Despite spending most of the last decade living, working, and nurturing their craft in the city of Philadelphia, Shannen Moser’s sound remains rooted in their upbringing in rural Pennsylvania. Tributes to the pastoral hillsides of Berks County echo through their music, evoking images of learning to sing along to Townes Van Zandt in the passenger seat of their dad’s pickup or along with the Sacred Harp choirs in Quaker meeting halls. In 2014 Moser packed up their roots, along with influences from freak-folk artists like Joanna Newsom and early Animal Collective and moved to Philadelphia to focus on recording and performing. Those privy to these performances and recordings quickly became captivated by a sound that was both haunting and infectious, showing promises of song writing genius and a powerful voice.
Over the last half decade they have continued to develop and refine that voice. Now, on the verge of releasing their third full-length record, Shannen Moser is hitting their stride as a musician and a writer. They’ve shared the stage and toured with acts such as John K Samson, Kevin Devine, and Manchester Orchestra, and moved audiences all over North America with their profound ability to conjure emotion.
The latest single from Shannen Moser’s new album “The Sun Still Seems to Move” is the tender, folky “Ben,” which Shannen says is their “favourite on the record and I really love playing it for people live.”
Shannen Moser from the album ‘The Sun Still Seems To Move’, out September 30th on Lame-O Records.
Legendary Australian psychedelic alt-rock greats The Church toured the US this spring surrounding their appearance at Pasadena’s Cruel World festival, and their set often included a tantalizing new song “The Hypnogogue” That is now released as the band’s first new single in five years, a nearly seven-minute epic with a dark, futuristic theme. “I don’t think this song has any predecessor in our history at all,” frontman Steve Kilbey says.
“The Hypnogogue” is set in 2054,” Kilbey continues. “A dystopian and broken down future. Invented by Sun Kim Jong, a North Korean scientist and occult dabbler. It is a machine and a process that pulls music straight of the dreams.”
“The song is about Eros Zeta, the biggest rock star of 2054 who has travelled from his home in Antarctica (against his manager’s advice) to use “the Hypnogogue” to help him revive his flagging fortunes,” he continues, noting, “he also falls in love with Sun Kim and it all ends tragically (of course…as these thing often do).”
With a song this cinematic, it had to have dazzling, distopian video and that comes courtesy Australian filmmaker Clint Lewis. “I gave the director a lot of input into this video but he took my ideas and ran with them and came up with a fair bit of stuff I never envisaged,” says Kilbey. The Church appear on screens in “the Hypnogogue” as workers in the system translating the dreams of users into real time music.”
Tiny Blue Ghosts are the kind of band you don’t mind being haunted by. Their latest release, “Between the Botanicals”, is their third album, and the first with their current line-up that sees the addition of guitarist Kyle McDonough, bassist Andy Vlad and keyboardist Kristoff Lalicki. With the new members rounding out their wispy shoegaze, they create layers of gauzy sound that resemble the pale pink luster of dusk.
Treading lightly, vocalist/guitarist Marissa Carroll’s vocals melt into their gossamer arrangements like another stroke in a watercolour painting. As they move away from their college-rock roots and into a more refined territory, Tiny Blue Ghost appear more like angels than apparitions.
“The Blacktop” · Tiny Blue Ghost from the album “Between the Botanicals” available on Count Your LuckyStars Records Released on: 2022-08-26
“Drift” is their fifth album, and first in four years, after 2018’s “Wait for Love” from Baltimore post-hardcore quintet Pianos Become the Teeth. A far cry from their explosive screamo origins, the LP is proof of the sonic transformation the band have embraced over the years, as even “Drift’s” occasional flares of aggression are swathed in a darkly dreamy post-rock hum—“We are not who we used to be,” Kyle Durfey chants on the celestial “Mouth,” as if to underscore the point. This continued growth is in spite of Pianos Become the Teeth’s reunion with producer Kyle Bernsten (Pig Destroyer, Integrity), who worked on their first two albums—the album’s production is critical to its effect, with complicated textures further enriching the band’s dynamic performances.
Durfey specifically encourages listeners to spin “Drift” from start to finish, describing the album as “a journey” best experienced as “one piece,” rather than a cobbled-together collection of tracks. It’s easy to see what he means: The record earns its title, with the band’s unusual arrangements keeping the listener off balance, opening them up to the deceptively powerful emotional punch it packs.
Further distancing themselves from their contemporaries, “Drift” is different from previous albums, while being instantly recognizable as Pianos. If you were unsure of “Drift” after hearing Skiv, start again. It makes a whole helluva lot more sense in the context of an album.
“Genevieve” by Pianos Become The Teeth from the album ‘Drift’, available now
Wild Pink are back with another preview of their forthcoming fourth full-length “ILYSM“, coming October 14th on Royal Mountain Records. The album’s tender, twangy second single “Hold My Hand,” featuring Julien Baker, was inspired by an experience Wild Pink bandleader John Ross had while battling cancer—an ordeal the band reckon with at length on the follow-up to their acclaimed 2021 LP “A Billion Little Lights”.
“I wrote that song right after my first surgery, about lying on the operating table where a member of the surgical team held my hand right before I went under,” Ross recalls of the heartfelt “Hold My Hand” in a statement. “It sounds kind of arbitrary, and like it shouldn’t have been as impactful as it was, but I felt very comforted and wanted to capture that loving feeling in the song.” I knew pretty quickly that I wanted it to be a duet, and I’m super grateful to Julien for joining me on it. This was one of the first songs we rehearsed together as a band in the studio and David [Moore]’s piano part felt great almost immediately. There were a couple moments like that in the recording process where a song just immediately fell into place as soon as we started playing it.
The finished product is a quiet storm of emotion, with Moore’s arpeggiated piano figure and Dan Keegan’s brushed drums as its slow, but steady heartbeat. Ross strums an acoustic guitar and sings at just above a whisper, wondering, “Wherever I go when I go down / Will you be there when I come around again?” It’s only then that Baker joins her voice to his (on “To hold my hand”), a musical representation of the simple, but beautiful act of human togetherness that saw Ross through such fraught uncertainty. Moore’s piano and sustained lap steel eventually come to the forefront, like morning’s first rays of sunshine.
“Hold My Hand” follows “ILYSM’s title track, released alongside the album’s announcement in late July, on Royal Mountain Records.
Wine Lips “Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party” is pure adrenaline, it’s noise, it’s intense, it’s refreshing, and it feels life-giving. The garage-psych band’s new album is, for all intents and purposes, pretty fucking crazy.
Every “Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party” track is an unrelenting and ferocious psilocybin-infused garage rock clinic. Wine Lips bring an infectious energy to the album with their fuzzy power chords, distorted guitars, and lead singer Cam Hilborn’s high-pitched screaming vocals hardly breaking through the sonic wall of drums.
One of the highlights, “Choke,” starts with a looping guitar riff and slowly builds to become a blitzed-out power-pop earworm, complete with a guitar solo so sketched-out that it would probably make John Dwyer jealous. “Choke,” much like the rest of “Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party”, follows one creative impulse to the next, hardly allowing for any form of reprieve.
Since many of the songs on “Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party” are quite literally about taking a shit-ton of drugs (see “Tension”), Wine Lips do their best to underscore some of the possible adverse effects of overconsumption. On “Suffer The Joy,” Hilborn, in an attempt to salvage a bad trip, hollers, “I don’t know what you’ve been thinking / Help me out ’cause you’ve been sinking / I’m so sick I’m on the brink…” This leads up to Hilborn lending one piece of sage advice: “I can’t help you unless you learn to love yourself.”
This isn’t to say that the album feels like a ‘Choose Life’ PSA. “Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party’s” eccentric instrumentation takes the listener to a space where experimentation with drugs (and music) is not only encouraged, but exalted. However, on an album with such manic energy and fantastical song writing, overinterpretation probably isn’t worth your time.
Any fan of psych music worth their weight in delay pedals will not be hearing anything ground breaking or wholly unique. But truthfully, that doesn’t even matter, because the pace at which Wine Lips tear through each track is jaw-dropping. As your heart rate skyrockets from the lightning-fast guitar riffs and pounding drums, you can only think that “Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party” is fun as hell. It’s audacious, shameless, and most of all, great to listen to.
Taking inspiration from the likes of Mazzy Star and The Smiths, Bleach Lab have fused their own introspective yet emotionally frenetic soundscape, Set for release on 4th November via Nettwerk, BleachLab have announced their third EP ‘If You Only Feel It Once’, sharing new single ‘Obviously’ alongside the news.
“This track addresses the person your partner has left you for, you’re bitter, hurt and rightly or wrongly directing your aggression towards them instead,” Jenna Kyle says of ‘Obviously’. “However in the chorus, it is a bit of a conversation with yourself, self-reflection and realisation that it doesn’t really matter what you say or do, your former partner still loves them either way.”
“There’s a lot of themes of feeling at home and finding your feet as an adult, which relates to the way that I feel at home with my family and the journey that I’ve been on since I’ve left home.” Jenna adds of the EP. “Also of finding your way in life, navigating relationships and friendships and as you grow, realising which ones weren’t for you and which ones you are better off without.”
With our new single ‘Obviously’ out today, the time has come to share with you the fruit of our labours.. Our new EP ‘If You Only Feel It Once’ will be out on 4th November.
Psych outfit, Hot Garbage, melts within their unique sonic foundry, shiny metallic melodies, unearthed within rugged rhythms from the regions of krautrock and post-punk, then carbonized within sus-alloyed arrangements, that eventually emit heavy streams of gaseous neo-psychedelia.
“Ride”, the latest effort from Toronto psych rockers, Hot Garbage, effectively mends core elements of 60s and 70s psych music, post-punk and desert rock with otherworldly textures, sometimes in a vaporous way, other times with quaking soundwaves. Along its 33 minutes, the foursome takes the listener through a multitude of terrains where cinematic soundscapes await behind the initial haze of reverberations and fuzz-heavy riffs.
Also featuring guest musician Sam Maloney from Kali Horse on auxiliary percussion duties, the 9 track full-length is both challenging and approachable, the songs taking on many forms, genres and styles, rooted in psych rock and post-punk, but also speeding through motorik krautrock, hinting at surf rock and flirting with crafty garage tropes. It is not only surprising because of a gutsy flow, it is quite literally a sonic maze where you can get lost for just over half an hour. Within its corridors, listeners are presented with lyrics tackling complex themes like the afterlife, depression or freedom, but can also just rejoice in soft mantras and uplifting verses.
Produced and mixed by Graham Walsh from Canadian electronica band, Holy Fuck, and recorded mostly live off the floor to better capture the band’s raw energy, “Ride” is all at once dread, beauty, wonder, horror and mystery. From its initial feedback storm, all the way to its mystifying title track, Hot Garbage’s first full-length album will please psychedelic music aficionados, but also fans of Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine or CAN.
Dendrons hit the road before they even knew exactly where they were headed. On New Year’s Day 2018, Dane Jarvie and Zak Sprenger first convened in Chicago to start a new project, recording a demo at home by the seat of their pants, and almost immediately after, began to play shows. “I would just email as many people as possible,” says Jarvie. “I’m like, ‘Can we open this?’ It didn’t matter if it was in Dallas or New Orleans or Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It was like, let’s go.”
With a band name chosen by flipping through books in the library (“Dendron” is Greek for “tree”) and a sound and line-up in healthy evolution as they bounced around North America, Dendrons were finding who they were in front of a live audience. Over the course of 2018 and 2019, they were developing a propulsive, acerbic rock style both reminiscent of midwestern peers like Deeper and Dehd and reaching beyond to develop an unmistakable aura all their own. They put out their debut, 2020’s Dendrons, and were packing their bags for a full European tour before it had to be abruptly cancelled when borders closed and venues shut down around the world. Suddenly, a band that cut their teeth on the road had to get comfortable staying at home.
“It was out of necessity,” says Jarvie, who started brainstorming ideas for a new album back at his family’s home in Phoenix, Arizona, just after the pandemic took hold. When he returned to Chicago a few months later, the full band of Jarvie (vocals/guitar/synth), Sprenger (synth/guitar), Matt Kase (bass/synth/vocals), John MacEachen (guitar/samples), Nick Togliatti (drums), and Stef Roti (drums) formed a bubble to get together and work out what would prove to be their highly ambitious and meticulously crafted second album, “5-3-8”.
“It was just like, well, we can’t tour, we can’t do anything,” Jarvie remembers. “So we might as well just stick together and really create something.”
Meeting three or four times a week, and ultimately rehearsing almost 40 song ideas, Dendrons began to methodically whittle down the batch to a set of songs that weaved through one another intricately, with lyrical and musical motifs dancing around a swirling rock arrangement.
Taken on their own, tracks like “Vain Repeating” and “Octaves Only” tap into the manic energy and wit of bands like Wire and Stereolab but in the context of the album’s full vision, they come together to paint an album informed by post-truth spectacle, and a desire for optimism in the face of isolation.
The lyrics paint those emotions with subtlety, having been put together partially through a cut-up method, grabbing words and phrases from places such as CNN and CSPAN. “That was a real intention with this record was to try different techniques in terms of how words are coming together—stringing together sentences through collage,” Jarvie explains. On “New Outlook 1,” he sings in his direct, almost Stephen Malkmus-like style: “Soon we’ll be stooped over laughing / Watching ourselves high on a vision.”
When it came time to record “5-3-8“—the title being a reference to the lyrical refrain that appears at a few points of the album of “Fifths, thirds, octaves only”— Dendrons decamped to Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, and did additional recording at Highland Recording Studio in Phoenix, Arizona, producing the album with Tony Brant and Sonny DiPerri. A far cry away from where they started as two friends doing everything themselves, from the recording to the booking to even the graphic design, the band is now an eagerly collaborative project. And they’re already thinking about what’s to come.
“You’re always gonna leave a record feeling like there is something more to be said,” Jarvie says. “I don’t believe in a magnum opus. Art is contextual, and exists for the specific time and circumstance it was created in. Every record is a conversation with the last.”
R.M.F.C. returns in 2022 with a brand new single from the much-anticipated, forthcoming LP, due early 2023. “Access” is a short, sharp, straight to the point piece that combines an anarcho marching beat and Devo-style guitar riff that leads into the driving rhythm section R.M.F.C. is known and loved for. With the permanent addition of 12-string guitar to the band; it’s fuller, thicker and janglier than ever before, but still retains the R.M.F.C. sound. Formerly based in Ulladulla, and now relocated to Sydney, R.M.F.C. is the baby of 21 year-old Buz Clatworthy, who writes and performs all the groups recorded output himself from his home studio (still based in Ulladulla). Following up in the footsteps of 2020’s “Reader” 7”, R.M.F.C.’s sound has grown as quickly as Buz has. Giant strides forward since the first cassette, “Hive”, was released in 2018 – and “Access” is only further proof of this.
On the flip side we have a phenomenal cover originally by The Lillettes, a UK based post punk band that wrote this great tune “Air Conditioning” in 1981. These two ripping tracks complete the brand new R.M.F.C. 7”. “Access” is out now via Anti Fade Records – stay tuned for the LP early next year!
The Fat Angel Sings 