The Fat Angel Sings

Voids is the LP from Texas-based producer John Mark Lapham under the name Old Fire. He was a member of The Earlies (who were fantastic if you want a little bit of listening homework) and the spooky magic here is really impressive, with Bill Callahan, Emily Cross, Adam Torres and Julia Holter all adding vocals to the ambience and low tempo, baroque-pop, alt-country sounds. Some dark treasure here.

The album’s Texas-based producer John Mark Lapham was a member of Secretly Canadian band The Earlies. Voids employs the vocal talents of Bill Callahan, Emily Cross, Adam Torres, and Julia Holter across twelve genre-fluid, yet impressively cohesive tracks that span baroque dream-pop, filmic ambient, raga-like drones, avant-country, and even spiritual jazz, all imbued with poetic heft and seared by the West Texas sun. It was beneath this same sun that Lapham lost both of his parents, mourned a withering relationship, and shouldered the fallout of the pandemic, turning his life into the rusted-out scraps he then used to build Voids from the ground up.

There is no better narrator for Lapham’s story than fellow Texas resident Bill Callahan, whose iconic delivery perfectly personifies the core themes of Voids. By the time Callahan appears, he does so over a saw-blade drone that sounds like machinery echoing off the corrugated steel walls of a nearby workshop, which then breaks open into a loose yet pained confluence of violin and upright bass that recalls Joe Henderson’s 1974 spiritual jazz album The Elements. On “Dreamless” the album crystallizes into its most straight-ahead moment as Lapham trains his compositional lens on a brilliant piece of pop songwriting. Featured vocalist Adam Torres soars over John Mark’s punctual arrangement of stomping drums and rapturous string-work to anthemic, and gently psychedelic consequence.

Voids concludes with the pleasant clatter of “Circles” wherein Lapham throws all his ingredients into a pot of celebratory catharsis. Drum sets collide with one another gleefully, and harmonized textures scatter and roll about the floor like a dropped bucket of ornate marbles. Lapham’s collage-work, which up to this point has been smartly restrained, comes unglued as he transmutes grief into relief within a moment-of-death montage of aural imagery. Across Voids, that same awareness of tragedy and loneliness is made palatable by the album’s exciting and varied topography, which stands insubordinately against Lapham’s real-life surroundings.

The settlers who established West Texas towns like the one he calls home must have done so with a sense of hope despite the hostility of their surroundings, however inevitable the withering. Similar spirits speak through John Mark Lapham’s work, and he welcomes them as fascinating old friends. “That more than anything inspired a lot of what I try to express through Old Fire, faded memories, former glories, places lost in time,” he discloses. “Whatever I was trying to express with Old Fire wasn’t finished with the first album, like a story that was only half-read. It seemed like that was only the beginning, and there was a lot more ground to cover.” If there is ground still uncovered for Old Fire after “Voids”, it’s sure to be lush in spite of or perhaps because of the dusty soil beneath it.

From the album “Voids“, available November 4th, 2022 on Western Vinyl

Paul Weller may appear to be modelling 1984-era Left Bank clobber here but there’s nothing casual about his contribution to the latest RC. He delves deep into his solo catalogue to discuss his favourite lost tracks then takes us record shopping to his fave vinyl emporium in West London and annotates a list of the best B-sides by other artists. We send not one but two intrepid journalists to interview Robert Fripp about his solo career. Ken Scott remembers working on Bowie’s Hunky Dory. Jimmy Cliff has happy/sad memories of his reggae glory days. Jason Draper stakes a claim for Holland as The Beach Boys album for connoisseurs and cognoscenti. We meet two mad-fer-it Oasis collectors. Creem’s editor emeritus (yup) picks a dozen or so of the 70s/80s rock bible’s best front covers… And so much more. Out on Thursday this week. It’s entertainment.

My brand new single, the Elton John-inspired “Crystal Mystic”, is out to download and stream on all platforms now! It’s my first new music in two years and is a taste to come of what will be my forthcoming album.

Inspired by my friend Crystal who reads tarot cards in Montauk, the song is about calling out to the universe and being open to what comes your way. Arriving in New York City from Nottingham, England in 2017 with just a suitcase to his name and a fierce ambition to make classic pop records, singer-songwriter Tom Wardle and his brand of soulful pop/rock have already made its mark here in the States. With a voice that Rolling Stone compares to Rod Stewart, the same publication proclaimed his earnest acoustic ballad “Jacqueline” as one of their Songs You Need To Know.

Wardle is currently living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and writing songs towards his debut album, including a tune penned with revered American lyricist Van Dyke Parks, the man who Wardle credits as “Writing the lyrics that inspired me to move to this country in the first place!” He hopes to be able to record in Los Angeles again with a crack studio team whom he now feels he has a winning formula. 

Horsegirl have made their cover of the Minutemen’s “History Lesson Part 2.” — previously released as the b-side to the “Billy” 7″  — available digitally for the first time today. “‘History Lesson Part 2’ has always been a punk manifesto for us,” says Horsegirl. “It was an unusual pick to cover considering the lyrics are so specific to the Minutemen, but we thought there was something appealing too about recording a”History Lesson”; that doesn’t actually give you any history on us.”

the album ‘Versions of Modern Performance’ out now:

Bnny, led by Jess Viscius alongside her twin sister Alexa Viscius return with a new single, “Breaking Up” ahead of a run of dates with Dehd in the UK/Europe as well as two headline shows in London & Paris beginning tonight. The track follows debut album ‘Everything’, which Pitchfork calls “a beautiful record from wall to wall… worth every year that went into it,”. “Yet another breakup song,” Viscius jokes. “A reflection of my past and present.”

We’d say it’s an essential listen but you don’t have to just take our word for it!

“With a smoky alto and languid delivery, Bnny’s Jess Viscius uses her cloud-vapor voice to bely the harrowing emotional content of her lyrics. Matching them with her band Bnny’s spare, country-tinged Americana makes for a compelling combination, as the group incorporates late-night haze and True Detective levels of noir cool into its arsenal.” – AV Club

“There’s a lot of beauty in Viscius’ coolly melodic psych rock, not least of all in how honestly she sketches the experience of plumbing such bewildering depths of loss.” – Bandcamp

“Fragile, tactile, tender… it’s a frequently gorgeous thing.” – DIY 

“A deceptively bold debut that opts to do more with less, relying on polished rock minimalism and the raw emotion of Jess Viscius’ songwriting to land its knockout blows.” – Paste 

“Bnny’s debut album contains multitudes.” – Uncut 

A new single from Bnny out now on Fire Talk Records.

Here are some more tracks from 2019-2020 era, most of which were on the CD that came with the Monorail Records (Glasgow’s most sacred record temple) edition of “Uncommon Weather” in 2020. I remixed most of them for this digital release because I have some new gear I have used on everything since then. I am weirdly happy with this little six-song EP for some reason, I hope you like it. It’ll be on Bandcamp on Friday and hopefully on all the other dumb streamers. In addition, there are two albums of mostly brand new material that are basically done, at least one of them will be on vinyl, but that takes so long, it will be old songs for me.  

This system is not working for me. I hope to play some festivals and shows in 2023, send your dream offers my way. Here I am living my broken dreams. Hope you are too

released March 18th, 2022

For people the world over, January 6th, 2021, was a day dominated by feelings of disillusionment and anger, watching helplessly as a violent mob swarmed the U.S. Capitol like ants at a picnic. South London-born and Athens, Greece-based Westerman channelled those and other feelings into “Idol; RE-run,” It’s his first new single in two years, which he co-produced alongside James Krivchenia from Big Thief. Over finger-picked acoustic guitar, skittering percussion, serene piano and synth, and contemplative trombone, Westerman considers what he calls “the compulsion towards the pedestal [and] the need to scapegoat and revere without logic,” immortalizing the sheer human suffering (“All the pain / The doubt”) that crashes against the bulwarks of society, provoked by leaders who wield outsized power in both our lives and minds.

The song’s jazz-inflected folk gains momentum as it goes, while Westerman takes repeated aim at the cheap facades these figureheads erect for themselves: “There goes a juggling bear / There’s always going to be another,” he sings, mocking the falsehood of political theater without losing sight of its price: “People die waiting / For the lighting to come back / This way.”

Can’t get enough of the hauntingly beautiful melodies from Maia and Susanna — all while being solidly backed by Max on the drums. The Bay Area rock trio Sour Widows are back with their second new single of the year, out now alongside an animated lyric video. Like this summer’s “Witness” before it, “I-90” was produced in collaboration with Oakland-based engineer Maryam Qudus (Toro y Moi, SASAMI, Spacemoth). Sour Widows’ Maia Sinaiko says of the song, written in 2017 after their partner’s tragic passing: “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.”

“I-90” is the latest single from Sour Widows, out now on Exploding in Sound Records. Animation by Cole Montminy

Sour Widows build a characteristically dynamic memorial to those lost moments on “I-90,” the instrumental marching forward unafraid, much like Sinaiko journeying back into their precious, painful memories. The band’s luminous slowcore expands and contracts like a lung, with steady bass from Will Bohrer and atmospheric synth from Qudus expanding its dimensions. Meanwhile, Sinaiko’s songwriting shines: They zero in on the kind of details that make it feel like you’re right there in the backseat, singing, “I wonder what it felt like asleep in that car / While I drove by all the cold cattle / Could you feel them breathing?” Crashing choruses let the track’s passion shine through, as do a hauntingly beautiful instrumental bridge and an explosive climax: “I’m all emptied out / Like the freeway / You keep driving down,” Sinaiko sings just before the track explodes into distorted electric strums and a vocal shout-along, one last gasp.

Dry Cleaning guitarist Tom Dowse once said, “I’m not really interested in being a technical guitarist, I’m much more interested in how much I can communicate emotionally through a guitar.” His playing on “No Decent Shoes for Rain”—the fourth (and presumably final) single ahead of the band’s sophomore album “Stumpwork”, due out next week—is perhaps his most expressive yet, setting the track’s blearily downcast tone alongside Florence Shaw’s bummed-out vocals. Like the unfortunate, ill-prepared pedestrian its title implies, the song finds Dry Cleaning assuming the perspective of someone emotionally unprepared for what life has thrown at them—this is rooted in truth, as the quartet made “Stumpwork” after having lost both bassist Lewis Maynard’s mother and Dowse’s grandfather.

The result, on “No Decent Shoes for Rain,” is unlike anything in the band’s burgeoning catalog: Dowse, Maynard and drummer Nick Buxton lay down a groove that warps and blurs like wet newsprint, while Shaw’s knowing non-sequiturs (“I’ve seen a guy cautioned by police for rollerblading”) cover, but can’t quite obscure the cold, hard truth: “My poor heart is breaking.” 

Released as the fifth and final single ahead of their new album “Blue Rev”, “After The Earthquake” finds Alvvays picking up the pieces after disaster. Molly Rankin and Alec O’Hanley intertwine their exhilarating jangle-pop guitar riffs over drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell’s thrumming low end, all in service of “a rapid fire recital of drive-thru breakdown, tectonic breakup and boyfriend in a coma brake failure,” as the quintet describe it.

The racing song screeches to a halt in its bridge, bringing Kerri MacLellan’s solemn keys to the forefront, as well as Rankin’s plaintive considerations of the painful fallout of loving and losing: “Why would I ever fall in love again / When every detail is over the guardrail?” Before you know it, the track is back at full throttle and beyond, fearlessly moving forward into its uncertain future.

From “Blue Rev“, Out October 7th, 2022