San Francisco Bay area trio Sour Widows share “I-90,” an explosive new single produced in collaboration with Oakland-based engineer Maryam Qudus (Spacemoth).
Written in 2017 after the devastating loss of their partner, Sour Widows’ Maia Sinaiko speaks to the song’s growth and development: “I wrote ‘I-90’ at a time when all I could do was make music alone in my room. Day to day life was a constant cycling through memories of places, feelings and experiences of which I was now the sole keeper. I found that the most mundane memories – driving in my partner’s car, the rural midwest landscapes of my college town – felt priceless, acting as vivid portals into what was now an irrevocable part of my life. The endlessness of grief supersedes the normal passage of time and the people we lose remain in places we can never go back to. It’s magic and terrible all at once; that is what this song is about.”
Maia Sinaiko – Guitar and Vocals Susanna Thomson – Guitar and Vocals Max Edelman – Drums Will Bohrer – Bass Maryam Qudus – Synth
“I-90” is the latest single from Sour Widows, out now on Exploding in Sound Records.
Crown Lands makes music that’s mighty, magical and vast, especially impressive since there are only two people in the band. So how do these young rockers achieve such widescreen sonics onstage, on songs like “Right Way Back” and “The Witching Hour (Electric Witch)”?
For one, sheer musical prowess. Crown Lands singer/drummer Cody Bowles commands cirrus-scaling pipes and hot beats. Meanwhile, Kevin Comeau conjures guitar storms, silky synths and contoured bass, often within the same tune. “One of our favourite bands was Rush,” Comeau says, “and they always joke about being the world’s smallest symphony. And we kind of wanted to one-up, or one-down them, and see how lush, orchestral and symphonic we could get with our rock sound.”
Standout Crown Lands single “Context: Fearless Pt. I” – not to mention the “2112″-esque title – certainly echoes Rush. The version on 2021 live-in-the-studio album “Odyssey Vol. 1″ is particularly stunning.
The saying goes “never meet your heroes.” But Bowles and Comeau have become friends with bassist/singer Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson, Rush’s surviving members after drummer/lyricist Neil Peart’s 2020 death at age 67 from brain cancer.
“Who you are as a person and how you treat people is just as important as what you create, and those guys walk through life so humbly,” Bowles says of Lifeson and Lee. “They’re still best buds after being on the road together for 40 years. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time on a tour, but that’s an amazing feat.”
Crown Lands served as Lifeson’s backing band at a 2021 charity gig. Leading up, Lifeson loaned Comeau his iconic white Gibson double-neck to take home. “I played (Rush classic) ‘Xanadu’ every night,” Comeau recalls. “He’s such a generous human being.”
The nine-song “Odyssey Vol. 1″ LP, which was also filmed and livestreamed, is the ideal entry point into Crown Land’s progressive hard rock. “Odyssey” presents songs from Crown Lands’ first three studio albums with that extra heat of a live performance and captured with crystal clarity. Comeau says “The Oracle,” an epic track from 2021 EP “White Buffalo” and also the closing performance on “Odyssey: Vol. 1,” is the most challenging song for Crown Lands to pull off onstage.
Bowles and Comeau have conflicted feelings about whether to eventually expand Crown Lands ranks. Bowles leans toward keeping things stripped down. Comeau, though, relishes the thought of getting to focus on one instrument onstage, if additional musicians were brought it, and Bowles moving from behind the drumkit to sing out front,
The title track from “White Buffalo” is a concise rocker likely to appeal to fans of famous bluesier rock duos like the Black Keys and White Stripes. But unlike those aforementioned two bands with guitar-playing frontmen, since Bowles is a singing drummer, it gives Crown Lands a different groove. Bowles says, “I feel like, having to play drums at the same time as singing, you intimately know all of the rhythms, accents and hits, so you unconsciously start making vocal riffs and hooks around those beats, so it does inform how the melodies are created.” Bowles credits “White Buffalo” producer David Bottrill, who previously worked with Tool and Peter Gabriel, with helping him expand his vocal phrasing.
Pittsburgh’s Feeble Little Horse is a four-piece band that writes intricately catchy, digitized noise pop songs. Formed by Sebastian Kinsler (guitar, production, vocals, bass) and Ryan Walchonski (guitar, vocals) in Ryan’s student apartment in South Oakland, PA in February 2021, the duo soon added Ryan’s roommate Jake Kelley on drums, and, inspired by a wave of creativity, the trio released their first EP – “Modern Tourism”, in May 2021, with artwork contributed by future member Lydia Slocum (vocals, bass).
After officially joining the band in June of that year as bassist and vocalist, Lydia added her own sweet vocals, rich melodies, and punchy lyrics to the band’s heady mix. From summer to fall of that year, the quartet played their first shows at DIY establishments across Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, gaining a word-of-mouth reputation as one of the most exciting new bands on the scene.
In October 2021 Feeble Little Horse released their first full-length album, “Hayday”, via Julia’s War Recordings.
Full of dense textures and exhilarating tension, the album’s eleven songs bristle with pent-up energy, the mood flipping between sweet noise-pop elements and more visceral discharges, the whole thing balanced on a knife-edge between the light and dark, the earnest and unhinged.
The band continues to expand and evolve in 2022, with new music on the horizon that looks set to redefine the band’s sound once again. Before that, however, comes a reissue of “Hayday“, in conjunction with Unstable – a record label started by the band. Available on vinyl for the first time, this reissue also features two bonus tracks: the previously unreleased “Dog Song 2” and a remix of “Termites” by Full Body 2.
Released October 25th, 2022
songs written, recorded, and mixed by Feeble Little Horse
After an eight-year odyssey of concept albums, and movie projects, The Who confronted the prospect of their seventh album with a mixture of exhaustion and boredom. Returning to the studio after the innovative but chaotic “Quadrophenia” tour, the band entered the studio in April 1975 as Pete Townshend battled a writer’s block, straining to write an album’s worth of new material.
Having mined generational identity as a core tenet for The Who’s music, Townshend was staring down too his 30th birthday midway through recording and worrying whether the group’s relevance was waning. A decade after The Who’s salad days as Mod role models, the band’s songwriter, lead guitarist and chief creative officer was at a loss for grand themes, turning his attention inward instead.
That shift veered from the conceptual and narrative scale that had shaped Townshend’s music since 1966’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” written as a quick fix to a tactical challenge—the need to pad a sophomore album that was still nearly 10 minutes shy of target length. To bridge that gap, he assembled a six-part suite chronicling a lover’s infidelity dubbed as a “mini-opera” that would inspire him to push past stand-alone songs over the course of the band’s next four albums.
From the phantom radio broadcast of “The Who Sell Out “(1967) to the band’s definitive, pioneering rock operas “Tommy”(1969) and “Quadrophenia”(1973), Townshend’s songwriting was rooted in world-building. Even the concept-free “Who’s Next” (1971) extracted its evergreen hits and perennial deep cuts from the rubble of the doomed, Utopian multi-media blueprint for Lifehouse project, which had collapsed under the conceptual weight of its screen, stage, record and interactive ambitions.
Four years later, Townshend began the new album with another relic exhumed from Lifehouse, “Slip Kid,” a cautionary rocker conceived as “a warning to young kids getting into music that would hurt them.” Blurring schoolroom and barracks, adolescence and combat, its lyrics depicted the plight of the title protagonist as “a soldier at 13…off to the civil war” that could work as parable for literal or figurative conflict.
Musically, the track retreats from the orchestral scale of previous albums, building a lean arrangement from a syncopated drum beat and cowbell accents into a shuffle stalked by Townshend’s electric guitars and guest Nicky Hopkins’ bright piano flourishes. Roger Daltrey’s defiant vocal lines are answered by Townshend’s more vulnerable laments on the price of freedom. “Slip Kid” has since seen praise from critics, appearing on lists of the best Who songs and often being described as underrated. It has appeared on multiple compilation albums since its release and has been performed live intermittently throughout the Who’s touring career, including an unrehearsed performance in 2016.
Any expectation that the opener’s title character will serve as avatar for a unifying narrative is banished pointedly on the succeeding track, a starkly autobiographical high point for the album that harnesses its confessional pain to Townshend’s passionate lead vocal and an energetic performance by the band. Townshend’s withering self-assessment juggles disgust, despair and ultimately fear as he castigates himself as “a faker, a paper clown” who habitually lies, exaggerates his challenges and loses sleep as he agonizes over the source of his problems, “drench[ing] myself in brandy” in an unsuccessful attempt to quell his fears, nodding to demon alcohol in a real-life detail distinct from the fashionable psychedelia that had surfaced from “Magic Bus” and “I Can See For Miles” onward. A cycle of self-recrimination and defensive justification leads him to a harrowing verdict:
“I take no blame I just can’t face my failure I’m nothing but a well fucked sailor You at home can easily decide what’s right By glancing very briefly at the songs I write But it don’t help me that you know This ain’t no way out… There ain’t no way out…”
The candor and ferocity of Townshend’s singing is reinforced by a kinetic arrangement powered by TheWho’s thundering rhythm section, with Keith Moon’s exuberant fusillade braided by John Entwistle’s cascading bass figures beneath Townshend’s acoustic rhythm guitar and layered electric leads and fills, lucidly captured by veteran Who producer and engineer Glyn Johns. To follow the exhilarating fireworks of “However Much I Booze,” the album seeks lighthearted relief in “Squeeze Box,” a loping celebration of sex that unspools as a nostalgic faux folk song that winks at a couple’s hearty carnal appetites. “Mama’s got a squeeze box she wears on her chest,” Daltrey observes, “and when daddy comes home, he never gets no rest, ’cause she’s playing all night…” The wordplay is anything but subtle as Townshend multitasks a lively “knees up” of accordion, banjo and guitar.
Eros invites a less genial, more sobering examination as Townshend reverts to his confessional mien on “Dreaming From the Waist,” replacing the optimism of the lusty elders of “Squeeze Box” with first-person anxiety over sexual self-control in the present and the spectre of diminished potency that lies in his future. While Roger Daltrey resumes his post as lead singer, the lyrics’ anguish over the primal drive to “hump,” “jump,” “heat up” and “cool down” echoes the internal struggle of “However Much I Booze,” as do the instrumental fireworks set off by the band, with the rhythm section again explosive in its force.
On balance, it’s The Who’s focused ensemble attack that sustains interest for much of …By Numbersin the quartet’s agile power. As with Who’s Next, the project’s thematic modesty pushes the band toward its playing, even as Townshend’s autobiographical musings pull the lyrics inward and away from any grand design. That leaves welcome room for Entwistle to vent the band’s collective anomie and have some fun in the bargain with “Success Story,” an unfiltered snapshot of a rock band’s grinding path to glory.
The Who bassist may have ceded the band’s thematic preoccupations to Townshend’s dominant role in songwriting, but Entwistle’s original songs routinely flexed arch humour, here informing an anthem that valorizes then thumbs its nose at career milestones: “Back in the studio to make our latest number one, take two-hundred-and-seventy-six, you know this used to be fun,” sings a bored Daltrey in a lyric tipping Entwistle’s hand to the same torpor felt by Townshend and his other band mates.
For the balance of the album, the focus remains internal, musing over the authenticity of love (“They Are All In Love”), grumbling about false company (“How Many Friends”) and rambling through a loose catalogue of quotidian pleasures in Townshend’s solo “Blue Red and Grey,” a ukulele reverie he would later claim to revile.
That sequence adds a melancholy reserve to much of the album’s second side that gives way to “In a Hand or a Face,” a concluding rocker that regains the band’s more exuberant energy.
On his first solo album three years earlier, Townshend’s priorities were stipulated in the title, “Who Came First”. With his retreat from high concept on …By Numbers, his gravitation toward the personal would bubble up more frequently, both in subsequent Who albums and the parallel solo discography he would enrich in years ahead. The penultimate album for the original quartet, “The Who By Numbers” sustained the band’s reach into the top 10 on album charts upon its October 3rd, 1975 U.K. release , its modesty welcomed rather than critiqued by the rock press.
A thirty-minute trip for the post-Internet consumer, “Air Guitar” calibrates inventive pop hooks for the indie rock lover, instantly accessible yet intricately arranged. The album draws a line through the history of pop stylistics from 80s new wave [Last Resort] and 90s power-pop [Burn Book] to 00s sk8er punk and radio pop [Air Guitar]. Further informed by the cosmopolitan, culturally astute ethos of PC Music – Sobs connects the uptempo of Shibuya’s Advantage Lucy [Lucked Out], heart-on-sleeve indie rock of Bettie Serveert and Big Star [World Implode], with the eclecticism of New York’s Darla Records [Friday Night] to define the pulse of indie-pop then and now.
released October 26th, 2022
Sobs is Celine Autumn, Jared Lim and Raphael Ong.
With: Shaun Khiu [Drums, Percussion] Zhang Bo [Bass, Additional Guitars]
There are times in our life when we feel magic in the air. When new love arrives, or we find ourselves lost in a moment of creation with others who share our vision. A sense that: this is who I want to be. This is what I want to share. It’s a fleeting feeling and one that Kyle Thomas, the singer-songwriter who records and performs as King Tuff, found himself longing for in the spring of 2020.
But knowing he couldn’t simply recreate this time in his life at will, Thomas—who hails from Brattleboro,Vermont—set out to write a love letter to those cherished moments of inspiration and to the small town that formed him. The one where he first nurtured his song writing impulses, bouncing ideas off other like-minded artists. The kind of place where the changing of the seasons always delivered a sense of perspective and fresh artistic inspiration. Where he felt a deeper connection with nature and sense of community that had once been so close at hand.
“I wanted to make an album to remind myself that life is magical,” he reflects.
And so, Thomas seized upon his memories, creating what he calls “an album about love and nature and youth.”
The result is “Smalltown Stardust”, a spiritual, tender and ultimately joyous record that might come as a shock to those with only a passing knowledge of the artist’s back catalogue. On “Smalltown Stardust”, Thomas takes us on his journey to a place where past and present collide, where he can be a dreamer in love with all that he sees. Images of his youth abound: from Route 91 which runs through his hometown (in “Smalltown Stardust”); to Redtooth, a spectre who used to roam the streets (“Bandits Of Blue Sky”); to old friends, old haunts and old dreams (“Always Find Me”); to Vermont’s Rock River, which gave its name to a song of a torch still burning for past love: “Those days are gone and we can’t rewind/ Cuz people grow and places change/ But my love for you will never fade away.”
But at the core of “Smalltown Stardust” is Thomas’s desire to commune with nature on a spiritual level. Images of the natural world, from blizzards to green mountains to cloudy days, fill the songs and create a setting unmistakably far away from Los Angeles. “I consider nature to be my religion,” he explains, and “Smalltown Stardust” is nothing if not a spiritual exploration.
Thomas’s identification as a sort of eternal spiritual seeker is underscored in one of the album’s sweetest moments, “A Meditation,” which features a home audio recording of Thomas as an eight year old, trying his hand at leading a meditation. It’s a journey that he continues to this day, as he intones on “Portrait of God”: “Walking in the woods, wading in the river” and “breathing in the mountain air” before heading back to a place where he finds himself “Oil painting in my garage/ Let my colours flow/ I’m working on my portrait of God.”
While so much of “Smalltown Stardust” invokes idealized traces and places of Thomas’s past, the album’s recording process made his communal vision a reality. Thomas’s Los Angeles home in 2020 formed a micro-scene of sorts, with housemates Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) and Sasami Ashworth recording their own heralded albums (2021’s “Fun House” and 2022’s “Squeeze“, respectively both worthy of checking out) at the same time.
A shared spirit dominated an era spent largely on the premises, with Thomas serving as engineer and contributor to both records, and Ashworth working as co-producer on “Smalltown Stardust”. Thomas describes the time with a fitting metaphor: “I’ve always thrived around other people making things. You want to bloom with each other.” Ashworth’s contributions are vital to the album: she co-wrote a majority of the record and contributed vocals, arrangements, and instrumentation to each song. As Thomas notes, “I tried to follow her vision a lot. It helps to open your world to collaborators. You always get something completely different than you would have expected.”
With the gorgeous orchestral tones of “Love Letter to Plants,” it’s immediately clear that Thomas is declaring a wider vision of what his music can be. Gone are many of the squalling guitars of previous King Tuff records, replaced with thoughtful, tender touches of cello and violin on “Love Letter to Plants,”“Pebbles In A Stream” and “The Bandits Of Blue Sky”; a plaintive saxophone on “Always Find Me”; and orchestral vocal harmonies with Ashworth that lift the songs to a celestial plane.
(Though the rollicking, joyous leads on “Portrait of God” show Thomas hasn’t lost his touch on guitar.) On “How I Love,” Thomas makes clear that all of this is by design: “So lost in nothing but noise for so many years, I forgot to love.”
In the end, “Smalltown Stardust” is not merely a nostalgia trip. In making the record, Thomas not only conjured a special time in his life, he found new inspiration, surrounded by a small circle of collaborators and a sense of love and wonder for nature. If the first King Tuff record was content to merely state Thomas was no longer dead, “Smalltown Stardust” is a paean to what that life means. A statement of belief and a hymnal to the magic still to behold all around us. “I’m a different person now than I was 20 years ago when I first started it. But oddly, when I first started the band, it was more like this,” he says. Which is to say, things have come full circle. Or as Thomas intones on “The Wheel”:
“Ooh we were just kids then… Caught up in the turning of the wheel…. And it’s coming ‘round again.”
“I came across this Emily Dickinson poem and found it to be the most vivid description of an inner world I’ve ever encountered. It became an inspiration for the songs on Inside Problems. Who better to sing it with than Phoebe Bridgers? I sent her a demo and so, here we are. Thanks to Ms. Dickinson’s publisher at Harvard University Press for allowing us to use this poem. As I understand, her poems weren’t published as she intended them until the 1950s – that is, without the heavy hand of her male editors.” – Andrew Bird.
Andrew Bird is an internationally acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, whistler and song writer who picked up his first violin at the age of four and spent his formative years soaking up classical repertoire completely by ear. As a teen Bird became interested in a variety of styles including early jazz, country blues and folk music, synthesizing them into his unique brand of pop.
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard seem determined that their fans should have very little free time. “Changes” is the upcoming 23rd studio album by Australian psychedelic rock band, Who knows how long it will take to fully absorb and process the five albums the six-member Melbourne psych-rock outfit has released this year alone? “Changes”, the band’s third album to be released this coming month, is a departure from the psychedelic guitar noodling of early October’s “Ice, Death, Planets,Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava”, toward a jazzier amalgam of influences like Queen, Stevie Wonder and the Beastie Boys.
The album was first conceived in 2017. That same year, the band released five studio albums “Changes” was supposed to be the final one, however the band didn’t think the album was finished, and instead released “Gumboot Soup”. The eventual release of the album contains “ExplodingSuns” as it was recorded back in 2017. As stated by band member Stu Mackenzie: “Every song is built around this one chord progression – every track is like a variation on a theme.” The band had been “tinkering with” Changes since then, calling the album “not necessarily our most complex record, but every little piece and each sound you hear has been thought about a lot.”
Only those familiar with 2017’s “Sketches of East Brunswick”, KGLW’s collaboration with American stoner jazz collective Mild High Club, would even suspect upon hearing the opening of the album, during which a fast hi-hat pattern chases a slithery piano melody, that this blue note-inflected noodling was emanating from a gizzard of any kind. “Changes” was originally going to be one long song. That became the album’s 13-minute opening track “Change”, which was described as a “odyssey touching on kaleidoscopic ’60s pop, colour-splattered prog-rock fireworks, and floaty, keyboard-driven retro R&B”. Mackenzie described the following songs as building out of the first track: “Hate Dancin” is built out of one of the chord progressions from “Change”. And then “Astroturf” is built out of one of the chord progressions in “Change” as well. And so is “Short Change”, the last song. Every song on the album is built out of a section of “Changes”.
During the 13-minute epic, synth sounds transform the strange soundscape into a spacey groove replete with electric piano, tubby bass and whispery lyrics.
“Change for its own sake/ Uniformity gives me a bellyache,” guitarist-singer Stu Mackenzie sings. The song is sprawling but remains thoroughly chillaxed, at times punctuated by mellow scatting, until the huge rock outro reminds listeners they have a head with which to bang. The album’s other extended jam, “Astroturf,” which clocks in at seven and a half minutes, is pinioned by syncopated drumming and keys. Just imagine an uptempo “The Virgin Suicides” soundtrack from Air. Whispery vocals are accompanied by blasts of horns. During the second half of the song, a funky flute dances with bubbly synth bass. Here, a band that earlier this month released an album that evoked comparisons to Santana, Yes and Magma seems equally at home dipping into the vibe from the Beastie Boys and classic vinyl.
The album’s five other tracks all set up their sonic base camps around vintage electric piano grooves and bumping drumbeats. “Hate Dancin” calls to mind Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend” with its major key cheeriness and plunky Fender Rhodes piano sounds.
Standouts include “No Body,” which feels like a funky guitar solo, a further twist on Ween’s take on Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” The song’s huge hi-hat blasts add a touch of Yoshimi-era Flaming Lips sound to the sonic stew. “Gondii” sports a Krautrock vibe with Motorik-inspired beat and bleepy synths sounds. Mackenzie’s sort of new wave sounding vocals manage to sound mechanized but soulful.
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard seems to operate almost like a bacterium or other single-cell organism, in that the band’s growth seems exponential rather than linear. Like a bacterial culture spreading to cover the bottom of the petri dish, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard is constantly exploring new musical landscapes, and like any good explorers, sending back plenty of maps of these territories. Good things come to those who wait, and the magnificent “Changes” is worth every one of the 2,628,000 minutes King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard invested in it. Soaked in the warm sonics of 70s r’n’b and guided by simple chord-changes that contain multitudes and rounding out another remarkable year for the group, their fifth album of 2022 is a luminous, soft-pop marvel. Come lose yourself in its slow-cooked brilliance.
The Fat Angel Sings 