Eyedress’ fourth album “Mulholland Drive” is the latest evolution of the Filipino musician’s unique sound. Following his 2020 breakthrough Let’s Skip To The Wedding, which introduced global hits Jealous and Romantic Lover, the new record features collaborations with some of his favourite artists (King Krule, DāM-FunK, Triathalon, Vex Ruffin and more), while staying true to his vision.
“This album is about loving yourself and your life” Eyedress
Los Angeles based Filipino producer/singer Idris Vicuña has been making making glammy, twee DIY pop as Eyedress since the early ’10s. While some artists associated with that sound and city may have fallen out of favour, Eyedress is still going strong and had success recently when his 2020 single “Jealous” has become a viral hit.
Working to maintain the momentum, he’s back with new album “Mulholland Drive“, out via Warp Records imprint Lex Records, that features a cavalcade of notable guest stars not to mention a whole bunch of catchy, melted pop songs. Among those guests are King Krule, who brings his moody, murky production style to “Chad and Gordy”; Dent May who sings a verse on the album’s most immediate earworm, “Something About You”; Dâm-Funk who slathers his namesake sound on slow jam “Keep It Real With You”; and DIY punk Vex Ruffin who brings a claustrophobic energy to “Fulfil the Dream.”
The guest-free songs are good, too, including the gothy, angry “Brain Dread” and “Spit on Your Grave,” the crystalline “Long Nights At The 711” and the yearning “Want You There Tomorrow.” Nostalgia is baked into Eyedress’ sound, pulling from the 2000s that were inspired by the ’80s that were inspired by the ’60s, while making room for the ’70s, ’90s and now, all recorded over the same cassette, with tracks bleeding through as the loop closes in.
Originally released in 1997, the Britpop band’s second album feels like a crash course in the history of UK rock, zipping through glam, psychedelia, punk, and pop in fresh, surprising ways. This newly expanded edition of their classic second album features remastered audio, plus bonus material.
The lp has been remastered from analogue tape on 180g black and 140g turquoise vinyl (retail exclusive). lp also includes 12” single ‘Sun Hits The Sky (bentley rhythm ace remix)’ / ‘The Animal’ on 140g white vinyl. not available on record since original release. the 3cd format includes 43 tracks over two cds of b-sides, rarities, outtakes & live tracks, imagery from Kevin Westenberg and sleevenotes from Charles Shaar Murray. compiled by Supergrass.
Indulgence can be its own reward. Take In It for the Money, the wild, careening sophomore set from Supergrass. Flush with success and fresh out of adolescence, the Britpop trio embraced all the new adventures heading their way, a journey that steadily pulled them away from the frenzied pleasures of their 1995 debut “I Should Coco“. Where their peers sang of common people and wonderwalls, Supergrass concerned themselves with teenage thrills: buzzing on speed, getting busted by cops, telling dirty jokes, and hanging out with friends. At the centre of the album was the smash hit “Alright” an incandescent pop song about being young, dumb, and free. Other bands might have chased the charts by attempting to re-create the spirit of “Alright.” Supergrass instead chose to see how fast and far they could run.
In It for the Money isn’t so much a departure from I Should Coco as a progression. Often, it feels as if Supergrass are attempting to offer a crash course in the history of British rock, cramming in elements borrowed from the swinging 1960s and 1970s classic rock, then filtering these well-known sounds through the irreverence of punk. They still sound vigorous—witness the rampaging single “Richard III”—but they lack the exuberance that fuelled their first album. The shift was necessary for their long-term survival. “Alright” threatened to pigeonhole Supergrass as loveable teenage imps, a role they played to the hilt in the song’s supremely silly video. (They played their part so well that Steven Spielberg believed Supergrass would be ideal candidates for a gen-X spin on The Monkees..)
Supergrass turned down Spielberg, choosing instead to do the things normal rock’n’roll bands do: play an enormous amount of shows before hunkering down in the studio to make another record. It helped that Supergrass had arrived just as the Britpop wave crested, its rising tide not only lifting the shaggy group into the Top Ten but putting them squarely within a happening scene. They shared space on charts and festival bills with the amiably straightforward likes of Cast, Sleeper, the Bluetones, and Ash, yet they were qualitatively different, possessing punk-pop smarts to rival Elastica, a brawnier musicality than Oasis, and a self-evident sense of humour.
All of this comes to a head on In It for the Money, an album where the riffs and jokes are wrapped in woolly psychedelia, blaring horns, and splashes of sweet melancholy. Where I Should Coco blew by at a breakneck pace, In It for the Money unfolds with a deliberate sense of drama, slowly coming into focus with the menacing swirl of the title track and proceeding to ebb and flow across its 12 songs. The record feels so unified that it’s remarkable to realize they entered the studio in 1996 with only two completed songs in tow, forcing them to write the bulk of the album during the recording sessions. Along for the ride was Rob Coombes, a keyboardist who was the brother of Supergrass frontman Gaz. He’d been on the band’s periphery for a while, hammering out the piano to “Alright” and playing woozy organ on “Going Out,” the stopgap 1996 single Supergrass released between their first and second albums, but he’s an integral part of In It for the Money, earning writing credits on all 12 songs and adding distinctive colour throughout. (Rob Coombes would officially become a member of Supergrass in 2002.)
Listen closely—or spend some time with the clutch of monitor mixes and rough versions that fill the second disc of the new 3xCD deluxe reissue of the 1997 album—and it’s apparent that Supergrass did indeed write In It for the Money in the studio. Many of the songs are rooted in vamps that blossom into full songs: The slinky funk that propels the verses of “Cheapskate,” the circular stomp on “G-Song,” the lazy, shambling gait of “Hollow Little Reign” all bear telltale signs of compositions that began as group jams. None of these songs sound tossed off, though, littered as they are with overdubs, backwards guitars, and sound effects. Supergrass couldn’t resist any bit of studio trickery when they were making In It for the Money, yet they retained their sense of concise craft. The record feels vibrant, not overstuffed.
The triple-disc reissue of In It for the Money can dampen some of the album’s energy. Some fine B-sides, such as the tuneful neo-music-hall ramble “Melanie Davis,” are buried among the alternate mixes and working versions on the second disc, a collection of ephemera that plays better as individual tracks than as an album. The disc of live recordings is another story. Anchored by a full show from January 1998, a concert given nearly a year after the release of In It for the Money, the live disc shows Supergrass at full roar, turning these studio creations into breakneck rockers.
The title of In It for the Money is a nod toward Frank Zappa’s anti-hippie classic We’re Only In It for the Money.Supergrass may not sound anything like the Mothers of Invention, but their choice reflects the extent to which they were steeped in rock history. Supergrass never attempted to be innovators. They were magpies who busied themselves with figuring out how to assemble pieces of glam, psychedelia, punk, and pop in fresh, surprising ways. They would continue to hone their craft, making sleeker albums than In It for the Money, yet the group’s enthusiasm and imagination are at a peak here. They sound delighted to discover their full potential, and that giddiness remains infectious decades later.
The Hawks were a shortlived UK band led by Stephen Duffy and Dave Kusworth and formed in 1979. Duffy had just quit Duran Duran (he was their original lead singer) and was approached about starting a new group by Kusworth (still a few years from forming Jacobites with Nikki Sudden), whose band TV Eye had just broken up. With TV Eye members David Twist and Paul Adams, as well as ex Duran Duran bassist Simon Colley rounding out the line-up, the band were formed and originally went by Obviously 5 Believers (named for a Dylan song), before changing their name to The Subterranean Hawks which was then shortened to just The Hawks.
The Hawks rehearsed constantly, creating a tough yet sensitive sound that was somewhere between Sniff ‘N’ The Tears and Felt. They played live when not rehearsing, gaining a small but rabid following, and released their debut single, “Words of Hope,” in 1980. They broke up not long after, unfortunately, leaving the rest of their material in the practice space. Those practices were recorded, however, and the dozens of tapes sat in a box in Duffy’s house unopened as he went on to lead groups TinTin and The Lilac Time and later a solo career. In 2019, Duffy and Kunsworth met for lunch, caught up, and Duffy promised to dig out The Hawks tapes and release them. Kusworth passed away in 2020 but Duffy has made good on his promise, and here we have the band’s debut album, 40 years after breaking up.
Duffy has said that The Hawks didn’t make demos — “we played live and I sang over the top, just to see what we sounded like” — and refers to these tapes as “field recordings,” but the 10 songs on Obviously 5 Believers show a band that seemed to have it all figured out. A bunch of them seem ready to go: “Bullfighter” is muscular power pop worthy of The Only Ones or The Soft Boys, “All the Sad Young Boys” predates The Smiths’ mopey glamour, and “BigStore” is swaggering and effete a la The Monochrome Set. Other songs are rougher around the edges, and many clearly sound like cassettes that have been stuffed in a drawer for 40 years but that doesn’t make the music any less compelling. The Hawks sound vital and alive on these recordings and it will leave you wanting more and wondering what might have been.
“All Day Gentle Hold !” is the fifth album from Aaron Maine and a celebratory collection of songs. Harder, faster, shorter and louder than any other Porches record, it’s direct and pointed, charged up and chaotic, described by Maine as “the most energetic, off-the-cuff moments, collaged together into the most captivating songs [he] could make.”
“All Day Gentle Hold !” is a celebratory collection of songs. Harder, faster, shorter and louder than any other Porches record, it’s direct and pointed, charged up and chaotic, described by Maine as “the most energetic, off-the-cuff moments, collaged together into the most captivating songs [he] could make.” After years of experimentation, All Day Gentle Hold !is Maine’s music at its most fundamental, made with blind momentum and without the structure of everyday life: regardless of what would happen to his career, the industry, or the world at large.
Fully embracing his rock roots and the guitar as his main instrument, Maine pared down the maximalism of Ricky Music to a focused sonic palette of two guitars, keyboard, live drums, and a drum machine. The 11 songs, written to work together from the onset, take cues from the cadence of The Ramones, the power of Nirvana, and the influence of teenage years spent listening to pop punk and grunge. Each track is totemic in its angst.
Equally personal and universal, tapping into moments intimate, absurd, banal and strangely everyday, All Day Gentle Hold !takes the listener on a dreamy, primal journey through the mind of a man coping with an incomprehensible time, revelling in the joy and confusion of living through it all. It was recorded by Maine in his New York home studio, and mixed and mastered by James Krausse.
All Day Gentle Hold ! is available for pre-order as a single brown vinyl LP, housed in an embossed jacket with a printed inner sleeve.
Praise for previous single “Okay”: “a loud, highly saturated rush — a quintessential summer rock song by a musician who…is a master of the form.” – PAPER “It’s a breezy blast of dry drums and acoustic guitars with a chorus that sucks you in like a vortex.” – Stereogum “‘Okay‘ shines with the gloss of ’90s adult contemporary radio, but there’s something delightfully bent about its particular luster.” – The FADER “unforgettable” – FLOOD
“Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, who’s the baby?”sings Aaron Maine aka Porches on his latest single “Lately” from his forthcoming album, All Day Gentle Hold !, out October 8th. On the album opener, Maine wastes no time flinging himself into the crashing synths, cymbals, and guitars, while repeating lyrics as if in a trance, stumbling upon a new meaning each time,“Crying out! How’s everybody holding up out there??!!”
“Lately” arrives with a video directed by frequent collaborator, Nick Harwood, and follows Maine as he thrashes around a house while his unlikely band pummels through the song.
Porches – “Lately”, from ‘All Day Gentle Hold !’ out digitally 8th October 2021 on Domino Record Co.
The video for Dragonfly is made by Søren Lynggaard Andersen, who also did the video for ‘Living Other Lives’, and it features the three of us alongside our live-band members Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, Bert Cools, Øyunn and Christian Balvig who all have contributed significantly to the making of our new album. It was Indre who had the idea of featuring kite flying in the video and shortly after we found a box of abandoned white clothes and then it sort of rolled organically from there. We were all on Møn for Efterklang’s Sommertræf (Efterklang’s Summer Summit) and took the afternoon and evening off to fly kites, swim and run around and dance silly and un-choreographed in Danish corn fields. It was a beautiful moment with people we love dearly and I am so thankful it’s been captured so stunning and vibrantly by Søren.” – The song features Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė and Karen Beldring on vocals.
Efterklang will take the album on tour 2021 & 2022.
‘Dragonfly’ by Efterklang. Taken from the new album ‘Windflowers’ released October 8th 2021 on City Slang Records
Hauntingly beautiful vocals paired with a minimal musical backdrop makes for a truly inspired selection of emotional and beguiling songs. Marissa Nadler announced a new album, “The Path of the Clouds” and shared its first single, “Bessie Did You Make It” via a video for it. The Path of the Cloudsis due out October 29th via Sacred Bones and BellaUnion.
Nadler wrote and recorded the album during the pandemic and was partially inspired by binging reruns of Unsolved Mysteries as she “began to notice parallels between many of its stories and her own life,” as a press release puts it. On The Path of the Cloudsshe worked with various collaborators, including Mary Lattimore, Simon Raymonde (of Cocteau Twins and Lost Horizons and the head of Bella Union), multi-instrumentalist Milky Burgess, Jesse Chandler (Nadler’s piano teacher and a member of Mercury Rev and Midlake), Emma Ruth Rundle, and Black Mountain’sAmber Webber. Seth Manchester (Lingua Ignota, Battles, and Lightning Bolt) mixed the album.
Thou’s Mitch Wells directed the “Bessie, Did You Make It?” video and had this to say in a press release: “When I first got the chance to hear Marissa’s new album, and was asked, ‘Which song would you like to do a video for?’ I sort of panicked because literally every song is SO good. It was like being at a buffet of all your favourite food and only being able to choose one thing to eat. I had a blast making the video, but there was always the pressure of ‘don’t let down the song.’ It’s such a beautiful opening track and I’m really lucky I was given the chance to be a part of it.”
Nadler’s last album was 2018’s “For My Crimes”.
So glad that Marissa releases all this extra material. I often like the demo versions better than the final thing, it’s so intimate and real. Like having a friend show you a song they are working on.
Bessie, Did You Make It? from the album “The Path of the Clouds” Out 10/29/21 on Sacred Bones Records and Bella Union Records
Brooklyn post-punk five-piece Geese announced their debut album, “Projector” and shared a new song from it, “Low Era” via a Fons Schiedon-directed video for the single, which has a bit of a Strokes vibe. Projectoris due out October 29th via Partisan/Play It Again Sam (with a physical release on December 3rd).
Projectorincludes the band’s auspicious debut single, “Disco” which came out in June and garnered acclaim from other outlets.
Geese’s members are recently out of high school. The band wrote, produced, and recorded Projectorduring their junior and senior years of high school at their home studio (which they call The Nest). Singer Cameron Winter wrote each song, which was then fleshed out by guitarist Gus Green, guitarist Foster Hudson, bassist Dom DiGesu, and drummer Max Bassin. Each song had to be recorded between the end of the school day and 10 p.m., which is when they’d start getting noise complaints from the neighbours. Dan Carey (Squid, black midi, Fontaines D.C.) then mixed Projector.
The band collectively had this to say about “Low Era” in a press release: “We had been trying to get everything to sound super heavy, creepy crawly, and complicated, really because that’s all we knew how to do. Four-on-the-floor songs like ‘Low Era’ had felt a little like poison to us for a while, until we consciously tried to challenge ourselves to write something more danceable. Once we stopped enforcing certain boundaries, it ended up working out without us expecting it to, and even ushered in this psychedelic 3-D element that ends up appearing throughout the album. We like the idea of confusing the listener a little, and trying to make every song a counteraction to the last, pinballing between catchy and complicated, fast and slow. ‘Low Era’ is one end of that spectrum, and ultimately broadened the scope of songs we thought we could make.”
Curiously alien, yet strangely familiar, the band’s debut album, Projector, is a product of five teenagers whose love of music touches every part of their lives: their restless anxiety about their futures, and their pent-up frustration with their present-a perspective all too familiar in today’s uncertain world. For fans of Television, The Strokes, Shame and The Feelies.
“Low Era” taken from the forthcoming album, Projector, out October 29th
Everyone has had a different experience of the last year and a half. While some of us sat at home, endlessly scrolling through Twitter and You Tube, others were releasing a near-constant stream of new music. And by ‘others’, I mean Will Gould. After the critical acclaim and soaring success of last summer’s Sex, Death & The Infinite Void, the band Creeper frontman gave some time to his latest goth-punk project Salem, with whom he has put out two EPs since last October. We spoke with him over the phone a few days before Creeper made the surprise announcement that they were back for more with their upcoming EP, “American Noir“. That’s an awful lot of productivity for such an unpredictable time, so my first question is a simple one: is he okay?
“No. No, I’m not,” Will jokes, quickly clarifying that although it’s a novel experience to be working quite so much, he has had a good time of it. “I’ve actually quite enjoyed the process of putting lots of releases out. It’s been a challenge [but] it’s been fun being creative. I’ve got to work with a lot of different people I wouldn’t typically have worked with because I would be on tour”.
American Noir acts as an epilogue to the story of Sex, Death & The Infinite Void, which Gould describes as a “really lavish love letter between Roe and Annabelle”. It isn’t a lockdown album, and while all the songs were recorded at the same time as the last album, they felt that now was the right time for them to see the light of day. “We’re coming back, the world is reopening and it’s the perfect time to be reborn in some degree. Something to christen this new era of live music” he says, “And I had this wonderful title!”.
One major difference between American Noir and Sex, Death & The Infinite Void is that the new EP features more of keyboardist Hannah Greenwood on vocals. She and Gould previously shared vocals on the Nick Cave/PJ Harvey style duet ‘Four Years Ago’. Here, she reprises the character of Annabelle on ‘Midnight’, ‘America at Night’, ‘Ghosts Over Calvary’ and ‘Damned and Doomed’. It turns out that Gould had done a lot of writing for her, and he gets particularly animated when he talks about seeing her flourish as a singer. “I’m very proud of her on this EP. I know she’s anxious about it coming out and it’s the first time that she’s been thrust into that position” he enthuses, “She’s always had the talent, so it’s cool to see her come out of her shell even more”.
Much of Creeper’s recent music revolves around religious imagery, perhaps unsurprisingly: Will Gould is a former Catholic school student. But what fascinates Gould the most is the contrasting relationship between faith and belief in the supernatural. “I’ve been fascinated by the idea that these things could be real; the blurring of fiction and reality is really interesting to me. Why we would take less seriously something that is I guess rooted in science like UFOs and UAPs, but we take more seriously a religious text from a long time ago that there’s not a lot of grounding in”. The result is an album that tells a classic story – a man sent from above who becomes a martyr for the sins of the people – interwoven with the supernatural imagery that defined his childhood.
He tells us about his childhood obsession with UFOs, searching the library for books he had seen advertised on TV: “I was, like, a little baby, looking for Alien Base, this hardback book!”. An X Files fan, perhaps? “When I was a kid I used to dress up as an FBI agent all the time and carry round a little badge I made for myself because of The X Files”.
Alongside the truth that may be out there, the band are heavily influenced by musical theatre – the campier the better. Gould is starting to see Creeper the same way he sees The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shock Treatment and Little Shop of Horrors. “It’s too campy, it’s too over the top for some people, and I kind of relish that”, he admits. It’s not unthinkable that this era of Sex, Death & The Infinite Void and American Noir could hit the stage. Green Day and Meatloaf have seen their concept albums turned into stage sensations, so could Creeper be next? “It’s always been a dream to take it to the stage. But I wouldn’t want to sing it myself in that position, to be singing on a stage like that. But I like the idea of someone else doing the singing and being able to sit in the back and work on projects from behind the curtain a little more. That’s something I’d really like to do”. Always full of surprises, it wouldn’t come as a shock if Creeper moved into the world of theatre.
When Gould describes the band’s music, the words that most often come up are ‘camp’, ‘ridiculous’ and ‘silly’. But that doesn’t mean that Creeper are superficial. When they supported pop-punk acts over the years, they didn’t always gel with the crowd with their Rocky Horror numbers and dramatic ballads. But instead of trying to fit in, they forged their own path, one of magic and theatricality. “That’s the way the show is going and that’s the way I really want it to be. Something that when it comes to town, you know. Like when the Rocky Horror Picture Show comes to town. When I was a kid, very effeminate, very unsure of my sexuality, going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, being able to dress up and go out and be whoever I was without being judged was such a powerful thing for me as a young man”.
It would be easy to think that Creeper had created their magnum opus with this era, but the truth is that they’re going to keep pushing forward, reaching new ambitious heights and plummeting “further and further down the ridiculous hole”. Maybe it is too campy and too over the top for some people. But for others, it might be everything you’ve ever needed.
In a world which seems to move at a million miles an hour, it’s easy to get lost in commotion and feel completely overwhelmed by it all. Coupled with things like toxic productivity or toxic positivity, we are constantly pulled in multiple directions and sometimes it can be hard to just be. One singer resisting society’s endless clamour is Oakland-based singer-songwriter Boy Scouts. An expert at swimming around in her feelings and honing in on the uncertainty of life, she dives headfirst into uncomfortable sensations of precariousness or pain, coming up for air gripping hauntingly beautiful music.
In her new meditative single, ‘Didn’t I’, Boy Scouts delves into existence itself; no question is too big or too small to escape her magnifying glass as she tries to make sense of her world. Opening with a gentle plodding piano melody, she instantly creates a warm place for her to unfold her findings, or lack thereof, as she slowly sings “I don’t have the answers / I have memories”. Stirring strings support her expressive voice as she wonders “maybe things are just as they seem”, meanwhile aching organs and steady guitars propel the song gently onwards.
Speaking on the single Boy Scouts pondered: “Why are we alive? Is there a point to any of this? Have I done this before? I was thinking about these questions like that, just playing with these ideas and being curious.” As the song progresses we get no closer to an answer to The Big Question, but that is the beauty of ‘Didn’t I’. Purposefully unhurried and measured vocals sit alongside equally leisurely instrumentation and we are all led into Boy Scouts’ slow-going world and given time to unwind. ‘Didn’t I’ certainly leaves us with more questions than answers but Boy Scouts’ affable vocals and soothing harmonies act like a balm to the anxieties which come hand in hand with being a person.
Boy Scouts will return soon with her new album, Wayfinder, in October. Named for how music has acted as her personal compass, the record sees Boy Scouts delve further into life’s big questions, and find gratitude in just being alive. It’s comforting to know that in our manic world, there are others who prefer to take a step back and just be. Maybe things really are just as they seem
“Didn’t I” by Boy Scouts from the album ‘Wayfinder’, available October 1st
When Brighton quartet Fur first began pricking up ears back in 2017, their early moves seemed imbued with more than a dash of good fortune. Without any big money campaign, that autumn’s jangling, sepia-tinged third single ‘If You Know That I’m Lonely’ went borderline viral on Youtube, amassing millions of streams over the following months; currently, it stands on more than 40 million plays across all platforms. But since then, the band – comprised of singer Murray, bassist Tav, guitarist Josh and drummer Flynn – have set about confirming that their early algorithmic victories were no fluke.
Breaking into the Asian market, building an increasingly strong community in their native UK and now heading into their debut album, Fur’s is a tale not of flukey success, but of playing the long game. What Fur have specialized in is their ability to mix the old and the new, to take a particularly nostalgic strain of lovelorn guitar music but make it sound fresh again. Whether it’s playing a Gibson SG, enlisting the skills of Mike Rowe (Oasis and Mick Jagger’s key’s player amongst other accolades), or falling down the White Rabbit hole of The Velvet Underground via The Strokes in a flurry of influential digestion, Fur, are unquestionably a contemporary act, writing contemporary songs, for tomorrow’s music explorers; an infinite balancing act between present relevancy, and the traditional rock n roll of which they themselves, look up to.
The record is produced by Theo Verney and mixed by Grammy winning engineer Caesar Edmunds (Queens of the Stone Age, Foals, St. Vincent).
While the Brighton group might easily be mistaken as a group of mods and rockers from the suede jackets and bootleg jeans, Fur is one of the biggest growing alt-indie bands in the UK. With a modern twist on rock and pop, their latest single ‘The Fine Line Of A Quiet Life’ highlights their talent to combine a steady upbeat bass with a fun and catchy set of lyrics.
While the sorrowful lyrics place a strong emphasis on self-reflection and understanding the milestone you are at in your life, the upbeat range in frontman Murray’s voice gives the song a cheerful edge. During the transition to the chorus, the change in pitch of Murray’s voice and guitar give the song potential to make it a summer anthem.
‘The Fine Line Of A Quiet Life’ is an amazing addition to the ever-growing alt-indie genre. Putting a twist on a classic type of rock song, Fur has demonstrated creativity in both their lyrics and pitch.
The Fat Angel Sings 