Ada Lea shares a new song “hometown (edit),” It’s her first release since 2022’s “One Hand on the Steering Wheel” , The Canadian songwriter Alexandra Levy, publicly known by the moniker Ada Lea. Ada Lea has followed up the creative, indie-rock songcraft of her album with surprising arrangements and new perspectives.
The resulting sounds range from classic, soft-rock beauty to intimate finger-picked folk passages and night-drive art-pop. And the textures are frequently surprising due to the collage of lo-fi and hi-fi sounds that tastefully decorate the album without ever clouding the heart-center of the song. The songs flow together with ease into one big, romantic dream for Levy’s silken vocals to float above.
Lead Vocals: Alexandra Levy Vocals: Felicity DeCarle Electric Guitar: Harrison Whitford, Christopher Hauer, Alexandra Levy Bass Guitar: Harrison Whitford Drums: Tasy Hudson Percussion: Marshall Vore Keyboards: Marshall Vore, Alexandra Levy
Northern California-based quintet Soft Science is “deeply invested [and] honest in their approach to find something new” (The Chicagoist) while maintaining their pop sensibilities. Once described as having “the potential to become one of the great Left Coast power pop bands” (Popmatters), the band’s sonic evolution has led to an exploration of the noisier side of dream pop with glimmers of dark wave on their fourth LP, “Lines” (Shelflife Records – US | Spinout Nuggets – UK | Fastcut Records – Japan).
Soft Science began working on their recently completed album “Lines” in 2019, forging the record in their home studios together and at times in isolation from each other during the height of the pandemic, swapping tracks and making adjustments from a distance for what felt like an eternity. Reuniting in person to finalize the mix created a palpable excitement, an energy that can be felt throughout the record. Lines addresses living and loving within the complexities and challenges of everyday life in our fast-paced digital world.
released July 12th, 2023 Katie Haley – vocals Ross Levine – guitar, synths, backing vocals Matt Levine – guitar Tony Cale – drums, percussion Becky Cale – bass, backing vocals Hans Munz – electronics
On “Jupiter”, Brooklyn trio Upper Wilds voyage deeper into the cosmos, mapping out the overwhelming enormity of the universe in soaring hooks and blistering noise. The third installment in the trio’s exploration of our solar system looks to its largest planet for a daring exploration of scale and perspective. New York underground mainstay Dan Friel’s melodic gifts and wry lyricism are magnified and propelled ever outwards by the thundering rhythm section of bassist Jason Binnick and drummer Jeff Ottenbacher, all immersed in rippling fuzz. Just like its namesake, “Jupiter” stands as Upper Wilds most colossal offering to date in their catalogue. The raw power of their music is amplified to titanic proportions, sky-clawing riffs invoking the sheer awe that the heavens inspire.
Throughout “Jupiter”, Friel makes canny use of shifting perspectives to make sense of the universe’s infinite expanse and our place within it. The buzz-saw groove of “Drifters” mirrors the relentless forward-motion of the NASA Voyager space probes pushing out to the edges of the known universe, Friel musing on the likelihood that they outlast the existence of the earth and our sun. “Short Centuries” pays homage to the oldest married couple on Earth, Julio Mora and Waldramina Quinteros, and love’s ability to echo out through the eons, rising from a slow shuffle to ecstatic peaks bolstered by guest vocals from Katie Eastburn (KATIEE) and Jeff Tobias (Sunwatchers). Album centerpiece “10’9”” liquifies the trio’s fizzing distortion into molten sludge in an ode to the tallest person on Earth, still a mere speck from the perspective of the cosmos. “Books About UFOs” turns instead to the legacy of science-fiction in punk music, their bounding cover of the Husker Dü original amplified by Tobias’ screeching saxophone. The juxtaposition of strange true stories of the human experience alongside grand interstellar narratives brings the enigmas and mystery of space home to the more familiar and mundane.
More than any Upper Wilds album before it, “Jupiter” makes humanity’s endeavors in space exploration an inseparable part of its sonic DNA . Recorded with Travis Harrison at his studio Serious Business in Brooklyn (Guided By Voices, Dope Body, The Men), the trio’s live recordings are augmented throughout with samples inspired by the Voyager Golden Record – a double LP launched with the 1977 Voyager probe spanning field recordings to compositions by J.S. Bach and Laurie Spiegel.
“Greetings” opens with greetings to the universe in 55 languages, a cascading choir calling out to the void. “Voyager” blends the field recordings of wild animal calls and morse-code bleeps into a rollicking pulse before erupting into galloping riffs. “Permanent Storm” opens with sounds of storms, echoing “Jupiter’s” eternal storm aka the Eye of Jupiter’s unending turbulence in its searing guitars. While the Voyager Golden Record’s intended audience may have originally been the extra-terrestrial beings that might encounter the probe, Upper Wilds bring cosmos-seeking sounds back to earth with a record made for and about humanity.
“Jupiter” finds comfort in space’s unending expanse. Far from feeling defeated by the smallness of our existence in the face of an uncaring universe and ever-expanding infinite, Upper Wilds capture the power of creativity to extend our lifespans far beyond our limited time on earth.
Personnel: Dan Friel Jason Binnick Jeff Ottenbacher
I’d like to announce and invite you into the world of our next album “Growing at the Edges” with the first single/video “Little Ways”. ‘Growing At The Edges’ is the first studio album in half a decade from JordanLee’sMutual Benefit. It ranks as Lee’s most sonically diverse record ever, making all manner of genres from classical music to Americana submissive to his template, with his backing band made up of members of Baroness (heavy metal) to Andy Shauf’s band (indie-folk) by way of illustrating this diversity.
This song is about admiring the weeds along with the flowers and never fails to cheer me up. A big shout-out to Gabriel Birnbaum for co-producing and being on the whole journey with me.
The video was shot/directed by Vidhu Kota and is an ode to the trash and treasure (and turtles!) of prospect park in Brooklyn.
Where there was a wasteland, something new…
Jordan Lee: sounds + ideas Gabriel Birnbaum: co-producer Concetta Abbate: string arranger
Jordan Lee: singing, acoustic guitar, piano, synth Gabriel Birnbaum: saxophones, electric guitar, singing, organ Concetta Abbate: violin, viola, mandolin, singing Sean Mullins: drums, percussion Nick Jost: upright bass Eva Goodman: singing Jonnie Baker: guitar Noah Klein: flute Johanne Swanson: singing Adam Brisbin: additional guitar Justin Randall: additional guitar LP: additional singing Steven Head: additional synth
Courtney Barnett announced the release of instrumental album “End Of The Day”. The 17 songs were originally part of the score to the documentary about Barnett titled “Anonymous Club”. The album will be released via Barnett’s own label Milk! Records & Mom+PopRecords. It will be the final release on Milk! ahead of the label closing after more than 70 releases and more than a decade.
“End Of The Day” is described as a “meditative, slow-burning record, prioritizing atmosphere, tone and texture over traditional song structures and melodic hooks. It’s a fearless and stunning turn for an artist who built her formidable reputation through profound lyricism and riff-based fireworks”.
As a taste of the album to come, Barnett releasesed the first three tracks of the album. “Start Somewhere”, “Life Balance” and “First Slow” alongside a visual accompaniment directed by film-maker Claire Marie Vogel.
Barnett announced a series of “End Of The Day” concerts. The short tour will consist of intimate shows split in two sets. The first set will see Barnett and collaborator Stella Mozgawa perform instrumental songs and improvisations from the soundtrack, the second will see Barnett performing songs and singing from her back-catalogue.
In May of 2021, Courtney Barnett and collaborator/producer Stella Mozgawa had just handed in the final masters for Barnett’s third album “Things Take Time, Take Time” when they met up with filmmaker Danny Cohen in a Melbourne studio. Barnett had been experimenting with new gear, making meditative long-form pieces for an audience of one. Mozgawa had just bought an Oberheim OB6 which became the centre-piece of her setup, feeding sounds through a tape echo. And for his part, Cohen had a near-finished documentary, “Anonymous Club”, a candid portrayal of the travails and hard-fought personal triumphs of Barnett’s ascent to international indie rock adulation. Now, he just needed a score.
As Cohen played the final edit of his film that day, Barnett and Mozgawa improvised with one guiding principle—nothing too maudlin, obvious, or instructive, nothing to tell the future audience how they should be feeling about Barnett’s life onscreen. “Anonymous Club” offers up a plethora of Barnett’s music, documenting her charged live sets and her start-and-stop-and-search songwriting process. The pieces she and Mozgawa made that day, though, float around the edges of the finished scenes, coloring the proceedings much like the grain of Cohen’s 16mm film. Really, one could watch “Anonymous Club” and never know that Barnett had made extra music for it.
A year passed and Barnett found she liked listening to what they had made in Melbourne, putting it on and existing within its reflective gaze. Might this be more than the instrumental music of a film? She began sorting through the panoply of little instrumentals like amoebic puzzle pieces, figuring out how she might adjust them ever so slightly until they fit together into a complete picture.
Yard Act have shared “The Trench Coat Museum”. The track, Co-produced by the band and Gorillaz member Remi Kabaka Jr., the standalone single is the first original music that Yard Act have shared since the release of their debut album “The Overload” in January 2022.
Yard Act will open the main stage at Reading & Leeds Festival this summer as well as making appearances at Latitude (headlining the BBC Sounds stage, no less), Fuji Rocks, and Boardmasters.
A lyrical study on ego, vanity, perception and legacy, “The Trench Coat Museum” recalls Yard Act’s JamesSmith’s reaction to reaching a level of visibility which: “left us open to scrutiny and disdain just as much as love and appreciation.” He says, “Criticism is fair game and the internet is lawless so you gotta take it as it comes, but I definitely stopped searching for myself on Twitter the day I read that someone wanted to punch my lights out.”
Smith expands further: “‘The Trench Coat Museum’ is about how our perception of everything shifts both collectively and individually over time at speeds we simply can’t measure in the moment. Within whatever space in society we occupy, we often see our own beliefs as being at the absolute pinnacle of what should be the “cultural norm” and whilst the completely human trait of being self-assured can’t be helped, it’s an absolute hindrance on our collective process. We are one etc. (Are we fuck)”.
The video’s director James Slater added: “The video serves as a continuation and expansion of the Yard Act universe we explored on the first album. It’s set some 30 years in the future in this strange, dystopian trench coat museum in which an enigmatic character – the visitor – takes an audio guided tour. The song’s an eight-minute banger so I wanted the exhibits to come to life so that we could transition from an exhibition tour to a warehouse rave. It feels like a mini-film which is no accident, we see this as the first part of a Yard Act movie that coincides with their next album.”
“The Trench Coat Museum” on limited edition black vinyl, signed by no one and definitely not numbered, hand printed, stamped, and comes with no bonus prints, stickers or postcards.
Holy Wave have announced their new album “Five Of Cups”, out August 4th, 2023 on Suicide SqueezeRecords. In addition to the announcement, the group have shared single “Happier,” featuring the vocals of Mexico-City songwriter and instrumentalist Estrella del Sol, of the band Mint Field. The track sounds like it was unearthed from a time capsule buried on a commune in 1970s California. It’s accompanied by a trippy video directed by Arturo Baston that only heightens the acid-washed listening experience. The band have also announced a string of US tour dates.
On the track, Fuson offers: “We had been working on this song on and off again for a while and it all kind of came together right before we started recording this album. The song is loosely a song to Kurt Vonnegut, and a song taking some of his ideas and quotes and exploring them a little further. Mainly just a song about happiness today and maybe where it was during his time. While recording this song we knew that we wanted something unique for the outro, but we didn’t really know what it was that we were looking for, so we sent the song to Estrella and basically asked her to do whatever she thought was right and she completely exceeded our vision. It really took the song to a whole new level, some place we have never been before.”
“The Five of Cups” card signifies loss and grief. Depicting a cloaked figure with a bowed head looming over three spilled chalices while ignoring two remaining vessels, the “Five of Cups” is generally interpreted as representing a forlorn dwelling on the past and an inability to appreciate the positive things in the present. It was this card that struck a chord with vocalist/guitarist Ryan Fuson, member of the Austin TX subversive subterranean pop outfit Holy Wave, during a Tarot reading at the height of the pandemic. “I was really sure that the music world was finished and it seemed like internet aggression and, well, aggression in general was at an all-time high, so I was ready to stop playing music,” Fuson says. “It could be so easy to become jaded and pessimistic and I had to really decide what perspective I was going to take.”
Rather than abandon music, Fuson and his compatriots chose to immerse themselves in their work. Fittingly, the Tarot card became the muse for Holy Wave’s sixth full-length album—“Five of Cups”.
The childhood friends of Fuson, Joey Cook, Kyle Hager, and Julian Ruiz grew up in El Paso, where they cut their teeth in the local DIY scene. Hungry for more music and broader perspectives, the members made frequent road trips across the Southwest to catch touring bands who opted to skip West Texas markets. That wanderlust eventually prompted their relocation to Austin, but it also permeated in their adventurous songwriting and love for touring.
As Night Beats, Texas-born, LA-based artist Danny Lee Blackwell creates music like one might assemble a puzzle. The Western psychedelic auteur builds his work from one moment, an initial spark, that must fit a certain criteria: it must give him goosebumps. If that sensation arrives, Blackwell will pursue the idea relentlessly until he has a new song; if not, he moves onto the next moment, constantly looking for the perfect molecule of a song.
On his sixth Night Beats album, ‘Rajan’, the songwriter is at his strongest, creating works that shine with captivating melodies and hypnotic rhythms, but are underscored by subtle choices of craftsmanship that can only be achieved after countless hours in the studio. Blackwell creates a work that lands somewhere between Spaghetti Western film score and psych-pop opus, a career-defining album that reveals much about Danny Lee Blackwell’s artistic philosophy while keeping that ever crucial air of mystery intact.
Easy Eye Sound has released a new solo track from label head and The Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach. Titled “Every Chance I Get (I Want You In The Flesh),” the song serves as the final preview of the upcoming blues anthology record, “Tell Everyone!”, out on August 11th. In addition to audio, they have also dropped an official music video.
The new track is intentionally reminiscent of a 1967 recording, “On The Road Again,” which Auerbach referred to via a press release, saying, “I love that song,” and also noting that the Canned Heat number borrowed from Chicago bluesman, Floyd Jones’ 1953 number, “Dark Road” and Tommy Johnson’s Mississippi Delta ditty, “Big Road Blues.”
“Tell Everyone!”presents an overlook of the modern blues scene and involves a number of genre hard hitters and mainstays, including Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and Leo “Bud” Welch, in addition to the next generation of talent, such as Nat Myers and Detroit duo, Moonrisers, and others–with the aim to uplift voices within the blues realm.
From the new compilation ‘Tell Everybody! (21st Century Juke Joint Blues From Easy Eye Sound)’ available August 11th:
It’s been four years since Cherry Glazerr released their resplendent third album “Stuffed and Ready”, but Clementine Creevy has been in no rush. “I’ve spent these years taking a hard look at myself, at my relationships, and writing about it,” she says. “I guess I’m coming to terms with a lot of my bullshit.” Cherry Glazerr has been on the road more often than not since Creevy was still in high school, and when the pandemic hit, she immersed herself in a static existence she’d been deprived of. “When you’re always leaving, you don’t have a great sense of where your relationships stand, romantic or otherwise. You’re not thinking about the work that goes into maintaining them,” she says.
Creevy describes Cherry Glazerr’s ambitious new album, “I Don’t Want You Anymore”, as some of her most personal, raw music to date, a collection of songs that elaborate on this period of self-reckoning. It’s the first she’s produced since Cherry Glazerr’s garage rock debut, “Haxel Princess“, released nearly a decade ago when Creevy was a teenager. That album made Cherry Glazerr a Los Angeles mainstay act, and its follow up, 2017’s “Apocalipstick”, put the band on the national map. Cherry Glazerr’s rough and tumble sound coupled with Creevy’s witty, sarcastic, occasionally self-deprecating lyricism made the band a joy to watch live, their energy unmatched by the coolly detached bent of indie rock at the time.
Creevy describes “I Don’t Want You Anymore” as a “mature” album, moreso in reference to her personal growth than a reflection of the record, which in true Cherry Glazerr fashion is best described as Extremely Fun. To make it, Creevy linked up with producer Yves Rothman, who’s best known for his work with Yves Tumor. “I knew I had to work with him,” she says. The collaboration began with a cover of Metallica’s “My Friend of Misery” and grew into this new record, which Creevy considers to be Cherry Glazerr, fully-actualized. “The songs on this one are songs I’ve dreamed of making,” she says. Lead single “Soft Like a Flower” exemplifies that growth. A murky guitar riff inaugurates the track, before Creevy’s unguarded vocals enter the mix.
She sings of a consuming obsession and is joined on the chorus by longtime bandmate Sami Perez. “I’m high on your something,” they wail. “I like you killing me/ I like you killing me/ I like you killing me.” It’s proudly emotive, what Creevy calls an “Evanescence moment.” “It’s a real ‘losing your fucking shit’ kind’ve vibe,” she says. “I wanted this album to be just heart and soul. Completely exposed.”
“I Don’t Want You Anymore” uses the element of surprise to its advantage; each track is a radical reimagination of what Cherry Glazerr is and can be. “Bad Habit” opens with a spiraling vocal loop that Creevy began recording at home and it expands into a delirious downtempo dance track without ever invoking a guitar. “I can’t wait to play that one live. Whenever I’m free of a guitar and I can just sing… I love having those moments on tour,” she says. The subsequent track, “Ready for You” is sung in funky staccato and the initially spare bassline on the opening verse is eventually overtaken by a massive, staticky guitar riff that reminds you this is, at its heart, a rock album. “At the start of the pandemic, I was writing a lot in the box, what I call ‘computer music’ since I’m technologically challenged,” Creevy says. “It was fun to experiment, but after a while, I just really missed rock. I love rock music – I love how it’s cathartic and brash and sometimes a little dumb.”
Though Cherry Glazerr’s latest offers some insight into Creevy’s private moments, it’s also a humorous album, one she hopes people don’t take too seriously. “This was a really therapeutic record to make, but it’s also self-aware, and I hope, funny,” she says. On “Touched You With My Chaos,” the album’s outright loudest song that begs for a scream-along, Creevy becomes a wildly dramatic narrator, one who slashes the tires of her own car, accompanied by strings and the unexpected squawk of a trumpet. She wrote it after watching Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, and wanted to mimic the sense of desperation the film inspires. “I said that I loved you!” she howls over and over again on the chorus.
Movies have always played a role in Creevy’s songwriting, and many of the songs on “I Don’t Want YouAnymore” can be described visually. When she wrote “Sugar,” Creevy pictured playing it in a dark, seedy club, her deadpan vocal delivery mirroring the grim atmosphere. “That song tickles the part of my brain that loves driving really late at night,” she says. These are songs to soundtrack the listener’s life, a score to suit any occasion. The titular track makes a promise to an unnamed other, but the repeating lyrics on the bridge could just as easily serve as a love letter to listeners: “In the end, you’re always holding me.”
The Fat Angel Sings 