“Black Pearl” is the brand new album from 50 Foot Wave: Kristin Hersh’s ‘other’ band – active since 2003, with fellow Throwing Muses’ member Bernard Georges on bass and drummer Rob Ahlers. A sonic trip from the heavy, echoey riff of ‘Staring Into The Sun’ with all of its grunge melancholy and dronecore menace to the perfectly baroque ‘Hog Child’ with its spidery guitar that dissolves into motorik bass and drums.
“50 Foot Wave are infinitely harder hitting and blunter than anything Hersh has produced previously” BBC Music 50 Foot Wave are ever changing, enigmatic, flashing between moods, leaping walls of sound. From their very beginnings, the trio have been hailed in various quarters as “an outlet for the material deemed too weird or wild for Throwing Muses”, their “menacing, stalking, spirals of lean, hungry riffs, set alight” as “feedback rips into the fragile melody”. Detuned and discordant at will.
50 Foot Wave release second single ‘Hog Child’ taken from their new album ‘Black Pearl’set for release on 15th April on Fire Records. At their fuzzy best with time changes, key changes and a sliver of melody introducing a false state of calm, ‘Hog Child’ is a teasingly mellow moment that sounds perfectly baroque with Kristin’s vocal and her spidery guitar slowly dissolving into itself as bass and drums become motorik.
Like passing comets, releases by 50 Foot Wave are few and far between; their hypnotic mixture of ice-cold uneasy listening carefully warmed into its own unique sound by the sun. They are travelling to other dimensions, an unyielding triad that creates a sound so much bigger than the wave they surf.
Last sighted with 2016’s ‘Bath White’EP and before that in 2011 on the ‘With Love From The Men’s Room’,50 Foot Wave returned with ‘Black Pearl’, as its title might suggest; an anomaly, a rarity, a gem. The title refers to the neighbourhood in New Orleans where the record was written.
50 Foot Wave continue to traverse the rigid tension of their own sound. They remain detuned and discordant at will.
Today we unveil something we’ve been working on behind the scenes since late last summer. When PitPony first got in touch about having an album together, I was excited to hear what they’d been working on. On listening, I got to this track and knew we had something special on our hands. The track itself feels like an immersive journey to me, when I saw the video, I couldn’t believe how well they’d captured the intensity, emotion and feeling of the track.
With this and “Black Tar“, hopefully you can see the talent, intensity and depth the band have. Can’t wait for you to hear more from ‘World To Me’ which is the band’s debut album.
We’ve pressed 2 limited edition vinyl versions of this, one a red and black galaxy smoke vinyl version which is available from us and the band (click on the image above). The other a transparent gold vinyl which is exclusive to Indie record shops, places we love and want to support.
As Jackie puts it herself, “This one is a bit more of a storytelling exercise. Spliced experience to make a bit of narrative about two people with unfinished business or perhaps things unsaid but not to be resolved, or are they? Andrew (guitarist) brought the basis of the song which has a very strong krautrock vibe with the motorik beat and same bass throughout.”
“The monotonous start and heavy repetition really leant itself to that kind of everyday kitchen sink narrative. It then slowly gets more frenetic over time and wild towards the end, like most tumultuous relationships do. In terms of influence I’d just read/watched Normal People by Sally Rooney and been listening to Taylor Swift’s Folklore album so take from that what you will.”
‘Supermarket’ out now on Clue Records: the Debut album ‘World To Me’ available on 2 limited vinyl editions; – red and black smoke vinyl (Clue version) – transparent gold vinyl (Indie record shops only)
“Ferocious five-piece” – Mary Anne Hobbs BBC 6 Music “Wonderfully Abrasive. Bring on the ringing” – Narc Magazine “a seething slice of the finest Garage Rock” – Louder Than War
Green Man’s main stage is without doubt one of the most impressive main stages of any UK festival. Not only does it boast a beautiful backdrop of the Brecon Beacons, but the sloping nature of the field it’s in creates an arena-like setting where all eyes are on the band performing.
Throw in impeccable sound and dazzling visuals and you’ve got yourself a seriously impressive set-up at the heart of the revered Welsh festival.
And every single act who graced the magnificent Mountain Stage seemed to revel in doing so as the event made a triumphant return after its 18-month hiatus, as did the 25,000 or so revellers who were lucky enough to snap up tickets.
In the Walled Garden we see festival newcomers. The Far Out stage hosted more out-there performers.
On the Mountain Stage – so named as it sits in the shadow of Sugar Loaf, the best backdrop to a stage ever conceived.
A mix of sprawling, exploratory, psych-pop, prog rock, and heavy garage riffs, Australia’s Psychedelic PornCrumpets rose out of Perth’s indie underground, earning a devoted fan base through hard touring and releases like 2016’s “High Visceral, Pt. 1” and 2019’s more muscular And “Now for the Whatchamacallit“.
Our brand new album “Night Gnomes” drops April 22nd.
North London’s Sorry have shared new single “There’s So Many People That Want To Be Loved” – a thrilling first taste of a new body of work slated for release later this year. The exciting return of Sorry comes with a video, directed by Sorry’s Asha Lorenz and frequent collaborator Flo Webb and produced by Asia Amad.
Lorenz on the new track: “’There’s So Many People…’ is supposed to be a bit of a sad-funny love song! When we’re out of love we can feel detached and think ‘oh we’ll never be in love again… cry, cry’ but also try and laugh a bit… It’s easy to laugh or think you’ll never be That person then the next moment you can feel like the loneliest person in the world.”
“There’s So Many People That Want To Be Loved” is the first taste of new music to emerge from Sorry since the “Twixtustwain” EP arrived in February 2021, alongside the official digital release of their 2017 mixtapes “Home Demo/ns Vol I.” and “Home Demo/ns Vol. II”. The single will be pressed as a limited 7” with “15’4” featured as the B-side.
Comprised of best friends and co-conspirators Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen, joined by drummer Lincoln Barrett, multi-instrumentalist Campbell Baum, and Marco Pini on electronics, Sorry rose from a thriving scene of bands in London; unveiling a series of mixtapes, sporadic singles and generally experimenting with the disparate tastes and sounds that would eventually give their March 2020 debut album “925” its distinctively modern and apocalyptic sound.
In March of 2020, Sorry played one show at Brooklyn’s Union Pool before having to cancel the remainder of their debut North American tour due to the pandemic.
“There’s So Many People That Want To Be Loved”, is a brand-new single from Sorry.
A South London-based, “haiku loving” trio, Honeyglaze formed out of vocalist and guitarist Anouska Sokolow’s desire to not be a solo artist. After meeting up with bassist Tim and drummer Yuri, Honeyglaze began playing live just three days later. After eighteen months of not playing, the band quickly made up for it, with sets at the 100 Club and Green Man Festival already under their belts. Honeyglaze are set to be one of the most exciting bands across 2022 and beyond. With their self-titled debut album set for release later this month which coincides with support slots for Wet Leg – followed by a headline tour of their own, the Speedy Wunderground signees will soon be a household name for those on the hunt for the ‘next exciting thing.’
Continuing their magical few months, the band have this week announced their singing to Speedy Wunderground and marked the occasion with a brand single, “Burglar“.
“Burglar” was inspired by a poem by Charles Bukowski, and attempt to capture the feeling of, “being half-awake before dawn and waiting alone for the clarity of morning“. The lyrics are less a story and more an attempt to capture a feeling, a series of metaphors designed to make you dream, not understand, “you said I was nothing but a dream, I said you were nothing”. If the lyrics are intriguingly obtuse, musically too this is a difficult track to pin down, there are nods to the surrealist pop of Haley Heynderickx, yet the twitchy guitar lines and jazzy rhythms would sound equally at home on an album by Radiohead or Do Make Say Think.
By the time the track slides away on the fabulously intense instrumental outro, you’ll be intrigued and charmed in equal measure. The band claim to be for fans of Salvador Dali and Power Rangers, yet if you don’t fit that particular Venn diagram don’t be put off, there’s something here for everyone from a band who look to be at the start of something very special.
Asheville, North Carolina band Wednesday owes so much to our musical influences. The music we love is a big part of what brought us together. My bandmates Margo and Xandy both had infamous Asheville house show venues, Jake was in like a billion different bands which often played in their muggy basements and Alan was usually the one who brought the PA. Our immersion in music predated us trying to make songs together ourselves. Our common interests in noisey ‘90s guitars, good lyrics, and country music was quickly what permeated into our voice as a band. Most decisions in our songs are made by an amalgamation of all five of our inputs, which happens pretty naturally because of this thread of influences that ties us together.
So when we got an opportunity for some recording time with Alli Rogers at Betty’s studio in Durham, NC we decided to record covers, and hopefully repay in part the huge debt we are in to the artists who contributed so much to the music we write ourselves.
When I was thinking if there was anything that these songs have in common, the main thing I found recurring was the combination of sadness and humour. It’s effective as hell to combine the two emotions, making each other more intense by the contrast. Some of the masters of this included on this album of course are: Roger Miller, Vic Chesnutt, Gary Stewart and Drive-By Truckers.
Sonically, Medicine opened a world of sound to me: a soft voice paired with unrelenting industrial noise. And if you listen to Wednesday’s original music it goes without saying that the Pumpkins discography (at least ‘til 1998) is a sound we reference often and tether ourselves to. Chris Bell is the master of the perfect musical “moment”. There are few lines in any song that hit me as hard as: “Just when I was starting to feel okay, you’re on the phone. I never wanna be alone” I mean… c’mon!!
There’s just one cover from a band we are lucky to call our peers and for the record I just wanna say Hotline TNT is one of the best bands out there. We stayed real true to the original song for that one… cause it’s pretty perfect as-is. The later half of the album is songs recorded with my partner and frequent collaborator MJ Lenderman (the thing is… I love him!!) His music is probably my biggest influence out of anyone and I owe him a lot a lot a lot.
Anyways, if for whatever reason you’re reading this and haven’t heard the original songs, I encourage you to look ‘em up! We tried our best to pay our respects but at the end of the day you can’t exactly replicate the magic of any of these tracks. Making music (and hopefully living off it sometime soon) has been a dream come true for us. So thank you a million times to all the artists that paved the way for us…. Music rocks!!! Wow!!! Karly Hartzman
In Kurt Vonnegut’s famous examination of war, “everything was beautiful” is something that the main character considers getting inscribed on his tombstone. “Everything was beautiful” would be a nice way to welcome in the afterlife on its own, but that’s not the whole of it – what Billy (he’s called Billy) actually considers chiselling into the granite is “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”.
As such, when Jason Pierce’s Spiritualized broke a six-year LP duck with 2018’s ‘And Nothing Hurt’, it wasn’t hard to anticipate the title of the follow-up. There’s probably a wry bit of jokery going on here too Spiritualized has long felt like a project whose existence is predicated on the amplification of the past, As such, the way that ‘Everything Is Beautiful’ will indeed form the full phrase with ‘And Nothing Hurt’ while scrolling down a streaming service interface feels like Pierce indulging in a bit of light hearted ribbing about the times a-changed.
During lockdown last year, J Spaceman would walk through an empty “Roman London” where the world was “full of birdsong and strangeness”, trying to make sense of all the music playing in his head at the time. The mixers and mixes of his new record weren’t working out yet. Spaceman plays 16 different instruments on “Everything Was Beautiful” which was put down at 11 different studios, as well as at his home.
He also employed more than 30 musicians and singers including his daughter Poppy, long-time collaborator and friend John Coxon, string and brass sections, choirs and finger bells and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Eventually the mixes got there and “Everything Was Beautiful” was achieved.
The most arresting moments of ‘Everything Was Beautiful’ are when Spiritualized get their Lou Reed or. ‘Let It Bleed’s Sixties links go further than the title, but while the Stones are detectable in this track’s spirit’s-moving-now coda, it’s the street-level paeans of ‘Transformer’ that are channelled most concertedly here. The following cut ‘Crazy’, though those excellent recent Lavender Country reissues mean that I actually think of Patrick Haggerty’s project first and foremost when hearing this (did Haggerty and Reed ever meet? I sense they’d have got on.)
Spiritualized cook on gas at the front and back ends of ‘Everything Was Beautiful’. That Reedvivalism comes together with hazed motorika to pleasing effect on ‘Best Thing You Never Had’, the overall result of which is kind of like Alabama 3 if they skewed more towards Can. ‘Mainline’ might not be quite as much of a perpetual-motion sprawl, but the way the track’s beatific instrumental climbs ever higher has that same sense of ecstatic repetition about it.
The result is some of the most “live” sounding recordings that Spiritualized have released since the “Live At The Albert Hall” record of 1998, around the time of “Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space“
The energy of ‘Mainline’ flows outwards to invigorate the album’s final straight. ‘The A Song (Laid In YourArms)’ is an exemplary bit of Spiritualization – so well does the track subsume well-wrought melodiousness into widescreen psychscapes that you’d be forgiven for mistaking it from a cut from one of the group’s classic Nineties LPs. The same goes for the slow-burn of ‘I’m Coming Home Again’, nine minutes of slowly apexing gospel-ish harmony-rock spiked with a searing electric guitar tone.
“Everything Was Beautiful” by Spiritualized is magnificent and everyone agrees with me yay!
“An immaculate orb of grandiose space-rock. Pierce’s rare communications are generally breath-taking events, and “Everything Was Beautiful” is no different.” Classic Rock – 9/10
“A life-affirming masterpiece, as euphoric as music can be.” Classic Pop – 9/10
“Jason Pierce continues to orbit high above a planet of his own making and all lovers of ambitious music should take note.” HiFi Choice – 4 stars ****
“A record that manages to be both direct and concise yet also wildly experimental, tender, nihilistic and joyous… It’s everything that you could want in a Spiritualized album.” Uncut – 9/10
“Much of “Everything Was Beautiful” has a vital, thundering pulse… Some fantastic songs aboard, too, including ‘Always Together With You’s Daniel Johnston-style naked expression of fatherly/romantic commitment, and a country-soul ballad, ‘Crazy’, complete with pedal steel. So, yes, utterly beautiful, as advertised.” MOJO – 4 stars ****
“An album chock-full of the soaring musical extravaganzas that make a Spiritualized record such an event.” Shindig – 5 stars *****
“A record that fills the void with ecstatic noise… Between Mainlines propulsive euphoria and the crashing grandeur of “The A Song (Laid In Your Arms)“, a declaration of belief in the restorative powers of consuming sound takes potent, peak-Spaceman form.” Record Collector – 4 stars ****
“Some of the most adventurous and mind-bending music that Spiritualized have ever released… This is one of the most potent expressions of Pierce’s vision to date.” PROG
“Chockful full of big songs, it packs a massive emotional punch. And it rocks too, with Pierce directing a choir and 30-odd musicians to create a lavish wall of sound on tracks like “Best Thing You Never Had”. If “Everything Was Beautiful” was a debut record it would be impressive. That it appears 25 years after their career high is nothing short of astonishing.” Morning Star – 5 stars *****
“Utilising 11 different studios and 30 different musicians, Pierce is clearly sacrificing none of that deliciously overblown pomp and swagger here, none of that ubiquitous bliss, not one brick from those enchanted fortresses of magisterial noise so synonymous with his work.” DIY
Elton John’s fourth studio album release in little over two years, “Madman Across The Water” has been a long held dear favourite of artist and fans alike.
“Madman Across The Water” was largely written after Elton had made his initial foray to America; offering the opportunity for lyricist Bernie Taupin to witness first-hand the landscapes and people he’d only seen on a screen or on the page. Recorded at Trident Studios in central London in February and August 1971, it was the first album where all five players of Elton’s fabled band line up – Dee Murray, Nigel Olsson, Davey Johnstone and Ray Cooper – were featured, albeit not on the same tracks.
The album’s first single, released on November 29th, 1971, was “Levon,” and though it peaked in the U.S. at “just” #24, it was his second-highest at the time, and fared better than the album’s now-better known single, “Tiny Dancer,” which only reached #41. (None of the songs were released as singles in the U.K. at the time.)
After John’s brief piano intro, the first verse is fairly straightforward, beginning with:
Levon wears his war wound like a crown He calls his child Jesus (As the new edition’s liner notes reveal, “Madman mentions Jesus several times. Jesus was everywhere in the early 70s – Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, “Spirit in the Sky.” “Tiny Dancer” contains the lyric “Jesus freaks, out in the streets.”)
The second verse, with the brilliant orchestral arrangements written and conducted by Paul Buckmaster, includes the line:
In a garage by the motorway (pronouncing “garage” as “carriage,” and then using the word for what Americans call “highway”) As John writes in the 50th anniversary liner notes, “Buckmaster’s arrangements soar above the songs that Bernie and I wrote after our first trip to America.”
The song continues with John’s stunning vocal:
He was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas day When The New York Times said, “God is dead And the war’s begun” Oh, Alvin Tostig has a son today (Who? What? Taupin has said the name is fictional. “He seemed an American everyman,” he says.)
And as the band kicks in…
And he shall be Levon And he shall be a good man And he shall be Levon In tradition with the family plan (At the time, John’s accent and pronunciations – in this case, for the word “tradition” – still took getting used to by American audiences)
As John himself explained cryptically, the song “is about a little boy, who gets fed up with what he’s doing, and wishes he could get away from it, but he really can’t.” Taupin says he doesn’t “remember where I wrote it and what was in my mind.” He calls it “one of our finest moments lyrically and melodically. I’m immensely proud of this song, incredibly dynamic and soulful.”
The reissue, due out June 10th, features 18 unreleased tracks, mostly in the form of John’s piano demos of all of “Madman’s” album tracks, including his classics “Tiny Dancer” and “Levon,” as well as three different takes on the title song: Piano demos from 1970 and 1971, plus the original version that featured guitarist Mick Ronson. The deluxe edition’s third disc includes John’s eight performances from a 1971 taping of BBC Sounds for Saturday; video of that concert, as well as John’s December 1971 gig on the Old Grey Whistle Test, is featured on the Blu-ray component of the deluxe reissue.
While the UK were still deciding about Elton, these nine tracks struck a chord with Elton’s American audiences, reaching the top 10 and its singles, ‘Levon’ and ‘Tiny Dancer’ both hit the USA top 50.
After years as a ‘best kept secret’ to Elton’s fans, ‘Tiny Dancer’ has gone on to become one of his most loved songs, third only to “Rocket Man” and “Your Song” in global streaming lists.
Capturing the headiness of California at the time of Elton’s first us concerts, the song was used to phenomenal effect in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film “Almost Famous”. This celebration of the album to mark its 50th anniversary comes in three different formats. all formats contain Bob Ludwig’s definitive 2016 remaster of the main album. there are 18 previously unreleased tracks across the super deluxe 3cd/1br version, which also tidies up stray rare material from the era, piano demos of the album, and the audio of the BBC Sounds for Saturday concert, broadcast in 1972. the blu-ray contains a 5.1 mix by Greg Penny, plus the BBC Sounds for Saturday and his 1971 Old Grey Whistle Test performance. the audio of the super deluxe cd/br set will be available on a 4lp set. The box set includes a full historical essay with interviews with many who helped make the album, as well as memorabilia and artwork from the rocket archive.
Deluxe edition of 1971 LP features 18 unreleased tracks, from piano demos of entire album, including “Tiny Dancer” and “Levon,” to BBC recordings
The Fat Angel Sings 