The Fat Angel Sings

1992 Blend takes us on a kaleidoscopic trip through what they used to call “Alternative Rock” (Or College Rock? Or Indie Rock?) via a selection of dusty-but-dynamic live tapes. This stuff may be 30 years old now, but in many ways, these sounds represent a gold standard for guitar-forward rock music, finding inspiration in the past, but with eyes still fixed on the horizon. Nevermind the Buzz Bin — dig into this.

Tracks:

Soon – My Bloody Valentine / Perfume V – Pavement / Sugar Kane – Sonic Youth / Dress – PJ Harvey / 1880 or So – Television / Find A Way – Wake Ooloo / Slash Your Tires – Luna / 8 Tall Ships – Swirlies / Two Step – Throwing Muses / Catch The Breeze – Slowdive / Ode to C.C. pt. 2 – The Flaming Lips / Railway Shoes – Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians / Safari – The Breeders / Kennedy – The Wedding Present / Looking For A Way Out – Uncle Tupelo / Farmer’s Daughter – Yo La Tengo

Leah Wellbaum has never been afraid of her own humility or honesty. But she’s never quite examined it the way she has now with “Parallel Timeline”.

On Slothrust’s latest album, bandleader Leah Wellbaum pushed herself to try and understand her own spirituality on a deeper level, putting a lens on the core wound of the human experience, the idea that we’re alone. With “Parallel Timeline”, Wellbaum explores the feeling of being trapped inside her own consciousness while simultaneously searching for a meaningful connection to the universe, and all the mysteries it contains.

In advance of recording their fifth studio album, Leah, along with drummer Will Gorin, sought to dramatically expand the band’s sonic palette. Slothrust put an emphasis on incorporating new production techniques and processes into the established Slothrust sound, resulting in an extraordinary amount of experimental demo recordings, many elements of which appear themselves on the final record.

They leaned into risk-taking — a freedom that comes with having been in a band together for more than 10 years, cultivating new sonic realms for each track.

Leah sought to craft unique and calculated guitar parts instead of continuous bursts of wall-to-wall sound, and in turn delivers what will likely be considered a “how-to manual” for guitar playing in the next decade.

Educated musicians all with backgrounds in classical, jazz and blues, the band’s newest work once again sees Slothrust leaning into improvisation — something that in the past has lent itself to the infectious energy of their live shows. “Parallel Timeline“, mixed by industry legend Billy Bush and mastered by Heba Kadry is a masterclass in balancing tenderness with the fierce guitar work Leah has become known for. With a distinct yet unified sound that blends progressive rock, acoustic and pop, Slothrust has never been more confident. 

Released March 16th, 2022

To the new wavers of ’77, Elvis Costello must have looked a straightforward proposition, a black and white world. Punk’s febrile, combative energies and the naïve excitement of golden age rock’n’roll and mod beat encapsulated in one bespectacled, legs-akimbo, skinny tied package. And so, for a short while, it would prove; as the arrival of The Attractions – and a pill-popping angry young man attitude – powered Costello on to the new wave front lines with “This Year’s Model” and “Armed Forces“, his aesthetic cohered around barbed and allusive dissections of pop culture, cutting social commentary and the politics of love and war. A critical darling, and not just because, as Dave Lee Roth bitterly attested, the sleeve of …Model was, for most journalists, like looking in a mirror.

In the 148 pages of this Deluxe Ultimate Music Guide, fully updated to account for his most recent activity, you’ll read some of Costello’s most memorable interactions with just those journalists. Here you’ll find spiky moments – “Getting it all down are you?” – and expansive encounters. Not to mention a full reckoning of the many recordings, collaborations and other adventures which caused them to occur in the first place.

Costello’s tale began to twist early on, and never reverted to formula for forty years. “Get Happy!!” arrived drenched in classic soul and R&B, looking like it’d been dusted off from the basement of the “Twisted Wheel“. A country album emerged, “Almost Blue”, fresh from Nashville itself. A swerve into lush, baroque art pop for “Imperial Bedroom“; another into brassy ‘80s pop for “Punch The Clock“, home to some of the finest deep cuts in alt-rock history in “The Invisible Man” and “Charm School”. The untamed unpredictability of Elvis Costello came to a head in 1986, the year he both premiered the beard on the sleeve of “The Costello Show’s” immaculately authentic country collection “King Of America” and arguably invented grunge on his unhinged junk rock masterpiece “Blood & Chocolate“, introducing his Machiavellian alter-ego and ringmaster of the “Spinning Songbook” tours, “Napoleon Dynamite“.

Since then there have been Celtic Beard Years, classical quartet collaborations, meetings of minds with the pop, blues and hip-hop greats, torch song collections, experimental electronic endeavours, country and jazz departures and plenty else besides. Costello has evolved from new wave’s sharpest rebel poet into a sonic polymath and onstage raconteur, not just one of the country’s finest songwriters but amongst its most adventurous too.

Throughout the decades, though, Costello has retained the will and ability to reconnect with that core punk attitude and fire out a firecracker rock record when the mood takes him – a “Brutal Youth“, a “When I Was Cruel“, a “Momofuku”. It’s been a skewer holding together a career that might otherwise fly off in a dozen directions, and spears through his most recent run of albums too in the shape of the cranky, incredible “The Boy Named If”.

From the very beginning, Pink Floyd were thinking about how to make a show something more than a band simply playing songs. It was a mission that began with stroboscopic light experiments in the company of their landlord Mike Leonard, and concluded with the band erecting an enormous wall between themselves and the audience.

In between there were experiments. An enormous jelly. Frying bacon. Murmuring priests. An octopus, slowly inflating. Animated films. Oil lights and projections. A circular screen. Flying pigs. Flying sheep. As they explored ways to continue as a working band after the retirement of their singer and songwriter Syd Barrett, they moved beyond psychedelic songs into a place almost beyond songs – something more like a film soundtrack, designed to paint a mood on an epic scale.

In this struggle to find a way forward and to keep working, Pink Floyd made their live performances a laboratory for their grandest and most successful music. Songs from the classic albums “Wish You Were Here“, “Animals” and the whole suite of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” (performed live first just over 50 years ago) were first presented (sometimes falteringly; sometimes beset with “technical difficulties”) on stages in the British provinces.

It’s this creative evolution that we’re celebrating in this latest Ultimate Companion, one of our quarterly Special editions, designed to bring you closer to music you love. You might choose to think about the music we talk about here as rough prototypes for more streamlined studio version. Or you may, like us, come to think of them all as a noisy celebration of the creative process. If you dig them out, you’ll find astonishing versions of compositions you thought you knew.

That’s where we come in. Pink Floyd spent a lot of time thinking about how they were going to present a show: the music, the show, the pyro and inflatables, even the placing of the intermission. So much so they don’t seem to have spent a lot of time curating hi-fi recordings of their performances.

So we’ve waded in among the live recordings from official to unofficial, to help guide you on Pink Floyd’s historic creative path – the tapes, the rarest songs, the thoughts of the eyewitnesses now they’ve had time to reflect. We’ve pulled back from the stage to bring put this all in the context of Pink Floyd’s imperial phase. From the archives, we’ve curated a selection of interviews illustrating what the band thought they were doing then, whether planning the perfect freakout, soundtracking a ballet that seems indefinitely postponed, or battling the “wankers” from the council who won’t let them turn all the lights out when they play. As we learn from their inner circle, the band’s reluctance to stay in one place is the keynote of this secret history. “Roger was thinking ‘how can we better this?’,” Floyd creative director Aubrey Powell told Uncut. “It started way back at that Crystal Palace gig with that inflatable octopus. I think he realised that the audience appreciated something more than just the band.”

Best known as the singer of the Hold Steady, Craig Finn is a Minnesota-bred singer, songwriter, and guitarist based out of New York City. Combining literary influences like Jack Kerouac and John Berryman with the musical influences of Bruce Springsteen and fellow Minnesotan Paul Westerberg, Finn’s highly descriptive lyrical style has a strong focus on narrative, crafting whole worlds for the people in his songs to exist within.

‘A Legacy of Rental’s’, is the 6th solo record from Finn, was produced by Josh Kaufman and recorded by D. James Goodwin at The Clubhouse recording studio. Compared to past solo releases, this collection was recorded with the help of a 14-piece string section including violins, violas and cellos, instead of the usually horn-heavy sounds that Craig and The Hold Steady are known for. The themes of the record explore memory, how we remember our loved ones, the places in our lives that have changed, and recent events that are part of our past.

Very pleased to announce Craig Finn and The Uptown Controllers will be returning to Europe and the UK for dates this Fall in support of my new record A LEGACY OF RENTALS. We’ll start in Denmark and make our way to the UK and Ireland. It’s our first trip over since 2019 and we are excited to share new and old songs with you. 

A member of both the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Laura Nyro not only wrote songs that became hits for acts including The 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, and many more, but has been cited as a major influence by Kate Bush, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Cyndi Lauper, Todd Rundgren and countless others. She recorded 10 studio albums (one released posthumously), but a live performance was always an event. Originally issued only in Japan in 2003, the 16 tracks recorded at Kintetsu Hall, plus five recorded at “On Air West” return as “Trees Of The Ages: Laura Nyro Live In Japan“. It runs the gamut of her career, from Nyro-penned hits including “And When I Die”, “Wedding Bell Blues“, and “Save The Country”, to covers of Bacharach/David, Smokey Robinson, and Phil Spector classics.”

1994 live performance includes the classics “And When I Die,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” “Stoned Soul Picnic,” and more.

A member of both the Songwriters and Rock & Roll Halls of Fame, Laura Nyro not only wrote songs that became hits for acts including The 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, and many more, but has been cited as a major influence by Kate Bush, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Cyndi Lauper, Todd Rundgren, Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Wicked), and countless others. She recorded 10 studio albums (one released posthumously), but a live performance from Nyro was always an event.

Originally issued only in Japan as “Live In Japan” in 2003, these 16 tracks recorded at Kintetsu Hall, plus 5 recorded at On Air West return as “Trees Of The Ages: Laura Nyro Live In Japan”. From Nyro-penned hits including “And When I Die,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” and “Save The Country,” to covers of Bacharach/David, Smokey Robinson, and Phil Spector classics, “Trees Of The Ages” is an essential document of Laura’s February 1994 historic visit to Japan. With Laura on piano and vocals, with harmonies by Diane Wilson, Dian Sorrell, Diane Garisto, the performances are sublime.

Newly remastered by Grammy®-winner Michael Graves, and produced for release by Grammy®-winner Cheryl Pawelski and George Gilbert with the approval of The Laura Nyro Trust, the packaging contains updated artwork and new liner notes from author and musician John Kruth. Looking and sounding incredible, this essential addition to Nyro’s discography is available worldwide for the first time. “Trees Of The Ages: Laura Nyro Live In Japan” cements the legend of the incomparable Laura Nyro.

The title of The Stroppies’ newest LP, “Levity”, serves as a creative statement of intent and an acknowledgment of the dichotomy between the music they have made and the conditions in which they were produced. For a group that started over an initial idea to “create open ended music, quickly and haphazardly”, the logistical challenges of creating their second album in the midst of a pandemic, in a city that endured the longest lockdown in the world, created a need to redefine process.

“Levity”, The Stroppies strongest creative statement to date, is the result of this new approach to creative process. Playful yet focused, but broader in scope and experimentation than previous efforts, the ten songs that comprise Levity continue the band’s exploration of the pop song as both foil for experimentation and conduit for personal reflection.

Whereas the group’s debut LP “Whoosh!” demonstrated their ability to craft clean, concise jangle pop, “Levity” takes a different route by utilizing a darker pallet of sounds to create its impressionistic whole. Fuzz and distortion are employed to add weight to songs built on tape loops and Motorik drum patterns. Warbling synthesisers and modulated keys add new moods and dimensions to The Stroppies unique brand of pop classicism. Thematically, the band continues their exploration of the personal refracted through the lens of the absurd, though this time around the music feels a few shades darker, a somewhat inevitable consequence of the collective trauma of the past 24 months. The songs still hit with the immediacy that made their debut so engaging, but there’s a creeping cynicism and wistfulness that now permeates The Stroppies sound.

While the narrative around the ‘lockdown record’ is increasingly commonplace, there are unavoidable realities involved in making creative decisions under such circumstances that can’t be overlooked, especially for a band that thrives on collaboration.  “The restrictions around COVID really informed the way we made the record’, says Angus Lord, the band’s co-founder and guitarist. “There was a lot less opportunity to meet and build ideas collaboratively, which is how we’ve worked in the past. Instead, ideas were developed in isolation, then shared digitally, developing slowly over correspondence and only bearing fruit when we were able to be in a room together. I think this had a big effect on the song writing and execution.” adds drummer Rory Heane .

This process even extended to the studio, where The Stroppies found a kindred spirit in John Lee of Phaedra Studios, who mixed the record in isolation, somehow managing to synthesise the band’s pop sensibilities with their penchant for studio experimentation. Furthermore, the addition of new member Zoe Monk to the , known for playing in a diverse array of Melbourne acts (Eggy, Thibault, The Opals) contributed both synthesiser experimentation and a rock solid rhythm guitar style, a huge addition to the band’s developing sound, an infectious combination of the off-kilter 90s US underground, British artpunk ala Wire and a more than generous love of classic Pop song writing.
Reflecting on the making of the record, bassist and co-vocalist Claudia Serfaty understands their shift in approach, noting that, “the world feels strange and in turn making pop music feels even stranger. A healthy dose of levity had to be employed in order to find meaning in the process.”  In spite of this light hearted attitude, The Stroppies have managed to craft a record of weight and substance.

Through “Levity” the Stroppies have, at least temporarily, found their feet amongst the chaos.

On 6th May, we will be releasing the second long player by Melbourne-based four piece, The Stroppies. Recorded at the start of 2022, “Levity” finds the band tackling life in the most locked-down city in the world with their now characteristic brand of whimsical odd-pop brilliance. Watch the band directed video for lead single, “The Perfect Crime”. 

As well as CD and digital versions, “Levity” will be released on a few different vinyl formats – a standard black pressing, a transparent edition, and, much like with previous records “Whoosh” and “Look Alive”, a very limited white vinyl pressing with a bonus secret 7″. The latter will be exclusively available via Bandcamp, the Tough Love online shop and Rough Trade. 

The Stroppies tour the UK with Paul Weller in April, and will also be playing two headline shows in Glasgow and London.

When one of your favourite bands returns after a longer break mixed feelings are natural as you approach the new material. I’ve been through all stages of love with Editors throughout the past 17 years; they partly also lost me, only to triumphantly win me back later. Now, a seventh studio album is approaching and “Heart Attack” is the first teaser from it and also the start of a new chapter. The band now added a sixth(!) member – electronic wizard Benjamin John Power, better known under his alias Blanck Mass – to the line-up. And while one could argue why it had to be another middle-aged man, that also appears to be quite logical since Power was already heavily involved with 2018’s “Violence” album. But it also means that we’re not getting rid of the slightly cinematic over-the-top version of Editors anytime soon. 

“Heart Attack” is a pumping goth pop anthem with industrial influences and while it might appear strange at first it actually grew on me with every listening experience. That final minute is especially nice. A friend of mine said the chorus sounded a bit like A-ha and I can’t unhear it ever since. I’m still on board … for the moment but we’ll have to see what the future will bring for these guys.

We’re also really pleased to announce Ivor Novello winning producer, composer and long time friend, Benjamin John Power, aka Blanck Mass, is joining the band as a full time member and will be playing live with us from the Autumn onwards.

The setting for the magnificent new album by The Delines, “The Sea Drift,” named after one of those run-down motels along Route 82 from Tallahassee to Houston. The album’s first two lines are, “Little Earl is driving down the Gulf Coast / Sitting on a pillow so he can see the road.” Like the opening of a Raymond Carver short story, this gets us asking questions: “Who is Little Earl, and why does he need a pillow to see over the steering wheel?” Why does the passenger seat hold three frozen pizzas, two cigarette lighters and a 12-pack of beer?

The answer comes in the second stanza: “Little Earl’s brother is bleeding in the backseat.” The owner of the convenience store where the siblings grabbed the beer and pizza had a gun. Now they’re driving the car they “borrowed” from their uncle past “the houses on stilts on Holly Beach,” looking for a hospital without a map or a clue. Soon the horns and organs are rising through the third verse like the panic in Earl’s throat.

What’s remarkable about this song and the album that follows is this: The Delines live up in Portland, Oregon, far from Holly Beach, Louisiana. Willy Vlautin, the band’s songwriter and guitarist, grew up in Reno before moving to Portland, and the band’s singer, Amy Boone, grew up near Albany, Santa Fe and Austin. But in Holly Beach, a town demolished again and again by hurricanes, only to rebound, they have found the perfect locale for their songs about the precariousness of life in 21st-century America. And the perfect soundtrack, for the Gulf Coast’s country-soul coats these patient story songs like the humidity on its tank-top-clad characters.

“Willy and I both come from working-class backgrounds,” Boone says. “These characters are people we grew up with, worked with and went to school with. He and I talk a lot about our childhoods, and they’re a lot the same even though they’re geographically distant. Reno, upstate New York and Holly Beach are a lot the same; they have the same pop culture, the same kind of working-class families with the same kind of child raising. There were crazy times in our childhoods, things we maybe shouldn’t have been exposed to, but we found out about the world for ourselves.”

“I lived with my single mom and my brother until my mom’s boyfriend moved in when I was 12,” adds Vlautin. “When I was 15, 16, I started realizing how many grifters and lost men were living in Reno. I was scared of them and attracted to them at the same time. I drank that romantic Kool Aid that that was a cool way to live—and I sort of believed I was headed that way anyway. I was reading a lot of John Steinbeck and listening to Springsteen, Tom Waits and Willie Nelson.”

The Delines grew out of two rocking, Americana bands that had reached the end of the line around 2012. Vlautin and drummer Sean Oldham had been in the Portland band Richmond Fontaine, which had released 14 albums since 1996. Boone and her sister Deborah Kelly were co-leaders of the Austin band The Damnations, which released three albums over the same period.

The break-ups were all amicable, but Vlautin and Boone were approaching 50, and they wanted to make some music that took its time to tell a story and to savour the atmosphere. As role models, they looked to their favourite Gulf Coast songwriters: Louisiana’s Tony Joe White, Mississippi’s Bobbie Gentry and Texas’s Gatemouth Brown. The grooves are relaxed but seductive, the harmonies steamy, and the stories too true to be cheerful. Holding it all together are the arrangements of The Delines’ keyboardist-trumpeter Cory Gray.

“It feels easy on my ears to not be in a loud, crazy band,” admits Boone. “It seems more age-appropriate, right for where we are in our lives. Our music is described as romantic, but there’s this dark underbelly. It’s a little confusing how the topics and the music fit together, but it comes out feeling beautifully tragic. That’s thanks to Cory; he’s a cornucopia of influences. Just calling them sad songs is not giving them enough credit. There’s a lot more going on. These are people in tough spots trying to work it out. That doesn’t mean they don’t get out of it.”

“Amy has that Gulf Coast feel to her singing,” Vlautin points out, “and she was really interested in that vibe for this record. I was, too. She and I could listen to Tony Joe’s ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’ three hours a day. She said, ‘Why don’t you write me a ‘Rainy Night in Georgia?’ It was fun for me to try to write something with that kind of groove and that kind of feel. Some of the songs I bring don’t work for her; they’re too raw. So I try to write some romantic tunes for her, which is great, because my voice could never pull them off. For every romantic tune I write for her, I get a ‘Little Earl.’”

One such romantic song is “Past the Shadows,” whose melody seems to swoon before perking up again at the end of each line. As Boone stretches out her syllables over Vlautin’s clipped guitar and Gray’s sumptuous horns, she describes a room at the Sea Drift Motel, where the drapes are drawn, the lights are off and “all you can see is you and me in the darkness … That’s when I feel safe.”

But for most of the songs, Vlautin has written a female character who’s trapped in a bad relationship and is trying to find a safe off-ramp. In “Drowning in Plain Sight,” it’s a woman who’s willing to let her husband’s beer and her kids’ ice cream get warm, because she needs some time to herself. So she keeps driving past the marinas outside of town, disappearing into the haze of lazy horns.

In “All Along the Ride,” she’s in the passenger seat, next to her man, suffocating in a silence as haunting as the pauses between Gray’s piano chords, as final as the Primadonna Club when it closed for good. She’d like to pretend it doesn’t hurt; she “could lie and say I’d get a thicker skin, but I’ve been trying my whole life to get a thicker skin.”

In “This Ain’t No Getaway,” she’s coming back to the apartment at six in the morning to get the boxes of her belongings, bracing herself against her man’s glare and his loaded .38 on the TV set. Over the push-and-pull ballad groove and the reverb-heavy guitar chords, she sings, “My sister warned me not to come, but I ain’t giving anything else away.”

“She’s terrified of this guy,” Vlautin says of the latter character, “but she’s tired of being terrified. She doesn’t care if the cops come or if he kills her. I’ve never been a woman in that situation, but I’ve been in situations where I’ve been really scared like that. And I’ve learned that sometimes you have to stand your ground if you’re going to retain who you are. It’s a good song for Amy to sing, because this woman is really tough, and she decides, ‘I’m not going to spend my life being scared.’”

Vlautin he works on writing his novels as well as his songs. His published five novels so far, and two of them have been turned into movies, most notably 2017’s “Lean on Pete“, starring Charlie Plummer, Amy Seimetz, Steve Buscemi, Steve Zahn and Chloe Sevigny. Like his songs, Vlautin’s fiction centers on working-class characters caught in difficult circumstances, not entirely of their own making. From his office window, he reports, he can see a bar and a clump of guys on the sidewalk, taking a cigarette break from drinking.

“During the summer,” he remembers, “I’d work with a lot of vagrant guys who had already failed in life, and I felt maybe I was headed in the same direction. Why not jump into it right away? Like getting a tooth pulled, you want to get it over with. But then you’re sitting in a bar next to a guy who’s 50, and you realize you don’t want to end up that way. What saved me was I loved records so much that I wanted really bad to be in a band. I got so much comfort from books and records as a kid that I wanted to be a part of that.”

His older brother John, who wrote folk songs, said, “You’re so sad, you should write songs.” The younger brother started at age 11 and never stopped, even though he wasn’t happy with anything he wrote till he turned 27. He started writing novels at 17, though he didn’t publish one until he was 39. He kept at it, however, and finally realized he had to get out of Reno if was ever going to find an audience. He tried Denver but wound up in Portland before he was 30. He spent a year there loading trucks before he formed Richmond Fontaine.

The band didn’t make much sense geographically. They were based in Oregon, but sounded like such Southwest bands as Rank & File or The Blasters. But they never found much popularity in any corner of North America; instead, they became very popular in England and then northern Europe.

Meanwhile, Boone and her sister Deborah Kelly (two years older, she uses their mom’s maiden name while Boone uses her mom’s married name) had moved from rural New York State to New Mexico and after high school to Austin. With drummer Keith Langford (later of The Gourds) and guitarist Rob Bernard (later Kelly’s husband), they formed the jangly, country-rock band The Damnations. Their debut studio album, 1998’s “Half Mad Moon“, was re-released by a major label, Sire Records.

When The Damnations opened for Richmond Fontaine on a West Coast tour, the two groups bonded. Vlautin asked Kelly to sing a duet with him on the title track from the Fontaines 2003 album “Post to Wire”. In 2011, he asked her to join Richmond Fontaine for a European tour, but she had just become pregnant, so she couldn’t go. So she recommended that her sister take her place. And when Vlautin heard Boone singing a piano ballad at a radio station one day, he realized she had a voice that he could write for.

“As you get older,” he says, “you have to chase dreams like this; you can’t put them off till the right time. So I went home and wrote seven songs for Amy, plus a long letter on why she should waste her time with me. I told her I didn’t want to do a rock band; I didn’t want to lean on the ‘boom-de-chick-de boom.’ I wanted to do a ballad band with story songs. She liked three of the songs right off the bat, so she came up to Portland to rehearse, and we recorded the first Delines album, “Colfax.”

“I still have the letter,” Boone adds. “I was surprised, but I was really excited. I felt incredibly insecure. I had never thought of myself as a singer; I was a singer as a default, because who else was going to sing the songs I was writing? But Willy’s songs were so good, I didn’t want to mess them up. You can mess up your own songs, but you don’t want to mess up someone else’s.”

Jenny Conlee played keyboards on “Colfax”, but when it came time to tour, she had to return to her regular job with Portland’s Decemberists. She was replaced by Gray, whose responsibilities have grown to the point where he composed two instrumentals for the new album, mixing Miles Davis trumpet with Brian Wilson keyboards. Drummer Oldham and bassist Freddy Trujillo fill out the line-up.

Gray’s contributions to the second studio album, 2019’s “The Imperial“, hinted at the Gulf Coast sound of this year’s “The Sea Drift“. The completion of “The Imperial” was delayed when a car hit Boone when she was walking down a sidewalk, leading to multiple years of recovery. The completion of “The Sea Drift” was delayed by the pandemic.

But now it’s here, and it demonstrates the value of breaking up the phrase “singer/songwriter” into its two halves. Just as Robbie Robertson wrote lyrics for Levon Helm, just as Robert Hunter did the same for Jerry Garcia, so has Vlautin penned his best work for Boone. No longer hemmed in by the limitations of his own voice, Vlautin can range wider both in pitch and psychology. With more distance from his protagonists, he can bring a new perspective to his material.

“I was never that great a frontman,” he admits. “By stepping back and letting Amy do it, that took the handcuffs off me as a songwriter, took the blinders off. It’s really fun to write these tunes thinking about her singing them. Both her voice and her personality are the same: really sweet but world-weary, too, and she’s really smart, and all of that comes through in her voice.”

“Because he’s a novelist,” Boone adds, “his songs unfold in short-story form. They don’t always end, sometimes you just get a portion of a story. So I feel like I’m a storyteller as much as a singer. I think it’s interesting to sing about people at the margins of society. I like diving into the characters and bringing them to life, not by any vocal calisthenics, but by the way I deliver the songs.”

The album features the classic line-up of the band with Amy Boone (vocals), Willy Vlautin (guitars, vocals, songwriting), Freddy Trujillo (bass), Sean Oldham (drums, vocals) and Cory Gray (keyboards, trumpet and arrangements) doing some of their finest work yet. Willy Vlautin has just published his sixth novel and there will be more reissues of their previous band, Richmond Fontaine in later 2022.

Please note the sticker says 180gm but all the stock on the limited edition is 140gm. ‘Hold Me Slow’ is only on bonus compact disc and not on the vinyl. From their new album ‘The Sea Drift’, out now.

May 5th Nottingham – Metronome (sold out)

New York filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is no stranger to working with musicians, whether it’s been with his documentaries about The Stooges and Neil Young, or casting the likes of Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, multiple Wu-Tang Clan members and Iggy Pop in his movies. He’s also directed music videos for Talking Heads, Big Audio Dynamite and The Raconteurs. Now, Cat Power (aka singer/songwriter Chan Marshall) has joined that group of heavyweights, sharing the Jarmusch-directed video for her cover of The Pogues’ “A Pair Of Brown Eyes.”

Cat Power’s version of the song, which originally appeared on the band’s 1985 album “Rum Sodomy & The Lash”, comes from her most recent album “Covers”, which came out this past January, and swaps The Pogues’ guitar-and-accordian backing with layers of harmonies, mellotron and minimal percussion. The video matches the stark difference in instrumentation to a T, placing the singer and her mellotron in a cloud of white fog, and mirroring the ethereal quality she brings to the track.

“As someone who deeply loves Cat Power’s music, getting to collaborate with Chan on this video was like a dream come true,” Jarmusch said in a statement. “She’s so inspiring to me, of course as an artist, but she’s also just such an extraordinary person.”

Cat Power is currently on tour, playing dates across the U.S. and Europe, She’s also added new North American dates throughout the summer.