The Fat Angel Sings

Charlotte Cornfield has announced a new LP titled “Highs in the Minuses“. The follow-up to the Canadian singer-songwriter’s 2019 album “The Shape of Your Name” comes out October 29th via Polyvinyl and Double Double Whammy. The first cut from the album is out today alongside an accompanying video. Check out ‘Headlines’ below.

“I wanted to express the joy of seeing people, of those little interactions that happen throughout the day that I missed so much in the last year and a half,” Cornfield said of ‘Healdines’ in a statement. “When I wrote this song I was spending so much time walking alone through my neighbourhood, and I wanted the video to take place on the same streetscape but be the antidote to that solitude. To me the city is so much about the people in it. Adrienne McLaren Devenyi, the director, came up with this arc of me exchanging objects with people as I move through the neighbourhood and that just created a beautiful jumping off point for these interactions. We had so much fun making this video, and it was such a gift to see everybody.”

Cornfield recorded Highs in the Minuses at Howard Bilerman’s studio in Montreal with bassist Alexandra Levy (Ada Lea) and drummer Liam O’Neill (Suuns). “I feel really grateful that he was on the same page, in terms of focusing on the emotion,” she said of working with Bilerman. “He didn’t worry about all the little details that people can sweat about in the studio.”

“Headlines” is taken from Charlotte Cornfield’s album, Highs in the Minuses, out October 29, 2021.

“John is on a walk somewhere in Chicago,” Timothy Showalter, who records as Strand Of Oaks, sing on his upcoming album In Heaven. “Losing our leaders/Who you gonna follow?”

The “John” he’s singing about is singer songwriter John Prine, the late country-folk songwriter who died last year from complications due to Covid-19. Showalter grew up in Indiana, just a couple hours away from the big city of Chicago, where Prine was from. His latest song, “Somewhere in Chicago,” pays tribute to his late hero — not just by name-checking him, but by emulating the calming, sing-song nursery rhyme cadence of Prine’s best tunes.

“It’s a song for John Prine, growing up Midwestern, the goodness I learned from my parents, me learning that gentle music can be powerful,” Showalter has said “For someone from Northern Indiana, John Prine was my Willie Nelson. The patron saint of Midwestern ethos. I think about him every time I pick up a guitar.”

Showalter abandons the bombastic grandeur of his best rock anthems for the ballad, singing in a quiet, low register as a chorus of backup vocalists return each of his lyrics by singing, “The master calls back into the room” in a low hum. By the time he gets to the pre-chorus (“There’s a blue oasis”), Showalter has been reduced to a literal whisper, his voice trailing off during the word “oasis.”

In the refrain, Showalter plays off of several Prine songs — “When I Get to Heaven,” “Taking a Walk” — by imagining that the singer-songwriter is spending his time in the afterlife, embarking on leisurely strolls down the streets of the city he grew up in. It’s a moving image, transforming a song rooted in grief into an occasion for healing and hope.

Wild Pink released one of the best albums of the year so far in “A Billion Little Lights”. And now, the New York indie rock band has already returned with the new EP “3 Songs“. We’ve heard the record’s lead single and opening track “Ohio” a collaboration with Samia. And today, we get to hear the EP’s other two yearning, expansive tracks, “Leferever” and “A Scene From The Eau Gallie Causeway.”

John Ross played guitar, bass, keys and sang
Dan Keegan played drums
Samia sang on “Ohio”
Stephen Chen played saxophone on “Ohio”
Ellis Ludwig-Leone wrote string arrangements for “Leferever”
Andie Tanning & Gokce Erem played violins on “Leferever”
Mike Slo-Mo Brenner played pedal steel on “Leferever”

Produced, mixed and mastered by John Ross
Drums recorded with Allen Tate at Red Convertible

Released June 25th, 2021

A band from Oslo, Norway. Nostalgia is at once the most destructive, most overused and most poetic emotion I know. This EP is my attempt at tapping into nostalgia in its utmost purity, musically and lyrically. That specific year, that specific place, that specific guitar tuning, those specific bands.

So, it’s about a certain year in my life. It was 1998, I was sixteen and had just moved to Texas on my own. It’s about the people I met, the people I had left behind, and the music I encountered there: The Get Up Kids, Braid, Deep Elm Records bands, and most of all the tape of Ultramagg’s self titled debut. An album I haven’t heard since, but that was always played in my friend’s Taurus as we drove around for hours on end, to Magnolia to see a house show, or downtown to buy t-shirts & records. Or as we sat on our skateboards in all those humid nights spent in an IHOP parking lot. At least that’s how I remember it.

And that, of course, is the problem with the nostalgic scope. The lens is inaccurate, always a little blurred around the edges, always filtered through the experiences of the 20 years that came after it. If I remember anything, it’s not to trust my memory.

Recorded over a weekend in the summer of 2017 (June 22nd-25th, to be specific), unrehearsed and mostly live, and mixed the week after, maybe as a one-off, who knows. I guess I had to wait until the recording itself was a bit tinged with nostalgia, before releasing it. – Sjur Lyseid

Sjur Lyseid: vocals, guitar, bass guitar
Anders Blom: guitar
Eirik Kirkemyr: drums, bass guitar
Anders Magnor Killerud: backing vocals

Released June 25th, 2021

Levitation Sessions from POST ANIMAL!, The Chicago based quintet takes us into an alternate-universe created at Sleeping Village – a garden of distorted mirrors and a 70 minute psych-pop journey of swirling riffs and melody. 

For their “Levitation Sessions” show and live album, the band recorded a discography-spanning set, documenting a well-tuned machine ready to bring their tunes back on the road again this year – including a stop at Levitation 2021 in October.

The Chicago quintet takes us into an alternate-universe created at Sleeping Village – a garden of distorted mirrors and a 70 minute psych-pop journey of swirling riffs and melody. In addition to the live performance film stream, the performance is being pressed on limited edition vinyl + digital release on Sept 10. Artwork by Andrew McGranahan, available on screen printed posters signed by the band, limited edition cassettes, t-shirts, and tie dye tees! Get your hands on the good stuff at the link above. Filmed at Sleeping Village in Chicago, IL.

The Chicago based Post Animal takes us into an alternate-universe created at Sleeping Village. The gardens of distorted mirrors lend itself to the 70 minute psych-pop journey you’re about to embark on!

The grass was truly greener on the inside. Brought to you by the source of creativity excelsior (ever upward)!” – Post Animal

released September 10, 2021

Chicago singer-songwriter Jessica Viscius moves through grief in a profoundly moving and generous way on her spare debut as Bnny. 

The debut LP from the Chicago indie-rock band Bnny has the sound of an empty bedroom. “Everything” features a solitary lead electric guitar that gasps, reverberates thickly, and then deadens, as if resonating between walls recently stripped of room-softening decor. Jessica Viscius, the songwriter behind the project (and former Pitchfork graphic designer), barely allows her voice to vibrate above a whisper, like she’s committing song ideas to a recorder alone at night in a window-side chair. In the moments when her full band does show up to keep time or add some texture, they seem to materialize like a figment of her imagination that she can summon when she shuts her eyes. Multiple songs sound a lot like the Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”.

On those minimal characteristics alone, Everything is a beautiful record from wall to wall, comfort food for heartbroken insomniacs. But it also arrives with a tragic background that casts an entirely different kind of shadow over the evocation of an empty bedroom. In September of 2017, Viscius’ former partner, Trey Gruber, died after an accidental overdose of heroin that was laced with fentanyl. Gruber was also a gifted musician who had formally released just one song and played only a few shows under the band name Parent, but they were enough to ignite a rolling word-of-mouth buzz through the city about the soulful, wounded-sounding singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. After his passing, Viscius spent the next couple of years preserving Gruber’s recorded output alongside his mother, compiling and releasing the 25-song double LP “The Herculean House Of Cards” for Numero Group. With that chapter now closed, Viscius finally takes her turn to sing. Everything is a long-awaited debut that resembles a journal spanning five years, its first half consisting of songs written during her relationship with Gruber and its second half of ones after it. It is worth every year that went into it.

When Viscius first began writing songs, a waterlogged sound was emerging from Chicago indie-rock. A proudly lo-fi recording quality gave a satisfying wobble to both the wilting grace of Angel Olsen’s “Half Way Home” and the tinnitus-inducing crash of Ne-Hi’s debut. Some songs here bear the distinct markings of that mid-decade time and place: “Sure” takes notes from Olsen’s “Lights Out” but flips the idea from an encouraging nudge forward to resigned acceptance of a slow freefall. “Time Walk” is a masterclass in economy, barely running over 90 seconds but somehow rocking extremely hard through muted breath, nicely punctuated by a jagged, seven-second solo from Tim Makowski, who plays some fantastically cracked and frail lead guitar lines throughout the album. Seconds later, on “So Wrong,” his solo falls somewhere between Yo La Tengo’s “Today’s The Day” and a slowed-down sample of a cat groaning to its sleeping owner for breakfast. In sequence, they make for a binge-worthy three-song run.

Haley Dahl is a fascinating artist. She used to perform live with blue glittery slime dripping from her mouth, and spends time in caves recording music—in fact, she recorded her forthcoming album “Madison” with 21 bandmates in West Virginia’s Los World Caverns. Today, she’s released that record’s lead single “Party Anthem” with the news that her pal and former bandmate Phoebe Bridgers has added Dahl’s project called Sloppy Jane to the roster at Saddest Factory Records.

“Party Anthem” is some whimsically morbid art-rock. Continuously surreal (“Imprisoned in a wedding pigeon body with a tin can face”) and poetic (“Were you better as a phantom, symphony, or a party anthem?”) Dahl’s music is like nothing you’ve ever witnessed. There’s lush symphonic swirls and childlike background harmonies. And it all takes place in a magnificent cave where couples hold each other tight as Dahl bounces around them.

“When I started talking about recording in caves, she was one of the few people to really get it immediately and thought it was the coolest thing,” Dahl says of Bridgers in regard to her Saddest Factory signing. “To work with someone who has so much personal context and enthusiasm was kind of a no-brainer. The label name ‘Saddest Factory Records’ came from a joke I made on Twitter, and I kind of think that’s representative of what my ideal professional trajectory looks like—me and my same friends who understand each other making the same jokes over and over again while our platforms expand.”

Bridgers added, “I have never seen an audience more captivated than at a Sloppy Jane show. Whether it was a house show in Reseda where the opener was a trash fire, or a 2,000 seat theatre in New York. They have been among my favourite band’s since I was 16. I am never surprised, and always impressed. I’m glad to live in a world where Haley Dahl wanting to go to a cave to make a record just makes sense. This is already a classic album.”

“Party Anthem” the new song by Sloppy Jane from the forthcoming album ‘Madison’, out November 5th on Saddest Factory Records.