The Fat Angel Sings

Germany-based experimental group Flying Moon In Space are today releasing ‘Traum Für Alle’ (‘Dream for Everyone’), the third single to be pulled from their incoming ‘ZWEI’ LP due out June 24th via Fuzz Club Records. Preceded by UK and EU tour dates kicking off this month, the six piece’s new album will arrive off the back of their highly-praised and sold-out self-titled debut album and a recent remix 12″ that featured reworkings by Xiu Xiu, Suuns, A Place To Bury Strangers, Minami Deutsch, Camera and Warm Graves.
 
Where the ‘ZWEI’ LP as a whole sees Flying Moon Space explore more pop-leaning sensibilities (see the infectious, festival-ready psych-pop of latest single ‘Optimist’), the racing krautrock jams of their earlier work – the sort that yearn to be experienced in some sweaty underground venue – are very much still there. New single and album-opener ‘Traum Für Alle’ kicks into a motorik pulse that is ridden at a breakneck speed, beneath Atom Park’s distinct, screeching vocals and a reverb-soaked triple-guitar assault.

On the track, vocalist Parks says: “The dream for everyone is more. More money. More time. More everything and anything. We never get enough of enough. Our sole purpose seems to be chasing the satisfaction that never comes. So we work for our piece of the cake that pays for a home we’re only at when we’re asleep. Every day. Every week the same thing; a dream you have to be asleep to believe. Then you wake and wonder, ‘why?'”

On their self-titled debut, Flying Moon In Space honed in an improv-driven approach to their art that, when committed to wax, resulted in a maximalist melting pot of psych-pop, krautrock, techno and math-rock. This approach, however, was an extension of their live shows: huge, improvised performances that were known to last hours at a time. As they began work on the album’s follow-up whilst the world shut down around them, it’s of little surprise that the resulting ‘ZWEI’ LP sees Flying Moon In Space change course (but get no less creative with it.) 
 
“Just like many other artists we used the time without concerts for a creative process,” Henrik Rohde recalls: “This started digitally at first. We used a concept that everyone has actually known since childhood – a game we call ‘Stille Post’ here. You whisper something in someone’s ear and after a while the content has evolved into something new.

We started a circle and each of us got a different tone, recorded a single line each, set a tempo and let go until we received a complete track. This was actually the starting point of “ZWEI.” Coming out of lockdown with an album’s worth of demos as a result, the band decamped to an old church deep in the forests of the Czech Republic and took the new ideas with them.
 
“We lived there all together for 3 weeks last summer and recorded our 2nd album. It was the perfect atmosphere to bring these ideas to life”, they reflect: “Musically it turned out to be somehow something completely new to us as we usually develop our ideas out of improvised sets we play live. As a result “ZWEI” has a more structured, poppy side compared to our debut, even though sound wise we opened up to more experimental layers – using synthesisers for the first time, as well as loops and field recordings of the church and surrounding forest. I guess generally you can say that the process behind this LP was manifold – testing out personal and aesthetic borders, and carrying on our idea of what Flying Moon In Space can be sonically.”

As they’re simultaneously prepping for the release of their eighth album and celebrating the 40th anniversary of its classic debut “The Days of Wine and Roses“, L.A. rock veterans the Dream Syndicate used their second SXSW showcase to workshop the show they intend to take on tour later this year: a set of recent material and choice cuts from the catalogue, followed by “Days” front to back, with tonight’s show being the first time. The first half was more like a fourth, including reunion-era standouts “Glide” and “Out of My Head,” Medicine Show’s “Like Mary,” and “Where I’ll Stand” – the first single from “Ultraviolet Battle Hymns and True Confessions”. After sharing a memory of sleeping on Jody Denberg’s floor after the Syndicate’s 1982 show in Austin, bandleader Steve Wynn said, “Let’s drop the needle on side one,” and we were off.

Long time setlist perennials “That’s What You Always Say,” When You Smile,” and “Tell Me When It’s Over” got proper readings, of course, but deep cuts like the breathless “Definitely Clean,” the noirish “Until Lately,” and the dreamy “Too Little, Too Late,” sung by surprise guest Vicki Peterson from the Bangles as substitute for the long absent Kendra Smith, provided the deepest pleasures. “I think this album’s a keeper,” Wynn commented dryly, before leading the band through a blazing “The Days of Wine and Roses,” a model album closer on par with The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and Blue Öyster Cult’s “Astronomy.” As the final chords faded into the air, Wynn summed up the show for everyone in the sanctuary: “What a freakin’ blast!” 

The brand-new album from The Dream Syndicate blends vintage Krautrock, Eno-like ambience, Neu-inspired rhythmic groove and a Californian sun baked sheen into the their classic psychedelic, melodic, hue. The Dream Syndicate have moved well past their early Velvet Underground influences and taken on British glam, German prog, and more.

Featuring singer / songwriter / guitarist Steve Wynn, drummer Dennis Duck, bassist Mark Walton, lead guitarist Jason Victor plus their newest member Chris Cacavas on keyboards, plus guest appearances from Stephen McCarthy (of The Long Ryders) and Marcus Tenney’s expressive sax and trumpet work.

“Atmospheric rock music veering between noise and subtlety— compelling.” Pitchfork

Released June 10th, 2022

Shearwater announced the release of a new album, “The Great Awakening”, which will be out on June 10th via the band’s Polyborus label in partnership with Secretly Distribution. The band also shared a video for the album’s lead single, “Xenarthran,” which wouldn’t sound out of place on a Talk Talk album.

Emily Cross directed the video. Frontman Jonathan Meiburg and Cross are also both in the band Loma together.

In a press release Meiburg elaborates on the new song: “Xenarthrans are the ‘strange-jointed’ mammals, which mostly live in South America: armadillos, anteaters, and sloths. Only one species of armadillo has wandered up to the southern U.S., and while we were recording “The Great Awakening” in Texas, I often saw them scurrying dimly through fields at dusk or snuffling in the mud after a rainstorm, and I couldn’t help admiring them. They’d walked thousands of miles on their wispy little feet, long noses to the ground, trundling into alien landscapes filled with unfamiliar dangers.”

“This song, and Emily’s eerie video, aren’t about armadillos, exactly—but they are about making your way through the dark spaces of a menacing but still very beautiful world. The roaring sounds near the end are howler monkeys I recorded in Guyana.”

we’re sharing “Laguna Seca’ , the third single from THE GREAT AWAKENING. JM says: “Laguna Seca’ came from one of those dreams where you meet someone you know, but they aren’t themselves. And then you realize that you’re not yourself, either.”

This is Shearwater’s seventh studio album, produced by the band and Dan Duszynski (Loma), shows us where its wandering frontman has been. While the thundering songs of the band’s 2016 LP Jet Plane and Oxbow (Sub Pop) were filled with fears for what the United States was becoming under the previous presidential administration, Meiburg resolved to find a new approach for “The Great Awakening”. “I felt hopeless,” he admits. “And I didn’t want to make hopeless music.“

“The Great Awakening” is a soulful and immersive travelogue of grand atmospheres and intimate landscapes, decorated with field recordings from Meiburg’s journey while writing his critically acclaimed debut book, A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey, released in March 2021 by Knopf.

The resultant 11-track album—anchored by Meiburg’s closely-recorded voice, more otherworldly and urgent than ever—is one that Shearwater’s been striving toward for years: a journey into the unknown, embracing sorrow and joy, beauty and terror.

Shearwater’s last album, “Jet Plane and Oxbow”, came out in 2016 via Sub Pop

Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, also known as the founding members of the U.K.’s ethereal indie-pop band Let’s Eat Grandma, appreciate the countryside. While they spend significant time in cities like London for promotion and in others around the world to perform while on tour, when they’re home and off the road, each enjoys the more pastoral surroundings and the serene landscapes. While many their age (both are in their twenties) might aim to reside in fast-paced bustling cities, Hollingworth and Walton stay in the countryside, using the space and slower pace to reflect, think, contemplate and experiment with their craft. This decision has proven healthy for both their work and their interpersonal creative relationship. Evidenced by their spacious new LP, “Two Ribbons“, which the duo is set to release on Friday (April 29th).

“Being from Norwich,” Hollingworth says, “Norwich is kind of out of the way. Nobody really goes there. I think it’s allowed us to make music that was maybe a bit more kind of weird. We didn’t have that kind of pressure in place.”

“I think it gave us the space to make music,” adds Walton. “London is so busy and chaotic. It’s difficult to find the headspace to be creative, I think. Whereas I feel like being surrounded by countryside and beaches and stuff, that’s more conducive to creativity.”

Spending significant time in the countryside allows them, Walton explains, to process their lives and careers, as well as their friendship and working relationship. The quietness is welcomed. Not only that, it’s beneficial, but it provides a tangible sense of freedom—a feeling that shows up not only in the music they make but in the aura in which they make it. For many, being a professional musician requires an unabashed sense of competition—a scratching your way to the top, so to speak. But the duo of Let’s Eat Grandma, which began formally in 2013, doesn’t give off this impression. They’re each able to separate their growing, expectant audience from the creative process. After the success of their 2018 LP, “I’m All Ears”, the duo didn’t rush to make a follow-up. They allowed for space.

“It’s important having time between records,” Walton says. “To be out of the public eye. To kind of detach a bit from that. I think it’s really important to write for ourselves as opposed to an audience.”

“It feels like too much pressure thinking about trying to please everyone,” Hollingworth says.

“You can’t,” Walton says. “There’s always going to be somebody that loves it and somebody that hates it.”

“It’s no way to live life,” Hollingworth adds.

Hollingworth and Walton are intellectually mature beyond their years. They have grounded perspective in a time when they could be racing for some fantastical goal. The two have been friends since four years old. Yet, they are realistic about this relationship, its ups, and downs, even taking to their songs to write about their at times-personal and creative tensions.

“We’re both creative people,” Hollingworth says, “and music was the one that made the most sense to me, I guess.”

Of course, practice (and play) makes perfect. Today, the two have enjoyed great success, including albums that have landed prominently on the U.K. charts and a coveted appearance at Coachella. Today, as their new album is set to hit shelves, the two are both grateful for their success and for the time they’ve allowed themselves to grow within it. For the new LP, the two didn’t sit down and set out to write a record. They just allowed themselves to work on one song and then another until, well, they had a completed record. And that they mined their own lives and relationship made it cohesive.

“When you’re writing a song, when you’re in the feeling of the song, it’s impossible to know what feeling you’re going to want to write about next,” Walton says.

“We don’t tend to really plan stuff out,” Hollingworth says.

Hollingworth adds that this album felt particularly cathartic. Prior to its release, her boyfriend passed away after a battle with cancer. Writing music was her coping mechanism. When you’re in a state of mourning, as she was, there’s no time to think about the audience. Instead, it’s about putting your emotions into a piece of music. Additionally, the duo helped their own dynamic by processing whatever frictions they may have with each other in the music.

“It’s just a very personal record,” Hollingworth says.

“It’s not creative differences,” Walton says. “That’s something we’ve always agreed on throughout. It’s more just changes in personalities. Growing up, I guess. Growing apart and not really understanding how each others’ brains work in the way that we used to.”

“That coupled with so much going on in our personal lives,” Walton continues. “Loss and other things about growing up. There’s a lot of pressure on our relationship.”

Yet, even with all this in mind, the two express excitement about heading out on tour, to play their new music for fans. The two have been rehearsing with a rhythm section and the songs are tight. They’ve come to life outside of their recordings and they’re ready to fill a room. After the pandemic, there is a greater appreciation for live performance and while Hollingworth and Walton didn’t make their new record with an audience in mind, per se, they’re ready for one to hear what they’ve been up to together. For the two, music is an important part of their lives. It fills the spaces between days and creates new ones to live in and find their futures.

“I love the way that it’s something that’s always there,” Walton says. “If you’re feeling sad or angry or whatever, there’s always a song to help you feel comforted. That applies to writing music, as well.”

“For me,” Hollingworth says, “it expresses experiences and emotions in life that you just cannot express through words.”

Let’s Eat Grandma’s upcoming album Two Ribbons, out on Transgressive Records 8th April 2022.

Permit some warranted hyperbole: the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist. Backed with his equally distinctive burbling guitar, “Say Laura” is a perfect gateway to his oeuvre with some of his loveliest compositions – and There They Were may be his best ever. 

“This constant shift between dream and reality, between the ground and a consciousness-expanding dimension, is what makes Eric Chenaux records so precious and unique. The ultimate and safe mind-altering experience. Not to be missed.” – The Quietus

“As delicate and lovely as a rare orchid, the album follows its own inner logic, with the songwriter guiding us through a wide-open landscape that’s unusual but strangely familiar all the same.” – Uncut

“Beguiling. An album brimming with a sublime alien balladry.” – Record Collector

“Chenaux is instantly recognisable as a phenom, finding endless new patterns for melodies to converge and separate and take the long road home.” – YellowGreenRed

“When he’s soloing, it sounds like his instrument is made of wax and he’s playing in a warm room, all the notes are bending and sliding and drooping. It’s got this slippery warmth to it.” ATTN Crucial Listening

“There are surface parallels between “Say Laura” and Arthur Russell’s minimal avant pop, but there are also more subtle similarities to Talk Talk’s floating ambience, the most stripped-down Sun Ra sessions, and the boundless curiosity and willingness to chase impulses that This Heat’s Gareth Williams explored with the sideways song writing of his obscure Flaming Tunes side project. In less careful hands, the combination of free range guitar exploration and crooning vocals could come off as awkward or disjointed, but Chenaux’s patient guidance makes even the most disruptive moments of “Say Laura” feel sweet” – All Music

“Compelling… songwriting that’s atypical and free from boundaries, driven by a commitment to unexpected sounds and uninhibited exploration.” – The Wire

The new record by Eric Chenaux is his most immaculate and pristine. “Say Laura” perfectly incarnates the counter-intuitive interplay of instrument and voice that Chenaux has been revealing and revelling in throughout the past decade: his gently unhinged juxtaposition of resplendently smooth, seductively assured singing and puckish, frazzled, thoroughly destabilized guitar could come from no other musician. The five wandering, wondering ballads on “Say Laura” bring Chenaux’s semi-improvised but keenly intentional song writing to its fullest, clearest, warmest and coolest articulation; uncompromising and generous, hyper-specific and loose, spartan and luxurious, elemental and ornate.

“Say Laura” might as well be a jazz record — certainly as much as his previously acclaimed albums Slowly Paradise and Skullsplitter tread that genre-adjacent territory — though it also features moments and melodies that come as close to pop flirtation as Chenaux is likely to get. But above all, “Say Laura” breathes like no other Chenaux album. Voice and guitar are inscribed with elemental clarity in a wondrously open, symbiotic sonic space. His pure tenor croon glides through a crisp, reverberant ether while his fried guitar careens dizzily and giddily, every gesture and timbre captured in unflinching detail by engineer Cyril Harrison.

Chenaux has also made his most minimal, controlled, regulated and rhythmic record. Citing a spectrum of influences — Sun Ra, Jeanne Lee, Gang Starr, Charlie Parker, Betty Carter, EPMD and Thelonious Monk — “Say Laura” expands on a foot-pedal technique Chenaux has previously used here and there, taking things to a more programmatic level: beats composed on a Boss drum machine are used as noise gate triggers, slowed down and inserted into his guitar signal path to create tempered pulses.

Opener “Hello, How? And Hey” immediately establishes these subtly heightened characteristics of elementalism, dualism and structure, with Chenaux’s vocal tracing gorgeous soaring melodies across a single beating chord, occupying all the space until guitar and Wurlitzer (courtesy of the album’s only guest, long-time collaborator Ryan Driver) enter in a cascade of twinkle and wah at the two-minute mark, eventually leaving the vocal behind as the song’s second half gives way to a woozy guitar and keyboard improv over the chordal pulse. Album closer “Hold The Line” follows a similar motif, the vocal playing more on folk and pop tropes, but wrapping up in time for a gloriously gnarled eight-minute instrumental ramble. “There They Were” is something closer to unprecedented in Chenaux’s twenty-year songbook: singing and soloing at the same time, he breathlessly repeats a joyous highlife-tinged vocal refrain without pause, cutting against his trademark languorous pace, propelling the song for miles. Title track and lead single “Say Laura” is the centre piece distillation of the album’s stylistic, compositional and spatial mission: sparse but lush, controlled but wild, every note in its place and all over the place.

Interviewed as The Wire magazine’s cover star in 2017, Chenaux said “the details of our lives are often produced with improvisation and experimentation and in my music, improvisation is a way to hear those details I would not likely be able to hear otherwise.” The details on “Say Laura” achieve new heights of lucid acuity. Eric Chenaux just keeps getting better, and “Say Laura” captures him at his best.

Not everything has to come to a logical conclusion; not everything needs to be about something. In her lecture “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” the writer Garielle Lutz explains her fondness for language where “the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language.” By that, she means that language, for some, is at its best when it can be isolated, when it takes on a sort of synesthetic, acoustic resonance. You can apply this terminology to the song writing of New Zealand’s Aldous Harding, who, for four albums, has made folk music with a conceptual weight that’s difficult to categorize or assign to any established narrative. Her latest album, “Warm Chris“, is a record of the portable solitude that Lutz writes about: It is opaque, surreal, and above all, lonely.

At first blush, Warm Chris is almost a discouraging listen. Its soft, slightly psychedelic folk pop is deceptively thorny and dense. You have to learn how to listen to it, kind of like how you have to teach yourself how to read Samuel Beckett or Renata Adler. It is less accessible than 2019’s Designer: Most of the pop hooks and acoustic bass drops are gone. It moves slowly, and the music flourishes where you least expect it. A song like “Ennui” builds in waves, with an arrangement that snakes from strident pianos to squeezes of baritone sax. Harding’s voice sounds plucked from a dream, growing more awake as the song progresses. “No one look/And a canny fucking fill/Don’t lie to me!” she sings in one moment. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not supposed to: Harding wants you to find your own logic. “I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher. You put on a record, and that record belongs to you,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview.

Harding is a painstaking songwriter, even though her lyrics tend to veer toward disorder. At times, the vantage point can feel almost dissociative. On “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” she subverts a traditional song title into something alien and mournful. Banjos and horns bloom brilliantly as Harding sings about love, and her words are soft and searching, as if she were narrating the view through a train window. On the title track, her voice drops from soprano to alto and she sings about watching paper planes burn. Her delivery almost recalls a lullaby, and the tape hiss in the background is as gentle and constant as the sound of waves heard from within a seaside home.

For all her inscrutable intensity, there are also moments of levity and light. “Lawn” is sneaky and surreal, the kind of song that demands you put on vintage Mary Quant and go boogie—or turn into a human-sized gecko wearing Twiggy eyeliner, which is what happens to Harding in the video. On “Leathery Whip,” her voice bends abruptly from the sound of a long-haired songwriter living in Laurel Canyon circa 1972 to that of the chipmunk outside her window. “Here comes life with his leathery whip/Here comes life with his leathery leathery!” she exclaims, joined by the flat, freaky baritone of Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson. She draws out her words as she sings, blowing up vowels like twisty balloons. It’s funny yet vaguely threatening, like the last thing you’d hear before Harry Houdini saws you in half.

The lilt of her New Zealand accent gives an odd, familiar poetry to the words “cheap wig” – it’s just the kind of crisp, slightly absurd imagery often found in her lyrics.

It was here that Harding finished writing the bulk of her fourth album “Warm Chris“, bunkering down with Jessie and her mother, Lorina, during the first of 2020’s lockdowns, before heading to Monmouth in Wales to record with John Parish, her long time producer with whom she shares an almost wordless rapport. (“Our gifts have a really lovely way of communicating without us,” she says of Parish, who also worked on albums “Party” and “Designer“.)

A week out from the album’s release, she’s back home again. Birdsong rings loudly in the long, full gaps between words as Harding thoughtfully coaxes out each sentence – some people talk just to fill out the silence, Harding is happy to sit in it.

If there’s a beguiling opacity to her public statements, it’s in step with her lyrics. On “Warm Chris” she ranges from breezily evocative similes (“The weather opened up like a birthday card,” she sings on second single “Fever”) to more obscure reflections (“Here comes life with his leathery whip”), but even more so than her earlier albums, it’s less about what the words mean than how they feel when Harding sings them.

“For this album I was a lot less focused on ‘poetry’, as I understand it,” she says. “I was more focused on phonics, pure phonics. Letting sounds stand alone as poetry against their background, just the sound of the word, rather than people knowing [the meaning].

“I use my voice like language or clothing,” she says, of the slippery character of her vocals. “I understand that that’s really interesting to people … I’m sort of like the Jim Carrey of the indie world or whatever.

“I use whatever sounds I need to fill the gaps in my musical universe. I make songs that I want to hear, how I get there really does feel handed to me.”

I wonder aloud if part of people’s fascination with her inscrutability – in her lyrics, her stage presence, her surreal video clips – stems from the authenticity listeners usually expect from singer-songwriters.

The sound of “Warm Chris” is sparse and oblique, and trying to anchor yourself in Harding’s lyrics can feel like organizing a narrative from the shape of passing clouds. But that’s also where its brilliance lies, what makes this some of Harding’s best song writing yet. “Warm Chris” asks you to surrender catchiness and legibility and think instead about how a lyric like “sometimes shepherds have it right” (from “Staring at the Henry Moore”) might also be infused with inexplicable melancholy. Or why on “Lawn,” you have to suppress a giggle when Harding rhymes “They don’t mean a thing to me” with “All these lamps are free!” She favours this kind of free association, unconnected turns of phrase that synthesize the strange, lonely resonance of staring at a piece of abstract art or visiting an empty beach in winter. These are concrete images, but “Warm Chris” isn’t explicit about anything: The feelings you have when you experience these songs are yours alone.

In 1973, artist manager David Geffen was basking in the success of his Asylum Records label, launched two years earlier with the backing of Atlantic Records. Emboldened by the commercial success of the Eagles, Asylum’s first band, and his earlier triumph managing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Geffen proposed another would-be supergroup by lobbying John David Souther, Chris Hillman and Richie Furay to join forces. With song writing experience and their own shared affinity for country-rock, the trio seemed poised to cash in on California’s ’70s rock gold rush.

If Souther Hillman Furay was pitched as a trio of equals, Geffen’s first consideration was Souther, already signed to an Asylum solo deal and writing songs with the Eagles, led by his former Longbranch Pennywhistle partner, Glenn Frey. “Souther Hillman Furay was David Geffen’s attempt to make them mainstream in the wake of the Eagles’ success,” Souther would later tell rock historian Barney Hoskyns. “I think he thought I’d be the Neil [Young] of the group.”

His new bandmates already enjoyed some of the luster Geffen sought for Souther. Chris Hillman had been a Byrd, a founding Burrito Brother and Stephen Stills’ wingman in Manassas. Richie Furay had followed Buffalo Springfield by co-founding Poco, one of the most influential L.A. country-rock units. Hillman recruited Manassas bandmates Paul Harris on keyboards and Al Perkins on pedal steel and lead guitar, along with Jim Gordon, former Derek and the Dominos drummer and a first-call studio player. Harris, Perkins and Gordon would be accorded co-billing behind the leaders in what was now called the Souther Hillman Furay Band.

With visions of CSN success dancing in Geffen’s head, Asylum enlisted producer Richard Podolor, who had guided Three Dog Night to an impressive streak of Top 40 single hits and gold albums. The Earlier bonds between Furay and Hillman, a valuable ally during Buffalo Springfield’s formation, and Manassas gave hope for a tight-knit, cohesive band, but Geffen either misread or ignored the chemistry between his three named stars. Hillman and Furay were accustomed to collaboration, but Souther was perceived as an arrogant, acerbic maverick.

Tension was most toxic between Souther and Furay, whose friendship with born-again guitarist Perkins catalyzed Furay’s evangelical fervour, prompting Souther and Hillman to forge their own “Heathen Defense League” only partly in jest. “Richie and I were just oil and water,” Souther would later note. “I’m not a great team player under those circumstances.

Chris Hillman would be more diplomatic. “Rather than collaborating, we each brought our own songs to the table, and everyone’s material had his own personal signature attached,” he recalls in his memoir, “Time Between: My Life as a Byrd, Burrito Brother, and Beyond“. That assessment would be borne out in the three principals’ musical temperaments. Souther’s worldly cool contrasted sharply with Furay’s earnest intensity, with middleman Hillman laid-back yet less mannered than Souther.

Country-rock was their common denominator, but The Souther Hillman Furay Band leads off with Richie Furay’s “Fallin’ in Love,” a spirited mainstream rocker propelled by Gordon’s muscular drumming, Harris’ surging organ fills and Perkins’ sharp electric lead guitar riffs. A typically jubilant Furay vocal shares the same energy and vaulting melodic shape as “A Good Feelin’ to Know,” his best-known Poco track, which powered “Fallin’ in Love” into the Top 40.

Country accents do shape Hillman’s first vocal feature, “Heavenly Fire,” an elegy to his Burrito comrade Gram Parsons, who had died in September ’73, remembered here as a fallen comrade “who lived the life you sang about.” Perkins’ mournful pedal steel, Harris’ keyboards, and Hillman’s mandolin honour the country-rock vision for which Parsons was already being canonized, but Hillman’s pensive vocal is nearly swamped by elaborate, lapidary backing harmonies on the final choruses.

J.D. Souther, meanwhile, proves the most prolific contributor, penning four of the album’s 10 tracks. “The Heartbreaker” is a loping, R&B-edged shuffle warning against a romantic predator with “a song and a suitcase, and a rodeo smile—just a picture of style” who seduces his prey with “that magic sound.” The song showcases the Detroit-born Texan’s laconic drawl and a laid-back, jaded sensibility shared with his pals in the Eagles, evoking life in the same fast lane they would map on Hotel California. Its third-person vantage point masks the irony in Souther’s own notoriety as a ladies’ man since his early days hanging at the Troubadour’s bar, with Linda Ronstadt, Judee Sill and Stevie Nicks among his conquests.

On “Border Town,” Souther glamorizes decadence in the first person to survey the perils in a Mexican border town, citing “the dope and the night life…no place you’d really want to hang around,” before admitting, “But…I think I might.” Latin percussion buoys the track as Souther offers a roguish commentary on “good-looking women, most of them easy” and “dudes” that are “pretty greasy.” What may have passed as a cinematic tableau in 1974 now sounds tone-deaf in its casual misogyny and ethnic stereotyping.

Throughout the album, Souther’s worldly cool offers a stark contrast to Furay’s earnest intensity, while Hillman emerges as middleman both musically and temperamentally. Sandwiched between Souther’s two rockers, Furay’s “Believe Me” is a forthright romantic ballad decorated with keening pedal steel and piano arpeggios before flexing more electric firepower courtesy of Perkins’ lead electric guitar. His third SHF contribution, “The Flight of the Dove,” is a minor-keyed, mid-tempo rocker that hints at a crisis of faith that may or may not be merely romantic in origin.

Hillman splits his remaining originals between “Safe at Home,” a strutting mid-tempo rocker enlivened by Perkins’ slashing guitar leads and Gordon’s splashing cymbal crashes, and the lysergic bluegrass of “Rise and Fall.” “Safe at Home” is another cautionary tale of wretched excess from alcohol to cocaine to faithless women, tailored for ’70s rock radio, while “Rise and Fall” points to Hillman’s future embrace of acoustic country and bluegrass.

For his remaining tracks, Souther pivots to his softer side and stronger suit as a writer. “Pretty Goodbyes” is a languid waltz with elegant lyrics and a lush choral arrangement. A better balladeer than a belter, Souther’s tender vocal and the track’s musical bloom cushion the blow in what’s essentially a kiss-off to his lover, admitting he’s been “lonelier with you than I was without.” On the album closer, “Dark, Deep and Dreamless,” Souther scales up to a grandiose ballad that adds an Eagles nest of contrapuntal backing vocals around an ascending melody that reaches for, but doesn’t quite achieve, Roy Orbison’s altitude, leaving a finale that stumbles toward bombast.

True to Geffen’s agenda, The Souther Hillman Furay Band, released in July 1974, accomplished its commercial mission and displayed the stylistic DNA of the Byrds, Poco and, yes, the Eagles, reaching #11 on the Billboard album chart and attaining gold status. Yet ultimately the SHF Band proved to be less than the sum of its parts, any cohesion frayed by internal friction. The antipathy between Souther and a now devout Furay only intensified, while Gordon’s increasingly volatile behaviour led to his departure, a precursor to mental illness that would lead to his psychotic break in 1983 and the murder of his own mother. They would complete a second album with new drummer Ron Grinel, the aptly titled Trouble in Paradise, which met with critical and commercial indifference.

Yes bassist Billy Sherwood revealed details of the fourth all-star Prog Collective album.

The supergroup has also released the lead track “House of the Rising Sun” featuring Gong’s Steve Hillage and David Clayton-Thomas of Blood Sweat & Tears.

Titled “Songs We Were Taught”, the follow-up to 2021’s “World on Hold” will arrive on July 1st and is available for preorder now. Among the performers this time are current Yes singer Jon Davison, former Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre, Steve Morse of Deep Purple, Rod Argent, Dweezil Zappa and Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal.

“Producer Billy Sherwood once again leads this uber-talented prog-rock supergroup, this time on a trip through some of the most recognizable and influential folk and art-rock songs of their generation,” label Purple Pyramid said in a statement. “Listen to how these stellar musicians transform the sound of ’60s and ’70s folk-rock into ethereal and atmospheric masterpieces!”

Listen to how these stellar musicians transform the sound of ’60s & ’70s folk rock into ethereal and atmospheric masterpieces!

Prog Collective, ‘Songs We Were Taught’ Track Listing
1. “The Sound of Silence” – Jon Davison (Yes), Geoff Downes (Yes/Asia)
2. “Year Of The Cat” – Billy Sherwood (Yes/Circa), David Sancious (E Street Band)
3. “House Of The Rising Sun” – David Clayton-Thomas (Blood Sweat & Tears), Steve Hillage (Gong)
4. “In The Land Of Grey And Pink” – Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal (Guns N’ Roses)
5. “Summer Breeze” – Roine Stolt (The Flower Kings), Steve Morse (Deep Purple)
6. “Fire And Rain” – Sonja Kristina (Curved Air), Martin Barre (Jethro Tull)
7. “The Weight” – Rod Argent (Zombies), Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (Doobie Brothers)
8. “Wild World” – Rosalie Cunningham (Ipso Facto), Patrick Moraz (Moody Blues)
9. “It’s Too Late” – Candice Night (Blackmore’s Night), Dweezil Zappa
10. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” – Martin Turner (Wishbone Ash), Jerry Goodman (Flock)