“Dry Cleaning’s guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton, and Lewis Maynard had been friends and musical collaborators for years; at first Dry Cleaning was simply their latest project, formed after a karaoke night and based out of the miniscule garage next to the house of Maynard’s mum. One day, however, after a mutual friend’s exhibition, Dowse played some snippets of what they’d been working on to Florence Shaw, a visual artist, picture researcher and drawing lecturer. A few days later, she came to his flat armed with a copy of Michael Bernard Loggins’ Fears Of Your Life to read out over the music, and later still started contributing words of her own. Before long she was the group’s frontperson, her dryness, wit, and linguistic acrobatics acting as the perfect counter to the musicians’ taut instrumentals. Eventually they produced two thrilling EPs, 2019’s Sweet Princessand Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks. On stage, the contrast between the stillness of Shaw and the emphatic energy of Dowse and Maynard became even more pronounced. They swapped influences from Black Sabbath to Augustus Pablo to Yuzo Koshiro. “It all absorbed,” says Dowse. “Then when we got back to writing, we felt like we were drawing very organically from a collective palette.”
UK band Dry Cleaning will release their debut album, “New Long Leg”, on April 2nd and they were just on long-running BBC series Later with Jools Holland (via London’s Moth Club) to play the album’s lead single, “Scratchcard Lanyard.”
We’d really recommend checking out Dry Cleaning’s recent performance on Later… with Jools Holland! We mentioned it above, we’re mentioning it now and no doubt we’ll mention it again in a matter of days. It’s great, what can we say?!
Bay Area’s amplified and electric artful dodgers Fake Fruit have become one of the most exciting and talked about local acts as of late. With much fanfare surrounding the arrival off their self-titled release.
Post-punk lovers have a new act to follow in Fake Fruit, a Vancouver-bred, Bay Area-based quartet whose self-titled debut is out now on Rocks In Your Head Records. The band cite Pink Flag-era Wire, Pylon and Mazzy Star as influences, and Fake Fruit bears that synthesis out: You’ll find the first two acts’ versatile, hard-edged, bright- and fast-burning guitar rock (“Old Skin,” “Yolk”), as well as the last one’s engrossing quiet-loud dynamics (“Stroke My Ego”).
But that specific stylistic fusion is only a jumping-off point: “Keep You” finds singer and guitarist Hannah D’Amato’s melodic vocals overlaying hypnotic shoegaze guitars (courtesy of Alex Post on lead) and a clattering low end (Martin Miller on bass, Miles MacDiarmid on drums), while album closer “Milkman” finds D’Amato sharing vocal duties over deft guitar harmonics and a motorik backbeat. And an X factor in all this is Fake Fruit’s mordant lyricism: “My dog speaks more than you did tonight,” D’Amato sneers on “Keep You,” a laugh line on an album that shows serious potential.
Hannah D’Amato has been leading Fake Fruit though various line-ups and various cities for five years, but didn’t find her footing until landing in San Francisco with a steady, talented group of bandmates and a champion in Sonny Smith (Sonny & The Sunsets) who tried to get band signed to a proper indie before just putting this album out himself. “Fake Fruit” has the energy of a debut but the assuredness and nuance of a third album, using standard indie rock parts but making them feel brand new.
The Band:
Hannah D’Amato- Vox + Guitar Alex Post- Lead Guitar Miles MacDiarmid- Drums Martin Miller- Bass
“No Mutuals” , the new single from the debut record of Oakland’s Fake Fruit, available on Rocks In Your Head Records March 5th.
Like a scene from a medieval tarot card come to life in brilliant technicolor, Tele Novella’s psych-pop opus “Merlynn Belle” rides a pale horse through a lonesome land in search of something once lost. No strangers to realm-hopping psychedelia, the Lockhart, Texas duo’s musical craft reaches elegant new heights on their second full-length with the addition of dusty country-western accents and pastel baroque-pop flourishes fleshing out their romps between worlds. There’s something sweepingly cinematic about Tele Novella’s songs, which are painterly in their composition and evocative in their lyricism, the yearning tales of crystal witches, wishing shrines, and faded love prettily adorned with colourful vintage sounds straight out of a magic thrift shop and beautifully anchored by Natalie Ribbons’ velvety, emotionally-rich vocals. Though one could wax poetic about its many enchanting embellishments, Merlynn Belle’s truest revelation lies not in its aesthetics but in its intuitive understanding that resilience is as potent a spell as heartbreak, and twice as strong.
Tele Novella is a project out of Lockhart, Texas–a small town lost in time–where their classic and sincere pop song writing is slowly processed through a loner medieval-tonk machine and then captured on cassette 8-track. Their forthcoming record, Merlynn Belle, was the music they wanted to be making all along but didn’t know until it happened accidentally.
The Seed, The Vessel, The Roots And All, the highly anticipated full-length debut by New Pagans, finally arrived on March 19th. The Belfast band’s biting, noisy and raw brand of post-punk is inspired, striking an impressive balance between biting wit and an understated sweetness. This symmetry can be marked in single “Yellow Room,” as frontwoman Lyndsey McDougall effortlessly flows from pleasant verses into powerful, anthemic choruses and a snarling breakdown. The song lyrically takes inspiration from the iconic feminist novella The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and pulls from McDougall’s experiences feeling silenced as a new mother, advocating for an increase in parent-and-baby mental health programs in Northern Ireland.
New Pagans create music that’s not only vivid and engaging but also home to massive riffs and rare dynamics. The bands audible influences range from PJ Harvey to Sonic Youth while lyrically the band deliver protest songs, songs about women, songs about mothers and songs about conversations overheard on Belfast’s public transport systems. Their live shows are also something to behold and have just been the recipients of the best live act at The Northern Island Music Prize 2020. Music is the focus and an important vehicle for the healthy message the band promotes. New Pagans is a proud advocate for women’s rights, visibility and inclusion in the global music industry – an industry dogged with a history of stark gender inequality.
Debut album “The Seed, The Vessel, The Roots and All” out now via Big Scary Monsters.
As with anywhere in the world during these post-pandemic times, there are both positive and negative aspects to residing in Belgium right now. In Flanders, there is a rise in far-right extremism, rooted in the N-VA party and the Ons Land movement, which want Flemish independence from the homeland and an end to remaining lockdown curfews. But in more grounded Leuven, national virologist Marc Van Ranst has stressed science over skepticism in his regular TV broadcasts over the past year, calmly reassuring the populace that such low-contact isolation can truly save your life. And current Prime Minister Alexander De Croo is on the same cautious page, as he just curtailed Belgium’s scheduled Outdoor Plan for April, as the government worries that even schoolchildren can contract the mutating European virus and, sans symptoms, infect their unsuspecting families. Naturally, there’s a huge left/right uproar about the safety-conscious decision.
Following on from ‘Ease’, their shimmering debut EP, ‘Aurora’ is the coming of their first full-length and with it brings the ideal combination of Shoegaze’s most ethereal sounds and distorted haze. Isa Holliday’s vocals are instantaneously captivating as if from a dream-state; guitars weigh heavy in the atmosphere whilst drum passages vary the pace. This is a band confident in their undeniably unique brand of Shoegaze and Grunge.
The gloomy abrasion is both comforting and melancholic; something that many acts reviving this style have so often missed. Density in the instrumentation and swirling riffs means there is something here for everyone, and so take shelter in the violet murk of Aurora and witness one of the most promising new bands in Shoegaze.
“It’s one of the best shoegaze albums I’ve heard in a good long time.
Isa Holliday is glad she lives in Leuven. British born, she moved there as a kid when her chemical-engineer father was posted there for his job in water treatment. The family loved the place so much, they stayed, she recalls. And it’s where she first took up bass guitar and started playing in sludge-metal outfits like Hearserider, which eventually morphed into the conversely-ethereal new dream-pop combo Slow Crush, in which she also handles vocal duties. The band’s murky, 4AD-textured debut disc from 2018, “Aurora”, formerly out of print, has just been given a triumphant new re-release on Quiet Panic Stateside and Church Road Records in the UK and EU, and from its dense opener “Glow” to the frothy “Drift,” a thundering “Beach,” and the layered coda “Pale Skin,” it’s a perfect blend of cathedral-ringing guitars buttressing Holliday’s pneumatic, almost aqueous singing voice, which is only clearly discernible on the sole ballad, “Collide.” Dark, velvety music for even darker death-shrouded times, all conceived in Leuven’s center of sanity.
There’s one more upside to life in Leuven, she adds, cheerfully. “It’s the city where Stella Artois is brewed, and the brewery is actually only a few kilometers away from my house—I’m in the city of Stella!,” she says.
Originally released late June 2018 (from the album ‘Aurora’).
Fillmore Auditorium, July 25—30, 1967 On first glance, this classic Bonnie MacLean poster gives the appearance that it advertises the Doors and the Yardbirds on the same bill. Look closer, though, and you realize that each band played two separate three-night stands at the hallowed Fillmore. Openers Richie Havens and the James Cotton Blues Band, however, did appear on all six nights. MacLean, who passed away in 2020, ascended to her role as one of the in-house poster artists for Bill Graham in 1967, after Graham, inspired by the way she drew letters on a chalkboard, decided to surprise her with an easel and art supplies for Christmas. Between 1967 and 1971, she designed a total of 32 posters for the company, many of which are still celebrated among the most enduring images from the period.
The seventh studio album from Scottish rock duo Arab Strap—the first since 2005’s The Last Romance, not to mention their breakup the following year “As Days Get Dark” finds Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton reuniting to make music that braves new sonic territory while remaining true to the band’s ‘90s/’00s output. The result is a sparse, yet sprawling album “about hopelessness and darkness, but in a fun way,” as Moffat puts it. “Dark” is simply unavoidable as a descriptor for this record, a drum machine-driven, synth-studded exploration of where human beings turn for comfort in bleak times. Producer Paul Savage, with whom Arab Strap collaborated on their first, second and sixth albums, returns for As Days Get Dark, assisting the duo in wrangling the record’s many jazz, post-rock and electronic flourishes. Moffat’s signature Sprechgesang vocal delivery, in particular, gives Arab Strap’s comeback an of-the-moment feel, as do his erudite, blackly comic, frequently horny lyrics—these are songs like short stories, well-worth getting lost in, as engrossing as they are ominous.
Today Tune-Yards announce details of their fifth studio album, “Sketchy”. The 11-track record, which includes the single ‘Nowhere, Man’, will be released on 26th March 2021. Today, Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner release another preview from sketchy., the grounding single ‘hold yourself.’ and its animated accompanying video directed by Basa Studio.
Beneath the layered sounds of ‘hold yourself.’ lies Garbus’ most explicit lyrics she’s ever written; a clear-eyed moment of grief and simmering rage that builds from the song’s calming introduction to its explosive culmination. “This song is about feeling really betrayed, by my parents’ generation, and at the same time, really seeing how we are betraying the future,” Garbus explains.
Interrogating these systems and her role within them had left Merrill feeling heavy with guilt and grief and lost about how to move forward as a musician. But then she began to rediscover the joy in making music. Inspired by the Beastie Boys Book and Questlove’s Creative Quest, Merrill and Nate began jamming daily for hours in their home rehearsal studio “like athletes”. They ditched computer screens for live instruments (Merrill on drums, Nate on bass) and before long full songs started to emerge
Unlike the lyrical introspection of previous outing i can feel you…, on “Sketchy”. Merrill balances self-inspection and reflection with bombastic rallying cries, reminiscent of the furious tones of early days Tune-Yards. The result is a colourful and joyous record with lyrics that cut to the bone. “I started remembering that people come to us to be entertained, to move, to feel joy. And together, I think, we can wake up.”
Tune-Yards’ last release i can feel you creep into my private life, was a self-reflexive question mark at the end of a decade of outspoken, polyphonic indie music. From 2009 to 2018, Tune-Yards (both Merrill and her partner and collaborator Nate Brenner) released four critically acclaimed albums, travelled the world relentlessly to play live shows, and composed the psychedelic score to Boots Riley’s surrealist cinematic masterpiece Sorry To Bother You. “We had really been non-stop hustling,” Merrill reflects. “And when we’re hustling, we’re complicit in all of the systems that I really don’t believe in.”
Today, Tune-Yards release their fifth studio album,sketchy. The album features previously released singles ‘nowhere, man’, ‘hold yourself.’ and ‘hypnotized’. The latter two of which were performed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel Live! respectively marking a visual representation of the depths of the album – ‘hold yourself.’ was a vibrant, buoyant performance while the band crafted a moving and remarkable performance of ‘hypnotized’ that channelled Merrill’s puppeteer past.
The 11-track record balances self-inspection and reflection with bombastic rallying cries, reminiscent of the furious tones of early days Tune-Yards. The result is a colourful and joyous record with lyrics that cut to the bone. Merrill Garbus says of the album, “I started remembering that people come to us to be entertained, to move, to feel joy. And together, I think, we can wake up.”
+ Pre-ordersketchy. on limited yellow opaque vinyl, standard black vinyl, and CD, from the 4AD Store here + Yellow vinyl pre-orders from 4AD Store will receive a limited signed 12×12 print whilst stocks last +Getsketchy. on exclusive blue translucent vinyl from your local indie store + + Pre-order and pre-save on the platform of your choice here +
Garage rock supergroup The Surfing Magazines have unveiled their new single ‘Sports Bar’, the first release from their freshly announced Badgers of Wymeswold, out 30th July via Moshi Moshi Records: https://moshimoshi.plctrmm.to/SB Consisting of one half of Slow Club and two thirds of The Wave Pictures, The Surfing Magazines’ primary influences are Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground and all the great surf guitar music of the 1960s. They burst onto the scene with their eponymous debut album in 2017, a lauded LP described by Record Collector Mag as “a vintage-yet-modern rock’n’roll classic”.
Marking their first release since 2017, ‘Sports Bar’ combines rumbling bass, slick vocals and witty lyricism to masterful effect. In typically mischievous fashion, the band describe it as “Like The Modern Lovers if Marc Bolan had sung lead vocals instead of Jonathan Richman, with a bridge ripped out of Pavement, only better than any of those people’s music” and in doing so strike a curious balance of self-deprecation and self-belief – a quality that permeates their music as well as their description of it. Mixing the noir surf textures of 1960s garage rock along with westcoast sun beaten harmony pop, the 17-track Badgers of Wymeswold follows the acclaimed debut and is to be released July this year. The London based foursome recorded the album at Ranscomb Studio in Rochester in February last year before the start of the first UK lockdown.
This week started today, at 9am on the dot with the announcement of Dinked Number 111 – Badgers of Wymeswold – from the most excellent Surfing Magazines, one of our most favourite of all the super, super-groups. Consisting of one half of Slow Club and two thirds of The Wave Pictures, The Surfing Magazines’ primary influences are Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground and all the great surf guitar music of the 1960s.
The three members of Australian trio The Goon Sax are keen to talk about the band’s second album, a meditative romp about breaking up and moving on called “We’re Not Talking”. for Louis Forster, Riley Jones, and James Harrison, a Goon Sax song speaks for all of them. “We really like honest music, and so being sincere and honest is something we wanted to do,” Forster explains. “If nothing else, that was achieved. Sometimes I don’t know whether the other things we wanted [the album] to be [happened], but we got there on the honesty.”
The members of the Goon Sax were only 17 when their first album, “Up to Anything”, was released — it positively ached with growing pains and almost every song was cringingly real as if it was cribbed from a diary and set to sparsely hooky guitar pop. After time spent touring the world, gaining experience, and graduating high school, the band set out to make a more mature second record. For 2018’s We’re Not Talking, they hired Cameron Bird and James Cecil of Architecture in Helsinki to produce, brought in some string players, and paid far more attention to the arrangements of the songs. They wanted the record to hew closely to their idea of what a pop record should sound like and despite some clashes with Bird and Cecil, who have different ideas about the concept of pop, this is a wonderfully poppy record in the best sense of the word. The songs are bright and bold, the strings swoop in occasionally to lift the songs into the skies, and there’s a refreshing lightness to everything that makes the still-somewhat-difficult nature of the subject matter go down more easily. They managed to build up and expand up their sound without losing the core of what made them special. Another change was adding drummer Riley Jones to the song writing roster to join Louis Forster and James Harrison. She also steps up to the mike to sing lead vocals on “Strange Light,” one of the album’s quieter moments.
For a band with high expectations, the three share a healthy level of modesty. “Natural selection’s going to get [our band],” says Forster, even though industry heads have kept tabs on him for the past four years as the son of Robert Forster from The Go-Betweens. His mate Harrison, who penned some of the most humbling moments on the album, still doubts his own humility.
Still, there’s lots of hard work in We’re Not Talking that the band can take pride in. The nuanced layers of strings and percussion interwoven across this album took almost two years to stitch together; and even then, the band spent another three weeks threading out the extra fluff. Forster plays this down at first-“We sucked out all the fun,” he quips-but Jones insists that they’ve shaped the record into a “rocket.”
They can also all agree that the old wounds confessed in the lyrics still fester. Forster wasn’t fibbing on “We Can’t Win,” where the protagonist cries as the bus drives past his girlfriend’s house. “The day that song came out, I was having a walk,” he says. “I don’t really walk that often, [and I was] right exactly where I was walking when I wrote those lyrics. It pretty much felt terrible as well. I felt terrible again, three years after that.
Both Forster and Harrison sound more confident as vocalists, especially Harrison. He sometimes sounded like he was hiding behind artifice on their debut, which made his songs less effective. The improvement in his vocals give his songs a boost, and they’ve gone from being skippable to some of the highlights. The rumbling folk-pop of “Love Lost” is a brilliant sketch of loneliness and confusion, “A Few Too Many” is a wonderfully breezy tune, and his duet with Jones on “Til the End” is a perfect balance of his tartness and her sweetness. Once again, Forster’s songs are the biggest and most immediate. “Make Time 4 Love” is the kind of expansive indie pop Belle and Sebastian forgot how to make years ago, “Sleep EZ” channels the early Go-Betweens and adds a giant hook, and “Get Out” is a wound-up rocker that shows the band has a tougher side.
Throughout the record, the production team of Bird and Cecil give the songs some depth and greater scope, adding nice touches like cowbell and keyboards that make the songs leap out of the speakers. It’s a great combination of sound and songs that makes good on the promise the band showed on their debut, and shows them navigating the numerous pitfalls of growing up as a band in fine fashion.
The Fat Angel Sings 