The Fat Angel Sings

“There is no pursuit in this world that is as equally fulfilling, and devitalizing as being a musician. The thrill of being on the road juxtaposing the squalor of living out of a van is one of the most unique dissonances I have experienced in my adult life. “Don’t Start a Band” captures the introspection that comes with dedicating all your time (and all your money) to an artistic pursuit as your 20s slowly slip away from you. The high-spirited bounce of the song contrasting the sense of futility in the lyrics sets this feeling to a rhythm that I think is relatable to many, but hopefully not too much so. Nonetheless, if this sentiment is meaningless to you, you can at least enjoy the song for its catchy back and forth vocals, its hooky bass lines, and it’s abundant and oh-so-gnarly guitar harmonies.”
– Sam Treber / Short Fictions

Don’t start a band, unless you like spending time in a hot van (7 hours to get there, 14 dollars at door) Don’t start a band, you oughta invest in your future (your student loans won’t pay themselves, you should pick up more hours) / and every day I feel like a failure, sit alone at home watching Sailor Moon DVD sets / and everything just fills me with envy, always feel like my world is ending, every moment of every day don’t start a band, unless you like picking fights with your best friends (“I wish you’d start playing sober,” “why don’t you ever shut up?”) / don’t start a band, you didn’t go to college for nothing (this run of records costs more than my car, these kids aren’t buying our t-shirts) / and every night I feel like a failure, drink alone and curse like a sailor, I shouldn’t drink so much / and I think that this tour just might kill, drinking every night doesn’t thrill me, like it did in college credits.

Excited to say that Short Fictions has joined the label! Lauren Records. Today they released their new song “Don’t Start a Band,” and will be embarking on a midwest tour in February (as of now). This song is so good, check it out.

We released a single today called “Break Right In“, a song I wrote after a McDonalds worker mistook my “breakfast roll” order for a “bacon roll” order and supplied me with a roll that was missing that weird flat spicy sausage and that ugly, somehow perfectly circular, gelatine egg. 

Naturally I decided to smash the entire McDonalds to pieces screaming “capitalism wins!!” and trying to find some mayonnaise to rub all over my increasingly naked body, they didn’t have any. 

The track has a lovely video directed by Will Clark who was surprisingly good at maintaining moral as we all stood around in a freezing cold Manor House waiting for our ‘big moment’.

“Where’s my orange juice?!” I screamed.

‘Break Right In’ by Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard

Are you ready to be blown away by one of our very favourite racket makers? loud, cathartic & abrasive – a quintessential Crows record this certainly is!, equal parts ferocious & hedonistic, the London four-piece’s 2nd album (following their 2019 debut on the Idles-run Balley Records label) conjures a dark & visceral post-punk. It‘s been hardened by years of notoriously rowdy live shows (we’ve seen many of you at the shows & some of you will even have had the pleasure of seeing them play up close & personal on our shopfloor). we’re stoked to be presenting their outstanding new offering to you for preorder. We are massive fans of the band’s aesthetic too & as you can see, this awesome dinked edition package is a real celebration of everything they are about, in full monochrome glory!

London four-piece Crows will release their highly anticipated second album, ‘Beware Believers’, via Bad Vibrations Records. Conjuring a dark and visceral post-punk that’s been hardened by years of notoriously rowdy live shows, Crows have amassed a legion of die-hard fans since they formed back in 2015 and cultivated a singular, much-adored presence in the British alternative music scene. Equal parts ferocious and hedonistic, the incoming ‘Beware Believers’ LP arrives off the back of their critically acclaimed 2019 debut ‘Silver Tongues’, international touring and festival appearances, and shared stages with the likes of IDLES, Wolf Alice, Girl Band, Metz, Slaves and Protomartyr.

Following the release of their long-awaited debut album on the IDLES-run Balley Records back in 2019, Crows immediately set to work on its follow-up and by January 2020 they were already back in the studio tracking what would become the ‘Beware Believers’ LP and then Covid hit. “Once we knew Covid was here to stay, we took the first break we’ve taken since we released our first single ‘Pray’ in 2015.

Being locked down for three months unable to finish the last bits of the record was very frustrating but it did mean we could come back to the album with fresh ears and make sure it sounded like it should: a true representation of Crows.” Loud, cathartic and abrasive a quintessential Crows record it certainly is.

“Beware Believers” has felt like a marathon, a real endurance test that’s been a long, winding road filled with highs and lows and plenty of twists and turns”, frontman James Cox says: “The majority of the themes on the album came from what was going on in the world around Summer 2019 when we started writing the album. Covid wasn’t in our lives and the biggest impact was Brexit and the madness our government were putting us through. I was reading a lot of J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut, mad dystopian novels, whilst all this craziness was going on around us and it was a weird headspace to get into.”

Bad Vibrations records

‘Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001 – 2021)’ is a career-spanning retrospective of folk-rock band Fruit Bats. Fruit Bats is the project of Eric D. Johnson, who in his career, has also found time to collaborate in bands such as The Shins, Bonny Light Horseman and Vetiver. The LP is split into two halves, the first being a ‘best of’ the second being made up of deep cuts featuring four-track recordings and covers.

“Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001–2021)” is out January 28th, 2022 on Merge Records

St. Paul & The Broken Bones shared another preview of their upcoming album, “The Alien Coast”, on Tuesday with the single “Minotaur”. “The Alien Coast” is out on January 28th via ATO Records.

The dreamy single finds its footing in a guitar loop that guitarist Browan Lollar dreamed up on a tour bus in Europe. Frontman and onetime aspiring preacher Paul Janeway delivers a falsetto sermon of lyrics inspired by Pablo Picasso‘s use of a minotaur as an alter ego in a series of paintings. The song’s poetic verses confront issues of identity and trauma, as Janeway belts, “Innocence is lost by violent decay/Stuck inside the maze all the mundane.”

“‘Minotaur’ is about fearing something within you, and the loneliness that comes from that,” Janeway said in a statement. “Especially if you grew up in an abusive situation, there can be this feeling of having something in you that you don’t want to encounter or even recognize.”

‘Alien Coast’ is the fourth LP by US band St. Paul & The Broken Bones. The eight-piece soul band have taken influences from dystopian sci-fi, art, Greek mythology and the books about their country’s colonial past. Includes the funky disco single ‘The Last Dance’ – a song about dancing whilst facing the apocalypse.

The new St. Paul & The Broken Bones single “Minotaur” is from St. Paul & The Broken Bones’ new album ‘The Alien Coast’ which will be released on January 28th, 2022.

USA Nails are consistently the victims of inaccurate historicization, in so far as we’ve listened to them a fair bit, and quite amiably, but always forget who the fuck they are when it comes to press time. Putting on one of their records, though, everything becomes clear: this isn’t brick wall grinders Nails, but the dirty, shouty noise rock band that sound somewhere between Blacklisters, Metz and a less cheeky Mclusky. Phew.

‘No Pleasure’ features members of Oceansize, Hawk Eyes, Future of the Left future past, so its fury is true: guitars screech at one another before falling gracelessly to the ground, while the catchy riffs are also the ones that sound like sirens fighting each other — word up to that second track, which can make noise both for dynamism, and also for noise’s sake. Feedback rocks; rock the feedback.

‘No Pleasure’ is business as usual with a few tricks thrown in, like the unwinding guitar motif that splits open the record’s fifth track — it’s noise rock’s discordant equivalent of twang, and the track plugs in a psych rock seatbelt before a feral spoken word tirade kicks in. This sound has been done a lot, and I’ve heard more than my fair share of dudes losing their shit over dirge rock, but for USA Nails, it’s the same as it ever was — good. I promise never again to incorrectly recollect them.

Christ alive, the lineage of this band’s membership… You should know whether or not USA Nails are for you when I tell you which groups have alumni represented here: Kong, Future Of The Left, Oceansize, Hawk Eyes… “No Pleasure” is thus, obviously, a furiously tight and gnarly noise-rock slab. CD or fancy coloured vinyl on Smalltown America.

2022 is going to be a huge year for us with the release of our album ‘Shoals’ and our tours across the UK, Europe and North America – we can’t wait to get started!. We have just released a brand new single ‘Shame On You’, which is out everywhere now. There is also a brand new live video to go along with it, 

‘Shame On You’ is about being confronted with your own faults and flaws and deflecting them onto others. It’s about learning to embrace and understand these imperfections in our character rather than trying to escape them.

Not (in case anyone is still confused) anything to do with Will Oldham, London’s Palace are now on their third album of textural and emotional songwriting. ‘Shoals’ is inspired by the vastness of the thing we call the sea and it uses that great big blue (not actually blue) thing as a metaphor for all life’s anxieties and crises. A very early 2020s sort of thing then. 

it’s only one month today until our new album ‘Shoals’ will be out in the world for you all to hear. We first started work on it in the Summer of lockdown 2020, and it’s been a real journey…we can’t wait for you guys to hear it and get stuck into. It probably goes without saying but we are very very proud of this one. If you haven’t pre-ordered the album already,

Andy Bell follows his 2020 solo debut ‘The View From Halfway Down’ with an eighteen-track double album.

‘Flicker’ hears the Ride man cover folk balladry, heady neo-psych, Byrds-referencing West Coast jangle, and baroque pop on one of his most adventurous releases of his whole career. ‘Flicker’ is the second solo album by Ride guitarist Andy Bell. The album is a follow-up, not just chronologically, to his debut ‘The View From Halfway Down’ with the seeds of some songs being sewn at the same initial sessions. Bell deals with mental health, tooling up to cope with life after events such as Brexit, a global pandemic and a post-truth world. Musically you will find baroque pop, 12-string jangle, acoustic folk and modern psychedelia.

You won’t have long to wait either, as the physical formats arrive exactly a month today on February 11th. On CD and 2LP clear vinyl on Sonic Cathedral Records.

Singer-songwriter Aldous Harding has just announced her fourth album. Harding’s preceding folk LP ‘Designer’ was a huge hit around here, becoming one of our most popular releases by the end of 2019. ‘Warm Chris’ sees familiar faces return to the fold alongside new collaborators, as John Parish handles production duties once more, and Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson guests.

On “Tick Tock,” an early track on her new album “Warm Chris”, Aldous Harding addresses the absurdity of interpretation. “Wanted to see me, now that you see me, whatcha gonna do?” she taunts in the refrain, defying her witnesses to comprehend her. Her voice-play finds her evoking both Cat Power and Annie Lennox, sliding from the husky lament “Oh, the dirty of it” to a reedy cry of “Party people!” The new album continues Harding’s creative partnership with producer John Parish and evolves her sonic treatment of this Dadaist bent. The sparse instrumental backings of “Party” and “Designer” are elevated with a palette that draws from freak folk and baroque piano pop—it’s easy to sift out the influences of Sufjan Stevens and Kate Bush. “Warm Chris” thrives in that new flexibility, using Harding’s expanded sound to consider the implications of professional and interpersonal performance in turns across its 10 tracks.

Released on 4AD, ‘Warm Chris’ is the fourth studio album from New Zealand-based indie-folk star Aldous Harding. Just like with 2017’s ‘Party’ and 2019’s ‘Designer’, Harding continues her fruitful partnership with producer John Parish, and brings in outside collaborators in the form of jazz drummer Seb Rochford, Welsh singer-songwriter H. Hawkline and Sleaford Mods’ frontman Jason Williamson.

‘Lawn’ is the first single from Aldous Harding’s forthcoming album, ‘Warm Chris’, out 25th March 2022 on 4AD. Records.

Pavement has announced the deluxe reissue of 1999’s Terror Twilight, dubbed Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal, out on April 8th via Matador Records. Alongside this news, the band shared a previously unreleased single, “Be The Hook”.

Terror Twilight, Pavement’s fifth and final album, also becomes the fifth album to see a deluxe release from Matador Records. In addition to a remastered version of the original album, this expansive set will include 28 unreleased tracks including B-sides, home demos, rehearsal tapes, era-appropriate live recordings, and cuts from the band’s scrapped session at Sonic Youth‘s Echo Canyon Studio.

Matador will offer “Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal“ on multiple formats, including a 4xLP set and a 2xCD set, both arriving with a collection of never-before-seen photos and commentary from members Mark Ibold, Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, Spiral Stairs, and Steve West, as well as the album’s producer, Nigel Godrich. While the CD version will keep the final track order intact, the 4xLP set will feature Godrich’s suggested sequence.

Check out the previously unreleased single, “Be The Hook”,

Originally released in 1999, ‘Terror Twilight’ marked a departure from Pavement’s established operating methods. Which is to say that it was recorded with a big-time producer in an expensive studio,” wrote Matador Records in a post to Facebook. “However, for all the talk of ‘polish’ and ‘precision’ it’s still very much a Pavement record. And a great one. Like every Pavement album that preceded it, ‘Terror Twilight’ thrills and confounds. Often at the same time. Twenty-two years on, the songs remain moody, strange, and eminently deserving of re-celebration.”

 The 45-track collection will include a remastered version of the album, B-sides, home demos, rehearsal tapes, live recordings, and some rough tracks from a session at Sonic Youth’s Echo Canyon studios. The physical editions will also come with a book containing photos and commentary from the band. The LP version will restore the track list sequence suggested by the album’s producer Nigel Godrich,
while the CD will retain the band’s final track order.

Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal is available to pre-order now. Pavement recently announced its 2022 reunion tour, which marks the band’s first run of shows since 2010. After its first performance at Primavera Sound in Barcelona, ES on June 2nd and Porto, PT on June 10th, the group will return stateside for the U.S. leg of the tour in September before heading to Europe in October. 

This was their final album, released in 1999.
The deluxe edition is titled ‘Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal’.