“Chicamacomico” is the name of a decommissioned life-saving station off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. It now also serves as the title of American Aquarium’s latest album, a serious and significant work from the band on which Barham’s lyrical turns are given more prominence than ever before.
“Chicamacomico” is a record about loss. Over a six-month span at the end of 2019/beginning of 2020, I lost my grandmother, my mother and watched as the world fell into a 2+ year pandemic that decimated businesses, relationships and dreams. This is a record about dealing with those losses. My hope is these songs serve a salve for anyone else experiencing loss. A reminder that you are not the only one that lost a friend this year, or a parent, or a loved one. There’s a special kind of hope that comes from that realisation. I am not alone. I wrote this record in the February 2020 on the northern coast of Hatteras Island in a small beach town called Rodanthe.
In the summer, this area is an extremely popular vacation destination packed with tourists, but in the winter, it was a desolate ghost town. The perfect backdrop for the record I was trying to write. Over the course of two weeks these songs would take shape and come to life, and it quickly became obvious that the overall theme would be dark. During my stay I realised that the town used to be named “Chicamacomico” until the locals changed it in the name of ease and progress. In that moment, I knew I had the name of my record.
We enlisted Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Nathaniel Ratliffe, Waxahatchee) to produce the record and traveled to Sonic Ranch, a world-renowned recording complex tucked in the middle of a 1,700-acre pecan orchard, in the Texas border town of Tornillo. Over the course of ten days, we watched these songs go from simple folk rumination into fully formed band arrangements. In my sixteen-year career I have never been prouder of a set of songs, lyrically or stylistically. The songs have weight, but they aren’t weighed down. It’s a sad record, that makes you feel good. It’s a culmination of nearly two decades of work.
“Chicamacomico” sounds like nothing we’ve ever done yet it sits comfortably amongst the rest of our catalogue. My records are chronological observations and I feel like this record perfectly represents the highs and lows of the last few years. Themes: Loss, Death, Darkness, Suicide, Divorce, Losing A Child, Losing A Parent, Losing A Spouse, Addiction, Recovery.”
“It’s beautiful, touching stuff, indicative of the songwriter’s talent for capturing life’s most emotionally tense moments with tenderness and sympathy…these stories are as captivating as many of those from John Prine…these songs finds Barham in superb, insightful form”
“It’s like putting together a great meal,” says Bonnie Raitt of the 10 songs on her 18th album “Just Like That…” “I’m not a terrific cook, but I appreciate why you wouldn’t want to put this vegetable with that vegetable when this one will be a better match.”
Initially touched by a human interest story she saw on 60 Minutes about a woman who met the recipient of her son’s heart and would hear it beating for the first time since his death, Raitt began writing the title track. Another newspaper story about volunteers who spent time with terminal inmates inspired “10 Down the Hall,” while the remainder of “Just Like That…” was a collection, snapshots of songs Raitt meant to cover over the years, from “Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart,” by NRBQ’s Al Anderson; Toots and the Maytals’ “Love So Strong,” a song she originally planned to duet with her friend Toots Hibbert before his untimely death from COVID in 2020; the more uptempo blues of “Made Up Mind” by alt-country group The Bros.Landreth, who she had friended nearly a decade earlier at the Winnipeg Folk Festival; and her own rendition of “Here ComesLove” by the California Honeydrops, which she initially cut during her Dig In Deepsession in 2015.
Throughout “Just Like That…”Raitt hoped to tell stories as great as her late friend John Prine. “Those story songs—Prine and Jackson and Paul Brady from Ireland, and Bob Dylan—was really what I wanted to do on those two songs,” says Raitt, “to come from that fingerpicking simplicity of just a person on the guitar.”
“Just Like That…” was recorded in the summer of 2021 in Sausalito, CA. The players include two longtime members of Raitt’s band, bassist James “Hutch” Hutchinson and drummer Ricky Fataar, as well as two new musicians, Canadian Glenn Patscha on keyboards and backing vocals and Nashville guitarist Kenny Greenberg. Her longtime guitarist / songwriting partner George Marinelli also joined in, playing and singing on “Livin’ for the Ones,” the song they co-wrote for the album. Once again, Bonnie took the producer reins, reuniting with her favorite recording and mixing engineer, Ryan Freeland, for their third collaboration (they each earned Grammy Awards for Raitt’s 2012 release, “Slipstream”).
The mix of sounds and approaches on “Just Like That…” reveals how, 50 years after the release of her debut album, Raitt continues to personify what it means to stay creative, adventurous, and daring over the course of a life’s work.
Joined by her band Golden Highway and slew of guests like Margo Price, Gillian Welch, and Old Crow Medicine Show, Tuttle pays homage to her familial bluegrass history on “Crooked Tree”. The songs are vibrant and move as quickly as your heart does when you’re doing something you love, but the most compelling quality of the record is how fun it sounds.
Acclaimed singer, songwriter and musician Molly Tuttle releases her anticipated Nonesuch Records debut, “Crooked Tree”, with her new bluegrass collective Golden Highway. Recorded live at Nashville’s Oceanway Studios, “Crooked Tree” was produced by Tuttle and Jerry Douglas and features collaborations with Sierra Hull, Old Crow Medicine Show, Margo Price, Billy Strings, Dan Tyminski and Gillian Welch. The album explores Tuttle’s love of bluegrass, which she discovered through her father, a music teacher and multi-instrumentalist, and her grandfather, a banjo player. Across these thirteen tracks, all of which were written / co-written by Tuttle, she honours the bluegrass tradition while also pushing the genre in new directions.
Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway’s “Nashville Mess Around,” from their debut album, ‘Crooked Tree,’ out now on Nonesuch Records
New releases and current inspirations from your hosts Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang aka HTRK.‘Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings’ new HTRK music video by Charlie Grant and Guilherme Santos
Friendship interpreted through keepsakes, a hidden diary, a cursed CD and a photograph Jonnine and Nigel have an encounter at a desert highway motel with a handsome cowboy.
Subterranean grooves and spectral electro vibes, What better way to sink into the subterranean vibes than with the slinky, sonic shadowplay of cult legends HTRK?
Known for its shape-shifting sensuality and spectral sound, the beloved Melbourne duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang has been stunning audiences for nearly two decades, transforming from skeletal noise to brooding, seductive soundscapes.
“What’s the Worst Thing You Heard?”, he asks. Certainly not this… Glenn and outfit have put out no fewer than *eight* separate releases in 2022, not counting bespoke live treats on top of that. Melancholy but far from depressive, every track on here and every other RP&P release brings sonic joy at every listen. I’ve been buying these on sight and never once regretted.
free 5-song EP.
released December 23rd, 2022
songs & sounds by Glenn Donaldson except lead guitar on 1 & 2 by Lewis Gallardo
“Heaven Tonight”, Cheap Trick’s third album overall and second (of three) to be produced by Tom Werman, continued the band’s ascent onto the charts.
Their self-titled debut album had merely bubbled under the charts . “In Color”, also under Werman’s auspices, reached a lower position. So “Heaven Tonight’s“ just under the top 50 was no slouch, and 1979’s “Dream Police”, the third and final album of the Werman production trilogy got into the top10,
It is one of Cheap Trick’s all-time classics; it remains the band’s usual set closer (pre-encore) to this date, usually positioned prior to “Auf Wiedersehen,” also from the album, which is not a casual “see you soon” kind of goodbye but rather a song about suicide, one of two on the album. The second death-related song is the lush title track (“Heaven Tonight”) which, with a degree more subtlety, chronicles a drug-related death (“there’s a limit, you went over”).
(These, of course, follow in the tradition of “Oh Candy” from their debut album, in which the speaker attempts to talk a depressed photographer friend out of ending it all—sadly, that was a true song and the suicide was real.)
“Heaven Tonight” combines some of the last unrecorded songs from the band’s pre-record contract club days (“Surrender,” “Auf Wiedersehen,” “High Roller,” plus their cover of Roy Wood’s “California Man,” and the bonus track instrumental “Oh Claire” which is not listed in the sequence).
The band paid homage to its musical roots with the Move’s “California Man,” penned by Roy Wood, Cheap Trick’s version famously punctuated with the guitar riff from another Wood/Move song, “Brontosaurus.” The song had double meaning as Cheap Trick by then had built a respectable following in the Golden State, one of their L.A. shows from the previous year having been released on vinyl and (as of this past December 16th, as a 4-CD set) as “Out to Get You! Live at the Whisky 1977”. It depicts the electricity of the band’s early club days in a way the far-better-selling “At Budokan” does not. (I hold out the hope that they’ll one day release a live album recorded at the Brat Stop in Kenosha, all of which set the stage for some of Cheap Trick’s most roof-raising live performances.
Among the newer songs, the layered title track “Heaven Tonight” was a standout. The band’s love for the later-period Beatles was fully on display, with Nielsen playing mandocello, harpsichord and cello on the track, which he has described as an “anti-drug song,” and one of two songs about mortality on the album. Played in a minor key, it’s been likened to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).”
“Heaven Tonight” was one of three songs on its namesake album that evoked the Fab Four, others including “Takin’ Me Back” and the closer (excluding the unlisted bonus track that follows) “How Are You.” The latter track playfully alludes to lyrics from “I Want You to Want Me,” the band’s single from “In Color” and the live version from “At Budokan“: “I said I want you, need you, love you, want you to want me…remember?”
One of the album’s deeper tracks is also one of the band’s earliest songs, “High Roller,” co-written by Nielsen, singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson. It’s reportedly the story of a drug dealer in Lake Geneva, Wis., a self-proclaimed high-roller, who “always get the things that I choose.”
While just about every song in Cheap Trick’s repertoire is a showcase for Zander’s voice, the track “On Top of the World” displays his gift for delivering Nielsen’s often humorous lyrics, especially in the line “I got lucky with the girl next door/She was lonely and didn’t care.”
The balance of the album consisted of six songs their early club-going fans hadn’t yet heard, which, with one exception, landed on side two (“On Top of the World,” “Takin’ Me Back,” “On the Radio,” “Heaven Tonight,” “Stiff Competition,” and “How Are You”).
Werman’s touch would later cause the band a degree of regret; they commissioned Steve Albini of the post-punk bands Big Black and Shellac—and producer of Nirvana’s multiplatinum Nevermind—to re-record “In Color” as a straight-ahead rock record. As for “Heaven Tonight”, we’ll just need to imagine what a stripped-down version might sound like. Or, we can bask in its intricacy, and its keen sense of space between notes. Where “In Color” often sounded emasculated, “Heaven Tonight” regains the powerful, arena-ready punch of Cheap Trick, but crosses it with a clever radio-friendly production that relies both on synthesizers and studio effects.”
Countering the old record executive cliché of “I don’t hear a single,” nearly every song on “Heaven Tonight”might have been a single—even if the overall sound was still a little left-of-center in relation to the corporate-rock sounds favored by FM rock stations of the day, while somehow more mainstream and radio-ready than the bulk of indie punk and new wave recordings also being released that year.
It probably hurt their radio relations none to have included an outright love song to radio, “On the Radio”: “All of the rock and roll DJs got their fingers on the world/‘Cause they play the songs that make you and me feel so good.” That song stood in stark contrast to Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio” (“I wanna bite the hand that feeds me/I wanna make them wish they’d never seen me”), released that same year. In this writer’s 1978 review of “Heaven Tonight” in Lively Times, the weekly entertainment newspaper in the band’s hometown Rockford, Ill., I wrote: “For Costello, radio’s a sad salvation, while for Cheap Trick, it’s peachy.”
Forever to its credit, “Heaven Tonight”, released in mid May 1978, contained the track that would fast become one of the band’s signature songs, “Surrender.” The song, in which a boomer describes his army brat mother (“served with the WACs in the Philippines”) who warns her son to “stay away from girls” like the one he’s addressing because “you’ll never know what you’ll catch.” By the end of the song, the generation gap has been bridged, with “Then I woke up, Mom and Dad are rolling on the couch/Rolling numbers, rock and rolling/Got my Kiss records out.”
As Zander sings in the closing chorale of “Surrender”: “Bun E.’s alright, Tom’s alright, Robin’s alright, Rick’s alright.” Truth in advertising—Cheap Trick sounds consistently alright throughout “Heaven Tonight”. Go ahead and surrender to its greatness. Just don’t give yourself away.
“Surrender” is a Rick Nielsen original that Cheap Trick had waited three albums to release—it was a standout in their three-sets-per-night shows in the Midwest as far back as 1975…two years prior to signing with Epic Records. It is also one of the catchiest power pop songs ever, with added interest from its mid-song key changes (from B-flat major to B major to C major). In his 2007 book Shake Some Action: The Ultimate Power Pop Guide, author John Borack called it “a stone classic for the ages.”
Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn started SST Records to put out his band’s music — because nobody else wanted it. Yet SST became the most legendary of American punk labels, the one every outlaw band wanted to be on. (Until they saw their royalty checks — or didn’t.) Jim Ruland tells the whole messy saga in his un-put-downable “Corporate Rock Sucks”. You might expect it to focus on the big names: Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, The Minutemen. But it covers every record by every obscure punk band in the story, upholding the legacy of Saccharine Trust and Würm. All these years, fans always wondered why the hell SST released so many Zoogz Rift albums, but it turns out most of the SST crew wondered the same thing. (“Sweet Nausea Lick” is still a banger, though.) A classic story: It begins with punk ideals, then ends with everyone hating each other and lawyering up. But in between, a heroic shitload of music.
Pink Floyd quietly released 18 previously unreleased “Dark Side Of The Moon” era live shows on to streaming services, There are 18 previously unreleased Pink Floyd concerts have suddenly appeared unannounced on streaming services over the last few days, all centred around the band’s live activity in 1972 as they road-tested what would become their groundbreaking “The DarkSide Of The Moon” album.
The releases include the band’s four dates at London’s Rainbow Theatre in February of that year and a collection of alternative tracks from the “Dark Side…” album, simply titled “Alternative Tracks 1972“, which features trance remixes and ‘ultra rare’ alternative versions of five of “Dark Side’s” songs, including a rough demo of “On The Run“.
It is widely believed that the band, who also released a slew of live concerts from the early 1970s at this time last year, have released the shows in order to extend the copyright of the recordings.
Fans should be warned that last year the collection of releases disappeared as quietly as they appeared so our suggestion is to make the most of them while you can.
The full list of releases is as follows:
Alternative Tracks 1972
Live At Southampton Guildhall, UK, 23rd January 1972
Live At Carnegie Hall, New York, 5th Feb 1972
Live At The Rainbow Theatre, London 17th February 1972
Live At The Rainbow Theatre, London 18th Feb 1972
Live At The Rainbow Theatre, London 19th Feb 1972
Live At The Rainbow Theatre, London 20th Feb 1972
Live At The Taiikukan, Tokyo, Japan, 3rd Mar 1972
Live At Osaka Festival Hall, Japan, 8th Mar 1972
Live At Nakajima Sports Centre, Sapporo, Japan, 13th Mar 1972
Live At Chicago Auditorium Theatre, USA, 28th April 1972
Live At The Deutschlandhalle, Berlin, Germany, 18th May 1972
Live At The Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, 22nd Sept 1972
Live At The Empire Pool, Wembley, London, 21st Oct 1972
Live At Ernst-Merck Halle, Hamburg, Germany, 12th Nov 1972
Live At The Palais des Sports, Poitiers, France 29th Nov 1972
Live At The Palais des Sports de L’Ile de la Jatte, Saint Ouen, France, 1st Dec 1972
Live At The Vorst Nationaal, Brussels, Belgium, 5th Dec 1972
Live At The Hallenstadion, Zurich, Switzerland 9th Dec 72
As Idles get more and more serious with each release, there’s a void that calls for a band that’s capable of metaphorically either breaking your bones while tickling your funny bone at the same time. Enter the Chats, specifically their second album “Get Fucked”. The riffs are about as subtle as the title, and for 27 minutes, you’re treated to pogoing odes to literally getting struck by lightning to spitting laments about how “the price of smokes are going up again.”
The Australian “shed” rockers make few adjustments from their 2020 debut “High Risk Behavior”, but “Get Fucked” proves there’s still plenty of material that can be mined from being broke, run-ins with the law, and class resentment. If you’re a fan of brutal, hard-edged punk, “Get Fucked” doesn’t offer too much in the way of new surprises, but it’s delivered with such gleeful confidence that you don’t care if the tune is familiar. The Chats provide a much-needed, cathartic jolt of joy with just the right amount of sneering, nihilistic anger.
I absolutely love these drunk crazy Aussie bastards. the pure unfiltered raw energy from these lads is so infectious. I can’t wait to see them live straight bangers.
On the heels of their critically acclaimed self-titled record, La Luz has announced the release of a new single entitled “EndlessAfternoon,” available worldwide on all DSPs. Shana Cleveland of La Luz says that “Endless Afternoon” is a “California lullaby.
The melody for this song came to me while I was hiking in the hills above the Yuba River. About the sweetness found in slow days close to home.” This song is the a-side of a physical 7” that is b/w the track “San Fernando Shadow Blues” (available digitally on June 14th) with both songs physically available on July 7th.
The Fat Angel Sings 