Liverpool’sAmber Jay: ‘Stay the Same’ is out now, ahead of debut EP ‘Never Too Far From A Dark Thought’.
“‘Stay The Same’ is a classic heartbreak track. It encapsulates that pining feeling for someone when a relationship has ended and whatever you try to do to fix it just makes the other person more and more distant. Kind of like when you’re swimming and there’s like a lilo in the water and every time you try and wade towards it to get on, the water’s ripples from your movement pushes it further and further away. This track was super fun to make and the first track we recorded. I was so happy with how it sounded that it made me want to make an EP. So, without this track there would be no EP!” .
My EP ‘Never Too Far From A Dark Thought’ which comes out March 3rd
Fast-rising Australian four-piece Spacey Jane have announced they are set to take their debut album “Sunlight” on a huge national tour. With numerous shows across the country planned, cancelled, rescheduled and cancelled again in 2020, the Fremantle act are keen to get the show on the road with over two months of gigs scheduled right across the country.
Western Australians fans might not have waited as long for the chance to see the band live, but expect demand to be high for tickets to shows at Fremantle Arts Centre on Friday, April 9 and Mandurah Performing Arts Centre on Friday, May 14.
Spacey Jane kicked off 2021 with a bang, taking out the No2 spot in triple j’s Aussie chart with “Booster Seat”. Three more tracks from Sunlight made the countdown, with Weightless at , Straightfaced and Skin placing’s, marking a momentous and celebratory day for the band. They backed it up last week taking on triple j’s Like a Version with a cover of The Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun,” along with a performance of “Booster Seat”.
Released in June last year, Sunlight voted Album of the Year in the triple j Listener’s Poll. And just a few days ago, one of their earliest singles Feeding The Family achieved Gold Status.
The band have revealed how pleased they are to finally be taking the full album on a tour, stating “we’re so excited to finally have the opportunity to play these songs on the road! It’s been a long time since we’ve managed to tour Australia, and we’re all rearing to go! These will be our biggest shows to date, in venues we’ve only dreamed of playing – see you out there.”
Spacey Jane will be joined on the tour by another of Perth’s most prized musical acts Carla Geneve, who has just announced the exciting news that her debut album Learn to Like It is coming out in April.
New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based singer/songwriter Sarah Mary Chadwick’s previous effort, 2020’s “Please Daddy”, if you were feeling fragile, you could almost insulate yourself from her painfully honest song writing style, training your focus only on, say, the soaring horns on “When Will Death Come,” the blues-rock boogie of “Let’s Fight,” or the wistfully jazzy flute of “The Heart and Its Double.” But there’s no hiding from the broken heart of Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby—Chadwick fully embraces emotional catharsis, stripping her songs back to solo piano and vocals only, and you have no choice but to follow suit. Just as she worked wonders on a 147-year-old pipe organ for her 2019 record “The Queen Who Stole the Sky”, Chadwick crafts an album of untold power not in spite of her focus on one instrument, but because of it. With “Please Daddy’s” diffuse textures out of the equation, the songwriter can only take a fearless inventory of her interior turmoil, turning a truly harrowing series of events—after the deaths of her father and a close friend, and the dissolution of a long-term relationship, Chadwick attempted to take her own life in 2019, just weeks before the Ennui sessions began—into an album that will knock your heart on its ass.
Chadwick’s unusual vocal delivery and unsparing, darkly funny song writing combine to make Ennui’s stark sensibility unforgettable, and Chadwick never flinches, wondering of her struggles at one point, “Is it all for this song? / If it is, is that wrong?” It will take all of your inner fortitude to answer her.
‘Every Loser Needs A Mother’ is the first single to be lifted from Sarah Mary Chadwick’s forthcoming 7th LP ‘Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby’ out February 5th 2021 via Ba Da Bing Records & Rice Is Nice Records.
They’re the psychedelic four-piece who hail from Sydney, Australia, ready to whisk you off onto a magical mystery tour of their own. An attempt at untangling hazy, drunken memories from a heavy weekend down the beach – whether it be Bondi or Brighton. After forming in 2015, the pals are fast making a name for themselves with their dreamy psych-rock, with singles Cheesy Love Song and Tangerine highlighting how far they can push their sonic sound.
Lazy Eyes have announced the upcoming release of their second EP, dropping a new single and sharing tour dates. The band return in 2021 today with a new single, ‘Where’s My Brain???’, the first taste of The Lazy Eyes’ next chapter. In a press release, the band explained that ‘Where’s My Brain???’ was written during the band’s formative years, at a time “when the setlist was lacking fast paced, energetic tracks” ,
“We needed that one last song that the audience could mosh and get sweaty to,” they said. “The song is loosely about losing your mind over something and wanting to have a tantrum, but really it’s just a jam.” . The psych-rock Sydney outfit dropped their debut EP, ‘EP1’, in June of last year. Upon its release, NME said in its review that The Lazy Eyes “coast from dazed pop to shameless love ballads, claiming pole position for the next mainstage psych outfit along the way”.
“These Aussie teens are blazing a fresh path for psych-pop with a mesmeric throwback sound – and as that dialogue might suggest, they’re not cutting any corners.”
The Lazy Eyes make no qualms about wearing their psych-rock influences on their sleeves, but do so with the kind of cheekiness only a teen band could get away with (take the self-deprecating title of the charming ‘Cheesy Love Song’, for example). Written largely during their high school years, The Lazy Eyes’ sole EP already provokes equal measures of nostalgia and “cringeness” for the group – a sign they’re ready to evolve and carve their own path to the big league.
A cross between The Flaming Lips and The Beach Boys. Wonderful stuff.
The Lazy Eyes are a four-piece psychedelic rock band based in Sydney, Australia. The band are Harvey Geraghty (vocals, guitar, keyboard), Itay Shachar (vocals, guitar), Leon Karagic (bass) and Noah Martin (drums).
Composed right before lock-down ensued, Spielbergs reunited with their debut album This Is Not the End producer, Tord Øverland Knudsen, for the song. And the new track is as eruptive as their previous works. With snarling guitars, fast-paced drumming, Lead singer and guitarist Mads Baklien explains the inspiration behind the track in a press release:
“I find myself looking back a lot. Looking back in regret, looking back in anger. It leads to nothing. So I’ve decided to look forward. But the only problem is I don’t know where the fuck I’m going. So I just keep doing what I’ve always done. Going nowhere.”
Spielberg’s: Noisy indie rockers on hold, “We were really well underway and have recorded a number of songs. Unfortunately, Corona and Mads’s abscess with subsequent fistula has made things stop completely. All of 2020 has only been an endless start-stop-stop situation. Admittedly, there is no shortage of songs, we just have to have the opportunity to gather at the rehearsal and in the studio so that we can finish things,” explains the Oslo trio Spielbergs. When we started playing together, we struggled to agree on what we should be called. Well into the recording process of what ended up as our first EP, we still had no band name. We had a song called the Spielbergs song (“Ghost Boy”) in which the songtitle was inspired by Spielberg’s “Close Encounter.”
So we have to prepare ourselves for even longer waits before we can get more delightful melodic noise rockers from the band that was nominated for the towering harmonies and energetic drive on their debut album “This is Not The End” in 2019. We’d love to know more of the musical heat and the bombastic tunes in the meeting points between indie, power pop and post-hardcore punk. In 2020.
Read more about frustrations over the year 2020, lack of interest in technical things and music equipment, about how the band was misunderstood by its American fans and about great musical freedom.
Norwegian power-pop trio Spielbergs combine the finest elements of Superchunk, Jimmy Eat World and Sonic Youth and bring them to life in a way that’s as fresh as it is nostalgic. Their debut should hold a grab-bag of punk-pop treasures recently reflected by single release ‘Five On It’.
Al Riggs is back today with the new single “American Pencil” off of his upcoming album “I Got A Big Electric Fan To Keep Me Cool While I Sleep” from the opening notes there is a sense that this song is going to be full of dread. Those guitar chords are full of doom, the organ that comes in is haunting, and the drums are powerful. Al’s thoughts on what an artist is in today’s world are biting and stick with you long after you’ve listened to the track.
There is a big, honking, humming box fan in the bedroom of our barely-insulated century-old Durham house. Like most meaningless noise, it is white.
Noisier than this fan are the earworms that pervade the space. They’re in the walls, the floorboards, and even the couch cushions. The earworms–let’s call them Strum, Kick, and Wail–nest in our second bedroom: a de facto recording studio. I try not to interrupt the work. But upon hearing the demos for piano-powered “America’s Pencil” and the rhythmically elusive “Emo Revival,” I kicked the door in and, wearing little more than a handful of shaving cream, proclaimed “that’s the hit!” But they knew that already.
Al speaking about the song: “This is a song about being delusional and in your twenties and thinking you’re discovering poetic bitterness for the very first time. You sort of make every single thing in your life interesting for the sake of hopefully putting it in a song one day. Eventually some people learn that no one really cares about the sandwich you ate or the girl at the bookstore with the cool hair, and then some people just write ‘Universal Themes’.”
Those we know and/or love are present and accounted for. A.C. Niver’s pure tones make “Wishing and Clapping” a Three Stooges-esque harmonic casserole while Chuck Johnson’s pedal-steel witchery makes “Blighted By the Light” as dreamlike and borderless as a Carolina Country Night. Neither queer nor country enough in their own right, Al booked two of the gayest fabric samples in the business Patrick “Lavender Country” Haggerty and Paisley Fields to plug up the holes in “Ragged But Right.”
Like shuffled pages from random chapters of a yet-to-be-finished novel about being an old queer married couple (in our 20s and 30s yet), the sonic scraps have been dropping clues to what was to come: I Got A Big Electric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep.
Ireland’s music scene is thriving right now, especially in the post-punk pocket. Like Fontaines D.C. and The Murder Capital, Dublin’s TV People are another band destined to breakthrough. Their brooding, claustrophobic sound is reminiscent of early Interpol, with a lyrical, relatable rawness as frontman Paul Donohoe sings of life’s uncertainty. 2020 has been a strange year to be in a band. We have really missed being able to play in front of a live audience and being able to create together as often as we would have liked, but we’re extremely grateful for all of the support and opportunities that we’ve gotten throughout the year. At the start of the year, we were gigging constantly and building great momentum. We had lots of plans for the year and were really excited about what could come from it.
Singles Kitchen Sinking and Time Eats Up were recorded by Dan Doherty at Dublin’s Darklands Audio, the same studio where Fontaines D.C laid down their early tracks.
Our normal style of writing had always been to meet up in our rehearsal room and improvise ideas until something stuck. Because lockdown forced us apart, we became more reliant on putting demos together by sending ideas back and forth to each other. Writing like this forced us to be creative in a new way. Every member of the band has stepped outside of their own instrument and we’re all collaborating at a level that we never did before. Our music has benefitted from this and we’re extremely excited to release some of it next year.
We wrote ‘Nothing More’ at the start of lockdown and it was the first proper demo we made outside of the rehearsal room. I think everyone was in a heightened state of emotion with everything that was going on. Paul wrote the lyrics about his experiences with existential anxiety which was definitely something that we could all resonate with at the time. We were extremely proud of the unusual form and style of the tune and it definitely represents an intense time and place in our lives. We got to eventually record the tune in Darklands after the first lockdown and it was amazing to see the demo come to life in a live setting when we heard the final mix.
Blanketman? They’re the Manchester four-piece turning heads and stoking up a feverish excitement in the indie scene. They only have three singles under their belts, too. The edgy debut Taking You With Me is reminiscent of early blur while instantly catchy follow-up Beach Body cranks the urgency up a notch. Latest track Harold is another banger; one that grows into a explosive closer.
Manchester’s Blanketman are leading some form of cultural renaissance up in that neck of the woods, and you’d be a fool to ignore it. For a city with such a rich tradition of producing era-defining bands, recent years have been comparatively thin on great bands coming out of the city and onto the national stage – so it feels the time is ripe for an explosion. Enter, then, Blanketman, the fresh-faced quartet that have set tongues wagging in recent months.
Signed to [PIAS] early on, they serve up a particularly sanguine form of post-punk that upon tasting, is both sharp yet sweet on the old audio palate. Fantastic debut ‘Taking You With Me’,an ode to the existential fear of ageing we can all fall prey to, mixes the somehow-optimistic guitar lines of The Smiths with the vitriolic vocal sneers of an early Mark E Smith, and still manages a nod to the angularism of the Talking Heads in one fell swoop. It’s a wicked debut, and one that set the scene perfectly for what was to come.
I hear there are big things ahead, They’ve already had support from the likes of Annie Mac, Steve Lamacq and Mark Riley, and their Luke Smith-produced EP National Trust, out in March 2021 via PIAS Recordings, is likely to propel them even further. Recent single ‘Harold’ sees the band finding their feet properly, adding an infectious pop edge to the track that leaves the feet tapping as it keeps your mouth “aaaah-ahhhhhh”-ing to the point of sickness. Some super clean drumming and constant guitars keep the whole operation tight and to the point, but glimpses of unabashed joy creep through, nonetheless. Should live music ever happen again, expect to hear this track as you drink cheap cider, with the sun going down over a large field.
Ahead of their phenomenal ‘National Trust’ EP penned for release next year, Blanketman have that sunshine-optimistic feeling about them that the best is yet to come, and with endorsements from the likes of Steve Hanley (who’s joined them on stage several times), it’s obvious that a lot of people also feel that way. As mentioned above, Manchester has been due for an seismic musical eruption for a while now, and with bands like this leading the way, we’re definitely on the cusp.
Nancy Brighton based is a one-man, psych-pop delight. The B3SCI Records signee channels the glam-rock swagger David Bowie in his recent five-track EP “Happy Oddities”, which spawned the seriously catchy single “Call Me On Your Telephone”. Nancy could well be my favourite new artist!.
Last year was not normal so why try be normal? Warping into psychedelia land from the ashes of Brighton band Tigercub, two EP’s in and he’s nailed it with a mini album that drags you into an Alice In Wonderland of wobbly warped sound that is weird and wonderful as fuck.
He explains…“7ft Blues is bi-polar”, Nancy explains. “The tracklist swings from suicidal, to cartoonishly happy, to self-deprecating, back to Alan Partridge pretentious (my spiritual home)… I think it’s a full portrait of me in that particular moment of my life, warts an’all. Before Nancy my main thing was writing songs for a rock band called Tigercub. In Tigercub I feel I had a tendency to hide my true self under a borrowed alt-rock, slacker introversion. It’s a pose that is easy to adopt and can easily trick you into a false sense of security when expressing yourself, wearing Kurt Cobain’s angst as a mask if you will. Striking out on my own has given me nowhere to look but inside, I think with 7ft Blues I’m really being myself, I’m actually talking about me now, what it’s like to be me, and I have never done that before, and it’s terrifying”.
He returned with a new song, the scuzzy foot-stomping “7 Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues”, in November, followed up by the outstandingly brooding “Pleasure Pen”, further solidifying his status as an artist you need to be on board with. Detailing his cut, the enigmatic figure explained: “‘Pleasure Pen’ is based on the Sacher – Masoch novella Venus in Furs, it’s dark and dirty and needs to be listened to whilst engulfed in red light. Break out those assless chaps cos it’s about to get disgusting”.
“In the past I had an anxiety to make everything as immediate and explosive as possible, which I think is cool but being fearless in what you do and having courage in your convictions is way cooler”,said Nancy You can’t argue with that.
“Don’t Pass Me By” is back in Bolan territory, an amazingly written glam tune that has a killer chorus which floats in and out. A spine tingling piece of work full of fuzz and some great guitar work that has hints of Santana without the noodling bollocks. Class. Clic Clac is a speeded up lo-fi bit of madness with dark lyrics I presume are about suicide? I may be wrong. It’s a fuck off slab of pysch madness that resonates. Psycho Vision is an acid tinged slice of madness yet again. Insane whistling, loads of fucking about with that wobbling sounding. It like listening to glam rock when you’ve necked 100 mushies and having a 50/50 good/bad trip.
I keep thinking a clown’s gonna fucking jump me from behind the telly! Deathmarch ends the album in style. He’s defintely influenced by Mark Lanegan on this one. Funereal keyboards with some great guitars and dark lyrics of the end of your life. An excellent foreboding track that is dark yet sounds fuckin’ massive. A song that Lanegan would easily put his name on if he heard it.
TV Priest signed to Sub Pop Records to release their debut album “Uppers” on February 5th. The album was originally set to be released through Hand In Hive this fall, but will now be released through their new label next year. The band has shared the album’s lead single “Decoration” alongside its music video. The new single follows the release of “This Island,” which is on the album as well as standalone singles “House of York” and “Runner Up.”
TV Priest, are the London-based four-piece you need to get behind. Right now. No ifs, no buts. The childhood mates, led by frontman Charlie Drinkwater, only formed in 2019 but are already on a rapid ascent to the top with legendary label Sub Pop snapping them up earlier this year off the back of just four massive singles.
TV Priest was borne out of a need to create together once again, and brings with it a wealth of experience and exhaustion picked up in the band’s years of pursuing ‘real life’ and ‘real jobs’, something those teenagers never had. Last November, the band – vocalist Charlie Drinkwater, guitarist Alex Sprogis, bass and keys player Nic Smith and drummer Ed Kelland – played their first show, to a smattering of friends in what they describe as an “industrial freezer” in the warehouse district of Hackney Wick. “It was like the pub in Peep Show with a washing machine just in the middle…” Charlie laughs, remembering how they dodged Star Warsmemorabilia and deep fat fryers while making their first statement as a band.
Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a precedent for launching a band during a global pandemic, but among the general sense of anxiety and unease pervading everything at the moment, TV Priest’s entrance in April with the release of debut single House Of York – a searing examination of the Monarchy set over wiry post-punk and fronted by a Mark E. Smith-like mouthpiece – served as a breath of fresh air among the chaos, its anger and confusion making some kind of twisted sense to the nation’s fried brains
Debut single House of York put the monarchy in its sights and quickly made it to the BBC 6 Music airwaves thanks to its chaotic energy. Along with follow-up tracks This Island, Runner Up,Slideshow and Decoration were equality brilliant.
It’s the same continued global sense of anxiety that will greet the release of Uppers, and it’s an album that has a lot to say right now. Taking musical cues from post-punk stalwarts The Fall and Protomartyr as well as the mechanical, pulsating grooves of krautrock, it’s a record that moves with an untamed energy. Over the top of this rumbling musical machine is vocalist Charlie, a cuttingly funny, angry, confused, real frontman. Uppers sees TV Priest explicitly and outwardly trying to avoid narrowmindedness. Uppers sees TV Priest taking musical and personal risks, reaching outside of themselves and trying to make sense of this increasingly messy world. It’s a band and a record that couldn’t arrive at a more perfect time.
Debut album Uppers is scheduled for release in February 2021.
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The Fat Angel Sings 