardcore” and “emo” became pejorative terms. Sure, you get a sense of the more sophisticated mid-tempo punk approach on songs like “B” and “Silverspoon Glasses,” and maybe catch wind of wistful songwriting on “Pennies to Save” and “Cue Cards,” but Lync seemed to cull their ideas from whatever bits of inspiration they could find in the gray gloom churning it together into a style uniquely their own. 

Despite Lync’s short existence, modest aspirations, and DIY approach, their work had a ripple effect. Jayne and Bertram appeared on Beck’s “One Foot in the Grave” album. Jayne would go on to make music under the moniker of Love As Laughter. Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch was so enamored by the album that he enlisted Bertram and Schneider to serve as his rhythm section on the “There’s Nothing Wrong with Love” tour. “These Are Not Fall Colors” engineer Phil Ek would go on to help record and produce records by Fleet Foxes, Band of Horses, and The Shins. Bertram and Green would also go on to form the revered indie rock group Red Stars Theory. At times it feels like you could pick any major Northwest indie rock group from the ‘90s and ‘00s and trace their DNA back to Lync.

“These Are Not Fall Colors” out October 20th, 2023 on Suicide Squeeze Records.

If Islands’ last record, (2021’s “Islomania“) was a Saturday Night Fever dream, then the follow up– 2023’s “And That’s Why Dolphins Lost Their Legs” is the Sunday Morning comedown.

Taking a giant leap forward, replete with addictive hooks at every turn, “Dolphins” (the 9th record in the catalogue), stands out as the strongest and most articulate Islands record yet. Nick Thorburn and crew manage to tap into both the pain and the joy of living, (sometimes within the very same breath), while musically stripping things down to their simplest element: a bouncing bassline, a snappy kick and snare, or a persistent, hooky guitar line.

Though “Dolphins” is arguably their biggest musical departure (which is saying something, coming from a band that has constantly reinvented their sound from album to album), the DNA of Thorburn’s first band The Unicorns can clearly be heard throughout songs like “Headlines”, “Life’s A Joke” and “And All You Can Do is Laugh”.

“Dolphins”, which came together over a methodical, carefully considered multi-year process, continues Thorburn’s fruitful collaboration with co-producer Patrick Ford (!!!), and features production on a few songs from Chris Coady (Beach House) and Mike Stroud (Ratatat).

“And That’s Why Dolphins Lost Their Legs” out August 25th, 2023

• 28-song opening night set.
• Six songs from 2020’s “Letter To You”: “Ghosts,” “Letter To You,” “Last Man Standing,” “House Of A Thousand Guitars,” “Burnin’ Train” and “I’ll See You In My Dreams”
• “Last Man Standing” features a new arrangement.
• “I’ll See You In My Dreams” is performed solo acoustic to end the show. Bruce takes the opportunity to talk about his late friend and Castiles bandmate George Theiss before dedicating the song to Emily Marcus (daughter of legendary rock journalist and long-time Springsteen ally Greil Marcus), who passed away a few days prior.
• Two songs from 2022’s “Only the Strong Survive” in their first E Street Band performances: “Nightshift” (written by Franne Golde, Dennis Lambert and Walter Orange, popularized by The Commodores) and “Don’t Play That Song” (written by Ahmet Ertegun and Betty Nelson, popularized by Ben E. King).
• “Johnny 99” is performed in the “Wrecking Ball” tour arrangement.
• Concert stalwarts including “Because The Night” and “Dancing in the Dark” are performed in tighter, shorter versions.
• Rare inclusion of a new song, “Burnin’ Train,” as the first track of the encore.

Bruce Springsteen sauntered onstage Wednesday night (February 1st) with nothing to prove and all the determination to prove it anyway. The E Street brethren opened their much-anticipated 2023 tour at Tampa’s sold-out Amalie Arena with a show high on highs and prove-it-all-night uplift. Twenty-eight songs total, starting with a bombastic “No Surrender” and ending with the sombre solo acoustic “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”

When the house lights kicked on for the seven-song encore, which commenced with the live debut of “Burnin’ Train,” it signalled an even looser, grittier performance, a whole lot of fun, but a little barroom sloppy, too. “Professor” Roy Bittan is a brilliant pianist to be sure, “Born to Run” and “Rosalita” and “Glory Days” still run hot on full tanks of Jersey fuel.

Bruce Springsteen – Lead vocal, electric and acoustic guitars, harmonica; Roy Bittan – Piano, keyboards; Nils Lofgren – Electric and acoustic guitars, lap steel, backing vocal; Patti Scialfa – Guitar, percussion, backing vocal; Garry Tallent – Bass; Stevie Van Zandt – Electric and acoustic guitars, backing vocal; Max Weinberg – Drums; Jake Clemons – Tenor saxophone, percussion, backing vocal; Charlie Giordano – Organ, keyboards; Soozie Tyrell – Violin, acoustic guitar, percussion, Anthony Almonte – Percussion, backing vocal; Ada Dyer – Backing vocal; Curtis King – Backing vocal; Lisa Lowell – Backing vocal; Michelle Moore – Backing vocal; Barry Danielian – Trumpet; Ed Manion – Baritone and tenor saxophone;  Ozzie Melendez – Trombone; Curt Ramm – Trumpet

No one knew Sonic Youth was making its last stand — not even Sonic Youth itself.

“It was a period of regrouping. But in spite of some personal problems, it was still business as normal: ‘We’re going out to do a summer show in our hometown,’ ” admits co-founder Lee Ranaldo from his New York apartment.This cycle was not either for Sonic Youth or its fans:

Despite a period of relative inactivity, with nearly no shows in eight months, most members of one of American indie rock’s most beloved, raucous and best bands assumed they’d be back to work soon enough. Their Friday night show on a sprawling outdoor stage alongside the East River in Brooklyn on August 12th, 2011, was simply the latest in their decadelong string of summertime New York sets.

They had, as always, recruited an excellent cast of openers: Kurt Vile & the Violators, the emerging pride of Philadelphia, and Wild Flag, a Sleater-Kinney offshoot still a month from releasing its debut LP.

Sensing nothing unordinary, especially that they were on the precipice of the end, the band issued only one photo pass to a short-lived New York music blog. But two months and two days after that concert, the night would become the stuff of legend and history, not only for an unorthodox set list where Sonic Youth performed several songs for the first time in decades but also because it was, indeed, the end. The personal problems Ranaldo sensed exploded into public view:

After three decades as bandmates and 27 years of marriage, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore the first couple of indie rock, a pair whose creative partnership had given countless Gen X disciples life goals were splitting. With their marriage’s fracture, the band would also end. In the years to come, through interviews and memoirs and gossip columns, the source of that split would become clear: a common middle-aged affair. Sonic Youth played five more shows that November, fulfilling a contractual obligation for a festival swing through South America. Those were hard and perfunctory gigs, so that night in Brooklyn remained special. “I always refer to it as the last show, because it was the last one where we weren’t cognizant that we were going to stop playing,” says Ranaldo, sighing. “There’s a lot of complicated feelings in the aftermath, but we all left that concert feeling like we did a wonderful job.”For that final moment, at least, Sonic Youth’s future seemed wide open. 

This week, Silver Current Records will release a remixed version of the concert, previously issued online as a pandemic-era Bandcamp exclusive. In retrospect, it is almost impossible not to hear the strange set of non-hits as an onstage conversation about the scandal that would soon engulf Sonic Youth. Moore sings of cheating cads during “Psychic Hearts,” a relative obscurity from a solo album. Gordon commands the crowd to “support the power of women / use the power of man.” But in real time, it wasn’t like that. This was just a show meant to stand out for the songs the band played, not what those songs signified.

For the first time, the band members, their crew and their fans remember that concert and its aftermath in a series of candid interviews about the end of one of America’s great rock institutions. (Gordon and Moore declined interview requests; their memoirs, both of which address the band’s end, have been quoted.) This is a history of what might have been one night in a busy band’s long career, and what it came to represent.

Philadelphian punk heroes The Menzingers are returning with their seventh studio album. “Some Of It Was True” is set to arrive October 13th via Epitaph Records, and the momentum begins via lead single “Hope Is A Dangerous Little Thing.” The track is anthemic yet personal, as the band’s songwriting takes a powerful, melodic turn towards their brightest chapter yet.

“Some Of It Was True” was produced by prolific visionary Brad Cook (Bon Iver, The War on Drugs, Waxahatchee) and was recorded in El Paso at Sonic Ranch. The product that came from those sessions is a project that greatly mirrors the Menzingers’ incredible, enduring live energy and spirit.

“This record just feels different for us,” guitarist and vocalist Gregor Barnett explains. “It’s a really important one in our catalogue, and a pivotal moment in our history. We have the liberty of our fans growing with us now, and after writing these lyrical songs about where we are in life, we decided to take other peoples’ stories and make something bigger out of it.”

This is Diners’ 7th full length album, Diners four singles made their way into some of our best listened too songs at various points this summer “The Power” I heard “Domino” album title track way back in April and that guitar solo came wailing in for the first time, my interest was immediately.

On “Domino,” her energetic new album, she’s taken a turn toward overdriven, uptempo power pop, applying her affirming lyricism to an unabashed rock record. With production help from Portland songwriter Mo Troper, “Domino” places her breezy melodies alongside stomping Big Star guitars and hazy fuzz bass, lending a new urgency to her anthems. “This is the rock record that I always wanted to make,” Broderick says. “I know that any time I turn it on, it’s what I set out to do.”

Because the truth is, the hype for “Domino” is as real as any excitement around a record could ever be. Across 10 songs, Diners spearheaded by songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Blue Broderick—have turned 25 minutes into an entire universe. 

“Domino” is the perfect example of the many ways that a three-minute song can truly sing. The album is all killer, no filler for real. There’s something about precise and sharp hooks that are epic in their own right, but Blue’s work here is especially hypnotic and cathartic in that regard. 

“Domino” is bubblegum mastery glossed with retro incantations that fit nicely in a modern, un-retro world; a wondrous excursion into the limitlessness of epic hooks and saccharine storytelling,

Produced by patchwork pop provocateur and distortion spin doctor Mo Troper. “Domino” is the rock record that Blue has always wanted to make. Though she asserts that, in the past, he didn’t have the skills to write and arrange songs like “The Power” or “So What,” that doesn’t erase the fact that she’s a brilliant guitar wizard who had all of those parts baked and ready to go by the time Troper got involved.