The Fat Angel Sings

The Men have proven pretty reliable at dropping new music every few years, sometimes playing up the country rock on albums like “New Moon”, or embracing weird psychedelia on “Drift”. With songs like “God Bless the USA” and “Hard Livin’” (great titles by the way), The Men get back to basics on their latest and first for Fuzz Club Records, wherein they get back to their garage rock roots and simply rip. We’re ready to turn this one up.

‘Hard Livin” is taken from ‘New York City’, the ninth album from Brooklyn group The Men that’s due out February 3rd 2023 on Fuzz Club Records

Introducing Golden Hours Based out of Berlin and Brussels, the new project is comprised of past / present members of Gang Of Four, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Tricky, The Fuzztones and The Third Sound. A band with mileage and stories, Golden Hours trade in rock’n’roll missives that are at times dark, tense and hypnotic, at others sweaty, relentless and danceable. 

Their debut single ‘Come And Find Me’ is out now and taken from the self-titled debut album, out March 31st on Fuzz Club. Stream / pre-order here: goldenhours.lnk.to/album

Making up the Golden Hours is Hákon Adalsteinsson (Guitar/Vocals), Rodrigo Fuentealba Palavacino (Guitar), Tobias Humble (Drums/Vocals) and Wim Janssens (Bass/Keys/Vocals).

On the shadowy and macabre ‘Come And Find Me’, Wim writes: “A relentless bass brings back the ghost of The Birthday Party, drums keep a violent pace and urgently push forward. Guitars open up like a vortex and suck the air out of the room, while the singer urges you to come and join him in his deathbed. These are Sunday afternoon vibes in hell. A hit on any devil-worshipping radio station.”

“The musical backgrounds of each member are pretty broad but somehow when we come together there’s a pretty clear definition of what our music should sound like. There’s a beautiful friction between the noise we produce and the love for melody that seems to overtake at just the right moment. There never seems to be a lack of ideas when we come together. In silent agreement, every idea gets tried and will be further developed into a song or skipped in a heartbeat. No time is wasted. It all happens pretty automatically.”

Brisbane psych-pop artist Baby Cool is dropping another single from her ‘Earthling On The Road To Self Love’ LP Out today, ‘Daydream’ is a gorgeous cosmic country slow-burner,

The incoming debut solo album from Grace Cuell (also of Nice Biscuit fame) is out February 10th on the Bad Vibrations imprint! It arrives on pink vinyl and also a limited Dinked Edition with splatter vinyl, postcard and a bonus flexi-disc featuring a stripped-back version of ‘Daydream’

Part three of the Earthling’s journey- “Daydream” out now.

“I wrote this song about coming through the other side of a big event that leaves your life completely altered. For me, these events don’t always offer clarity after the dust settles, and there’s an ache in this that is difficult to bear sometimes. The aftermath of anything big always circles back to the same feelings for me – that life is intense and weird so we may as well love as hard as we can.

Performed by: Grace Cuell (Vocals, Guitar) Jess Ferronato (Drums, Guitar) Nick Cavendish (Bass) Johnny Mort (Keys) Samuel Joseph (Pedal Steel) Clea Pratt (Backing Vocals) Lisa Kelly (Backing Vocals)

Available on all platforms now via Virgin Music Australia (AUS/NZ), Bad Vibrations/Fuzz Club (UK/EU) and Greenway/Levitation Records (US).

A very special MOJO this month, as every issue comes with an actual BOB DYLAN CD of 14 hidden gems from the Bootleg Series – including two from the forthcoming “Fragments” set. Plus a startling blow-by-blow account of the “Time Out Of Mind” sessions.

New interviews with Rick Rubin, John Cale, Weyes Blood. Features on Sparklehorse and John Lee Hooker. Definitive tributes to Terry Hall and Christine McVie. Paul Simonon. Lawrence on Felt. Quasi. Lucretia Dalt. Bitches Brew remade. Sunny War. Robert Palmer. Laraaji. Mike Oldfield. Candi Staton. And much more.

Broadcast by KUSF FM radio, Billy Persons [The Falcons/Weirdos] replaces Rob Ritter on bass. Billy:”I replaced [Rob Ritter] in the fall of ’81 for a bunch of shows in Los Angeles and three in the Bay Area including the On Broadway show with The Cramps and Panther Burns. The band wasn’t doing much in the fall and winter of ’81. I would have joined permanently but Ward [Dotson] and Terry [Graham] told me they were going to quit once the “Miami” album was done as they were on salary at the time so Rob was brought back for that album.

That [On Broadway show] was a really fun show although my memory of it is pretty foggy. Jeffrey and the band spent the whole day drinking in a German restaurant in San Francisco so we were plastered at this show.” : The On Broadway theater, was upstairs at Mabuhay Gardens, located at 435 Broadway Street. It was constructed in 1919 as the Garibaldi Hall, renamed the Mabuhay Gardens in the 1970s. The Mabuhay Gardens nightclub started featuring rock shows around 1976 when Ness Aquino, the owner of the club, was approached by, rock promoter and television producer, Dirk Dirksen to promote punk rock shows at the Mabuhay. In 1983, Dirksen seemed to have enough and stopped promoting shows at the Mab and On Broadway. Ness Aquino tried to keep the shows going, but sometime in 1988 the club closed it’s doors forever.

[with The Cramps and Panther Burns]

The band were supposed to do a more elaborate live set at the Target Video studios, in between shows, like some other bands did then. But couldn’t, because Terry had injured his hand because Jeff had thrown a beer bottle that broke on the drums and cut Terry’s hand. At the time Kid Congo Powers was in The Cramps, having left The Gun Club in November 1980. Panther Burns has Jim Duckworth on guitar. Jim would join The Gun Club in January 1983.

“Sex Beat” from this show was released on “V/A:Target Presents Hardcore Vol.3” VHS (Target 1985) and also on “V/A:Underground Forces Volume III” VHS

Jeffrey Lee Pierce around this time on what would later become Tex and The Horseheads. Also, I don’t know if you are aware but Target Video taped the set and it may finally be released soon. The Weirdos on their [March 1979 recorded] “Who, What, When, Where Why” EP. Also replaced Rob Ritter in Thelonious Monster in the early ’90s for a while and was in The Joykiller in the mid-’90s (we did three albums for Epitaph).

Setlist: Watermelon Man/ Run Through The Jungle [John Fogerty/CCR]/ She Is Like Heroin To Me/ John Hardy (aka Ballad Of Dead Man)/ Fire Spirit/ Black Train/ Jack On Fire/ Sex Beat/ For The Love Of Ivy/ Goodbye Johnny(*).

“The record” is the debut full length album from boygenius.

Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus formed Boygenius after booking a tour together, but the trio had subconsciously been in the works for longer than that.

Through a series of tours and performances together, and chance encounters that led to friendships – including Bridgers’ and Dacus’ first in-person meeting backstage at a Philadelphia festival, greenroom hangouts that felt instantly comfortable and compatible, a couple of long email chains and even a secret handshake between Baker and Dacus – the lyrically and musically arresting singer-songwriters and kindred spirits got to know each other on their own terms.

Due 31st March

Featuring guest appearances by Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers and Sufjan Stevens, The National announce their ninth album is coming April 28th. Anchored by evocative melodies and an enthralling lyrical narrative, “First Two Pages of Frankenstein” signals a thrilling new chapter in the band’s discography.The 11-song album was produced by The National at Long Pond Studios in upstate New York and features guest appearances by Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers and Sufjan Stevens.

The follow-up to 2019’s top five hit album “I Am Easy To Find”, “First Two Pages of Frankenstein” was initially stalled while lead singer Matt Berninger navigated “a very dark spot where I couldn’t come up with lyrics or melodies at all, and that period lasted for over a year. Even though we’d always been anxious and argued quite a lot whenever we were working on a record, this was the first time it ever felt like maybe things really had come to an end.” Instead, The National “managed to come back together and approach everything from a different angle, and because of that we arrived at what feels like a new era for the band,” according to guitarist/pianist Bryce Dessner, whose bandmates also include his brother Aaron (guitar/piano/bass) as well as brothers Scott Devendorf (bass, guitar) and Bryan Devendorf (drums).

“First Two Pages of Frankenstein” channels the group’s revitalized chemistry into a body of work that beautifully balances elegant musicality with the National’s more idiosyncratic impulses. Tracks such as “Grease in Your Hair” and “Ice Machines” were road-tested in 2022 before they were recorded, allowing the band to hone the material in real time (another song, “Weird Goodbyes” featuring Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, was released as a standalone track last August). “To me the power of this record has to do with the intentionality and structure of the music meeting with a lot of accidental magic,” says Aaron Dessner.

Swift duets with Berninger on the luminous “The Alcott,” continuing her recent string of collaborations with members of The National on her chart-topping albums folklore and evermore and Aaron Dessner’s Big Red Machine project. 

The song finds Berninger and Swift inhabiting the roles of a couple attempting to resurrect a troubled relationship, forging a finely drawn story nearly novelistic in scope. “It’s about two people with a long history returning to a place and trying to relive a certain moment in time,” says Berninger. “It’s got the feeling of a last-ditch effort to hold onto the relationship, but there’s a hint of something positive where you can see the beginnings of a reconnection.

Listen to the first single “Tropic Morning News” now and watch the lyric video

The concept of the Dark Island is metaphorical: When you’re at the end of your life, taking stock of it, what will you think about? No matter what you land on, good or bad, that island is yours – the dark surely looms, but it also covers all you’ve ever experienced.

For the folk-rock quartet Villages, the concept is also literal: Hailing from Cape Breton Island, on the farthest flung northeastern corner of Nova Scotia – itself already flung far – and jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, it’s a lush landscape of great complicated beauty, its rocky coast covered in sea salt and leaning defiantly into harsh winds.

On its new full-length, “Dark Island”, Villages marries metaphor to roots on 11 tracks that offer an experience meant to echo a visit to Cape Breton itself: Otherworldly, euphoric, sobering, celebratory, and reverent. what is perhaps the album’s most Celtic-leaning track, “Play the Fiddle All Night.” All of the album’s themes are handily encompassed in just half of a chorus in this beautiful song: “Play for me the ‘Dark Island’ / till the dew lifts off the clover / play the fiddle all night.” This gorgeously infectious tune finds the band channeling the likes of Richard Thompson while marrying their Celtic roots with more of a contemporary indie folk sound. Layering in orchestral textures and soaring choruses, the song feels like it could fill an arena.

The band – Matt Ellis, Travis Ellis, Jon Pearo, Archie Rankin – tapped the JUNO-winning composer and soundscapist Joshua Van Tassel (David Myles, Great Lake Swimmers, Fortunate Ones) as producer, stepping into Joel Plaskett’s Fang Recording for a whirlwind eight days. Van Tassel directed the band to play the songs fully live off the floor (three takes max) capturing the boisterous energy of Villages’ live performances and making the album a series of present moments strung together.

Nature is, aptly, a dominant theme on “Dark Island”, befitting men who grew up in a place wild and beautiful: fields, waves, trees, rivers, and rocks figure prominently throughout the lyrics, presenting the music as a kind of soundtrack to Island life, putting you in and at home.

Detroit, MI three-piece Bonny Doon have shared a new single, ‘Crooked Creek’. It follows their recent track ‘San Francisco’, which accompanied the news that they had signed to ANTI- Records. Take a listen below.

“We were trying to be more free in our writing and I think this song is a good example,” the band’s Bobby Colombo said of ‘Crooked Creek’ in a statement. “We had a lot of fun with the words, which is sometimes not the fun part. I love writing with Bill’s voice in mind, and he was able to really capture the spirit of this one I think.”

Bonny Doon Release New Single ‘Crooked Creek’ – Bonny Doon is Bill Lennox, Bobby Colombo and Jake Kmiecik.