The Fat Angel Sings

Peter Gabriel knows a thing or two about lunar cycles, which he is happy to espouse on at length in our cover story. Stand by for tales involving full moons, gabble ratchets and foxheads when Gabriel reveals all about i/o – his first album of new music for 21 years. There’s more, of course – not least some beautiful unseen shots of The Band by Elliott Landy and The Beatles by Terry O’Neill, the swaggering return of Rickie Lee Jones, the sardonic brilliance of the late David Berman and a revelatory trip to Senegal to meet the towering Baaba Maal. There’s also OMD, The Damned, Huggy Bear and Lonnie Liston Smith. Back to new music quickly and check out Melbourne’s Brown Spirits, whose psych jams are causing a significant stir in the Uncut office. And don’t forget our free CD rounds up the month’s best new music, including tracks from North Americans, Purling Hiss, Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection, Fruit Bats and that Steve Gunn/ David Moore collaboration I mentioned at the top.

Lanterns On The Lake have just announced news of their highly anticipated new album, “Versions Of Us”, out on 2nd June via Bella Union. This self-produced fifth studio LP follows 2020’s Mercury-nominated “Spook the Herd”, with Radiohead’s Philip Selway joining the band on drums and percussion throughout the album. To accompany the announcement, the Newcastle quintet have shared a visualizer for the first single and album opener ‘The Likes of Us.’ 

Opener and lead single ‘The Likes of Us’ documents the state of things (“Oblivion howls for these gutted streets / Boarded shops cower in defeat”) but sublimates observations into a mantra of resolve (“I won’t let this spark die in me”). It heralds “Versions of Us” as the band’s most cohesive and concise record yet, with its pervading sense of empowerment encapsulated in Wilde’s startling vocal performances.

The nine songs of “Versions Of Us” are existential meditations examining life’s possibilities; facing the hand we’ve been dealt and the question of whether we can change our individual and collective destinies. Singer and song writer Hazel Wilde has no doubt that motherhood fundamentally shifted her perspective. “Writing songs requires a certain level of self-indulgence, and songwriters can be prone to dwelling on themselves,” she says. “Motherhood made me aware of having a different stake in the world. I’ve got to believe that there’s a better way and an alternative future to the one we’ve been hurtling towards. I’ve also got to believe that I could be better as a person, too.”

Her voice soars with previously unheard force on an album austere in its beauty, with its shifting sands of searing guitar, fluttering vintage synths and swarming melodic lines, topped with glistening strings from Angela Chan.

Tyneside’s Lanterns On The Lake have been releasing music on Bella Union records since 2011. Mixed by the band’s guitarist Paul Gregory, in the bedroom of his home in North Shields, there is a sense of time and place that runs deep throughout this record.

‘The Likes Of Us’ is taken from the new Lanterns On The Lake album ‘Versions Of Us’ out on 2nd June

Creep Show brings together John Grant with the dark analogue electro of Wrangler (Stephen Mallinder / Phil Winter / Benge) to create “Mr Dynamite” which is a debut album packed with experimental pop and surreal funk. “Mr Dynamite” will be released 16th March via Bella Union Records.  Creep Show shared thier first track from the LP entitled “Pink Squirrel” 

Recorded in Cornwall with a lifetime’s collection of drum machines and synthesisers assembled by Benge and explored by every member of Creep Show, there’s a real sense of freedom in the shackles-off grooves, channelling the early pioneering spirit of the Sugarhill Gang through wires and random electric noise.

“Yawning Abyss” the second track by the Creep Show featuring John Grant a collaboration of Stephen Mallinder, Benge and Phil Winter

According to Mallinder the band “sprang fully formed a couple of years ago but in truth had been bubbling away for decades in a petri dish containing spores of seventies sci-fi, post–punk electronic music, bad taste, broken synthesizers, luscious film soundtracks, and dubious band t-shirts.” Their first show – their name hadn’t yet come to Benge in a dream – was at the Barbican in London late 2016 as part of an event celebrating 40 years of Rough Trade. Preferring not to live on past glories, Grant and Wrangler wrote a whole new set of material together. As Mallinder explains, “we thought the only way to work with someone was to lock the doors and wrestle each other until we could come out with entirely new and original stuff. Why not? If you work with someone, test yourself, see what’s buried under the soil.”

“Yawning Abyss” to be released on Bella Union 2023-03-07

Hollywood Vampires, the supergroup featuring Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, actor/musician Johnny Depp, and shock rock icon Alice Cooper, have release a video for “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory”, featured on the “Rise” album, released in June 2019 via earMusic.

The legend of the Hollywood Vampires began in the upstairs rooms inside the wicked halls of legendary Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset Strip in Hollywood in 1972. Surrounded by plenty of memorabilia on the walls, the location became the home away from home for stars like Alice Cooper, Ringo Starr, John Belushi, John Lennon, Keith Moon, Keith Emerson, Harry Nilsson, Marc Bolan and many more to get their (often) daily fixture. The staff at the Rainbow dubbed the crew the Hollywood Vampires – their very own secret late-night drinking club.
 
More than 40 years later, Cooper and good friend Johnny Depp got together and decided the spirit of the Hollywood Vampires should live on (minus the drinking). They were joined by Aerosmith lead guitarist Joe Perry, who is an old friend of both and Tommy Henriksen, longtime friend of Alice Cooper, band member and producer.

Originally by the great Johnny Thunders, “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory” features Joe Perry on lead vocals.

Wednesday are honest chroniclers of the Southern everyday, surveying a no-frills landscape of ashen Dairy Queens, run-over dogs, and pissed-on wallpaper. Their stories will make you laugh, wince, recoil, and reminisce. On “Chosen to Deserve,” the lead single from the Asheville band’s debut studio album, “Rat Saw God”, singer and guitarist Karly Hartzman details a messy adolescence full of fuck-ups and first times: skipping school, having sex in the back of an SUV, witnessing friends overdose on Benadryl.

“Now that it’s been awhile I’ll get around to telling’ you all my worst,” she informs a lover, not looking for absolution but just saying it like it is, “just so you know what you’ve been chosen to deserve.” Between the meandering, relaxed verses, the band takes it back to a slamming country guitar riff that’s part Drive-By Truckers, with whom the band toured with last year.

The accompanying Spencer Kelly–directed music video is an ode to down-home North Carolina, with home-video footage interspersed with newly-recorded scenes of the band in the neighborhood where Hartzman’s parents live: golf cart rides around the trailer park, geese swimming in the local pond, trips to the pool with the slide shaped like a frog’s tongue. Though in the last verse Hartzman confesses that she’s outgrown her teenage antics—“Now all the drugs are gettin kinda boring to me/Now everywhere is loneliness and it’s in everything”—the song still indicates fondness for the good ol’ days, surrounded by community. 

“Chosen to Deserve” by Wednesday from the upcoming album ‘Rat Saw God’, out April 7th on Dead Oceans Records.

The lead single from the Asheville singer-songwriter’s upcoming album, “All of This Will End”, hits like a flaming missile to the heart. After dressing her disarmingly blunt musings up in Auto-Tuned synth-pop, swirling grunge, rumbling indie rock, and bittersweet funk on her 2021 breakthrough, “Any Shape You Take”, Singer songwriter Indigo De Souza, tries something new on “Younger & Dumber”: honest-to-goodness power balladry.

Think ’90s country-pop queen Faith Hill, but with a smaller budget and a bigger sense of inner turmoil. She started to write the song as a frank conversation with her flailing younger self and delivers every conflicted line as if her life depended on it. “You came to hurt me in all the right places/Made me somebody,” she ruminates, as sombre piano and acoustic guitar accentuate the ache. The song’s apex is both triumphant and destructive, and it’s followed by a guitar solo that seems primed to ascend to the stratosphere before fizzling out on the runway. Soul-baring catharsis has its costs, and De Souza is unafraid, launching a flaming missile at the heart.

Indigo De Souza – New Album: “All of This Will End” out April 28th on Saddle Creek Records

Toronto indie rockers Dilly Dally are splitting up. The band have revealed the news on Instagram (March 2), writing: “It’s time for us to move forward and continue our journeys separately.” The statement continues: “We wanted to say goodbye on a positive note. That’s why we are self-releasing two new songs today. Recorded close to home in Toronto, they came about naturally over the last year or so.”

The tracks—titled “Colour of Joy” and “Morning Light”—are available on Dilly Dally’s Bandcamp page.

We wanted to say goodbye on a positive note. That’s why we are self-releasing two new songs today. Recorded close to home in Toronto, they came about naturally over the last year or so.

For anyone who’s shown support in any way, from fans to friends to collaborators: We could not have accomplished what we did without each of you, and will be forever grateful.
Xoxo

Dilly Dally formed in 2009, and released their debut full-length “Sore” in 2015. Their second and final LP “Heaven” arrived in 2018. The quartet featured singer/guitarist Enda Monks, guitarist Liz Ball, bassist Annie Jane Marie, and drummer Ben Reinhartz.

In addition to releasing two new songs, Dilly Dally have announced a farewell show. The concert will take place on May 27th at Toronto venue Lee’s Palace with guests Bad Waitress and Breeze. 

“False Lankum” follows their 2019 breakthrough album “The Livelong Day”, which paved the way for critical and commercial success, earning them that year’s RTE Choice Music Prize (the Irish equivalent of the Album of the Year Grammy) and the #8 spot on NPR Music’s Best Albums of the Year list. Drawing on traditional folk songs, Lankum put their own dark, distinctive mark onto each, leaning into heavy drones and sonic distortion that imparts new intensity and beauty into each track. This record sees the band cement their breakout from the folk genre, creating bold, contemporary music that may be fashioned from traditional elements but is firmly new, sitting comfortably alongside Rough Trade labelmates like black midi and Gilla Band. “False Lankum” also features two original tracks, ‘Netta Perseus’ and ‘The Turn’, both penned by the group’s Daragh Lynch.

‘Go Dig My Grave’ was discovered by Lankum’s Radie Peat who learned the particular version on the album from the singing of Jean Ritchie, who recorded it in 1963 on the album “Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City“. It is a member of a family of songs which seem to be largely made up of what are known as ‘floating verses’, originally composed as stanzas of various different ballads, some of which date back as far as the 17th century. 

“’Our interpretation of the traditional song “Go Dig My Grave” is one that centres around the emotion of grief – all-consuming, unbearable and absolute” explain Lankum, “A visceral physical reaction to something that the body and mind are almost incapable of processing. The second part of the song is inspired by the Irish tradition of keening (from the Irish caoineadh) – a traditional form of lament for the deceased. 

Regarded by some as opening up ‘perilous channels of communication with the dead’, the practice came under severe censure from the catholic church in Ireland from the 17th century on.”

From the start, Dublin’s Lankum planned for “False Lankum”, their fourth record and third for Rough Trade, to feel like a complete piece – a progression and a journey for the listener. “We wanted to create more contrast on the record so the light parts would be almost spiritual and the dark parts would be incredibly dark, even horror inducing,” they explain. The album’s 12 tracks, composed of 10 traditional songs and two originals, show the four-piece using a new palate to colour their sound in an increasingly experimental way, alongside longtime producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy.

Our 4th album “False Lankum” will be released on Rough Trade Records the 24th of March 2023.

Bonny Doon have announced a new LP, “Let There Be Music”, their first for ANTI-Records. It’s set to arrive on June 16th, and it will include the previously released singles ‘Crooked Creek’ and ‘San Fransisco’. The announcement comes with the release of the new single ‘Naturally’, alongside a video filmed by Ian Rapnicki and Ben Collins.

The first release since the band’s pair of albums in 2017 and 2018 comes after guitar/vocalists Bill Lennox and Bobby Colombo joined Waxahatchee to play on her album “Saint Cloud” and join her on tour. Then the band was sidelined because of health—drummer Jake Kmiecik suffered complications from his Crohn’s disease and Colombo dealt with a brain injury and Lyme disease.

“‘Naturally’ is a song where the musical development really mirrored the lyrical content, specifically the idea of leaning into a situation and letting it develop organically, in this case that of a relationship,” the band’s Bill Lennox explained in a statement. “The song began as a slow ballad and worked better as a more uptempo thing, and a certain sentiment only made sense when translated to French. It speaks to those kind of unexpected surprises we encounter when we surrender to the flow of things.”

Bill Lennox: vocals, acoustic guitar Bobby Colombo: bass, electric guitar, electric piano, synths, piano, backing vocals Jake Kmiecik: drums, percussion Kyle Forester: piano

Produced by Bonny Doon and Brian Fox

New Album ‘Let There Be Music’ Out June 16th On Anti Records.

Thurston Moore has unveiled the second song from his forthcoming album — an electrifying new tune entitled ‘Isadora’; it is an ode to longtime muse Isadora Duncan. The track, out on his label The Daydream Library Series today, available on “Bandcamp Friday”, March 3rd, 2023 — comes from a session with Thurston’s London-based group, including bassist Deb Googe (My Bloody Valentine),guitarist James Sedwards (Nøught), percussionist Jem Doulton (Róisín Murphy), electronic music wizard Jon Leidecker (Negativland) with lyrics by London-based poet Radieux Radio.

‘Isadora’ is the second single from a forthcoming album and is accompanied by a music video featuring what Thurston has referred to as a “Sky Dance”. The video written & directed by Radieux Radio features American actress, musician, dancer & choreographer Sky Ferreira. “Sky is a talented friend who’s been spending time in London, and immediately understood the connection to this mysticism & music and sent through this magical digital diary for the song.

Sky’s insight into modern dance,
including her love of Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham sparked off a conversation about Judson Theatre Group, Douglas Dunn, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer and other artists of performance and dance who bring the word ‘freedom’ to our minds and spirit.” 

released March 3rd, 2023
guitarist/vocalist: Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth)
bassist: Deb Googe (My Bloody Valentine)
guitarist: James Sedwards (Nøught)
percussionist: Jem Doulton (Róisín Murphy)
electronics: Jon Leidecker (Negativland)
lyrics: Radieux Radio