The Fat Angel Sings

On “Everything Harmony“, the fourth full-length studio release from New York’s The Lemon Twigs, the prodigiously talented brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario offer 13 original servings of beauty that showcase an emotional depth and musical sophistication far beyond their years as a band, let alone as young men. While they eagerly devour musical influences from everything and everywhere, they have somehow arrived at a cohesive and dynamic sound that speaks to our troubled times.

Having bounded onto the music scene with their precocious 2016 debut “Do Hollywood“, they threw caution to the wind two years later on their follow up “Go to School”. By the time of their third album, “Songs for the General Public” (2020) The Lemon Twigs had begun to pull from a wide range of multigenerational inspirations, expertly darting from twee chamber pop balladry to full on glam punk, mixing plaintive singer-songwriter confessionals with an almost Syd Barrett sense of outré pop. In an interview from the time, they expressed an interest in creating “something really beautiful sounding” based on vocal harmonies and developing their combined melodic sensibilities into a setting where “the sounds were as important as the songs” themselves.

On “Everything Harmony“, the brothers have fully realized that vision, with a unified Lemon Twigs sound” that successfully blends their distinct personalities while giving voice to their diverse and eclectic influences.

Opening the album with the unassuming acoustic folk of plaintive “When Winter Comes Around,” which echoes the sophisticated grandeur of classic Simon & Garfunkel recordings, they immediately switch things up to the sunny classic pop motif of “In My Head.” From that point on “Everything Harmony” makes it clear that the Lemon Twigs can’t be pinned down.

Having recently worked with friends like Natalie Mering, with whom they appeared on the latest Weyes Blood album, they also collaborated with classic rock hero Todd Rundgren on his most recent album, “Space Force”. Rundgren, himself no stranger to eclecticism, says he can relate to their time-tripping approach to contemporary pop.

“They started when they were five and six years old, doing TV and Broadway and things like that,” says Rundgren. “So, they have built-in appreciation for music that is of a couple of generations before theirs.

I think they were bored by the music of their own generation, and since you can’t fast forward to the music of the future, you just start going backwards to music that was made before you were born. I can empathize with that impulse, because I did that too, back in the seventies.”

Released as the album teaser track, “Corner of My Eye” channels an Art Garfunkel-like vocal melody over a moody, vibraphone-tinged backing track suggesting the chamber pop of Brian Wilson.

“Everything Harmony” was mostly written and recorded between 2020 and 2021, when tracking for the album began at a “very chaotic” rehearsal studio in Manhattan.

“It was one of the noisiest places I’ve ever been,” says Brian. “We did takes of acoustic guitar in between metal bands rehearsing next door and fire engines roaring down 8th Avenue. After months of sessions there, where we recorded the basic tracks to ‘Corner Of My Eye’, ‘In My Head,’ ‘I Don’t Belong To Me,’ ‘What Happens To A Heart,’ ‘Ghost Run Free,’ and ‘New To Me,’ we decided enough was enough and we looked into studios that had acoustic echo chambers after hearing East West’s chambers during the recording of Weyes Blood’s latest record.”

They finally got out of town, but instead of ‘doing Hollywood’ again, they took the tapes to San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios where they added the album’s omnipresent vibraphone textures, harpsichord, French horn, strings, and many layers of vocal harmonies.

To finish up, they flew home to their brand new studio in Brooklyn to finish mixing and mastering with the help of Paul Millar of Bug Sound.

Brian D’Addario notes the influence of two late lamented artists in particular this time; Moondog, and Arthur Russell whose album Iowa Dream encouraged them to lean into their own melodic tendencies and keep the arrangements delicate.

“Their arrangements entered my head when we were arranging the strings on the album,” says Brian, “and we worked for a long time on our vocal blend. On previous records, whoever wrote the song might do most, if not all, of the harmonies on their track but not so much on this one. Our blend is a strength that we tried to exploit as much as possible.”

While they had no grand concept for “Everything Harmony“, both the D’Addarios felt a “palpable mood of defeat” prevailed while writing and recording it. “New To Me” was inspired by their shared experience with loved ones suffering from Alzheimer’s, “What You Were Doing” is dressed in the tortured jangle of vintage Big Star, while “Born To Be Lonely,” written after watching John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, deals with what Brian calls “the fragility that often comes with age.”

“The album cycles through moments of depression and isolation on songs like ‘What Happens To A Heart,’ or ‘Born To Be Lonely’ to episodes of dizzying euphoria in ‘Ghost Run Free’ or the title track. There’s very little middle ground. On ‘What Happens to A Heart’ we were going for a 70’s Spector vibe, along the lines of Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies Man. We tracked it with me on piano, Daryl Johns on electric bass and Michael and Andres Valbuena both playing drums. I overdubbed a fretless bass. Two pianos, two organs, harpsichord, and celeste. The basic track was done in New York, and strings and French horn recorded in San Francisco. We got the Friction Quartet to overdub themselves about 8 times to get a more symphonic sound. We also recorded about 8 acoustics and bounced them down to two tracks; we did the same with the electric guitars.”

“Everything Harmony” is a unified song cycle born of shared blood and common purpose. With two musical heads being better than one, there’s no shortage of ideas to draw on. Their only impediments are time and the challenge of keeping up with their own prolific musical inspiration.

“We share an intuition and tend to be influenced by one another,” says Brian, “so the lyrical ideas on this record tend to complement each other. Writing has never been the issue for us. It’s completing, editing and compiling that takes the time. We’re trapped in a web of songs!” 

releases May 5th, 2023

Official video for Any Time Of Day by The Lemon Twigs, from their album Everything Harmony, out May 5th, 2023.

All songs written by Brian and Michael D’Addario

The latest single from Fenne Lily’s new album “Big Picture” is “In My Own Time,” is a gentle folk track. “This song’s about the weight of stasis about time moving too quickly and too slowly and every mistake feeling both permanent and inconsequential,” she says.
“When it came to writing this video concept, I wanted it to reflect the twisted aspects of a love that’s found in the midst of chaos and the subsequent feeling of being inanimate in your own story. All that, in the style of Terminator 2.”

Fenne Lily’s third LP, “Big Picture”, is set to be among one of the best records of the year. To commemorate the upcoming occasion, Lily has gifted us “In My Own Time” a low-key but breathtaking acoustic triumph about mutual affection and reliance on others. “Write me a love song, make it all rhyme / Hold me up sometimes, we’ll be just fine,” she sings.

There are romantic undertones lingering, but “In My Own Time” is much more than that. It’s—as the title of the record might suggest—a small ecosystem gazing out at the big picture, one where Lily is reckoning with how to co-opt a space when there’s no place left to turn but into the arms of who’s closest to you. If “let’s make this house a home” was a song, look toward the lighthouse that is “In My Own Time,” one of the tenderest ballads of 2023

from the upcoming album ‘Big Picture’, out April 14th on Dead Oceans Records.

Art School Girlfriend, Aka Polly Mackey, releases her second album “Soft Landing”, via Fiction Records. The album is self-described as a series of “small euphorias”, it is an album that finds Mackey shifting her sound towards tactile electronics whilst retaining the floating melodies of her debut. 

Lead track “Close To The Clouds”, follows the success of standalone single “A Place To Lie” earlier this year. “Close To The Clouds” is an integral part of “Soft Landing“, with the central refrain providing the album with its title, and the song unfurling into climbing, arpeggiated synths amidst acid-house indebted drums. 

“Soft Landing” follows Mackey’s 2020 debut album, “Is It Light Where You Are?” an album made in the wake of a tumultuous time and released during one. “Soft Landing” feels like Mackey’s true debut, a record of curiosity and playfulness with songs that sound like they are falling effortlessly into place.

the new album, ‘Soft Landing’, out 4th August

“Bunny” is a stunning evolution of Beach Fossils’ sound throughout the years, pulling elements from the jangly melancholy of “What a Pleasure”, the lush arrangements of “Somersault” and the gritty, post-punk inspired tracks from “Clash the Truth”. The record has Dustin Payseur’s most vulnerable lyrics by far. He’s pushed himself to be honest and give insight to his emotional world. From poignant words about a family member’s cancer battle, the joy of being a father, to smoking a cigarette out of a car window with friends–it’s the band’s most vivid and personal work to date. Beach Fossils have spotlighted at Coachella, Bonnaroo, Primavera, and Posty Fest, in addition to sold-out headline dates at venues like Brooklyn Steel, The Wiltern, and Thalia Hall.

The Other Side of Life: Piano Ballads hit No. 3 on the Billboard Traditional Jazz Albums chart and the band recently cracked two million Spotify monthly listeners and seven million monthly listeners total across all platforms. “Bunny” will be released June 2nd on Bayonet Records–a genre-expansive indie label he co-founded in 2014 that has served as an incubator for a diverse roster of developing artists since its inception.

“Don’t Fade Away” off the new album “Bunny” out June 2nd, 2023

Celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Yardbirds, the British band who gave rise to Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. From rave ups at the Marquee, via psychedelic sonics, all the way to Led Zeppelin.

Which musical moment is the most definitively “Yardbirds”? The thrilling rave-ups of “I’m A Man”, which were so inspirational to David Bowie? Jeff Beck’s devastating one note feedback solo on “The Nazz Are Blue”? A delivery during which, as Simon Napier-Bell recalls in the following pages, Jeff just “glared at the band through the glass”? It’s a classic. But topping the lot would surely have to be the thirty second burst of madness about one minute and 45 seconds into the 1966 single “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”.

In historical terms, we welcome this as one of the few recorded instances of the Jimmy Page/Jeff Beck Yardbirds of June-October 1966. On a more visceral level, though, it does something less easy to rationalise when a warning siren sounds and Jeff Beck begins a series of bombing runs on his guitar. One guitar solo threatens to start, but then another one, oblivious to the first begins on top of it. After a few seconds, someone starts talking – actually, more like heckling. “Pop group, are you? Bet you’re making money…” At this, there is mad laughter in the mix. “Why you got to wear long hair?”

It’s disorientating, but it feels representative of how things generally were for this band: hectic, confusing, often magnificent. The Yardbirds, like their more storied contemporaries like The Rolling Stones made a successful transition from R&B enthusiasm to professional pop and psychedelia (something they did markedly better than the Stones). It’s inescapable, though, that they are today better known for giving a home to Eric Clapton, the late Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, than for their own collective output.

In the face of overwhelming odds, we’ve made some sense of it all. Inside you’ll find in depth reviews of the band’s intriguingly scattershot catalogue, presented alongside our pick of archive interviews. The Yardbirds own lifespan was an explosive five years, so beyond that, we’ve taken the opportunity to follow Jeff Beck’s career, from blues rock, to jazz fusion and even drum ‘n’ bass as he maintained a hunger for fresh sounds, much like his friend David Bowie.

Mo Troper, the Portland power-pop musician whose most recent full-length “MTV” Album, puts out covers with some regularity. A couple months ago, he offered up his take on Chris Bell’s “I Am The Cosmos” and a little while after that he had his hand in a Ducks. Ltd cover of the Feelies. This weekend, he’s shared a home-spun version of the Beach Boys’ “Wonderful,” written for the “Smile” album and included on 1967’s “Smiley Smile”.

“happy st patrick’s night,” Mo Troper wrote in a tweet. “i recorded this cover of Beach Boys “Smile” classic ‘Wonderful’ . I love studying the masters. hope you enjoy, cheers and have an incredible weekend.”

Shannon Lay has announced a new collection of covers, “Covers Vol. 1”, due out on April 14th via Sub Pop Records . “I absolutely love doing covers. It’s such a joy to offer my perspective on songs I admire and spread the word about amazing artists. “Covers Vol. 1” is the first in a series of cover records celebrating my obsession with shannonizing songs,” she says.

“Covers Vol. 1” features renditions of songs by Nick Drake, Arthur Russell, Sibylle Baier, Vashti Bunyan, Ty Segall, and more, and kicks off with the release of her taken on Elliott Smith‘s “Angeles.” “If I had a nickel for every minute I’ve spent listening to Elliott Smith I’d be a very rich woman,” Shannon says. “His intricate thoughtfulness always fills me up. ‘Angeles’ was one of those songs I was always quite intimidated to learn but upon finally trying it came together so naturally. Then Debbie Neigher topped things off with an amazing piano outro. I love feeling Elliott’s spirit embedded in the musical scene at large. Anywhere notes are played he lives on.” Listen to “Angeles” and check out the tracklist for “Covers Vol. 1” below.

Shannon has also announced she’ll be opening for Whitney on tour in March. She heads to the UK and Europe in April.

“Covers Vol. 1″ Tracklisting
Angeles (Elliott Smith)
From the Morning (Nick Drake)
Blues Run the Game (Jackson C. Frank)
Close My Eyes (Arthur Russell)
The Keepers (Ty Segall)
I Lost Something in the Hills (Sibylle Baier)
Glow Worms (Vashti Bunyan)
I’m Set Free (The Velvet Underground)
I Am Slow (OCS)

“Angeles” by Shannon Lay from the upcoming ‘Covers Vol. 1′ out April 14th on Sub Pop Records Original song by Elliott Smith

Horse Jumper of Love released “Natural Part” last year, and now they’ve shared a new acoustic version of album track “I Poured Sugar In Your Shoes.” “’Last Night Version’ is always how the song was meant to be: simple and acoustic,” vocalist and guitarist Dimitri Giannopoulos says. “Sometimes the pressure of turning a track into a rock song can get to me. But this is how it was meant to be. We recorded this version because I was in my friend Rhys’ student film Townsends Last Night.

We were filming this scene outside of a gas station on Comm Ave. by Boston University where the main character has a vision of me playing guitar. We recorded it in one take because the guy who owned the gas station was closing and kept shutting the lights off on us. Rhys had to go in and beg him to give us five more mins with the lights on. So that’s all we had – five minutes – just enough time for one take of the song. I liked the performance and how you can hear cars driving by in it, so I asked them to rip the audio from the movie for me to be released as a Horse Jumper track.”

“I Poured Sugar In Your Shoes (Last Night Version)” by Horse Jumper of Love, out now via Run For Cove Records

New York City duo Laveda’s new album “A Place You Grew Up In” is out next month, and the latest single is the propulsive “Troy Creeps,” which Ali Genevich says is meant to evoke “a long night spent along with your thoughts.”

Laveda’s new album, ‘A Place We Grew Up In’, is highly anticipated, with the singles; ‘F***’, ‘Surprise’, Clean’, and ‘Troy Creeps’ setting an impressive scene to an epic dreampop masterpiece.

Founded by duo Ali Genevich (vocals/guitar) and Jake Brooks (vocals/guitar/synths), Laveda released their polished debut album ‘What Happens After’ in 2020. As complex as it was colourful, the LP saw the band compared to the likes of The Sundays and My Bloody Valentine as they attracted glowing praise across the US and beyond.

Written and Produced by Ali Genevich and Jacob Brooks

releases April 14th, 2023

 The Lemon Twigs shared another single leading up to the release of “Everything Harmony”, their first record for Captured Tracks, released May th5. Brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario produced and mixed “In My Head,” which is ocean-sprayed pop music at its finest. The bright melody in combination with pensive, melancholic lyrics recalls The Beach Boys, but “In My Head” is The Lemon Twigs’ own twist on Californian surf-pop.

“The song’s about the disconnect between your inner and perceived self,” the group shared. “The music video was shot mostly at Fort Tilden Beach and juxtaposes the fun in the sun energy of the track with inclement weather and neuroscience.”

This new single and video. “The music video was shot mostly at Fort Tilden Beach and juxtaposes the fun in the sun energy of the track with inclement weather and neuroscience.” New album “Everything Harmony” is out May 5th via Captured Tracks.

The duo’s latest album “Everything Harmony” is out May 5th via Captured Tracks.