The Fat Angel Sings

London-based band Caroline have release their latest single “Skydiving Onto The Library Roof” on vinyl.

The much anticipated 12-inch edition features the track along with b-side Everything for everyone. It is the band’s second release for Rough Trade Records following their debut, “Dark Blue” in March last year. 

The new signings to Rough Trade Records Caroline shared their debut single ‘Dark blue’ backed with new track ‘BRJ’. Watch the video for “Dark Blue” directed by the artist Joe Namy. Both tracks are available to listen to now and they will also be released as a 12″ Single.

On the video for Dark blue Caroline say: “We see ‘Caroline’ as being ‘systems-based’ music in the way that all the musical parts are mutually interdependent and none are expendable. This video shows a city and explores how, with it’s similarly interconnected roads, tracks, tunnels and rivers, it shares something with this characteristic of our music and of this song in particular. A city’s architectural features, and the ways that they coexist with each other, became analogies for the musical parts that knot together in ‘Dark blue’. 

“We’ve always been interested inpatterns and repetition and that definitely features in a big way, although rather than there being a minimalistic, mechanical precision to therepetition, each one is unique,” the group explain of the track.“The essence of the song -the broken loop -came early in the process and everything else seemed to naturally evolve out of it, as if the other parts were already contained within the broken loop and just needed to be unpacked.”

Caroline, are an eight-person London-based band,

Parquet Courts have announced a new album “Sympathy for Life”, and shared its first single “Walking At A Downtown Pace” via a frantic video for it featuring New York City street life. “Sympathy for Life” finds the band embracing their more danceable electronic side and is due out October 22nd via Rough Trade Records, with a visual album featuring videos for every song premiering two days earlier. They have also announced some unique global events connected to the album. New York City street photographer Daniel Arnold directed the “Walking at a Downtown Pace” video.

Sympathy for Life follows the band’s acclaimed 2018 album “Wide Awake”, also released via Rough Trade. In June the band released a new limited edition 12-inch single, “Plant Life” that isn’t currently available digitally. “Plant Life” is included on the album.

For Sympathy for Life the band worked with producers Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, Hot Chip, David Byrne) and John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding, Dry Cleaning). The album was made mainly from improvised jams and inspired by New York clubs, Primal Scream, and Pink Floyd.

“Wide Awake! was a record you could put on at a party,” co-frontman Austin Brown said in a press release. “Sympathy For Life” is influenced by the party itself. Historically, some amazing rock records have been made from mingling in dance music culture—from Talking Heads to [Primal Scream’s] Screamadelica. Our goal was to bring that into our own music. Each of us, in our personal lives, has been going to more dance parties. Or rather, we were pre-pandemic, which is when this record was made.”

“Most of the songs were created by taking long improvisations and moulding them through our own editing,” Brown adds. “The biggest asset we have as artists is the band. After 10 years together, our greatest instrument is each other. The purest expression of Parquet Courts is when we are improvising.”

Co-frontman A Savage had this to say about the “Walking at a Downtown Pace” video: “We see New York City from the vantage point of someone busily hurrying through it. That’s what life can be like here; a world of constant motion surrounds you while you’re just walking toward where you need to be. There’s a lot of beauty that can be missed, and it wasn’t until the streets were virtually empty that I did miss it. The song was written before all quarantine, but eerily enough the lyrics echo that longing. Now the city is back and, so it seems, are Parquet Courts.”

Feel Free – Sympathy For Life, Visualised will be a livestream of 11 videos, one for each song on the album, each directed by a different visual artist. It will stream on October 20th and is a ticketed event. Tickets cost $15 (or $10 if you buy them in the next three days) and ticket-holders will also get access to exclusive merch. You can buy tickets here.

Finally, Parquet Courts have also announced The Power of Eleven, which will be 11 global events, or “happenings” as a press release calls them, each in a different city (including London, Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Austin) and each tied to a different song on the album and a different piece of exclusive merch. The first happening has already happened, when last week the Lesbian & Gay Big Apple Corp (LGBAC) Marching Band marched through the streets of downtown Manhattan and performed “Walking at a Downtown Pace” while also flying a custom-made Parquet Courts flag (find a recap on the band’s website here). More info on future The Power of Eleven events can also be found on the band’s website.

Australian band Amyl and the Sniffers release their second album, “Comfort To Me” , on Friday 9/10. Made during the pandemic, you can feel the pent-up tension and energy of being stuck in lockdown, not being able to play shows, across its 13 ripping tracks. The album doesn’t let up, but it’s also rather sweet and tender.

Amyl & The Sniffers to tell us about some of the inspirations for the new album, and their list includes everything from Power Trip and Minor Threat to The Stone Roses, Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Junglepussy, and more. The whole band — Amy Taylor, Bryce Wilson, Dec Martens, and Gus Romer — contributed to the list.

Already renowned for a ball-tearing live show, The Sniffers made their international debut as one of the hottest tipped acts at The Great Escape in 2018. Soon afterwards, they signed deals with both Rough Trade Records and ATO Records, made a massively hyped appearance at SXSW, and finally released their self-titled debut album in 2019, landing them an ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Award for Best Rock Album, capping off a wild year for the lunatic, likeable punks.

Late in 2020, Amyl and The Sniffers went into the studio with producer Dan Luscombe to record their sophomore album, Comfort To Me. Written over a long year of lockdown, the album was influenced by and expanded on a heavier pool of references – old-school rock’n’roll (AC/DC, Rose Tattoo, Motörhead and Wendy O Williams), modern hardcore  (Warthog and Power Trip) and the steady homeland heroes (Coloured Balls and Cosmic Psychos). Lyrically,  the album was influenced by Taylor’s rap idols and countless garage bands and in her words ‘I had all this energy inside of me and nowhere to put it, because I couldn’t perform, and it had a hectic effect on my brain. My brain evolved and warped and my way of thinking about the world completely changed.’

Seventeen songs were recorded in the Comfort to Me sessions and the top 13 made the cut. They were mixed long-distance by Nick Launay (Nick Cave, IDLES, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and mastered by Bernie Grundman (Michael Jackson, Prince, Dr Dre). 

“Comfort To Me” demonstrates the same irrepressible smarts, integrity and fearless candour as their debut but as you’d expect of any young band five years on, their sound has evolved, in Amy’s words it’s ‘raw self expression, defiant energy and unapologetic vulnerability.’

New album ‘Comfort To Me’ is out on September 10th,

We are so excited to announce the ten year anniversary deluxe reissue of “Made The Harbor!” We recorded it when we were smelly freaks eating kimchi and Camembert in a too small car driving around and playing campfire shows. To kick off with, here is a vibey cover of Kid Like You by Arthur Russell

In 2009, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, Amelia Randall Meath, and Molly Erin Sarlé came together as a band known as “Mountain Man”, creating powerful folk music that maximized vocal harmony to a disarming effect. A year later they released their debut album Made the Harbor. Now, a decade after that, the debut is getting a deluxe reissue with unreleased recordings, live sessions recorded at Bennington College’s Greenwall Auditorium at the project’s inception, and covers of the Mills Brothers and Arthur Russell. The deluxe packaging will also include a personal collage from the band and an essay by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy.

Today, we get their stunning take on Arthur Russell’s “Kid Like You,” which was recorded live in 2011 at Big Car Gallery in Indianapolis. “We are so excited to announce the ten year reissue of Made the Harbor!” the band said in a press statement. “We recorded it when we were smelly freaks eating kimchi and Camembert in a too small car driving around and playing campfire shows.”

Made the Harbor is out 11/5 via Psychic Hotline, and features a bonus disc of unreleased material, The deluxe reissue, features an essay by Jeff Tweedy.

Last year, North Carolina duo Sylvan Esso released their third album “Free Love”. One of the album’s highlights, “Numb,” spoke to an itch that we’ll probably be scratching at for years to come, a wormy electronic cry to feel. The song details a new dance movement called “shaking out the numb” that Amelia Meath craves for: “Give me hot water / Give me freezing air / Give me the gossip / And a reason to care.”

Sylvan Esso are still shaking out the numb, as we all are, and will continue to do so with their newly announced tour. In celebration of the announcement the duo have released a video for the Teddy Geiger remix of “Numb.” The video, directed by Marc Levy and Marc Salomon, finds the duo and their team getting ready for their return to live performances. There’s sound checks and costume fittings, but the warmest scenes are ones of long-awaited gatherings. There’s a team feast and joyous embraces of friends back on the road.

“One of things that really sticks out from filming with Amelia and Nick is how Sylvan Esso is really this tight-knit family of artists and technicians who come together and share their time and energy to make something so special,” Levy shared. “Everything is personal and considered for them. And while we were filming with them, they completely welcomed us into their family, which was heart warming and is something for which we are grateful.”

Laura Marling and Tunng’s Mike Lindsay collaborate again for a second album of proggy, otherworldly synthpop.

When Laura Marling teamed up with Tunng‘s Mike Lindsay for an album as Lump, it seemed like a one-off and a record that, as good as it was, wasn’t totally sure what it wanted to be. Proving at least some of us wrong on some counts, LUMP have returned for a second album that has a much more definitive sound, point of view, and energy. “There’s a little bit of a theme of hedonism on the album, of desires running wild,” says Lindsay. “We created LUMP as a sort of persona and an idea and a creature. Through LUMP we find our inner animal, and through that animal we travel into a parallel universe.”

Musically, “Animal” is a much more interesting beast, with songs built around Lindsay’s Eventide H949 Harmoniser, which is the same pitch-shifter David Bowie used on Low. It gives everything here an eerie, dark, primal grit. Songs feel low to the ground, slinking through the tall grass in the moonlight. Marling stays in breathy, understated mode, which works perfectly with the dense harmony style at play here, often double tracked with ASMR-y pure whispered vocals. It’s a different style for her, which she says was intentional. “It became a very different thing about escaping a persona that has become a burden to me in some way. It was like putting on a superhero costume.” That goes for her lyrics, too, which are rich with imagery. “Those who find themselves acclaimed go to God to get renamed,” she sings on “Bloom at Night,”  “It took one god seven days to go insane.”

Add to that Lindsay’s arrangements, full of warm cosmic synthesizers, fretless bass, and heavily treated guitars and you’ve got a very specific environment for LUMP to thrive. The songs are great, too. “Animal,” “We Cannot Resist,” “Bloom at Night,” and “Climb Every Wall” are wonderfully askew pop singles, while the more delicate songs — “Red Snakes,” “Hair on the Pillow” — bewitch like quiet moments in Italian horror films. With Animal, this LUMP has really taken shape and lets hope Marling and Lindsay continue to let it run wild.

LUMP have shared a new video for their song ‘Paradise’, animated and directed by the band’s Laura Marling.

The track is taken from the duo’s second album ‘Animal’, which came out last month via Partisan/Chrysalis Records.

Speaking of the new video, Marling said: “The day I wrote ‘Paradise’, I’d been reading lots about Lacan, this French psychoanalyst who is very difficult to grasp, and I had a dream that I saw him on a bus and he offered me a cucumber sandwich and it was deeply, deeply erotic for no obvious reason, and I thought that’s too good! It’s perfect psychoanalytic nonsense.

“Lacan talks all about the discourse of the master and the idea that we all have this impulse to project this idea that somebody has the answer, somebody knows. And of course he had become that in my mind, because he’s so ungraspable that he became an erotic master on a bus…So there we go. And the guitar solo in that one’s amazing.”

Released July 30th, 2021

With a slight Marc Bolan wail and brazen buoyancy to boot, it’s little surprise that the first album of Leeds-via-York four-piece band Perspex have eschewed the angst of their peers for a foundation of palatial, 80’s Glam. Prior to their imminent ‘Whip the North’ tour with The Black Lagoons, Perspex’s singer and guitarist Michael Cable spoke about epiphanies and recording their eclectic debut.

Formed from another band, which we were in when we were really quite young – from the ages of about 17 or 18 – and so we stopped doing that and formed Perspex. We all met in York, from being in college, I’m from Leeds but I moved to York at that time, it’s a pretty standard, boring story. Though I met our bassist Ollie through joinmyband.com which is a pretty archaic way of meeting someone…I’d love to pretend there’s a meaning behind the band name but there isn’t, it makes me laugh; it suits our sense of humour having a plastic name when plastic is evil now! Obviously, I want to see the world burn, I’m against recycling, I litter; we are the first band to fully go against climate change! Not really, before I was in an actual band, I used to make up imaginary bands and write albums and songs, and I think one of them was called ‘Perspex.’

before Covid we were getting a bit of momentum and getting used to doing gigs, and then when lockdown hit it forced us to look around at what we were doing. I had a complete change of heart about what we were doing, maybe the word ‘epiphany’ is too much, but I was floating round the room going “no more Post-Punk!” and started writing different songs. That was probably the best thing that happened that year.

This year, we went into the studio and recorded an album, hopefully we’ll get it out within the year as I don’t want to sit on it. Otherwise, it becomes stale and then you’re not excited about it and you can’t push it in the same way! ‘Soft/Double Recovery’ was recorded the week before lockdown, we’d gone into the studio to record what we thought would be an album, which was great as we had all these songs ready to release as singles in quick succession over lockdown. It was a funny week, we learnt from that what not to do; we went into the studio and got pissed every day and came out with half an album.

i want us to be one of those bands that just puts out albums all the time and function as artists away from the hype, not quite like King Gizzard but maybe like The Jonestown Massacre. I’m determined to avoid the hype thing we have in this country; it ruins bands. It lumps bands who could be quite different and eclectic into one big collection of dross, when actually there’s lots of good stuff around, it’s just the way it’s marketed. I feel that in America they do it better; bands have their own identity and are releasing music as artists rather than as a low-level celebrity.

Post-punk risers Regressive Left have shared their new single ‘Cream Militia’. A sonic collision sounding like ESG at their most unsettling and Talking Heads at their most cavorting, Regressive Left’s unfurls at a dizzying pace. Agitated electronic chatter, “Does blood run thicker than an IV drip?” questions singer Simon Tyrie in a baritone observation of neoliberalism and greed, One chorus of ghostly vocals from drummer Georgia Hardy and a frustrated guitar solo from Will Crosby and the abrupt hit has been taken. With a reception as instantaneous as the song itself, and half an album written and recorded, Regressive Left have come a long way since the trio met playing in teenage bands in Bedford.

The band have set out their stall across a short burst of singles, matching wonky electronics to spider-like threads of guitar music. It’s an intriguing formula, one that is playfully supervise, while recalling everyone from Delia Derbyshire to Young Marble Giants.

Following previous releases ‘Eternal Returns’ and “Take The Hit”, art-funk trio Regressive Left have returned with their brand new single ‘Cream Militia’.

A dazzling new dance-rock newbie, ‘Cream Militia’ was self-produced and self-recorded by the band in an outhouse near Stevenage. Out now, new single ‘Cream Militia’ opens with analogue synths, before settling into this kind of home-spun LCD Soundsystem groove.

Self-produced and self-produced at an outhouse near Stevenage, ‘Dream Militia’ comes as the band prepare for a flurry of live shows.

Filmed and recorded by Dante Traynor and Gamaliel Traynor at Sweat Studio. Mixed by Dante Traynor and Gamaliel Traynor and Regressive Left.

Regressive Left (Georgia, Simon and Will), Luton and Bedfordshire