The Fat Angel Sings

Cathal Coughlan, who fronted Irish cult band Microdisney in the ’80s and Fatima Mansions in the ’90s, is set to release new solo album Song Of Co-Aklan on March 26 via Dimple Discs.

The co-founder of seminal bands Microdisney and one of all-time favourites The Fatima Mansions, Cathal Coughlan has been an artist and songwriter who has and never will tick the boxes of convention and predictability. Though praise and acclaim has certainly surrounded the London-based Irish-born individualist we would suggest the depth of his inspiration on others has been underestimated certainly understated. From those early adventures through his solo career, lyrically Coughlan is an artist and protagonist like few others. His words make you stand still, think and react; every syllable woven against sounds which have been just as potent in their intimation and imagination. The recent release of Song Of Co-Aklan, his sixth solo album and the first in ten years, provides all the proof and confirmation of our suggestion you might need, the release a cathartic spark for the mind and contagion for the senses.

Song Of Co-Aklan sees Coughlan drawing on the craft of long-time collaborators from the Grand Necropolitan Quartet in drummer Nick Allum (The Fatima Mansions, The Apartments), guitarist James Woodrow and cellist Audrey Riley and also reunite with old friends such as Sean O’Hagan (Microdisney, The High Llamas, Stereolab), Luke Haines (The Auteurs, Black Box Recorder), Jonathan Fell (Microdisney, High Llamas), Rhodri Marsden (Scritti Politti) and other notable musicians.

Andy Golding, well known for his own musical output with the Wolfhounds, Dragon Welding and other projects, weighs in with this visual presentation – a psychotropic journey through the world of the provincial raptor-captor, by way of Gloucester and Addis Ababa, through a network of luxurious man-caves belonging to demagogues and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, leading beneath the Vatican, the Kremlin and an abandoned Safeway near Barstow, California. All processing and animation by Andy Golding. Musical landscape features James Woodrow (Gibson SG elemental guitar, with inlaid horse-brasses), Audrey Riley (Alpine steel cello), Nick Allum (rocket fuel drums) and Rhodri Marsden (double-necked granite bass guitar).

Emmy Award-winning filmmaker George Seminara presents a hermetic visual feast to accompany the digital single release from Cathal Coughlan’s 2021 album ‘Song of Co-Aklan’. Also features James Woodrow (guitar), Luke Haines (bass), Nick Allum (drums) and Audrey Riley (The Synth).

The album’s emotive artwork provided an immediate intrigue which its title track instantly fed upon, the opener strolling in with the thick lure of bass and crisp coaxing of beats accompanying Coughlan’s ever distinct and compelling tones. As keys wrap their warmth around that core temptation, a delicious hook works its way under the skin, virulence coating every aspect of the indie rock persuasion. That infection equally applies to the track’s lyrics, Coughlan weaving imagery and intimation as poetic as it is an evocative trespass to compel even deeper focus, one in turn only further escalated by the gripping twists and turns which spring forth.

 St Wellbeing Axe and successor Owl In The Parlour also gripped attention like few other encounters this year, the first an almost rapacious stroll with a clamorous scent to its unpredictable and heady incitement, the second offering a theatre of sound and enterprise which had the body swaying in unison to the song’s own manoeuvres and ears swiftly a greedy slave. Crepuscular in its light, noir shaded in its breath, the track is a sublime piece of temptation continuing the viral persuasion of the album with almost cinematic elegance.

Similarly Let’s Flood The Fairground sparks a vision in the imagination even before Coughlan shares his dextrous writing, it a collusion of shadows and spirit raising light upon a canvas of revelry welcoming inauspicious experiences while The Lobster’s Dream casts ears into a realm of aligned fantasy and reality, one spun with orchestral nurtured charm and carnival spiced beauty.

Through the similarly but more shadowed folkish air of The Copper Beech and the animated shuffle of The Knockout Artist, the album continued to surprise and broaden its temptation, the latter of the two an eighties pop teased offering with a Paul Haig like factiousness to its amble with Falling Out North St. instantly after providing a sultry romance of sound in a melancholy enriched and at times eagerly sprightly ballad.          

From the forthcoming album ‘Song Of Co-Aklan‘ (March 26th, 2021) on Dimple Discs.

Chicago, Illinois band FACS use minimalism and space to create abstract, modern art rock. The Chicago trio FACS never stop pushing forward; they’ve honed and refined their stark, minimal scrape and clatter for four years and counting, having risen out of the ashes of beloved Chicago band Disappears in 2018 with the bone-rattling intensity of Negative Houses. After three albums in the past three years, the trio return in 2021 with Present Tense, their fourth album and perhaps their sharpest statement as a band.

Opener “XOUT” barrels forward like a tank, with Case’s guitar chiming like warning bells, until the climax comes crashing down, glitching out near the close. “Strawberry Cough” comes next, its fusion of corporeal playing and stately, electronic heartbeats punctured by random bursts of noise or backwards masked sounds. “Alone Without”, a track originally recorded for Adult Swim’s 2020 singles series appears next, albeit in different form; more menacing and serpentine.

Side two opens with “General Public”, taking the loud/quiet dynamic as a jumping off point for the song’s unsettling seasick vibe. ‘How To See In the Dark” offers a brief respite, with its persistent, dark quietude that lingers until the song’s end. “Present Tense”, the album’s title track, offers up its first truly weird moment mid-song when the song changes mood distinctly, and the music drops out save for Case’s guitar and vocals. The album’s final track, the densely packed “Mirrored”, begins with a restrained, post-rock shuffle. The mind-scrambling cacophony that comes next takes its time to roll in, but once it does, it comes in waves, flipping back onto itself multiple times until it’s folded into oblivion. 

This time, the band approached their song writing from a different angle “Alone Without” was the first song we recorded and we really built it in the studio” Case says, “Alianna and I played different instruments, and I think that freedom informed how the other songs developed. All the lyrics were random phrases on a big sheet and were put together as the songs took shape, so I feel like I was collecting these thoughts and trying to figure out how to process them as a big picture vs making complete ideas in individual songs.” Case adds ”…letting the songs go where they wanted, without steering them into what we all think a FACS album should be.” The change is palpable from last year’s claustrophobic and fried Void Moments, but “Present Tense” is still ALL FACS, albeit draped in a layer of haze. Paranoia in soft focus, perhaps?. 

Possibly their finest LP yet. Dark, terrifying, noisy, and hauntingly beautiful.

Released May 21st, 2021

Noah Leger – drums, keyboards
Alianna Kalaba – bass, keyboards, drums on A3
Brian Case – guitar, vocals, bass VI on A3

Foxing is a band. Someday Foxing won’t be a band.

Happy Flower Moon, everyone. We are proud to announce our new album, “Draw Down The Moon“, is out in its entirety August 6th 2021. You can pre-order the album along with our very own role-playing game, a colouring book, wild new clothing designed by Gordon Thomas and more at our store:

This album is about cosmic significance as it relates to ten themes. So far, we’ve explored the themes of death and financial ruin. Today, we present “Where The Lightning Strikes Twice”, a song about success and failure. We’ve been a band for about a decade. In that time, we’ve had our hopes raised and our hearts broken a thousand times by the music industry. This song is about begging for success and stability in the most uncertain, chaotic places. It’s also about acknowledging that failing with people you love and believe in will be worth the attempt in the end.

Draw Down The Moon is a ten-song album recorded & produced by E.M. Hudson and mixed by John Congleton with additional production by Andy Hull and mastered by Joe Lambert.

Releases August 6th, 2021

Austin-born Justin Toland (guitar/vocals) found his own musical food early through his father, a classic-rock aficionado who turned Justin on to the Stones, Creedence, soul music and the Stax sound. At 17 Toland moved to Memphis and met Thomas Storz (bass), a native of the city, through mutual friends; the pair found common musical ground and began playing groove-grounded rock with a series of temporary drummers. Andrew Denham (drums), a Shreveport-born drummer and British hard-rock fan, joined up with Storz and Toland in 2007.  

The trio began demoing using a basic setup: a single cassette recorder, no tracks, no real separation, just mics on the bass/drums and guitar and vocals live in the room. Without the option to isolate, tweak, or sweeten after the fact, Dirty Streets became accustomed to running through a take 40 or 50 times as they worked to get it right, all the way through. By the time they began gigging live, that level of discipline had honed Dirty Streets into an instinctual, responsive outfit. Bootleg recordings of their shows in and around Memphis helped to generate buzz, and established Dirty Streets’ rep as a band whose timing was as sharp as their sound was ragged.  

Albums followed—Portrait of a Man (2009), Movements (2011), Blades of Grass (2013), White Horse (2015), Distractions (2018), and the live Rough and Tumble (2020), drawn from an in-house performance for the DittyTV streaming music service—all steeped in the raw rock-soul groove that serves as the band’s taproot, the musical core from which all of its explorations still proceed. And within that core, too, is the element that gives their music, the music they love and play, its unique character.  

“Soul and blues music is about testifying,” says Toland. “To me, that’s great songwriting. When it’s good, it’s good because it’s true, because it’s authentic.”

If rock is the watchword here, it’s an alchemical one : alchemy of the guitars, flying (far) away, lost in space and time, melting over the sustained or relaxed – even dreamy – pace of the drums. The skeleton-bass gives a cohesive substance to the whole. This is a liquid chemistry, after all, made out of fluid streams of light.

Founded in 2019, Swear I Love You as a musical project, could be seen as a text where different writings are being superimposed : sounds reminiscent of previous bands (three of its members also played in the mighty Forks and the trippy MK-Ultra), but somehow distant from that past. Rewriting here should be understood as reinvention. Novelty comes hand in hand with a renewed collective enthusiasm channelled through the music composition and performance of their hypnotic and captivating tunes.

Lulled by influences found on the psych rock scene of bands such as Brian Jonestown Massacre and early Black Angels, their sound is expansive, equal parts heavy and ethereal, stained with an alpine kind of psychedelia, inspired by forests, mountains and (magic) mushrooms, flying clouds and a golden transluscent low-angled light glowing through the dark foliage and prairie wildflowers. In this neverending chiaroscuro game of the reassuring and the eerie, the poignant neo-romanticism of Echo and the Bunnymen and the enlightened ghost of Joy Division appear sometimes, haunting in the shady background (Smoke and Mirror, Sound of Seashells)

Catchy mélodies filed with nostalgia of Post-punk and Brit-pop, thats the promesses of Swear I Love You.
From the wild beauty of Swiss mountains to the none less real disillusion of modern life, this band bring back the ghost of 80’s romanticism with a pinch of enjoyable kitch.

New Maxi 12inch from single ‘Down The Stream’ taken from self titled album.

This record includes remixes by Anton Newcombe, Amson feat. Claire Dromelet, Die Wilde Jagd.

Available on EXAG Records. releases June 11th, 2021

‘Grapefruit Season’ is the long awaited 5th studio album from James Vincent McMorrow.

produced by James alongside fellow genre disruptors Paul Epworth, Kenny Beats, Lil Silva and Patrick Wimberly (chairlift), the album was recorded in London, Los Angeles and Dublin largely before the pandemic struck. it embraces the fact that life is chaos, and the idea of growing up but feeling none the wiser.

My new album Grapefruit Season will be out on the 16th of July, and new song Waiting is out today. Pre order the album . I am so excited to finally be sharing this, the last year has been like holding my breath waiting to talk about it!! All European tour dates have also been rescheduled and are on sale now!!

Beyond overjoyed to say that the next single from the album is called Paradise and is out next Tuesday 18th! Honestly, I’ve never been as excited about a release as I am about this one. it captures everything that I’ve been trying to get to for the entirety of my musical life. I’m such a chaotic fucker, for so long I saw that as weakness, like I needed to control my chaos and refine it into something functional. Before I started this album, I swore I’d see the chaos as my greatest asset. I am a chaotic fucker, and I do not control a single thing. I can’t control what people think of me, so why give so much of myself to the pursuit of acceptance. I can’t control the outcome, so make only what I want to make.

Beyond overjoyed to say that Paradise, the next single from the album, is out now! Honestly, I’ve never been as excited about a release as I am about this one. It captures everything that I’ve been trying to get to for the entirety of my musical life. I’m such a chaotic fucker, for so long I saw that as weakness, like I needed to control my chaos and refine it into something functional. Before I started this album, I swore I’d see the chaos as my greatest asset. Like I said, I am a chaotic fucker, and I do not control a single thing. I can’t control what people think of me, so why give so much of myself to the pursuit of acceptance? I can’t control the outcome, so I committed to make only what I want to make. I went in and I made the album that captured every angle of that chaos in all its fucked up glory, all the influences, all of the desire to push forward what it means for me to be a singer and a songwriter and a human. That’s what this song is about, that’s what it sounds like to me, that glory, fragility, bigness and hope. I hope it becomes your soundtrack to this summer of chaos and bigness and hope and glory. 

I went in and I made the album that captured every angle of that chaos in all its fucked up glory, all the influences, all of the desire to push forward what it means for me to be a singer and a songwriter and a human. That’s what this song is about, that’s what it sounds like to me, that glory, fragility, bigness and hope. I hope it becomes your soundtrack to this summer of chaos and bigness and hope and glory. wouldn’t have gotten to this place without 2 of the greatest humans I’ve ever known, Lil Silva and Paul Epworth. Honoured they wanted to help me build this song, truly 2 of the greatest musicians and friends. And a huge shout out to the Capital Children’s Choir for walking into the studio that first day singing every line of the song at the top of their lungs, capturing that energy in the song gave it the magic.So excited for this. James X

I’m playing some in-store performances at a few record stores in July to celebrate the launch of the new album. Pre-order ‘Grapefruit Season’ from the stores below to get your ticket.

20th Rough Trade Nottingham, 6.30pm

Howlin Wolf’s voice, Hubert Sumlin’s guitar and Willie Dixon’s songs made for an unbeatable combination on this defining classic of Chicago blues, which, along with its predecessor, “Moanin’ At Midnight“, had a deep impact on the course of rock history.

Not to be confused with The Howlin’ Wolf Album (a psych-blues experiment from 1969 which Wolf himself even handedly evaluated as “dog shit”), Howlin’ Wolf – aka ‘The Rockin’ Chair Album’ after its iconic cover shot from Playboy staff photographer and Chess Records house photographer Don Bronstein – became one of Chester Arthur ‘Howlin’ Wolf’ Burnett’s most famous records. But as per the conventions of the time, it was actually a compilation of six singles and their B sides spanning his late 50s to early 60s output, with the variations in recording and personnel that implies.

As well as providing the bass for the majority of the record, Chess song machine Willie Dixon wrote nine of the 12 tracks. Howlin’ Wolf was unhappy about having to do so much material by Chess’s chief songwriter, believing the Chess brothers were effectively denying him the chance to earn royalties from his own songs and only two tracks here are his own. Despite concurrently writing hits for Muddy Waters and others, there’s no sign of Dixon’s inexhaustible supply of innuendo drying up here – and a rotating cast of backing musicians delivers them behind the core triumvirate of Wolf, Sumlin and Dixon. His given name was Chester Arthur Burnett. Originally from Mississippi, he’d recorded for Memphis’ Sun Records—home of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and so many others—before he, too, went over to Chess. His songs would eventually find favour with many rock bands—Cream recorded his “Spoonful,” the Doors cut “Back Door Man” and there were many others—but for now he was still a mystery figure to most of the white audience.

Any record that relegates Buddy Guy to bass has to have a decent six-string line-up, and alongside Sumlin, the tracks include guitarists Jimmy Rogers, Willie Johnson, Freddy Robinson, Otis ‘Big Smokey’ Smothers and possibly others still.

Hubert Sumlin had stepped out of the shadow of Willie Johnson to become Howlin’ Wolf’s trusted sideman, even though their relationship was legendarily fractious and often violent. His jagged, frantic approach to riffs and solos is attention-grabbing throughout the album, and the key to it lies in his use of fingers and thumb instead of a plectrum to vary his attack.

On Shake Me, his largely major-pentatonic flavoured solo erupts from the speakers with string slides, feverish tremolo, descending bends and more tricks besides, which are repeated at a more leisurely pace on Goin’ Down Slow. For You’ll Be Mine, his solo takes a detour no other blues lead player has ever rediscovered since; and on Spoonful, his P-90-loaded Goldtop sings, squeals and chokes in equal measure to deliver one of the blues’ most expressive, vocal solos.

He may be the six-string star of the show, but the guitars on Howlin’ Wolf come from a variety of sources. For Spoonful, Wang Dang Doodle and Back Door Man, Freddy Robinson provided the back-up guitar lines, although bluesmen’s memories weren’t ever too clear: Sumlin himself couldn’t recall with certainty who played what, and Freddie King once claimed to have played on the sessions, too. And on closer Tell Me, the uptempo shuffle parts are a combination of Willie Johnson and Otis Smothers.

With so much flashy lead guitar throughout Howlin’ Wolf, it’s easy to overlook the slide guitar skills of Wolf himself, of course, given how terrifying his vocals were. But Little Red Rooster and Down In The Bottom are two equally atmospheric polar-opposite performances that underline the Delta roots behind the electrified Chicago sound, two guitar parts that mirror the music’s shift from the country to the big city.

Varying where accents fall on the beat is an art that’s learnt through thousands of hours of playing and Howlin’ Wolf’s vocals, with their constant push and pull of the song’s meter, define the rhythmic space for the other musicians. How they use this space is the real trick: on opening track Shake For Me, the rhythm and chord changes are destabilised by Hubert Sumlin’s riff sliding lazily into the one and playing upstrokes on the offbeats, whereas when you listen to the breakdown sections in Little Baby, no one treads on anyone’s toes unless they really mean to and the timing of the band is locked in, to the millisecond.

In contrast to both, Wang Dang Doodle lollops around drunkenly, constantly falling forward, gaining momentum like a party getting dangerously out of hand, as the law-enforcing tambourine struggles to keep time (in the best way possible). Towards the end of the record, the telepathic ensemble playing that makes up the loping rhythm of Back Door Man is humbling listening for anyone who’s ever dismissed the blues as unsophisticated music.

Guitar tones and recording levels in the mix also play their part in creating further separation: hence the minor-key Latin-tinged swing of Who’s Been Talking? has woolly rolled-off tone for Otis Smothers’ guitar riff to steer clear of the harmonica, piano and tenor sax, but the smoky atmosphere decisively clears when Wang Dang Doodle’s stinging icepick-treble guitar accents cut through from the two entwined guitar parts of Hubert Sumlin and Freddy Robinson.

After Sam Cooke had released a soulful interpretation in the US in 1963, The Rolling Stones 1964 cover of Little Red Rooster became the first (and still only) blues song to reach No. 1 on the UK singles chart and set in motion the album’s profound influence on rock. Eric Clapton and Cream transferred it into the psychedelic realm with their version of Spoonful; Led Zeppelin famously quoted the lyrics of two of its songs in Whole Lotta Love, and a cover of Wang Dang Doodle was Koko Taylor’s biggest hit. The roll call of other artists to have attempted to cover the songs in the ensuing decades has some unexpected entries, too, including Bryan Adams, The Jesus And Mary Chain, PJ Harvey and many more.

But as ever with Chicago blues, you need to return to the source for the real story, and in this case, it’s time well spent. Howlin’ Wolf is among the greatest and most influential blues albums ever made and a must-listen for guitarists everywhere.

Howlin’ Wolf, “Howlin’ Wolf” (Chess, 1962)

the Band:

• Howlin’ Wolf, vocals, guitar, harmonica
• William Johnson, guitar
• Freddy Robinson, guitar
• Jimmy Rogers, guitar
• Otis ‘Big Smokey’ Smothers, guitar
• Hubert Sumlin, guitar

Howlin’ Wolf, born Chester Burnett on June 10th, 1910, died at age 65 on January 10th, 1976.