The Fat Angel Sings

London’s Jockstrap deliver a wildly ambitious debut in “I Love You Jennifer B”. With the shadow of a prestigious music school behind them, the duo shake all preconceptions with an expansive record that collates heavy electronics and crystallising vocals. Comprised of Georgia Ellery (also of Black Country, New Road) on vocals and lyrics, and Taylor Skye on electronic production, the pair breathe new energy into the expansive boundaries of pop.

Cohesively eloquent and atmospheric, their contrast of musical styles becomes their signature. Opener “Neon” eases in with gentle guitar plucks and breezy silences, melding sweetly with Ellery’s crooning voice before crunching synths dart in, heavy and droning. The titular “Jennifer B” sticks out as a creeping, woozy affair, with hazy elements woven around seedy samples. Soaring orchestral arrangements delight on tracks like “Concrete Over Water”, while “Glasgow” indulges in flourishes of keys and uplifting string accompaniments.

Together, the ten tracks are a barrage of lightheaded vertigo, a culmination of five years of recorded work. The unpredictable evolution of previous EP offerings, the pair’s experimentation displays a keen ear for melody, and a reinvention of the modern colliding with classical influences. For a debut, Jockstrap are brandishing hugely enthralling potential.  I swear this album will become a classic one way or another.

Kathryn Joseph’s songs often tread a fine line between comforting and chilling, which is an astonishingly difficult thing to pull off. On her Lomond Campbell-produced third album, “for you who are the wronged”, her aim was more in the direction of comfort but there’s still a spine-tingling strangeness to it that’s undeniably arresting.

This is an album about abuse and survival, but the stories here are largely not her own. Assuming the role of observer, these songs are Joseph’s way of trying to make sense of the violations she sees being imposed on those she loves, and how she might, with care, give them something to latch onto. At its core is a smouldering fury, which Joseph keeps mostly under or just at the surface. Erupting would be too easy.

When she does bare her teeth, as on “what is keeping you alive makes me want to kill them for” and the sinister highlight “the burning of us all”, it’s done with love and loyalty. There’s even room for hope in places. Joseph wants to open doors with these songs, or at least to signpost where they stand. Concluding with the cryptic, glitchy “long gone”, which ends abruptly as if shutting something behind, the hope is that, one day, the exit is found. 

Kathryn Joseph released her stunning third album “for you who are the wronged” in April. Her haunting single is ‘what is keeping you alive makes me want to kill them for’. Watch the video below, it’s a startling song quivering with Joseph’s quiet rage, above sparse brittle keyboard motifs that mirrors the work of Cat Power or Portishead.

Always intense, insular and eerily pretty, the work of Scottish songwriter Kathryn Joseph may require a focused, sit-down listen to truly appreciate, but the payoff is worth it. Her third album “for you who are the wronged” is no exception, using mostly keyboards, minimal ambient percussion and the gentle warble of Joseph’s voice to toe the line between the harrowing and the sweet with ease. For all of the horrors she pulls out and condemns on songs like singles “what is keeping you alive makes me want to kill them for” and “the burning of us all,” there is also obvious love pouring from every note, letting the listener find comfort in Joseph’s creation even as the world seems to silently burn down as each track starts. “When the teeth sink in your skin / I’ll suck the poison out,” she promises on sinister-sounding lullaby “flesh and blood,” wrapping those left vulnerable up into the fabric of her work, letting them hear their experiences reflected in her thoughtful, intricate songwriting.

released April 22nd, 2022

“I’m just a fire,” Emily Wells sings on her album “Regards to the End”, her ethereal warble floating over a backbeat of drums. “Burn everything in sight.” And so she does, in a new body of work that smolders and scorches, wounding and illuminating in equal turn. The polymathic composer, producer, and video artist explores the AIDS crisis, climate change, and her lived experience—as a queer musician from a long line of preachers, watching the world burn—in immaculately layered yet spare songs that impel the listener to be attuned, acting like a magnet on our attention.

Wells, is a multi-instrumentalist who comes from a classical background in violin, often thinks in terms of an ensemble while composing. Along with a roster of contributors including her father, a French horn player and former music minister, she builds the songs on “Regards to the End” from deliberate strata of vocals, synths, drums, piano, string instruments (violin, cello, bass), and wind instruments (clarinet, flute, French horn). The music is numinous in part because the listening experience is a resoundingly bodied one. Life—unsanitary, beautiful, persistent, brief—swells inside of every note.

“Quietly transfixing” composer / producer Emily Wells is known for her varied use of classical and modern instrumentation, “a master of blending the worlds of classical and electronics” (NPR) and “dramatic, meticulous and gothic songs”

released February 25th, 2022

Produced, Written, Arranged, and Recorded by Emily Wells
On this album Emily performs: Vocals, Guitars, Synths, Programing, Drum Programming,
Violin, Viola, Cello, Piano, Bass

Enumclaw, the rising rock four-piece and recent best of new rising act out of Tacoma, Washington, shared one last single ahead of their debut album “Save the Baby” before its release this week. Our fifth preview of the album after “2002,” “Jimmy Neutron,” “Cowboy Bepop” and “Park Lodge,” “10th and J 2” is out now alongside a music video. One of the last tracks on “Save the Baby”, “10th and J 2” is also quietly one of the album’s best, a gleaming, twang-tinged strummer in which Aramis Johnson fights to safeguard his self-belief, even in the face of anxiety, isolation and doubt.

Over Eli Edwards and Ladaniel Gipson’s steady low end, Johnson and Nathan Cornell interweave warm acoustic chords and distant pedal steel, setting these heartland rock sounds against Johnson’s aspirational lyrics: “You should have it quoted / Say it all the time / I will be, I will be / Who I’m destined to be,” he sings, his heart set on running down that dream.

Enumclaw’s new single “10th and J 2” off of their forthcoming debut album “Save the Baby.”

Following on from Hutson’s breakthrough 2020 release “Beginners”, a record that saw him catch the corners of Phoebe Bridgers’ starlight, “Quitters” puts Bridgers back in charge of production, this time splitting duties with Conor Oberst. Taking cues from Elliot Smith and sharing the same downcast and detached musical DNA, they kept the recordings intimate, capturing the warmth and diaristic confessionality of Hutson’s performance.

But it’s Hutson’s lyricism that really lifts “Quitters”. Full of cutting insight, self-deprecation, considered wit and loaded imagery, he can illuminate a scene with the turn of a few words. “I’m peeking through the bandages, to see if I can handle it”, he sings on “Endangered Birds”, while on “Teddy’s Song” he paints a glowing portrait. “Asleep with the radio next to the bed on the floor, ‘cause it sounds like my parents talking through the door.” His lines are evocative, instantly accessible and intuitive. While his use of first-person often has him playing the punchline, his delivery is so inclusive you always feel like you’re in on the joke. 

released April 1, 2022

Produced by Phoebe Bridgers & Conor Oberst

With a melancholic breakup ballad turning into a global success, Inverness native Katie Gregson-MacLeod, was little known outside the Scotland folk and indie scene. On 4th August, Gregson-MacLeod posted a one-minute clip of herself singing a stripped back piano ballad called “complex,” a song she’d written in an evening about the strange dysmorphia that comes with wholeheartedly loving someone who will never quite love you back the same way. The next day, the snippet had received the full TikTok treatment, generating thousands of views by the hour. By the weekend, she remembers, “it was very clear everything had changed.” The world was singing the words along with her—everyone from teenagers making duet videos to the likes of Gracie Abrams and Adam Melchor—crowning Gregson-MacLeod as the next writer in line for the throne of social media’s favorite sad song anthems.

“People were just listening to it over and over again,” she recalls of “Complex” first blowing up. But while this kind of virality is thrilling, it can also be an overwhelming amount of pressure. “When I released the (demo) version, I got messages and comments telling me that I said certain words different and breathed in different ways from the original video.”

“It just happened that the song that blew up for me was one that I was very proud of.” She says that she’d only written “complex” a few days before posting it after a fresh wave of emotions about a previous relationship caused her to revisit that period in her life. As is the case with so many of the best songs, she remembers that writing it was a blur, the words pouring out of her quickly. Though she had no plans to release it—maybe, she concedes, it could have been a deep cut on an album a few years down the line—the Internet had other ideas. Three weeks after the initial clip, Gregson-MacLeod released “complex (demo),” a one-take version of the track featuring just vocals and a soft piano, recorded at an Edinburgh studio in her native Scotland.

Gregson-MacLeod’s rise has been stunning, but it’s also been extremely well deserved. “Complex” is in and of itself a stunning piece of song writing, but perhaps most important is that the song’s success came on the heels of years of hard work from Gregson-MacLeod that put her in all the right places once the right time came.

As Blondshell, Partisan-signed New Yorker Sabrina Teitelbaum is channelling honesty and rage, picking up the baton from alternative music’s greatest women.

Blondshell, the alias of her latest project, is a vehicle for female rage. When she wiped the slate clean and announced her debut single, “Olympus”, the caption of her Instagram post read: “It’s the music I’ve always wanted to make but was too scared to”. But what is fear when there are scores to settle?

Without the pandemic, Teitelbaum doubts Blondshell would have come into being. “I learned a lot,” she says. “I was so scared to spend extended periods of time alone, and when COVID happened, just like everybody, I had to. I think I can look back on myself with a lot more compassion because of it.” And at the end of it all, Sabrina Teitelbaum is a woman who is unafraid to ask for what she wants.

“I’m going back to him / I know my therapist’s pissed,” she plainly declares on her song “Sepsis”, an admission of defeat. The treatment she accepts in a relationship spreads through her self-worth like rot as she tries to untangle the riddle of herself through the lens of someone else. “And I think I believe in getting saved,” she sighs in a streak of masochism, “Not by Jesus, validation in some dude’s gaze / And I think I believe in getting saved / Holy water pull my hair right from the base.” But there came a point where Teitelbaum couldn’t force herself to swallow this long-brewed resentment. She’s spitting it out.

So Blondshell doesn’t represent a persona? “No.” Her lyrics are unambiguous. “I was never able to write figuratively,” she admits. “That concept is so hard, like, people who write metaphors in their music. I think it’s awesome, but it’s just not my skillset. My songs are all pretty literal.”

When writing the songs for her upcoming debut as Blondshell, she didn’t have sprawling ideas or an excess of material that needed whittling down. In a cautious and considered way, she dealt with her emotional upheaval track by track – guided by sheer instinct. But without the encouragement of producer Yves Rothman, a close collaborator with Yves Tumor, she doubts that the album would have arrived at all. ‘I think we make a lot of space for each other,”

Maggie Rogers‘ last album “Heard It in a Past Life” came out in 2019, and today the musician has shared news of its follow-up titled “Surrender“, arriving July 29th. The album, which was recorded in Electric Lady Studios in New York, Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios near Bath in England, and Rogers’ parents’ garage, finds the songwriter giving in to harmonic emotional buzzing.

The announcement came with an album trailer directed by Rogers and Michael Scanlon. In it, Rogers recites a poem. “When I’m angry or in love, I feel it in my teeth. Strange harmonic buzzing. Cuts through my hands. My jaw. My breast bone,” it begins. The video matches her recited words about relinquishing power to emotion with close-up images of Rogers, New York City traffic, and bright explosions of light, with the black-and-white montages recalling Andy Warhol’s work. What I assume is snippets from the forthcoming album break through between her spoken word, presenting collisions of guitar and powerhouse vocals.

It takes a combination of raw talent and deep introspection to birth an album like Maggie Rogers’ “Surrender”. Full of collaborations with artists as varied as Rogers’ old pal Del Water Gap and late-night bandleader Jon Batiste, the album never settles on a direct muse, but flits between radio-friendly rock and early girl-power pop.

While not quite as daring as its predecessor, “Heard It in a Past Life”, the album still delivers as an honest expression of the singer’s desire to be taken seriously as an artist. Perhaps Rogers said it best in “Anywhere With You,” one of the album’s breakout hits: “All I ever wanted is to make something fucking last.” This time around, she has.

‘Surrender’ – the new album by Maggie Rogers, available July 29th, 2022

The eight songs on the Norwegian musician Jenny Hval’s latest album, “Classic Objects”, are purposely dreamlike. They are more atmospheric and rhythmic than narrative and follow tangents into unexplored places. As both narrator and protagonist, Hval starts in a waking state and then lets the songs float away into unknown territory. The results suggest our primal urges and our conscious thoughts are out of balance. “Life could be a dream”, as the Chords sang us so long ago on “Sh-boom”. But then it wouldn’t be real. Hval implies that we need to find a way to incorporate our dreams into our everyday life but to be wary. Hval’s ethereal voice suggests that her art serves a higher purpose. Her role is that of a doula to help the listeners release their inner selves. The specifics of her experience help ground us.

Norwegian musician and novelist Jenny Hval releases her new album “Classic Objects” a map of places; past places, like the old empty Melbourne pubs Hval’s band used to play in, public places Hval missed throughout lockdown, imagined, future places, and impossible places where dreams, hallucinations, death and art can take you. It is interested in combining heavenly things and plain things.

“Classic Objects” is Hval’s version of a pop album. Every song has a verse and a chorus. There are interchangeable moments of complexity, interesting melodies throughout, and a feeling of elevation and clarity in the choruses. Heba Kadry mixed it to sound as though it’s played through “a stereo in a mysterious room.”

‘Year of Love’ by Jenny Hval is taken from new album ‘Classic Objects’, out now via 4AD records.

Performers Vocals Jenny Hval Keys and vocals Jenny Berger Myhre Bass Håvard Volden Keys Johan Lindvall Drums and percussion Kyrre Laastad Guitars Daniel Meyer Grønvold

S.G. Goodman has a distinctive voice that is not conventionally pretty. It serves her alt-Goth country tales of life and love well. Her Tennessee drawl and warbly delivery provide grit to the demonstrative values expressed. Her sentiments come across as nastier and more personal than anthemic.

Goodman’s not preaching on “Teeth Marks”. She observes the world around her and sees that too many people waste their lives or at least don’t spend their time wisely. The good life would involve centreing one’s life around the love of another human being instead of one’s job. Goodman is a queer Southerner who has received her share of abuse because of her sexuality. Her focus on romantic love seems to come as a defense mechanism. She’s enough of a realist to know that it’s not always a positive experience. Sometimes, love hurts, as in the title song “Teeth Marks”. Just because one may love somebody does not mean the other person will love you back.

S.G. Goodman gazes off into the distance as she begins the first song in this Tiny Desk session, rocking her body from side to side, connecting with a force inside and also just out of reach: maybe it’s something in her past or the image of a person she holds dear, or maybe it’s simply fierce, ragged hope. “I see all my love coming back to me — I can see it!” she wails in her piercing, haunted soprano. Her band revs its engine beneath her as she testifies about a rock and roll epiphany. As drummer Stephen Montgomery and bassist Mark Sloan push the rhythm harder and guitarist Michael Ruth lays down some pure-energy riffs, she squeezes her eyes shut and bears down on her guitar. Music, Goodman’s songs show us, is a route to both survival and transcendence. A proud and ever-questioning Southerner who invokes Tyler Childers, Dolly Parton and her own Kentucky accent in her between-song banter,

Goodman released her debut album “Old Time Feeling” early on in the pandemic and her astounding “Teeth Marks” released in June of this year. Goodman’s songs cultivate a direct gaze as they confront grief and stump for understanding. The two others offered here, “If You Were Someone I Loved” and “Space and Time,” show the breadth of expression she and her band achieve with their feet firmly planted on the ground of grassroots rock, the kind that echoes from bar stages and garages in Hickman, Kentucky, and countless small American towns like it. Goodman’s stories and her sound are very particular, but she’s a hero with big arms, an ordinary woman learning how to keep on keeping on. You can see it, that engagement and resilience, in every moment of this performance.

SET LIST “All My Love Is Coming Back To Me” “If You Were Someone I Loved” “Space And Time”

MUSICIANS S.G. Goodman: vocals, electric guitar Michael Ruth: electric guitar Mark Sloan: bass, vocals Stephen Montgomery: drums