Simple Minds will release “Direction of the Heart”, their 19th studio album, in October.
It’s the band’s first album of new material since 2018’s Walk Between Worlds and the first single is ‘VisionThing’ – a tribute to Jim Kerr’s “best pal”, his father who passed away in 2019.
“Direction Of The Heart”was written in Sicily, where both Kerr and Burchill live and recorded in Frankfurt (since they were unable to come to the UK because of quarantine rules). The record has been co-produced with Andy Wright and Gavin Goldberg. Sparks’ frontman Russell Mael features on one song (‘Human Traffic’).
Jim Kerr describes the album as an ‘Electro-rock’ record. Direction of the Heart will be released on 21st October 2022, via BMG.
One of the band’s finest instrumentals, performed on July 4th, 1971 at the Fillmore West. The footage was released as part of the film “Fillmore: The Last Days” this month in 1972. The movie chronicles the last weekend of performances at the legendary venue before it closed down. For five nights Bill Graham brought on stage San Francisco bands including Santana, It’s a Beautiful Day, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and a poetry reading from Allen Ginsberg.
The film shows extensive footage of Bill Graham, mostly on the phone making arrangements for the concerts. One telling conversation: “What have I said for months and months what’s wrong with this business? That these groups have gotten to be too authoritarian and they have a right to be ‘cause money talks, success controls. Why do you think I want out?”
As for the song featured here, Santana revealed several interesting facts:
“Neshabur is where the army of Toussaint Louverture – who was a black revolutionary – defeated Napoleon in Haiti. So that’s what it’s about. I think by writing songs like ‘Incident at Neshabur’ and ‘Toussaint L’Overture,’ we felt we were our own kind of revolutionary. Alberto Gianquinto, our pianist on “Abraxas”, helped us a lot putting it together. The first part of the music is from Horace Silver’s ‘Señor Blues.’ The slow part is from Aretha Franklin’s ‘This Girl’s In Love With You.'”
The Band:
Carlos Santana – guitar, percussion, vocals, Neal Schon – guitar, David Brown – bass guitar, Gregg Rolie – Hammond organ, keyboards, Michael Carabello – congas, José “Chepito” Areas – timbales, bongos, Michael Shrieve – drums, Coke Escovedo – percussion
Watch the full film here:
“Fillmore: The Last Days” is a live album, recorded at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, California from June 29th to July 4th, 1971. It contains performances by 14 different bands, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area, including Santana, the Grateful Dead, Hot Tuna, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. It was released by Columbia Records in June 1972 as a three-disc album. It was re-released by Epic Records in 1991 as a two-disc CD.
“Fillmore: The Last Days” documents the final run of concerts at the Fillmore West, which closed after these shows. The concerts were promoted by Bill Graham, who ran the Fillmore West, and before that its predecessor music venue the Fillmore, starting in November 1965.
The original triple LP was packaged as a box set. It included a 7-inch, 33⅓ rpm EP record, containing an interview with Bill Graham. It also included a commemorative booklet with liner notes by Graham, an illustrated essay about the Fillmore concert posters, and a listing of every concert at the Fillmore and Fillmore West. The box set also included a reproduction of the concert poster for the final run of shows, and an actual Fillmore ticket stub
Joan Shelley is a songwriter and singer from Louisville, KY. Often joined by guitarist Nathan Salsburg, she has shared shows with the likes of Jake Xerxes Fussell, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Daniel Martin Moore, the Other Years, & Michael Hurley.
I want to explain these songs / I want to leave them unexplained. We’ve all been working with a lot of silence. I was tired from touring, remembering the long drives across the midwestern plains at dusk, against the pale yellow sky seeing the black outline of the horizon with the occasional silhouette of a little farmstead, a corn crib or windmill, beyond, a breaking society, beyond, the aches of a world in pain.
A powerful tugging between apparently opposite things, hopelessness and resilience, isolation and togetherness, all at once. A deep connection to our homeplace, to staying, a complex reckoning with family, with the past, with the rubble, with the wind taken out of everyone’s sails, with new life and constant death.
We returned to the feral tree farm. Raising goats, chickens, listening to birds, watching the river, growing a child. A deep clean spring.
So I started reaching out. Bringing in. I wanted these people I admire to be close to me in the game, in the tangle of my emotions, in my unaddressed fears, I wanted them woven into my tapestries, which are songs, because I am only a bird on a branch echoing others, embellishing the present with past inventions. Let the new world come around. Together we shook these things out of the rug, our shared anxieties, our guilt, our joy, discomfort and heartbreak. We asked and were asking of each other. Dying breath, wind-breath, singing breath shared beyond the language song, strings and brass, heartbeats and drums, wooden and stone breath, water and light, non-human breath, written breath, the little breaths of a newborn thing. Now I sing some of these songs to my daughter. Soothing her discomforts. Especially “completely,” she likes to hear that one. How it goes from low to high.
How it goes from song into silence, and back again. Do you know that line of Wendell Berry’s “make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came”? .
Joan Shelley – vocals, acoustic and resonator guitars, piano Nathan Salsburg – acoustic and electric guitars James Elkington – drums, keyboards, dobro, mandola, bass, recorder, percussions Meg Baird – vocals (1, 11) Bill Callahan – vocals (4) Anna Jacobson – brass (5, 6, 10) Sean Johnson – drums (12) Lia Kohl – cello (1, 6) Nick Macri – upright bass (1, 7, 12) Spencer Tweedy – drums (5, 10)
Joyce Manor’s follow-up to 2018’s “Million Dollars to Kill Me” was named after an auto-corrected text message about Sublime and their 1992 album “40 oz. to Freedom“. The latest from the California power pop and pop-punk band was produced by Rob Schnapf. The review’s, which notes that it’s a “Joyce Manor album for Joyce Manor fans—a loving, uncynical refinement of the band’s best.”
We are excited to announce this here North American headline tour, in celebration of our new album ‘40 Oz to Fresno’! It’s our first proper headlining tour in years at this point, and we’re bringing along our friends Citizen, Prince Daddy & the Hyena, and Phony. ADDITIONALLY, we will be playing a big hometown show in beautiful Long Beach, California in January with the mighty PUP and Jeff Rosenstock.
On 14.10.22 Rachael Dadd is to release her new studio album ‘Kaleidoscope’. The contemporary folk multi-instrumentalist and long-time This Is The Kit band member, Rachael Dadd, wraps us in her technicolour dream blanket on her naturally radiant new album
The wildly creative free-form songwriter was another one of those annoying people who used their lockdown wisely & productively. during that time, she crafted her magical new album ‘Kaleidoscope’, which joins the dinked edition family because, as soon as we heard it, we knew you needed to, too. japanese aesthetics absorbed from her time spent living there are subconsciously woven into Rachael’s songs. married to her gentle but affecting folk-inflected melodies, she coaxes us into her vibrant sound-world and away from the overwhelming noise outside
Co-produced “intuitively, boldly, and playfully” by Rachael and Rob Pemberton (the Staves, Emily Barker, Maja Lena), ‘Kaleidoscope’ includes musical collaborators such as Maja Lena (low chimes), long-time collaborator Emma Gatrill (Willy Mason), Alex Heane (bass), Charlotte West (synths), Alex Garden (strings) and 2019’s ‘flux’ producer Marcus Hamblett (villagers, the staves, laundromat), giving the record “just the right colour combination, just the right pattern of shapes, plenty of space where needed”, reflects rachael
Singer songwriter Naima Bock is sharing a new video for “Campervan,” directed by Cassidy Hansen, and a standout track from “Giant Palm”, her forthcoming full-length debut.
Naima says of the track, “Campervan” is another collaboration between myself and producer Joel Burton. This is a song about the falling apart of a relationship and the bleak impact that it seems to have on us as humans and the renewal that it can provide afterwards. We thought it would be fun to approach the song from a more tongue-in-cheek perspective; Joel’s arrangements draw on western cowboy nostalgia as well as orchestral influences such as ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’ by Joaquin Rodrigo and ‘Pure Imagination’ from the 1971 Willy Wonka film.
The process of writing the song was a joyful and creative one, turning something depressing into something that doesn’t take itself too seriously whilst preserving the poignancy and melodrama of heartache.”
Naima Bock’s international touring schedule in support of Giant Palm begins in June through to October.
The third album from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz.
With expert, The Beths wanted to make an album meant to be experienced live, for both the listeners and themselves. they wanted it to be fun — to hear, to play — in spite of the prickling anxiety throughout the lyrics, the fear of change and struggle to cope. Most of expert was recorded at guitarist Jonathan Pearce’s studio on Karangahape road in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand) — and sometimes in the building’s cavernous stairwell at 1am — Toward the end of 2021, until they were interrupted by a four-month national lockdown. They traded notes remotely for months, song writing from afar and fleshing out the arrangements alone, the first time they’d written together in such a way. the following February, The Beths left the country for the first time in more than two years to tour across the USA, and simultaneously finish mixing the album on the road.
The latter half felt more collaborative, with everyone on-hand to trade notes in real time, until it all culminated in a chaotic three-day studio mad-dash in Los Angeles. there, “Expert In A Dying Field” finally became the record they were hearing in their heads. “Expert” is an extension of the same skuzzy palette the band has built across their catalogue, pop hooks embedded in incisive indie rock. the album’s title track “Expert In A Dying Field” introduces the thesis for the record: “how does it feel to be an “Expert In A Dying Field” how do you know it’s over when you can’t let go?” Stokes asks. “love is learned over time ‘til you’re an expert in a dying field.” the rest is a capsule of The Beths’ most electrifying and exciting output, a sonic spectrum: “your side” is a forlorn and sincere love song, emotive; while “Silence Is Golden,” with its propulsive drum line and stop-start staccato of a guitar line winding up and down, is one of the band’s sharpest and most driving. “Silence Is Golden” maintains The Beths’ bright power-pop and guitar-driven song structures.
There’s a palpable tension throughout the track, reinforced by the tight percussion and Elizabeth Stokes’ rapid repetition of “The sound, the sound, the sound, the sound, the sound, the sound, the sound, the sound.” The unbearable level of noise getting under her skin, she compares it to a “building to a jet plane engine / Building to 6 a.m. construction / It’s building and building and building until I can’t function at all.”
“When You Know You Know” skews a bit groovier, pure pop and a natural addition to the band’s live set. “Knees Deep” was written last minute, but yields one of the best guitar lines on “expert“. there’s a certain chaos across the 12 tracks, the palpable joy of playing music with long-time friends colliding with the raw nerves of pain. Stokes strings it all together through her singular song writing lens, earnest and self-effacing, zeroing in on the granules of doubt and how they snowball. did i do the wrong thing? or did you? and are we still good people at the end of it? she isn’t interested in villains, but instead interested in just telling the story. that insecurity and thoughtfulness, translated into universality and understanding, has been the guiding light of The Beths’ output since 2016. In the face of pain, there’s no dwelling on internal anguish – instead, through The Beths’ music, our shortcomings are met with acceptance. and “Expert in a Dying Field” is the most tactile that tenderness has been.
releases September 16th, 2022
The Beths: Elizabeth Stokes – Guitar, Vocal Jonathan Pearce – Guitar, Vocal, Keys Benjamin Sinclair – Bass, Vocal Tristan Deck – Drums, Vocal
All songs written by Elizabeth Stokes, except ‘Change In The Weather’ co-written by Jonathan Pearce
Aldous Harding has released the new song “Fever,” the second single from her forthcoming album “Warm Chris“. Harding made the video for “Fever” with Martin Sagadin.
Harding made “Warm Chris” with producer John Parish. It’s the follow-up to 2019’s “Designer” and it was released back in March via 4AD Records. The new record includes lead single “Lawn,” which also got a visual made by Harding and Sagadin. Quirky as anything, can’t get over this record! Every song is super unique in its own way.
An artist of rare calibre, Aldous Harding does more than sing; she conjures a singular intensity. The artist has announced details of “Warm Chris” her latest studio album, the follow-up to 2019’s acclaimed “Designer”.
For “Warm Chris”, the Aotearoa New Zealand musician reunited with producer John Parish, continuing a professional partnership that began in 2017 and has forged pivotal bodies of work (2017’s “Party” and the aforementioned “Designer”). All ten tracks were recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales, the album includes contributions from H. Hawkline, Seb Rochford, Gavin Fitzjohn, John and Hopey Parish and Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods).
A beguiling, playful and wonderfully strange. Aldous continues to defy expectation. With the highlight The culmination of “Leathery Whip,” where a chorus of voices sing “Here comes life with his leathery whip”—an essential metaphor in Harding’s particular oeuvre
Read about Aldous Harding’s “Old Peel” in Pitchfork’s “The 8 Best Music Videos of June 2021.”
“Entering Heaven Alive” is the fifth studio solo album from Jack White, the founding member of the White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and the Dead Weather.
True to his diy roots, this record was recorded at White’s own Third Man Studio throughout 2021, mastered by Third Man mastering, and released by Third Man Records. Jack White has released “If I Die Tomorrow,” the brand-new single from White’s second album of 2022, “Entering Heaven Alive” (out July 22nd via Third Man Records). “If I Die Tomorrow” comes paired with a haunting new video directed by Brantley Gutierrez.
Additionally, White & Third Man Records have unveiled the limited edition vinyl variants for “Entering Heaven Alive” which are all available starting today. The vinyl variants include a ‘Detroit Denim’ independent record store exclusive version, ‘Tranquil Turquoise’ in the Third Man Records web store, ‘Heavenly Eclipse’ via Vinyl Me, Please, and a Barnes & Noble edition with an exclusive slip mat. Standard black vinyl, CD, limited edition
Jack White’s new song “If I Die Tomorrow” from the upcoming album “Entering Heaven Alive” out July 22nd, 2022.
The Fat Angel Sings 