The Fat Angel Sings

Holy Wave have announced their new album “Five Of Cups”, out August 4th, 2023 on Suicide Squeeze Records. 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.

releases July 14th, 2023

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 You Anymore” 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.” 

Vocals: Clementine Creevy
Guitars: Clementine Creevy
Bass: Clementine Creevy, Yves Rothman, Sami Perez
Synths: Clementine Creevy, Joe Kennedy, Yves Rothman
Background Vocals: Sami Perez
Drums: Jesse Quebbeman-Turley
Drum programming: Yves Rothman
Trumpet: Jonny Chais
Strings: Omeka E.O.

releases September 29th, 2023

On September 15th we are releasing a Deluxe Version of ‘Expert in a Dying Field’

It’s a double LP! It includes ‘A Real Thing’ and ‘Watching The Credits’, as well as demos and a solo acoustic recordings. The acoustic version of ‘I Told You That I Was Afraid’ is out today and you can listen it in all its wobbly glory. On The Beths’ deluxe version of the album “Expert In A Dying Field”, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships — platonic, familial, romantic — and more importantly, their aftermaths.

The shapes and ghosts left in absences. The question that hangs in the air: what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life? The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz.

Thanks Lily Paris West for the artwork, and Bevin Smith for mixing the acoustic tracks 🙂
And thanks Lindsey Byrnes for the photo 📸
And also Carpark Records and Ivy League Records

A Certain Ratio return with a brand new 4-track EP set for release on limited edition 12” vinyl and digitally on 22 September 2023. The new release follows their latest album 1982, and includes three newly commissioned remixes of tracks from the album, alongside a brand-new track ‘Day by Day’, written and recorded with Ellen Beth Abdi – a seamless extension of 1982 to complete their playfully named 2023 EP.

We’re excited to announce a brand new 4-track EP follow up to 1982 called “2023” (naturally). it features 3 new remixes by our friends Werkha, The Emperor Machine and Jade Parker plus a brand new track Day by Day written & recorded with Ellen Beth Abdi.

releases September 22, 2023

Thrilled to announce I will release my sixth studio album ‘Jonny’ Friday, October 13th.

On his latest album as The Drums, New York-based indie pop artist Jonny Pierce plunges into the work of healing from childhood trauma and the long shadow it casts over adulthood.

The sparkling, eponymous Jonny unfurls a love letter to a galaxy of younger selves, all hungry to be nourished, all rejoicing now that they finally get to belong. Playful, heartbreaking, raucous, and serene all in turn, Jonny embraces the mess of life in all its facets. It renders the magic that happens when you fall in love with yourself down to the marrow.

Soaring to alt-pop prestige on arrival, The Drums have released studio albums that deftly walk the line of aching melancholy and irresistible pop sensibilities, presented through a kaleidoscope of pastel guitars, reverb, modular synthesizers and drum machines. It’s a sound that’s wholly unique, and unmistakably The Drums.

16 songs birthed out of my deepest wounds and out of my wildest joys. When I listen back to it, I hear my soul reflected back at me. I think you’ll find yourself somewhere in it too. For today however, I offer you a brand new single from the album. Listen to “Better”

released July 12th, 2023

Written, performed, produced, engineered and mixed by Jonny Pierce
All Instruments played by Jonny Pierce

 A 5CD set containing remastered 84 tracks; 52 tracks are on CD for the first time of which 22 tracks are previously unreleased.
Beautifully packaged in a high-quality clamshell box containing the 5 individual CDs in card wallet sleeves.
Featuring expanded versions of the band’s first three albums plus two additional discs containing their first two EPs, tracks by Landscape III and a comprehensive selection of 7” edits, 12” extended versions, remixes, B-sides, instrumentals and live tracks.
With a fully illustrated 52-page perfect bound book containing brand new sleevenotes, lyrics, biographies, archive photos, original artwork, press cuttings and more.

The set includes expanded versions of the band’s first three albums plus two additional discs containing their first two much-loved “Event Horizon” EPs, tracks by Landscape III and a comprehensive selection of 7″ edits, 12″ extended versions, remixes, B-sides, instrumentals and live tracks + a 2023 remix of top five hit ‘Einstein a Go-Go’

All tracks were mastered from high-resolution digitisations of the original analogue master tapes. The ‘previously released’ tracks from the analogue stereo two tracks, the ‘remixes’ and ‘instrumentals’ from digitisations of the original analogue multi-tracks, and the ‘live’ tracks were mastered from edited digitisations of the original analogue stereo live recordings.
Released with the full involvement of all the original band members.

On 21st July we will release ‘Landscape A Go-Go: The Story Of Landscape 1977-83’, a 5CD collection of the seminal catalogue from the synth-pop pioneers who spearheaded a new electronic movement over four decades ago, best known for the groundbreaking singles ‘Einstein a Go-Go’ and ‘Norman Bates’.

‘Landscape A Go Go’ features expanded versions of the band’s first three albums (‘Landscape’, ‘From the Tea-rooms of Mars …. to the Hell-holes of Uranus’, ‘Manhattan Boogie-Woogie’), plus two additional discs containing their much-loved “Event Horizon” EPs, tracks by Landscape III and a comprehensive selection of 7″ edits, 12″ extended versions, remixes, B-sides, instrumentals, and live tracks, alongside a new, 2023 remix of top five hit ‘Einstein A Go-Go’.

Notable highlights include the electro-pop brilliance of Landscape’s first vocal release ‘European Man’ (with both the 7″ and 12″ versions available for the first time ever on CD) – presciently catalogued ‘EDM 1’ for Electronic Dance Music – which dealt with the impact of computers on society and universal basic income, alongside the previously unreleased tracks ‘(I’d Love to) Fly Away’ and ‘When the Chips Are Down’, recorded at the start of the ‘Tea-rooms’ sessions. In addition, this exhaustive collection also includes a fully illustrated 52-page booklet containing brand new sleeve notes, lyrics, biographies, archive photos, original artwork, press cuttings and more.

released June 15th, 2023

“The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald” was on the original “Black Album” release. ‘Alien’ AND ‘Untitled 1’ are from these sessions. Think of this as a companion record to the “Black Album”.

“What will the Dandys do next,” you ask? Well, we’ve got some shows lined up for this October with The Black Angels we know you’ll flip over.

Courtney Taylor-Taylor
Peter Holmström
Zia McCabe
Brent DeBoer

released June 30th, 2023

Last month, L.A. psychedelic rockers Frankie and the Witch Fingers returned with a new single called “Mild Davis,” which continued the punky retro haze the group has come to be known for within a community of like-minded artists in their Southern Californian garage-rock scene. Yet “Futurephobic,” the follow-up single from their forthcoming record “Data Doom”,feels much more in line with the album title’s vintage dystopian sci-fi connotations, swapping weed-smoke riffs for frigid new wave pulses and staccato vocal deliveries.

“The main riff was an idea we came up with during the writing process for our album “Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters”…but we kept it in our back pockets, as it wasn’t quite fitting in with the theme of that album,” the band shares. “When we started writing “Data Doom“, it re-emerged very organically and everyone latched onto the idea surprisingly fast and ran with it. We expanded on the main riff and came up with the other parts and overall arrangement while writing with our new lineup in our studio in LA. The whole process went surprisingly smoothly. 

We added backing vocals and overdubs while on tour last year in Europe, doing all the passes to complete the song from various apart-hotels, attics in France and Amsterdam.”

Although the recording process was smooth, the recording’s post-punky flow is anything but. To match the song’s ’80s B-movie aesthetic is a video that leans into that decade’s sci-fi/horror imagery, wherein Ronald McDonald does a pretty bad job of selling the viewer his product. 

The Los Angeles psych-punks’ new LP “Data Doom” lands September 1st via Greenway Records and The Reverberation Appreciation Society.