Michael Cantor’s indie/punk project The Goodbye Party is back for its first album since 2014’s “Silver Blues” (Salinas Records), “Beautiful Motors”, which comes out October 9th via Double Double WhammyRecords . Michael made this one with the impressive cast of Maryn Jones (Yowler, All Dogs), Sam Cook-Parrott (Radiator Hospital), and Joey Doubek (Pinkwash), and it was produced by Kyle Gilbride of Swearin’, and as you’d expect from a lineup like that, it’s shaping up to be a very strong indie rock record.
First single “Unlucky Stars” was a dose of driving indie-punk, but second single “December Boys” was a little lighter and janglier and new single “No Reason” is even more so. It’s a gentle, breezy song that nails a balance between warm, summery melodies and autumnal melancholy — the perfect kind of song to drop on the first official day of fall.
“This song deals with a couple of themes,” Michael tells us. “One is how people you no longer keep in your life can show up in some of your favorite memories. It’s also about the experience of passing through the same place across different tours and seeing decay creep along, seeing cascading effects from hurricanes, and recognizing that slow change in yourself. My friend Emi Knight from Strawberry Runners sings on this song. She, along with a handful of local songwriters, held monthly salons where we would demo and critique each other’s songs. Having that space helped me focus, write, and rewrite songs for this record.”
London dream-pop ensemble Firestations are back with their first full album in five years. Preceded by the single ‘Undercover’ – an effervescent song about depression and self-discovery – ‘Thick Terrain’ is released by Lost Map Records on limited-edition 12” vinyl and digital platforms. It’s a clear-eyed and bold statement, deftly combining big ideas with pop sensibilities in a captivating way – it might be the band’s best work to date.
Firestations are Mike Cranny, Laura Copsey, Martin Thompson, Tom Hargreaves and Neil Walsh – collectively a band that spans genres from shoegazey indie and intimate folksy warmth, through to addictive synth pop and harmony driven psychedelia. Lost Map released their second album ‘The Year Dot’ in 2018 and this was followed in 2021/22 by three EPs – ‘Automatic Tendencies’, ‘Melted Medium’ and ‘Pixel Wilderness’. Each six-track EP embraced a mixtape aesthetic, including alternative “sunken” versions of songs by the band as well as covers and remixes of Firestations tracks by other artists (including Lost Map labelmate Clementine March). Laura curated collections of limited-edition artworks (a brass chip fork, a ceramic mountain) that expanded on the ideas within each release.
Following a period of writing and reconfiguration – Giles Littleford departed for the Midlands and Neil Walsh ably filled his bassy shoes – the band returned to Otterhead Studios in mid-2022, for what they expected to be the first of a few recording sessions. As it happened though, it all came together beautifully (thanks to engineers Oscar and Ellis), the songs made sense together and it felt like an album.
Over the ten tracks – ranging from cyclical hypnotic sci-fi numbers to addictive dream-pop jangle – the band zoom in (and out) on some themes including identity, memory, conflict and progress.“Where is the joy? Is it over? Where is the joy? Still undercover?”
About the meaning of ‘Thick Terrain’, Mike says: “Album titles are tricky – you just sort of have to go fishing in your subconscious until you catch something that speaks to you. To get to ‘Thick Terrain’ we had a series of pub-based meetings, where we free-associated some of the meanings of the songs, just blurted things out and wrote them down. Laura had been watching ‘Love Island’ (purely for research purposes), and mentioned how contestants were constantly getting “the ick”.
We thought about calling it Ick Terrain, but as the pints flowed we gravitated towards ‘Thick Terrain’. This spoke to the main themes of the album and fit in with the art concept that Laura and artist friends KeelerTornero were cooking up: edible landscapes – surreal vistas with strange, almost hallucinatory, food items embedded within them… A jelly mountain… The zine which accompanies the limited-edition vinyl release delves further into this idea, offering more delicious places to sink your teeth into as you listen to the record.”
Cmat has released her collaboration with John Grant from the forthcoming album “CrazyMad, For Me”, out via AWAL Recordings on October 13th.
Following on from recent singles ‘Have Fun!’ and ‘Whatever’s Inconvenient’, ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight’ is a duet from the pairing, which started when CMAT says she has realised “I had turned into my mother.” “It’s kind of inspired by this image i had of entering a waterfall-like portal from an Irish kids’ show called ‘Foreign Exchange’ where I’m looking at 1988 and 2023 at the exact same time every time I look at myself in the mirror. To quote a TikTok comment I saw recently: ‘The human experience is absolutely fucking wild.’”
John Grant was top of the CMAT’s wishlist for the song… “I always knew this song was going to be a duet, and when I was writing it I always said to myself, ‘It would be so good if we could get someone like John Grant on this’, because a) his body of lyrics reflects my own life and experience more closely than anyone else working today b) I never thought we would get him. But I got him! And he is so sweet. His performance really adds the layer of profundity that I was looking for to carry off the two-ages-staring-at-each-other angle. Love him so much.”
“Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” was recorded, produced and mixed by Matias Tellez at his studio in Bergen, Norway, with John recording his vocals at his studio in Reykjavik, Iceland.
The Stems came roaring out of Perth in the mid Eighties with a sound and style that definitively captured the spirit and enthusiasm of sixties garage music – lurching fuzz-tone guitars, brooding organ and solid gold garage-punk! Though at the core of it all, The Stems wrote some awesome songs, made great records and put on exciting live shows. Debuting in 1985 with their break-through double A-side single “She’s a Monster/ Make You Mine”, The Stems rode the top of the Australian Independent charts from 1985-1987 with each subsequent release. Tracks like “Make You Mine”, “Tears Me in Two” and “Love Will Grow” mark them out as one of the truly great Australian acts of the Eighties.
“Mushroom Soup – The Citadel Years” has been remastered and repackaged and brings together the band’s break-through singles, their debut EP “Love Will Grow” and a selection of demos and outtakes. This collection captures a great band at the peak of its powers.
The vinyl edition features all the classic singles and the “Love Will Grow” EP that have been long out of print since their release. It also features 4 additional tracks (“No Heart”, “She’s Fine”, “On and On” and “Don’t Let Me”) on vinyl for the first time, faithfully remastered and available in glorious green, pretty purple or traditional black.
The track “No Heart” was initially a contender for the “Love Will Grow” Ep and “She’s Fine” was to be their last single with Citadel but was shelved when the band moved across to the Mushroom label.
The Band
Richard Lane – keyboards, guitar and vocals Dom Mariani – guitar and lead vocals Julian Matthews – bass Gary Chambers – drums
2024 will be the 50th Anniversary of the band Radio Birdman. To celebrate that milestone, Citadel Records is pleased to announce the recutting / repressing of all their albums.
“Radios Appear” was Radio Birdman’s first full length album. Recorded piecemeal over 1976 and early 1977, on weekends and nights when their home base (Trafalgar Studios Sydney) had no paying customers, it was finally released on the Trafalgar label, created specifically to release their records. In addition to mail order, the album was literally distributed by hand and out of the back of cars. The band thus wrote the Australian handbook on DIY independent music.
It was hailed as a breakthrough album in Australian music, a turning point after the scene’s early and mid seventies stagnation. “Radios Appear” was given a 5 star review in Rolling Stone, and the album gave the band a needed boost to depart Sydney as a national touring entity, while still maintaining their renegade status. This LP has been out of print for 25 years now. Remastered from original tapes and cut onto lacquer, its a 140g black vinyl pressing in a standard jacket closely reproducing the original artwork. The black and white inner sleeve replicates and enhances the insert that came with the original Trafalgar pressing. A download coupon is included.
By the middle of 2024, all the albums will be available.
No matter your age or station, “Supermodels” is the sort of record you can hear yourself in. Claud’s engrossing and poignant second album is a confident diary of the mercury of life and love in one’s early 20s, whether it’s the self-doubt that creeps through its tunes or the place of compromise they try to find. It’s an exacting map of the emotional and logistical vicissitudes they’d encountered in their early 20s. Fissures in romances and friendships, pressures of recording careers, the casualties of growing up:
Each of these 13 songs is another articulated diary entry, threaded together with scant regard for genre and with the roller-coaster of feeling that gives each tune such specific gravity. These are familiar topics for Claud, covering some of the same terrain as 2021’s “Super Monster”. But there is a newfound confidence to the ideas here, rendered in structures and hooks that do not equivocate as they move from frowning folk to boisterous pop to twisted piano curios.
Where “Supermodels” was rendered mostly in their childhood bedroom, this was cut in a place of their own, with a team of confidants and collaborators building them into resplendent productions. “Supermodels” takes its name from “Screwdriver.” “You caught me looking at photographs of supermodels,” they sing, voice rising slowly over the elegiac line penned on that free and broken piano. “Trying not to cry when I look back at myself.” It’s a staggering moment, a reminder of the ways we’re all working to stop seeing ourselves as less than and not equal to, to beat back a dozen different insecurities that we try to store in the deepest recesses of our facade. But Claud doesn’t hide anything on “Supermodels” They are kernels of despair, redemption, and, ultimately, insight, here to remind us we’re neither the first nor the last to face these blues and keep going.
Partisan Records is thrilled to announce the signing of Los Angeles-based artist, Sam Burton. Sam was born and raised outside of Salt Lake City in what he calls a “truck stop town,” but moved to LA to pursue music. In the last year he toured with Loving and Jose Gonzalez. He recently wrapped up a three-week residency at Los Angeles’ Club TeeGee, and will head out on the road with Weyes Blood and Indigo Sparke in the coming months.
“Dear Departed”, the second album from Burton, is set to release July 14th. Sam describes the album as being wracked with pain and loss, and he spends much of the time saying goodbye to a version of himself.
“Dear Departed” is the follow up to Burton’s acclaimed 2020 debut “I Can Go With You”. With production from Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty, Margo Price), Burton achieves a sound that never descends into retro pastiche, but rather becomes an evocative echo, a dream of the past.
Like Sam and his band are crammed onto the corner stage of a smoke-filled bar in a long-lost time. Exemplified best by lead single “Long Way Around,” smoldering melodies are met again and again with ripples of piano and swells of orchestration – headlined by Sam’s evocative, velvet-lined vocals.
“Dear Departed”, the new album by Sam Burton, out July 14th, 2023:
Maple Glider has announced her anticipated sophomore album, “I Get Into Trouble”, This announcement is accompanied by the release of “Dinah” alongisde a new music video. This is the second single from the record, following “Don’t Kiss Me” released earlier this year.
On “Dinah,” Maple Glider pulls a wickedly clever bait-and-switch: fully embracing the pop side of her trademark psych-folk like never before, but pairing it with lyrics that turn the song into what she considers the scariest – and perhaps angriest – thing she’s ever released. The titular “Dinah” refers to the bible story ‘Dinah Gets Into Trouble,’ where a young woman is victim-blamed for being sexually assaulted. In the song, Maple Glider expertly dissects the double standards within her own experience growing up in Christianity; and the accusations leveled at “non-believers” whilst the church itself was not a safe space.
On the track, Tori says: “For me, “Dinah” is the scariest thing I’ve ever put out. It’s probably the most pop feeling song I’ve released, but it’s really quite an angry song. I have felt incredibly disturbed and frustrated and sad in the process of writing and putting it together.”
Palehound’s new album “Eye On The Bat” charts something that divides you into “before” and “after” – the danger of fantasy, of heartbreak, and the pain of growth. How we can surprise ourselves. It’s a documentation of illusions shattering, both of yourself and of others. A tangle of raw nerves coming undone amongst swelling, propulsive instrumentation, it’s the biggest – and best – Palehound has sounded on record.
From Palehound’s critically-acclaimed debut album “Dry Food” (2015) to “A Place I’ll Always Go” (2017), and “Black Friday” (2019) and then, “Doomin’ Sun” (2021) by Bachelor (a collaborative project with Jay Som’s Melina Duterte), El Kempner’s songwriting has always been generous and personal, dispatches from a deep inner world. On “Eye On The Bat”, though, we meet Kempner anew: a guttural howl; white-hot and blistering catharsis; a feverish and visceral and painful present.
As Palehound, Kempner’s guitar playing – their sinewy and off-kilter riffs – has always been front and center across the project’s discography, like smoke unfurling around anxiety-laden lyrics. It’s cerebral, trying to make sense of grief in a grocery store or an argument in a parking lot, plumbing the anxious depths of the interiors.
Introspection, retrospection, whatever you’d like to call it, has threaded together Kempner’s songwriting, the bruising aftermath of trying times, since the very beginning. Here, though, we’re trapped in the immediate: witnessing the tiny details that build or break a relationship, and the flood that comes after.
“It’s about me, but it’s also about me in relation to others,” Kempner says of the album. “After hiding for so long – staying inside and hiding your life and hiding yourself from the world – I was ready. I think I flipped.” Recorded in brief stints across 2022 at Flying Cloud Recordings in the Catskills, the space between each session gave Kempner more time to breathe, to revisit the songs after time away.
Kempner co-produced “Eye On The Bat” alongside Sam Owens (Big Thief, Cass McCombs), who was also crucial to the process — lending assistance yet allowing Kempner to take the reins on producing, to call the shots on the session and step into their own as a producer. Kempner also credits multi-instrumentalist Larz Brogan, who they refers to as “their platonic life partner” and longtime member of Palehound since the Boston DIY days, as a vital part of making the album come together the way it did. They make Kempner feel seen – allow them to be vulnerable, to experiment, to push themself in the studio. After playing together for so many years, Brogan and Kempner both wanted to push themselves to make a record that sounded less produced, one that simply captured the raw energy of Palehound live. Stand-out track “U Want It U Got It” was almost entirely self-produced by Kempner at home, save for Brogan’s drumming, the first time anything of the sort has made it onto a Palehound record.
“In the past, I’ve taken myself really seriously in the studio, and I’ve ended up with really serious-sounding records,” Kempner explains. “This one – it’s a break up record. I wanted it to sound raw. I wanted it to sound like I was feeling – very much in control, and out of control, at the same time.”
Opening track “Good Sex” charts trying to make a relationship work, the desperation to recapture something, in searing detail; before dissolving into “Independence Day,” its chaotic counterpart, where you realize you can’t and find yourself breaking someone’s heart in the glow of fireworks. “The Clutch” flies by red flags, plunging forward even though it shouldn’t, even though it’s speeding toward heartbreak; while “My Evil” is about being the heartbreaker, hurting someone you never could have imagined hurting. Accepting that, even if unintentional, we all act as villains in someone else’s story.
The poetry is still present – full of aching and shrine-building to minutiae – but it feels genuinely diaristic and authentic. In the past, Kempner admits to hiding behind poetic notions, burying the hurt in metaphors.
But here, El’s at their most open and vulnerable. “I was trying too hard to figure out who I am – what kind of musician I want to be, what kind of person I want to be,” Kempner explains. “And now I’m just embracing my instinct, and bucking what other people’s expectations are. These songs are truly just for me. I was really intentional in processing every detail. For my own sake, frankly.”
“Eye On The Bat” is not a hopeful record in content, but it’s immediately recognizable as the sort of totem you come out clutching on the other side of profound change. It feels like a promise to yourself – if you made it through that, you’ll handle whatever comes next.
The Fat Angel Sings 