The Fat Angel Sings

As a teaser for their 2022 album “Sympathy for Life”, Parquet Courts released a vinyl-only single of “Plant Life” with remixes by Yu Su and Peak Wifi (aka PC’s Austin Brown)), and an extended version of the song. Those have now been shared to streaming services. Fans of Happy Mondays, take note, these will twist your melon.

Parquet Courts’ thought-provoking rock is dancing to a new tune. “Sympathy For Life” finds the Brooklyn band at both their most instinctive and electronic, spinning their bewitching, psychedelic storytelling into fresh territory, yet maintaining their unique identity.

Built largely from improvised jams, inspired by New York clubs, Primal Scream and Pink Floyd and produced in league with Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, Hot Chip, David Byrne), “Sympathy For Life” was always destined to be dancey. Unlike its globally adored predecessor, 2018’s “Wide Awake!” the focus fell on grooves rather than rhythm. 

“Wide Awake! was a record you could put on at a party,” says co-frontman Austin Brown. “Sympathy For Life” is influenced by the party itself. Historically, some amazing rock records been made from mingling in dance music culture – from Talking Heads to Screamadelica. Our goal was to bring that into our own music.”

I’m skulls over Saturn excited to blast Peacock Pools to all you beautiful inter planetary creatures! Earth took some major beatings, but banding together with friends old’n’new to transport some magic to magnetic tape kept our hearts beating with hope & love. Huge thanks to ATO records for having faith and taking the reins to deliver this new 12 song slab throughout the galaxy due on May 6th!.

“Lights of The City” is the first single from Pink Mountaintops’ upcoming album ‘Peacock Pools’.

The Black Mountain frontman Stephen McBean’s project Pink Mountaintops has shared a cover of Black Flag’s hardcore classic “Nervous Breakdown” which opens his upcoming album “Peacock Pools“. He slows the song down, really makes it own, and emphasizes the underlying knack for melody that’s hidden behind the breakneck-speed rage of the original.

The follow-up to 2014’s “Get Back” was recorded at the start of the pandemic. “I’d moved into this cool little ’50s rancher house outside L.A. and was just mucking about in my bedroom studio, and pretty soon I started reaching out to some friends who were also shacked up and craving broadband sonic collaboration,” 

Stephen McBean’s latest album “Peacock Pools” features members of Black Mountain, Melvins, Redd Kross, Ty Segall Band, and more

When Cursive/The Good Life frontman Tim Kasher announced his new solo album “Middling Age”, he revealed that one song, “Forever of the Living Dead” features guest vocals from Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace and sax by Jeff Rosenstock, and that song is out now.

It’s a six-minute, melancholic slow-burner and it gets pretty explosive when Laura and Jeff come in. It also comes with a delightfully creepy music video. Here’s what Tim says about all that: “Forever of the Living Dead” is the closing track, and so, attempts to sum up the various tangents of mortality and existentialism the album explores. It’s closer to stream-of-consciousness than most writing I do, using absurdist imagery to express, well, my abstract thoughts on aging, I suppose. As stream-of-consciousness goes, I’m not entirely sure just what it’s about at times. But it maintains a tone, and I’d like to think that tone reflects the album and the weight of our passage of time. I recruited both Laura Jane Grace and Jeff Rosenstock to help out on this song, with Laura singing the second verse and Jeff playing a sax solo for an extended outro. It’s a Phenomenal sound.

Eric Stafford made the brilliant video, leaning hard into the absurdist imagery by creating a narrative of two zombies seeking one another out. I love what he’s done, and now I picture the video when I play the song, which is how a great video should work, in my opinion.

Tim, Laura, and Circa Survive’s Anthony Green are also teaming up for “The Carousel Tour” which is “more collaborative than your usual show” and will find the three artists “[joining] in on each other’s songs and [bringing] other players onto the stage with [them] each night,

My 4th LP, ‘Middling Age’, comes out April 15th

Playing in memory of the legendary Ian McDonald who passed away on 9th of this month. This album called “McDonald And Giles” was damn underrated Prog masterpiece released in 1970 featuring Michael Giles, Peter Giles, Steve Winwood, Michael Blakesley and the one and only Ian McDonald. 

McDonald, who had served for five years in the British army as a bandsman, co-founded King Crimson in 1968 alongside Robert Fripp, Greg Lake, Michael Giles and Pete Sinfield, and went on to record the band’s classic 1969 debut album “In The Court Of The Crimson King“, before quitting the band, along with drummer Michael Giles, to release a lone “McDonald And Giles” album in 1970. 

RIP Ian McDonald, multi-instrumentalist and a founding member of King Crimson. If he had stopped his musical career after the first album he appeared on, he would still belong in the pantheon of progressive music. That album was The Court Of The Crimson King. McDonald played saxophone, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, mellotron, harpsichord, piano, organ, vibraphone, composed the tracks I Talk to the Wind and the classic title track The Court of the Crimson King and participated in composing the rest of the tracks on that album. The title track originally had a different melody set to Pete Sinfield’s lyrics, and McDonald recalled, “I thought that his lyrics deserved a more majestic environment. Pete was very happy to let me run with it and write completely new music for the song.” His mellotron work on that track is considered one of the best showcases of that instrument.

Multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald and drummer Michael Giles left King Crimson after the band’s US tour in late 1969 to promote their milestone debut album In the Court of the Crimson King. They found road life and the newly found success too overwhelming and wanted to continue on their own. Robert Fripp’s journal, 3 January 1970, reads: “The American tour was such a total experience of plasticity that Ian and Mike now feel that getting their feelings across on records is more important than performing to audiences.”

While Giles remained as a studio entity for KC’s second album In the Wake of Poseidon, McDonald focused on preparing material for the duo’s album, recorded in 1970. The album, simply titled McDonald and Giles, was released in January 1971 and consisted of music pieces that existed since the early stages of King Crimson. These included Flight of the Ibis, the original melody of Cadence and Cascade, and the side-long epic Birdman, written in 1968.

A favorite track from the album is Tomorrow’s People, written by Giles in 1967 and dedicated to his children Tina and Mandy. Giles talked about this track: “This song is one of my favourites, and like Ian I was influenced by the Beatles at the time, especially John Lennon – hence the exposed voice and solo drums on the first verse. I played a slightly South-American influenced rock beat. The solo section is full of sound percussion objects to add texture and complexity.”

Ian McDonald: “I think it’s a great sounding track and one of the better produced songs on the album. It’s nice when all the instruments come in after the drum solo. Another one of my favourite moments comes just before the trombone section, where the repeat echo on the flute cascades like a waterfall.”

McDonald left the band after their first US tour and returned as a guest musician, playing alto saxophone on One More Red Nightmare and another King Crimson classic, Starless. In between these albums he released the album McDonald and Giles with drummer Michael Giles. In the early 1970s he appeared as guest musician on albums by Linda Lewis, Keith Tippett’s Centipede, T. Rex, Phil Manzanera. Later in the 1970s he found fame with Foreigner, a band he co-founded with Mick Jones and Lou Gramm.

McDonald’s son Max wrote on Facebook: “I’m deeply saddened to tell you that my father passed away yesterday from cancer. He was incredibly brave, and never lost his kindness or his sense of humour even when the going was rough.

“My father was a brilliant, intuitive musician, a gentle soul, and a wonderful dad. He will live on forever through his beautiful music and the love of his fans. Thank you all”.

In a post on the King Crimson website, Robert Fripp noted: “Ian brought musicality, an exceptional sense of the short and telling melodic line, and the ability to express that on a variety of instruments.”

McDonald also had a career as a session musician, notably playing on T-Rex’s 1971 hit Get It On (Bang A Gong) and also producing albums for Irish prog rockers Fruupp and Darryl Way’s Wolf.

He helped co-found Anglo-American melodic rockers Foreigner along with guitarist Mick Jones in 1976, appearing on the bands first three albums Foreigner (1977), Double Vision (1978) and Head Games (1979). He released a lone solo album, Driver’s Eyes, in 1999.

In 1996 he featured alongside Steve Hackett (with whom he guested on several occasions) at two Tokyo concerts that also featured the late John Wetton and drummer Chester Thompson, where they played a series of classic Genesis, Crimson,  Asia and Hackett material, which was released as The Tokyo Tapes in 1998.

Hackett tweeted: “I’m really sad to hear the news of Ian McDonald’s passing. He was a great friend and an incredible musician/songwriter. He will be very much missed.”

In 2002 he was a member of the 21st Century Schizoid Band alongside former King Crimson members Michael and Peter Giles, Mel Collins and current Crimson singer Jakko Jakszyk, performing a repertoire of classic Crimson. He also appeared, alongside Fripp, on the late Judy Dyble’s  2009 album Talking With Strangers.

Prince & The Revolution – “Live” will be released June 3rd. Pre-order this set featuring the legendary “Purple Rain” tour stop in Syracuse, NY will be released on 3 LPs

Prince and the Revolution’s “Live” concert film will receive a vinyl, CD and Blu-ray release for the first time. It’s available for preorder on the late artist’s website in the aforementioned formats, as well as a collector’s edition that includes three 150-gram LPs (purple, red and gold vinyl), two CDs, a Blu-ray video, a 44-page photo book, new liner notes and a poster.

The “Live” film was recorded during Prince’s March 30th, 1985, concert at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, N.Y., while he was on tour in support of his chart-topping 1984 album “Purple Rain“. The set list appropriately included the “Purple Rain” album in its entirety, as well as six songs off its predecessor, “1999“.

Prince originally released “Live” on VHS; the album received a posthumous DVD release in 2017, and the audio became available digitally in 2020. The concert includes extended versions of many songs, including an 18-minute rendition of “Purple Rain” to end the show. The set also had various interludes and song snippets, including the aptly titled “Purple House,” an ode to Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House.”
The members of the Revolution reflected on the simultaneous tightness and spontaneity of the Purple Rain tour in a 2017 Rolling Stone oral history, revealing that Prince would fine band members who made mistakes.

The Prince Estate is previewing the “Live” release with a video of the show opener “Let’s Go Crazy.”

“If you missed a cue or played an extra horn punch or something, that was $500,” keyboardist Lisa Coleman said. “He would withhold your money. It never happened to me. I’m lucky. Actually, I’m good at faking it. He never knew when I made a mistake.” “It was literally the Olympics,” guitarist Wendy Melvoin added. “We were like synchronized swimmers. If someone screwed up that thing, there’s not even a bronze medal. You’re just off the team. This was high stakes.”

Prince once said of the March 30th, 1985, Syracuse show, “There’s nothing I would change. It was one of the most powerful concerts I’ve ever attended.”

“Listening back to that Syracuse show, I’m like, ‘Wow, we sound like a freight train just coming out of nowhere,’” the Revolution’s BrownMark added of the concert in a statement. “That was powerful. I’ve been to a lot of concerts, and I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Today I am happy to announce the second single off of “This Is A Photograph” called “Rock Bottom“. I wrote this song loosely based on the late James Lee Lindsey Jr. after passing a mural of him in downtown Memphis during a writing session and falling into a rabbit hole and revisiting his incredible body of work. “Rock Bottom” could be about him or it could be about any of the countless influential souls who were before their time and rose from up from the bottom to the top too quickly, fading away young and never quite getting their due. I was however listening to a lot of Blood Visions and Grown Up, Fucked up while writing and recording this song and had read in an old interview that Lindseys stage name, Jay Reatard, was worn as a badge of honour after being made fun of in grade school which may or may not be why his seminal album Blood Visions features him on the cover, covered in blood, an obvious nod to Sissy Spacek’s charecter in Carrie. I also happened to watch Carrie for the first time around this time period (it was late October after all) and found myself repeating the iconic line—they’re all gonna laugh at you—over and over again.

The recording of Rock Bottom features a laugh track by friends Tim Heidecker and Alia Shawkat as well as Sam Cohen on bass, Nick Kinsey on drums, Cassandra Jenkins and Alecia Chakour on backing vocals and that’s me singing and playing guitar.

Kevin Morby wrote this his seventh album in Memphis and reflects the impermanence of life, as the ghosts of Jeff Buckley, Jay Reatard and others flow through these songs. He once again worked with Sam Cohen, recording at Sam’s Upstate NY studio and at Memphis’s Sam Phillips Recording Co. and special guests this time include Eric Johnson (Fruit Bats), Makaya McCraven and Cassandra Jenkins. “It’s about the battle every family faces,” Kevin says of “This Is A Photograph’s” title track, “that of chasing the clock, to live our lives and hold onto one another for as long as possible.”

The video is a whole lot of fun and will be detailed in a seperate post. Thanks and enjoy xo km

from the forthcoming album ‘This Is A Photograph’, out May 13th on Dead Oceans.

Angel Olsen has announced her new album “Big Time“. It’s out June 3rdx via Jagjaguwar and features the new single “All the Good Times.” Watch the video for the album’s opening song below.

According to the album’s announcement, “Big Time” was written during a period of time when Olsen was coming out . “Some experiences just make you feel as though you’re 5 years old, no matter how wise or adult you think you are,” Olsen said in a statement about coming out to her parents around that time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me.” Both of her parents died just before she began recording the album.

Kimberly Stuckwisch directed the new “All the Good Times” music video, which stars Olsen and her partner. “Angel’s story is a gift,” Stuckwisch said in a statement. “It allowed me to visually explore the universal themes of love, loss, and most importantly what holds us back from realizing our true selves.”

“Big Time” was recorded and mixed with co-producer Jonathan Wilson. It also features pianist and organist Drew Erickson and bassist Emily Elhaj. The new album is the follow-up to Olsen’s 2021 covers EP “Aisles” and the 2020 album “Whole New Mess“—a counterpart to 2019’s “All Mirrors“. She’ll soon tour with Sharon Van Etten and Julien Baker. 

On “Big Time“, the grand, burgeoning, symphonic gestures of Angel Olsen’s last three studio LPs are gone, substituted with “Phases”-era, minimalistic, pedal steel-tinged sobcore and dreamy twang. It’s a one-woman show, a prize fight where the challenger no-showed. “Big Time” isn’t a bummer opera; it’s a last-call, honky-tonk bar encore—and it rules. On opener “All The Good Times,” Olsen surrenders the album’s thesis, declaring that she’s done making excuses for everyone else. “I can’t say that I’m sorry when I don’t feel so wrong anymore,” she sings. The horn arrangements here are subtle, and Drew Erickson’s organ trembles slightly beneath Olsen’s vocals. It’s an announcement, a warning, that this is a new era of her songwriting.

“All The Good Times” by Angel Olsen from the forthcoming album ‘Big Time’, out June 3rd on Jagjaguwar.

The Chameleons are an English post-punk band formed in Middleton, Greater Manchester in 1981. The band consisted of singer and bassist Mark Burgess, guitarists Reg Smithies and Dave Fielding, and drummer John Lever. Their debut single “In Shreds” released in March 1982, was produced by Steve Lillywhite. The single’s cover – a harrowing painting by Smithies, who created the artwork for all of their releases – mirrored the band’s tense, atmospheric sound. During this time, the Chameleons’ independent style clashed with their label’s visions for the band. The Chameleons were protective of their image and consequently were dropped by the label soon after the release of “In Shreds”.

The band released their debut album, “Script of the Bridge“, in 1983. They followed it with “What Does Anything Mean? Basically” and “Strange Times” in 1985 and 1986, respectively, before abruptly disbanding in 1987 due to the sudden death of the band’s manager. After the split, Burgess and Lever formed The Sun And The Moon, while Fielding and Smithies formed the Reegs. Burgess also had a short solo career with backing band the Sons of God. The band were then inspired by U2’s early recordings : “U2’s first record was a big album for us. Edge’s guitar opened it up in terms of how you could build an ambient atmosphere”

Known for their atmospheric, guitar-based sound, the Chameleons are regarded as one of the most underrated Manchester bands of the 1980s. They did not attain the commercial success of other groups from the Manchester scene but developed a cult following.