“Manzanita” Second solo album by La Luz singer / guitarist Shana Cleveland. is out March 10th, less than a month away! Thanks to everyone who has preordered thus far. Preorder and video links are in the link below and lots of news to come. I love this photo that Kristin Cofer took at one of my top 5 guitar playing spots at home.
“Manzanita”is the common name for a kind of small evergreen tree endemic to California which has strong medicinal properties. It’s also the name of the brand new full length by visual artist, writer, songwriter, and musician Shana Cleveland. Subtle, powerful, and unafraid. We can’t actually tell you how much we love this record because you’d never believe us, so we’ll just say that it is her strongest and most personal album to date. These songs are as strong as the bricks in the Brill building, and seem destined to be covered by others in years to come. Where her previous record, 2019’s “Night of the Worm Moon”(HardlyArtRecords) functions as a collection of speculative fictions equally inspired by Afro-futurist pioneers Herman “Sun Ra” Blount and Octavia Butler, “Manzanita”concerns the love that loves to love. “This is a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness,” Cleveland explains.
The combinations of words and song structure are so strong throughout that one hardly notices Cleveland’s nimble fingerpicking on first listen, or how much is packed into the arrangements. The lyrics are satisfyingly direct, with the buoyantly whimsical descriptions typical of the 1960s New York School of poetry. It’s peppered with the kind of unexpected turns that make the words more modern, and in their spookiness they are more West Coast, as in “Mystic Mine,” with its “Mystic Mine Lane, cars rotting away/ I feel so relieved to be/ Back in the country.” So much of the pop music we love is propelled by those first blushes of infatuation and lust, but “Manzanita” concerns the kind of love that one can only experience with time, work, and devotion. Cleveland says: “The songs were all written while I was pregnant (side A) or shortly after my son’s birth in that weird everything-has-quietly-but-monumentally-shifted state (side B),” she says. Moving to the country, starting a family, laughing for real at the same joke the thirteenth time you’ve heard it, surviving heavy shit (this is the first release since Cleveland’s successful treatment for a diagnosis of breast cancer at the start of 2022).
This is a love album that’s somehow populated with the insect world, ghosts, and evil spirits. Sonically, “Manzanita”sits in a meadow similar to her previous solo records, set back and away from the genre-recombinant garage pop of her band La Luz. This is part due to the fact that there’s a different sonic palette in use here. While Cleveland continues to play guitar and vocals; Johnny Goss, who has recorded all of Shana’s solo material and early La Luz recordings, and Abbey Blackwell (Alvvays, La Luz) play the bass; Olie Eshleman is on pedal steel; and Will Sprott plays the keyboards, dulcimer, glockenspiel, and harpsichord—little of which would have been out of place on her previous two solo records—Sprott also adds layers of synthesizer infused with the sounds of the natural world.
For fans of Robert Wyatt, Opal, Nilsson, Kevin Ayers and his Whole Wide World, Norma Tanega, Jessica Pratt, Julie Driscoll, Michael Nesmith, Sibylle Baier
There’s a killer song on this new Screaming Females album called “Beyond the Void” that implies that the other side of nothingness sounds like Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy dancing a cosmic waltz. You can hear singer-guitarist Marissa Paternoster loud and clear out there in that fifth-dimensional ballroom, making her electric guitar gust while she sings about coming “undone” which is funny, considering she and her bandmates sound more together than ever.
Or maybe Screaming Females sound as together as they always have. Our praise reflex leans toward the superlative in this dank information age, an era when the only artists who transcend the digital noise seem to be the ones whose music gets overpraised on social media for being the most this or the best that. Out here in reality, Screaming Females only concern themselves with being. The New Jersey-born trio remain adamantly DIY in their day-to-day affairs, which makes their year-after-year music feel proud and principled — but also less resonant than it deserves to be. Instead of being loudly hyped, they remain quietly respected.
But they keep going. Screaming Females still tour every corner of the map, including an upcoming stint across Alaska. They still draw nostalgic audiences who admire them for carrying a DIY torch that burned brighter back in the ’90s, just as they continue to inspire younger ears who know there’s an even cooler future to be written. Bassist Mike Abbate still silk-screens the band’s T-shirts. Paternoster still designs the band’s album covers. They’re still self-managed, and on their eighth album, “Desire Pathway,” their music still sounds completely self-possessed.
Screaming Females are somewhat of an anomaly in today’s indie-rock space, where, yes, young musicians face dream-snuffing obstacles in nearly every direction: exploitative streaming services, impenetrable algorithmic playlists, a pandemic-damaged touring circuit. But when was making the planet care about your band ever an easy thing to pull off? Cash and clout have never been promised in rock-and-roll, but everyone still has the option to keep showing up and making the art. Screaming Females have been showing up for nearly two decades now, and their commitment to their sound, to their scene, to their principles and to each other should be upheld as a blueprint for freedom.
To understand that freedom in full, it helps to listen to the band in its entirety: eight pithy albums you can blaze through between dusk and midnight. Start back in 2006 with “Baby Teeth,” a batch of sweet-and-sour melodies forged at basement shows in the band’s native New Brunswick. Before long, you’ll get to 2012’s “Ugly,” produced by Steve Albini, and with riffs as gnarly as the title suggests. Everything starts to feel more aerodynamic on 2015’s “Rose Mountain,” then heavier on 2018’s “All At Once,” and now a little more of both on “Desire Pathway,” which features songs about feeling trapped, feeling heartsick, feeling like you’re a haunted freight train barreling across a forgotten wasteland, and feeling free.
Yet, for all of their tightness and concision, their sound can feel all over the place, too. It’s not that Screaming Females are channelling rock-and-roll writ large — Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Van Halen, Heart, the Pretenders, X, Black Flag, the Wipers, R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr., Dead Moon, Nirvana, Ride, the Breeders, Hum, Elastica, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — so much as they know all of those bands, and that their music becomes a physical expression of all that knowing.
It’s a sort of wisdom at this point. Drummer Jarrett Dougherty is about as no-nonsense as it gets. Abbate only seems to play melodic rebar. And Paternoster totally shreds, on her guitar and in her throat. Her singing feels broad, like a yawn, but urgent, like a shout, and whenever she approaches the top of her register, she tends to elongate her words like someone in a search party calling out the name of the disappeared. Whenever the music grows especially intense, she likes to bounce notes across the back of her windpipe. Technically, it’s vibrato, but it can sound like awkward laughter, or a grieving animal, or PJ Harvey choking on a helicopter.
There are probably a few thousand more metaphors hiding in her guitar playing, but if you widen your ears and listen to Paternoster’s fireworks in a cumulative way, her questing solos begin to rip parallel to the Screaming Females’ general road-dog philosophy: Whether they skew utilitarian or peacockish, anchoring or acrobatic, all of those pealing notes eventually add up to an expression of determination, discipline and continued forward motion. On the fretboard, on the road, through space and time, this band goes anywhere.
On “Desire Pathway,” they’re driving toward some kind of psychic void, perhaps in hopes of drawing a border around it. That aforementioned tune about a choo-choo ride to oblivion, “Desert Train,” feels like perpetual acceleration, somehow evoking the hormonal itchiness of ’80s hair metal without exuding a molecule of cheeky wink-wink. “Ornament” does a similar trick, conjuring an assortment of ’90s alt-rock ghosts with its roaring melodies and slack tempo, but when Paternoster sings, “Now I got what I want/It won’t make me feel better,” she sounds forsaken in a world of her own. Turns out that zones of complete freedom are good places to sing about feeling stuck.
Screaming Females keep going — and when a band stays together for this long, their music gets to tell a bigger story about how everyone moves through time. The Beatles progress narrative is about aesthetic expansion, and how something improves as it blooms. The Rolling Stones progress narrative is about exhilaration and endurance, about starting up and never stopping. The David Bowie progress narrative is about the thrill of perpetually changing shape. The AC/DC progress narrative is about the triumph of never changing shape. The Fall progress narrative has something to do with making so much music that it starts to self-cancel, annihilating the notion of progress altogether. The Fugazi progress narrative is about upholding your ideals, not out of dogma, but so they can better support an art that grows.
As for the Screaming Females narrative, it’s a messy hybrid of all of those. Refusing a tidy arc through time, their mission feels more like an unbroken scribble on a flat surface. They aren’t rising ever upward or expanding ever outward; they’re over here, then they’re over there, then they’re back this way again — always themselves, but constantly changed by where they’ve been, forever unfinished, because there are still new places to go, new ways to be. A band like that can be hard to find, hard to hype, but easy to recognize, at least to us listeners who, like Screaming Females, know no other path through life’s wild unknowability than forward.
Mike Abbate, Marissa Paternoster and Jarrett Dougherty are Screaming Females.
US hyperpop outfit 100 Gecs have shared their latest single, ‘Hollywood Baby’. The single is taken from 100 Gecs’ forthcoming second album, “10,000 gecs”, which arrives on Friday, 17th March.
‘Hollywood Baby’ is a typically unhinged number from the enigmatic duo of Laura Les and Dylan Brady, featuring heavy synths and autotuned vocals. Live performance videos of ‘Hollywood Baby’ have been circulating among the band’s fanbase since 2021.
‘Hollywood Baby’ comes with a self-directed video that concretises the incendiary nature of the song – i.e. it centres on Les and Brady setting off fireworks in their apartment. The new single follows the duo’s 2021 single ‘mememe’, 2022’s ‘Doritos & Fritos’, and the surprise EP, “Snake Eyes”, from December 2022.
The forthcoming “10,000 gecs” is the follow-up to 100 gecs’ 2019 debut, 1000 gecs. The record was written, produced, and performed by Les and Brady, with additional drumming from Josh Freese (Devo, The Vandals, A Perfect Circle).
100 Gecs have been playing this song in their boisterous, ridiculously fun live sets for a minute now, and its recorded version doesn’t disappoint, combusting in a cascade of crunchy pop-punk sparks.
The latest issue of Record Collector is out next Thursday. Bit of a Pink Floyd “Dark Side” spectacular, with a cover image created by Jill Furmanovsky, buffed to a brilliant purple shine by the design team at RC. Over 18 pages we revisit the 1973-4 Dark Side gigs, offer a Buyers’ Guide to all the DSOTM iterations, name some of Dark Side’s progeny, speak to Jill F about her collaborations with the Floyd, and present the 50 most sought-after Dark Side collectables. Oh, and Alan Parsons recalls his stint manning the boards during Floyd (and Beatles, and Pilot) recording sessions. Plus, Van Morrison talks (don’t mention Covid), Sam Brown explains how she made a new album ‘without’ her voice, Rick Buckley takes us on a photo by photo journey through The Jam’s peak period, and Lee John recalls bringing some US polish to Britfunk. And there are appreciations of David Crosby, Jeff Beck and Tom Verlaine.
Out of print for more than a decade, the first Keith Richards solo anthology returns for Record Store Day.2023
Originally released in 2011, “Vintage Vinos” included key cuts from “Talk Is Cheap”, “Main Offender”, “Live At The Hollywood Palladium“, and the the rare Katrina benefit track, “Hurricane.” The vinyl edition, limited to a single pressing, sold out immediately and has been a highly sought after collector’s item ever since, trading for hundreds of dollars on the second-hand market.
This RSD-exclusive pressing replicates “Vintage Vino’s” original tracklist and heavyweight, tip-on gatefold jacket but adds unique upgrades over the original. Now pressed on 180g black-on-red vinyl protected by black inner-sleeves, the reissue also features a new etching of the X-Pensive Winos logo on Side 4 and three new lithographs unique to this edition.
A1. Take It So Hard A2. Big Enough A3. You Don’t Move Me A4. Struggle A5. Make No Mistake
B1. Too Rude B2. Time Is On My Side B3. Happy B4. Connection
C1. Wicked As It Seems C2. Eileen C3. Hate It When You Leave C4. Locked Away C5. Hurricane
Thurston Moore unveils new song “Hypnogram” The track features bassist Deb Googe, guitarist James Sedwards, percussionist Jem Doulton, and electronic musician Jon Leidecker, with lyrics by poet Radieux Radio. It was mixed by London-based producer Margo Broom. Take a listen below.
According to a press release, ‘Hypnogram’ is the first taste of an upcoming album Thurston arranged with Sedwards in 2022. It’s also the first of two songs Moore plans to release digitally this spring before heading out on tour in Europe.
Last year, Moore issued “Screen Time”, a collection of instrumental guitar pieces recorded during the summer of 2020.
“Hypnogram” follows Moore’s 2021 album “Screen Time”, and was created in a session with Moore’s London-based group
Thurston Moore’s “Hypnogram” song is out now via his own Daydream Library Series label.
“Remember, thou art mortal.” That ancient Roman warning wouldn’t seem to apply to Bruce Springsteen, whose Herculean shows with the E Street Band belie his age. And even though the man has moved past the need to talk about his childhood and his complicated relationship with his father, as was often the case earlier in his career , he clearly hasn’t lost his ability to hold an audience in the palm of his hand.
Bruce Springsteen estimates he wrote the song “If I Was The Priest” in 1970 or 1971, and he sometimes played it with the E Street Band at shows up until 1972. After that, the Boss sidelined the song for almost five decades until re-recording it for 2020’s “Letter To You” album. And now, finally, it has returned to their setlist after 51 years.
As NJArts.net reports, Tuesday night at the Toyota Center in Houston,the E Street Band played “If I Was The Priest” for the first time since May 5th, 1972 at the 300-capacity Gaslight au Go Go nightclub in New York. (From Cinco de Mayo to Valentine’s Day!) Before the performance, Springsteen told the crowd he wrote the song when he was 22 and “I still don’t have a clue what the fuck it’s about.”
Some fans noted that the song was also not on the printed setlist.
“Yet perhaps the most interesting celebration of Springsteen’s life and legacy comes not through his modern musings on death and dying, but in his inclusion of a trio of songs from his past.”
It went on: ”Hearing a man in his 70s singing songs he wrote when he was in his 20s is an interesting experience, not least for Springsteen himself, who recently told the New York Times: ‘It’s fun to go back and see how wild my lyric writing was, and how uninhibited it was at a certain moment, and to be able to take that and bring it into the present with the band, and sing it in my voice right now. [It] was a bit of a joy ride‘.”
‘If I Was The Priest’ existed for decades a bootleg demo before it was officially re-recorded with the E Street Band and released in 2020 on 20th album ‘Letter To You’.
Neil Young has teamed with three members of his on-off backing band Crazy Horse on a new folk-rock album, under a name that hearkens back to CSNY days. The newly minted old friends Molina, Talbot, Lofgren & Young will release “All Roads Lead Home” at the end of March.
It contains 10 tracks, with songs written by all four members: Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot, Nils Lofgren, and Neil Young. The album started as a pandemic project for Molina, Talbot, and Lofgren, with Young joining later. His lone writing credit here is a live solo version of “Song Of the Seasons” from the 2021 Crazy Horse album “Barn”, which apparently came together concurrently with this project.
Bass, Drums, Guitar, Keyboards, Percussion, Vocals: Nils Lofgren Vocals: Tom Lofgren Writer: Nils Lofgren
Our first preview of “All Roads Lead Home” is the shuffling, Lofgren-led “You Will Never Know,” out today.
“All Roads Lead Home” is out 31st March on Reprise Records.
“Lines” is about what we do to each other, some call the dance of intimacy, exchanges. What we are given, carry with us, then subsequently pass on to others- good and bad. How the recipient is often undeserving of the negative side of this reality. It’s about trying to dodge blame and the loneliness of guilt. It’s about the irony of impermanence and unhealthy patterns coexisting; ‘nothing stays’ but ‘nothings changed’.
The idea of change I had grown accustomed to but the reality that some things won’t change until you actively work on them is something new to me, preferring to adopt a slightly lazy attitude and misunderstanding the saying ‘all passes’. Sometimes it doesn’t quickly enough. It’s also a song about anger, and the familiarity of not knowing where to put it.
Inhaler have their second album ‘Cuts & Bruises’ due out February 17th 2023. It’s the album we’ve always wanted to make. We’ve been working on these songs for a while now and can’t wait to take them around the world and play them for you all next year.
The Irish indie boys are back with their second album. Following on from their phenomenal debut, we only have high hopes for this record. With their second album ‘Cuts & Bruises’ out next month and upcoming shows with Arctic Monkeys and Harry Styles, Inhaler are entering 2023 as indie’s brightest rising hopes.
They’ve gotten musically tighter and emotionally open on ‘Cuts & Bruises’, a record that also shows the wisdom they’ve gleaned from years on the road.
Inhaler return with their 2nd album “Cuts and Bruises” in 2023. The album includes the singles “These Are The Days” and “Love Will Get You There”. “Cuts and Bruises” is the follow-up to Inhaler’s debut “It Won’t Always Be Like This” which debuted at no.1 in both the UK & Irish Official Charts.
“It Won’t Always Be Like This” became the fastest-selling debut album on vinyl by any band this century and saw Inhaler become the first Irish group to top the album charts with a debut in 13 years. 2022 has seen a relentless touring schedule with a run of festival dates, including their first Glastonbury performance, a homecoming gig in Dublin at the city’s Fairview Park alongside support shows with Arctic Monkeys and Kings of Leon.
Set for release on 17th February via Polydor Records, Inhaler have their second album ‘Cuts & Bruises’.
The follow-up to last year’s debut ‘It Won’t Always Be Like This’, they’re giving us the first taste of what to expect from their forthcoming LP with new track ‘Love Will Get You There’.
