The Fat Angel Sings

The Velvet Underground toured extensively in 1969, but the band set up shop in San Francisco in November and early December for a series of 18 nights over four separate engagements, the first at the Family Dog, the rest at the fabled North Beach club the Matrix, opened in a one-time pizza parlour by Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin in 1965. Over the course of their residency, which began November 11th, the club’s four-track recorder, manned by owner Peter Abram from a booth at the side of the stage, was rolling through much of it. The Velvet Underground – The Complete Matrix Tapes, a 42-track box captures the highlights of two nights – November 26th, the day Richard Nixon authorized a bill to create a draft lottery, and November 27th, Thanksgiving – as detailed in Rolling Stone editor David Fricke’s liner notes in the box set booklet.

These shows, taped several months after the release of the third, self-titled Velvet Underground album earlier that year, and before heading to the studio to record “Loaded” the following spring, featured the post-John Cale incarnation of the band, with newest member Doug Yule on bass and keyboards joining Reed and remaining members guitarist Sterling Morrison and percussionist Maureen Tucker.

Some versions of these performances were first issued in 1974 by Mercury Records as part of a double LP, “1969 The Velvet Underground Live”, while other audience recorded versions released were taken from cassette tapes made by the late Bob Quine, a huge fan and, at the time, a St. Louis law student who later went on to play guitar for both Richard Hell and Lou Reed. Quine was at a number of the shows during their stint at the club, and his cache eventually was released in 2001 as “The Quine Tapes“.

Now, for the first time, “The Velvet Underground – The Complete Matrix Tapes” features 42 recordings that have been mixed down directly from the original in-house multi-tracks, including the 18 tracks featured in a Super Deluxe Edition of the Velvets’ third album and nine previously unreleased performances marking the first time all the available tapes will be released commercially. As can be heard, the shows were intimate, and features early versions of yet-to-be-recorded songs like “Sweet Jane”, “New Age“ and “Rock and Roll”. Highlights includes previously unreleased versions of “Some Kinda Love” and “Sweet Jane” plus the almost 40-minute-long “Sister Ray“.

The Velvet Underground Trust, under license to Universal Music Enterprises, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc. Released on: 2015-11-20

“Only The Strong Survive” is the new album from Bruce Springsteen, and his first new album since 2020’s “Letter To You“. The album is a collection of soul music gems, that celebrate the legendary songbooks of Gamble and Huff, Motown, Stax and many more.

“Only The Strong Survive” features vocals from Springsteen and instrumentation primarily from his longtime producer Ron Aniello. The album also features guest vocals from Sam Moore, as well as contributions from The E Street Horns, full string arrangements by Rob Mathes and backing vocals from Soozie Tyrell, Lisa Lowell, Michelle Moore, Curtis King Jr., Fonzi Thornton and Dennis Collins. 

Vinyl versions are 140 gram double albums with 3 sides of music and an etched side 4. Housed in a gatefold sleeve with a 12″ x 24″ poster,

Watch the brand new video for Bruce’s cover of the Commodore’s “Nightshift”

Taken from the forthcoming album “Only The Strong Survive”

Channelling The Strokes with an effortlessly cool, understated, boxy indie vibe, The Horn’s new single ‘Do It Now’ is an example of everything which is great about this breakout up and coming five piece.

Infectious energy, tight guitar lines, catchy vocal lines and subtle depths, the band manage to tread the line between reflective, thoughtful lyricism and simplistic yet affecting indie soundscapes to create music that is effortlessly enjoyable on an a number of levels. Only the bands fourth single, ‘Do It Now’ possess a strikingly complete sound, complimenting the tracks which have come before and cementing the fact that they know their sound and have carved their own unique sonic lane.

Talking about the single, the bands lead vocalist Jonny Taylor shares: “I think it expresses the frustration, which is perhaps that of not being allowed to do something, waiting in line, or just the sheer impatience of what it is to be a human being on this planet.”

The Skids album “Days In Europa” has been re-packaged and re-released. The original cover with a painting evoking the look of the Berlin’36 Olympics apparently stirred up some people into thinking the band had pro-Nazi leanings. Nonsense! Lead singer Richard Jobson told Sounds, “We checked things out very carefully, even the gothic script we used on the cover, which supposedly has Nazi connotations, is actually Jewish!” He went on to say they even had a call from some British fascists who offered to give money to the band if they’d wave a few flags about. Instead of swimming against the current of public opinion, no matter how misinformed, The Skids have just repackaged the album with a nice ’20s style painting of high society people.”

‘Days in Europa’ by the Skids. Now over 30 years old and (depressingly) it stands up and over modern music, and in most cases, crunches them underfoot like beetles. ‘Days in Europa’ is a classic. I don’t know any other way to put it.
Despite being produced by the bombastic, Bill Nelson, it breathes joy and celebration.
It’s a happy album. It has loads of notions and possibilities streaming from its grooves. It’s an ideas album. Ideas of being brilliant electro-dance rock music which hasn’t dated.

‘The Olympian’, ‘Charade’, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘Home of the Saved’, ‘Thanatos’, it’s an arresting roll-call of literary mightiness and majesty. Extra tracks include the rare ‘Masquerade/Aftermath Dub’ and the Volgar Boatmen wannabe ‘Grey Parade’.

The Skids being Scottish, there’s a definite air of bagpipes at Bannockburn, claymores at Culloden about some of the melodies. This, clashing stridently with Nelson’s pulsing euro-rock supervision, is what gives  it’s memorable uniqueness .

Singer Richard Jobson eventually ended up doing poetry and directing films; and guitarist Stuart Adamson formed the stadium rock act Big Country before despairingly topping himself over a woman .
Forever though, their crowning glory is ‘Days in Europa’ and not even that old critic-killer – time – can take it away from them.

After eight years away, The Arcs will return in January with a new album “Electrophonic Chronic”, the band’s first album since its lauded 2015 debut “Yours, Dreamily”. The project helmed by Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) on Thursday shared “Keep On Dreamin”, the lead single from the album due to arrive from Dan’s own Easy Eye Sound.

“Electrophonic Chronic” features The Arcs’ full original line-up of Auerbach, Leon Michels, Nick Movshon, Homer Steinweiss, and the late Richard Swift, who passed away in 2018. The 12-track offering was recorded largely before Swift’s death and serves as a tribute to the singer-songwriter/producer who toured as The Black Keys’ bassist from 2014–15 and also produced albums by Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Guster, The Shins, and a host of others.

“This new record is all about honouring Swift,” Auerbach said. “It’s a way for us to say goodbye to him, by revisiting him playing and laughing, singing. It was heavy at times, but I think it was really helpful to do it.”

While The Arcs appeared to have gone silent following “Yours, Dreamily“, and the accompanying two-year world tour, the band continued to record prodigiously. Michels, who co-produced “Electrophonic Chronic”, notes that they probably laid down between 80 and 100 tracks.

“Whether it was New York City or Nashville or L.A. or Swift’s hometown of Cottage Grove, Oregon, wherever we were, we would always get in the studio together. Always. It was our favourite thing to do,” Auerbach added. “It’s rare that you meet a group of people that you click with like that, who you instantly bond with. We were just having fun, making sounds, making music. It was an amazing time for me.”

A remastered new mix of Weir’s solo debut album with a new live version recorded earlier this year at Radio City Music Hall, featuring the Wolf bros. And special guests Tyler Childers and Brittney Spencer. The original album remixed by Derek Featherstone and mastered award-winning engineer David Glasser. Bobby Weir celebrated the 50th anniversary of his solo debut, “Ace”, on stage in April with two special shows at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall on both nights, he performed the entire album live with his group Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros featuring the Wolfpack, a string and brass quintet, pedal steel player Barry Sless.

When Weir started working on “Ace” at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco in early 1972, he wasn’t planning for the Grateful Dead to be his backing band. it just happened. “I pretty much knew in the back of my mind what would happen,” Weir told crawdaddy a few months after the sessions. “I go and get the time booked and start putting the material together. everybody gets wind of the fact I got the time booked and may be going into the studio. so, one by one, they start coming around…” it made sense, the band was already familiar with most of the music,

Having road-tested six of the album’s eight songs, including “Greatest Story Ever Told,” “Mexicali Blues,” and “Playing In The Band,” destined to become one of Weir’s signature tunes. “Ace” also marked the beginning of Weir’s long-running collaboration with lyricist John Perry Barlow and includes early standouts “Cassidy” and “Looks Like Rain.” the liner notes that accompany the new anniversary edition were written by Jesse Jarnow, co-host of the good ol’ grateful deadcast and author of “Heads: a Biography of Psychedelic America”. he writes about Weir realizing his 50-year dream of touring with strings and horns in 2021 when the Wolfpack joined him and the Wolf bros on the road.

Jarnow writes: “by the time they played a pair of nights at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in April 2022 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Ace”, Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros featuring the Wolfpack had found their flow at the thrilling, porous border of improvisation and arrangement. in the eternal present-tense of the Grateful Dead’s music, none of the songs had stopped evolving in the previous 50 years… at Radio City, everything was heard in its newest (and perhaps already outdated) incarnations, the evolutions acting as a progress report on the ensuing half-century of Weir’s life, musical and otherwise.”

Gabriels Frontman Jacob Lusk is nothing short of incredible on the trio’s debut album, a powerful half-hour of top-tier song writing that proves Gabriels are far more than soul revivalists.

Gabriels seemed to appear out of nowhere. They were hoisted into the public eye a couple of years ago, thanks to an extraordinary self-released five-track EP and an equally extraordinary video accompanying its lead track, “Love and Hate in a Different Time“. A perfectly synchronised selection of clips of people dancing (African tribes, saucer-eyed habituees of Wigan Casino, Theresa May at the Conservative party conference), the video suddenly stops dead, the final two minutes given over to what looks like cameraphone footage of a singer at a street demonstration, performing Lewis Allan’s Strange Fruit through a megaphone. The singer was Gabriels’ frontman, Jacob Lusk, at a Black Lives Matter protest.

The more you find out about them, the more curious Gabriels sound: Lusk was a choir director and a runner-up on the 2011 series of American Idol. His bandmates are a classically trained California composer called Ari Balouzian and a Sunderland-born video director, Ryan Hope, who named the band after the street in Bishopwearmouth where he grew up. They first collaborated on an advert for Prada in 2018, from which the EP’s opening track, “Loyalty“, had sprung: outside “Love and Hate in a Different Time“, Balouzian and Hope’s other 2020 release was the soundtrack to a documentary about Pepe the Frog.

However odd their background, Gabriels quickly gained momentum: critical acclaim; a major label deal; a showstopping appearance on Later With Jools Holland. It would be easy to suggest that their rise is down to Lusk, who has vast charisma and an entirely astonishing voice: he has a startling ability to sound intimate and warm one second, then unleash an agonised, shiver-inducing falsetto the next.

But an astonishing voice isn’t necessarily enough on its own, as evidenced by Lusk’s pleasant but inconsequential 2018 EP My Love Story, which framed him with too-slick production, equal parts early 90s slow jam and Mellow Magic-friendly 80s AOR. Without wishing to take away from the power of his vocals, it’s hard not to feel that Love and Hate in a Different Time derived its head-turning power from the fact that it was a fantastic song and from an overall sound that smartly keyed into soul music’s past without feeling like a painstakingly researched historical re-enactment. It was obviously cut from a very different, more traditional cloth to most contemporary R&B, but it was cheeringly hard to put your finger on exactly what aspects of the past it was evoking.

That’s even more true of Angels and Queens Part One. Lusk is, plainly, incredible throughout – the sound of his voice multitracked to infinity on If You Only Knew is quite something – and the standard of song writing set by Love and Hate in a Different Time never dips, as evidenced by the dense funk of the title track and piano ballad If You Only Knew, written from the perspective of Lusk’s late godsister, which shifts from wrenching misery to euphoria.

This album highlights that Gabriels, having drafted Kendrick Lamar collaborator Sound wave as producer, are far more than revivalists. He helps craft a sound that feels entirely of the moment, and not merely because there’s a constant, nagging sense of tumult and foreboding lurking behind even its prettiest songs. There’s certainly nothing retro about a track such as The Blind, where the beat is made of a stumbling, clattering array of samples, Lusk’s vocal is drenched in backwards reverb and the piano and strings battle for space with droning, overcast synths. The orchestration that opens To the Moon and Back could have transported there directly from a 1940s jazz ballad, but it’s swiftly replaced by a cavernous-sounding swirl of massed vocals and an insistent, cyclical bass riff.

You can hear Lusk’s background in gospel, but it’s tempting to say that you can hear his collaborators’ previous jobs, too. There’s something weirdly cinematic about both the songs’ structures – they’re filled with sudden cuts and strange twists, as when Remember Me dramatically shifts gear halfway through, and moments when they suddenly focus in on tiny details, not least the agonising scrape of a plectrum being dragged down a guitar string on To the Moon – and the arrangements. The orchestrations frequently seem to be there, not as a lush embellishment or a nod to the days when soul records were orchestrated as a matter of course, but to heighten the tension, as on a soundtrack. On the album’s murky highlight, Taboo, every snare crack is amplified by a vicious stab of brass; the strings, meanwhile, slice through the track at unexpected angles, ratcheting up the drama.

If it seems counterintuitive to split your debut album in two – Part Two is due in March – a song like Taboo makes it feel like common sense: like a lot of Angels and Queens Part One, it’s intense listening. The seven songs here last barely 30 minutes, but a powerful, concentrated half hour dose is all you need. Certainly – it’s all you need to stake a strong claim to the title of album of the year.

The debut album from Brisbane artist Baby Cool, ‘Earthling On The Road To Self Love’, is coming out February 10th via Bad Vibrations Records , Baby Cool is the new project from Grace Cuell of Nice Biscuit and alongside the album news she’s also sharing the sublime first single & video ‘The Sea’.

There’s a beautiful Dinked Edition available to pre-order now! Limited to 300 hand-numbered copies, it comes on 180g clear vinyl with pink and blue splatter with a bonus track flexi-disc and postcard! Available exclusively from the Dinked stores

Marrying psychedelic pop with folk and a touch of country, Grace says of the record: “The songs on “Earthling” are deeply sentimental. I have a lot I need to sing about to help me make sense of this earthly pod I have been gifted. If in singing these words out loud, I can help others find solace in knowing that we’re all out here flailing about in the cosmos, then it feels good to me.”

Marrying hazy psychedelic pop with folk and a touch of country, this delectably unhurried, cosmic & dreamy record builds to a vibrant denouement. we were instant fans!, brought to you by the bad vibrations label (the same imprint as crows), this is another substantial fan package to support a brilliant album and at only a 300 pressing, it’s also stupidly limited. be cool – be baby cool!

Cuell says of the record, which follows her debut single ‘Magic’ and tours with Babe Rainbow and The Lazy Eyes: “The songs on this album are deeply sentimental. I have a lot I need to sing about to help me make sense of this earthly pod I have been gifted. If in singing these words out loud, I can help others find solace in knowing that we’re all out here flailing about in the cosmos, then it feels good to me.”

Performed by: Grace Cuell (Vocals, Guitar, Percussion) Jess Ferronato (Drums, Guitar) Nick Cavendish (Bass) Drew Heyden (Keys) Lisa Kelly (Harp)