The next single ‘Spite’ from Billy Nomates’ forthcoming album “Cacti” is out now on all streaming platforms, along with a brand new video!
Recorded at her flat and Invada Studios in Bristol UK, “Cacti” is a huge step forward for the artist, who received widespread critical acclaim for her eponymous 2020 debut album, with heavy airplay across BBC Radio 6 Music and support from luminaries such as Iggy Pop, Florence Welsh and Steve Albini.
Though every bit as unrepentant as Billy Nomates’ debut, “Cacti” comes from a much more exposed place and sees Tor further develop her instinctive, inventive songwriting and production. Unafraid to wade into the traumas of the past two years and the eerie sense of apathy that lingers, alongside heartache and more political themes, the 12-track collection openly confronts uncomfortable truths, as Tor puts it, “70-80% of being bold is about being vulnerable as hell.”
Maries said: “Writing “Cacti” took just over a year. I wrote very intensely and then none at all. (This seems to be the way I work best). I picked up old drum machines, mapped out things in my kitchen with the same small micro keyboard I always use and then raided the cupboards and rooms at Invada Studios, to play and experiment with old synths, an upright piano, this weird organ thing. I hope everyone finds their own narrative in “Cacti”. I think it’s about surviving it all.”
‘Cacti’ also features the songs ‘Saboteur Forcefield’, ‘Blue Bones’ and ‘Balance Is Gone’ , the latter 2 of which have been A-Listed at BBC 6Music.
The Invada Records ltd edition exclusive variant is pressed on white vinyl and is only available from http://www.invada.co.uk and Bandcamp. The album is also available from us on clear vinyl and on CD.
pre-orders are available now with a limited edition vinyl version of “Cacti” . This is pressing is going quickly and won’t be re-pressed once it’s sold out!
Jim Carroll expressed the Bomb-fear anticipation, the optimistic nihilism and glittering darkness of the 1980s that we who were there felt even if we couldn’t communicate it ourselves. When John Lennon was assassinated in front of the Dakota in December 1980, “People Who Died” was one of the most-requested songs on FM radio, just after Lennon’s own “Imagine.” Steven Spielberg chose “People Who Died” to play during the opening scene of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. “People Who Died” tapped a mainline. It was a hit even before it was released, and, as Newsweek’s Barbara Graustark noted, it “propelled [Carroll] from underground status… to national attention as a contender for the title of rock’s new poet laureate.”
“People Who Died” wasn’t the only thing that sustained Carroll’s reputation. The first full-length article about him appeared in 1969, when Jim was 19, and he was featured in Rolling Stone as early as 1973–the same year, it was rumored, that he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize at age 22. The 1980 release of “Catholic Boy”, along with the re-publication of his cult-classic book The Basketball Diaries, shot Jim and his band into the international spotlight. “Catholic Boy“, was named the second-most-popular album of 1980 by BAM, is now considered one of the last great punk albums. Jim appeared with his band on the variety program Fridays, he was interviewed by Tom Snyder, and he was featured on the MTV series The Roots of Rock, hosted by Lou Reed. Cover stories appeared in Newsweek, New York, Creem, Interview, Melody Maker, Stereo Review, Rolling Stone, Variety, and Penthouse. Playboy even printed a cartoon in which the punchline was, “Ever since the advent of Jim Carroll, ‘I’m a Catholic junkie poet’ seems hipper than ‘What’s your sign.’”
The Jim Carroll Band’s success can be attributed to the powerful combination of pure rock ‘n’ roll with Carroll’s poetic sensibility and ability to write from his own experience, forging a style that articulates the relevance of the individual to the particular, the past to the present. Carroll once said, “There ain’t much time left, you’re born out of this insane abyss and you’re going to fall back into it, so while you’re alive you might as well show your bare ass,” and that’s exactly what he does. Musician, Player and Listener described Carroll as “a transformer, chanting and moaning his litany into something infinitely more palpable than symbols made of sounds.”
When reporters began lining up in droves, wondering, “What’s a Pulitzer Prize nominee doing fronting a rock band?” Carroll was already well-known in underground circles for having lived a life of mythic proportions. One writer observed, “Carroll has his own voice and sound and he earned it the hard way Cassie Carter
The first ever vinyl box set featuring the band 8×7” singles mastered from the original 7” reels with 2 singles exclusive to this set. In depth 64-page booklet with track by track annotation from founder member Johnny Echols and comprehensive notes from Andrew Sandoval. 2 promotional postcards.
“The musicians known collectively as Love were a group of five uniquely talented individuals…and though the full story of this fascinating cast of characters has yet to be told, this boxset represents a small sample of the body of work produced by this group and has proven to be timeless.” – Johnny Echols
For the first time ever, Love’s original run of singles from 1966 to 1969 are collected and reissued together along with two exclusive 7”s. The first vinyl box set from one of the all time great psych-pop bands should thrill and enlighten fans in equal measure.
New Land Records were granted access to the original analogue master tapes courtesy of Rhino / Warner and all tracks were remastered especially for these singles by Grammy nominated mastering engineer Bill Inglot. Presented inside a deluxe box with spot-on gloss finish, the eight 7” singles, each featuring unique and original picture sleeves with ‘Elektra-style’ New Land labels. The two bonus singles include the previously only released promotionally ‘Que Vida’ / ‘Hey Joe’ and the newly created ‘Always See Your Face’ / ‘August’ single.
At the centre of this set is a 62-page booklet featuring track-by-track annotation by original guitarist Johnny Echols and in-depth liner notes from Grammy Award nominated writer Andrew Sandoval. For this package we have unearthed never-before-seen photographs of the band and included rare posters, singles, original master tapes and more. Every set also comes with a set of two promotional postcards.
Licensed with the blessing of Elektra Records founder and the man who signed Love, Jac Holzman, this is the first time a release has been put together which focuses on the bands incredible run of singles through the 1960s.
A must have for any fan, this is the ultimate collectors item. The music inside shines brighter than ever.
Vinyl Boxset 8×7″
8 7” singles housed inside a lift-off spot-gloss lid boxMastered from the original analogue master tapes with 2 singles exclusive to this setIn depth 64-page booklet with track by track annotation from Johnny Echols and comprehensive notes from Andrew Sandoval2 promotional postcardsLimited edition one-time pressing
Former Smiths members bassist Andy Rourke and guitarist Johnny Marr have once again joined forces following a performance at Madison Square Garden playing “How Soon Is Now?” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”
Now the more amiable half of The Smiths have recorded their first song together in 35 years: “Strong Forever,” a new track by Rourke’s group with former Happy Mondays guitarist Kav Blaggers, Blitz Vega. Marr is featured on guitar; the album was co-produced with DJ Z-Trip. Marr and Rourke, who have known each other since middle school, feel their friendship gets stronger as time passes – and this collaboration shows there is still magic in their creative forces.
“I wanted exactly what Johnny does,” says Rourke. “He has a very distinctive sound, and that’s what he did. We love what he brought to the track.”While it’s more Happy Mondays-flavoured than Smiths in its sound (Blaggers is on vocals), Marr’s signature jangling guitar takes centre stage. It’s an expansive, feel-good anthem – a cheerful, welcome balm to the gloomy days of mid-November.
Rourke and Blaggers had been working on the track since before lockdown. “We were originally recording this song for a UN/U.K. football anti-discrimination/anti-bullying campaign,” Rourke says. “We approached a few people to guest on the track, and I asked Johnny, who very kindly recorded some guitars and sent them over.”
Andy Rourke & Kav’s band Blitz Vega release new single “Strong Forever”. Guest guitar from Johnny Marr
“I Am The River, The River Is Me” , Jen Cloher’s fifth album, is verdant and rich; it luxuriates in stillness, and carries itself with cool, unfussy confidence. It suggests that home is not found in a place or a politic, but in the community you keep: Inspired by Cloher’s powerful matrilineal line of wāhine Māori, “I Am The River, The River Is Me” is not urgent, or hurried, but it is vital, made with the care and ease of someone who knows that their past began before birth, and will continue long after they’re gone.
Jen Cloher’s new album “I Am The River, The River Is Me” is out in March, and the latest single is the anthemic “Being Human.” Out of all the songs on the album, this is the one Cloher said they were the “most nervous about” releasing. ““It’s earnest and basic and raw,” they said. “Reclaiming your culture is an awkward and messy business. I can see why so many people shy away from it. When you’re not living on your own lands, you have to seek it out and find the people who can support you.”
Jen Cloher (Ngāpuhi & Ngāti Kahu) is a songwriter and performer living on unceded Wurundjeri land in Naarm. Cloher’s taut, terse brand of rock is charged with static tension. Admirers have naturally gravitated towards Cloher’s incisive, generous songwriting. Over the course of five albums, they have won a J Award and an AIR Award and been nominated for an ARIA and the Australian Music Prize.
Recorded between Aotearoa (NZ) and Naarm (Melbourne) with producers Tom Healy (Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams), Anika Ostendorf (Hachiku) and Cloher’s longtime drummer Jen Sholakis; the album brings in trailblazing artists including Emma Donovan (Gumbaynggirr, Yamatji), Kylie Auldist, Liz Stringer, Te Kaahu (Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Tīpā), Ruby Solly (Kai Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) and members of the Naarm-based Kapa Haka, Te Hononga o ngā Iwi. The entire record feels communal — a celebration not just of Cloher, but of the rich, life-filled communities that surround them.
Throughout their lifespan as a band, The Lone Bellow have cast an indelible spell with their finespun songs of hard truth and unexpected beauty, frequently delivered in hypnotic three-part harmony. In a departure from their past work with elite producers like Aaron Dessner of The National and eight-time Grammy-winner Dave Cobb, the Nashville-based trio struck out on their own for their new album “Love Songs for Losers”, dreaming up a singular sound encompassing everything from arena-ready rock anthems to the gorgeously sprawling Americana tunes the band refers to as “little redneck symphonies.” Recorded at the possibly haunted former home of the legendary Roy Orbison, the result is an intimate meditation on the pain and joy and ineffable wonder of being human, at turns heartbreaking, irreverent, and sublimely transcendent.
Nearly 50 years after Devo made its live debut at Kent State University’s Creative Arts Festival, Casale—who originally co-founded the innovative band as part of an art project with fellow Kent State student Bob Lewis the band is releasing the six-song “The Invisible Man” EP for Record Store DayBlack Friday. Created in collaboration with Josh Freese (Guns n’ Roses, Weezer, Vandals) and Steve Bartek (Oingo Boingo), the EP features three mixes of the pulsating title track along with three new remixes of Casale’s 2021 single “I’m Gonna Pay U Back.”
“Devo was always about collaboration and innovation, experimentation and a sense of humour,” he explains. “I’m just collaborating now with people who still have fun creating, where there’s no guarantee that there will ever be a payday or anything. It goes back to why you write songs or play music to begin with—which is the pure inspiration or enjoyment of it, not the guarantee of financial success.”
With their electronic grooves, synth-driven melodies, and darkly humorous lyrics, “The Invisible Man” and “I’m Gonna Pay U Back” are very much in the tradition of such classic Devo tracks as “Freedom of Choice” and “It’s a Beautiful World,” only with a level of anger that feels most appropriate for an age in which the band’s original theory of de-evolution has proved to be horribly prescient.
Together with Gram Parsons’ daughter Polly Parsons, a newly discovered, never-before-heard Gram Parsons and The Fallen Angels concert from 1973 via a Kickstarter campaign launching November 17th, 2022. This is the first Gram Parsons live club show ever released and the first new solo Gram Parsons recording to surface in over 35 years!
The discovery of this long-lost concert was nothing short of serendipitous. During the process of moving Amoeba Records Hollywood store to a new location, a box labelled “GP Archives” was discovered. There were some very interesting items in the box, but one in particular stood out. It was labeled GP-FA Bijou. Amazingly, it was a clear and beautiful soundboard recording of the next to last club date ever of Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels! At the Bijou Café in Philadelphia, from March 1973. Sourced from the vocal mics, it is one of the best quality Parsons recordings that has ever surfaced and it truly captures the incredible energy put out that night by Gram, Emmylou Harris and the band. The 19-song concert includes fantastic versions of “Drug Store Truck Driving Man,” “Sin City,” and the never-before-heard Gram and Emmy duet, “Jambalaya.”
Amoeba Co-Founder Dave Prinz said, “This is a chance for Gram fans to help bring something truly beautiful and special into the world at a time when we could all use a lift in our spirits.”
Polly Parsons adds, “I love that there is going to be intentional energy put forth by all of the fans to collectively make this release happen. Community is so important and doing things together, on a massive scale, can have a giant impact.”
A double-LP release of “Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels! At the Bijou Cafe from March 1973″is the star of the Kickstarter campaign, but there are anadditional 20 remarkable tracks from both Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, who sang with Gram before launching her solo career.
These will be available across three 10” LPs exclusively through Kickstarter and are likely to become immediate collector’s items.
Two 10” LPs feature acoustic & home recordings by Gram Parsons from 1969 and 1972, and the third 10” is Emmylou Harris’ first album demos, which she has generously allowed us to offer as a Kickstarter reward. Highlights from these three 10” LPs include “Two Hearts,” a legendary long-lost song of Gram’s that has never been heard before, an incredible acoustic performance of “Cody, Cody,” and two previously unheard Emmylou songs, “Norfolk” and “Our Father.”
“Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels! At the Bijou Cafe in Philadelphia, from March 1973” will be offered on CD and double LP as rewards for pledging November 17, 2022.
The three 10” LPs are limited edition exclusives to the Kickstarter campaign and will be available as individual rewards or in bundles with the Bijou Cafe album.
One of the true visionaries of roots Americana music, Gram Parsons died tragically at the age of 26 in Joshua Tree, CA in 1973, just four months after the Bijou Cafe concert. His short, but storied, body of work has moved countless people, and his early passing has left a giant hole in so many fans’ hearts, including ours. Although he has been gone for almost 50 years, Gram’s music continues to influence artists today and speak to new generations of fans.
Palm’s live performances are revered for their uncanny synchronicity; one gets the sense that, on psychic levels unseen, the members share an intuition unexplained by logic. But as the Philly-based band has grown up and moved on from the sweaty basement shows and self-booked tours of their formative years, the costs of maintaining such intense symbiosis started to build. “I used to think of Palm as an organism, a single coherent system, and at a younger point in our lives, that seemed like the ideal way to be a band,” Eve Alpert reflects. “I’m realizing now that it’s unrealistic, that for this band to grow we had to tend to ourselves as individuals – little pieces – who create the whole.”
To confuse parts for the whole is inevitable with Palm. Drummer Hugo Stanley, bassist Gerasimos Livitsanos and guitarists/vocalists/high school sweethearts Alpert and Kasra Kurt started making music together as teenagers, and spent much of their twenties in the kind of proximity unusual for adults, outside of touring bands and the International Space Station.
For a number of years the band consumed the lives of its members to a point of exhaustion: “To be honest I think we got a little burnt out. There were times where it wasn’t clear if we’d make another record,” says Alpert. It was only after multiple freak injuries followed by a pandemic, forced a pause – from touring but also from writing, rehearsing, even seeing each other- that the four were able to regroup and see a way forward again.
On their latest effort, “Nicks and Grazes”, Palm embrace discordance to dazzling effect. “We wanted to reconcile two potentially opposing aesthetics,” Kurt says. “To capture the spontaneous, free energy of our live shows while integrating elements from the traditionally gridded palette of electronic music.”
In order to avoid what Kurt refers to as “Palm goes electro,” the musicians spent years educating themselves on the ins and outs of production by learning Ableton while also experimenting with “the percussive, textural, and gestural potential” of their instruments. To this end, the band continued the age-old tradition of instrument-preparation, augmenting guitars with drumsticks, metal rods and, at the suggestion of Charles Bullen (This Heat, Lifetones), coiling rubber-coated gardening wire around the strings. The unruliness of the prepared guitar on songs like “Mirror Mirror” and “Eager Copy” contrasts with the steadfast reproducibility of the album’s electronic elements.
While Palm cite Japanese pop music, dub, and footwork as influences on this album’s sonic palette, they found themselves returning time and again to the artists who inspired them to start the group over a decade ago. “When we were first starting out as a band, we bonded over an appreciation of heavy, aggressive, noisy music,” Alpert reflects. “We wrote parts that were just straight-up metal.” Kurt adds, “I found myself rediscovering and re–falling in love with the visceral, jagged quality of guitars in the music of Glenn Branca, The Fall, Beefheart, and Sonic Youth, all important early Palm influences.” Returning to the fundamentals gave Palm a strong foundation upon which they could experiment freely, resulting in their most ambitious and revelatory album to date.
“Music isn’t about things. It is things,” Richard Powers wrote in his novel Orfeo. While making “Nicks and Grazes”, Kurt found himself returning to this quote as a guiding philosophy as Palm spent days and months on end working out songs together in their practice space.
Though a single narrative remains elusive, Stanley points out echoes of the members’ individual and collective experiences in the use of samples. Snippets of conversation on tour in Spain, the blare of a Philly high school marching band’s early morning practice, and the refracted reverberations of Palm’s friend Paco Cathcart performing as The Cradle are just a few examples of daily sonic flotsam the band incorporated with instrumentation to create a new communal experience. The album’s titular track is a prime example; Anderegg combined the band’s disparate field recordings into a diaristic kaleidoscope of sound, as much a collection of memories as it is its own composition. “We’re constantly grabbing at sounds that move us,” Stanley says. “In a sense, the record is cobbled together from these pieces of our lives.”
Performed by Eve Alpert Gerasimos Livitsanos Hugo Stanley Kasra Kurt Matt Anderegg
Hotly-tipped indie and post-punk quartet from Nottingham. On the day that Nottingham Forest were promoted to the Premier League for the first time in 23 years, Cucamaras were playing a gig at Rock City, their hometown’s most famous venue. Taking to the stage as part of Dot To Dot Festival at 2pm, a few hours before the Forest team played Huddersfield Town in the Championship Play-Off Final at London’s Wembley Stadium, the four-piece got their set in just before much of the crowd – and the band – decamped to the city’s pubs to watch the biggest game the team had played in decades.
Nottingham is definitely on a buzz at the moment,” vocalist Olly Bowley says six months later, The band across town at The Chapel, the venue they played their first gig at a few years ago. “It’s good for the city, and it does well for the music scene as well,” he adds in reference to Forest’s success after that 1-0 victory in late May. “I feel sorry for the bands who clashed with the game, though!”
Forming in 2019, Cucamaras – Bowley, co-vocalist Josh Hart, bassist Dan McGrath and drummer Joe Newton – started out playing straight-up indie songs and gigging around Nottingham before, like many of us, they used the pandemic as an opportunity for reflection and reinvention.
‘Death of the Social’ distributed via 3tone Records on behalf of Cucamaras.
The Fat Angel Sings 