The Fat Angel Sings

Seattle-via-Connecticut band Bread Pilot have signed to Double Double Whammy and announced a new album, “New To You”, due out May 27th via their new label home. On their debut, “New to You”, Bread Pilot create a time capsule that holds all the highs and lows of the last 10 years. The band began making music when they were in high school and draw on their decade’s worth of memories together to make something truly sentimental. They manage to catapult between comfortable nostalgia and energetic indie in a way that authentically captures the whole spectrum of emotions they experienced. Listening to the album feels like flipping through a photo album where each song is an intimate snapshot of a specific person or place sacred to the band.

The lead single is “Skin Day,” a tuneful, fuzzed out slice of upbeat indie rock. “‘Skin Day’ is fuelled by the urgency to complete an idea before the inspiration expires,” guitarist/vocalist Stephen Ibanez, Jr. says. “It was conceived on a winter afternoon while housesitting in an unfamiliar place. I had taken a bit of a substance and felt the effects coming on as I was writing, and in fear of being unable to be in control of my body/mind for much longer, I focused in and wrote the rest of it in a bit of a panic.”

“Skin Day” from the album “New To You”, out May 27th 2022 via Double Double Whammy

Remixes don’t quite have the appeal they did in the ’90s and ’00s, when indie rock and club culture were intertwining a little more. It still happens, and we’ve seen a lot of remix albums through the pandemic but those often seem like a way to remind fans that they’re finally going to tour for that record they made two years ago. Still, some groups seem to understand the appeal of remixes and what makes a good one. UK motorik darkwave duo The KVB have turned over last’s “Unity” to a select group of sympathetic friends and fellow artists and the result is this excellent EP that offers up across-the-board great alternate versions of songs that, in a couple cases, might better the original.

One of those that feels like a step up is Trentemøller‘s remix of “Lumens” that strips out a lot of the original’s synths and refashions it into textured dreampop not unlike what’s on his new album “Memoria“. Also bettering the original is The KVB’s own “After Hours” version of “Structural Index” that adds a little laid-back swing and house feel. Elsewhere: Drab Majesty give “Blind” a whole new (killer) bassline, Moa Moa take “Unbound” into more overt rock territory, Principleasure reimagines “Unité” as pure techno, and “Ideal Living” is shot into the stratosphere by maXIon. None are radical reworks, but all add welcome detail, making for a worthy companion to a very good album.

Through the years, Weiss has played with everyone from her bands Quasi, Wild Flag, and Sleater-Kinney, to collaborators like Elliott Smith, Stephen Malkmus, and others.; Grow has fronted his own groups Modern Kin and the Pastors’ Wives, producing other bands along the way. Starting as a moonlighting collaboration, the meeting of this particular group was kismet if not totally cosmic.

Slang, the Portland band that includes Janet Weiss (Sleater-Kinney, Quasi), Drew Grow (Modern Kin, Pastors’ Wives), Kathy Foster (The Thermals), and Anita Lee Elliot (Viva Voce), started in the mid-2010s, but between Janet getting in a car accident and the pandemic, they’ve were a little slow out of the gate. With Janet more of a free agent these days, and the last two years giving everyone a little more free time, Slang are finally here with their debut album.

For those imagining some sort of true PDX supergroup, combining elements of the many notable bands involved, you might be disappointed but on its own terms “Cockroach in a Ghost Town” is a very solid record. Drew Grow is the primary creative force here: he sings lead and wrote all the songs (or co-wrote with Weiss) and he’s got an emotive, anthemic style that’s closer to Arcade Fire than Sleater-Kinney or The Thermals.

He knows his way around big choruses, not to mention memorable verses and middle-eighths, and has the fiery vocal chords with which to deliver them. Having such a killer band — including one of the best drummers on the planet — all just makes it kick a little more ass.

Rock-n-roll group hailing from Portland, Oregon.

Band is: Drew Grow, Janet Weiss, Kathy Foster, Anita Lee Elliott
Debut album,
“Cockroach in a Ghost Town” out now on Kill Rock Stars.

There’s something elemental about a trio, take one member away and the whole thing falls over. Chicago’s Dehd are as elemental as it gets, with Jason Balla, Emily Kempf and Eric McGrady laying down guitar, bass and drums at their most minimal. They have a unique chemistry, though, with Balla and Kempf both singing lead on Dehd’s brand of scrappy, occasionally twangy indie rock earworms. You couldn’t lose any of them. They are a band that makes me miss NYC’s Lower East Side club Cake Shop, as their style and spirit would’ve fit right in alongside Crystal Stilts, Box Elders, Hunx & His Punx and other groups who frequented the subterranean venue in the late ’00s.

Following their 2020 breakthrough “Flower of Devotion”, Dehd signed with big indie Fat Possum and “Blue Skies” is their first for the label. The gentle electric piano on “Control” that opens the album make make you might wonder if moving on up has changed their sound, but then they barrel into the feisty, full-throated “Bad Love” and it’s clear this is the same Dehd, just spiffed up a little.

They worked at the same studio as their previous records, with Balla still behind the boards, but they were afforded more time to make this one, as well as to have engineer Craig Silvey (Jarvis Cocker, The Horrors) mix the album. 

The songs are tighter, the drums hit with more oomph, keyboards colour in the edges just a little, and Balla and Kempf’s voices sound just a little sweeter. Dehd haven’t gotten slicker, just more vivid.

Stars have always crafted widescreen, romantic pop, songs full of intimate details and grand ambition even when they were working as a duo with a few cheap keyboards and a drum machine. Over the last two decades, their line-up has expanded, contracted and expanded again, and records have been made with bigger budgets and sometimes famous producers. But their core ideals have remained resilient: heartfelt music that sounds good in an indie disco or at home by yourself. You know, the whole spectrum of “How Soon is Now?” but finding the joy in little moments as well as those when you go and stand on your own and you leave on your own and cry and want to die.*

Working with The Besnard Lakes’ Jace Lasek, Montreal’s Stars sound appropriately cinematic on their very good ninth album.

Their ninth album, “From Capelton Hill” finds Torquil Campbell, Amy Millan, Chris Seligman and the rest of the band working with a very sympathetic collaborator, The Besnard Lakes’ Jace Lasek who really helps them achieve the appropriate level of grandeur and sweep that their songs deserve. It’s a wonder these Montreal residents haven’t worked together before. Jace also sings backup on the album, as does

The Dears’ Murray Lightburn, making this a very Montreal affair. Stars remain at their best with one foot on the dancefloor, mixing electronics and a beating heart, and “Palmistry” and “Build a Fire” are wonderfully sultry additions to their cannon, as are swoony indie-pop numbers “Pretenders” and “Hoping.” Few bands that were with us at the dawn of the millennium continue to sound this vital. “If I could count up every mile we passed, how did we even make this last,” Campbell and Millan ask on “Patterns.” “Our memory splits in two cause we don’t do goodbye.”

released May 27th, 2022

Written and Arranged by Stars:
Chris Seligman, Evan Cranley, Torquil Campbell, Chris McCarron, Amy Millan, Patrick McGee

Angel Olsen’s new album “Big Time” was released last week, but her latest single is, instead, off the soundtrack to Apple TV series Shining Girls, on which she covered Bob Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings” for. It’s a gorgeous renditions, and Angel is donating proceeds from it to Everytown for Gun Safety.

Olsen new album, “Big Time”, she’s shared the early singles ‘Through the Fires’, ‘All The Good Times’, and the title track.

Based on the novel by Lauren Beukes, Shining Girls follows Kirby Mazrachi (Moss) as a Chicago newspaper archivist who is the survivor of a traumatic assault. When she learns of a recent murder that’s linked to her case, she teams up with journalist Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura) to understand her blurred reality and uncover the killer’s identity.

For decades, a quality live album eluded Led Zeppelin. The only option for fans who wanted a concert recording was 1976’s overproduced “The Song Remains the Same“, which failed to do justice to the group’s pyrotechnics. “The BBC Sessions“, released in 1997, was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t until 2003, nearly a quarter century after the band’s 1980 breakup, that they truly delivered the goods on “How the West Was Won“, a chart-topping three-disc set that culls the best material from three June 1972 Los Angeles–arena concerts.

That album was remastered under the supervision of the band’s Jimmy Page and reissued in 2018. (A “super deluxe” version supplements the compact discs with the album’s vinyl debut and an audio DVD with a surround-sound mix.) The two-and-a-half-hour album doesn’t add any tracks to the 2003 release, but fans won’t complain. The sound quality is superb, the band is operating at its peak, and the program hits many of the important bases from the group’s catalogue.

From their debut album comes “Dazed and Confused,” here in a wild 25-minute version. Led Zeppelin II yields “Heartbreaker,” “What Is and What Should Never Be,” “Moby Dick” and, last but not least, a 21-minute “Whole Lotta Love” that quotes from John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun,” the ’50s rocker “Let’s Have a Party,” the blues standard “Goin’ Down Slow” and Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Bring It on Home.” (A side trip into Rick Nelson’s “Hello, Mary Lou” that appeared mid-song on the 2003 edition of this album has for some reason been edited out here, however.).

Led Zeppelin III is represented by “Immigrant Song,” “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” “That’s the Way” and “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” while the group’s untitled fourth album contributes “Black Dog,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Going to California” and “Rock and Roll.”

“Houses of the Holy“—the group’s fifth album, whose release was still nine months away at the time of these concerts—is previewed with strong versions of “Over the Hills and Far Away,” “Dancing Days” and “The Ocean.” (There’s also a bit of that LP’s “The Crunge” in “Dazed and Confused,” along with “Walter’s Walk,” a Houses outtake that first surfaced on 1982’s “Coda“.)

Virtually without exception, these are essential performances. Some of Page’s guitar solos will take your breath away, and the band has never sounded tighter or more invigorated. It’s no stretch to say that this is one of the greatest live rock albums ever made, and it sounds better than ever in its remastered 2018 version.

Frankie and the Witch Fingers simulated reality prototype! The band’s “LEVITATION SESSIONS” live album finally has a proper vinyl release. Isolated in the heart of Joshua Tree, California, The Witch Fingers recorded these sessions during 2020, the great shutdown of Planet Earth. Plug it into your brain and experience a deep-fried, multi-coloured, sensory invasion featuring nine jams off their latest LPs MEPEM & ZAM. A psych rock meltdown in the 4th dimension!

“We spent a full week in the desert shooting our session – it was really more of a space mission than anything else, a self-contained artistic ecosystem. I hope all the love that went into it is apparent when you see it, and that you enjoy watching it as much as we did making it.” – Frankie and the Witch Fingers

Filmed at: Super X Ranch in Pioneertown, CA

Toronto-born, London-based artist Tess Parks will return with her long-awaited new album ‘And Those Who Were Seen Dancing’ on May 20th 2022 via Fuzz Club Records. Following years of international touring and a lengthy list of critically-acclaimed collaborations with Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe in recent years (most recently the duo’s self-titled 2018 LP), the new album will be Parks’ first full-length solo offering since her much-loved debut album, ‘Blood Hot’, was released back in 2013 on Alan McGee’s 359 Music label.

“In my mind, this album is like hopscotch”, Parks says: “These songs were pieced together over time in London, Toronto and Los Angeles with friends and family between August 2019 and March 2021. So many other versions of these songs exist.

The recording and final completion of this album took over two years and wow – the lesson I have learned the most is that words are spells. If I didn’t know it before, I know it now for sure. I only want to put good out into the universe.” A growing disillusionment with the state of the world paired with an injury that stopped Parks from being able to play guitar and piano for months meant the album was nearly shelved. 

“I really felt discouraged to complete this album”, she recalls: “I stopped listening to music for honestly about a year altogether and turned to painting instead. I really had to convince myself again that it’s important to just share whatever good we can – having faith in ourselves to know that our lights can shine on and on through other people and for other people. The thought of anyone not sharing their art or being shy of anything they create seems like a real tragedy to me. Even if it’s not perfect, you’re capturing a moment.” Recorded over a two year period but with songs, lyrics and ideas dating back over a decade in some form, ‘And Those Who Were Seen Dancing’ is an album full of such moments, people and places. 

Hovvdy have shared news of their upcoming EP “billboard for my feelings”, “Everything” is Hovvdy’s first new material of 2022, following their “True Love” album that landed in October last year.

Will Taylor says of the new outing, “Everything” is a song about having fun even when you miss the mark.”

“Town” is the duo’s second outing of 2022, following last month’s “Everything”, and allowed Charlie Martin to “break out of a relatively dark place.”https://youtu.be/BFuIDZEqZ50

Martin adds of the track, which was co-produced by Hovvdy and Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver, Dijon), “There was catharsis in almost every layer – I remember crying recording the mellotron flutes. I’m not sure why, but with “Town” I wanted the instrumental to do the heavy lifting, leaning less on storytelling. In that way, the song’s meaning isn’t terribly specific, but for me it’s about missing your friends and hoping they miss you.”

“Hide” is the third track to be lifted from the duo’s forthcoming EP, following “Town” and “Everything”, and is accompanied by a Boone Patrello-directed video.

Hovvdy’s Will Taylor says the new song, which is co-produced and mixed by Will Taylor, is “a lighthearted song about learning when to let your thoughts run wild and when to batten them up.” “billboard for my feelings” will follow Hovvdy’s 2021 album “True Love”, and will feature one other new song titled “Ruby”.

Charlie Martin says of the EP, “I allowed myself to focus more on how everything feels, and a little less about telling a complex story. Both are super valuable how a melody or texture makes you feel, versus how a super-emotional piece of impacts you.”

Taylor adds, “We got to have more fun; we got to cut back. I’m realising there are many forms Hovvdy can return to, and this EP is a different form.”

“Hide” is out now. Hovvdy’s “billboard for my feelings” EP will follow on Grand Jury. released May 27th, 2022

Produced by Hovvdy & Andrew Sarlo