Richmond, Virginia’s James Goodson project Dazy, is back with another new single ahead of “Out of Body” due out October 28th, on Lame-O Records. the music video, “On My Way” is the third single off Dazy’s debut album after “Split” and “Rollercoaster Ride.” Dazy is for the people. People who know the words to every Punk-O-Rama compilation. People with an emergency Oasis reunion fund. People who will talk your ear off about Dookie. People who worship at the altar of the Jesus And Mary Chain’s proto-shoegaze. People who love ’60s pop (and can tolerate full-throttle guitar distortion). People who dig the current wave of independent power pop, led by the likes of Mo Troper and Young Guv.
Dazy goes with “On My Way,” staying true to his vision of combining “big room, widescreen hooks with homemade, bedroom production,” as press notes put it. Goodson shrugs off existential dread (“Comet won’t miss, but I’ll just be on my way / Spreading that stress, but I’ll just be on my way”) over a drum machine beat and blown-out guitar and bass, eventually whammy-ing his way into a pocket of spacey psych-rock.
A catchy record packed with quick, fuzzy songs, Dazy’s official debut LP “OUTOFBODY”builds on the success of last year’s compilation “MAXIMUMBLASTSSUPERLOAD”. pointing out his influences as “uncomplicated music that you can return to endlessly.” That’s a great way to describe “OUTOFBODY”. It’s got a thick, 1990s power pop sound, and would sound perfect in a coming-of-age movie or on a ‘90s radio station. Goodson is a one-man band, recording every vocal and instrumental on the album by himself, but the album still sounds huge. “OUTOFBODY” is meant to be turned all the way up on your car stereo so you can let your mind swim into the distorted guitars.
Feedback and guitar fuzz hang in the air alongside Goodson’s vocal harmonies, a rare unmoored moment that he follows with one last crashing, power-pop shout along.
Dazy from the album ‘Out Of Body’, out October 28th 2022 on Lame-O Records
On April 8th, Matador Records will release “Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal”, an exhaustive 45-track reissue of the band’s much-loved fifth and final album. The new special edition compiles the remastered original album, B-sides, home demos, rehearsal tapes, era-appropriate live recordings, and even the rough tracks from Pavement’s scrapped session at Sonic Youth’s Echo Canyon studio. Altogether, it features 28 unreleased tracks.
Originally released in 1999, “Terror Twilight” marked a departure from Pavement’s established operating methods. Which is to say that it was recorded with a big-time producer in an expensive studio. However, for all the talk of “polish” and “precision” it’s still very much a Pavement record. And a great one. Like every Pavement album that preceded it, “Terror Twilight” thrills and confounds. Often at the same time. Twenty-two years on, the songs remain moody, strange, and eminently deserving of re-celebration.
The 4xLP and 2xCD editions will include a book with never-before-seen photos and commentary/context from band members Mark Ibold, Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, Spiral Stairs, and Steve West as well as producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck).
Classical-musician-turned-rockstar-turned-cult-icon John Cale is releasing his first album in a decade early next year. The new batch of original songs from the former Velvet Underground member is called “Mercy”and it will arrive January 20th via Double Six and Domino. He’s collaborated with Animal Collective, Sylvan Esso, Laurel Halo, Tei Shi, and Actress across the 12-track project, with the Weyes Blood–featuring lead single “Story of Blood” .
“I’d been listening to Weyes Blood’s latest record and remembered Natalie’s puritanical vocals,” Cale said. “I thought if I could get her to come and sing with me on the ‘Swing your Soul’ section, and a few other harmonies, it would be beautiful. What I got from her was something else! Once I understood the versatility in her voice, it was as if I’d written the song with her in mind all along. Her range and fearless approach to tonality was an unexpected surprise. There’s even a little passage in there where she’s a dead-ringer for Nico.”
The single comes with a video directed by Jethro Waters. It depicts Cale and Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering engaging in ritualistic activities with pigments, pearls, and silk ribbons.
John Cale – “Story Of Blood” feat. Weyes Blood from the forthcoming album ‘Mercy’ out 20th January 2023 on Double Six / DominoRecordings.
A few months into the pandemic, Courtney Marie Andrews released her staggeringly vulnerable album “Old Flowers“, which was both a predecessor to the countless pandemic-spawned confessionals artists would begin to churn out soon after and a somber shift in mood from the more reverently Laurel-Canyon-descended themes and tones of “May Your Kindness Remain“. Turns out it was also a stepping stone toward even more personal and unique music, as proven with the newly released “Loose Future“.
Arriving today via Fat Possum, Andrews’ sixth LP leans further into intimate autobiography and experimental sounds with the help of co-producer Sam Evian and additional contributions from the likes of Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear and Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman. The result is often unexpected within Andrews’ thick back catalogue of songs, though rarely does the music wander outside the parameters of freewheeling, heartfelt, densely wooded folk-rock established on the opening title track. Andrews took the time to walk us track by track through the new LP, detailing the lyrical and instrumental impetus for each song in the collection.
1. “Loose Future”
These words slipped out of my mouth one evening while speaking playfully with a lover, and we both agreed they needed to be a song about the unknowns of bracing for any romantic endeavor. We always want to play it cool with love, but deep down our inner children are always afraid. In the studio, Sam Evian and I wanted to create the hopeful and free feeling of that sentiment.
2. “Older Now”
I went on a disastrous date, which ended sweetly despite the awkwardness of it. When I got to my room, this song poured out. It’s about that pivotal point in life where you’re ready for something different, but you still have these old patterns you can’t let go of. This was the first song I took to Sam. I declared the recording needed lots of percussion, lots of harmonies, and lots of summer feelings. Recording this song was the beginning of the whole record.
3. “On the Line”
A wake-up call, when you realize you give to no avail. A song for those who know all about the perils of avoidant attachment. Sam and I went into the deep when recording this one. We had one memorable night where we smoked a lot of grass and drank too much whiskey. In the morning I tried to run it off and landed on the studio couch where I laid down a hauntingly unexpected whistle that became the sonic marker of the song.
4. “Satellite”
A love song without caveats. I wanted to look forward, and fall in love with the mystery of someone. Let love in, without questioning or instigating how it might hurt me. Sonically, I wanted to go to space. This kind of love isn’t earthbound.
5. “These Are the Good Old Days”
This is a saying my uncle always says to try and remind us of the beauty of the now. I tend to always live in a constant state of hindsight being 20/20, and I wanted to write this as a sort of mantra to honour my family’s sentiment. I also genuinely wanted to write a feel-good song after such a dark few years. Even in the saddest of times, there are little moments you’ll always look back on with a fondness that don’t seem so sad after all—they seem perfectly placed.
6. “Thinkin’ on You”
When you tell someone you miss them, it implies something is missing from your life. I was ready for the level up from missing. When you’re thinking on someone, you’re also allowing love for yourself, within the context of a relationship. You’re saying, “I’m here too, and I can hold space for both of us.”
7. “You Do What You Want”
We all have that friend that gets us into trouble and pushes our personal boundaries. I was reminiscing on a person like that in my own life, and how many times I bent for this person—in the end, I still loved them despite this.
8. “Let Her Go”
This is a love song for someone whose freedom you don’t want to change or narrow. It’s about accepting this person exactly as they are, and choosing to love them for those very things you cannot contain. We used the first take I sang of this song because it felt raw and unencumbered. Josh Kauffman surprised us on this one with so many beautiful and unexpected textures.
9. “Change My Mind”
I’d been listening to many Tin Pan Alley writers in 2020, and those memory-space melodies were swirling around my brain. One day, I was hanging out and writing with my friend Kate York. When I came around, I told her I wanted to write a song about not trusting healthy love, and she knew exactly how I felt. We wrote this in 20 minutes at her house, and both felt like crying after.
10. “Me & Jerry”
This is a song about having sex with someone you love—how it transcends your headspace and is purely the physical heart space. Sam and I had so much fun creating this one. I recorded the choir at the end in his unfinished barn in upstate New York. I stood in the sun with the doors wide open and sang my heart out.
‘Loose Future’, out on Fat Possum Records on October 7th
To anybody wondering about my journey and the ups & downs that came with it, I’m thrilled to announce my forthcoming memoir Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You, coming 25th April 23.
If the first volume of post-Clash Strummer solo work that was “001″ was a cluttered bummer, “002”—with his radical Latin-inspired rock ensemble The Mescaleros—was still cluttered and crowded, but a hummer filled with soul, poetry, funk, sloganeering, punk, folk, Conjunto, and miraculously original ideas all told through the lens of Joe’s cigarette-and-bourbon stained/strained vocals. And while having Strummer die at all is sorrowful, that he passed away while working on yet another Mescaleros record feels downright cruel. 2022 marks 20 years since the passing of the legendary Joe Strummer. While best known as the frontman for The Clash, between 1999-2002 Strummer produced some of his most exciting work alongside The Mescaleros.
Strummer’s solo career, too, has often gotten lost in the haze of various indie labels—a mixed-bag, ethno-musicality that existed from the time following the final Clash album (1985’s genuinely awful “Cut the Crap”) to his passing in 2002. From 1999 on, his second great band, The Mescaleros guitarist Antony Genn, bassist Scott Shields, percussionist Pablo Cook, and other assorted Brit instrumentalists—became Strummer’s primary means of interpreting his often free-associative, occasionally hyper-Guthrie-like lyricism with their own drunky brand of Pogues-meets-Bad-Seeds intensity and theatricality.
“Joe Strummer 002: The Mescaleros Years” is the first comprehensive collection highlighting this intense period of creativity and brings together the albums “Rock Art and the X-Ray Style” (1999), “Global A Go-Go” (2001), the posthumous “Streetcore” (2003), and “Vibes Compass“, a brand-new compilation of 15 B-sides and rarities, including never before heard tracks like ‘Ocean of Dreams’ (featuring Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols on guitar) and early demos of some of the Mescaleros best-loved tracks (“The Road To Rock ‘N’ Roll,” “X-Ray Style” and more), through to some of the original recordings from Joe’s last ever sessions (“Coma Girl (Outtake),” “Fantastic” and “Get Down Moses (Outtake)”), all in one complete boxset.
By the time of that third Mescaleros album, Strummer and company had finally settled into a unique groove roughed up by Strummer’s punk-folkish roots. While “Rock Art” finds the still-new team making worldly rhythmic rock below Strummer’s dense refrigerator-magnet poetry (“Global” is similar, if not for some acoustic folk thrown into its West Indian/Latin percussion-driven mix), “Streetcore” is where they caught fire. Driven more directly by rocksteady Jamaican rhythms than they were on their first two albums, and with The Clash’s old friend Tymon Dogg as part of the ensemble, the group head loudly into a mix of fired-up garage-punk with deep reggae accents.
All albums are remastered by Grammy Award winner Paul Hicks (The Beatles / The Rolling Stones / John Lennon / David Bowie) and are packaged in a richly curated boxset, featuring extensive new liner notes and interviews with Joe’s friends, collaborators and The Mescaleros band members, plus never-before-seen handwritten notes, lyrics, and drawings by Joe taken from the Joe Strummer Archive.
Both the 4CD and 7LP boxes include four reproduction lyric sheets and chord charts, and the LP box includes an exclusive 12”x12” art print. Joe Strummer 002 serves as a loving tribute to Strummer’s final musical output, released in celebration of what would have been his 70th birthday year.
In May of this year, Florence + the Machine, led by frontwoman Florence Welch, released what could be described as their best album to date, “Dance Fever” rich, diverse work of baroque pop headlined by addictive singles “King,” “My Love,” and the unrelenting “Free.” However, one of the album’s deeper cuts, “Heaven Is Here,” is already getting a second life with a brand new remix concocted by British post-punk quintet IDLES.
IDLES bring a haunting element of production to an already operatic song. The result is a balance of sorrow and strangeness emphasized by Welch’s powerful vocal performance and IDLES’s distorted tonal arrangements. The songs of “Dance Fever” are cathartic in their own unique ways, but IDLES’s translation of that catharsis brings more profundity to the swell and release of thematic and expositional tensions.
“IDLES are one of my favourite bands and I’ve been wanting to work on something together for a while,” Welch said. “It might be strange for people to think but I see a lot of symbiosis in what we do in terms of live performance. Connection above all else. Joyful rage and togetherness. A lot of people wished that ‘Heaven Is Here’ was longer. And I think IDLES have done the perfect job at turning it into a much-demanded dance track that loses nothing of the hex at its heart.”
The song originally appeared on Florence Welch and company’s 2022 album “Dance Fever”.
Tegan and Sara (sisters Tegan and Sara Quin) have shared a new song, “Fucking Up What Matters,” via a video for the single that spoofs how music videos are made. It’s the band’s first single for Mom + Pop Records, which has announced they’ve signed the band, and is the first taste of their yet-to-be-announced upcoming 10th album.
John Congleton (Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and Future Islands) co-produced the song with Tegan and Sara. Tony Wolski directed the video.
Tegan Quin had this to say about the song in a press release: “‘Fucking Up What Matters’ felt like an ode to the moment in your life when you realize that you have most, if not all of the things you wanted and you start to think about what would happen if you just walked away from it all. It’s the moment in the middle of the night when you start to daydream about something else, something you never imagined. It’s the feeling you have when you think you might have hit a new low, and yet you’ve never felt so good. Sometimes it’s admitting that you can’t stop yourself from fucking up what matters, that you feel your strongest. And as my mom would say, it’s often when we’re fucking up what matters, that we’re learning the most about ourselves.”
Of moving from their previous label, Sire/Warner, to Mom + Pop, the band collectively say: “Michael Goldstone signed us to Sire/Warner in 2006. We had just made “The Con” and felt like the vision Goldie and the team at Sire had for us and the album were a good fit. But soon after he signed us, he left to start Mom + Pop. We never held it against him. But joked that one day we’d work together for real. So it was with great enthusiasm that we agreed to sign to Mom + Pop when our deal with Warner ended in 2021. We look forward to being back at an indie label, on a brilliant roster, with Goldie and the label’s incredible team helping us start this next chapter in our lives with the release of our tenth album.”
In February, Tegan and Sara reissued their 2004 breakout album, “So Jealous”. The reissue featured acoustic re-recordings of each song from the original album.
From their masterfully titled, anthemic “Shit Opus,” to their growling, distorted guitar, Shutups could be effectively described as a group of anti-establishment California indie punks with a vested interest in encouraging capitalism’s implosion. Leaving it there would also be a disservice to the deliberation, complexity, and artistry in their music.
Recording started in the summer of 2019, two months after releasing “Zen“. Our second session was in February 2020, a few weeks before lockdown began. We shelved the album and started working on “EP 5“. “EP 5″ boiled over into 2021’s “Six and Seven“. On occasion we’d hack away on “Vomit“, tracking and re-tracking, editing and re-editing, several songs getting reworked many times over and/or scrapped. It felt like the album we’d never finish. Mostly due to the positive feedback received from playing these songs live and sharing demos with friends & family, we finally pulled it together and finished it.
The first single “Endless Heaven”, a quiet/loud/quiet chugger offset by sticky finger-picked guitars, clave, timpani, falsetto vocals and strings. It’s a summer song, but for the more mundane moments of summer (sitting in hot cars, power outages, sunburns, days lost to the void). It’s about dissociating and returning mid sentence. Bud played the gong.
The groups’ new album holds true to the distinctive niches they carved out to begin with, from bedroom pandemic production to post-isolation DIY maximalism. “I can’t eat nearly as much as I want to vomit” presents a very human expression of reality in spite of what is, overwhelmingly, a bad time––serving us a sort of seething, technicolour alternative sound that’s both intimate, furious, and inarguably cool.
“I can’t eat nearly as much as I want to vomit”, out now via Kill Rock Stars.
On Beat Radio’s last album, 2016’s “Take It Forever”, bandleader Brian Sendrowitz offered up a succinct chestnut of self-examination: “I’ll always be that singer / Who sings the words like they mean too much,” Sendrowitz declared on the rousing “Song for Camden Power. “That’s because the words always mean too much in my mind.” For Sendrowitz Beat Radio’s singer, songwriter, and only permanent member—that may well be a statement of purpose. Since starting Beat Radio back in 2005, Sendrowitz has excelled at writing open-hearted indie-rock songs that double as life rafts, carrying him through the tumultuous waters of adulthood, grief, and familial trauma.
You don’t juggle songwriting with raising five kids while recording demos in a laundry room if you don’t believe every word, and on “Real Love”, Beat Radio’s sixth album (and first since 2006 with founding member Philip Jimenez), it’s clear that Sendrowitz does. Songs ripple with catharsis and hard-fought empathy. Choruses reach out for understanding through the pain and disconnect.
Put simply, it is Beat Radio’s best and most honest album yet. “There was nothing to hold back anymore,” says Sendrowitz. “This whole record just feels like the record I was working towards my whole musical career. I went all in emotionally in a deeper way than I was capable of before.”
With a textured sound that splits the difference between lo-fi indie-pop, folk jangle, and emo vulnerability, Beat Radio grew out of Sendrowitz’s years as a mainstay in the early 2000s New York singer-songwriter scene. After growing up on Long Island playing in emo bands (one of which included a young Daryl Palumbo of future Glassjaw fame), Sendrowitz became obsessed with Bob Dylan and began performing in coffeehouses during college. In 2005, aiming to move beyond his folksinger origins and write anthemic pop songs with a more raggedy edge, he formed Beat Radio with producer/multi-instrumentalist Philip Jimenez (formerly of Wheatus).
“Real Love” (out this fall via Totally Real Records) represents a new beginning. For one thing, it marks a reunion between Sendrowitz and Jimenez more than a decade after the latter’s departure. Sendrowitz describes their collaboration as “a trust exercise”; he would send over skeletal demos and, in the hands of Jimenez and his wife Kathryn Froggatt, they would blossom into ornate indie-rock gems. “Real Love” is flush with lush sonic flourishes—the rustling banjos on “Lowlands,” the climactic sax on “Radioactive,” the elegiac violins and layered harmonies on the title track—that rank it as Beat Radio’s most fully realized record yet. At the same time, the record injects a new urgency into Sendrowitz’s songwriting, woven from several years of heartbreak and rigorous self-examination. “I think I had a very shallow narrative of my life. That just started to unravel,” the musician says. In 2020, when Sendrowitz began writing “Real Love”, he felt his world tilting off its axis. A dear friend died unexpectedly at 37. Struggles in his marriage had come to a head, forcing him to question his identity as a husband and father. And, as the new decade began, Sendrowitz went through a painful fracturing with family, which resulted in him becoming estranged from his parents—a profoundly difficult decision that proved necessary for his emotional well-being. “The songs on this record are way more vulnerable and more connected to my real life,” Sendrowitz says. “I think I’ve learned how to be more emotionally honest as a person.”
On the stirring centerpiece “Family Name,” Sendrowitz confronts intergenerational trauma and what it means to accept a fraught family background (“The mistakes I’ve made and this psychic pain / Is a legacy in the family name”), while the jangly pop of “Protection Spells” finds the singer reflecting on a decision to sever family ties: “Needed to walk away / To save myself / And sleep to dream of better days.” “Solid Ground” is a somber meditation on a marriage strained though unbroken by crisis, while the immensely moving title track is the most honest kind of love song, which is to say, one that reckons with the difficulty of making love last across decades and life changes: “We’ve got a real love / Sometimes it ain’t enough / No matter what it takes / I’m never giving up.” While that lyric was written for his wife, Liz, a similar sense of dogged determination describes Sendrowitz’s songwriting career. At 44, he knows he’s not a buzzy new band. But the songs have never felt more meaningful; the stakes have never seemed higher. “When I look at bands that feel like they started to coast, it’s because they don’t really have to prove themselves anymore. For me, I was just trying to go all in,” Sendrowitz says.
Songs written by Brian Sendrowitz
Featuring: Brian Sendrowitz – guitars, vocals / Philip A. Jimenez – drums, guitars, synths, vocals, percussion, banjo, bass / Kathryn Froggatt – backing-vocals, bass, tambourine Additional contributions by: Tim Lannen – vocals on “Weightless” / Drew Danburry – saxophone on “Radioactive” / BryanBruchman – guitars on “Harder to Pretend” / Tom Urwin – bass on “Harder to Pretend”
The Fat Angel Sings 