Chicago indie rockers Dehd are back with their third album, “Blue Skies”. The follow-up to 2020’s “Flowerof Devotion” chronicles the perils of “love addiction,” as the band has noted. “I wrote it for myself and for everyone who needed to hear a song about choosing new forms of love,” vocalist Emily Kempf explained. “It’s about chasing a relationship with oneself rather than an unhealthy one, one that just doesn’t quite fit, or a co-dependent one.”
All songs written by Emily Kempf, Jason Balla, and Eric McGrady. Produced by Jason Balla.
“Hyaline” (released 27th May 2022) is the debut album from Ohio-born, Oakland, CA based artist and songwriter, Maria BC. Following last year’s debut EP “Devil’s Rain” which received critical praise from Pitchfork, BBC Radio 6 Music, KEXP and more, Maria created “Hyaline” across their untreated Brooklyn apartment in Summer 2021, like a wandering spirit gaining energy from different spaces.
Their classically-trained mezzo-soprano voice soars over raw, etherial guitars; audio samples from Prospect Park – now almost unrecognizable – dapple across minimal percussion; organ, played by MariaBC’s dad at his church in Ohio, settle alongside tender, transformative harmonies. Mixing together different sessions, tracks recorded directly into their phone and samples collected over the years, Maria BC likens “Hyaline” to a “sonic collage.” It’s a project of patience, and trusting the process.
“Hyaline”, the album title, describes something that is clear and translucent like glass, especially a smooth sea. For Maria, song-writing is a stretched blank canvas awaiting the strokes of an exhale, and it’s this slow-moving process that rewards us the ease of a crystalline sky, without forgetting the clouds that may have come before it. A knife’s-edge balance of intimacy and ambiguity, “Hyaline” accesses snapshots of grief, anxiety and wonder through a miscellany of spectres: these are ghost stories, but not as we know them.
Dawes have shared the latest taste of their forthcoming studio album, “Misadventures of Doomscroller”, which is set to be released on July 22nd. The single, dubbed “Comes In Waves,” showcases the band’s indie-folk sensibility with an added light rock layer due to an exceptional electric guitar solo during the latter half of the six-minute song.
“I had this riff and one of the verses for a while,” offered Dawes frontman, Taylor Goldsmith. “Griffin, Wylie and Mike Viola came over to my backyard – this was peak Covid – to just play music together for one of the first times since lockdown.” He went on to add, “I started sharing the song and Griffin and Mike started singing their background parts you hear on the choruses on the record immediately. It inspired me to finish writing it.”
Goldsmith then remarked, “The lyric is about the arbitrary demands I make on myself. I want to perceive me or my life a certain way but I make no exceptions for an off day or a misstep. Whether it’s a win or a loss, it’s all transient, and only when I can live in some version of that awareness – which is itself transient – am I able to bat away any fears or anxieties or the consequences of an over indulged ego.”
The band has also shared the accompanying music video for their new single via YouTube. The intimate performance shows the band playing “Comes In Waves” in the studio, giving fans an intimate glimpse into Dawes’ unparalleled companionship as musicians.
“Misadventures of Doomscroller” to be released on July 22nd
“There’s an immediate, Big Star-like appeal to Bread Pilot’s unabashedly poppy music; true, it’s leavened with a good deal of crunchier distortion and the periodic ragged holler of vocals, but the commitment to expertly crafted songs (with unexpected hints of psychedelia) is similar. Plus, the band performs the admirable task of getting in and out in under three minutes on most of these tracks. Rarely has the phrase “You have your whole life to make your first album” been more applicable: “New To You” is the full-length result of a decade of playing together that began in high school. And it’s one hell of a coming-out party.” —The AV Club
Bread Pilot’s new album “New To You!” Recorded at The Unknown in Anacortes, WA and engineered by Sam Rosson (Great Grandpa’s Four of Arrows, Death Cab for Cutie) — we’re confident this album is going to be a classic.
“It’s an album which is rooted in the heart of lo-fi but produced with contemporary indie-rock sheen. Each layered track emanates a measured approach to song writing, a precise ear for earworm melodies, and scores of influences from the past.” —Under The Radar
All songs written by Stephen Ibanez and Taylor Hayden
Bread Pilot is Evan House, Stephen Ibanez, Taylor Hayden, and Levi Nattrass
For more than 20 years, Neil Young’s mythical lost album “Toast” has sat on the shelf. Shelved by Young: “I was not happy with it, or maybe I was just generally unhappy,” he wrote in his Super Deluxe memoir. I don’t know. “It was a very desolate album, very sad and unanswered.” Now, “Toast” is being released. On July 8th, the “lost” album recorded by the singer-songwriter and his long time compatriots in his band Crazy Horse will be released on CD, double vinyl, and digital formats.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse recorded the album “around the turn of the millennium” at San Francisco’sToast Studios but the prolific and notoriously mercurial artist soon thought better of releasing it. “Quit” and “Goin’ Home” appeared on 2002’s “Are You Passionate?“, the former in a re-recording with a different band (including Booker T. Jones, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Crazy Horse’s Frank “Poncho”Sampedro).
Still other tracks including “Standing in the Light of Love” were familiar from Young having played them live in 2001. Young teased a release in 2008, telling Rolling Stone at the time that it was a “mind-blowing record…great rock and roll, very moody, kind of jazzy.”
Clearly it was back on his mind last year when he devoted an entry on his Neil Young Archives website to the album. He wrote, in part, “It must be said that here Crazy Horse shows a depth never seen or heard before. The greatest group I have ever met. This is a pinnacle.” He described the music to which the band applied its particular brand of alchemy: “”The music of “Toast” is about a relationship. There is a time in many relationships that go bad, a time long before the breakup, where it dawns on one of the people, maybe both, that it’s over. This was that time.”
On July 8th, listeners will finally have a chance to hear what Young and Crazy Horse cooked up two decades ago. Their last collaborative album to date, “Barn”, was released in 2021. “Standing the Light of Love” is currently streaming at YouTube and all other streaming services.
Meanwhile, “Toast’s” existence was never officially revealed until 2008; since when it has become a central part of Young’s cannon of ‘lost’ albums, alongside “Homegrown“, “Chrome Dreams“, “Oceanside/Countryside“, “Island In The Sun” and “Times Square“.
Do It Yourself is the only album by the Seahorses, the band formed by John Squire, formerly guitarist in the Stone Roses. The album’s cover features a photograph of Squire’s 1996 sculpture in the shape of globe made of puzzle pieces and also named Do It Yourself.
‘After John Squire left The Stone Roses, he formed The Seahorses in 1996 together with Stuart Fletcher, Chris Helme and Andy Watts. The year after they released their debut album “Do It Yourself“, which was produced by Tony Visconti. It featured three popular singles: “Love Is The Law”, “Blinded By The Sun” and “Love Me And Leave Me”. The latter was Liam Gallagher’s first song writing credit.’ This album has been reissued on 180gm vinyl.
The album features the singles “Blinded By The Sun”, “Love is the Law” and “Love Me and Leave Me” (Co-written by Liam Gallagher) The album was produced by Tony Visconti (T. Rex, David Bowie)
“Heart Under“, Just Mustard’s second album and first for Partisan Records, is an album that asks you to forget what you know. At every turn, this remarkable record reconfigures and stretches the ideas and ambition of a rock band, and turns a year of lockdown and personal struggles into a breath taking artistic statement. Across its 10 tracks, the album presents a coherent style and ethos – those scything guitars, Katie’s magical vocals – but still incorporates a wide and untethered vision. There are brooding, atmospheric rock songs (“Still”, “In Shade”) and others that apply a lighter, dreamier touch (“Sore”, “Mirrors”), all tied together with impeccable instrumentation and a united vision. On “Wednesday”, the band played with dreamier soundscapes and production techniques, and “Heart Under” serves as the next stage of this development, with every instrument brilliantly pushed to its limit and every boundary of the band stretched.
“Thrillingly untraditional” – NME ★★★★★
“Masters of atmosphere” – Dork, ★★★★
“A striking, fantastically original work” – CLASH, 8/10
“Just Mustard are a band completely at one with their sound, and with “Heart Under” they have well and truly mastered the art of atmospheric rock.” – Loud and Quiet, 9/10
“Simultaneously ghostly and glorious, a wretched yet emancipatory tornado of distorted dissonance that places the band among the vanguard of the British Isles’ ever-crowded post-punk scene.” – Paste, 8.5/10
Newly-unearthed 8mm film footage of Led Zeppelin’s September 19th, 1970 evening show at New York’s Madison Square Garden is setting the internet ablaze, the newly-discovered footage capturing the second of two Led Zeppelin shows at the Garden on September 19th, 1970 is generating much excitement among Zeppelin aficionados.
Led Zeppelin performed two shows at the Manhattan arena that day, at 2pm and 8pm, with frontman Robert Plant paying tribute to guitar god Jimi Hendrix at the latter show, in acknowledgement of his death the previous day. LedZeppelin.com states that “the evening’s performance is widely considered one of their best ever.”
Which helps explain why a newly-unearthed reel of 8mm film capturing the band in full flight on the night in question is generating much excitement among Zeppelin fans.
Posted on YouTube by user ikhnaton yesterday (May 25th), the two minute 48 second clip features snippets of set opener “Immigrant Song”, which would emerge as the opening track on the band’s third album, released three weeks later, on October 5th, 1970, and the set’s second track “Heartbreaker”.
And comments under the clip suggest that Zeppelin fans are digging it. “Holy grail stuff right here” reads one comment, while user Simon Perry writes “Wow. These three minutes are more enjoyable than the Albert Hall footage.”
“It’s amazing to me how just under 3 minutes of fragmented Zeppelin footage is still better than any other band on the planet,” adds one.
Wilco shared a new song, “Tired of Taking It Out On You,” from their forthcoming double album “Cruel Country” (out May 27th), Hard times and conflicts bubble up on nearly every song, whether it’s the self-inflicted crises of “Ambulance” or the interpersonal struggles of “Tired of Taking it Out on You.” These themes are familiar ones in the Wilco songbook and they’re also ideally suited to be filtered through the country music stylings that pop up across the album.
“I’ve realized over the years that a lot of the songs I’ve written have worked as reminders to myself to pay attention to various things,” says Jeff Tweedy of Wilco’s new song. “Sometimes I think I’ve figured out how the world works in some small way, and I worry I’ll forget it if I don’t sing it back to myself occasionally. This song, I believe, is going to come in handy for just that purpose. I’m a person who needs to stay alert to how I’m treating others when I’m not feeling my best. And now that I mention it, when I look around, it seems like a lot of us have been taking things out on each other when we would be better served striving for understanding and empathy. I’m just trying to be honest with myself, and I guess I’m hoping if this song can help me focus on that, maybe someone else could find it useful in the same way.”
As for the tour, It kicks off August 12th in Cedar Rapids, and includes stops in Toronto, Montreal, New Haven, Fargo, Santa Fe, San Diego, Memphis, New Orleans, and more. There are no NYC shows at the moment, but Wilco did just play a five shows here celebrating the 20th anniversary of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”. All dates are listed below.
In other news, Wilco have announced that their sets at the Solid Sound Festival this month will be available to livestream. Those include Friday, May 27th’s performance of “Cruel Country“, their May 28th performance and the May 29th “Jeff Tweedy & Friends” performance.
The dynamic Chicago rock band Wilco return’s with their 12th studio album, the first of its kind. “CruelCountry” is the band’s exploration of the genre they’ve often been defined by but, until now, never fully embraced. The double album features 21 Jeff Tweedy-penned tracks, made almost entirely of live takes, created with all six members together in The Loft for the first time since the 2011 release “The Whole Love”.
“I love my country stupid and cruel,” Jeff Tweedy sings on “Cruel Country,” the title track to Wilco’s 12th studio album. That line, and the song itself really, serves as a summation of the LP’s sound and purpose as the iconic band works more overtly classic country music themes into a sprawling album that attempts to make sense of life in this fractured country.
Wilco is Jeff Tweedy, John Stirratt, Patrick Sansone, Nels Cline, Glenn Kotche and Mikael Jorgensen “Tired of Taking It Out On You” is from the forthcoming Wilco record “Cruel Country”.
Jeff Tweedy – vocals, acoustic guitar Glenn Kotche – drums, Tambourine John Stirratt – bass, vocals Nels Cline – lap steel Mike Jorgensen – organ, piano Patrick Sansone – electric and acoustic guitar, piano, vocals
The Fat Angel Sings 