Archive for the ‘MUSIC’ Category

JEFF TWEEDY – ” Love Is The King “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in MUSIC
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It was inside Jeff Tweedy’s second home, The Loft in Chicago, that “Love Is The King” was recorded in April of 2020. Surrounded by an assemblage of treasured instruments and loved ones in a world that felt more and more alien by the day. “Guess Again” is the first single from Jeff Tweedy’s forthcoming album, Tweedy recorded Love Is the King in April at the Loft in Chicago, working with his sons Spencer and Sammy. The album marks his fourth solo album in as many years,

Out on dBpm Records, “Love Is The King“, a “beautifully honest ode to love and hope,” is the follow-up to 2018’s Warm and 2019’s Warmer, and comes on the heels of Tweedy’s second book, How To Write One Song, via Penguin Random House’s Dutton. “At the beginning of the lockdown I started writing country songs to console myself. Folk and country type forms being the shapes that come most easily to me in a comforting way. Guess Again is a good example of the success I was having at pushing the world away, counting my blessings — taking stock in my good fortune to have love in my life,” comments Tweedy.

“Gwendolyn” is the third single from Jeff Tweedy’s forthcoming album Love Is The King.

The album will be released ten days after Tweedy’s second book ‘How To Write One Song’, which is published on Faber Social on October 13th. It follows his 2018 memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back).

“The feeling I get when I write – the sense that time is simultaneously expanding and disappearing – that I’m simultaneously more me and also free of me – is the main reason I wanted to put my thoughts on song-writing down in book form to share with everyone so inclined,” the singer said in a statement.

“A few weeks later things began to sound like Love Is The King — a little more frayed around the edges with a lot more fear creeping in. Still hopeful but definitely discovering the limits of my own ability to self soothe.” –Jeff Tweedy.

Label dBpm Records Released 15/01/21

The DEER – ” Do No Harm “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in MUSIC
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Austin band The Deer are the most recent addition to our roster. Indie folk band from Austin Texas. What began as the solo recording project of singer/songwriter Grace Rowland Park, the group formed its core membership in 2012 under the band name Grace Park & The Deer, and released “An Argument for Observation.” The songs have a dark, folky feel; eerily lilting melodies with unexpected subjects like stalking, drug-dealing, and murder. Through the recording process they found a spark lit by natural chemistry, on and off the stage, and they began performing and touring together with alternating guests – some of whom ended up becoming permanent members. Grace’s screen-printed cover art would later rank among Austin Music Industry Awards’ Top 5 Best Album Art for 2014. In 2013 they suffered the devastating loss of dear friend and band member Stephanie Bledsoe to an accident on her farm. 

Singer Grace Rowland, guitarist Michael McLeod, bassist Jesse Dalton, drummer Alan Eckert, and string player Noah Jeffries dress up their otherworldly tunes in sequined mermaid jumpsuits. They’re formerly known as Grace Park & the Deer.

They blur genre lines with their indie-folk-rock and their forthcoming album Do No Harm will do even more to move them into new territory. Split into two stylistic realms: the first side is rooted in muddy folk and surf-country, and the other side wanders far out in a dream-pop and psych-rock wilderness – all with their distinctly curious and incantational poetic content printed within.

 Love how the instruments and styles come together to form The Deer’s unique sound.

We released Do No Harm on November 1, 2019

released November 1st, 2019

The Band:

Grace Rowland: Vocals, guitar, piano, synth
Michael McLeod: electric guitar
Jesse Dalton: vocals, electric bass, upright bass, synth, acoustic guitar
Alan Eckert: vocals, piano, synth, drums, percussion
Noah Jeffries: fiddle, mandolin

BUCK MEEK – ” Two Saviors “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Big Thief’s Buck Meek releases his new solo album, “Two Saviors”, on Keeled Scales. While his last album, 2018’s Buck Meek, is a yarn of blue-collar fairy tales and character driven narratives, Two Saviors emerges as a cathartic, naked confession of heartbreak, resiliency, and enchantment. The first word on Two Saviors is “pareidolia.” It is a word about recognising shapes where none were intended to exist – like searching for images in the clouds. It’s an uncommon word, with a beautiful sound, and serves as an apt guide through these new songs of Buck’s, which are themselves uncommon and beautiful, and which invite a deep, cloud-gaze state of attention.

Two Saviors was recorded by producer and engineer Andrew Sarlo (who produced the first four Big Thief LPs), under his specific conditions: they make the album in New Orleans, during the hottest part of the year, spend no more than 7 days tracking, all live, on an 8-track tape machine with only dynamic microphones, and no headphones, not allowing the players to hear back any takes until the final day. The band, featuring Adam Brisbin (guitar), Mat Davidson (bass, pedal steel, fiddle), Austin Vaughn (drums), and Buck’s brother Dylan Meek (piano, organ), set up in a Victorian house one block from the Mississippi River and worked within these limitations, encouraging every recording to be imbued with the living, intuitive, and human energy of a first take.

I wrote a handful of songs during the covid-19 lockdown, and asked Andrew Sarlo to produce a recording of one. “Roll Back Your Clocks” felt most appropriate. Andrew prompted me to record the song at home with an acoustic guitar, and send that solo version to each of my four band members separately. Then we overdubbed instrumental parts and vocals on top of my solo recording, without hearing any of the other band member’s contributions – with no outside direction or insight, and sent their stems to Sarlo, who took the parts and alchemized them into a mix, revealing a serendipitous union. This era has presented every human on earth with the challenge to relinquish all expectations and bend with the fragility of life and society. “Halo Light” is a gently rumbling rumination on “the afterglow of loss, humanity’s ephemera, and the eternal nature of love.”

All we are left with is ourselves, and our own capacity to find peace within. This was an attempt to embrace the quarantine – to try to make something beautiful and honest and new without denying the limitations, but to move within them. It was a reminder to trust our telepathic instincts, and to value the connection with our loved ones as something that we always have access to, even in solitude,

Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek returns with Two Saviors, his second solo record. Backed by a band featuring pedal steel, fiddle, and his brother Dylan on piano and organ, Meek takes a look at heartbreak and expands on the loose, easy going twang of his 2018 self-titled debut. The songs on this album shine with this wisdom and are not ostentatious about it. This is true to Buck’s nature. He is recording life, consciously and unconsciously on a broad spectrum of planes. A new album from him is a gift, a chance to wonder about ways we could be seeing, recording.

The WAR ON DRUGS – ” Live Drugs “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Culled from over 40 hard drives of recorded live shows spread out across years of touring behind multiple critically acclaimed records, “Live Drugs” is unlike anything previously available in The War on Drugs’ catalogue.

The first volume to capture the band’s live interpretations, Live Drugs is a document showcasing the evolution of the band’s live show over the years. Additionally, Live Drugs is a portrait of the enduring relationship between Adam Granduciel and Dominic East. A longtime friend, guitar tech and stage manager, East is Live Drugs’s co-producer and the presence Granduciel credits as holding everything together.

Sequenced to reflect how a typical 70-minute set would flow, Live Drugs thrives on live set staples immortalized on record for the first time. This includes Buenos Aires Beach from the band’s 2008 full-length debut, Wagonwheel Blues, and the long-time musical interlude flowing between Under the Pressure and In Reverse – which bookend 2014’s “Lost In The Dream“. There’s also the band’s essential cover of Warren Zevon’s Accidentally like a Martyr – a song “so true, you should ever be lucky to write a song that simple,” Granduciel says.

I keep returning to this version. It’s my favourite of the many on YT. The extended bridge in the middle… There is just something so pure and damn near hypnotic about it… The long foreplay opening…The sax just gently caressing your temporal lobe… The drummer is just in the zone… Then it all kicks back in… I can’t even with how much I love this

The War on Drugs – “Under the Pressure Live”

released on Secretly Canadian records 20/11/20

TRAAMS – ” Intercontinental Radio Waves “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in MUSIC
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TRAAMS have always wrestled with category. Part motorik drum beats, part discordant guitars, pop melodies and hypnotic bass lines. All are present here. With a collection of three new tracks they have expanded further. Collaborating with friends and new instrumentation, each track is different from the last. But all sound like the inimitable TRAAMS.

The second single to be recorded in Brighton with Theo Verney after a brief hiatus is ‘Intercontinental Radio Waves’. The track was written in Paris, whilst touring with Car Seat Headrest at the tail end of 2017. ‘Intercontinental Radio Waves’ is about change.

Released October 5th, 2020

SHAMIR – ” Other Side “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Shamir called this his “most commercial-sounding” album since his 2015 debut, but whatever mainstream leanings it might have did not compromise how vibrant or creative he could get. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter performs synth-pop, Gun Club country punk, and shoegaze all with the same confidence and charisma, in a voice that can transform any anxious misgivings into reassurance. “I prefer to be alone, but you can join if you like/I’ll stay strong for you ’cause I don’t want to be seen when I cry,” he sings on “Running,” speaking as much to his audience as he is to himself.

Shamir embraces a balance between composure and restless dissatisfaction throughout his self-titled album. He vividly captures a Gen Z-specific angst and stewing inner conflict: “Smoke all the weed so I can cover my anxiety,” he confesses on “Paranoia.” Indeed, some of the best moments on the album explore the contradictions of the self and the paradoxical relationship between thoughts and behaviors. Stylistically, Shamir is a hodgepodge of the different approaches the artist has employed in the past, synthesized into a mostly satisfying pop-rock sound. Still, Shamir’s penchant for melody and introspection have proved adaptable to any genre that he fancies at any given moment, characterizing even his most lo-fi work with a pleading humanity. No matter how roomy or tight the mix is, or whether he’s caught in a moment of self-doubt or soaring confidence, he brings a sweet buoyancy to his music that carries Shamir, while also peeking into the torment of being inside his own head. 

There’s a lot to love leading up to next week’s eponymous effort from Shamir, but nothing quite brings it back home from the indie-pop polymath than when he winks at Nashville in the way he does whenever he puts a butterfly spin on Stetsons and pedal steel. “Other Side” is probably the most fully realized version of Shamir’s country crossover dalliances since kicking up some dust in 2018′s “Room” single. 

Here, he resolves the brooding cow-punk darkness inspired by a true unsolved mystery with an idealized Hallmark Channel movie ending in the listen’s country-pop plucked banjo tumbling throughout its chorus. Where as the love tales heard churning out from the big machine are often sanitized in predictable visions created by a white-washed Americana, Shamir taps into something a little more real in his take on a happy ending: faith in spite of the unknown.

Shamir’s “Shamir” will be self-released October 2nd.

FLEET FOXES – ” Jara “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in MUSIC
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While critically revered, Fleet Foxes 2017 effort “Crack-Up” was still a polarizing document in the experimental folk band’s catalogue. Robin Pecknold averted the timelessness that made his band’s beardy grandeur with abrupt fractures and diverted away its underlying pop reach away from the absolutes of this world. Naturally, that boldness to be that considered with intentional complexity became this side of opinion’s Fleet Foxes preference, but if there something that has come to be appreciated with Pecknold’s work as a whole over the years, it’s that his craft has a strange, reaching majesty throughout it that goes unrivaled in much of today’s indie scene peers.

“Shore”, Fleet Foxes’ latest effort, may have had to go a distance further to glue the path of fragments created by Crack-Up to make that splendour absolutely visible once more in their sound, but with a highlight journey in “Jara”, he and his collaborators find that destination once again. The listen pushes its atypically warm autumnal wind through branches singing and a tumbling of needle-pricked guitars. Pecknold’s voice takes on the personification of that, as if to breath life through every blade of grass and water ripple it encounters. “Though we’re only alive a short while / So many beneath my feet / All weather, you walk with me,” he sings. and in that moment, Fleet Foxes brings you back to a place unseen, yet all so familiar.

The album is out! This one was an intense two-year labour of love and I’m elated that it’s out in the world now, so soon after we finished it. Really hope it can be a 55 minute life-preserver in this ocean of bad news. This album was almost abandoned back in April but I’m so glad it came together how it did over the summer, so glad to share it, and so glad to have some time now to make even more music, other songs that will soon enough live alongside it. Thank you so much to Kersti Jan Werdal for making an incredible full-length 16mm film companion to this album.

Fleet Foxes’ “Shore” is available now on ANTI Records.

LAURA GROVES – ” A Private Road “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in MUSIC
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Introducing… Laura Groves

Bella Union Records are thrilled to announce the signing of Laura Groves whose new EP, “A Private Road“, will be released 4th December via the label . Of the 6-track EP Groves says: “This record, made mostly on my own, became both a channel for the expression of an inner world and an imagined soundtrack to my physical journeys through the city. It is rooted in the stories, atmospheres, mistakes and wrong turns, desires and layers of meaning that run through and play out in the landscapes we inhabit. The songs are snapshots of late night journeys across the river, the sparks of love that transform us and keep us going, the dead ends that the mind can lead us down, the erotic, the visible and invisible places we pass through as they merge and are erased and overwritten. The ability and opportunity to create and connect through music is a gift and I’m so happy to be able to share these new explorations with you.”

Of the eye-catching video to lead track “Infinite Wisdom” Groves adds: “The video for Infinite Wisdom is a collaboration between myself and visual artist Sophie le Roux. I shot the footage at home during the lockdown and then sent it to Sophie, who edited it and added animation. This method of working was due to necessity at the time, but I like how it reflects the self-produced nature of the record and also how rewarding and special a collaborative process can be.” 

Laura Groves is an artist and producer born in West Yorkshire and based in South London. As a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, she explores themes of inner worlds, healing, connection, and imagined environments and real-life surroundings, mixing traditional song-writing with experimental synthesised sounds, textural electronic layering, and a passion for home recording. Following on from her work as Blue Roses on XL Recordings, Laura has released two EPs under her own name on Deek Records, created with long-time collaborator Bullion: ‘Thinking About Thinking’ (2013) and ‘Committed Language’ (2015). 

Along with her solo work and three-piece band, Nautic, Laura has built a reputation as a sought after collaborator, in both live and recorded settings, for the likes of Darkstar, Wilma Archer, Sampha, Westerman, The Paul Institute, Bat for Lashes, and Hannah Peel. Delving into the art of soundtracks, Laura scored the silent film ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ at the BFI and Latitude Festival, along with creating her own moving image work to accompany her music.  

Laura has been regularly played on BBC6 Music, championed by Guy Garvey, and continuously featured on NTS with both guest slots and performances. She has been featured in The Fader, DUMMY, Dazed, and The Line of Best Fit. Notable performances include Glastonbury, Bestival, Green Man, NTS at Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival, along with supporting St Vincent and Wild Beasts. 

Releases December 4th, 2020

LYDIA LOVELESS – ” Daughter “

Posted: October 6, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Lydia Loveless Issue 54 Cover

Lydia Loveless is working through a few things on her new album. “Daughter” is her first new release in four years, during which time Loveless has got divorced, moved from Ohio to North Carolina and was frank on social media about her mental health, and also having been sexually harassed by someone in the orbit of her former record label. So there’s a lot to cover on her fifth LP. She hasn’t lost her knack for writing brutally candid songs: Loveless is as frank as ever on these 10 tracks. She has, however, learned to pull back from the flame-thrower vocal sensibility of her earlier material. Loveless‘ songs display her usual directness and fearlessness, but there’s also plenty of vulnerability.

While she has often included laugh-out-loud lines in her lyrics, they don’t seem to fit this particular kind of therapy-through-songwriting.

The title track is a real gem. It addresses the difficulties women face to be accepted for who they are, not as people whose sovereignty is considered through their relation to others, whether as daughters, mothers or sisters. Loveless is at her most Stevie Nicks-like here, backed by a rhythm section evoking the sturdy base of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie.

Loveless has a massive, powerful voice that she uses to great effect, though the effect is even greater, and hits even harder, when she blends it with a measure of restraint instead of going full-bore all the time. Singing with greater nuance also helps put the focus on her lyrics, which can be flat-out wrenching. Loveless sings with a mix of remorse and dismay on “Wringer,” a divorce song where the opening lines refer to dividing up possessions: “You give the sweetest kisses, dear,” she sings on the refrain. “But you leave the stinger.”

“September” is grim but youthfully defiant, its piano complemented by cello and Laura Jane Grace’s vocals.

Electronic percussion and synths, not usually part of the Loveless sound, provide the foundations for hopeful closer “Don’t Bother Mountain,” about her life’s current chapter. She finally lets her voice soar, as if emphasizing her will to keep going.

The challenges and traumas that led to a new start have made her talents as a musician and songwriter even sharper. Here’s hoping that the fine humour that gave her songs a special spark will be back soon.

“Daughter” available through Honey, You’re Gonna Be Late Records Released on: 2020-09-25

FUTURAMA FESTIVAL The Invisible Wind Factory Liverpool 3rd-4th April 2021

Posted: October 6, 2020 in MUSIC
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