The Fat Angel Sings

Buzzy U.K. rock act Squid’s debut album is close at hand, and ahead of Bright Green Field’s May 7th release via Warp Records the band shared another new single, “Pamphlets,” and announced their first-ever U.S. tour. The track finds Ollie Judge and company attempting to bottle the lightning that is their live-show energy, which translated into one of our favourite performances at the last End Of The Road Festival.

Drummer, vocalist and lyricist Judge says of “Pamphlets” in a statement, “It’s about all the rubbish right-wing propaganda you get through your front door. It imagines a person with that as their only source of news being taken over by these pamphlets.” Both Judge’s vein-popping vocals and the band’s edgy instrumentation build to an explosive crescendo, like paranoia and isolation straining and ultimately fracturing an already-tenuous grasp on reality.

Taken from the debut album “Bright Green Field”, out 7th May: This is one of our songs that has shape-shifted the most and has always been a staple of our live show when we were able to tour. Out of all the music on Bright Green Field, we’ve played “Pamphlets” the most, and some people might remember it from our gigs. It’s a song that’s also has come full circle, we started it in Chippenham and finished it in Chippenham. An ode to Wiltshire?

Possibly – but it was always the song that we knew would finish our first album.

L.A. band The Marías will release new album “Cinema” on June 25th via Nice Life Recording Company / Atlantic Records. “The Marías were born from cinema,” says María. “The reason Josh and I started writing music together was because of cinema. Through a friend, we were connected to a music supervisor who would send us requests for music for films. We’d receive a synopsis of a scene, and then we’d have to write music to it within a couple of days. Not only did that teach us how to write songs together fairly quickly, it taught us how to think like filmmakers. We’d imagine worlds in our minds based on the synopses – the colours in the scene, the lighting, the actors, the set design, and of course, the music.” First single “Hush” is definitely on the cinematic tip, modern noir synth.

The Marías are an indie pop band from Los Angeles, California, composed of Puerto Rican lead singer María Zardoya and Los Angeles native and drummer Josh Conway. 

‘Hush’ written by María Zardoya and Josh Conway

Polyvinyl Record Co.’s latest signing is unGoogleable Melbourne duo Good Morning, i.e., Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons, who marked their addition to the Illinois-based indie label with their first new songs in two years, “Mollyduker” and “Keep It.” Both are worth your time, but it’s the latter, sung by Parsons, that stands out to us, a warm, Wilco-esque amalgam of indie pop and alt-country described in a press release as “a meditation on failure, drinking and aging.” While Parsons dwells on “the stupid shit I said over the years,” acoustic guitars amble onward over barebones bass and percussion, sharing space with twangy electric riffs and well-placed keys. Parsons calls the song “an ode to stasis,” but Good Morning are on the move, thanks in part to their ability to render regret’s aches and pains in such soothing song.

“Keep It” is the new digital single from Good Morning, out everywhere April 28th, 2021.

Jasmine Lucilla Elizabeth Jennifer van den Bogaerde, better known by her stage name Birdy, is an English singer, songwriter and musician.

Five years on from Birdy’s last studio album Beautiful Lies, it may sound like a long break between albums but for Birdy, taking time to stop, experience the world and find out who she really is, was a necessary circuit break. Travelling to Nashville, home to the greatest heartache songs ever written and visiting LA drawing from classic artists Joni Mitchell and Nick Dave was the perfect way to seek inspiration. These gorgeous surroundings and collaborators seemed to know, instinctively, how to draw the words out from Birdy imbued Young Heart with strokes of the artists who had gone before.

Young Heart is quite the departure from Birdy’s previous album, 2015’s dramatic Beautiful Lies. Where Beautiful Lies was a fairy tale, Young Heart is a gritty realist portrait of the artist in pain, looking for the light.

“It’s been a long journey making and finishing this record and it’s been the most difficult but special thing I’ve ever done, I hope if you listen to it you’ll be able to feel the love and tears that have gone into it and that it moves you in some way.” Birdy x

Critically acclaimed indie folk songwriter Birdy is both adored by the music press and her ever-growing fanbase, seeing her reach multi-platinum record sales and become a BRIT Award nominee. Following the release of her latest Top 10 LP “Young Hearts“, 

‘Young Heart’, the new album, out now:

Following her X Files homage last month, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner returns with a horror-tinged visual for the slow-burn ballad “Posing in Bondage.” Zauner floats into an empty supermarket on a hoverboard, wearing a striking black outfit with winged shoulder pads and dried blood on her face, plus a scarily vacant gaze (the question of where, or who, the blood came from is tantalizingly left to the imagination).

She takes advantage of the desolate store by chugging orange juice straight from the jug in the frozen food aisle before eventually striking up an unlikely friendship with the store’s lone cashier. Images of the pair careening around in shopping carts and sharing cups of noodles offer a wry take on intimacy that’s in line with the song’s yearning for closeness. It also completely makes you want to make friends with someone who may or may not be a vampire.

“Posing in Bondage” the new song by Japanese Breakfast from the album ‘Jubilee’, out June 4th on Dead Oceans Records.

“BNR” is Crumb’s fuzzy ode to the colours black and red, and the Brooklyn psych-rock group brings the theme to life with a Lynchian video that slowly lulls you into its sinister point of view. Lead singer and guitarist Lila Ramani wanders down a palm tree-lined street, all while a trail of dark water crawls behind her. The imagery gets slippery from there: flares of red filter through into the black and white; Ramani sits for a lobster dinner while two waiters literally spin impatiently around her; and, in a surprise conclusion atop a hillside, the tone switches from surreal to gruesome in a shocking split second.

From the start, the group knew that cohesion was best achieved through plumbing their individual strengths – frontwoman Lila Ramani’s earliest song writing, which catalyzed the group’s first two EPs; Bri Aronow’s knack for building (dis)affecting soundscapes; the hypnotic grounding of Jonathan Gilad’s drums, a Crumb mainstay; and Jesse Brotter’s distinctive bass playing, which subtly traces Ramani’s vocal melodies while providing an unrelenting pulse. These collective skills make Crumb a project of independent self-discovery, four creative minds converging around an idea that is always shifting and reforming.

In a couple days, under her moniker Girl In Red, Marie Ulven will share her debut album “if i could make it go quiet” with the world. We’ve already heard the riotous lovelorn track “You Stupid Bitch” and the lead single “Serotonin” and now we’re getting a very funny video for the latter.

Ulven runs around a few pastoral parks with a big bunch of red balloons strapped to her wrist. Sometimes unable to handle them due to the wind, or ride peacefully in a car with them, these balloons seem to be as unpredictable as the chemicals in her brain she sings about. At one point, Ulven is jumping on a trampoline and falls off the side—it’s actually kind of scary. But after her friend asks if she’s OK, of course, Ulven meme-ifies herself. An edited still of her falling is sent across the famous Microsoft green field desktop background, New York City, the pyramids, and then eventually space. The visual is evidence of Ulven’s skill to be completely candid and forthcoming about her mental health struggles, which, don’t we all have our own and not be afraid to approach them with humour.

If I Could Make It Go Quiet ends with a brief instrumental, It Would Feel Like This, in which a simple piano melody is shadowed by a string arrangement. “If I could make it go quiet,” Ulven is saying, “it would feel like this piano and these strings”, rather than, for instance, a song such as “You Stupid Bitch” where her record reaches its peak bratty yang. You Stupid Bitch finds Ulven venting her frustration at a female friend who makes bad choices and can’t see their relationship from Ulven’s perspective. “The only one for you is me!” she yells.

Norwegian bedroom-pop star Marie Ulven goes deep on loneliness, anxiety, lust, rage, jealousy, and all the other agonies of that crazy little thing called love. As Girl on Red, she’s built a loyal following since her 2018 “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend,” building up to her long-awaited debut If I Could Make It Go Quiet. Ulven summed up these songs in Rolling Stone as “a lot of mental noise,” from “Serotonin” (produced by Finneas) to the booty-call malaise of “Midnight Love.” But she’s got a great way of getting right to the point: “You stupid bitch, can’t you see / The perfect one for you is me.

my debut album ‘If I Could Make It Go Quiet’ comes out april 30th.

Sometimes waiting is the hardest part. Quicksilver Messenger Service, originally formed in 1964 to back singer-songwriter Dino Valenti, was one of San Francisco’s original psychedelic bands, but committed fans and the merely curious didn’t get an album from the group until May 1968. In part this was, as guitarist-singer Gary Duncan told an interviewer, because, “We had no ambition toward making records. We just wanted to have fun, play music and make enough money to be able to afford to smoke pot.”

To everyone’s benefit, that lack of ambition and herbal-life preference combined with years of playing and professionalism to produce one of the era’s best records, whose sheer musicality shines as brightly today as it did more then a half-century ago.

Initially a five-man band, by 1968, when they signed with Capitol Records–one of the last of the classic-era San Francisco bands to ink with a major label–QMS was a taut quartet, its sound defined by Duncan and John Cipollina’s twin guitars, bassist David Freiberg’s (and Duncan’s) vocals and Greg Elmore’s drumming. (Valenti, jailed on drug charges, wouldn’t rejoin the band until his release in 1970. Another early member, guitarist Jim Murray, had dropped out before the debut album was recorded.) But the band’s eternal weakness persisted: its members hardly wrote. Which, curiously, became one of their strengths, as it obligated them to transform and customize cover material into interpretations they would come to own.  “Gold and Silver,” which began life as a jam on Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” becomes a fiercely swinging dual-guitar riff-swap that presages later Allman-Betts workouts.

Among the album’s great reveals: It discloses a rock ’n’ roll band that’s not only conversant with jazz but also at ease with—and adept at—pop music. Valenti’s “Dino’s Song,” melodic, perfectly crafted and irresistibly effervescent, just missed being a top 40 hit.

On “It’s Been Too Long” (credited to QMS manager Ron Polte), Cipollina tears off a wiry, spiralling solo and Freiberg punches through the fade with buoyant Del Shannon-ish “whoa-whoa-whoa’s”. Not surprisingly, the set’s two band-generated songs lean heavily instrumental. “Light Your Windows” partly recalls Fred Neil’s breezy “Coconut Grove,” though its real draw is the stinging electric filigree Cipollina applies throughout the track. The 12-minute closer, “The Fool,” is the obligatory long song all San Francisco bands featured, but it’s hardly an aimless sprawl. Instead, it’s a watertight collection of mini-suites that deftly traverse all sorts of musical space, from pastoral acoustic interludes to vertiginous gothic assaults—interspersed with “mystical” lyrics straight outta hippie philosophy.

If the purpose of a debut album is to show ’em what you can do, “Quicksilver Messenger Service” is an unqualified success. It shows a group making the most of what it had to forge a style that remains utterly unique. Harvey Brooks and Pete Welding produced, along with Nick Gravenites (those are the Electric Flag horns you hear on “Pride of Man”).

Dennis Anderson and Lois Kahlert met at a Fats Domino show, went on their first “real” date to see Television and Talking Heads at CBGBs, and it’s been a rock n’ roll love story ever since. They are legendary superfans who, now in their early ’70s, are still at it. Chris Cassidy’s long-in-the-works film “Dennis & Lois” is a warm, funny, and inspiring documentary about their dual loves. The film spends a lot of time with them, be it on tour with The Vaccines, in Manchester seeing Happy Mondays, or at their Long Island home that is packed to the gills with memorabilia and toys. 

Dennis and Lois is similarly packed with amazing stories, such as when they were on tour in the UK selling merch for the Ramones in the early ’80s and, at the Manchester show, took a very young boy backstage to meet the band. That boy grew up to be Jimi Goodwin of Doves. Or the time Happy Mondays asked them to score some weed for them — the band were recording in L.A. and Dennis and Lois FedExed it to them from NYC. Though Lois has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and is mostly confined to a wheelchair, she’s still seeing shows with Dennis — they haven’t lost their love for rock n’ roll, or each other.

They are legendary superfans, having made friends with the Ramones and sold merch for them on tour in the early days (they gave up their “RAMONES” NY State license plate because it kept getting stolen; they now have “MEKONS”). Happy Mondays wrote a song about them on their 1991 album Pills N’ Thrills N’ Bellyaches and, at 70, they are still at it. If you’ve been a regular concert-goer in NYC at any point in the last 40 years, especially if it’s to see UK bands, you have probably seen Dennis & Lois at a show.

Chris Cassidy‘s long-in-the-works film “Dennis and Lois” is a warm, funny, and inspiring documentary about their dual loves. The film spends a lot of time with them, be it on tour with The Vaccines (the bulk of the film seems to have been shot at the start of the decade), Their house really is something and you quickly understand their obsession does not end with going to see live music — there’s barely enough room for furniture for all the trinkets that line their shelves and walls. They have whole rooms dedicated to Spiderman, Batman, The Simpsons, Doctor Who, and The Ramones, and their kitchen doesn’t look like anything’s been cooked in it for a long time.

Dennis & Lois is similarly packed with amazing stories, The time they flew to Manchester to see Oasis, barely made it to the show, then immediately caught the red-eye back to New York so they could make it to work the next day. (They’ve both been fired from day jobs, choosing seeing bands over going to the office.) Most of these stories are told in the film by both Dennis and Lois, but also the bands involved. There are interviews with The Charlatans, Badly Drawn Boy, A Place to Bury Strangers, The Mekons, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Happy Mondays, Peter Hook, The Stone Roses, John Grant, The Hold Steady, The Smiths’ Andy Rourke, El Vez, and more.

There is a bittersweet side to the film, too. Chris Sievey, the man behind Frank Sidebottom’s mask, lost a short battle with cancer during the filming of the documentary in 2010, and the last third of the film deals with Lois’ heath problems  — after going from doctor to doctor she’s finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Even though she watches from a wheelchair, she’s still seeing shows with Dennis — they haven’t lost their love for rock n’ roll, or each other.

“I have written songs since the first time i picked up an instrument, ’cause the idea was to express myself. Especially the guitar,” says Ivan Julian. “I’d come from a classical background where I was taught bassoon and saxophone. And the future of that meant playing somebody else’s music for the rest of your life. I thought, ‘No, I want to be able to pick up an instrument and play, when I’m feeling my own music.'” Geoffray Barbier’s new documentary is a nice hang with legendary New York guitarist Ivan Julian, best known for playing in Richard Hell & The Voidoids, but who has also played with The Clash, Matthew Sweet, The Bongos, Shriekback and more. While some of the ups and downs of Julian’s life are represented here — including his 2015 cancer diagnosis (he’s currently doing well) — but the film makes a point to focus on the music.

He talks about what he brought to Voidoids songs “Blank Generation” and “Love Comes in Spurts,” playing on The Clash’s “Sandinista” and his work as a producer and studio owner. The film also talks with friends and collaborators including Richard Hell, Vernon Reid, Alejandro Escovedo, The Fleshtones’ Peter Zaremba & Keith Streng, Garland Jeffreys, and The Bongos’ Richard Barone who says “Ivan can play the entire history of rock n’ roll in one solo.”

“You Don’t Know Ivan Julian” (Amazon)