The inimitable post-punk icon Brix Smith is held in high regard for her work with The Fall, The Adult Net and The Extricated, but even after four decades in the game she’s still embracing new musical horizons with characteristic intensity. This is her debut solo album. Produced by the Grammy Award winning Youth (The Verve, Jesus and Mary Chain, Killing Joke), Brix’s seemingly effortlessly cool vocals top a mix of power-pop addictiveness, ragged garage-rock riffs and classic grunge melody.
Given its explosive energy. The album was started during lockdown, with Brix and Youth collaborating remotely between her home in London and his base in Spain. She has described the album as sounding like a cross between The Breeders and Hole with an atmosphere that’s “very dystopian California.” It features special guests including Susanna Hoffs from The Bangles and Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama and Shakespear’s Sister.
Check out the new video produced by Funky Doodle and filmed at the Lexington.
The third single from the album ‘Valley of the Dolls’, “Fast Net” is written and produced by Brix Smith and Martin ‘Youth’ Glover. Brix, a former member of The Fall in which she performed with Mark E Smith has teamed up with the legendary producer and bass player of Killing Joke to create this amazing album and latest single.
English rap-punk poets Sleaford Mods Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have their 11th LP, called “UK GRIM” out on 10th March. Following the title track a few weeks ago, you can rant now to new groovy cut“Force 10 From Navarone” featuring Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw.
Jason Williamson said “The track is a conversation with myself coming to terms with happiness and whether it is in fact a darker space than my negativity and depression. Coupled with that it explores the myth of activism and inaction of the majority in the UK in the presence of a corrupt government.”
“Jason, why does the darkness elope? Cross sectioned. Its not a drink and I don’t fucking smoke”
New album ‘UK GRIM’ out 10th March 23 via Rough Trade Records.
LED ZEPPELIN were on their way to becoming the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world. Embarking on an American tour to promote their new album “Houses Of The Holy” , they shattered box office records, rewriting the blueprint for rock’n’roll tours as they went. Peter Watts climbed aboard the Starship to hear tales of glorious, transcendent music – but also unsolved robberies, giant mirrorballs, cake fights during John Bonham’s 25th birthday party and motorbike rides down hotel corridors. “As the venues got bigger, they got better,” recalls one confidant. “They blasted you into the middle of next week.”
The Hull four piece have signed with Mogwai’s label Rock Action, embracing dance, ambient and experimental music, and the importance of keeping things ambiguous, The UK shoegazers bdrmm just released their second album, “I Don’t Know”, which is also their first for Mogwai’s Rock Action Records. With this one, they’ve grown beyond the standard signifiers of the genre and have figured out their own sound, incorporating elements of dance music, krautrock, trip hop and post-rock.
bdrmm have revealed details of their second album ‘I Don’t Know’, which marks their signing to Mogwai‘s label Rock Action. Check out new single ‘It’s Just A Bit Of Blood’ below,
‘It’s Just A Bit Of Blood’ comes with visuals directed by Chris Tomsett’s Innerstrings. The track will be familiar to longtime fans of the band, having been a staple of the band’s live shows for over two years. “People have liked to sing along to it before we even had it recorded, so it felt like a natural place to start,” said guitarist Joe Vickers. Bassist and keyboardist Jordan Smith explained that the song acts as a bridging point between the shoegaze-leaning sound of their 2020 debut album ‘Bedroom’, and a broader pool of influences that defines ‘I Don’t Know’.
“It’s got the first album’s sensibilities, but it does things in the way we work now, so it’s a nice jumping-off point,” he said. “We’re not putting the six-minute dance song out just yet, that can wait until release day!”
‘I Don’t Know’ sees the band embrace not only dance music but trip-hop, slowcore, experimental and ambient music. Drummer Conor Murray, meanwhile, has brought a heavy influence from his love of jazz music to the album’s beats.
bdrmm – ‘I Don’t Know’ Track-by-Track
ALPS “Alps” was written whilst on tour with Mogwai. We were driving through the Swiss Alps (hence the title) and I was inspired by a mix by Thom Yorke for CRACK Magazine. I started with the percussion and went from there. The theme of the track is one of despair. While driving through such a beautiful place, but still being plagued by the constant feed of negative news coming through from back home. I don’t think we’d ever regard ourselves as a political band, but it’s hard not to escape the constant depression that has been imposed on this country this year, and how I feel we’re all just trying to cope but are seemingly forever moving backwards.
BE CAREFUL “Be Careful” was written during the pandemic. (I said I’d never write the P word again, but for honesty’s sake). I had set up a little studio in the back of my garden and would often take myself there on evenings with numerous bottles of wine. Inspired by Portishead, and the bassline owes itself to Radiohead’s Nude, this track just came so naturally. It’s about taking care of yourself and realising when you need to change. I’ve been guilty of indulging too much and I definitely noticed myself becoming somebody I don’t like. When realising that, it felt important. Trying to be a better person is hard when you don’t know you’re doing something wrong.
IT’S JUST A BIT OF BLOOD Most people who have seen us tour will recognise this track as ‘Picky New’, essentially based on its guitar picking introduction and that it was a new song at the time. The more we played it, the more we realised it was becoming something special, and an integral part of our set. It stems from my recent mental health awareness. I’d become depressed and very social anxious, I really felt like I had changed and didn’t know who I was. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by 3 of my brothers within this band (one literally by blood) and have always been able to be myself with them. I guess it’s just about realising what you have and remembering that when you can’t see it.
WE FALL APART “We Fall Apart” is probably one of the last tracks that was written for the album. It is a nod to our admiration of Krautrock. We have always been huge fans of NEU! and Can, and I think that kind of got touched on with the first record, but we wanted to try and make something as pure as organic as it seemed they did. Stripping back the effects and trying to make it as real as possible. The vocals are about a relationship. Trying and trying to make something work and it still failing. You want it to happen so much that sometimes you don’t realise that it’s impossible. It’s important to realise that moment.
ADVERTISEMENT ONE This is another one of those tracks that was written on the road during the Mogwai tour. The piano parts were created using generative processing in the van, inspired by Brian Eno experiments with the delay line method in his Ambient series. I defined the parameters and then glued my favourite parts together into a cohesive piece that I subsequently learnt and recorded on the piano back at The Nave. Similarly, I sampled some drum recording that Conor did from the “Be Careful” sessions and reworked the takes into a 16-bar phrase, inspired by Boards of Canada and DJ Shadow. Writing for the band is something I’ve always wanted to do, yet constantly dissuaded myself from. Ryan, Conor and Joe were all so supportive and encouraging during this period so it’s appearance is owed to them.
HIDDEN CINEMA This was the final song to be finished on the record, and to be fair, it nearly didn’t make it. We started and stopped on it so many times it seemed like it was doomed, but the final week, we approached it in a completely different way and it’s now become one of our favourites on the record. This track is about reflection. I was technically homeless when I was in the midst of recording this record, and I was going through a tough time internally. Living in the mistakes that you’ve made in the past and falling into the same situations. Sometimes you don’t know when something is wrong, but when you come out of the other end, it’s good to reflect on that time to not let it happen again.
PULLING STITCHES I remember the exact day that we wrote this track. We were in the practise room, and I just started playing the first 2 chords, incorporating the bend as if I was literally winking at Kevin Shields, and Conor just looked at me like, “This is the one”. I think we finished the track on that day. It’s amazing when those moments happen, and it reminds you of why you do this. It’s so obviously the Shoegaze adoration within us.
A FINAL MOVEMENT This track has been flying around for years. When I first wrote it, it was influenced by Duster, it was a VERY slow-core, emphasis on the bending of the notes. From there, it’s taking many forms, when we performed it live, under the moniker ‘Drug’, it was definitely indebted to Slowdive’s cover of Golden Hair, but from there it’s taking a brand new route. Being avid fans of Oneohtrix Point Never, the opening chords are inspired by that of Chrome County. The way they come in just grab you instantly, and as soon as Jordan opens the track, I know the track has reached its natural home. The lyrics come from a place of understanding. It’s a very cathartic track and to finally release it, and to close the album with it, feels very special. It’s been a long journey, but it’s good to finally be here.
The new covers EP from Tropical Fuck Storm is, believe it or not, unconventional. For one thing, it’s largely a return to the guitar-centric jams the Australian collective have slowly been gravitating away from on their recorded material for fear of it being precisely what listeners expected to hear. But for another, the short collection of songs is noticeably lacking in the “Running Up That Hills” and “Love Will Tear Us Aparts” most covers records tend to gravitate toward, instead opting for the second most popular track on The Stooges’ Funhouse to have “Ann” in the title, a cut from TFS’s own most recent record, and two songs belonging to groups that may or may not be entirely fiction.
Which leaves the crowning center piece of the record, a take on Jimi Hendrix’s epic 14-minute “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be),” which the band takes on surprisingly reverently as they stretch it even further into a marathon 18 minutes. According to co-vocalist Gareth Liddiard, the Hendrix homage was “an attempt to right the recent wrongs perpetrated against Hendrix’s classic ‘Angel’ by some idiot from One Direction doing a karaoke-style ‘tribute’ for Jimi’s 80th birthday.” I think Jimi would’ve approved of this version, and I’m glad he didn’t live to see his work become American Idol–ized.
This epic single arrives ahead of the Australian group’s kind-of covers EP “Submersive Behaviour”, via Joyful Noise.
Over the past decade, numerous supergroups have risen to the forefront of contemporary music. They’re all beloved heat seekers with unfathomable chemistry, however, the one supergroup I think about most often is The Arcs. Started by Dan Auerbach, Leon Michels, Nick Movshon, Homer Steinweiss, and Richard Swift in the early 2010s, the band quickly embodied a perfect mixture of neo-psychedelia and soul. They weren’t out to capitalize on popularity with sold-out shows in big venues. They played lowkey gigs in landmark clubs across America, like The Orange Peel in Asheville and the Civic Theatre in Auerbach’s hometown of Akron.
‘Electrophonic Chronic’ is the second album from The Arcs, the band founded by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and which released its debut studio album ‘Yours, Dreamily’ back in 2015. Eight years later – and following the death of one of its members, Richard Swift – a successor has been shaped out of left-over recordings from the same sessions that yielded that debut.
Around 2012, Auerbach wanted to make a follow-up to his debut solo record “Keep It Hid”. He’d just put out the Black Keys records “Brothers” and “El Camino” back-to-back, and both Michels and Movshon had joined him and Pat Carney on tour in 2010. Whatever Auerbach’s second personal project would become, he was going to surround himself with musicians he trusted. “As soon as it was me, Dan, Nick, and Homer, we did a lot of recording sessions together, just for the hell of it, and there wasn’t anything attached to it,” Michels recalls. “Then, when Swift got involved, that’s when it really felt like, ‘OK, this is a band.’ It became clear very quickly that it was its own thing.”
Auerbach’s second solo record wouldn’t come until 2017, and “Waiting on a Song” was lightyears away from what he had made with The Arcs: songs torn from the cuffs of Captain Beefheart’s Safe as Milk and the hip-hop that inspired The Black Keys’ 2009 rap project “BlakRoc”. The Arcs were making music that became unique in how so many familiar parts stacked on top of each other to make a singular sound, which came from the guys spending countless days together just laying down whatever sounds came out of their instruments.
The Arcs are special because every member of the group is a producer—or, as Michels affectionately calls everyone, “studio rats”—which has only widened their musical capabilities in the studio. Songs on their debut like “Outta My Mind,” “Velvet Ditch,” and “Pistol Made of Bones” may have fragments that fit on a Black Keys project like “El Camino” or “Turn Blue“, but it’s clear that The Arcs’ songs were gleaned by each member equally. Their second album, “Electrophonic Chronic“, is just as psychedelic as “Yours, Dreamily” was, except it’s much more harmonious and electronic.
Robert Forster—former singer-songwriter for Australian indie rockers the Go-Betweens—has released his eighth solo album. He co-produced the album with his wife, Karin Bäumler, and his son, Louis, formerly of the Goon Sax. Forster also enlisted former Go-Betweens and Warm Nights bass player Adele Pickvance, as well as Scott Bromiley and Luke McDonald of the John Steele Singers, to contribute to the new LP.
This is a record of sombre hope, stubborn joy and a steadfast buoyancy perched on a wobbly fulcrum, grief and fear on one side, grit and belief on the other. This being who it is, no one familiar with Forster’s work and in possession of their wits would bet against him and Karin landing anywhere but on the latter half of that divide. “Candle”, sparse in its way but rich and direct is, start to finish, a-brim with the doing of life. And, if we may say, what a start.
One of the songs on the album, “She’s a Fighter,” was partly inspired by Bäumler’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent chemotherapy treatment and recovery. “She’s a Fighter,” bristling with the energy and spark it deserves, also, thanks to the tight acoustic coil it’s wrapped around, rather beams with a proud and loving streak of pure appreciation, its brevity, deft punch and minimalist lyric – add “fighting for good” to that title you have the words entire – as well a ringing curl of electric each contributing to an impression of basic awe and admiration toward its subject (notably, though nearly every track conceivably fits ‘that’ narrative only “Fighter” was written post-diagnosis). As opening statement it’s a stunner even though, by every thinkable metric, the record’s just getting started. There is simply no slack to be taken up anywhere on here, a fact the next track underlines with astonishing grace.
“The Candle And The Flame” consists of 9 songs written by Robert. Produced by Robert, Karin Bäumler and Louis Forster (The Goon Sax), “The recording sessions for the album were done sporadically over six months. Sometimes just one or two days a month. As that was all Karin’s strength and condition allowed her to do. So we had to record ‘live’, catching magical moments and going for ‘feel’. And that became the sound of the album.” says Robert.
