Recorded at the famed Sam Phillips Studios (Memphis, TN) with producer Matt Ross-Spang and help from Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, known collectively for their work in the indie-art-pop band Finom (formerly known as Ohmme), Iron & Wine preset “LORI” – their take on four of their favourite Lori McKenna tracks.
SamBeam came to McKenna’s music a few years ago on the suggestion of a friend; as the lock down dragged on, Beam found himself like so many turning to music for comfort. McKenna’s catalogue of work was never far from reach. Taken by her heart-on-your-sleeve confessional style storytelling, Beam admits it’s a trait that draws him to McKenna and something not often found in his own song writing. As a well-known interpreter of other artists’ songs, when the time came for him to shake off the pandemic cobwebs and record, McKenna’s songs were as fresh and familiar to Beam as his own.
The special sauce on “LORI” however comes in the formidable talents of Sima Cunningham and MacieStewart. Having enjoyed successful solo careers outside of Finom, the two bring their own touches to “LORI” and helped Sam Beam find even further depths to McKenna’s songwriting. Together the three sonically re-interpreted her plaintive odes into a tapestry of sounds while effortlessly blending their signature singing styles breathing fresh life into the lyrics.
The track “That’s How You Know” was released August 24th with a lyric video directed, concepted and animated by Nebila Oguz. The full EP will be available NOW
“LORI” Tracklisting:
1. Like Patsy Would 2. Halfway Home 3. That’s How You Know 4. Shake
Helen Ballentine’s spellbinding first full-length album “Quiet the Room” is the sound of a window opening, a barrier dissolving. Across these fourteen tracks, the outside world seeps in and the inside world crawls out. The result is a stunning and quietly moving work that reflects the journeys we take through the physical and spiritual realms of ourselves in order to show up for the world.
While writing the album in the summer of 2021, Ballentine drew inspiration from her childhood home in Mount Vernon, NY. What she set out to capture on “Quiet the Room” was not the innocence of childhood, as it is so often portrayed, but the intense complexity of it. Past and present merge Escher-like in this dreamlike space laced with elements of fantasy, magic, and mystery. Musically, this translates into a sound that feels somehow weighty and ephemeral all at once, like a time lapse of copper corroding.
To capture the effortless blend of electronic, ambient, folk, and rock, Ballentine and her collaborator Noah Weinman brought in producer Andrew Sarlo to record at Chicken Shack studio in Upstate New York, close to where Ballentine grew up. “We wanted every song to have that little twinkle, but also a sense of crumbling,” she says.
These songs thrum with moments of anxiety that boil over into moments of peace, as on lead single “Whatever Fits Together,” which chugs to a ragged start before the gears catch and ease. On “It’s Like a Secret,” Ballentine struggles to connect and let people in, recognizing that no one can ever fully know our inner worlds and that to understand each other is to cross a barrier and leave a part of ourselves behind. And yet, on closing track “You are my House,” she finds a way to reach out. “You are the walls and floors of my room,” she sings in perfect, hopeful harmony.
As the album cover invites, these are dollhouse songs to which we bend a giant eye, peering into the laminate, luminous world that Ballentine has created. Like a kid constructing a shelter in a patch of sharp brambles, she reminds us that beauty and terror can exist in the same place. The complexities of childhood are so often overlooked, but through these private yet generous songs, she gives new weight to our earliest memories, widening the frame for us—even opening a window.
A trio comprised of Bill Lennox (vocals, guitar), Bobby Colombo (vocals, guitar) and Jake Kmiecik (drums), Bonny Doon were formed in 2014 and put out a few 7”s before releasing their self-titled debut in 2017. “Bonny Doon’ is at once jagged and unfinished, languid and detail-oriented, restless and at peace,” Pitchfork said at the time. In 2018 the band began performing as the backing band for Waxahatchee and released their latest record ‘Longwave’.
“Longwave’ is a gently simple record but one which manages to exert an almost hypnotic pull,” the UK’s Clash Magazine said. Lennox and Colombo were also close collaborators on Waxahatchee’s critically acclaimed 2020 album ‘Saint Cloud’ and wrote many of the record’s guitar arrangements.
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, amidst the halcyon days of NYC music blogs, 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).
The band’s 2006 debut, “The Great Big Sea”, attracted critical raves and drew comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel and The Weakerthans. Critics raved, and major labels started calling. But Beat Radio’s momentum stalled when the original line-up disbanded in 2008.
Over the next decade and change, Sendrowitz sporadically kept the dream alive in his basement studio while raising a family near the south shore of Long Island. “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.
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.
With the help of therapy, Sendrowitz underwent a period of reckoning and painful growth. He took stock of his flaws and turned to music. Immersing himself in wide-ranging influences—from the grief-powered catharsis of Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree to the rowdy emotional intensity of Irish folk music (The Pogues) to a playlist he jokingly describes as “baby-boomer midlife crisis music” (Graceland! Tunnel of Love!)—he used song writing as a means to make sense of the chaos and to heal. “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.
Featuring: Brian Sendrowitz – guitars, vocals / Philip A. Jimenez – drums, guitars, synths, vocals, percussion, banjo, bass / Kathryn Froggatt – backing-vocals, bass, tambourine
“Being Somewhere”, Dan Mangan’s sixth studio album, cuts incisively but never forget’s its underlying thesis: It’s cool to care. Mangan arms the rebels in the crusade for tenderness. The album is a combative plea for mercy from a manic world and its effects on the psyche. Whittling his sharpest pen to date, Being Somewhere is marked by Mangan’s singular wit and a respectful deference to the quagmire of existence.
“I wanted this album to feel like the inside crook of a familiar elbow on the nape of your neck, a comforting embrace.” says Mangan, “These songs are tender hearted and unfurl like an overdue conversation with a dear friend. They essentially lay out where we’re at, how I’m doing, and how I think I can help.”
Under the care of producer Drew Brown’s (Radiohead, Beck) distinct touch, “Being Somewhere” forges sonics well beyond the tropes of modern folk music. Helming the project from Chicago, Brown sourced musical contributions from all over North America, the UK and Japan, including work from Joey Waronker (Beck, Atoms for Peace), Jason Falkner (Beck, St. Vincent), Thomas Bartlett (The National, Taylor Swift), Dave Okumu (Arlo Parks, Adele) Mary Lattimore (Kurt Vile, Sharon Van Etten), & Broken Social Scene frontman Kevin Drew.
The Heartbreakers, were also known as Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, An American punk rock band, formed in New York City in May, 1975. The band spearheaded the first wave of punk rock. The first recordings from the hugely influential New York born garage punk band The Heartbreakers who would live on as the support band behind ex-NY Doll Johnny Thunders!.
These are the only recordings featuring the lineup of Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders, Walter Lure and Jerry Nolan!
A definitive collection focused on Richard Hell’s brief time with the Heartbreakers. We’ve never had this demo set released in its entirely before, and there’s a few “new” tracks to me in the live material, too. Sound quality is so-so, but the energy is palpable throughout. The CD version includes rare live tracks from the band’s early years performing at legendary New York venues CBGBs and Mothers!, Includes full liner notes from Dave Thompson!
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. The compilation will include remastered copies of The Mescalero’s three full-length albums: “Rock Art” and “The X-Ray Style”(1999), “Global A Go-Go” (2001) and “Streetcore”(2003), the latter of which was released after Strummer’s death.
Also included are the first ever demos that Strummer wrote for the outfit, amongst 15 unreleased tracks and rarities, which Paul Hicks has remastered. The collection also includes a track entitled, ‘Ocean of Dreams’, which features Steve Jones, the guitarist from the Sex Pistols.
Dark Horse Records have issued the previously unheard track, ‘The Road to Rock ‘N’ Roll”, to commemorate the box set’s announcement.
Lucinda Tait, Strummer’s widow, was executive producer on “The Mescalero Years”. Tait had said that work on the upcoming release had actually started in 2018 when working on the box set Joe Strummer001, which collected 32 songs from all across Strummer’s glittering career.
“There’s so much great music that Joe left us in his archive,” Tait said. “To focus on Joe’s work with The Mescaleros was the natural second step on 002 because those songs he made with them just seemed to resonate so strongly and reinvigorated his connection with his audience at a level he hadn’t experienced since his days with The Clash.”
Strummer tragically died in 2002 from a heart attack at the age of just 50. He played in many bands, including The Clash, The Mescaleros, The 101ers, Latino Rockabilly War and The Pogues.
The box set of music by Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros – his band after The Clash – has been scheduled for release this month. Joe Strummer 002: The Mescalero Years will be released by Dark Horse Records on September 16th and will serve as the first time that a complete anthology of the group’s work has been released.
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.
“Joe Strummer 002: The Mescaleros Years” is the first comprehensive collection highlighting this intense period of creativity “Vibes Compass”, a brand-new compilation of 15 B-sides and rarities, including never before heard tracks 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.
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.
Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros Released16/09/22 BMG Records
The best music reflects a wide-screen view of the world back at us, helping distill the universal into something far more personal. Since forming in Austin in 2004, The Black Angels have become standard-bearers for modern psych-rock that does exactly that, which is one of many reasons why the group’s new album, “Wilderness Of Mirrors”, feels so aptly named. Says vocalist/bassist Alex Maas, “a big focal point of this record is just the overall insanity that’s happening. What’s true? What’s not?” Adds guitarist Christian Bland, “We leave our music open to interpretation, but our topics are always universal themes — problems mankind has had since the beginning of time. You can relate them to any period.
“Wilderness of Mirrors” expertly refines the Black Angels’ psychedelic rock attack alongside a host of intriguing sounds and textures. There are classic blasts of fuzzed-out guitars meant to simultaneously perk up the ears and jumpstart the mind, alongside melancholy, acoustic guitar-driven newfound experiments. Mellotron, strings, and other keyboards also play a more prominent role on “Wilderness of Mirrors” than ever before.
Even amidst these new experimentations, The Black Angels remain masterfully true to psych-rock forebears such as Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, Arthur Lee and the members of the Velvet Underground, all of whom are namechecked on album highlight “The River.” “The Velvet Underground song ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ – that’s what every Black Angels album has been about,” says vocalist/bassist Alex Maas. “You can’t work out your struggles unless you bring them to the forefront and think about them. If we can all think about them, maybe we can help save ourselves.”
CHRISTIAN BLAND – guitar, drone machine/organ ALEX MAAS – vocals, bass, organ/drone machine STEPHANIE BAILEY – drums, percussion RAMIRO VERDOOREN – keyboards, percussion, bass, guitar JAKE GARCIA – guitar
From the forthcoming album “Wilderness of Mirrors”
Among Britain’s most exciting breakthrough band of recent years, Sports Team, are about to release their second studio album “Gulp!”Sports Team are Alex Rice (lead vocals), Rob Knaggs (rhythm guitar and vocals), Henry Young (lead guitar), Oli Dewdney (bass), Al Greenwood (drums) and Ben Mack (keyboard + percussion). Formed in 2016, the band released two EPs — “Winter Nets” and “Keep Walking!” — before sharing their debut album “Deep Down Happy” in June 2020 to widespread critical acclaim. Sports Team’s vivid vignettes of modern Britain and inspections of the follies, foibles and frustrations of youth have earned them an impassioned fanbase, a real community who come together at the band’s infamously electrifying live shows.
The first taste of “Gulp!” came as Clara Amfo premiered the band’s new single ‘R Entertainment’ as her Hottest Record in the World on BBC Radio 1. “Gulp!” follows Sports Team’s 2020 Mercury Prize nominated debut album “Deep Down Happy“, which charted at #2 in the UK’s Official Charts, achieving the biggest vinyl sales for a debut British artist in 2020.
Signposting a bold and ambitious new era for the band, Sports Team explain that ‘R Entertainment’ explores “The packaging down of all human experience into entertainment, prompted by the infinite scroll through social feeds and the manic formlessness of the images we are hit with every day. Graphic news interrupted by ads for season 17 of The Bodyguard, news as a rubbernecking, passively waiting for the next drop of horror as we flick through recipes.”
A Grateful Dead Show could feel like a world apart too, an improbable, thriving anomaly in a music business hub and all-night-every-night live scene addicted to the new and next in punk, experimental rock, dance music, and hip-hop. Two nights before the Dead hit the Garden in March 1981, a young Irish band, U2, performed virtually all of their debut album, “BOY”, at the Ritz, a downtown ballroom—some songs twice because that’s all the material they had. The night after the Dead left town,
Garcia argued in a 1981 confrontation with Britain’s punk-obsessed New Musical Express, “We’re no more nailed to the Sixties than anybody else. We’re not celebrating an era that no longer exists. We’re here and now, partaking in what’s going on.”
We can now see how that traffic went both ways in New York. As The Clash were up at Bond’s in June 1981, the avant-rock band Sonic Youth played their first dates downtown—cofounded by a guitarist, Lee Ranaldo, who had followed the Grateful Dead in high school, hitting shows in 1972 and ’73, one of them Watkins Glen. Ranaldo, in turn, did not know that singer-guitarist Ira Kaplan—a critic for New York Rocker and The Village Voice who started the indie-rock group Yo La Tengo in 1984—was a fellow Dead Head (with 80 shows under his belt) until they were invited to play at the same after-party during the 2015 Fare Thee Well concerts in Chicago. “We played ‘Dark Star’ together,” Ranaldo said later. “It was a pretty good version, I have to say.”
“It’s one of the big myths about the Dead—the idea that punks hated the hippies,” said guitarist Bryce Dessner of the Brooklyn-born band The National when we spoke in 2016 about Day Of The Dead, a benefit compilation he coproduced with his twin brother-guitarist Aaron featuring 59 new recordings of Dead songs by modern-rock artists including Ranaldo and Kaplan. “Think of that long-form jamming of Sonic Youth, the edgiest of those post-punk bands,” Bryce said, then pointed to The Flaming Lips—a prolific, psychedelic institution formed in Oklahoma in 1983 (they covered “Dark Star” on Day Of The Dead)—as “a great example” of the “bands that exist in the Dead’s diaspora.” – David Fricke, “In And Out Of The Garden”Madison Square Garden ’81, ’82, ’83
“We’re just now starting to loosen up to the point where we were, say, back in 1970, ’72, where we can start drifting from key to key, from rhythm to rhythm, and in the jams, some interesting stuff has come up. Once again, we’re tending to go new places every night.” – Bob Weir, Rolling Stone, 1980
3/9/81 at Madison Square Garden delivers all that. It’s got colour and texture and freshness, keyboardist Brent Mydland’s Hammond organ painting a new layer for the Dead to dabble on. And dabble they did, from the “shot out of a cannon” opener of “Feel Like A Stranger” to the “fleeting romance of ‘Althea” to the high-gloss 80s blues of the first set to the second set, both intense “China Rider”, “Samson And Delilah,” “Estimated Prophet” and dramatic “Ship Of Fools,” “Stella Blue” in its ability wrap you up its spirals and accents. It’s all undergone Plangent Processes tape restoration and speed correction, with mastering by Jeffrey Norman.
47 minutes of MSG 1983 by-and-by for my-oh-my! Night One (10/11/83) has us floating along from a dreamy “Bird Song” to twinkly “St. Stephen” into a slow and funky “Wang Dang Doodle” But don’t even think of putting away those dancing shoes – Night Two (10/12/83) will have you dosey-doeing through the “Cumberland Blues” into The Beatles’ “Revolution,” before gently setting you back down with “My Brother Esau”.
Welcome to this unique, enduring phenomenon of the Grateful Dead in New York City, a mutual devotion, forged in concert, that ran for nearly as long as the band itself—from June 1st, 1967, a free show in Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side (ahead of the band’s official, local bow at the Cafe Au Go Go), to the Dead’s last Garden run, six nights in October 1994…the Grateful Dead’s affinity for New York City…was instant and arguably their most profound with any city aside from San Francisco.” – David Fricke
They got on the bus to the Port Authority, rode in on the Long Island Railroad and the New Jersey Transit line. They traveled North, South, and West on the 1, 2, and 3 subway lines, their numbers growing as they descended upon Penn Station. Some rolled up in those iconic New York yellows. Some walked excitedly through the bright lights of Broadway and Times Square, meeting up with old friends on the way and picking up a few new ones too as they ascended The Garden’s stairs. Maybe you were among them – lightly buzzed on the way in, fully aglow on the way home. New York City was in its prime and damn if the Grateful Dead wasn’t going to rise up to meet it! If you were there, we call on you to join us as we recapture that MSG magic and if you weren’t, we invite you along on the epic journey that is “In And Out Of The Garden”Madison Square Garden ’81 ’82 ’83.
Numbered and limited to 12,500, this 17CD set celebrates the band’s rich history at “the world’s most famous arena,” introducing six previously unreleased shows recorded at MSG between 1981 and 1983. It offers a front-row seat to The Grateful Dead in the early 1980s, an overlooked and underestimated era of rebirth for the band. At the time of the recordings, the group featured Brent Mydland. Mydland’s vocal power and colourful keyboard palette energized the band, invigorating older material like “The Wheel,” “Truckin’” and “Eyes of The World.” He also gave the band more musical flexibility, which encouraged them to dust off rarely aired treasures like “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” and “Crazy Fingers.”
“In And Out Of The Garden” touches on the three-year period after 1980’s “Go To Heaven” was released, a time when the Dead were constantly on the road, playing more than 200 dates. While they were in no rush to return to the studio during this time, they continued to write new music. In 1982 and ’83, the band performed most of the songs that would appear on 1987’s “In The Dark”. The new collection includes performances of four songs from that album – “Touch Of Grey,” “Hell In A Bucket,” “Throwing Stones,” and “West L.A. Fadeaway” – plus the B-side, “My Brother Esau.”
Due September 23rd, “In And Out Of The Garden” comes in a custom box featuring new artwork by Dave Van Patten celebrating the band’s eclectic fanbase, with a cavalcade of illustrated Dead Heads. The collection also includes detailed liner notes by award-winning music journalist David Fricke, who explores the band’s connection to the Big Apple. It features newly restored and speed-corrected audio by Plangent Processes, mastered by Jeffrey Norman.
