Activity recently shared this track “White Phosphorus,” a b-side from their debut album “Unmask Whoever”, named as one of the best rock albums of 2020. Much like their LP, the New YorkCity band’s latest track has a pervading eeriness, complete with hushed vocals, a steady synth hum and elusive guitar lines—not to mention bleak lyrics like “decorate the walls with horse insides.” Its twisted drama is quite cinematic, and their instrumental sprawl is nothing if not absorbing.
This is actually the first song we recorded but it didn’t work on the album. Putting it out NOW on Bandcamp only. It’s called “White Phosphorus.” We hope you enjoy!
One night in June of 1999, we were sitting in Jason’s tiny house in Modesto, California when he mentioned that he could sit down at the piano and play the whole of what would be The Sophtware Slump front to back. This meant he was (finally!) ready to begin recording. The piano was in the kitchen then so we sat and he started to play. Distracted by beer and conversation, we didn’t make it all the way through.
Early last year, as we discussed if we should commemorate the 20th anniversary I recalled the memory and wondered what the album would have sounded like before all that wonderful production, before one note had been committed to tape.
Today we announce The Sophtware Slump…..on a wooden piano. Recorded at Jason’s home during Pandemia 2020. It will arrive digitally November 20th on Dangerbird Records and as part of a four piece vinyl boxset of the original album and most of the b-sides and odds and ends from that era, many appearing on vinyl for the first time here. And a standalone physical release to follow in early 2021.
Grandaddy formed in 1992 and have released five official LPs, most recently 2017’s Last Place. In its 20th anniversary feature on The Sophtware Slump, Stereogum summed up the album, and Grandaddy, with the question: “What if West Coast indie, but sci-fi?” In an age of unprecedented connectivity, these songs spoke to significant solitude. Grandaddy members include Jason Lytle, Aaron Burtch, Jim Fairchild, Tim Dryden, and the late Kevin Garcia, who passed away in 2017.
The Sophtware Slump. Grandaddy’s second album, released 20 years ago today, essentially answered the question: What if West Coast indie, but sci-fi? Or, given the music’s vast prog-rock horizons and Lytle’s skepticism toward all the technology encroaching on Earth’s natural order: What if Radiohead, but West Coast indie? Grandaddy hailed from Modesto — Spanish for “modest” — and the punny title was appropriately self-deprecating. It made a lot of thematic sense, too:
This was a concept LP about the slouching citizens of a disappointing dystopia, trapped on a tapped-out planet full of useless junk. But far from a dreaded second-album misstep, The Sophtware Slump stands as a quirky, ambitious landmark in the overgrown ruins of Y2K-era indie.
Lytle formed Grandaddy in 1992 after his burgeoning pro skateboard career was unceremoniously ended by a knee injury. Early gigs at skate parks plus a longstanding devotion to the Maximumrocknroll radio show led to Grandaddy playing up tempo punk rock at first, but by the time they released their debut album Under The Western Freeway in 1997, their style had softened into a rustic yet electronic spin on the scrappy underground guitar noodlings of Pavement and Built To Spill. The album’s best, most enduring song, “A.M. 180,” paired fuzzed-out power chords with a deviously catchy keyboard riff that sounded futuristic and amateurish all at once. The other tracks toyed around with a less overtly poppy variations of this aesthetic, a sort of ramshackle space-age slacker rock that, as it turned out, lent itself perfectly to songs about the American West decaying into a technological wasteland.
Such is the genius of The Sophtware Slump. Jason Lytle had established an entire alternate universe in sound and substance, strung together in peculiar vignettes that left much to the imagination. It was a triumph, but Grandaddy weren’t done evolving yet. Three years later, they’d return with Sumday, an album that ditched the mythology and experimentation in favor of ’70s-inspired hi-fi splendor. At the time, Lytle called it “a reflection of everything we’ve been working towards” and “the ultimate Grandaddy record.” Maybe, but some might argue that the ultimate Grandaddy record is the one they rolled out in the year 2000, the grand treatise about the tortured love triangle between mankind, his planet, and the works of his hand. Like the clunky machinery that dots its landscape, The Sophtware Slump may now seem like an outdated relic, but boot it up and you’ll discover it still works wonders.
Wishing you all as much health and happiness as you can muster during this often trying time. With love from Jim, Jason, Aaron and Tim. And Kevin.
Grandaddy really figured out their sound and worldview with their fantastic second album, featuring frontman Jason Lytle’s absurdist tales of mundanity and stress in our increasingly tech-reliant world, set to a blend of ’90s indie rock, glammy synthphonic flourishes (Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev’s influence loomed large in 2000), and twangy country. The concept album imagines a world full of alcoholic robots, sad computer programmers, lost pilots, stuntman Evil Knevil, and forests made of discarded appliances that Lytle makes relatable with his empathetic style and a hard drive full of earworm spacerock pop…somehow it all sounds even more relevant now than it did in Y2K.
For those who have followed McNally’s nearly twenty year career, the essence of what she brings to Americana Blues music is all packed into her performance. McNally’s voice oozes with nostalgia of Blues music history to almost hypnotize and transports her audience back to a time when life was simple and music was outlaw. With a large and growing catalogue of songs and a star-studded list of peers with whom she has written, recorded and toured with, McNally continues to create music that transcends.
When Shannon McNally signed with the artist collective Blue Rose Music, she was given the option of recording … well, whatever she wanted. Which would be a dream come true for most of us, corporate backing with no demands on our artistic output. But where many singer/songwriters would choose to record their own material, McNally—who already has several releases of original material under her belt going back nearly two decades—chose to record not only an album of covers, but an album of songs originally cut by one of the most iconic country legends ever, and a male legend at that.
The Waylon Sessions is McNally’s upcoming album of Waylon Jennings material on Compass Records, set to drop on May 28. With tracks like “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,” “I’ve AlwaysBeen Crazy,” and the current lead single, “Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This,” McNally enlisted friends Rodney Crowell, Buddy Miller, Lukas Nelson, and Jennings’ widow Jessi Colter to help out, as well as a top-notch band assembled by guitarist Kenny Vaughan of Marty Stuart’s Fabulous Superlatives.
Listen to “I Ain’t Living Long Like This” Written by Rodney Crowell Made Famous by Waylon Jennings sung by Shannon McNally on the new album, ‘The Waylon Sessions,’ out on Compass Records.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band have shared a new ensemble rendition of Bob Dylan‘s 1964 classic “The Times They Are A-Changin”. This new cover features contributions from Jason Isbell, Steve Earle, Rosanne Cash, and The War and Treaty and serves as a fundraiser for Feeding America.
In the song, released via Bandcamp last week, NGDB leader Jeff Hanna bookends the track with the first and final verses. Between those two ends, each vocalist delivers a unique vocal performance that is able to make a song so iconic and familiar appear in a new light. From Earle’s gravely outlaw country drawl to Cash’s powerful ballad gusto, each singer is able to put their own mark on the song’s timeless lyrics.
Though the track, originally released on Dylan’s 1964 album of the same name, may seem older than time itself, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was founded just two years after the song’s release.
“I’ve been a fan of Bob Dylan’s since I was a teenager, living in California,” Hanna said. “I was fortunate enough to see him sing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ in concert the year the song was released. It moved me deeply then and that hasn’t changed. The lyrics are as relevant today as they were when Dylan wrote it. Maybe even more so.”
Consider purchasing it via Bandcamp to help Feeding America. Each donation of $1 can provide up to 10 meals for children, families, and individuals facing hunger across the county.
Released February 5th, 2021 Original Composition by: Bob Dylan
Island are back with a new tune for a wintry February. ‘Octopus’, out now via Frenchkiss Records, is a sweet, melodic indie-pop delight from the quartet, written during lockdown last year and produced by Thom Yorke collaborator Mikko Gordon.
London four-piece ISLAND are an alternative guitar band whose history is characterized by old friendships, close bonds, and an almost telepathic mutual understanding. Forming as teenagers when frontman Rollo Doherty’s acoustic bedroom project was treated to the boisterous backing of guitarist Jack Raeder, bassist James Wolfe and drummer Toby Richards in a dingy windowless practice room where they began to painstakingly shape a sound which combined darkly twisting instrumental with a sweetly melodic song-writing nous that belied their age.
“‘Octopus’ describes the feeling of looking back on rebellious teenage years from a time where an impulse to cause trouble has been replaced with new sentiments,” say the band. “The song ends by flirting with the idea of reverting back to old ways, and getting back to making trouble.”
Last October, releasing “Sentimetal”, the debut album by London-by-way of Argentina three-piece, Value Void. Remember the band from when we posted the track ‘Back in the Day’ in May. That song features on the album, alongside ‘Babeland’, which to these ears, it conjures some kind of magical interzone between Breeders’ jangle and Women’s hypnotic creepiness. Not a bad place to be.
Sentimental is available on limited edition green vinyl (first pressing limited to 500 copies) and the usual CD and digital formats. Paz Maddio and Marta Zabala grew up with each other in Azul, a small town south of Buenos Aires, where the seeds of this project were sown. They collaborate in the same way that Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote songs, with Marta penning lyrics then taking them to Paz to spin them in to music.
Marta first came to London on tour with the super-slanted art punks Los Cripis, where she met Luke Tristram (of Cop, Score and Owner) who released their record via his Unwork label. Paz followed to join them and scrape rent from the city’s bars and cafes. By early 2017 the three of them were holed up in practice rooms, Luke adding Evens-esque basslines that laid concrete to their minimalist guitar-lead pop songs. Originally as WVS, they started playing shows with bands that had once orbited the tiny Power Lunches venue in Hackney and, since its death, were now to be found on bills at DIY Space, New River Studios and other dusty successors of its autonomous, cheap drink, creative-friendly spirit. In common with bands like Shopping, rudimentary surroundings and resources fed into nonetheless ambitious, hooky work. Songs such as “Teen For Him,” a self-effacing lark importing strains of Leslie Gore and the Velvets; the minimal, Guided by Voices-reminiscent chug of “Bariloche” and “Cupids Bow,” an up tempo, Breeders-esque standout, were lynch pins of a pummeling, inspired set.
In April of that year, they recorded with Euan Hinshelwood of Young Husband at the studio TVT, in an overlooked corner the other side of Blackheath, tucked under giant knots of flyover on the way to Charlton in South East London.
Upon deciding to flesh the songs out for a full length, they returned to TVT studios with Euan in April this year, tweaking the mix and laying down two new songs: “Mind,” a down tempo lullaby/lament in which the band track into the territory of early St. Vincent, Grouper or Julianna Barwick, supported by a raw dirge that blossoms in feedback, and “The Deluge,” which is also reflective but structured by a roaming curiosity and big chorus seeking road movie oblivion.
The album is instantly affecting, with an ease and clarity that suits the elegance of the lyrics: coded love songs and cool reflections on life which are all the more vulnerable and touching sung in Paz Maddio’s lilting, ultrachromatic voice – a ceramic-sharp diagonal transatlantic on a pure open tone, with subtle waves of vibrato at its top end. It’s a particular heart breaker on tracks such as “Babeland” and “Dead Ladies Lament”.
Restricted to a palette of drums, bass, guitar and double tracked vocals caught on 2″ tape, coloured here and there with a daub of feedback or a passage of ground-shifting tape delay, this is the sort of thing that gets called “stripped back”. It speaks to the powerful understatement at the heart of their style, but it fails to capture the crafty, delicate, taught and spaced-out ride Value Void subject you to: a species of NY proto-punk and Californian post-hardcore born miraculously from London’s piss swilling street level like religious icons in toast.
LostMap RecordsSulka is the lo-fi melodic scuzz-rock song writing and recording project of Glasgow-based Lukas Clasen. His debut single for LostMap, ‘Fear It’, was released in October, 2020 on digital services and as part of LostMap’s subscription service The PostMap Club.
“Take Care” which will be released in January 2021. The Album “‘Fear It’ channels a lot bands I listened to in my late teens,” says Lukas, “Cloud Nothings, The Cribs, Dinosaur Jr, Elliott Smith for example. So it has a kind of nostalgic but timeless feel to it for me. Lyrically there’s a lot of angst and turbulence in there which I think sets up some of the themes of the album quite well. I’m especially grateful to my friend Niamh from Moonsoup for adding some last-minute backing vocals which makes it a million times more listenable to me.”
Sulka has been putting out a steady stream of albums and EPs since 2017 via various local cassette labels including Gold Mold, Death Collective, Common and Negative Hope. Luka’s songwriting draws its main inspiration from figures of the late 90s and early 00s alternative scenes; Elliott Smith-esque acoustic compositions, scuzzy upbeat indie-rock tracks reminiscent of The Cribs and experiments in sound collage in the vein of Badly Drawn Boy.
The dynamic and stylistic range of the tracks are kept coherent through a DIY home recording aesthetic and a consistent lyrical tone. Throughout the tracks, raw personal subject matter such as relationships and mental health are often explored with a mixture of sincerity and tongue-in-cheek word play. Sulka has regularly performed live (both solo and as a full band), with highlights including opening slots for like-minded acts PAWS, Sorry, Current Joys and Jeffrey Lewis & the Voltage.
This release was available exclusively via our membership series, PostMap Club, during the month of January 2021. To keep up with all our future releases, sign up from just £3/month: lostmap.com/club
Hand Drawn Dracula Records (HDD) is pleased to release the debut solo album, “On Arrival”, by Kyle Edward Connolly. An HDD alumni and Toronto music veteran, Kyle has released projects on the label as co-founder of Wish and The Seams as well as playing with Beliefs/Breeze, before joining Columbia / Sub Pop recording artist Orville Peck on bass for the ShowPony and Pony releases.
With tinges of Chris Cohen, Neil Young, and Gram Parsons/The Flying Burrito Brothers, Kyle has developed his own unique indie country rock style heard throughout “On Arrival”, and enlisted friends from TOPS, Darlene Shrugg, Milk Lines, and The Highest Order to perform on the album. Kyle recorded and finished his debut around a busy touring schedule, with some help on the production from long time bandmate/friend, Josh Korody (Dilly Dally, Tallies, Partner).
“On Arrival” is a spontaneous album trying to capture a feeling and moment in time. Recorded from the comforts of home in Toronto, periodically over the course of a year, using outdated and at best semi-functional recording equipment. Friends stopping by now and then, inevitably, would also participate even if it was just to capture a fleeting glimpse of an idea.
It’s an album that was also recorded in the middle of a years long tour (see Orville Peck). A rare few days off were spent in pre winter Berlin, getting down on tape what musical ideas I could with the help of some friends from Tel-Aviv. Sessions flew by through a cloudy haze with linguistic barriers and late night jazz.
After some time I collected the tapes off the shelf, brought them back to Toronto and sorted through the tracks. Finally finished off and mixed with long time friend and collaborator Josh Korody at Candle Recordings. A quick collection of songs, On Arrival. This for now, more to come.” – Kyle
The B-side – a cover of Mark Fry’s “The Witch” whose album “Dreaming with Alice” released in 1972 is a cult classic. The Chemistry Set have given the song a twist, with a Gregorian Chant intro, that is taken from The Bee Gee’s acid drenched 1967 song “Every Christian Lion-Hearted Soldier”. Mellotron flutes, Iranian Setar and Acoustic guitars abide, faithful to the original vibe but then heads into “Freak-out” territory a la “Interstellar Overdrive” meets The Red Krayola. which, even this early in the year, is going to rank this among everyone’s top singles of the year, a folky, spooky, haunted slice of occasionally Floydy psych (it’s that organ) that morphs so gently into a pounding freak out of the kind you wish every record sounded like. The Chemistry Set have always rated high on the Modern Psych-o-meter, but this time, they’ve hit the nail so hard on the head that a time machine could not make you happier.
Flip it over – and oh, what the hell, let’s pretend it’s a double a-side. Because “Paint Me a Dream” effectively picks up where “The Witch” left off, with the Set already sparking alchemical magic, but this time heading towards a shoe-gazey kind of Byrdsy sound, with guitars on stun and a dynamic guitar solo spilling fuzz all over the carpet. this is truly wonderful.
Brand new single from The Psychedelic Scientists – released 29th January on the Los Angeles “Hypnotic Bridge” label. Limited edition 7″ vinyl. Available in the UK –
Think of the Edgar Broughton Band and you immediately remember the hairy freak combo that emerged out of the tail end of psychedelia, to join Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies at the apex of the early 70s festival underground. Five albums cut for Harvest between 1969 (Wasa Wasa) and 1975 (Oora) contain some of the most dramatically out there rock of the age, and some of the most brilliantly conceived, as well – who else would medley the Shadows “Apache” with Captain Beefheart’s “Drop Out Boogie”?
Less feted are the albums that the band produced over the next seven years three studio sets and a live album to prove that even at the end of the decade, the Broughtons were a concert force to be reckoned with. Those records are the ones you’ll find here… Bandages (1975), Live Hits Harder! (1979), Parlez Vous English? (1979) and Superchip – the Final Silicone Solution (1982). And if you’re not familiar with them, let this be your introduction.
Bandages is the runt of the litter, recorded as the band struggled with both management problems and their new label… which just happened to be owned by their management. It definitely has its moments, but coming after the minor disappointment of Oora, it suggested that the band had reached the end of its tether. And so it had – the following year saw the Broughtons embark on their farewell tour.
A live album was planned, but it was three years before the tapes emerged as Live Hits Harder!, a savagely enjoyable collection even if, for Broughtons aficionados, it was recorded five years too late. Released only in Switzerland, it dribbled into the UK on import, and the story was over. Which means, nobody could have predicted what would happen next, as the band reformed at the end of 1978 and set to work on what can only be described as one of their masterpieces.
Parlez Vous English? was everything its most spirited predecessors are, but seen through a sheen that recognized all that had changed since the band was last in the studio, on record and in society. Released under the abbreviated name of the Broughtons, it’s an electrifying album, sharp and witty, demanding and demonstrative. The record did nothing chart wise, but it proved that the Broughtons were back.
And then they were gone again, vanishing for three years before re-emerging with the final album in this box, the conceptual Superchip.
Again the band had been paying attention to what was occurring outside of their studio. Synths burble and bleep all over, with the opening “Metal Storm” alone truly remarking upon the band’s former chaos. But it works. The lyrics are as crafty as ever, and Edgar’s always going to sound like Edgar, no matter what’s going on around him. And those are the elements that drag the electronics out of their then-customary roost in alienation and ice, to give Superchip an energy and an atmosphere that only John Foxx, of the contemporary wave of synth warriors, had even come close to capturing. It remains a joy.
It’s also the only album in the box to include a bonus track, the period b-side “the Virus,” but that’s barely a deficiency. Three of the four albums here demand a place in your collection, regardless of how many Broughton discs you already own; and the fourth (Bandages) will swiftly prove itself to be more than makeweight as well. Indeed, of all the early-mid seventies proggy favourites who persisted in making albums after punk scorched the ears… and that’s everyone from Caravan to ELP, from Genesis to Yes… the Broughtons truly were one of the precious few that were worth still listening to.
The Fat Angel Sings 