The Fat Angel Sings

It just keeps getting better for Sam Fender, one of England’s biggest songwriters. With his second album, the brilliant and personal “Seventeen Going Under“, released in November 2021, Fender cemented his place in the pantheon of great British songwriters, earning praise from Adele, Elton John, and many more in the process.  Since hearing the songs I had been a mild fan of Sam Fender during his first album cycle, but it wasn’t until late last year when  “Seventeen Going Under” that I realized what a special artist he could be. Not only is his voice beautiful and his song writing poetic and affecting, he’s such a genuine, humble person to his love of Guinness, New York City, and Bruce Springsteen.

Sam has found a way of combining his northern English upbringing with a sense of universality that is rare these days, and he deserves the many accolades he’s receiving right now for “Seventeen Going Under”.

And it didn’t stop there — since the release of “Seventeen Going Under”, Fender was awarded the prestigious Ivor Novello song writing prize for “Best Song Musically and Lyrically,” supported The Rolling Stones at a show in London’s Hyde Park, headlined dozens of festivals around Europe, and, most recently, was nominated yesterday (July 26th) for the Mercury Prize, which awards the best album released in the UK.

It’s clear that the personal and therapeutic direction of “Seventeen Going Under” struck a chord with Fender’s audience just take a look at the heartfelt and deeply sincere praise in the YouTube comments of “Seventeen Going Under.” Not only was the title track’s iconic line “I was far too scared to hit him/ But I would hit him in a heartbeat now” a TikTok trend for several months, but thousands have rallied behind Sam Fender and his poetic working class stories, earning him the colloquial title of “Geordie Springsteen.

Fender’s identity as a Geordie — a nickname for people from Newcastle and its surrounding towns in the north east of England — is a major part of lyrics and persona, but his music itself is directly inspired by Springsteen’s detailed canon, complete with barnstorming tenor sax lines, expansive and anthemic chord combinations, and lyrics that address hardship and epiphanies.

Fender admits that Bruce Springsteen still looms large in his overall connection to music, nostalgia, and stories. “I saw him in Manchester and I just bawled my eyes out the whole show,” he says “Every song just means that much to me. Every single one of his songs is attached to a memory I have in my own life.” But unlike his fellow Springsteen worshipers from America (looking at you, Jack Antonoff), Fender seeks not just to emulate the cathartic sonics of The Boss, but to bring those ideas to a more modern, urgent place.

Take, for instance, the first lines of “Seventeen Going Under,” where Fender reminisces on his adolescence, crooning, “I remember the sickness was forever/ I remember snuff videos.” Already, within two lines, there’s an image of terminal illness followed by an image of violence, images that are both hyperbolic and far too real for a young boy to experience. The rest of the album follows suit with a myriad of personal epiphanies, reflecting on the various ways in which boys are urged to hold their own emotions hostage, the damage it inevitably does to the psyche, and the ways in which he’s rebuilding himself.

Power pop miniaturist Tony Molina is back with another batch of minute-long masterpieces, stylistically falling somewhere in between the Weezer cribbing of 2014’s “Dissed and Dismissed” and the ’60s pop classicism of 2016’s “Confront the Truth“.

“In The Fade” finds Molina still incorporating the delicate ’60s folk rock elements from his recent work, while also returning to some of the distortion and volume of his early days. The result is an album that offers something from every phase of his catalogue, almost like a Tony Molina greatest hits, except with all new songs. Very few artists can credibly evoke everything from The Beatles, to The Fastbacks, to Weezer, to Belle and Sebastian, and even fewer can do that while still sounding completely like themselves–but that’s why there’s only one Tony Molina.

Summer Shade Label was founded in Los Angeles and Boston in the year 2020 as a new bi-coastal, boutique label with an emphasis on riffs and hits. The new presence is a part of Run For Cover’s growing family and will allow established acts a new home while pushing young undiscovered artists to a wider audience, fuelled by a for-artists by-artists ethos with all songwriters owning their own music. New music is the core of Summer Shade, with a curated flow of new music coming to you through various forms of streaming and visual media.

The label’s first release comes from Tony Molina, one of modern guitar pop’s best and most unique songwriters. The Bay Area musician is serious about the craft that goes into songwriter, and not much else. Following “Kill The Lights“, his more pared-back 2018 full-length, Molina found that some listener reactions threw him off. “I kept hearing: ’Oh, he’s maturing, he’s getting into other shit, writing more mature stuff,” he explains. “I thought, ’Man, that’s kinda lame, no I’m not…’

“I Don’t Like That He” from Tony Molina’s album “In The Fade”, out August 12th on Summer Shade and Run For Cover Records.

Growing up together in Kawartha Lakes, Heaps (Tanner Paré, Fred Kwon and Warren Frank, formerly of the Kents) carry themselves with a casual confidence in knowing who they’ve become in each other’s company. They look back over their shoulders at the question they first begged on their 2020 debut “What Is Heaps?” with a breezy clarity on their new EP, where gleaming dream-pop guitar on “Didn’t Matter Anyway” gives way to the understated soul mantra of “Laid Back” before the latter mutates into a glitchy post-rocker ahead of its second minute.

“Little Blue” is out now!, We wrote this over the past couple years through zoom calls, rehearsal rooms and little cottage retreats. Anything we could do to get around lockdowns and burnout. Anything to spend time together, really.

We loved the process of creating this EP. Feels like you can hear that in the tunes.

Official lyric video for Heaps’ new single ‘Didn’t Matter Anyway’. Heaps’ new EP, “Little Blue”, will be out everywhere Friday, July 22nd.

Florist’s fourth full-length album, and the first deserving of a self-titled designation. 19 tracks that culminate the decade-long journey of friendship and collaboration. Born of a concoction of love, loss and the power of family and friendship, Florist’s new self-titled effort is recorded over several hazy summer nights in Hudson Valley — finds the band at the intersection of staking out new ground and falling in love with each other all over again.

“It’s a portrait of who we are as collaborators, as really long term friends and as extended family as well,” leader Emily Sprague says of her band’s new self-titled album. Florist is also the strongest album of the band’s decade-long career, an immersive work that conveys the magic of the earth and of family, and the whole of the band’s heart.   

It arrives just after the cap of a winding journey. In 2017, shortly after the release of the band’s sophomore record, “If Blue Could Be Happiness”, Sprague sequestered herself in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away from friends and family, and from the physical void and spiritual crisis left in the wake of her mother’s death. There, she took up surfing and released “Emily Alone“, which was essentially a solo album released under the Florist moniker. 

Florist’s excellent self-titled new album came out this month and successfully marries vocalist Emily A. Sprague’s solo ambient soundscapes with the autobiographical folk songs she writes alongside her bandmates. “Feathers” falls into the latter category, Sprague’s delicate voice backed by a shimmering slide guitar, but the album is best consumed whole; a transportative experience.

Only after months of self reflection and therapy did Sprague realize that life in a silo is no way to live. That a life directed by fear is not much of a life. “The trauma response to losing my best friend, my mom, was to feel really afraid to get close to anybody ever again,” she says. “It’s sort of cheesy, but I realized that life is better when you share it. The answer isn’t to isolate yourself and be alone.” 

So she began writing Emily Alone’s companion, the other side of the binary, a record that rings distinctly of Sprague’s tender and poetic spirit, filled with nature and wonder and tears, but without all the loneliness and seclusion. She also adopted a dog, who, she says, “completely changed my life.” “My mind just started exploding with all these thoughts about what it means to live with others, and live with love and care collaboration.” 

Then, for all of June of 2019, amid a hot and rainy summer, Sprague (guitar, synth, vocals), Jonnie Baker (guitar, synth, sampling, bass, saxophone, vocals), Rick Spataro (bass, piano, synth, vocals) and Felix Walworth (percussion, synth, guitar, vocals) convened in a rented house in the Hudson Valley, to live and work together. It was the first time the quartet recorded that way, and for that long. “In the past we’d meet up for a couple of days, or one day here and there,” Spague recalls. “Living together for a month is a really big part of why the arrangements are the way they are, and also why the instrumentals are such a huge part of the record.”

They set up their gear on the screened-in front porch, which looked out onto a canopy of trees, allowing the sounds of nature to play a leading role throughout. Then, they experimented. The production and recording of the album directly reflects the organic ways in which the band worked that month, with whispering voices, crickets, rain and birds accenting the aleatoric quality of the instrumentation, each player drawing from the communal energy of the woods and their interpersonal bonds.

 Poignant, guitar-centric meditation “Red Bird Pt. 2 (Morning)” carries on Sprague’s concern with love, loss and the natural world. “She’s in the birdsong/She won’t be gone,” she sings of her late mother, proffering a merciful sense of resolve. “Feathers” finds her facing her fears over threads of bowed guitar while “Dandelion” meditates on the beauty of our finite existence, pairing synth and fingerpicking with the spirit of Emily Dickinson. “Sci Fi Silence” occupies a liminal space between soul baring confession and contemplative new age, a swirl of analogue synth that culminates in a full-band meditation. “You’re not what I have, but what I love,” the band sings over and again until the words grow into a kind of mantra, a thing that at once pierces and heals.  

The quartet played through muggy days and breezy nights, and often impromptu. “In between working on songs specifically, somebody would be sitting on the porch playing a little instrumental piece, and somebody else would be in the kitchen making dinner and stop, and go to the porch and pick up a random instrument,” Sprague explains. These creative bursts became the album’s ambient instrumental bridges, like “Variation” and “Jonnie on the Porch,” gentle moments that portray their life together in that particular moment. The bells heard throughout the album are from a collection housed in the rental, the animals were their neighbours.

The result is 19 tracks that feel like the culmination of a decade-long journey, their fourth full-length album, but the first deserving of a self-titled designation. “We called it Florist because this is not just my songs with a backing band,” Sprague explains. “It’s a practice. It’s a collaboration. It’s our one life. These are my best friends and the music is the way that it is because of that.”

After making the record they always knew they could, together, as one, Sprague could no longer live on the west coast without her band and blood. So, she returned home. Last year, she moved back to The Catskills to be closer to her father and her creative collaborators. She misses surfing, but finds peace in the area’s natural landscapes, and through a strengthening sense of physical reconnection. “A goal is to share the band’s connectedness and relationship, but also how we’re all connected,” she says. With Florist, Emily is no longer alone.

Florist’s self-titled album, out July 29th on Double Double Whammy Records

Molina has dedicated his solo career to various guitar-pop sounds “In the Fade” is where you’ll find them all, The California-born songwriter started out in DIY hardcore bands, and took to releasing bite-sized power-pop tunes as a solo artist over a decade ago. 

Amid acclaim for his restrained 2018 album “Kill The Lights”, one particular notion stuck in Tony Molina’s craw. “I kept hearing: ‘Oh, he’s maturing, he’s getting into other shit, writing more mature stuff,” he recalls in press materials. “I thought, ‘Man, that’s kinda lame, no I’m not … ’” As if to prove that his older sounds weren’t “immature,” and that he owns every style he’s explored across his singular career, the micro-pop iconoclast made “In The Fade”.

His longest record yet at 18 minutes, it encompasses the power-pop fuzz of “Dissed and Dismissed” and the swaggering guitar-monies of Ovens, It was with Ovens that Molina found his voice as a songwriter as well as the ‘60s acoustic-folk flourishes of “Confront the Truth” and “Kill the Lights”, all tied together with the unerring ear for melody and wry humour that define Molina’s solo output. Simply put, it’s an album that only Tony Molina could make, made on no one’s terms but his. 

Back in June, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs announced their first album in nearly a decade, “Cool It Down”The announcement was joined by the gorgeous and sombre single “Spitting Off the Edge of the World” in collaboration with Perfume Genius. 

“‘Burning’ is a song about that feeling, smoke signals for the soul. Begging to cool it down, just doing it the best we know how. Nick and I nodded to Frankie Valli’s ‘Begging,’ with the line ‘oooh lay your red hand on me baby.’ We’ve cut a rug to many a soulful sixties bangers in our day, it was in our DNA by the time we wrote ‘Burning,'” Karen O said of the single.

“Back when I was 19 living in the East Village, one night a roommate dragged me out of the apartment for an impromptu drink across the street,” Karen O shared in a statement. “I left a votive candle burning on a plastic Yaffa block which in my absence set flame to my room. Within an hour and a half of having one drink down the block firefighters had come and gone extinguishing the fire, I came home to find that a natural disaster had occurred (to my room) and most of my stuff, lost in the flames. All electronic goods were melted and demolished like my laptop, cameras, etc., but oddly enough the items that held the most sentimental value remained intact like sketchbooks, a favourite sweater with hearts across the chest, and photographs. I had photos of my parents in their youth where the fire burnt around the two of them as if there was some intangible force field protecting them, many photos like that, mysteriously leaving the beloved subjects untouched.”

She continued: “If the world is on fire I hope the most beloved stay protected and that we do all we can to protect what we cherish most in this life. ‘Burning’ is a song about that feeling, smoke signals for the soul. Begging to cool it down, just doing it the best we know how. Nick [Zinner] and I nodded to Frankie Valli’s ‘Begging,’ with the line, ‘Oooh, lay your red hand on me, baby.’ We’ve cut a rug to many a soulful ’60s banger in our day, it was in our DNA by the time we wrote ‘Burning.’”

Secretly Canadian Records It’s the second single from the trio’s forthcoming album “Cool It Down“, which is out September 30th.

The Los Angeles-based three-piece band and design collective Julie has shared two new tracks, “pg.4 a picture of three hedges” and “through your window” The tracks mark the first official release from the shoegaze group since their independently released 2021 EP “Pushing Daisies“. Despite the band’s DIY ethos, they have garnered a bit of a cult following, with standouts like “flutter” amassing thousands of streams. Julie seems to exist on the edge of a knife, the threat of ferocity laying dormant until the moment comes for them to cut deep.

There’s a sustained tension on “pg.4 a picture of three hedges” that crescendos after the should-be-sweet confession, “I like it when you smile.” Instead, the song cliff-jumps into an abyss of blistering, overdrive-drenched guitars and razor-sharp basslines.

London’s High Vis reject comfortable numbness on the latest single from their forthcoming sophomore album “Blending”  “Trauma Bonds.” The powerful song is our fourth preview of “Blending” after “Talk for Hours,” “Fever Dream” and the title track. ”‘Trauma Bonds’ was written after the news of another tragic suicide of one of our friends during lockdown,” frontperson Graham Sayle explains in a statement. “It forced us to reflect on how the death of young people had become so normalized within our group of friends that we had become numb to it.

‘Trauma bonds” was written after the news of another tragic suicide of one of our friends during lockdown. It forced us to reflect on how the death of young people had become so normalised within our group of friends that we had become numb to it. Friendships became Trauma Bonds and the gravity of these situations suppressed through toxic coping mechanisms. The song is a hopeful exploration into these feelings in an attempt to support each other through better communication and collective empathy.‘

High Vis are Sayle (vocals), Martin Macnamara (guitar), Rob Hammeren (guitar), Rob Moss (bass) and Edward “Ski” Harper (drums)—deliver that call to emotional arms through anthemic, deceptively complex rock, with hints of shoegaze, post-punk and jangle-pop in its mix. The force of their performances batters down your inner barriers and lets the feeling flow out, but Sayle’s hooky vocal is more circumspect about what it takes to defeat apathy: “I wish I could say / Something sane to wash away / And annihilate the trauma that we save,” he laments before spotting a light at the end of that tunnel: “It might just take just one / Reason inside to carry on / Or something sharp to cut these trauma bonds.”

“Blending” album release September 9th Dais Records,

“This is a song to listen to when you’re confused about somebody’s intent in a relationship,” says Disq’s Isaac deBroux-Slone of the group’s heartland rock-leaning new single. “It started as a sort of ‘British invasion’ vibe but I wanted to take it in a more interesting direction. The feeling of the song is longing and I thought some of the wistful chords and moods from the plethora of ‘90s and 2000’s indie I’d been listening to at the time would fit just right, so I pulled those influences in. The band and I fleshed it out into something close to its current state after I had the initial idea in the Summer of 2020 but something was still missing… It felt ‘boring’ to me so I had my friend Matthew Sanborn come over and help me figure out some new chords to insert into the middle of the song. I added the synth guitar solo over it all and what we now internally refer to as the ‘freak out’ section was born.

We attempted to inject as many nostalgic moments and sonic sighs into ‘If Only’ as we could. Hopefully the results tug on your heartstrings.”

Though initially formed as an extension of the lifelong friendship between guitarist Isaac DeBroux-Slone and bassist Raina Bock, Disq has evolved into a far more democratic and egalitarian organization, as “Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet” finds guitarists Logan Severson and Shannon Conor splitting singing and song writing duties with the aforementioned DeBroux-Slone and Bock. Such an approach could have easily fallen into the trap of “satisfying everyone, pleasing no one,” resulting in committee-approved music devoid of any personality or rough edges, but happily, the opposite is true.

Pushing play on “Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet”, it is easy to imagine that it is the year 1998, and your cool older sister has returned from her freshman year at college only to hand you the sort of mind-altering mixtape out of which lifelong rock fanatics are born. It is the sort of record Beck might have made in his prime, if you swapped out the hip-hop and delta blues of Odelay for midwestern emo, Scottish power-pop, and the sort of all-American indie that functions as “classic rock” for this cherubic cohort.

Wrangling a melange of styles such as this is no simple task, but the record is held together by the powerful yet nimble rhythm section of Bock and drummer Stu Manley, whose muscular and hyperactive playing alternately keeps these adventurous compositions tethered firmly to the Earth and sends them soaring into stratosphere. Producer Matt Schuessler (the recording engineer of Collector making the most of his promotion) rarely lets a verse or chorus go by without adding some new sonic sparkle, keeping the arrangements an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of textures and moods. If there is a record in 2022 which squeezes more ideas into 41 minutes, then that record could surely only be the unlistenable mess that “Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet” avoids becoming so deftly.

Things being how they are in the world today, the idea of finding “someplace quiet” feels like an increasingly remote possibility, and the act of imagining such a place does, indeed, feel more and more desperate. Listening to Disq navigate the myriad twists and turns of their new album can feel akin to an attempted processing of our endless poly-crisis, where each new catastrophe and atrocity jostle for position at the top of the timeline. With their new album, Disq take a valiant stand against the temptation of complacency. As for that “someplace quiet?” It will have to wait… it’s about to get loud in here.

Disq’s new album, Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet, is out October 7th via Saddle Creek Records.

Blues legend Buddy Guy will release his 34th studio album, “The Blues Don’t Lie”. It’s a guest-heavy affair with appearances from the likes of Mavis Staples, Elvis Costello, and James Taylor. And on new single “Gunsmoke Blues,” Guy duets with the alt-country mainstay turned Hollywood favourite Jason Isbell, who has enjoyed quite the glow-up in recent years.

“Gunsmoke Blues” is a classically minded blues-rocker. Lyrically, it’s a sadly current lament about school shootings in America, one that finds Guy and Isbell taking turns with the line, “A million thoughts and prayers won’t bring back anyone.” Despite the grim subject matter, Isbell is elated to be on a track with Guy: “Can’t imagine a higher honour,” he wrote on Twitter, “and it’s a great song too.”

The Blues Don’t Lie is out 30th September on RCA/Silvertone.