The Fat Angel Sings

‘Great American Painting’ is the fifth LP by Pennsylvanian indie-rockers The Districts. Thematically the album centres on the problems facing America from gun control to capitalism, albeit imbued with a sense of hope. Their sound follows in the tradition of great American bands of the 21st century from The Strokes onwards. For The Districts‘ latest album “The Great American Painting“, the Pennsylvania trio unpack the unravelling definition of America and how it coincides with the flawed existence of humanity.

Vocalist/guitarist Rob Grote was impacted by the contrast between the scenic beauty he encountered in a Washington state cabin during the pandemic’s onset and the political combustion he encountered at protests in Philly. “While we were there I spent some time driving near all these crazy rivers and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and I was mesmerized by how those unspoiled landscapes really capture a timeless idea of what America is,” Grote noted in the leadup to the record’s release. “I’d just come from taking part in the protests in Philly and getting tear-gassed, and it felt so strange to go between those two extremes. In a way this album is asking, ‘What is the great American painting? Is it police brutality, or is it this beautiful landscape?’ And the truth is it’s all of that.”

“The Great American Painting” pads harsh reckonings with playful rock ‘n’ roll and blistering pop songs. There are anthemic ballads that feel like a cross between Sharon Van Etten and U2, while more contemplative moments cross the grit of early Modest Mouse with the soaring arena rock of The Killers. Together, Grote, guitarist Pat Cassidy, drummer Braden Lawrence, and bassist Connor Jacobus (who has since departed from the group) combine vibrant hues from various corners of the rock canon for a gripping listen.

1. “Revival Psalm”
“Revival Psalm” began as a reflection on close brushes with death and trying to survive. From nearly getting struck by lightning, being in Paris the same night as a terrorist attack, to close-miss car accidents, there are numerous situations where death felt close at hand. “Revival Psalm” is about saying no to fear, and the liberation offered by embracing and having faith in your own survival, no matter how unlikely.

2. “No Blood”
This song is about the idea that no weapon, no violence will eradicate the truth. In every era, it is those who live in the name of truth who prevail in the shadow of evil. The peak pandemic world was like an apocalyptic landscape—as if much of society had vanished in an instant. Even in the solitude of such a world, truth remains and will catch up to those who run from it. “No Blood” is about dancing forward in spite of fear.

3. “Do It Over”
“Do It Over” is about wising up and seeing the past through the lens of a more complete version of yourself. It’s directed toward a younger self who wasn’t ready for what life would throw and simply navigating interpersonal relationships. It’s a simple song and a simple plea to right your wrongs and clarify your intentions and untangle the mess of relationships and do it the way you would now.

4. “White Devil”
This song is a reaction to exploitation in our country, from red lining to gentrification to working without a living wage, and the heresy of crowning a blatant exploiter, the most ugly face of that behaviour, as a leader and a president. It’s about the ideals that are compromised in the name of getting ahead, and rage toward oppressive structures and your place in them.

5. “Long End”
“Long End” is about holding on to hope at the end of history and not giving in to the idea that there are no better possible futures. Mark Fisher’s introduction to Acid Communism was inspiring during the making of this record and is relevant to the uncertainty and desire for a better world. This song is nowhere near an answer to where the future will head, but simply a longing in the face of what sometimes feels like a hopeless epoch.

6. “Outlaw Love”
Life is this weird, fucked up journey, constantly changing and constantly realizing you were wrong, but there’s a lot of beauty in our ability to shift and grow through observing ourselves and our patterns. This song’s about seeing your experiences through the lens of change and evolution.

7. “Hover”
“Hover” is about memories of disjointed pieces of experience. Once, while checking into a hotel in Arizona, our van was surrounded by police and the spotlight of an extremely low-flying helicopter was trained on us. The officer ran up with his hand on his gun and we were all frozen, “What the fuck?” It was surreal and ultimately turned out that they had tracked down the wrong vehicle. It was incredibly strange. This song builds off of certain assumptions and memories that are potentially wrong or misunderstood, and wondering whether you are rushing toward a false reality or a dead end.

8. “I Want to Feel It All”
This song was inspired by LSD in a dark forest in Washington state under a volcano, and it is about feeling everything possible all at once and emotional fireworks and explosions and loving the universe and everyone in it, but also about death and the darkness underlying all existence, and forgiveness and pain and acceptance.

9. “On Our Parting, My Beloved”
“On Our Parting” is about letting go and lifting dark clouds. It’s about giving in to the flow of life instead of kicking against it, and holding good memories of those you’ve lost close to your heart. When frozen in pain and stuck while life rushes forward, this song is about acceptance—take the good, leave the bad, and move always onwards.

The Districts album ‘Great American Painting’ out February 5th, 2022.

You can hardly walk through Los Angele’s hipper neighbourhoods without bumping elbows with one of your favourite artists who’s probably on the verge of realizing that the block they live on is home to half a dozen of your other favourite artists, and will imminently start recording with them. It felt like a huge moment a few years back when Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst surprise-released their debut album-length collaboration, for example, which has since become the foundation of a number of other projects incorporating a wider net of talent.

One such collaborator is Christian Lee Hutson who, in addition to enlisting that duo as backing musicians on his major-label debut a few years ago, brought Bridgers and Oberst on as producers for his follow-up release, “Quitters“. Hutson’s new record also features contributions—ranging from co-song writing credits to drunken guitar solos—from Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, Great Grandpa’s Al Menne. The result is something much more nimble and comfortable than the constraints of a supergroup might allow, swapping the inherent competition of such an arrangement with a reflective sense of inspiration. 

With “Quitters” arriving via ANTI- Records, Hutson break’s down each track on the record to give us a better sense of how the project came together.

1. “Strawberry Lemonade”

This is vaguely inspired by The National’s song “Not in Kansas.” I wanted to write a long marathon song that was just like a collage of memories and images from my life. During the recording, I fucked up the opening chord like 10 times in a row and my friend Harry, who played bass on the song, couldn’t stop laughing. My favourite part of mixing this album was throwing his laugh on a fader and pushing it way up at the very beginning of the song.

2. “Endangered Birds”

This is one of my favorite songs on the record. It’s about a guy visiting his ex-wife and her new husband at their new home in California. We borrowed this Mellotron that was used on an Elliott Smith record and had Nate Walcott write and play a three-part string arrangement for this one.

3. “Rubberneckers”

This was the last song written for the album. I like to think this is the same character from “Endangered Birds.” The opening lyrics came from watching this guy’s sky writing proposal and thinking, “God, it takes so long for them to write this whole thing out.” There’s also a little nod to my friend Scott McClanahan’s book The Sarah Book, which I read probably seven times while making this record.

4. “Sitting Up with a Sick Friend”

This song is named after a creepy Cassius Marcellus Coolidge painting of some dogs partying. I wanted to write something about someone with family money but kind of absent, estranged parents. I think the subject of the song has “the world at their fingertips,” but doesn’t know what they want out of life, so I imagine them just sitting around joking their life away.

5. “Age Difference”

I wrote this the week “Beginners” was released. The narrator of this song is a middle-aged guy who has never really grown up describing his relationship with a person much younger than him. He goes on a trip to meet his partner’s family for the holidays and is just kind of taking an inventory of his life and their relationship. 

6. “Blank Check”

This song was written with my friend Al Menne over FaceTime. At the time, I was reading Bob Mehr’s book “Trouble Boys” about The Replacements. So the song is loosely inspired by Bob Stinson getting kicked out of the band by his own brother and best friends. Phoebe and I asked Meg Duffy to take an intentionally drunken, shitty solo at the end of the song.

7. “Cherry”

I had the music for this song for years and kept writing new words for it because nothing felt quite right. Conor wanted to try and build a drum kit out of random shit for this song. It ended up being an 808 kick sample played manually, a super effected snare, a bag of pennies, and a miniature church bell. Nate Walcott plays pump organ. 

8. “State Bird”

I’m a big blink-182 fan and wanted to try and write my own version of a blink song. Marshall Vore and I wrote it together. At one point it had the lines, “IMDb AARP / Got a DUI on an ATV.” 

9. “Teddy’s Song”

This song is a series of vignettes. It’s a collage of little LA scenes. The person in the song falls in love, it doesn’t work out, they isolate from friends and try to make a change for the better. Some of my favourite memories of places growing up are in this song: bonfires at Dockweiler Beach, The Roosevelt Hotel, walking around Sunset Junction. 

0. “Black Cat”

This song is a kind of experiment for me. I just let the words fall into place where they felt natural without trying to connect anything or make it mean anything specific. One of my favorite moments on the record is Marshall’s psychotic drum solo at the end. 

11. “Creature Feature”

The working title was “Postal Service” because I originally felt like the drum machine sounded like “Such Great Heights.” This song is another collage. I feel a lot of isolated pandemic energy in this one. I think it’s about watching the world fall apart and retreating into your mind to escape it. 

12. “OCDemon”

The title comes from a fake band name Sharon Silva made up. I have Pure OCD, so this song just kind of started as a therapeutic exercise. It’s about intrusive thoughts and obsession with morality. I think I subconsciously wrote the hardest guitar part I’ve ever written to distract me from having to think about what I was saying lyrically.

13. “Triple Axel”

I wrote this with my friend Al Menne. It’s about an ice skater who injures themselves and can never skate again. It’s about new beginnings and finding yourself again after losing what you love. I’m not much of a piano player but I do play a lot at home and this song is heavily inspired by Paul Buchanan’s solo album “Mid Air.”

The record was produced by Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst and features contributions from Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy and Great Grandpa’s Al Menne.

Released April 1st, 2022

We’re so excited to announce that our new album Emotional Creature will be out on July 22nd! To celebrate, we released a new track “Fire Escape” from the album along with an interstellar visualizer. You can pre-order “Emotional Creature” and new Merch now. Way back in October the Chicago rockers Beach Bunny shared the single “Oxygen,” which today they’ve revealed will appear on their forthcoming sophomore album “Emotional Creature” alongside another new song called “Fire Escape.” The 12-track project is out July 22nd via Mom+Pop Records.

The accompanying visual for “Fire Escape” shows a room decked out in psychedelic, retro decor. There’s a television that depicts Trifilio in Star Wars–esque garb and a purple creature (one you might remember from the previous single’s cover art) whose eyes glow and who holds the ability to manifest plants out of sand. Nice!

“We are always changing, growing, and adapting—it’s a deeply ingrained part of the human experience,” vocalist Lili Trifilio shared. “We strive to be stronger, trust we’ll grow smarter, and spend most of our lives reaching for comfort and happiness. Sometimes life is stagnant, sometimes life is difficult. But the wonderful part of being human is that we evolve and make the bleak moments beautiful—we find new ways to survive. Humans are emotional creatures and I wanted to capture that with this album in order to show how complex, sometimes tragic, and mostly wonderful the human experience can be.”

We are also happy to announce that we’ll be heading over to the UK and Europe this Autumn. Tickets available tomorrow at beachbunnymusic.co/tour. Check out the full list of dates below and grab your tickets. 

Thank you all for your patience and continued support – it’s a new era!, “Emotional Creature“, the sophomore album by Beach Bunny on pink/purple “ETHOS” marbled vinyl. Releases July 22nd, 2022 Mom+Pop Records.

After providing backing vocals on his 2021 single “Feels Like Yesterday,” Detroit singer-songwriter Emily Parrish has teamed up again with fellow Michigan artist Ian Ruhala (a.k.a. Hala) on her new single “Drown.” Co-written with Ruhala and other frequent collaborator Isaac Burgess, and mastered by John Naclerio, “Drown” is a splendid document of Parrish’s woozy alto and a bright display of her own translation of the bedroom-pop songbook. 

“I know you are hurting right now / But I won’t let you drown,” Parrish sings on the refrain. The track wrestles with self-worth while detailing two people being kind to each other in romance: “He calms me down when I’m too high,” she sings, “And I try to put him back on track / And he’ll fall right.” Although Parrish meditates on keeping her surroundings grounded and healthy, her voice is acrobatic and intoxicating, soaring high above Ruhala’s daydream arrangements but never flying too close to the sun. 

The Detroit-based songwriter shares her debut solo single, which was produced by Hala’s Ian Ruhala.

There’s something Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst has been trying to tell the world for a long time now via his politically charged punk side-project Desaparecidos. That band’s first album, 2002’s “Read Music/Speak Spanish“, was a seething indictment of American Capitalism™. They returned 13 years later with “Payola“, a similarly caustic reflection of life in the U.S. that captured a burgeoning zeitgeist of discontent. A more explicit denunciation of the System—remember, this came out when Obama was still in office—songs like “The Left Is Right,” “MariKKKopa,” and “The City on the Hill” confronted, among other issues, the increasing division in American politics, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and systemic racism on these shores. “All the founding fathers sowed their seeds into servant girls,” decries Oberst on the latter, before later doubling down and suggesting it was “so we could sing together in America / The price of an anthem paid in blood.”

They’re lines he chews up and spits out with extra disaffected venom on this, the band’s first live album, recorded at the now-shuttered Shea Stadium, a Brooklyn DIY venue that was run by the So So Glos. Recorded on June 23rd, 2015—two days after the album came out and almost 18 months before Hillary Clinton and the Democrats’ self-serving neoliberalism caused them to lose an “unlosable” election against a dumb, ignorant, and barely literate failed businessman.

Channelled through a wonderfully raw and ragged performance that pays less attention to being in tune than it does to turning the rage of the songs into tangible energy, it’s a performance that contains the anger everybody seemingly felt during the Trump administration.,

It means that those aforementioned songs, as well as “The Underground Man,” “Man and Wife, the Latter (Damaged Goods),” and “Radicalized”—which looks at the (obviously negative) effects of war on families on both sides of an international conflict—are all conveyed with devastating, breathless vitriol.

The result is a record that bristles with inspiring discontent that sounds like the swelling of a very necessary (but equally unlikely) revolution. The only downside is that, as someone who was actually in the audience for this show, this album only contains 11 of the 15 songs that were played that night. Presumably because otherwise it wouldn’t fit on a single vinyl record. Capitalism strikes again, then.

This 2015 performance from Conor Oberst’s punk band pays less attention to being in tune than it does to turning the rage of the songs into tangible energy.

Freeman Street Records Released on: 2022-04-01

Usually one waits until they release a song before they label it a “global smash hit.” But Los Angeles-based rockers Surf Curse have taken a bold approach with their latest single “Sugar” and its video directed by the band’s two core members Nick Rattigan and Jacob Rubeck. The now-fourpiece performs on a fake talk show where the nerdy host announces their performance of the major hit, which it has yet to become in our own reality. The band is manifesting. Or maybe Surf Curse knew they had a hit on their hands after brushing shoulders with viral fame recently when “Freaks” from their debut album “Buds” went viral on TikTok nearly a decade after its release.

Their new single, which bursts into rapturous gallops, announces their currently unnamed fourth album. “Sugar” was produced and mixed by Chris Coady, who’s worked with Beach House, SASAMI, and Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs.

Their forthcoming album will be their first major release since signing to Atlantic Records.

Blue Skies is Dehd’s first album for Fat Possum, and their follow up to Flower of Devotion, an album designated Best New Music by Pitchfork. Upon arrival during the fraught summer of 2020, Flower of Devotion felt like Dehd’s necessary prescription for us all. That was, of course, a moment of unprecedented anxiety and uncertainty, when just contemplating the future could seem overly optimistic. But Dehd captured and shared the precarious balance between real life and real hope, a feat mirrored by instant pop melodies and infectious punk energy. The Chicago trio had the audacity to look ahead when many of us didn’t, to imagine improvement through mere existence. It was an album we needed. We need its follow-up, the triumphant Blue Skies, even more.

Dehd’s fourth album (and first for Fat Possum) is also the band’s second consecutive breakthrough, loaded with the most compelling, compulsive, and expansive songs of their career. Blue Skies offers another jolt of timely hope, only with twice the power. These 13 hits feel like flashlights in the dark, acknowledging how difficult everything from love and sex to living and dying can be while supplying the inspiration of their own experiences.

The writing is sharper and smarter on Blue Skies. The harmonies and rhythms are more sophisticated and considered. The moods are deeper, the swings between them more inspiring. But this is still Dehd, just more wild and wonderful than ever before. “This is all we get,” Emily shouts with relish on the record’s last lines, during a song about the ways geologic deep time should free us all to live more. “Best to take the risk.” Heard, loud and clear.

Dehd is a three-piece indie rock band from Chicago formed in 2015. The band consists of members Emily Kempf, Jason Balla, and Eric McGrady.

Released 27/05/22 Fat Possum Records

“The Unraveling Of Pup The Band”, the fourth album by the great Toronto punk band PUP, starts out with frontman Stefan Babcock banging out a few chords on the piano, sounding like Conor Oberst by way of Patrick Stickles as he slurs his way through a tongue-in-cheek verse about PUP and the people who hate them (“they only listen to noise punk, or nothing, and they haven’t listened to any new music since college”). He hits a wrong chord, says “fuck” under his breath, and then the whole band kicks in, accompanied by rousing trumpets. Titled “Four Chords,” it’s a song that Stefan, who is not a pianist, wrote after buying a Fender Rhodes on a whim, sent to his bandmates as a joke, and never pictured as something that would appear on a PUP album.

But at the last minute, bassist Nestor Chumak encouraged Stefan not only to properly record it, but to start the album with it, and then PUP reprised it twice throughout the album. On it, Stefan sounds like the album’s narrator, breaking the fourth wall the way The Beatles did on the title track to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And like that album, “The Unraveling Of Pup The Band” is at least a semi-concept album, inspired in part by the need to do something different. But whereas The Beatles were playing the role of a made-up band, PUP are leaning even more into exactly who they are.

“The Unraveling Of Pup The Band” is the funniest, darkest, and weirdest PUP album yet, which also makes it the PUP-iest thing PUP have ever done. It uses the same introspective self-deprecation as its predecessors, but on a more macro level, and it found PUP pushing themselves even further to the brink of implosion than they ever had before.

“It was just a record of extremes for us,” Stefan told us, “like, wanting to kill each other but also loving each other and being so happy and proud of each other for making a record that we’re all stoked on.”

New album ‘“The Unraveling Of Pup The Band” out April 1st, 2022.

King Gizzard & The Wizard Lizard have shared details of their 20th (!) studio album “Omnium Gatherum“. Those details include the release date April 28th via the band’s own KGLW imprint — and the 16-song tracklist.

The album’s a double as you might expect, as the first single was the 18-minute “The Dripping Tap” The new single is the one that follows that on the album, the comparatively shorter (six minutes) “Magenta Mountain” This is the second single from King Gizzard’s new album “Omnium Gatherum” and is in the danceable pop style of the band’s Butterfly 3000 and has been in their live set lists for a while.

Stu: Guitar, Vocals Ambrose: Keys, Vocals , Percussion Joey: Synth, Vocals Cookie: Keys Lucas: Bass Cavs: Drums, Percussion Recorded at Reunion Park, Melbourne on March 5 by Sam Joseph, Nico Wilson, Toby Brandon. Mixed by Stu Mackenzie