Pink Floyd did an incredibly poor job documenting their Seventies stadium tours, leaving it up to their fans to preserve them in video and audio form for future generations.
Unfortunately, amateur recording equipment of the era was difficult to sneak past security, let alone operate properly, and your average Floyd fan was a stoned teenager. That meant most Pink Floyd bootlegs (with big exceptions like Oakland 1977 were hissy, grainy, incomplete, and very difficult to enjoy.
That’s why Los Angeles area rock freak Mike “The Mic” Millard is a hero to bootleg fanatics all over the globe. He used a phony wheelchair to sneak a Nakamichi 550 tape recorder into Seventies and Eighties shows at the Los Angeles Forum. When the lights dimmed, he’d wire the machine to microphones connected to his hat and simply walk to the front of the venue. The trick allowed him to capture shows by Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Genesis, Rush, Yes, and many others with incredible sound quality and little audience noise.
One of his greatest recordings is a Pink Floyd show at the L.A. Forum from April 26th, 1975, which recently resurfaced on YouTube with even better sound quality than previous versions. This is six months before “Wish You WereHere” hit stores, so the audience is hearing songs like “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” and “Have a Cigar” for the very first time. There’s also early version of the Animals tunes “Sheep” and “Dogs” called “Raving and Drooling” and “You’ve Got toBe Crazy.” After a set break, they reward the patient audience with a complete performance of “Dark Side of the Moon” followed by an encore of “Echoes.”
Millard committed suicide in 1994 after years of battling depression, and internet lore says he destroyed most of his tapes. But many of them have surfaced in recent years and enterprising fans have been sharing them online. Read more about Millard. Jimmy Page even used bits of his Zeppelin recordings on the band’s DVD.
If Pink Floyd ever decides to create a Bootleg Series, they should get their hands on Millard’s master tapes — starting with this 1975 Los Angeles Forum gig. It’s the band at the peak of their abilities as a live act and deserves to be heard as widely as possible. It would also be a great tribute to the ingenuity and perseverance of Millard, even if the whole “phony wheelchair” trick isn’t exactly ideal. In this case, however, the ends justify the means.
This is the best audio recording of the Pink Floyd concert at the Sports Arena in L.A. 1975. Remastered sound! Great sound quality (almost like an official release) and a famous concert. Wonderful versions of the songs. 17.000 people in the audience. Full capacity crowd each night in L.A ’75., more than 500 arrests due to smoking pot over the course of the whole 5-night run. This is a highly recommended listening experience
Tracklist: 01-Raving And Drooling (Sheep) 03:26 02-You’ve Got to Be Crazy (Dogs) 16:01 03-Shine On You Crazy Diamond (1-5) 32:04 04-Have a Cigar 44:48 05-Shine On You Crazy Diamond (6-9) 49:36 06-Speak To Me 1:03:14 07-Breathe 1:08:16 08-On The Run 1:11:11 09-Time 1:15:43 10-Breathe (Reprise) 1:21:07 11-The Great Gig In The Sky 1:21:57 12-Money 1:28:13 13-Us And Them 1:36:10 14-Any Colour You Like 1:44:12 15-Brain Damage 1:52:34 16-Eclipse 1:56:14 17-Echoes 1:59:36
YES have announced the release of a new studio album, “The Quest”. The announcement revealed the artwork from the band’s long time designer, Roger Dean, whose tenure with Yes dates back to the Seventies and classic albums like Fragile and Tales From Topographic Oceans. as well as its track list. The Quest, coming October 1st on InsideOutMusic/Sony Music. It will be their 22nd studio album,
Guitarist Steve Howe has produced the album. He notes, “We commissioned several orchestrations to augment and enhance the overall sound of these fresh new recordings, hoping that our emphasis on melody, coupled with some expansive instrumental solo breaks, keeps up the momentum for our listeners.” Howe is joined by the group’s veteran lineup of Alan White, Geoff Downes, Jon Davison and Billy Sherwood. Additional percussion was provided by guest Jay Schellen who supplements YES’ live performances.
The seven years since the last Yes album have been an extremely tumultuous and challenging time for the band. Founding bassist Chris Squire died in 2015. Drummer Alan White, meanwhile, has suffered health issues in recent years that make it impossible for him to play drums for the entire length of a concert. He still tours with the band but is often just onstage for a few songs per night. The band also faced a significant rival on the road when former members Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman, and Trevor Rabin began gigging as Anderson, Rabin, and Wakeman — and later Yes Featuring Jon Anderson, Trevor Rabin, and Rick Wakeman.
The Quest, is the prog rock band’s first studio album since 2014’s Heaven and Earth, The album contains 11 songs, eight on the main CD with 3 extra tracks on a bonus CD. It will also be available on vinyl and 5.1 Blu-ray and CD, and limited edition deluxe 2-LP and 2-CD plus Blu-ray.
The current line-up of Yes was completed in 2015 when Billy Sherwood replaced founder member Chris Squire, at Squire’s insistence, as he bravely fought a losing battle with leukemia. Since then, Yes have concentrated on performing their album series tours, each featuring a classic YES album in its entirety. During this period YES have released three live albums Topographic Drama – Live Across America (2017), Yes Live 50 (2019) and The Royal Affair Tour: Live in Las Vegas (2020).
The Ice Bridge is the first single from YES‘ forthcoming album The Quest, to be released 1st October 2021.
We’ve got some news we’ve been very eager to share, and the day has finally arrived. Last year, Nation Of Language released their debut album Introduction, Presence in the middle of May — just in time for frontman Ian Devaney’s thirtieth birthday, and right around the time we were starting to creep out of lockdown and see each other again. This wasn’t the original plan: It had been slated for April, and then pushed back thinking they might still get to play a release show in May. Of course, that didn’t go as planned either. Little of the last year and a half has, and you can only imagine the amount of up-and-coming bands who got cut off at the knees, releasing albums that represented years of hard work and incremental growth and then not being able to tour behind them.
First thing’s first: album 2 is coming your way. It’s titled “A Way Forward”and will be out November 5th. The first single, “Across That Fine Line“, is out now . the Brooklyn trio — also featuring Devaney’s wife Aidan Noell on synths, and bassist Michael Sui-Poi — have become noticeably bigger, selling out shows around the country. Also on the other side of the pandemic, they have another new album already, arriving just in time for fans who have found Nation Of Language in the last year and hadn’t been able to catch them on the road yet.
“A Way Forward” is the follow up to Nation of Language’s debut album,“Introduction, Presence” (2020). While much of the sounds on the band’s previous record garnered comparisons to the synth-punk sound of the 80’s, on this new offering the band delved heavily into the Krautrock pioneers and electronic experimentalists of the 70’s for inspiration in the studio, stretching their boundaries in new and different ways.
“Introduction, Presence” was a bold, bright tribute to the classic era of new wave, A Way Forward is often a blearier album, exhuming more primitive drum machines and synths and combining them with trippier ambience without entirely foregoing the danceability and muscularity the band displayed on their debut. You will have already gotten a sense of this from advance singles, particularly “This Fractured Mind” and “The Grey Commute.” But the band also held back some of the album’s best songs and biggest surprises for release day: the swooning head fog of “Miranda,” the haunting and sprawling “Former Self,” the psychedelic lovelorn daydream of “Whatever You Want,” another mesmerizing album finale in “They’re Beckoning.” Altogether, “A Way Forward” in some ways echoes its predecessor, in that each song stretches out in a different direction, chases a different idea. But at the same time, it feels like Devaney has crafted an album that has more of a complete arc to it, an album-length journey through listlessness and shadows and memories.
“In Manhattan”
IAN DEVANEY: I think it sets the tone in a nice way for me. There’s something more subdued about it. I often like when there’s a track that welcomes you into things. That one is very triangular in shape, it basically goes up and up and up and everything swells, then you build to this moment. It’s mostly about building up the emotion right away. It also helps because, similar to the first album, I like the idea that A Way Forward lives in New York. I like that the record has a sense of place around here.
DEVANEY: Although everyone thinks about whatever city they live in, because every city has a Division St. Especially Chicago.
“In Manhattan” has a lot I relate to. I feel like it comes from those early years living here where you are kind of reckoning with fantasy vs. reality — the “Strung along by a fiction/ Read it in a magazine” sentiment.
DEVANEY: “On Division St.” is definitely more of a romantic song, and this one is definitely more of a disenchantment thing. Reckoning with the expectation of what you thought it was going to be like vs. what it’s actually like, both in terms of a lot of things being harder and crummier than you think and the inaccessibility you can feel in so many ways. A friend visits for the weekend and by the end of it you come out like, “Where has all my money gone?” It feels like, in other places, it wouldn’t happen as severely.
I feel like I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t just go out and have fun all the time. When you’re living outside of New York and you’re thinking of what it’s going to be like, I personally thought I was going to be out at bars all the time, having fun all the time, and it just isn’t. There’s still elements you can romanticize, but it’s basically realizing the board is just nothing like what you thought. Some things are great, and some things are not, but it’s often not how you expected it to line up.
“Wounds Of Love”
DEVANEY: To me it feels OMD-ish… there’s a bit of a more conscious decision to go for a kind of classic pop songwriting. That’s something they were able to do very well. The Kraftwerk thing was really that main riff. I wanted to write something that felt like it could be on Man Machine, and that got wedded with the pop song concept.
Originally it was meant to be a much more robotic song.
DEVANEY: It’s funny, I was just listening to a thing recently where they were talking about Kraftwerk and how it’s very cold and robotic but at the same time it’s kind of funky and they were trying to figure out how they were able to do that. When I first made it, it was only the cold parts of the Kraftwerk-ness. So then it was bringing in a bit of rhythmic synth in the background, to take the straight beat and give it a bit of groove.
“Miranda”
DEVANEY: I like to refer to this song as “The Great American Road Trip Song, Dirtbag Edition.” I was thinking about the Vampire Weekend song “Hannah Hunt” and “America” by Simon & Garfunkel. I wanted that sense of fuzzed-out traveling brain in the song. The protagonist is partially the worst versions of myself, partially a fictional character. It’s definitely a song about aimlessness and someone who can’t really commit to anything and doesn’t really have a good relationship to other people or the world around them.
“The Grey Commute”
DEVANEY: I first started writing it in 2017, when the Republican tax plan passed. It was similar to how they were always trying to repeal Obamacare and once they actually had power they couldn’t do it. It was like the dog who caught the car, they had no fucking idea. It was just a talking point for all that time. Apparently with the tax plan it was the same sort of thing. They were like, “Oh, shit.” The thing that ended up passing was basically written for them by the CEO of FedEx. Just handed to them. After that passed, FedEx were owed money by the government instead of having to pay a billion dollars in taxes.
It was one of those things that was so frustrating. You’ll talk about policies you want to pass that shouldn’t be considered ambitious but people are always like “Well, how are you going to pay for it?” Well, that billion dollars is a good fucking start. I think, particularly, when this song was written — I go through periods of paying too much attention to the news that send me into these doom loops in my head. “The Grey Commute” is the only positive thing that’s come from those doom loops, creatively. I’ve never been able to write a song before that felt like it touched on politics that didn’t feel forced or cheesy.
“This Fractured Mind”
DEVANEY: This is the sad townie anthem. It harkens a bit back to almost the early days of Nation Of Language, when I didn’t really know it was going to be a band. I was just living in New Jersey and delivering pizza. The bones of this song were created back then, in 2014. It was still when I was a little more aimless in terms of how to achieve various styles with intention.
It had been thrown in the demo bin, and I found it again while we were making this record and was like “Oh, shit.” Not knowing what I was doing [back then], it’s a very motorik beat song [that worked for A Way Forward]. The synth sounds weren’t right, but if I changed them a bit it lived in that krautrock world. I could re-address the lyrics and flesh the song out and I felt like it could help serve the general album theme.
“Former Self”
This is the big left turn of the album.
DEVANEY: I wanted something that was not as regular kick-snare driven. I wanted to live more in synth music world. The synth arpeggio is what it’s about, and everything else is in support of that. It was written on acoustic guitar. I had just recently gotten a nylon string acoustic, and I was messing around with learning finger-picking. The arpeggio here is what I was drilling on guitar, and all these changes came to me while I wasn’t even really paying attention. It felt like something I wouldn’t have thought to do if I had been like, “I’m going to sit down to write a song.” Then I figured out all the notes I was playing and sent them to the synths and put it together.
There’s a fun aspect of this song, in the support percussion. Have you ever watched the Miyazaki movies, the Studio Ghibli stuff? In a lot of them, whenever there is some sort of large machine going, it feels like it’s a combination of machine sounds but also someone being like psssshhh-psssshhh. That’s something I was playing with in the rhythm of this song. Some of the sounds were just me. It’s both robotic and human at the same time. Also, one of the sounds in “Former Self” is the same sample as the big drum hit in “Indignities.”
“Whatever You Want”
DEVANEY: It lives in a similar space as “Across That Fine Line,” but it’s a bit more about obsession and being drawn to someone who is just not drawn to you. But still getting the thrill, that jolt, of realizing you’re drawn to someone. There’s a bit of a celebration, even if it’s not reciprocated — like, “Oh, I’m capable of this.” I feel like it always makes one feel youthful to be drawn to someone in that way.
“A Word & A Wave”
In the press quote for this song, you said “A Word & A Wave” was about a person who tried to make everyone around them happy, but did little for themselves and ended up feeling spent and empty.
DEVANEY: Yeah, wanting to be there for everyone even if it’s in the smallest ways and just how draining that can be in the long run. Everything that the person is doing, they’re trying to keep everyone OK. They’re always watering their plant making sure that’s alive. In some sense, just being trapped by that.
In terms of me wanting the album to have a sense of place in New York, this is the one that doesn’t fit into that as much, in my own head. When I was writing it, I was picturing this person being in a small, warmly lit bedroom in Portland, Maine. That was why we went up to Portland when it came time to make the video. The only thing I knew about this song is that that’s where the person was in my head.
“They’re Beckoning”
This also began life as a vignette.
DEVANEY: That’s another one, that same feeling came up. Of all the songs, that came in the most uncooked. I really wasn’t sure it was going to end up on the album so it was like, “Yeah, let’s have fun. Probably won’t use whatever comes out, but we’ll see.” With each progressive step we took, I was like, “Oh, shit, that was cool. Maybe we do this,” and Nick would say, “If we do that, what about this, write some more words in this part.” You felt that joy of creation in the moment where you really never knew what the next step was going to hold.
Oftentimes that feeling of satisfaction you get in the studio is, at least for me, different than the satisfaction that happens when you’re in that writing mode at home before you get there. To have that sort of spontaneity happening in the other context was very electrifying. A fun thing about this song is it was composed based on the clicking of a heat pipe in my apartment. I recreated it. I think I tried to see if my mic cable was long enough for me to get from my computer but I couldn’t get over there.
Discussing, Devaney added, “‘A Way Forward’ is an exploration of the band’s relationship to the music of the 70s, through the lenses of krautrock and early electronic music. We aimed to more deeply trace the roots of our sound, hoping to learn something from the early influences of our early influences. Experimenting with how they might be reinterpreted in our modern context – looking further backward to find a way forward. We drew a lot from the steady locomotive rhythms of bands like Kraftwerk and Neu!, while also looking to less-propulsive electronic artists like Laurie Spiegel and Cluster. The goal was to have a record that felt like a journey, like being on a train that gets lost in a colourful fog, and then suddenly bursts through into different landscapes. Thematically, some of those landscapes are familiar in their melancholy, but we also wanted to introduce celebration and joy in a way that hadn’t really been present in our previous album. Having these bursts of positivity felt like it gave the emotional low points more resonance, giving a stronger sense of emotional reality to the album overall.”
Recorded during the lockdowns of 2020, production on the record was divided between Abe Seiferth (who worked on Introduction, Presence) and Nick Milhiser of Holy Ghost!
There is a Rough Trade Exclusive LP and CD with bonus CD featuring 3 exclusive alternate versions of album tracks and 1 remix from Nick Milhiser (of Holy Ghost!)
1. A Word and A Wave (Alternate Version)
2. In Manhattan (Alternate Version)
3. Miranda (Alternate Version)
4. A Different Kind of Life (Nick’s Dub)
To pre-order A Way Forward, you have a few choices: we’ve partnered with Rough Trade to create an exclusive blended red/blue colored vinyl, which also comes with a bonus CD of alternate versions of four songs, available nowhere else.(For our friends in the UK / EU, this is probably going to be the easiest way to get your hands on the record – as many of you know, shipping from the US can be a killer.)
On our website you can find a coke-bottle-clear colored vinyl (as well as traditional black), where you may notice that we have a new shirt available as well.
When Canadian indie rockers Mother Mother announced their upcoming album with not one but two awesome singles, “I Got Love” and “Stay Behind”, we knew we were in for something special. And now “Inside” is out, it’s even better than we had hoped!
Taking inspiration from the forced isolation we’re all experiencing, Inside sees all that pent up creative energy exploding into fourteen raw and atmospheric electronic orientated tracks.
“The world stopped, and all the sudden I had a lot more alone time on my hands, which isn’t necessarily conducive to songwriting. Usually, I like to venture out and find guidance from an external, interactive narrative — travelling, people, serendipities, etc. I love that process — it’s almost like you’re in collaboration with the world. But since that wasn’t an option, I set about a different kind of travel, one more inward and personal, exploring different types of therapies, meditation, and journaling as a means to unearth songs from a deeper, interior place.”
See Mother Mother smash it at two very special London shows at Heaven and O2 Forum Kentish Town during March next year!
In 2020 we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the eponymous Elliott Smith album by inviting artists we admire to record covers of the songs on that album. We had so much fun with that project that we’ve decided for 2021 to celebrate our 30th anniversary by expanding the idea to encompass the entire Kill Rock Stars release history.
We’ve got so many amazing artists onboard already, including much of the current KRS roster, along with lots of folks from our extended family and even some new friends! We are so excited to celebrate the music community we’ve all grown up in, as well as the friends and fans we’ve made along the way. With that in mind, please welcome Stars Rock Kill (Rock Stars)
“The Raincoats ‘Fairytale in the Supermarket’ is like jumping aboard a moving train and landing in a carriage of 70’s post punk mischief that’s giving a huge middle finger to all the things cis hetero white dudes had decided punk was meant to be,” Jen Cloher says of her new cover, the latest installment in Kill Rock Stars 30th Anniversary cover series. “But it’s the depth of the lyrics that blow me away, ‘It makes no difference night or day, no-one teaches you how to live.’ Nihilist or Buddhist? Either way, it’s one of the best opening lines for a song, ever. Myself and Anika Ostendorf aka Hachiku tried to find a way to access this incredible song and make it our own. I think Anika’s experimental spirit found a home in The Raincoats awesome weirdness. We are both on Milk Records a label based in Naarm (Melbourne) on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people in so called Australia. Kill Rock Stars is a label we looked to when we started Milk nearly 10 years ago, so it feels like being home with our people even if we’re on the other side of the world!”
Confirmed artists thus far include Mary Lou Lord & Mikaela Davis, Mike Watt, Eyelids, Fruit Bats, Little Mazarn, Califone, MAITA, Shutups, TEKE::TEKE, Møtrik, Ryan Sollee (The Builders & the Butchers), Badlands, The Hackles and there are so many more to come!.
After releasing their third album, James Murphy decided to break up LCD Soundsystem and play one final show with the ethos of “If it’s a funeral, let’s have the best funeral ever.” It was their biggest and longest show of their existence — a three-and-a-half hour extravaganza at Madison Square Gardens April 2nd 2011 with an all-white (suggested) dress code and guest appearances by band members of Arcade Fire, Reggie Watts, Juan MacLean, Shit Robot, Planningtorock, and Light Asylum’s Shannon Funches. Across 28 songs, they played nearly everything you’d want to hear from them at the time.
The breakup didn’t last (LCD did get back together in 2016 and made a fourth album in 2017 but that doesn’t make this show any less great. It spawned a 2012 documentary, “Shut Up And Play The Hits” and in 2014, the whole Madison Square Gardens concert was released as a limited edition 5-LP live album box set, entitled “The Long Goodbye“, with the audio mixed by James Murphy at DFA Studios to 1/4″ analogue tape specifically for vinyl. Out of print pretty much since its original release, The Long Goodbye is now getting a new vinyl repress in celebration of the Concerts 10th Anniversary.
James Murphy notes that this identical to the original, though there’s now also a 3-CD version. “basically, same shit. these were going for too much on the secondary market, so the brain trust over at DFA (of which i, james, am a humble member) made more. get ’em while they’re old as dirt and in stock. don’t ask me why there’s a CD version. i just work here.”
The Long Goodbye repress will be out August 6th via DFA
Toronto’s Ducks Ltd. (fka Ducks Unlimited) will release new album “Modern Fiction” on October 1st via CarparkRecords. If you like the jangly pop of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, you will probably find ’18 Cigarettes” worth checking out. “The thing I came to love about the song after watching that performance over and over again is that it’s a song that kind of tells on itself,” says singer/guitarist Tom McGreevy. “It’s a really raw emotional expression from someone whose capacity to talk about their feelings is stunted and they’re cut up about it. ‘18 Cigarettes’ is kind of an attempt to do a different version of what that song does.”
Toronto’s Ducks Ltd. the bright jangle-pop duo of Tom McGreevy (lead vocal, guitar, bass, keyboards) and Evan Lewis (guitar, bass, drum programming), accomplish the impossible. The pair craft songs that play to very specific inspirations without drowning underneath them—immediately evidenced on their critically acclaimed EP, Get Bleak, and sharpened on Modern Fiction, their debut LP. “The Servants, The Clean, The Chills, The Bats, Television Personalities, Felt,” Evan rattles off. “Look Blue Go Purple” is one I reference a lot with our production.” Echoes of ‘80s indiepop abound, but they never overwhelm. This is not a nostalgic record, after all, nor is it a derivative one. Instead, across 10 cheery-sounding songs, Ducks Ltd. explore contemporary society in decline, examining large scale human disaster through personal turmoil (hence the title, taken from a university course called Gnosticism and Nihilism in Modern Fiction, influenced by Graham Greene novels. Bookish indie fans, look no further.)
“18 Cigarettes” is taken from Ducks Ltd.’s forthcoming album, Modern Fiction, out on Carpark Records / Royal Mountain Records on October 1st, 2021.
Transcontinental, experimental duo Smoke Bellow have been at it since 2012, relocating from Australia to Baltimore, MD & back again and then back again (now firmly settled in Baltimore). The duo released the “Blooming/Middling” LP in 2014, followed by “Isolation 3000” in 2018 (both on Baltimore label Ehse Records) After a line-up shuffle, they eventually recruited one of their favourite drummers and dear friend, Emmanuel Nicolaidis . which found the duo refining their sound into a dizzyingly attractive mixture of kosmiche serenity, minimalist composition, test-card psychedelia, and highlife guitar.
With “Open for Business” the three members set out to create a set of songs more immediate and bare than previous outings. The album title itself is a cheeky reference to Maryland governor Larry Hogan’s less than inspired motto “we’re open for business”. Half of the songs were written in a room together and the second half via email (for obvious reasons). At the time they were listening to a lot of post punk and were struck with the partnership of drums and bass as propulsive instruments. The trio started writing songs around that idea – with the rhythm as a brace to hang their decorations.
Sonically, Smoke Bellow are inspired by disparate sources. The heyday of Compass Point studios’ famed rhythm section of Sly and Robbie sustained them for months. Others included good old VU, ESG, guitar hero Zani Diabate, The Raincoats (especially their under-appreciated second album, Odyshape), the frenetic sound collisions of the Flying Lizards, the ever warm blanket of Yo La Tengo, the evolving repetition of Stereolab, the understated genius of Asa Osborne, as well as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The David Byrne/ Robert Wilson “Knee plays” reminded them of the joy of the spoken word set to music. memories of life in Melbourne, their friends and each other. “We wanted to talk about resilience and resistance.” Says Best. Recording and mixing took place between a remote cabin in the Smoky Mountains and Tempo House in Baltimore with Jared Paolini. “Maybe Something” includes cello from Owen Gardner (Horse Lords).
Releases September 17th, 2021
Smoke Bellow are: Meredith McHugh, Christian J. Best, Emmanuel Nicolaidis
Los Angeles band FEELS are putting the finishing touches on their their third album which will be released by Wichita Recordings. (Their last album, “Post Earth”, came out in February 2019.) To hold you over till then, they’ve got an EP titled “Subversive Reaction” which will be out July 22nd via local art publication Deemed Printable.
The EP was recorded in March 2020 and features new member Cole Berliner of Kamikaze Palm Tree on guitar and vocals (replacing Shannon Lay, who left the group in 2019), in addition to original members Laena M.I. (vocals, guitar), Amy Allen (bass, vocals) and Michael Rudes (drums). The first single is “Night Walker,” a moody slow-burn that Laena says “sounded to us like walking down big city alleyways alone at night, questioning the true meaning of ‘connection’… and then as the world was forced into isolation and the months dragged on, the lyrics hit in a much more literal sense than we ever could have
The “Night Walker” video which stars dancer Gregory Barnett and was directed by Jeff Fribourg with cinematography by Travis Waddell. Laena says the video “paints a picture of quarantine: bouncing off the walls of our minds, facing who we really are in the absence of each other, but also a deeper longing to reunite with nature and our true humanity which was felt even before the pandemic.”
Subversive Reaction is a limited to 250 silk-screened vinyl 12”, hand packaged and printed using an in-house risograph printer.
Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen released their gorgeous, glorious collaborative track “Like I Used To” last month, and on Tuesday night (6/8) they performed it together for the first time on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. The performance, which was taped at Zebulon in LA (the same place Sharon recorded her “epic Ten” live album, also featured drummer Rhys Hastings, guitarist Emily Elhaj (both from Angel’s band), keyboardist Charley Damski (from Sharon’s band), guitarist Nicole Lawrence (who has worked with Mary Timony), and drummer Griffin Goldsmith (Dawes).
It’s a treat to see two of the most revered modern singer-songwriters collaborating like this, and we’re hoping there are more songs where this one came from — or a joint tour — or both!.
Sharon is on the stacked Primavera Sound in 2022, while Angel is set to play Pitch Fork Festival this year.
Musical guests Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen perform “Like I Used To” for The Tonight Show.
The Fat Angel Sings 