The Fat Angel Sings

The third single from “The Greater Wings”, Julie Byrne’s first LP in six years, is a solemn, orchestral piano ballad that fixtures her haunted, compelling voice front and center. Written while at an artist residency in Portugal, Byrne found inspiration in soundscapes of creaking docks and tidal flats. Though “Moonless” is a breakup song at its core, it’s also a coastal proclamation of queerness and autonomy. “I’d been learning you by heart / Voices rising through the smoke / Tables caving in / I found it there in the room with you / Whatever eternity is,” she sings, deftly and beautifully. 

The first album in over six years from American songwriter Julie Byrne is a testament to patience and determination, the willingness to transform through the desolation of loss, the vitality of renewal, and the courage to rise, forever changed. For nearly a decade, Byrne has moved through the world as a characteristically private artist largely outside the public eye. A self-taught musician that has committed her life to her work, she now emerges from a deeply trying and generative period with the most powerful, lustrous, and life-affirming music of her career, “The Greater Wings”. While they hold the plasticity of grief and trauma, the songs are universally resonant, unbridled in their devotion and joy, held up by the love and alliance of a chosen family.

“My hope for “The Greater Wings” is that it lives as a love letter to my chosen family and as an expression of the depth of my commitment to our shared future. Being reshaped by grief also has me more aware of what death does not take from me. I commit that to heart, to words, to sound. Music is not bound to any kind of linear time, so in the capacity to record and speak to the future: this is what it felt like to me, when we were simultaneous, alive, occurring all at once. What it has felt like to go up against my edge and push, the love that has made it worth all this fight. These memories are my values, they belong with me.”

Byrne leans further into atmospheres both expansive and intimate; the lush, evocative songcraft flows between her signature fingerpicked guitar, synthesizer, and a newly adopted piano, made wider by flourishes of harp and strings. It is the transcendent sound of resource, of friendship that was never without romance, of loyalty that burns from within like a heart on fire, and the life force summoned in unrepeatable moments — raw, gorgeous, and wild.

The latest offering from ANOHNI and the Johnsons ahead of their anticipated next album My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, “Sliver of Ice” is a slow-burning affair shouldered along by a flowing, soulful guitar and patient snare drum. Inspired by some of the last words that Lou Reed said to ANOHNI before he passed away in 2013, she opted to capture his explanation of how, in the final months of his life, the “simplest sensations had begun to feel almost rapturous.” “A carer had placed a shard of ice on his tongue one day and it was such a sweet and unbelievable feeling that it caused him to weep with gratitude,” she said in a press statement. There’s something genuinely indescribable about what kind of power and emotions ANOHNI’s most recent offerings conjure, but I can safely say that—just like lead single “It Must Change”— “Sliver of Ice” is delicate, beautiful and meticulous.

“Sliver Of Ice” by ANOHNI and the Johnsons from the upcoming album ‘My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross’, out July 7th on Secretly Canadian and Rough Trade.

Singer songwriter Holly Humberstone has officially announced her highly anticipated debut album “Paint My Bedroom Black”, set to arrive on October 13th via Darkroom/Geffen/Polydor Records.

Alongside the announcement, Holly has released “Antichrist” and “Room Service” today, the double A-Side singles that serve as the first tastes of “Paint My Bedroom Black”. “I feel like two different people half the time,” she said. “I love everything I’ve released, but the biggest challenge is always to make something I feel I haven’t done before, that reflects new parts of me.”

Always inspired by her environment and how that affects her sense of self and identity, from her parent’s Haunted House to flat-shares in London with The Walls Are Way To Thin, “Paint My Bedroom Black” represents Holly’s coming of age, growing from unknown singer at her parent’s piano to the most exciting alternative pop stars of her generation.

Holly will perform songs from “Paint My Bedroom Black” in the US for the first time at her recently announced show’s this summer.

Dark Horse Records releases Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros iconic “Live at Acton Town Hall” concert, remastered by Grammy Award Winner Paul Hicks (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, George Harrison) and available on 2LP clear vinyl and CD. Recorded on November 15th, 2002, the concert was a benefit for striking firefighters and would be one of Joe’s last performances (he passed away a month later.) The performance features a 3-song reunion with Strummer’s former bandmate from The Clash, Mick Jones, who reunited on stage for the first time in almost twenty years. It would also be their last time on stage together. Vinyl is packaged in a gatefold sleeve featuring never-before-seen photos from the show, plus new liner notes from former Fire Brigade Union Secretary Andy Gilchrist, who introduced the band at the show and led the strikes Joe was supporting.

This will be the first time the concert has been properly released with full packaging on vinyl, with its extremely limited previous incarnation as a Record Store Day exclusive in 2012 featuring just a DIY-inspired clear sleeve, and the first time it has ever been released 

American singer-songwriter Johanna Samuels made her debut in 2021 with the pleasant and quirky sounding “Excelsior!” and takes some extra steps on her even better second album “Bystander”
Johanna Samuels is not yet very well known, but she has been working in a small circle for a while. Her beautiful debut album “Excelsior!” deserved a bit more attention in 2021 and the “Bystander” released this week the album deserves that, because “Bystander”, made together with Bonny Light Horseman Josh Kaufman, this is not only an excellent album, but also an album that sounds different from most of the other albums in the genre.

During her darkest moments, while writing in isolation, her old friends in the band Bonny Light Horseman offered to take her out on tour in early 2020. “They re-contextualized music for me all over again,” she says. Observing a truly kind and compassionate music community brought Samuels out of herself even more. Inspired by conversations with producer Josh Kaufman (The Hold Steady, Bob Weir, Cassandra Jenkins) on the road, Samuels took him up on his offer to produce her new songs and retreated to Isokon Studios in Woodstock, NY in the summer of 2021.

Johanna Samuels writes songs full of melancholy, but they often sound surprisingly sunny. They are songs that draw on the past and the present and that are not averse to influences outside of American roots music.

She really is a great talent Johanna Samuels. released June 23rd, 2023

Gillian Welch has unfortunately hardly been productive in the past twenty years, but before this she made a pile of beautiful albums, of which the “Time (The Revelator)” released in 2001 is in many ways her best album. When Gillian Welch left the Berklee School Of Music in the mid-90s in Boston, Massachusetts in the early ’90s, where she shared a love of ancient folk and bluegrass with fellow student David Rawlings. , no one was waiting for her music, Welch mainly influenced by old folk and bluegrass.

After college, the pair moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where they caught the attention of none other than producer T-Bone Burnett, who helped Gillian Welch get a record deal. T-Bone Burnett produced her 1996 debut album “Revival” and was also featured on Hell Among The Yearlings, released two years later.

Both albums came at a time when the love of old folk and bluegrass was reserved for a relatively small group of music lovers. However, that changed with the success of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the soundtrack to this film, on which Gillian Welch could also be heard. 

At that time the music she was playing began to rise around the turn of the century, so Gillian Welch was suddenly prominently in the spotlight. All her talents come together on the 2001 release “Time (The Revelator)”. It is a very soberly coloured album with mainly influences from Appalachian folk and bluegrass, but it is also an album full of beautiful songs, in which the characteristic voice of Gillian Welch plays the leading role. On that album on which the unique Gillian Welch sound comes into its own. It’s a pretty sobre album, because there’s not much more than two acoustic guitars, a banjo, the voice of Gillian Welch and the occasional backing vocals from David Rawlings on the album, which was produced by Rawlings and T-Bone Burnett.

Originally released July 31st, 2001

Two years ago, the Brooklyn quintet—vocalist Cameron Winter, guitarists Gus Green and Foster Hudson, bassist Dom DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin—exploded onto the scene with “Projector”, a daring, awing debut that everyone in music circles became (rightfully) obsessed with—to some degree or another. With an artillery of post-punk, stadium anthems and energetic, Y2K garage rock, Geese perfected a sound that is as meticulous as krautrock and as titanic as cowboy chords set ablaze by 10-foot-tall amplifiers. Fast-forward to 2023, and the band’s second offering “3D Country” obliterates any notion of a “sophomore slump,” as the Brooklynites have crafted an ambitious, intricate and far-ranging LP of seismic proportions.

Standout tracks like “Cowboy Nudes,” “Crusades” and “Mysterious Love” dazzle in how unbound to each other they are. Surfing between remnants of Squid and the Rolling Stones, Geese never linger too long in any artifact they may decide to hold up to the light. It’s all vignettes of brief experimentation that coalesce into a greater vision: No influence is off-limits, nor is what Geese may begin to transform their palette into. The centerpiece of the album is the seven-minute concerto “Undoer,” which combs through trash-rock textures, abrasive drums and soloing axes while Winter cuts glass with a piercing octave that is as noble as it is spell-binding to witness unfold in real time.

All at once theatrical, vicious, heartfelt and daring, “3D Country” is a brilliant, miraculous assemblage of stone cold rock ‘n’ roll.

“3D Country” out now on Partisan Records and Play It Again Sam

“Deep Routed,” the lead single off Ezra Williams’ debut album “Supernumeraries”, is a lovely, tender folk-pop track about overcoming a fear of intimacy at the genesis of a relationship—with Williams transcribing their own perspective as an autistic person tasked with navigating social cues and attitude shifts while dating. “Something’s stopping me / Something’s shutting my mouth / Every time you say things first / I say them back, but it doesn’t count,” they sing atop an acoustic strum that quickly pales beneath a tranquil electric riff. When they unravel in the song’s breakdown, questioning “Is this how it is? / Is this who I am?” in a layered vocal with their collaborator GHRIAN, something clicked.

It was clear to me that this artist—who, by the age of 18, had already racked up over 5-million streams across 92 countries—was not just generational, but here to stay. Williams has gifted us a collection of 12 songs that surf between the soft and heavy. “Supernumeraries” is a collage of different genres and experiments, ranging from delicate synth-pop to singer/songwriter alt-rock. Songs like “Skin” and “Bleed” and “Don’t Wake Me Up” are visceral thematically but lush, daunting and fallible. 

“Supernumeraries” is a stark portrait of candid, blunt reflections; an album that will endure long after we’re all gone

In 2008 they busted out of the box and easily reached first with their “Frozen Ropes And Dying Quails”. The Baseball Project was on base and immediately posed a threat to go further.

In 2011, they moved on to second with some wildness aptly called “High And Inside”. They were halfway home. Three years later in 2014, the quintet of Big Stars moved on down the line to the aptly titled “3rd“, an epic double dip delight of craftsmanship and savvy. And there they stayed. For nine long years at the hot corner, but we’re happy to say that The Baseball Project is finally coming home, scoring big and touching ’em all with their fourth album “Grand Salami Time”. 

It’s the fourth album from this baseball-obsessed band featuring Steve Wynn, Scott McCaughey and half of REM. Even if you’re not a fan of the national pastime of America,

But I did enjoy Friday Night Lights, The Natural and Field Of Dreams. The Baseball Project is the alt-rock supergroup led by Steve Wynn (The Dream Syndicate) and Scott McCaughey (The Minus Five, Young Fresh Fellows) that also features R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Mike Mills, along with drummer Linda Pitmon. 

“Grand Salami Time” is The Baseball Project’s fourth album, first in nine years, and and given the “round the bases” implications of the title, maybe their last. Like their three previous albums, all the songs are about the American national pastime, at least tangentially, and this time they’ve got a couple pinch-hitters on deck in Stephen McCarthy (The Long Ryders) and Steve Berlin (Los Lobos).

Music nerds will find stuff to love, too: “Disco Demolition” tells the infamous and regrettable true story of July 12th, 1979 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park when thousands of disco records were blown up as part of a Major League Baseball promotion that ended in a riot. You’ll certainly get a lot more out of “Grand Salami Time” if you are a baseball follower. The album was recorded at Mitch Easter’s fabled Fidelitorium Studios in Kernersville, North Carolina, with the entire band performing live together in the same room, a joyous experience that seemed impossible to imagine only one year before. Mitch adds guitar on a few tracks

Few artists have had the cultural impact of Bob Dylan, and his discography is filled with terrific albums. While there are additional highly-rated compilations, “Bootleg Series“, and boxed sets, These are the highlights of his 5-star main albums .

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The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, the record that firmly established Dylan as an unparalleled songwriter, one of considerable skill, imagination, and vision. At the time, folk had been quite popular on college campuses and bohemian circles, making headway onto the pop charts in diluted form, and while there certainly were a number of gifted songwriters, nobody had transcended the scene as Dylan did with this record.

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Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964.

The other side of Bob Dylan referred to in the title is presumably his romantic, absurdist, and whimsical one anything that wasn’t featured on the staunchly folky, protest-heavy “Times They Are a-Changin'”, really. Because of this, “Another Side of Bob Dylan” is a more varied record and it’s more successful, too, since it captures Dylan expanding his music, turning in imaginative, poetic performances on love songs and protest tunes alike.

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Bringing It All Back Home, 1965.

With “Another Side of Bob Dylan”, Dylan had begun pushing past folk, and with “Bringing It All Back Home”, he exploded the boundaries, producing an album of boundless imagination and skill. And it’s not just that he went electric, either, rocking hard on “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Maggie’s Farm,” and “Outlaw Blues”; it’s that he’s exploding with imagination throughout the record.

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Highway 61 Revisited, 1965.

Taking the first, electric side of “Bringing It All Back Home” to its logical conclusion, Bob Dylan hired a full rock & roll band, featuring guitarist Michael Bloomfield, for “Highway 61 Revisited”. Dylan had not only changed his sound, but his persona, trading the folk troubadour for a streetwise, cynical hipster. Throughout the album, he embraces druggy, surreal imagery, which can either have a sense of menace or beauty, and the music reflects that, jumping between soothing melodies to hard, bluesy rock.

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Blonde on Blonde, 1966.

If “Highway 61 Revisited” played as a garage rock record, the double album “Blonde on Blonde” inverted that sound, blending blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound. Replacing the fiery Michael Bloomfield with the intense, weaving guitar of Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan led a group comprised of his touring band the Hawks and session musicians through his richest set of songs. “Blonde on Blonde” is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play.

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John Wesley Harding, 1967.

“John Wesley Harding” is informed by the rustic sound of country, as well as many rural myths, with seemingly simple songs like “All Along the Watchtower,” “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” and “The Wicked Messenger” revealing several layers of meaning with repeated plays. Although the lyrics are somewhat enigmatic, the music is simple, direct, and melodic, providing a touchstone for the country-rock revolution that swept through rock in the late ’60s.

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Nashville Skyline, 1969.

“John Wesley Harding” suggested country with its textures and structures, but “Nashville Skyline” was a full-fledged country album, complete with steel guitars and brief, direct songs. It’s a warm, friendly album, particularly since Bob Dylan is singing in a previously unheard gentle croon — the sound of his voice is so different it may be disarming upon first listen, but it suits the songs.

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Blood on the Tracks, 1975.

Following on the heels of an album where he repudiated his past with his greatest backing band, “Blood on the Tracks” finds Bob Dylan, in a way, retreating to the past, recording a largely quiet, acoustic-based album. But this is hardly nostalgia — this is the sound of an artist returning to his strengths, what feels most familiar, as he accepts a traumatic situation, namely the breakdown of his marriage. This is an album alternately bitter, sorrowful, regretful, and peaceful, easily the closest he ever came to wearing his emotions on his sleeve.

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The Basement Tapes, 1975.

The official release of “The Basement Tapes” which were first heard on a 1968 bootleg called The Great White Wonder — plays with history somewhat, as Robbie Robertson overemphasizes the Band’s status in the sessions, making them out to be equally active to Dylan, adding in demos not cut at the sessions and overdubbing their recordings to flesh them out. As many bootlegs (most notably the complete five-disc series) reveal, this isn’t entirely true and the Band were nowhere near as active as Dylan, but that ultimately is a bit like nitpicking, since the music here (including the Band’s) is astonishingly good.