There are few more gratifying feelings than hearing a new song, only to realize you were waiting for something just like it to come along. It’s like scratching an itch you didn’t know you had, or pushing a lost puzzle piece into place inside your brain. That was exactly the case when Philadelphia four-piece Sadurn announced their signing to Run for Cover Records in February and shared the lead track from their debut album, “snake.” Led by vocalist-guitarist and songwriter Genevieve DeGroot, Sadurn are a band who move as one in service of each song, disappearing selflessly into their intimate, gentle folk-rock and -pop compositions.
Sadurn have released their stunning debut record, “Radiator“, out today via Run For Cover Records. The group might be Philadelphia’s best kept musical secret, but not for long, having recently earned attention from the likes of Stereogum, NPR, The FADER, BrooklynVegan, Paste Magazine, them., MTV News, and more. Led by songwriter Genevieve DeGroot (they/them), Sadurn have created the rare debut album that feels fully realized in every way.
DeGroot’s song writing is defined by its stark vulnerability, their vocals alternately soaring and softening in time with each heart-baring observation on strained relationships and the often unbridgeable gaps between people. “Radiator” is just what its title suggests, emanating emotional catharsis even as it handles those feelings with the utmost care
Sadurn from their upcoming album ‘Radiator’ out May 6th 2022 via Run For Cover Records.
In many ways ‘Kumoyo Island’ represents the culmination of a journey for Kikagaku Moyo. While their decade-long career can be summarized as a series of kaleidoscopic explorations through lands and dimensions far and near, there’s a strong intention in each of their works to take the listener to a particular place, however real or abstract they may be. In that sense, the title and cover art for the band’s fifth and final album draws you into a magical mass of land surrounded by water—but the couch suggests that ‘Kumoyo Island’ may not be a fleeting stop, but rather a place of respite, where one could pause and take it all in.
It takes a lot of self-awareness to know when to pack it up in a world where it’s expected for our favourite artists to create forever. Japanese psych-rockers Kikagaku Moyo have accomplished what they set out to do, ending their decade-long career with “Kumoyo Island”. Sophisticated funk rhythms and twirling guitar licks bounce around the 48-minute runtime, leaving little room for boredom.
Kikagaku Moyo hold the listener’s hand as they jump down a rabbit hole of influences, taking sharp turns into playful country grooves on “Gomugomu” and shoegaze-inspired melodies on “Yayoi, Iyayoi.” “Kumoyo Island” is a concise, satisfying final installment in the band’s catalogue, making Kikagaku Moyo’s farewell a little easier to accept.
“Kumoyo Island” is the fifth studio album & the last euphoric mind-trip to Kikagaku Moyo’s imagined island.”
Lenderman plays guitar in the twangy shoegaze troupe Wednesday, and while the lyrical references in Boat Songs are not literary like his bandmate Karly Hartzman’s, they are employed with a similar economy. His holy trinity is basketball, professional wrestling, and Jackass, considerably “lower brow” vessels for entertainment compared to the flash fiction and poetry allusions of Wednesday. This, of course, sets up an interesting intra-band dynamic: Lenderman as the everyman foil singing ditties about sports, toilet humour, and bodily harm to Hartzman’s artier, dream-addled approach.
The 10 tracks of countrified indie rock sound primed to soundtrack plenty of beer-battered sessions.
Elsewhere, Lenderman uses all two minutes and 16 seconds of the opening “Hangover Game” to debunk a legendary NBA rumor. Don’t get it twisted, “The Last Dance” was fun and all, but there’s no conspiracy as to why Michael Jordan had a fever on that fateful night in June of ’97. Hell, he loves drinking too. For that matter, why don’t we ever think about the toll all those steroids and pratfalls take on wrestlers? “TLC Cage Match” reminds us that they aren’t gods, just regular people like you and me, with families and dreams, Lenderman has other things on his mind besides what was on the TV during recording sessions. “Toon Town” is supposedly a holdover from a scrapped metal album, but it’s the jilted “SUV” that houses the record’s sludgiest riffs, brings a Mascis-sized solo out of him before a breakdown segues into the bad luck sermon “Under Control.”
Best of all might be the tour travelogue “You Have Bought Yourself a Boat.” Detailing bug bites and freshly cleaned clothes drying out in the back of the van, its rootsy shuffle is infectious while Lenderman and company battle the elements on the road.
There’s something refreshing in the plainspoken way Lenderman sings and performs these songs. His backing band The Wind plays them straight with no irony, just pedal steel, pump organ, and a little Southern swing to support the white-hot distorted guitars. All of this is to say that Boat Songsis country in approach, but indie rock by means of marketing. Lenderman has namechecked acts like Bob Dylan, The Band, Warren Zevon, and Johnny Paycheck inprior interviews, and his recent cover of Drive-By Truckers was so complimentary the band snuck Wednesday into a recent show when they played neighbouring venues.
“Boat Songs” is a triumph in any sense of the word, but it’s a true victory for a certain strain of indie rock fan. Aligning oneself with sports, suds, and Sparklehorse.
MJ Lenderman’s ‘Boat Songs,’ available everywhere 29th April via Dear Life Records
“‘Nothing Gives Me Pleasure’ is about trying to love yourself when it feels like no one else will,” Girlpool’sHarmony Tividad says. “It was written during a time when I was working so hard to get someone specific to love and recognize me. On the path to doing that, I diluted myself so much that I lost sight of my own needs. This video plays with the lengths we go to to feel loved and how so many faces of intimacy may disguise what love actually looks like to us specifically. I have a history of getting lost in the labyrinth in the struggle for affection. In this video I wanted to interface with my own patterns in the attempt to better see and love myself.” It’s from their new album, “Forgiveness“, due out next month via ANTI-Records.
“Nothing Gives Me Pleasure” by Girlpool From the album ‘Forgiveness’, available April 29 on ANTI-Records
Our new single “Karaoke” from our upcoming album “Emotional Creature” is out now! “Karaoke” is part one of the upcoming triology of videos we having come your way. Chicago’s Beach Bunny are releasing their new album “Emotional Creature” on July 22nd via Mom+Pop Music. They’ve already shared a couple singles, “Fire Escape” and “Oxygen,” and now they’ve shared a third titled “Karaoke” along with a video written by bandleader Lili Trifilio and directed by Eliza Chance. The visual also has a guest appearance from actor and comedian Bob Odenkirk.
“Karaoke” details the small moments that take up one’s entire headspace when falling for someone else—a turn in conversation that results in an eruption of laughter, eye contact that makes one’s heart burst. Trifilio sings as if capturing these moments in real time, turning these romantic details into monuments for her memory. “‘Karaoke’ is a song about having a crush,” Trifilio shared. “It’s about infatuation, fleeting feelings, and the bittersweet nature of uncertainty. It’s about learning pieces of who someone is and liking them before even knowing the whole story.”
The visual finds the group in their groovy spaceship where they watch a TV showing scenes involving Trifilio and a purple creature (whose hands appear on the album’s cover). At the video’s end, Odenkirk beams in with an important message—Star Agent 0 (presumably the purple dude) has been captured. “Time is of the essence. The entire universe is counting on you,” he warns. It seems it’s not only matters of the heart at stake.
It would be too easy to call “The Words You Spoke Still Move Me” is a record about religion, dealing as much as it does with relationships, grief, and identity even its thoughts on spirituality are more complicated than that, with “Charlie IO” taking aim at psychedelics as another mode of spiritual bypassing. Ellevator’s verses are dense with re-purposed images, It could be my own baggage, but there are moments in which I’m convinced the band does something similar in their sound, which falls into even more interesting than just hard and soft rock. They share a stadium-sized ambition with Canadian indie bands of the 2000s (most closely, Metric) especially when the guitars soar in on the chorus of “Claws”
“When I was 17 I moved to the other side of the world and joined what I’d now call a cult,” recalled NabiSue Bersche, lead singer of Ellevator, on her formative days spent in the Charismatic church. “I won’t deny that I had an incredible and life-changing experience there, but as I’ve gotten further away from it I’ve realized how there was way more damage done than good.” She brings that perspective on survival and truth-seeking to the Hamilton, Ontario trio’s debut album “The Words You Spoke Still Move Me”, produced by Chris Walla in all its shimmering, electric-piano-laden ecstasy and righteous anger. On “Slip,”Bersche pleads for freedom, singing from the perspective of a mythical selkie taken captive by a cult leader—by the bridge, she drowns him and returns to the sea, a different kind of baptism that lends credence to Ellevator’s cheeky claim to be the “World’s Hardest Soft Rock Band.”
While Ellevator’s lyrics are startlingly grounded and their melodies are often impeccable, the soft atmospheres billow out to the point that they start to go thin. The energy also seems to peter out by the last track, “Party Trick,” one of a few misses that keep “The Words You Spoke” from feeling like a cohesive work rather than a strong collection of songs.
Then there are tracks like “The Prism,” which verges on losing itself in vaporous guitars before Ellevator parts the fog and delivers one of the album’s most surprising and sobering shifts in tone, suddenly bare and vulnerable again. This is a flashy record, but unlike the charlatans it prophesies against, you can usually trust it to deliver fire when it shows you the smoke.
The Pipettes’ Rose Elinor Dougall and Blur’s Graham Coxon announced a new collaborative project called The WAEVE. Today, they’ve shared their first single, an upbeat, punky track called “Something Pretty” that braids post-punk, dream-pop, and conventional rock ‘n’ roll together. It’s fun!
The duo also performed their first live show at The Lexington in London. “We are greatly looking forward to unleashing our new sound live at the Lexington,” the band said ahead of their debut show. “We’ve been locked away, busy translating the varied sounds of our songs into a dynamic live show, with the help of some great musician friends. We invite you to surrender to the world of The WAEVE.”
The WAEVE…. the coming together of two musicians, who through working together have formed a new, singular, sonic identity. Themes of oblivion and surrender are juxtaposed with suggestions of hopefulness and light.
Against a brutal global backdrop of impending apocalypse and despair, Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall strove to free themselves through the defiant, blind optimism of making music.
Hearing the opening track on Sunflower Bean’s new album “Headful of Sugar”, it would be understandable if you felt like you’d stepped onto the set of a high-speed crime caper, with dollar bills flying in the air after a dramatic heist. “Who Put You Up to This?,” is a neon-lit single punctuated by soaring riffs, is the perfect introduction to the trio’s third record, as Julia Cumming, Nick Kivlen, and Olive Faber charge headfirst into taking risks.
This was part of Sunflower Bean’s mentality when the record came together, Cumming explains “I think taking risks for big rewards is a theme on the record, for sure,” she says. “Even with putting out this record, I think we tried to take a lot of risks with our sound. You never know how they’re gonna pay off, but you take a chance because it’s what you believe you should do.”
The band spent the recent period of forced confinement mostly with each other, resulting in the trio not only emerging as a more confident version of themselves, but also, consequently, with their most adventurous album to date. Over the course of “Headful of Sugar”, Sunflower Bean embrace both rock and pop music in a much bolder fashion than before; their riffs never seem to miss a mark, and the slick, cinematic stylings match the fictional and personal narratives found throughout. Take “In Flight,” where they embrace the fleeting nature of existence: “Life is short and the cliffs are high / I don’t have to close my eyes to see us in flight,” Kivlen sings.
A huge part of the band veering in this direction was Faber taking the reins when engineering the album, allowing Sunflower Bean to find out more about themselves, as Kivlen explains. “We trusted ourselves completely for the first time by deciding that we were going to record everything and demo everything [ourselves]. We were just trusting that we could do it, and that’s so important. I think that helped us play our instruments better. You have to figure out how to speak your own voice to the fullest.”
For the recording of the new album, they consciously kept things small. “We wanted to create this little quarantine group,” Kivlen continues. “We tried to create a sort of energy like we were at a party when we recorded. It was very much like everyone walking around the house doing whatever you want—listening to music really loud, drinking, eating, whatever—and just trying to foster this insular environment.”
“It’s an honour to be a New York band, especially right now—there’s a really new, exciting energy in the city. I feel more proud than ever.”
“Another big theme on the record is letting go,” Cumming says. “I think because of the lack of control that we had in our lives, on our work [during the pandemic], I think it definitely gave us more of an interest in celebrating the unknown and stepping out of our past selves.” Adds Kivlen, “There are a lot of lyrics about going out and meeting people, or going to the airport and flying somewhere new. It’s about just having this sort of lust for life that we didn’t have before.”
Sunflower Bean’s new album ‘Headful of Sugar’ out May 6th.
The Fat Angel Sings 