In 2016, Trevor Powers shut the door on Youth Lagoon. “I felt like I was in a chokehold,” he says. “Even though it was my music, I lost my way. In a lot of ways, I lost myself.”
Stepping back from the alias, Powers found personal transformation at his home in Idaho and released experimental tapes under his own name (2018’s “Mulberry Violence” and 2020’s “Capricorn”).
After taking an over-the-counter medication, Powers had a drug reaction so severe it turned his stomach into a “non-stop geyser of acid,” coating his larynx and vocal cords for eight months. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to speak again, yet alone sing,” he says.
The growth that followed that nightmare narrowed Powers’ focus. Rather than writing about the world at large, he started writing about home. “Family, neighbours, and grim reapers,” laughs Powers.
With whispers of country, “Heaven Is a Junkyard” is mutant Americana in a world of love, drugs, storytelling, and miracles—held together by Powers’ voice and an upright piano. Recorded in six weeks with co-producer Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, Adele, Gil Scott-Heron), “Heaven Is a Junkyard” is a work of absolute devotion. A portrait of the God-haunted American West. And a reminder that there is always love in the tall grass.
Youth Lagoon’s new album “Heaven Is a Junkyard”, out on Fat Possum June 9th.
“Joy’All“ is the swaggering new fifth solo LP from Jenny Lewis. Written in daily instalments throughout the pandemic, it is really funny and secures her space as a contemporary troubadour of the highest order.
“I started writing some of these songs on the road, pre-pandemic… and then put them aside as the world shut down, and then from my home in Nashville in early 2021, I joined a week-long virtual song writing workshop with a handful of amazing artists, hosted by Beck. The challenge was to write one song every day for seven days, with guidelines from Beck. The guidelines would be prompts like ‘write a song with 1-4-5 chord progression,’ ‘write a song with only cliches,’ or ‘write in free form style.’ The first song I submitted to the group was ‘Puppy and a Truck.’” As the days progressed, the assignments kept coming in and Jenny ended up writing a good portion of “Joy’All”.
While “Joy’All” pulls from a bounty of sonic inspiration–from soul to 90’s R&B, as well as country and classic singer-songwriter records the album’s rich and intimate, live sound is the hallmark of eight-time Grammy winning producer Dave Cobb (John Prine, Brandi Carlile, Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell), whom Jenny met by chance while visiting Lucius at the Historic RCA Studio A in Nashville. A natural kinship developed between the two, and with her arsenal of songs that she had demoed on her iPhone ready to roll, Jenny texted Dave and asked him to produce her new album.
“Joy’All” is a beacon of enlightenment that could only come from embracing life, taking the good with the bad; it’s a ten-song overture that invites the listener to find their own path to joy.
A Jason Isbell record always lands like a decoder ring in the ears and hearts of his audience, a soundtrack to his world and magically to theirs, too. “Weathervanes” carries the same revelatory power. This is a storyteller at the peak of his craft, observing his fellow wanderers, looking inside and trying to understand, reducing a universe to four minutes. He shrinks life small enough to name the fear and then strip it away, helping his listeners make sense of how two plus two stops equaling four once you reach a certain age — and carry a certain amount of scars.
“There is something about boundaries on this record,” Isbell says. “As you mature, you still attempt to keep the ability to love somebody fully and completely while you’re growing into an adult and learning how to love yourself.”
“Weathervanes” is a collection of grown-up songs: Songs about adult love, about change, about the danger of nostalgia and the interrogation of myths, about cruelty and regret and redemption. Life and death songs played for and by grown ass people. Some will make you cry alone in your car and others will make you sing along with thousands of strangers in a big summer pavilion, united in the great miracle of being alive. The record features the rolling thunder of Isbell’s fearsome 400 Unit, who’ve earned a place in the rock ‘n’ roll cosmos alongside the greatest backing ensembles, as powerful and essential to the storytelling as The E Street Band or the Wailers.
They make a big noise, as Isbell puts it, and he feels so comfortable letting them be a main prism through which much of the world hears his art. He can be private but with them behind him he transforms, and there is a version of himself that can only exist in their presence. When he plays a solo show, he is in charge of the entire complicated juggle. On stage with the 400 Unit, he can be a guitar hero when he wants, and a conductor when he wants, and a smiling fan of the majesty of his bandmates when he wants to hang back and listen to the sound.
The roots of this record go back into the isolation of the pandemic and to Isbell’s recent time on the set as an actor on Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. There were guitars in his trailer and in his rented house and a lot of time to sit and think. The melancholy yet soaring track “King of Oklahoma” was written there. Isbell also watched the great director work, saw the relationship between a clear vision and its execution, and perhaps most important, saw how even someone as decorated as Scorsese sought out and used his co-workers’ opinions.
“It definitely helped when I got into the studio,” Isbell says. “I had this reinvigorated sense of collaboration. You can have an idea and you can execute it and not compromise — and still listen to the other people in the room.”
The first of five focus tracks from the album, “Death Wish,” is about being in love with someone suffering from depression, with a powerful universal undercurrent about the fragility of life and the power and limits of love. That grown-up kind of love.
Musically the track is beautiful and fascinating. Isbell, clearly, has been listening to The Cure and tiny little tracers of post-punk find their way into this song and others. Matt Pence, the drummer and engineer, came into the studio to help with the drum sound. He got a bunch of kits set up and they arrived on structure for “Death Wish.” The kick drum hits on the two, which was weird and disconcerting, even upsetting, until it clicked. Now it feels complicated and intricate, yet never fragile, like the subject of the song itself. As the first track it announces that Isbell is an artist growing, exploring new musical frontiers. The Sylvia Massy-added strings make it big and ambitious, almost like a James Bond theme song.
“Middle of the Morning” was a lockdown song. Melancholy, honest, with those Isbell phrases that will sneak into your vocabulary – ahem, “farmhand’s ghost” – the narrator, who both is and is not Jason himself, describes the feeling of being stuck in place, wheels and mind spinning, feeling like some essential part of yourself lives just outside your reach.
“It was about trying to keep my mind from unraveling over the couple of years there,” he says now.
In “Cast Iron Skillet,” which will be sung by audiences and printed on merch for years to come, Isbell returns to a common theme. He is southern in accent, and family tree, and in musical ancestors, but he uses his art to tear down the worst of the south and try to build a new, better, more loving region in its place. The engine in this song is breaking open the myths and legends he learned, from the small and insignificant to the large and deadly. The characters are murderers and racists, human beings who weren’t always those things, and in between the lines is an author grappling with the forces of nurture and nature.
“I think nostalgia is an abomination,” he says. “I think it is a crime. I think it’s unnatural.”
Isbell says “Save the World” was the hardest for him to write and record, going through several drafts and changing perspective. It is the hardest to listen to as well, describing the moment another school shooting hits the cable news ticker or the newspaper headlines. It’s not about a victim of the crime, or even anyone adjacent, merely worried parents trying to raise children in a world where something like this could happen. This is songwriting as journalism, very sophisticated journalism, and the music reflects the lyrics. There’s no reverb. No crutch. Everything feels bone dry, like the song is being played only for you.
“This Ain’t It” is a romp, with a live vocal take and live guitars except for the overdubs on the outro. This is the 400 Unit in a room playing, wings spread in flight, more southern sounding than anything Isbell has written in years. The spirit of Keith Richards is all over this track and the best part about the terrible fatherly advice being given here is that the father in the song, a totally untrustworthy narrator, really believes what he is saying.
Jason Isbell – Vocals, Background Vocals, Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Baritone Guitar, Electric Slide Guitar Derry deBorja – Acoustic Piano, Electric Piano, Organ, Accordion, Synthesizers, Therevox, Tack Piano, Background Vocals Chad Gamble – Drums, Percussion, Congas Jimbo Hart – Electric Bass, Bass Ukulele Sadler Vaden – Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar, Electric 12 String, Acoustic 12 String, Background Vocals —
Special guests: Amanda Shires – Fiddle, Background Vocals Mickey Raphael – Harmonica on Strawberry Woman
After recently releasing the critically-acclaimed Plains album (“I Walked With You A Ways”) with KatieCrutchfield of Waxahatchee, Jess Williamson’s “Time Ain’t Accidental” is the sound of a woman running into her life and art head-on. With a vocal dynamic kindred to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, Williamson blends the emotional immediacy and story-telling of traditional country with the artful, wholly honest transmissions of songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Terry Allen.
In the three years since her last album, 2020’s “Sorceress”, Jess Williamson has lived a lot of life. She went through a heavy breakup, found herself single for the first time in nearly a decade, and began figuring herself out alone in Los Angeles. She reconnected with an old acquaintance in Marfa and struck up a new relationship; she now splits her time between the two towns.
JESS :“Time Ain’t Accidental” is one of those lucky songs that I wrote really fast in one afternoon. The chorus talks about reading a collection of Raymond Carver short stories. The song is like a short story itself. It’s the true story of a day. It captures that feeling of the beginning of something where you’re just so excited and you don’t know if it will become something or not. When I wrote that song, it was celebrating this sweet beginning and not needing it to turn into anything or knowing if it would, and that being some of the beauty of it too. I’m just appreciating this moment.
The album’s reckoning with loss, isolation, romance, and personal reclamation signals both a stylistic and tectonic shift for Williamson: from someone who once made herself small to an artist emboldened by her power as an individual.
“Time Ain’t Accidental” is the new LP from Los Angeles Based, Texan musician Jess Williamson. Her voice is absolutely sublime; rich and effortlessly warm. Personal but relatable, she transcends generations of country vocals; this really is a special one.
WILLIAMSON: I had had really long relationships, and here I am single for the first time in nine years and it’s COVID dating. [Laughs] I tried it. I was raw from the breakup. It felt like being thrown to the wolves. It felt like: “These people have no context for me, and I have no context for them.” Everyone is judging each other and ghosting each other. It really didn’t align with my way of relating. It felt like an experiment. It was interesting, but it was very short-lived for me. I felt belittled by the whole process, if that makes sense. I felt unseen, the way I want to be seen by someone I’d potentially be dating. It was a weird way to be witnessed.
Thankfully, though, it did birth the song “Hunter.” I would hear people talk about “I’m just dating people, I’m not in a relationship,” so I thought, “OK, maybe that’s what I’ll do.” What I learned from attempting to do that was, that’s not interesting to me. What’s interesting to me is love and real connection. So that lyric “I’m a hunter for the real thing,” I learned that about myself by trying it a different way and realizing it was boring and unfulfilling. I would rather be home or with my friends than whatever this is.
WILLIAMSON: That is to be determined. I’m about to go on tour and we’ll be playing some songs that will hold a new meaning for me now. Ultimately I think the answer to that question — “Are my love songs lies now that the love is gone?” — is no, they’re not lies. It’s a funny thing to sit with though. I wrote these devotional love songs about loving someone forever. I have a song on Cosmic Wink called “Forever,” that’s what I reference on “Chasing Spirits.” The lyric is “There’s the one about forever and/ Loving you in a past life/ Or whatever.” I said all that. That’s on the record — literally. [Laughs] I went on the record with talking about loving someone across lifetimes.
Two years ago, English post-punk quintet Squid took the world by storm with “Bright Green Field”, their big, dystopian, guttural debut record. Ollie Judge, Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell and Anton Pearson are one of the most-uncompromising and level-headed acts around, and their follow-up “O Monolith” is a grand, meticulous achievement of iconoclastic funk, doomsday amalgams and charismatic, glossy noise.
Our Record of the Week is “O Monolith”, the jacked up return of Squid. If you loved the first record (and its preceding EPs), you’ll love this. If you don’t know them yet, you’ll still love this! It is full of curious and bright eyed sonic trips and changes of pace. It’s hugely ambitious and has such great energy.
Teeming with melodic epiphanies and layered sounds, Squid’s second album “O Monolith” is a musical evocation of environment, domesticity and self-made folklore. Like its predecessor, 2021’s critically acclaimed, UK number 4 album “Bright Green Field”, it is dense and tricksy – but also more warm and characterful, with a meandering, questioning nature.
Expansive, evocative and hugely varied, “O Monolith” retains Squid’s restless, enigmatic spirit, but it still holds surprises for those familiar with “Bright Green Field”.
Full of adrenaline, haunted murmurs and trumpets blazing into Dadaist entropies and punk poetics, “O Monolith” cements Squid’s magnitude. To celebrate the album’s release, we caught up with drummer/vocalist Ollie Judge and guitarist/bassist/vocalist Louis Borlase and got the history behind all eight tracks.
“Swing (In a Dream)” Ollie Judge: We started writing this one the day after we got back from Green Man festival in 2021. We played a secret set on the Sunday and arrived there on the Thursday, so we were feeling quite fragile the following Monday in the writing room. Initially I really didn’t like the track, but that’s the beautiful thing about being in Squid, you’ve just got to trust that something you might not be that keen on to start with will end up being something you all collectively love. The track is about a dream I had, I was in the painting “The Swing” by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, I looked down at my phone as it ran out of battery and my phone charger fell into some water, then I realised the whole scene was flooding. The lyric “And all they’ll do is scream” is a pretty dark one, I was imagining what the future will look like as the climate totally annihilates everything. It brought to mind the dream scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor is in the playground and the nuke destroys everything. It’s basically a climate crisis anxiety song, which feels extra weighty as I’m currently looking at news about the wildfire smoke from Canada drifting down to New York.
“Devil’s Den” Louis Borlase: In Summer 2021 we briefly rented a tiny studio space in Bristol, behind Stokes Croft. It wasn’t very soundproof and we got told off and ended up moving out. Devil’s Den started as an idea for two guitars called “Nines.” It ended up becoming the track that made us understand how Woodwind could help shape the album. We were writing the extra parts a couple of weeks before recording at Real World whilst doing the mammoth drive from Montréal through upstate New York.
Judge: I initially wanted to write this song about another dream I had. The dream was set in an alternate universe where emails were stored in plastic bags underneath peoples desks at work. I don’t know why I didn’t pursue that, It sounds interesting. Anyway… this was around the time that my parents were leaving the UK and moving to another country. I grew up in a town called Chippenham in Wiltshire, and I was feeling like I needed to write something about the place I grew up in. The Devil’s Den is the entrance to a burial chamber in Marlborough. There’s a folk tale that people used to put water in the hollows of the stone and the devil would come drink it in the night.
“Siphon Song” Borlase: This one is about seeing buildings on a screen on fire, the internet and compassion fatigue in an age of 24 hour news. Could it be the weirdest track on [O Monolith]? There’s a bit at the end where we used a drone machine of Dan’s which required 5 hands to slowly pitch each Oscillator to the chord that the choir were singing at the end. I think it’s fair to say we are all inspired by Laurie Anderson, I was stoked for a track with a vocoder and choir. It took me ages to try and create the THX style choral glissando you hear at the beginning. I reckon It’s gonna be fun to do this live.
“Undergrowth” Borlase: The first track we started writing post the release of [Bright Green Field] in 2021. The track took a few little twists and turns before writing including a guest freestyle from Chicago legend Sharkula when we were last doing a tour of the states.
Judge: This tune is inspired by the episode of Twin Peaks where Josie Packard’s spirit goes into a doorknob in the Great Northern Hotel. Shout out to all you Peak-Heads out there… Does her spirit still live in the Great Northern? The high pitch whistle you hear in The Return indicates so! I guess it’s about my fear of what happens after you die, but explored in the playful scenario of being reincarnated as a high quality oak chest of drawers. Like Louis said, this was the first tune we wrote, and I really wanted to continue down a kind of funk/trip-hop route for the whole record, but the monolith took us elsewhere.
“The Blades” Borlase: This one started as a live breaks jam, Ollie chopping away to Laurie’s beat on the Digitakt drum machine. When we pulled back the electronics at one point to loop the idea we’d reached, we realized it could be far more all-encompassing a track and became one of the longest on the album. A tryptic!!
Judge: I’ve said before, but this is my favorite tune we’ve ever written. It’s an amalgamation of past, present and future Squid all in one. It went through so many different iterations and I’m glad it ended up like this. It started as a kind of choppy Battles-esque song with no lyrics, to a kind of Arthur Russel-ish, 10-minute, soft funk ballad. We’re super happy with the video for it, featuring an amazing actor called Charlotte Richie.
“After The Flash” Borlase: This one went by the name “Rochdale” for ages because we started writing it at a great studio there called Voltalab. We had the intention of stopping and writing in several of the stops on our Fieldworks Tour of new music in 2021, and ended up coming back to the studio the following year to continue working on the song. There’s a demo of it somewhere where it gets heavier and features Tortoise-esque marimba, but we can’t remember where we put it…
Judge: I’d love to hear the marimba demo of this. I remember it sounding incredible. Maybe one for the 10th Anniversary, glow-in-the-dark, grass-scented LP reissue.
“Green Light” Borlase: There’s always a track we write and get excited about at the last minute before going in the studio. For O Monolith, it was “Green Light.” Were we starting to feel a tad proggy because we knew we were going to Real World [Studios]? Possibly. A highlight of the album for me is the Van Morrison moment of Woodwind glissando in the middle of the tune.
Judge: I agree with Louis here. The woodwind part in the middle of the song is the best part of the album hands down. I love it when artists put one amazing bit in a song but only for about 20 seconds, it makes going back to that song a little bit more special.
“If You Had Seen the Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away” Borlase: This was another one started in Bristol in the middle of Winter. Inspired by the Romans’ introduction of new Rats to Britain, the rhythmic tick of a car indicator, and executed by the amazingly versatile voices of Shards.
Judge: This one was a bit of a behemoth to write. There’s about five different time signatures in it and it’s probably the most packed-to-the-brim tune we’ve ever written. At one point in the song it basically becomes an ensemble of about 14 people… Us, choir and two percussionists. It’s one of those songs that if you think too hard about it, it’ll start to make less sense. You just gotta let goooooo maaaannnnn.
It’s a reflection of the outsized progression of a band always looking to the future. Like its namesake, “O Monolith” is vast and strange; alive with endless possible interpretations of its inner mysteries.
“Are we having fun yet? Living in the grey zone”? The Toads ask the question and already know the answer. There’s many a wry smile, often packed with gallows humour, shared on the Melbourne groups’ debut album “In the Wilderness” (out June 9th on Anti Fade and Upset The Rhythm). Navigating the dross of modern life, whilst keeping one foot in a dream is the key to their nervy post-punk scuffle. Featuring members of The Shifters, The Living Eyes and Parsnip you’d be forgiven for guessing what TheToads sound like, but their mordant step and minor-key enchantment makes for an intriguing parry.
After playing some formative shows, including a debut at Jerkfest in 2022, The Toads set about recording five songs mid-year for a tentative EP. Realising the songs were too long to fit on a 7”, they booked in another recording session the following September to extend the EP to 12”. Two tracks’ chords structures were fleshed out with new melodies and arrangements, and by this point The Toads were surprised to find they had an album’s worth of material.
‘In The Wilderness’ is a beguiling record, full of twists and turns. It’s arch, resilient, thoughtful and straight-at-your-head catchy to boot. It’s fitting that the title track “In The Wilderness” draws this record to a close, being the peak of their invention so far. Drums pound and tumbling bass-lines sprint among the crisply stabbing guitar phrases and soaring horns outro. It’s a survivalist epic of hard-worn wisdom, ambling and restless. “I open up the door trying to get all of us through” sings Miles, becoming progressively more dizzy and despondent.
There is a sense of toughing it out that never falters though and this is the essence of what The Toads do best. They push onwards into the darkness and keep their appetite, pulling us all into the light. Messy and raucous, it’s really great fun and totally going to be a most played record for us over here.
The Toads’“In the Wilderness” will be out June 9th through Anti Fade Records (AU) and Upset The Rhythm (UK).
Decisive Pink is the new collaborative project from Kate NV and Angel Deradoorian, and it is an absolute pop dream! “Ticket to Fame” just bubbles from start to stop; breakneck speeds, pops and clicks, squelching beats and two amazing voices that sound like something from anywhere between 1981 and 2029! It really is ludicrously good fun.
Angel Deradoorian and Kate NV are Decisive Pink – “Ticket To Fame” is their highly anticipated debut. After teasing the single ‘Haffmilch Holiday’ the duo amassed a rapturous response, with The Guardian calling it “a space-age-dancefloor swoon that brings to mind Kate Bush’s Waking the Witch” and the New York Times highlighting the single as “substantive and thoroughly hypnotic”. On their first LP they do not disappoint, calling on Kate NV’s experimental pop leanings and Angel Deradoorian’s taste for atmosphere and otherworldliness, Decisive Pink have created a playful and abstract album designed for escape and enchantment.
Electronic pop at it’s finest, the debut points to the fact that life is a puzzle, but you can still get a lot from living it. ‘Destiny’ is a smart take on the nature of belief, built on a question-and-answer format, where Angel plays a role as the seer, and Kate the enquirer. The poppy beat is reminiscent of Talking Heads’ ‘The Great Curve’, from Remain in Light. There again, it could be a sinister take on Will Powers’ ‘Kissing with Confidence’. The synth squeaks, squelches and toots sound like the timid affirmation of the initiate.
“Ticket to Fame” is also unashamedly romantic in atmosphere and tone. Romance is to be found in the simple pleasures, such as listening to a blackbird on the instrumental ‘Rodeo’, where warm synths, a melancholic guitar pattern and hissing rhythm combine with some vocal snippets to form a soothing contemplation. Then there is ‘Ode to Boy’; a perfect pop track. The walking into the room of “more than just an ordinary boy” (doubtless “drunk with fire”) allows a set of initially different, and shortened synth patterns to build to a glorious affirmation of the power of love.
Boston-based rock duo Mediocre arrives with their debut EP showcasing their unique blend of post-punk, garage rock, and indie pop.
On “To Know You’re Screwed”, the Dangerbird debut EP from queer West LA rock duo Mediocre, Piper Torrison (She/They) and Keely Martin (She/Her) immediately get to twisting the lyrical knife. With the opening line, we find out, “To Know You’re Screwed is to Know a Lot,” an indisputable statement, before even getting to the punchline: “and I’m a motherfucking genius.” She’s got a head full of ways it could all go wrong–but there’s an out! “Don’t worry babe, it’s all self-taught/ could be all wrong anyway.” It’s a once-in-a-generation sentiment, from Socrates on down to Operation Ivy: all I know is I know nothing. Here, Mediocre hints, all I know is I amnothing. It’s when the chorus hits that you realize the song is a mantra of abstaining from such anxiety: “Push it away, I push it away/ and I save it for the next day.” A blistering opening statement of elemental, edge-of-your-seat rock ‘n’ roll at its most honest.
Released April 7th, 2023
All songs written by Piper Torrison and Keely Martin
The Fat Angel Sings 