A lightning bug glows with the aid of a chemical called luciferin, derived from Latin for “light-bringer”. Lightning Bug began as three friends who made music together to bring each other light. The music we make continues to hold that purpose at its heart. The music of Lightning Bug is an attempt to record the deepest experiences in the self and connect them outward.
Lightning Bug is the hypnotic shoegaze project led by Brooklyn-based Audrey Kang, who released their album “October Song” in 2019 . The band announced they’ve signed to Fat Possum, who will re-issue October Song physically for the first time. Grounded in a tightly knit friendship and an intuitive musical bond, Lightning Bug’s music, an enveloping mix of rapturous shoegaze, longing balladry, and ambient soundscapes, sits at the centrepoint of a creative exchange among songwriter Audrey Kang, multi-instrumentalist Kevin Copeland, and producer Logan Miley. Despite a knack for sonic eclecticism, each Lightning Bug record holds a magnetic sense of cohesion. Lyrically, the songs document Audrey navigating a relationship with her own humanity, memories fraught with joy and pain, and the constant cycle of tension and release necessary in developing self-trust. Lightning Bug’s music is then the manifestation of dialogues: a musical dialogue amongst members of a sacred creative partnership and an internal one as Audrey plumbs the depths of her own foundation.
Last year’s October Song (released via Marbled Arm) marked Lightning Bug’s second full-length offering, the follow up to the largely anonymous release of their self-titled debut Floaters. Earning a spot on NME’s best debut albums of 2015 respectively, Lightning Bug have emerged as one of the musical underground’s most fertile sources for textured world-building and soaring catharsis. Lightning Bug have now announced Fat Possum as their new label home.
Setlist:00:00 I Lie Awake 04:00 The Return 11:20 The Right Thing Is Hard To Do 15:35 Song of the Bell 18:58 A Color of the Sky
Lightning Bug have wrestled with the fragile alchemy of the artistic process. On their third album, the billowing “A Colour of the Sky,” vocalist Audrey Kang zeroes in on a fascination with self-discovery through song, contemplating music’s ability to illuminate deeper truths in both its author and receiver, and artistic labour’s unlikely transfiguration into bliss. Underneath the record’s enveloping shoegaze swoon, these quiet musings bring us close enough to feel the vulnerable intimacy of its creation.
“A Colour of the Sky” is the New York group’s most direct and fully rendered work to date: It’s a beautiful collection of songs paying direct homage to the dreamy atmospheres, curling synthesizers, and blown-out guitars of slow-burning art rock of bands like Mazzy Star, Cocteau Twins and blistering shoegaze greats Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. Yet Lightning Bug re-imagine this cannon in the context of an entirely new plot. Like a Creation Records fan fiction, a ’90s 4AD reboot, or a shoegaze memoir, “A Colour of the Sky” builds upon a familiar palette, reconfiguring foundational sounds .
Lyrically, the album amounts to an extended meditation on the struggle inherent in the creative process. “If I empty me of all myself, am I a vessel or a shell?/Mining for the substance in the dark and precious well/Pour out my convictions till I’m hollow as a bell,” Kang sings on “Song of the Bell.” Her voice’s delicate confidence tells its own story. The record’s driving momentum and spiritual haze simultaneously pit enchantment and disillusionment against each other. The evolution from simple song to sonic universe is almost always made clear by each track’s gradually intensifying production, effectively mimicking this dialogue. Most songs build upward from a quiet voice and an acoustic guitar, drum, or synth into a sea of lulling feedback and fluttering ambience, direct conversations bleeding out into layered fantasies. Each song has a brief moment when the whimsical textures dissipate, and Kang is left alone, looking directly into the mirror.
“When you’re playing or writing a song, you have to enter your own little world to access it. I think that’s another way of ‘coming back to yourself,’” Kang has said. Kang articulates this dance on opener “The Return”: “But as I starе into the heart of my own twisting fire/The songs yet to be written flock around me like a choir.” She reckons with the need for the work of others to communicate her own feelings: “I turn to poetry/I turn to the books I read/To say what I mean,” she whispers on the album’s title track. She interrogates the phenomenon of the phantasmagoria, how signifiers can feel more real than what they remind us of: “How colours feel stronger and feelings so true/That even the flowers smell more like you.” Narrating the process of searching for the self through song, A Colour of the Sky feels like a surreal ride-along to the creative process. Even so, it can be difficult to make out these lyrics through their quiet exhaled delivery behind a haze of effects, like pulling back a curtain only to reveal a cloud.
Listening to A Colour of the Sky can feel, at times, like playing all of your favourite shoegaze, alt-rock, and dream-pop records sounds at once. Moments feel plucked directly from their source, recontextualized as subtle elegies to the loyal comforts of a treasured record collection. From the Bends-era heavy chords of “I Lie Awake” to the Loveless-like harsh whisper-squeals of “Song of the Bell” to the patient Talk Talk tribute “The Chase,” a collage of lush synth tones and fuzzy warmth orbits each track like an atmosphere, evaporating into thin air, and drifting away like a memory.
“A Colour of the Sky’s” immersive textures beckon, while its meta-aware poetry keeps the listener at a distance. Yet Kang’s attempts to demystify the nature of song writing somehow pull us in closer, providing a glimpse into the process of creation. Lightning Bug’s ability to transform the vulnerability and struggles of producing meaningful art into a gorgeous and deeply affecting record is its own sort of magic trick.
Lightning Bug’s new album ‘A Colour of the Sky’ out now.
For Chicago-based singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Nick Levine (formerly of the band Pinegrove), the blue heron is much more than just a big bird. It’s the symbol at the centre of their debut album as Jodi, the elusive understanding they search for in their intimate, effortlessly tuneful “queer country.” Levine had the great wading bird tattooed on their back, posing in a freezing Chicago pond on the album cover, one symbol immersed within another—one perspective on life’s meaning in a limitless spectrum of experience.
An alter ego for singer-songwriter Nick Levine, who was a multi-instrumentalist in Pinegrove up through last year’s Marigold. Listen through their debut album “Blue Heron” without any prior knowledge and you could probably figure that much out. An air of pensive melancholia, loosely drawling vocals, diaristic lyrics about deep feelings and fateful interactions: The imprint of Levine’s former band is unmistakable in these songs,
Levine’s lyrics evoke the personal and universal alike, often in the same breath: “Night driving at four in the morning through the town / Dim forager lost in the dark, following the sound,” they sing on “Get Back” over a gentle acoustic riff and keening pedal steel. The beauty of Blue Heron is Levine’s acceptance that true meaning is fleeting, and just being alive with one’s eyes open—perhaps even lucky enough to catch a glimpse before it spreads its wings and takes to the air—is cause for joy. “Is it really so bad to be floating around?” Levine wonders over rippling acoustic guitars on the closing title track, “wonder” being the operative term.
Levine is operating in an emo-adjacent folk-rock space somewhere near Slaughter Beach, Dog’s Jake Ewald, Big Thief’sAdrianne Lenker, and Lomelda’s Hannah Read (whose brother and collaborator Tommy co-produced Blue Heron in the Reads’ hometown of Silsbee, Texas). Collectively, it is the sound of twentysomethings working through heavy feelings one tastefully sighing guitar ballad at a time.
Jodi Go Slowly ℗ 2021 Sooper Records Released on: 13th April 2021
One month ago today, Sydney rock band Gang Of Youths returned with “The Angel Of 8th Avenue”, their first new song since 2017’s “Go Farther in Lightness”. The track infused the group’s hearty arena-indie sound with some War On Drugs/Killers style synth action, and upon its release, singer David Le’aupepe told Zane Lowe, “It’s probably the only song that you’ll hear from us from now that sounds remotely kind of what we sounded like the previous kind of six to eight years.”
Today, we get our first test case for that statement. Gang Of Youths have surprise-released a new EP called “Total Serene“. It includes three tracks, starting with the aforementioned “the angel of 8th ave.” The closing song, “Unison,” is much moodier and more low-key than usual — the new lowercase fixation is starting to make sense — but it ends with some hard-hitting drums that may or may not be programmed. “unison” sounds not unlike Elbow, whose “Asleep In The Back” title track is covered on the EP as well, though the National and U2 come through big time as well.
“‘Unison’ is a deeply important track for us that really signals where the music is headed on the new record,” Le’aupepe says in a press release. “I conceived the song in Samoa, my ancestral homeland. Here we sample and introduce the work of David Fanshawe, who travelled to the Pacific Islands in the 1980s and recorded the most extensive library of indigenous Pacific music anywhere in the world.” As for the Elbow cover: “We love Elbow and we thought it was thematically relevant. It couldn’t have been anything other than ‘Asleep In The Back.’”
Gang of Youths are an Australian indie rock group from Sydney. The band consists of principal songwriter David Le’aupepe, Max Dunn, Jung Kim, Donnie Borzestowski, and Tom Hobden.
Introducing Norway’s next great exports Veps! Their debut EP “Open the Door” is out now digitally & September 3rd on vinyl. Preorder today and watch the really fun DIY vids for Ecstasy and Girl on TV
Veps are four 17 year old best friends from from Oslo, Norway, that include Laura (guitar), June (bass), Maja (drums) and Helena (keys/piano) who have known each other since elementary school. The girls started playing together in middle school at the age of 14.
The name VEPS means WASP in Norwegian, and came about in a slightly cosmic and random way. “One Day while in our rehearsal room, we were discussing what our band name should be when all of a sudden a wasp came flying through the window, and we just looked at each other and yelled “Veps”.
Lala Lala’s sophomore record The Lamb was one of 2018’s most underrated indie records; balancing a violent, unpredictable edge with hard-won optimism, it felt like a crystalising of Chicagoan Lillie West’s talents. “Diver”, the first single from her third album, I Want The Door To Open, takes a brighter outlook: featuring baroque instrumentation and a soaring crescendo, it’s a warm introduction to the album, which attempts to reckon with, and fall in love with, life’s Sisyphean struggle.
“I want total freedom, total possibility, total acceptance. I want to fall in love with the rock.”
That’s how Lillie West describes the theme of “Diver,” the song she calls the thesis of Lala Lala’s third record, I Want The Door To Open. The rock in question is a reference to Sisyphus, the mythical figure doomed by the gods to forever push a boulder up from the depths of hell. To West, it is the perfect metaphor for “the labour of living, of figuring out who you are, what’s wrong with you, what’s right with you,” she says. “I think it’s easy to feel like we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, that we never learn, that we’re Sisyphus; but time is actually a spiral that we move up. The key is falling in love with the labour of walking up the mountain.”
“DIVER” from the album “I Want The Door To Open” by Lala Lala (Release date: October 8, 2021)
From the brimming light of the lead guitar on opener “Saturnine & Iron Jaw” to the mellow grunge unfolding in the finale “Rats in Ruin,” Nothing as the Ideal is a signature All Them Witches release, which of course means it sounds like nothing they’ve ever done before.
The Nashville trio thrive on contrast. Now six records deep into a tenure that began in 2012, they are unremittingly forward-looking, and while signature elements can be found throughout Nothing as the Ideal – from guitarist Ben McLeod’s prog-tinged explorations to the slacker-soul vocals of bassist Charles Michael Parks, Jr., to the restless energy and rhythmic nuance in Robby Staebler’s drum patterns – it is also their most experimental work to-date.
But contrast is the key: Tape loops coincide with unplugged minimalism. They recorded it in a strange place with a familiar producer. It’s their heaviest album marked by their broadest atmospheres, intimate and pummeling. It is unquestionably theirs even as it will no doubt engender ownership in anyone who hears it.
Nothing as the Ideal might forever be known as “the album All Them Witches made at Abbey Road.” Fair enough. You don’t record in a legendary studio surrounded by mics The Beatles used, sitting on the bench where John Lennon tracked the acoustic guitar for “A Day in the Life” without acknowledging that history. There’s no getting away from it.
Where Nothing as the Ideal triumphs, however, is in making that space and that history the band’s own. Working with Mikey Allred, who previously produced 2015’s New West label debut, Dying Surfer Meets His Maker, and has done other mixing and mastering along the way, All Them Witches not only did justice to the moment they were capturing – the sheer adventure of being there, doing that thing – but answered the call of their inspiration as they always do.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. The idea was to take time, do it themselves. But after spending the early part of 2019 constructing a studio in a church outside Nashville where Staebler was living and writing, writing, writing, the band came up against the deadline of a 35-date European arena tour with Ghost and had the single “1×1” to show for it. They put that song out, did a video, and after the tour, redirected their purposes. With the momentum of playing every night behind them, Nothing as the Ideal at last began to take shape.
Abbey Road might not have been the plan, but with the harder deadline of recording dates locked in, All Them Witches were able to focus more clearly. It wasn’t about applying pressure, but about doing what best served the songs. With Allred as the trusted party at the helm, they succeeded in crafting a defining moment for who they are as a band, with each player’s personality coming together to create a fluidity that is unique unto them.
Whatever they’ve done in the past, whatever they’ll do next, ”Nothing as the Ideal” epitomizes the literal and figurative journey All Them Witches have made, and it is to be treasured all the more for that.
Nashville’s rockers All The Witches, the stoner rock legends Nebula, King Buffalo unique psychedelic rock and the progressive intensity of Kalediobolt to Sonic Blast 2022. *** more to be announced soon***
SonicBlast Fest 2022 11th-13th August Praia da Duna dos Caldeirões Âncora, Portugal
Full festival tickets are now on sale at BOL (Fnac, Worten, Ctt’s…) or at
Green Man Festival is on We’re absolutely ecstatic to finally say that we can go ahead this August. And what a thrill to be able to introduce your GM21 line-up, with headliners Mogwai , Caribou, Little Dragon and Fontaines D.C. soaring over the Black Mountains each evening. Get excited, wrap your ears around the playlist and picture yourself sinking a Growler in your favourite spot on site, We have bundles more to share from all the other areas, so look out for them in the run up to the festival.
This decision was not taken lightly, and was made following Wednesday’s announcement by the Welsh First Minister, and after much consultation with the Welsh Government.
A gigantic thank you to everyone for your patience over the past year – all the support from our audience, crew, artists and the Welsh Government’s Cultural recovery fund has got us here. Seeing your faces in the fields is going to be nothing short of incredible! Big love, GM
Everyone’s safety is our number one priority. To gain entry to GM this year, anyone over the age of 16 will have to demonstrate that they’ve received two vaccinations at least 14 days before arrival or show that they’ve received a negative NHS lateral flow test within 48 hours prior to their arrival. We totally understand that some people may not feel ready to return this year, so if you have tickets and don’t want to attend, please contact Ticketline to arrange a refund or rollover to 2022, you must do this before 5pm 23rd July. If there are any returns we’ll have a resale at 10am on 27th July.
Get excited for thrilling independent music festival Down at The Abbey which hits Reading on September 11th bringing with it a glittering array of awesome acts and essential names including premier post punks Snapped Ankles as headliner, psychedelic alt rockers Flamingods, electronica superstar Lonelady, mind blowing band The Utopia Strong – plus many more!
First taking place in 2019 following a ten-year restoration project, Down at The Abbey is brought to you by the award-winning creators of Are You Listening? and has previously played host to such favourites as BC Camplight, Kathryn Joseph and The Wave Pictures.
A key location in English musical history, the festival is held at the Grade 1 listed grounds of the now ruined Reading Abbey, first constructed by Burgundy monks in 1121 before later being banished and the Abbott executed by King Henry VII. The site revealed the monumental discovery of the oldest piece of English music; “Sumer Is Icumen” dated back to 1240.
Offering two stages of music, enjoy drink courtesy of Siren Craft Brew bringing their award-winning selection of beers and ciders, plus pick from a wide array of stalls providing coffee, cocktails, and tasty street food. Plus kids will love the many exciting activities provided just for them!.
The Fat Angel Sings 