I spent lockdown progressively drawing away from lyrical music, favouring droning extended house mixes. Maybe it was a reflection of the monotony and repetitiveness around me or the need to get away from others’ thoughts and feelings.
Hearing Naarm-based Ruby Gill‘s song ‘You Should Do This For A Living’ helped rock me out of this, it’s really that soul-shattering.
Ruby’s cut-through storytelling, evocative wails, and gentle instrumentation were basically my gateway back to listening with intent, and her debut album, “i’m gonna die with this frown on my face” is simply a perfect culmination of that pure talent.
The title track from Ruby Gill’s debut album “I’m Gonna Die With This Frown On My Face” – out now on all platforms.
This is not a record for all occasions, this is music that needs to be felt as well as heard. You should be present for every gloomy moment of “The Real Work”, the third album from Sydney duo Party Dozen, from the doom riff that opens it to the dusty trip hop beat that shuts it down.
Do that and you’ll uncover endless highlights. The psychedelic propulsion of ‘The Worker’ will send you back in time, the creepy ‘Earthly Times’ comes across like Naked City without the pretence, while ‘Major Beef’ sounds like The Budos Band if they were possessed by evil spirits.
Doesn’t matter what you call it – punk, noise, indie rock, metal, shoegaze, jazz – so long as you play it loud and let it take over, you’ll get a whole lot out of “The Real Work”. Oh, Nick Cave’s on there too.
A labour of love and a love of the labour, in The Worker the wild synth, drum, and sax duo, Party Dozen, moved through the Phoenix’s liminal spaces of light and dark, glare and gloom, vibrant and vanish. Flaring, flashing lights, and a little too much smoke machine. “We wanted this track to feel like something you could start your day to. A sonic salutation for the bored and sanitised. And after postponing our ‘Pray For Party Dozen’ Album tour for almost 12 months, ’The Worker’ felt like part cathartic outlay of locked-down frustrations, and part jubilation… finally picking up our tools and getting back to work.” – Kirsty Tickle, Jonathan Boulet (Party Dozen) “The raw energy dynamic between Party Dozen is explosive and alive. I felt like I was watching two planets violently orbit. This production uses Phoenix as the gravity in this equation as our two performers drift inwards the ceiling and light installation by Sam Whiteside collapses in on them to reinforce their sonic super nova.”
Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus is a seducing mix of garage, surf, psych and krautrock. The members of Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus have known each other for more than 15 years and have been active in various bands together. The founders of Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus, Massimo Tondini and Jakob Läser, were former members of the band Navel. From 2011 until 2015, they toured internationally and appeared on radio and television with Navel, gaining the valuable tools that they later used to create this new band.
Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus bring us their third album “Freedomspacecake”. The band has used the pandemic-related touring and concert impossibility to create this album. The result is nine tracks which deal with fears, excesses and the downfall of the world. A bad trip, which threatens the world since a long time. If it goes according to Harvey Rushmore & the Octopus, there is only one remedy: “Freedomspacecake”
The Routes instrumental/psych/western surf sound of the California of the Fifties-first half of the Sixties: two sonic and conceptual worlds apparently irreconcilable with each other, in the minds of many musicians, but not for the Routes. Yes, because the prolific Japanese garage/psych band, led by the tireless talent of the British guitarist/frontman Chris Jack, after giving birth in 2021 to three albums, “Mesmerised” and the instrumentals “Instrumentals II” and “Shave Five”, in this first half of 2022 enjoys having his band record a selection of ten instrumental covers of classics by Kraftwerk, a seminal German electronic band collected in a new album, entitled titled “The Twang· Machine”, which also in the title is inspired by one of the most famous and iconic albums of the Dusseldorf quartet, “The Man-Machine”, clearly honored also in the cover of the album, which sees theRoutes posing to emulate the four Teutonic “machine-men”, who originally released the LP in 1978.
Released on Topsy-Turvy Records (Soundflat) in collaboration with Double Crown Records and Otitis Media Records, “The Twang · Machine” sees the Japanese-Scottish trio try their hand at reviving the various workhorses of Kraftwerk, donating to “The Model”, “Neon Lights” (here in a magnificent and languid rumba version) “The Robots”, “Computer Love”, “Trans-Europe Express”,“Radioactivity” and the other pieces a new life through an intelligent rethinking, rearranging and distorting the original songs, assembling a kaleidoscopic journey through space and time, characterized by a mood of sunny Californian beaches and the ocean now quiet, now stormy to face (in style “A Wednesday as a lion”) the dream of an “endless summer” of Beach Boysiana memory, surf rock,
Dublin five-piece Melts release their debut album Maelstrom produced by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band (FKA Girl Band). The raw, simplistic, primal nature of the early approach remains intact but they have expanded into immersive pulsing grooves
The album gracefully yet potently merges psych rock with touches of post-rock-esque soundscapes, pulsing krautrock, all of which is driven by demented organ wig outs, engulfing waves of heavily textured guitar and a crisp rhythm section.
While they land on a sound that is distinctly their own, their debut occupies something of a middle ground between Spacemen 3 and Primary Colours-era The Horrors. Or, as the band say themselves, something that sounds “driving and fucking stomping.”
Their debut which combines a questing spirit with a dystopian take on the here and now. Musically, whilst traces can be discerned of the dark and magisterial King Crimson of ‘Red’ herein, as well as the yearning cadences of early Yes and the delirious contortions of Van Der Graaf Generator, a whole host of influences made their presence felt in these mournful cadences, joyful solo passages and kinetic freakouts, from ’70s mainstays like Aphrodites Child, Premiata Formeria Marconi and Area to the primitive folk of Robbie Basho and the symphonic soundtrack work of Osanna.
This is the current realm of Birth, San Diego’s most transcendental new band and purveyors of a form of vibrant and electrifying progressive rock that moves beyond time and space itself. In ‘Born’ their debut for Bad Omen Records, the listener is invited on a magic-eye journey through a Castenadean realm in which colours and sounds warp into kaleidoscopic dimensions. Yet far from the trappings of retro chic and fashion-aligned classicism, these five celestial serenades stake their claim in a different headspace to most other exponents of the form. Certainly it’s true that many of the audial shapes manifesting themselves here – the exploratory jazz-rock diversions, Mellotron and Hammond-abetted textures and the rich melancholia of the song-writing – may recall moments from progressive rock’s past, and the listener may be forgiven for losing themselves in a gatefold-sleeved reverie. Nonetheless, this is a band which was thrown into life via the constrictions and temporal shifts of a global pandemic, as well as one which has largely set about chronicling a reality in which the surrounding world appears to be hurrying its own demise.
Birth evolved from Astra, whose two albums for Rise Above Records – 2009’s ‘The Weirding’ and 2012’s ‘The Black Chord’ – had already reinvented classic sonic textures and mind-melds in lucid and intoxicating style. Conor Riley and Brian Ellis nonetheless found themselves seeking out new life and new civilisations. Initially this led to a collaboration with Psicomagia’s Trevor Mast and Paul Marrone, although later Marrone (while he does play on ‘Born’) was replaced by Thomas DiBenedetto (of Sacri Monte, Joy and Monarch) as sparks began to fly in earnest.
Meanwhile, Reilly sums up the themes of songs like “Descending Us” and “The Long Way Down” as “the deterioration of society, transformation, mortality and other fun and positive things”, having found artistic solace in post-apocalyptic books like Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ and Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable Of The Sower’ in sculpting a science-fiction-inspired soundworld in which bleak tumult and skybound rapture could co-exist. “I’m a scientist by trade and I read a lot of dystopian sci-fi, which I believe is relevant to many of the events that have been occurring lately” notes Conor. “These views feed a dark, spiritual and mystical relationship that I have with scientific thought”.
More often that not however, on moments like the heartfelt meditation on impermanence that is “For Yesterday”, as well as “Another Time” which covers a desire to dissociate and escape reality, a fundamental thread running through these songs is a struggle to make sense of and illuminate the trials and travails of the everyday. Whatever the fractious relationship between science and nature, alchemical forces have done their considerable work with ‘Born’, in creating an uplifting album for the ages, 42 minutes in which past, present and future are blurred; an album haunted by earthly concerns even whilst its sonics aim for the stars.
Elegiac mellotron-assisted songcraft, richly melodious abandon and monumental solo passages thus join forces to deliver a third-eye-cleansing blast of vibrant progressive rock, replete with grandiose cinematic scope and psychedelic intensity.
released July 15th, 2022
Conor Riley – Vocals, synthesizer, electric piano, organ, acoustic guitar Brian Ellis– Guitar, electric piano, percussion Trevor Mast – Bass
we are a folk grunge band from Asheville, NC & Athens, ga!, Hiding Places The outfit is composed of Audrey Keelin Walsh, Nicholas Byrne, Henry Cutting and Anthony Cozzrelli, who all share writing and instrumentation responsibilities. Nicholas, Audrey, and Henry met while studying at UNC Chapel Hill.
All beginnings start with a name. And so, in October 1989, Simon Fowler, Steve Cradock, Damon Minchella and Oscar Harrison sat down together, chose their three favourite words, arranged them in a satisfactory order and became Ocean Colour Scene. A year later, they recorded their debut single ‘One Of Those Days’ and within months had a first taste of chart action with a third single ‘Yesterday Today’. Nevertheless, mainstream success would prove to be a trickier proposition. After a clutch of underperforming single releases, their record label, Fontana, dropped the band.
There followed a three year hiatus and a difficult period of self-examination. When the band re-emerged, they had reinvented themselves and faced the music industry guns blazing. In February 1996, ‘The Riverboat Song’ smashed into the UK chart and trail blazed six consecutive top ten hits. Backed by the triple platinumselling “Moseley Shoals” and the number one album “Marchin’ Already“, Ocean Colour Scene became one of the hottest bands in the country, as the hits kept rolling.
Thirty-five years on, and Ocean Colour Scene are still together: making music and regularly selling out huge concert halls across the country. They have the support of an extraordinarily dedicated and loyal fan base who cherish their music and hold close to their hearts a lifetime of memories supporting the group. Yet Ocean Colour Scene have never been popular with the music press. They are frequently overlooked for the key role they played in the nineties music scene. They were, and still are, subjected to derision and scorn. It matters not. Ocean Colour Scene did it their way. Standing firm by their music.They became the people’s band. They believe in the soul of bass, drum and guitar rhythm. They exude melody. And they stand amongst the finest purveyorsof the stirring sounds of a live concert. Each of the band has a passion to transcend everyday mundanity with music. And most of all they believe, as they always have, that one song can elevate the spirit and enrich the human experience.
Demon Music kick off an Ocean Colour Scene reissue campaign with Yesterday Today 1992-2018, a massive 15CD box set.
The large format package Includes all 10 of their studio albums. They are: Ocean Colour Scene (1992), Moseley Shoals (1996), Marchin’ Already (1997), One For The Modern (1999) , Mechanical Wonder (2001), North Atlantic Drift (2003), A Hyperactive Workout For The Flying Squad (2005), On The Leyline (2007), Saturday (2010), and Painting (2013).
Additionally, there’s five bonus discs featuring a very large selection of B-sides and rarities including the Free inspired ‘SoSad’ and ‘Men Of Such Opinion’, ‘Huckleberry Grove’ featuring the Jamaican ska legend Rico Rodriguez, and the more sedate ballads ‘Robin Hood’, ‘I Need A Love Song’ and ‘Mrs Jones’ and a cover of ‘Day Tripper’, featuring Noel and LiamGallagher. The package offers 230 tracks in total.
The box set comes with a 72-page hardback book, with in-depth essay from award winning author Daniel Rachel depicting the rise of Ocean Colour Scene from the inside. The book includes photographs from Ocean Colour Scene photographers Lawrence Watson and Tony Briggs, many previously unseen.
A limited edition,5LP coloured vinyl collection with the same name will be released at the same time. Smaller in scale, this simply offers the band’s first three studio albums Ocean Colour Scene, Moseley Shoals(2LP)andMarchin’ Already (2LP).
Both sets will be released on 24 February 2022 via Edsel/Demon Records and the label promises a “year-long” campaign marking 30 years of the band.
The Rolling Stones’ guest-filled 50th anniversary December 15th, 2012 concert at The Prudential Center in Newark will be released as a live album and DVD titled “GRRR Live!“, released February 10th. Joining the Stones on different songs are Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, The Black Keys, Gary Clark Jr. and John Mayer, and former Stones member Mick Taylor.
From the announcement: The Rolling Stones celebrated their golden anniversary in 2012 and 2013 by embarking on the 50 & Counting Tour, a 30-show itinerary for North America and Europe. On December. 15th, 2012, the band took the stage at Newark, New Jersey’s Prudential Center for the final of four shows in the New York area. Featuring guest appearances by Mick Taylor (“Midnight Rambler”), The Black Keys (“Who Do You Love?”), Gary Clark Jr and John Mayer (“Going Down”), Lady Gaga (“Gimme Shelter”), and hometown hero Bruce Springsteen (“Tumbling Dice”), the concert proved to be one of the most memorable shows in the band’s history.
Since its original airing on pay-per-view in 2012, this show has not been available since.
Billed officially as “the ultimate live greatest hits album,” GRR Live! aims to be just that: Some of the biggest and most celebrated hits from the vaunted catalog of the Rolling Stones over the years.
The show will be released in three-LP vinyl, two-CD, DVD + 2CD and Blu-ray + 2CD versions.
The concert was available as pay-per-view special in 2012 but has been re-edited and remixed for this release. Three bonus songs from the December 13th concert, 2012 concert at The Prudential Center — including “Respectable” (with Mayer), “Around and Around” and “Gimme Shelter” — will be available in the DVD and Blu-ray packages.
AMC hail from San Francisco and were one of the greatest bands in the world. Formed in 1982 by Mark Eitzel, Danny Pearson and Vudi joining shortly after with their first lp “Restless Stranger” in 1985, followed by “Engine”, “California”, “United Kingdom” all produced by Tom Mallon. “Everclear”, “Mercury”,”San Francisco” all followed before breaking up in ’94. Reunited for “Love Songs For Patriots” & “The Golden Age”.
From AMCs 2005 UK tour with Mark Eitzel (vocals/guitar), Vudi (guitar/vocals), Danny Pearson (bass/vocals), Tim Mooney (drums) and Jason Borger (keys)
The Fat Angel Sings 