The Fat Angel Sings

Cassandra Jenkins is a grand storyteller; the high point of her breakthrough album “An Overview On Phenomenal Nature” is a series of impressionistic character sketches that ache with reality. She applies those same talents to “American Spirits,” an outtake from that same album. Against a gentle whirr of atmospheric hum and keyboards, Jenkins adopts a calming demeanor to sing about a situation that’s anything but calm. Inspired by a voicemail left by a friend who was stopped and arrested at the Texas border, she recounts that incident but focuses more on the way the message was delivered. Jenkins puts it better than I can: “What resulted is the poetic ambiguity that can arise from the struggle of searching for the words to tell someone we love exactly what has happened.” “American Spirits” captures that tentativeness, the beauty at delivering a hard message in a tender way, something that Jenkins accomplishes well enough with her own music.

Cassandra Jenkins  new song called “American Spirits.” It’s taken from her upcoming album (An Overview on) An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, a collection of alternative tracks and outtakes from her excellent full-length An Overview on Phenomenal Nature.

“American Spirits” was originally written in 2019. When revisiting the track for this upcoming collection, Jenkins worked with Josh Kaufman and the Walkmen’s Matt Barrick. She also added an old voicemail by her friend to the mix. “I cherished this voicemail for years because, even in that difficult moment, I could hear a tenderness in his voice as he confessed, as well as avoided, reporting that he had spent the night in jail,” she explained in a statement. “What resulted is the poetic ambiguity that can arise from the struggle of searching for the words to tell someone we love exactly what has happened.”

Released February 19th, 2021

The debut 12-track-album from Massachusetts based band Bicycle Inn, explores themes of existentialism, abuse, life purpose, and the death of loved ones in a curation of sound from all members collaborating effortlessly together.

“This Time & Place Is All I’ll Ever Know”, the debut 12-track-album from Massachusetts based emo outfit Bicycle Inn, explores themes of existentialism, abuse, life purpose, and the death of loved ones in a curation of sound from all members collaborating effortlessly together. Recorded in the span of a month with Gary Cioni (Crime in Stereo/Daytrader) at Sound Acres Studios in Southern New Jersey, the members spent 4 weeks refining the sound portrayed on the album with the guidance of Cioni in order to deliver an album that truly reflects the feelings felt within the lyrics and tonalities.

Released March 24th, 2021

What a return for The Antlers made with “Green to Gold”. Their first album in seven years, it’s something of a back-to-basics record for the band. It’s a pivot away from the hefty post-rock grandeur of then-swansong “Familiars” and towards an airier, Americana-influenced sound. It feels like a rebirth for the band from the very first twinkling notes of “Strawflower,” and it’s a perfect soundtrack to the warming of the weather. The Antlers’ original three-album run is one of the most impressive (and most heart-wrenching) entries in the American indie rock canon, and with “Green to Gold“, it looks like the band plans on keeping up that streak.

Vocals, guitar, bass, pedal steel, piano, and organ by Peter Silberman
Drums and percussion by Michael Lerner

released March 26, 2021

Produced and engineered by Peter Silberman

It’s shocking that this is Another Micheal’s first LP. Considering the many beautiful EPs that the band has released over the years, the band has only built on that on “New Music and Big Pop“. Reflecting on the small moments of day-to-day life, Another Micheal has created an album that feels familiar and accessible. Letting the instruments speak for themselves, the stellar arrangements allow for room to breathe between the notes. The band has created something both cohesive and dynamic, a great debut LP for a strong song writing team. It’s beautifully crafted, earnest, and has moved me to tears simply from the angelic harmonies that braid themselves into a few songs.

This is an album that you listen to with the lyrics in front of you, reliving tiny moments that songwriter Michael Doherty has somehow pulled from your own memories and made them clearer and brighter with his words.

It is moving, majestic, and timeless. “New Music” by Another Michael from the 7″ / 2 song digital single ‘New Music’ out now via Run For Cover Records.

It follows that when an album that falls into that genre perks my ears, it must really be something special. The pained, conflicted early work from Pedro the Lion or the high watermark of Carissa’s Wierd’s “Songs About Leaving” achieve something truly memorable in the numbed dourness of their guitars and the flattened affect of the vocals. In the best slow-core songs, a steady, one-noted approach isn’t boring or blah, it’s a betrayal of a deeper relationship with a remarkable emotion. It’s the sound of patiently sitting with a feeling until you’ve memorized the shape of it. It’s the sound that comes after a scream or a howl or a yelp of joy. It’s the sound of learning to live with something. 

It makes a weird kind of sense that the members of The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick are living through it on the other side of Philadelphia, so perfectly does their music match up with the trudge toward the winter. Their debut album “Ways of Hearing” is full of the best kind of slow core songs, the kind that spend as much time as necessary with the thought they’re trying to convey, the kind that build not really toward a climax as much as a sort of indulgent plateau, a steady kind of enlightenment. It’s a very good, engrossing collection of songs—chilly and thoughtful and quietly surprising. 

The time and attention allotted to the details in these songs is what makes them so moving. For a new band, Goalie is particularly good at choosing the right moments to deploy the right sound, a mark of restraint that’s all the more unusual when you take into account the fact that this band has at least six members. “An Olive Coat,” the album’s opening song, wades elegantly from a low shimmer to a subtle crescendo, weaving its continuous refrain with a more emotive vocal held further back in the mix. The song deals with a bittersweet but ambiguous loss, its repeated lines searching for ways to carry forward without being overly precious about the past—“Found the socks you lost/ wool and flecked with gold…I traded them for an olive coat/ would have sold them sooner if I would have known.” Occasionally, an electric guitar will appear to offer a quick punctuation mark—that’s the sound that closes out the song, a distinct sonic shrug. 

As the album goes on, Goalie sinks into warmer territory. “We Love You So Much” starts off mournful but persistently adds layers of strings and percussion, eventually ending up in a place of swelling highs and hypnotic but catchy harmonies. “The Best of All Possible Worlds” pairs its acoustic strumming with a deep, gratifying bass and a few twinkling bells. “Joseph Stalin” sounds sweet and sentimental—had the song been sung with a little more overt intensity, it would fit as a standard acoustic number on any pop punk album. Every element here is thoughtfully placed without sacrificing an intimate aesthetic. This is wonderfully composed music, but it still feels like this record could have been lovingly assembled in a bedroom by a group of close friends. 

The album’s closing track, “Everyone Around Us,” is frosty and simple—there’s not a ton going on beyond a cyclical keyboard riff and a declarative, mostly lonely kind of melody. As the song goes on, the downbeat but oddly toy-sounding keys are joined by a wispy, whirring sound that flows beneath everything else. It’s as busy as the song will get, that addition of a low little key like a current of wind blowing outside a window. “I hope that you’re alright/ I hope that there’s a god that’s on your side,” the song goes, a straightforward depiction of tenderness with an element of cold distance. Albums that sound like “Ways of Hearing” can be easily flattened into nothing but sad music, but there’s a dynamic range of emotions and techniques here that will continue to reveal themselves if you let them. 

“Closer” is the standout track on “Ways of Hearing” for that reason. For the first two minutes, it’s as delicate and gloomy as much of the rest of the record, the only brightness derived from a smattering of bells. After the line “the weatherman said at half past ten, we’ll all blow our brains out/ so read a book, and have a smoke, and live forever,” the vocals trail off for a while before the gentle acoustic plucking shifts into an upbeat strum, a surprising bout of bright energy that will define the song’s final third. The lyrics grapple with a dark, existential finality, but the abrupt shift in tone plays like a sudden revelation.

Goalie’s music is often a little tricky in this way. There’s an ambiguity throughout that makes any analysis of these songs slippery, subject to change. The title Ways of Hearing is apt—because this album uses repetition in so many of its most important moments. A lot of these songs have the effect of speaking the same word over and over until it turns into something completely unrecognizable. Being familiar with a word or a sound or a line doesn’t always mean you understand everything about it. On their debut album, The Goalie’s Anxiety of the Penalty Kick show that they’re patient enough to let new ideas appear from well-trodden paths. 

“Dilettante” (n.): a person with an amateur interest in the arts;
an album of postcard-length power pop songs. See also: Mo Troper IV.

Shortly after their “bigger than Jesus” remarks rocked the United States, The Beatles released Revolver. They never toured again after that, maintaining a credibility and untouchability that gets reissued and remastered every three years. Mo Troper, after releasing his full-length cover of Revolver, announced and abruptly cancelled a tour because something much bigger than Jesus was rocking the planet. You’d hope it was Mo himself. It wasn’t, but Mo’s rocking, anyway.

Dilettante—also known as Mo Troper IV—combines decades of power-pop worship, scholarship, and penmanship into a 28-track collection of sprints. The playlist-as-album pundits might call it a data dump, but Mo brands it as a relaxed way to finish song sketches in unprecedented times. IV is a work that some of his friends call a musical, but this claim remains unverified. If there’s anybody aching to spin up a limiter-drenched production centered around scrolling a cluttered inbox for serotonin, prototype theme songs for public access shows plugged into the scene, and gasp-long dips into math rock, 1990s video game cheese, and medieval revelry, get in touch. (You might have to cut Mo’s rejected jingle for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, even though the stage needs to hear it.)

For those less dramatically inclined, there’s plenty here to pick up the slack. Mo gushes about “The Perfect Song” with syrupy, undeniably guitar pop that’s a remarkable stand-in for the gold he describes. False showtune “Sugar and Cream” goes medium about the wizardry found in a cup of coffee. Clipped moments like the sub-minute love song “Skyscraper Sized Bong” are as ephemeral as they are effective, shoving callouts to Big Star and Teenage Fanclub into pocket- sized arrangements.

“I think that’s the thing about this album – I don’t even really care about touring or making vinyl anymore, I’m generally pretty sick of the PR rigmarole, I just want to release as much stuff as I can before I’m dead,” Troper explains. Call it information overload or a heaping of odds and ends, but Dilettante finds Mo Troper at his most sincere, present, and challenged. It doesn’t take fifty million screaming fans to prove him right. -James Cassar 

Releases April 8th, 2022

Originally released in digital version on October 15th, 2021, vinyl version ready by April 8, 2022.

Everything you hear on ‘Dilettante’ was performed by Mo Troper*

*Maya Stoner sang backup vocals on “All My Friends Are Venmo”

We are generic local punk band The Battery Farm and we present to you our 2nd extended player Dirty Den’s March of Suffering, released on Blindside Records and out everywhere now. The North Manchester’s Battery Farm yet again hit our Top Twenty tracks list. It’s a piledriver of slow start grunge with hints of big hitters like Muse meets hardcore noise with shit loads of dark melody flowing throughout. A big stab at stadium punk if I’ve ever heard it. A support with the mighty Evil Blizzard beckons next February.

“When the Whip Goes Crack” is the 5th single by Manchester Gutter Punks The Battery Farm, released via Blindside Records. It’s a song about the disappointment, disenfranchisement and self-loathing that comes about through having grown up to perceive yourself as a failure. A song about the fear of all your demons, both internal and external coming crashing in on you. That, ferocious fear.

The Battery Farm are: Ben Corry, Dominic Corry, Paul Worrall, Sam Parkinson The new EP “Dirty Den’s March of Suffering” is out on all platforms via Blindside Records 15th October 2021.

Fat Possum Records celebrates the 10th Anniversary of Youth Lagoon’s debut album, “The Year of Hibernation” with a deluxe double vinyl edition which includes three bonus tracks on Side D – “Bobby”, “Ghost to Me,” and a live cover of John Denver’s “Goodbye Again” recorded in 2011. Upon it’s release in 2011, “The Year of Hibernation” was received to widespread critical acclaim, earning Best New Music from Pitchfork, which depicted the album as “compulsively listenable music that explodes at just the right moments”; while NPR described the songs as, “murmurs that bloom into powerful, otherworldly crescendos”. Now, a decade later, “The Year of Hibernation” continues to earn it’s initial praise.

The deluxe vinyl features artwork designed by Collin Fletcher whose practice is based on experimentation and collaboration with musicians and artists across a variety of fields.

‘The Year of Hibernation’ was the first of three albums Powers released under the Youth Lagoon moniker, along with 2013’s ‘Wondrous Bughouse’ and 2015’s ‘Savage Hills Ballroom’. “It is a space I no longer inhabit, nor want to inhabit. Youth Lagoon is complete. I’ve reached the top of a mountain, only to then be able to see a much larger one I want to ascend,” Powers wrote. “There is so much left to say, but it will not be through Youth Lagoon.”

Powers announced the end of Youth Lagoon in 2016, stating that “there is nothing left to say through Youth Lagoon. It will exist no more”. Two years later, the artist released the first album under his own name, ‘Mulberry Violence’. He followed up with his 2020 album, ‘Capricorn’.

Few songwriters hit the level of acclaim earned by Phoebe Bridgers right out of the box. But the California native captured the hearts and minds of critics and music fans alike with her 2017 debut album “Stranger in the Alps“, not to mention her work with side bands boygenius (with Julien Baker and alum Lucy Dacus) and Better Oblivion Community Center with another Conor Oberst. But it was 2020’s “Punisher” that catapulted her into the ring of stardom, thanks to singles “Kyoto,” “Garden Song” and “Savior Complex” and a raft of Grammy nominations.

Phoebe Bridgers did not release an album in 2021. Nonetheless, she was everywhere. Over the course of the last 12 months, everyone, seemed to want a Bridgers verse, harmony, or cover song. And Bridgers totally delivered. Bridgers has barely written a single song amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ‘Smoke Signals’ musician opened up to Olivia Rodrigo in an Instagram Live, where she admitted she has suffered from writer’s block during these unprecedented times. She told the ‘driver’s license’ hitmaker: “This is what I did for the pandemic.

“I probably wrote one half of a song.”

Probably the most impressive aspect to the Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s non-album work this year. Bridgers covered a wide range of artists (new acts, popular mainstays, and legends). She tried out numerous genres (rock, folk, pop, comedy, metal). She sang backup on the Lorde New album “Solar Power” record. She reunited — twice! — with her boygenius bandmates on their respective albums. She covered Metallica, Tom Waits, John Prine, and Bo Burnham.

She toured America, played Austin City Limits (the festival and the TV show), She was up for four Grammys, and made her Saturday Night Live debut (inadvertently igniting a debate around her guitar smashing). She visited James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and Ziwe. She ate Jackson Browne’s heart in a music video. She sang with Philip Glass and Matty Healy. She also wrote an essay for the 10th anniversary of Bon Iver’s sophomore album.

Collectively, we were all hoping for a little more from Lorde’s third album, which features backing vocals from Bridgers on not one, not two, but six tracks. (That’s more than half the album!).

Bridgers has covered the Killers on a number of occasions, including in 2019 with Better Oblivion Community Center bandmate Conor Oberst (“Human”) and in 2018 with boygenius (“Read My Mind”). So it fits that she’d appear on the Killers’ 2021 album “Pressure Machine“, where she joins Brandon Flowers to spin a Western yarn about a “small town girl” who “loves Radiohead” and is “crazy about The Bends” but “puts her dreams on ice” to get married.

Bridgers’ mournful voice adds unexpected depth to an otherwise so-so song with major “Free Fallin’” vibes.

Being asked to reimagine a McCartney song is a huge honour, and Bridgers’ “Seize The Day” cover, appearing on the Beatle’s McCartney III Imagined, doesn’t disappoint. Under Bridgers’ ownership, “Seize The Day” loses its jaunty, trademark McCartney happy-go-lucky stamp, but the resulting folk ballad is memorable nonetheless.

Personally curated by Paul, ‘McCartney III’ Imagined features an A-List assortment of friends, fans and brand new acquaintances, each reimagining their favourite ‘McCartney III’ moments in their own signature styles. The result is a kaleidoscopic reinterpretation of an album Rolling Stone accurately tagged “an inspiration to us all”—one that serves as an extension of the instantly beloved ‘McCartney III’ while standing on its own as brilliant and adventurous milestone in the McCartney discography.

Bridgers’ self-described “sadder” version of the “Punisher” lead single “Kyoto” lives up to its description; on the Spotify Singles track, featuring all-time great Jackson Browne, Bridgers takes a jaunty track and strips it down to just acoustic guitar and keys. Browne’s voice provides only a soft backdrop — you might not even know it’s him were it not expressly advertised.

Technically, Bridgers started peddling her whispery cover of John Prine’s “Summer’s End” last year when the beloved country-folk performer passed. In 2021, though, she formally released it as a Spotify Single, with Azure Ray’s Maria Taylor also on vocals. Together, Taylor and Bridgers offer a loving tribute to the great songwriter Prine with their moving softly harmonized reimagining. The repeated phrase “come on home” becomes a lullaby, demonstrating Bridgers’ agility at making a cover song her own.

Though not a boygenius song, the lush, mid-tempo “Favor” does feature Julien Baker’s boygenius bandmates, with Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, who provide beautifully harmonized backup vocals. It’s a generous example of how Bridgers is equally capable of leading a song or stepping back to provide support. Isn’t that what good friends are for?

Ideally, becoming successful should mean leading by example and lighting the way for the younger generation. After seeing Charlie Hickey cover one of her songs at just 13 years old, Bridgers has acted as something of a mentor to the young, Pasadena-based performer, and even hopped on a couple of his tracks, including last year’s “No Good At Lying.” On the heartfelt “Ten Feet Tall,” Bridgers gives Hickey ample space to shine, providing a boost with backing harmonies on the chorus.

Based on Bridgers’ sleepy reimagining, it’s easy to forget that “That Funny Feeling” originally came from Bo Burnham’s “Inside” comedy special. Still, Bridgers covering Burnham shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Though they specialize in different mediums, both artists tend to utilize music and comedy to express darker feelings around crippling anxiety and depression. Here, Bridgers does Burnham proud, gently recycling his contradictory lyrics about the world being at our fingertips and the ocean being at our door(s).

“What I’ve always loved about Metallica is that they don’t shy away from a great hook,” Bridgers told Apple Music while promoting her contribution to the all-covers Metallica Blacklist. This has to be Bridgers’ most adventurous rework, morphing one of metal’s classic power ballads into something baroque and bone-chilling.

Here’s Phoebe Bridgers amazing cover of “I’m On Fire” by the iconic Bruce Springsteen.

To celebrate being signed to Bridgers’ label, Saddest Factory, electropop outfit MUNA welcomed the singer on what is probably her poppiest feature of 2021. It’s also a proud celebration of queer make-outs, with the truly delightful music video satirizing gay conversion therapy à la But I’m a Cheerleader.

James Corden welcomes Late Late Show music guest MUNA to perform “Silk Chiffon” featuring Phoebe Bridgers.

Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers ascended via very different channels within the music industry: Swift through pop-via-country, Bridgers through indie rock. But their Venn diagrams fundamentally overlap as mega-talented singer-songwriters with penchants for diaristic song writing. On “Nothing New,” released on “Red” (Taylor’s Version), the two performers outline their anxieties around growing older in the industry, asking, “Lord, what will become of me/ Once I’ve lost my novelty?” and “Will you still want me when I’m nothing new?”.

Phoebe recently revealed she got “teary” recording her vocals on Taylor Swift’s ‘Nothing New’.

On Seth Meyers, Swift talked about how much she likes Bridgers, her duet partner on the song “Nothing New”: “Phoebe Bridgers is one of my favourite artists in the world. I just think she’s… If she sings it, I will listen to it. The star is featured on the re-record of the outtake from the Grammy-winner’s landmark 2012 album ‘Red’, and she shared how emotions were high when she laid down her part. Phoebe said of guesting on ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’: “It’s just been a dream. “I just am so excited to have people take it at face value the day that it comes out, because I got teary recording it. I just couldn’t be more excited.”

Phoebe Bridgers performs the song “Moon Song” on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the musical guest on last night’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! She and violinist Rob Moose performed Punisher ’s “Moon Song” while wearing spacesuits. Watch it happen below. Rob Moose—an arranger, string player, and co-founder of yMusic —contributed to several songs on “Punisher“.

“I Know The End” performed for SNL. Phoebe Bridgers concluded her Saturday Night Live performance on February 6th by attempting to smash her guitar onstage — a fitting finale for an apocalyptically intense folk-rock song called “I Know the End.” There was Bridgers doing her very own London Calling, attempting to smash her Danelectro Dano ’56 baritone guitar to bits as fog surrounded her feet and the skeleton pearls on her dress chaotically swayed back and forth. She proved that destroying a guitar is a lot harder than it looks, as she continuously banged the instrument on an amplifier before tossing it to the ground largely intact. It was dramatic, unexpected, and awesome. 

Phoebe Bridgers performs “Savior Complex” on Austin city Limits. premieres December 4th, 2021,

She shares the episode with fellow sad girl Olivia Rodrigo, marking her own debut on the program. Though she ditched her famous skeleton onesie (her backing band kept the uniform, however), Bridgers’ live rendition of the “Punisher “ballad otherwise stayed true to the original, down to the quiet cry of violin and smoky trumpet solo. Her resigned tale of a doomed relationship fills the theatre with her trademark bitter sweetness, especially with its “All the bad dreams that you hide/ Show me yours, I’ll show you mine” refrain.

Thanks to Stereogum