The Fat Angel Sings

“It’s not easy for a writer to maintain the aura of the unspoken in a song. Music and the space surrounding it intensify the impact of confession; the true challenge comes in giving voice to a narrator who’s tongue-tied, or simply reticent. Texas singer-songwriter David Ramirez does so beautifully.

Recorded at Austin Signal Studios, “Rules and Regulations” was tracked entirely live with no additional mixing or mastering. The sound engineers used vintage microphones and first-edition recording equipment in combination with Dolby Laboratories’ new spatial audio technology called Atmos to produce a raw yet finished sound. Speaking about the recording process, Ramirez shares, “Knowing all of it had to be live, one-take performances with no overdubs, over a two-day period, kept us on our toes and kept it interesting.

Fortunately, everyone in the live room and in the control room were complete pros so what could have been a very stressful and unpleasant couple of days ended up being incredibly inspirational. In my early days, I did a lot of live recording but as I’ve grown older and become more specific I never thought I’d record in this way again. I’m now very interested in seeing if I could pull this off on a bigger scale.”

releases February 25th, 2022

Sharon Van Etten’s “Porta”‘ is a song about catharsis. Her first solo single since late 2020, it’s a powerful, synth-heavy track that recreates the feeling of working through tough emotions. Van Etten says the song came about at a particularly dark time in her life. “For most of my adult life I have struggled with bouts of depression and anxiety and coping mechanisms,” she says in a statement, “and I sometimes let those dark moments get the best of me.” She says that during the time that inspired “Porta” she was feeling “very dissociated,” disconnected from her body and out of control. These feelings resonate hard in the song, as when Van Etten sings “I want to live my life, but you won’t allow,” but so also does the feeling of facing these emotions and confronting them. “Stay out of my life,” she repeats at the end, as the drums build and then quietly fade away.

“Porta” by Sharon Van Etten, out now on Jagjaguwar Records.

The sixth full-length studio album from Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon finds her returning to the ancient past so as to root out new insights into our apocalyptic present. She does so via vibrant, synth-laden art-rock that feels both hallucinatory and clearheaded at once—she wrote the album primarily on bass (and performs all of its instruments except drums and saxophone), which lends it an ever-present burbling low end. Meanwhile, Le Bon’s lyrics eschew black-and-white doom and gloom in favour of more obliquely cosmic considerations: “Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch,” she contends on atmospheric opener “Dirt on the Bed,” which might as well be a mission statement. An album equally suited to studying the present moment and escaping it, “Pompeii” is another transcendent effort from a singular songwriter.

She shared its third and final pre-release single, “Remembering Me,” via a colourful video for it that features Le Bon in various exaggerated costumes and poses. Juliana Giraffe and Nicola Giraffe of Giraffe Studios directed the video, which features costumes by Monica Adriana Rowlands. It also has a bit of a David Bowie vibe, circa Hunky Dory (the “Remembering Me” video perhaps references the one for “Life on Mars?”).  Our planet is in danger as we and Cate Le Bon know’s it.
She designs darksome, pessimistic images of humankind’s threats
with her classy song writing.

“Remembering Me,” our final preview of Pompeii before its February 4th release on Mexican Summer. In a statement, Le Bon describes “Remembering Me” as “a neurotic diary entry that questions notions of legacy and warped sentimentalism in the desperate need to self-mythologise.” Her vocals float over fluttering synths and a hypnotic mixture of electric and acoustic guitars as she evokes the human predisposition to delusion—the stories we tell ourselves to feel larger than life. “Louder than empty rooms / Face down in heirlooms,” Le Bon sings over long-time collaborator Stella Mozgawa’s drums, her self-image’s shadow lengthening with each word while the instrumentation around her distorts like a Dali painting. 

“‘Remembering Me’ is a neurotic diary entry that questions notions of legacy and warped sentimentalism in the desperate need to self-mythologize,” says Le Bon in a press release.

Previously Le Bon shared Pompeii’s lead single “Running Away,” which was followed by its second single, “Moderation,” “Pompeii “is Le Bon’s sixth album and the follow-up to 2019’s “Reward“. In 2019, Le Bon also released an EP alongside Bradford Cox of Deerhunter and Atlas Sound titled “Myths 04“. It featured the songs “Secretary”and “Canto!” .

Welsh singer/songwriter/guitarist Cate Le Bon is releasing a new album, Pompeii, on February 4th via Mexican Summer Records.

Screaming Females and Noun singer/guitarist Marissa Paternoster recently released her first-ever solo album, “Peace Meter“, which came out December last year via Don Giovanni Records. The announcement reads: Marissa Paternoster began writing “Peace Meter” immediately after arriving home from a west coast tour cut short due to COVID. Alone in her deceased Grandmother’s empty home, Paternoster sent the skeleton of a song to Andy Gibbs from the metal band THOU with the hopes that he might be able to extrapolate on the original idea. Andy sent his accompaniment back, and that process continued for the bulk of the first wave of quarantine.

As the songs developed, Paternoster decided to include two other musicians whom she admired: long time friend Shanna Polley of the NYC-based band Snakeskin on backup vocals, and the cellist Kate Wakefield from the Cincinnati-based band Lung. All parties recorded their parts within their respective homes. Once the songs seemed fully realized, they were mixed by Eric Bennett, one of Marissa’s oldest friends and closest collaborators, who was also quarantined at home alongside his mixing studio.

This LP is the final project of that collaboration, between four US states, a year of isolation, panic, and uncertainty – all the while never writing together in the flesh. Paternoster has long since found her niche, her people, and her voice. it’s under her name is because it’s more searchable, she laughs, but it does seem like a benchmark in her career. The concise, 31-minute, nine-track album is inexplicably new. It’s subtly supernatural, with Paternoster’s haunting vocals carrying through an acoustic/electronic folk realm, articulating an unfamiliar yet comforting sense of calm.

The first single is “White Dove,” which finds Marissa going in kind of a psychedelic folk direction, to great effect. It’s a far cry from Screaming Females, but her voice is as unmistakable as ever. Listen and watch the Joe Steinhardt-directed video.

The Screaming Females guitarist delves into haunting acoustic/electronic song writing on her solo album “Peace Meter“, expanding her sonic palette and typically raging approach—but not without the help of her musical community.

Before she released seven full-length albums with her punk band Screaming Females, another four under her solo moniker Noun, and getting listed as one of “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” singer/songwriter Marissa Paternoster didn’t have much hope for musical success.

“I spent a lot, if not all, of my teenage years being very afraid,” she shares. “I thought because of my gender, and then knowing full well that I was gay, that those things were going to keep me from ever being in a band or just being happy. I felt trapped.”

But the all-consuming urge to play guitar and be in a band kept her going. She absorbed every Smashing Pumpkins riff possible at her childhood home in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and then discovered the anarchic punk women of the ’90s riot grrrl scene—which changed everything. She thought, “They exist, they’re out there. Maybe there is this little, tiny chance that I can find those people too.”

Paternoster says that the album’s production was basically a 50/50 split between her and Gibbs. He took the originally morose, down-tempo “I Lost You” and infused it with a happier, up-tempo beat—it’s the track Paternoster says she’s most proud of from the collection. Throughout the project, “he would even manipulate the vocals. He used them as an instrument that he could add modulation to, which added texture to the songs.” The weird, Cocteau Twins kind of blurred line between analog and electronic instrumentation, she says, was mostly a product of Gibbs’ influence.

King Buffalo’s last album  ‘The Burden of Restlessness’, which the Rochester group put out in mid-2021, was titled to reflect the frustration felt by the band off the back of not being able to play shows during the pandemic. They did, however, put that bottled-up energy to good use by writing and recording lots of new stuff, and as such new LP ‘Acheron’ follows a few short months after ‘The Burden of Restlessness’. The band opted to record ‘Acheron’ in a cave, which is both very unusual and very dope.

Whether they were looking to make their already pretty widescreen brand of stoner-rock sound even grander, or simply seeking a way to keep themselves entertained during the months of lockdown, is by the by – whatever the reason behind ‘Acheron’, this is sprawling heavy psychedelia from a trio who really know their onions in that regard.

King Buffalo have got making an album down to a tee, three great albums in three years is quite an impressive achievement but I guess that’s why they’ve carved themselves a place in the world of psychedelic space rock.

King Buffalo – Acheron Written by King Buffalo in Rochester, NY
at the Main Street Armory in 2021

Recorded & Filmed Live at Howe Caverns
on April, 26th of 2021

Here is another fine full-length in the form of Erin Rae’s ‘Lighten Up’. Indeed, Rae’s music might be the more classically country-leaning of all the releases this week, this LP is certainly helmed by sturdy Nashville twang. What’s particularly impressive is how Erin Rae finds plenty of room to explore within the confines of such a well-worn sound, the songcraft of ‘Lighten Up’ ranging from wry lilts such as ‘Modern Woman’ to the triple-time stomp of ‘True Love’s Face’. with aided musical accompaniment from Kevin Morby and Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) show up here too.

“My last record was a lot of self-assessment and criticism, and trying to kick old habits and ways of relating and not relating to people,” Rae acknowledges. “This one is about blossoming, opening up, and living a little more in the present moment. Fully experiencing what it is to be human.”

With a renewed sense of agency, Rae also took a more active role in creating the kaleidoscopic soundscape that became “Lighten Up“, setting out to reflect a sound she calls, “an emotional pallet, I could get lost in.” Alongside Erin and Jonathan Wilson, who contributed various instruments.

Erin Rae has thrown down a direct challenge to the stereotype of what a Southern singer should be. Both lyrically and sonically, she strikes a fiercely independent chord, proudly releasing a deeply personal record that reflects her own upbringing in Tennessee, including the prejudices and injustices that she witnessed as a child that continue to impact her life to this day. Sharing stages with Iron and Wine, Jason Isbell, Jenny Lewis, Hiss Golden Messenger and Father John Misty, before her touring came to a sharp halt at the start of the pandemic. 

Produced by Jonathan Wilson (Dawes, Father John Misty, Conor Oberst), Erin Rae’s highly anticipated new album “Lighten Up” is a timeless amalgam of classic pop, cosmic country and indie rock, recorded earlier this year in California’s Topanga Canyon.

Charlotte Cornfield’s fourth LP ‘High In The Minuses’ rocks up here directly after a new Big Thief album. There’s certainly an influence of Meek, Lenker et al to Cornfield’s sound, a winning brand of singer-songwriter fare which combines more processional indie chops with some crunchier indie-rock influences and wittily leftfield lyrical approaches. I’m getting a fair bit of early Neil Young off of this record too – never a bad thing.

When the world shut down in March 2020, Charlotte Cornfield was in the middle of an artist residency in the Rocky Mountains, hunkered down in a hut with a baby grand piano, sketching ideas for a follow-up album to her Polaris-Longlisted 2019 LP “The Shape of Your Name“. In a matter of hours, she found herself back home in Toronto with months of touring cancelled and a wide swath of time ahead of her. She began to write feverishly, mining her memories and dreams and recounting them with vivid detail. When the songs were finished, she headed to Montreal to record with producer/engineer Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Leonard Cohen), drummer Liam O’Neill (Suuns), bassist Alexandra Levy (Ada Lea), and guitarist Sam Gleason (Tim Baker).

The group tracked the album in 5 days, mostly live off the floor, seeking to capture the raw emotion of the songs. The result is “Highs in the Minuses“, a memoir in fragments. Here Cornfield fully embraces the role of narrator, moving from one vignette to another in a colourful collage.

Title track from Charlotte Cornfield’s previous EP ‘In My Corner,’ released March 20th, 2020 on Next Door Records.

We see her at 21, heartbroken and lost, carrying a friend’s 3-legged cat back to her apartment in a box; then as a teenager, playing a new song for a group of friends on a trampoline. She sings of a magical first date, an ex with a mean streak, two skateboarders gliding in a lakeside parking lot. The brutal honesty in her lyrics brings to mind writers like David Berman and Adrianne Lenker, while musically she conjures a Zuma-era Neil Young, leaping from crunchy guitar rock to piano ballads with effortless grace. Highs in the Minuses is Charlotte Cornfield’s strongest offering to date, each song a gem in and of itself, please check it out.

Andy Bell’s second solo album is a sprawling double, covering neo-psych, dream pop, psychedelic folk, and all sorts of other sumptuous 60s songcraft across its eighteen tracks. You’ll likely know Andy Bell from his time with Ride and/or Oasis, but those with their finger on the pulse will have noticed that he’s actually been pretty busy with his own projects these past few years. ‘Flicker’ continues the fine run of LPs he’s released as Andy Bell and/or GLOK. This sprawling album proves a good summation of the sounds Bell has cultivated with both projects. 

There’s talk of summertime sweetness, exploring new ground, classicist psych pop, and offering a modern update to the sounds of times gone by. Indeed, the Ride/Oasis guitarist has had some of his most productive years recently. We’ve seen plenty of records of both the music Bell issues under his own name and his techno-tinged GLOK output land in our stockroom since the latter emerged in 2019 with the ‘Dissident’ LP. It’s an impressive work rate, particularly when you consider that Ride are a going concern once more.

2020’s ‘The View From Halfway Down’, the first Andy Bell solo full-length, was a shimmering psych-pop delight. The Ride style stuck in the album’s shoegazing hazes, a generally lush sound captured that same summertime sweetness of The Stone Roses in ‘Waterfall’ mode, and one also heard a bit of Beach Boys-esque harmonisation poking through at points. More than anything, though, you got the sense that Bell was allowing tracks like ‘Love Comes In Waves’ to unfurl with leisurely ease. This music was the fruits of someone working at no pace but their own, squirrelled away in a modest studio with a few effects pedals and loop tracks. 

With ‘Flicker’, the follow-up to ‘The View From Halfway Down’, Bell gently nudges the edges of this approach. As track titles such as ‘Way Of The World’ and ‘Gyre And Gimble’ indicate, ‘Flicker’ maintains a lackadaisical charm throughout that it very much shares with its predecessor. There’s plenty of pleasant psychedelic panache throughout the album as well – the gauzy wobble of lead single ‘Something Like Love’, for instance, is as primetime as anything we found on ‘The View From Halfway Down’.

‘Flicker’ is a lengthy album with more than twice as many tracks as ‘The View From Halfway Down’. This is not only a testament to the purple patch that Bell appears to be in at the moment – it also indicates how much musical ground he was seeking to cover. ‘Flicker’ may not be an LP of strident experimentations or sonic about-faces, but it does find Bell leading listeners, almost without us noticing, into sonic realms he spent less time in on ‘The View From Halfway Down’

Some of those regions neighbour Bell’s core sound. Specifically, the 1960s loom large here. The reverse-phase sound scaping that heralds the album is a classic psych trick, one which finds further voice in the shapeshifting ‘The Looking Glass’; there’s a quixotic curiosity to the aforementioned ‘Gyre And Gimble’, for instance, which harks to Syd Barrett; speaking of classic pop, many a Beatles devotee would have been proud to come up with ‘She Calls The Tune’ or ‘This Is Our Year’. Other tracks bring some of GLOK’s kosmische steez into play, with synthetic pulses backboning ‘It Gets Easier’ and ‘Jenny Holzer B Goode’. 

The sense that ‘The View From Halfway Down’ was the work of one curious mind carries through to ‘Flicker’ not by the new LP offering looping guitar spools, but in the way that this record inverts those classicist strains to reference more modern touchstones. There are more than a couple of points here when the layered, lightly groovy instrumentals line Bell up alongside LA Priest and Tame Impala, two artists who are similarly expert at harnessing the music of times gone by. 

By tightening the screws from the pleasant wanderings of ‘The View From Halfway Down’, Bell has been able to maintain that album’s charm on ‘Flicker’ while also serving up some of his most sumptuous songcraft.

Thanks Norman Records