LOVE TRACTOR – ” Love Tractor “

Posted: August 31, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Athens, GA cult legends get their snakey, jangly debut reissued, remixed by R.E.M.’s Bill Berry and Sugar’s David Barbe

It’s a good week for ’80s janglepop and Southern post-punk. Pylon are getting a box set and their essential first two albums reissued in November and, also just announced, their Athens, GA neighbours (and DB Recs labelmates) Love Tractor are getting their debut album reissued via Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records.

Coming up at the same time as R.E.M., Pylon and The B-52’s, Love Tractor share a little of those group’s DNA but were unique in the Athens scene in that they were an instrumental band, making jangly, danceable rock that didn’t need vocals to grab you. The band would start singing eventually, but early records were driven by the inventive guitar interplay between Mark Cline and Mike Richmond. Bassist Armistead Wellford added groove and R.E.M.’s Bill Berry was among the group’s early drummers for the band before Andrew Carter joined full-time.

Love Tractor’s debut album is catchy and atmospheric, and does it while mostly avoiding surf rock cliches you associate with instrumental rock. “When I hear it, I love it. It sounds like nothing else, like nobody else,” says Cline of the album, and I have to agree. The reissue has been remixed from the original tapes by Sugar’s David Barbe and Bill Berry, and features liner-notes from R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, The B-52’s Kate Pierson, and esteemed rock journalist Anthony DeCurtis. and the album’s artwork has been reimagined by the band (Cline, Richmond and Wellford are all visual artists.)

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The reissue is out November 4th (pre-order), but before that, Love Tractor will release a 7″ for the October Record Store Day “Drop” (10/24) featuring two newly recorded, re-imagined songs from their debut: “60 Degrees and Sunny” b/w “FESTI-vals.” They’ve also re-recorded “Seventeen Days” as a digital bonus track and you can listen to that, and stream the original album,

The DAMNED – ” Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead “

Posted: August 31, 2020 in MUSIC
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Director Wes Orshoski followed up his great Lemmy documentary with this funny, bittersweet, all-access look at iconic punk group The Damned, from their origins through the current line up of the band featuring Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible. Shot over a three-year period, “Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead” is, like The Damned themselves, supremely entertaining, with mountains of archival footage and new interviews with estranged members Brian James and Rat Scabies, plus Lemmy, Chrissie Hynde, Chris Stein and Clem Burke of Blondie, Nick Mason of Pink Floyd (who produced their second album, Music for Pleasure), Mick Jones of The Clash, Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, DJ/filmmaker/musician Don Letts, Buzzcocks’ Steve Diggle, Dead Kennedys’ founder Jello Biafra, Fred Armisen, Melvins’ Buzz Osborne, Ian MacKaye and many more. The real star of the film is Sensible whose charm and sense of humour hasn’t dulled over the last 40 years.

Official trailer for the film THE DAMNED: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead, the authorized documentary of the punk pioneers. Directed/produced by Wes Orshoski (co-director/producer of “LEMMY”), the film features all four original members of the Damned (Captain Sensible, Dave Vanian, Brian James and Rat Scabies), Shot around the world over the past four years, the film makes its debut at SXSW in March 2015. The third prong in the holy trinity of UK punk, with the Sex Pistols and the Clash, The Damned were the first U.K. punks to release a single (“New Rose”) and album (“Damned Damned Damned”), and the first to tour the U.S. Having logged hits in the punk, new wave and goth eras, they are one of the only surviving bands from punk’s first wave.

ROCK POSTERS – The Allman Brothers Band Winterland 26th September 1973

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WESTELAKEN – ” The Golden Days are Hard “

Posted: August 30, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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With a name that sounds like a remote village in Sweden, Westelaken are actually a quartet from Toronto, Ontario. Having first emerged back in 2018, with their self-titled debut, the band have had a productive 2020, releasing a split-EP with fellow Torontonians Hobby, as well as one of their own, The Pool of Blood. While that record only arrived last month, the band have wasted no time in following up with their most impressive step to date, brand-new album, The Golden Days are Hard, ten songs that show both the variety and quality of Westelaken’s songwriting.

In some ways, Westelaken could be pinned as an alt-country band, yet they’re not one that fall neatly into any particular box. Across the ten tracks they span influences and genres, from the Neutral Milk Hotel-like opening track, The January Song, through to the title track, a 10-minute opus, which combines the emotional vocals of Daniel Johnston with the bar-room balladry of Kyle Craft. Lyrically too, The Golden Days are Hard is a record that explores the layered emotions of modern living, an album laced with fear, resignation and just a touch of hope, it muses on topics of death, friendship, and finding the kindness that’s still left in humanity. While it could have been a heavy record, The Golden Days are Hard manages to portray a brightness that’s beyond its themes, it sounds like a bold next step, from a band whose talent could take them anywhere.

here’s an album what’s got ten types of songs.
The January Song, that’s a country-lobster city-lobster type song.
The April Song, dying type of song.
Grace, that’s a dying and living type song.
Mercy, “milk-of-human-kindness”, that’s an eye-of-the-dog, three-types-of-souls type song.
The Pool of Blood is a two paths type of song and The August Song is a one path type of song.
White Lichen, that’s a “you break it you buy it” type song.
The October Song, that’s a “you bought a ghost story and there are no refunds” type song.
Ghosts Explode, that’s a living and dying and worship the sun type song.
The Golden Days are Hard, now that’s a you-know-me-better-than-I-know-myself type of reckoning type song.

there are several additional type songs that these ten pick up here and there like stray radio signals ricocheting off street lamps and open palms and little rocks collected between the sidewalk and the yard. feel free to take note of ’em but a comprehensive list won’t be much more useful than the one we’ve got here anyhow.

Westelaken is
Alex Baigent – electric bass, upright bass, synth on track 1, backing vocals (all over the place but most prominently in tracks 1 and 9)
Rob McLay – percussion, synth on track 10, backing vocals (including harmonies on tracks 1 and 8)
Jordan Seccareccia – guitars, vocals
Lucas Temor – piano, banjo, backing vocals
with
Paul Vroom – “organ” on track 3, backing vocals
Rachel Bellone – vocals on track 3
and Slurry (Rachel Bellone, Tago Mago, Patrick McKenna, Steven Lourenco) on group vocals
Released August 21st, 2020

CAITLIN PASKO – ” Greenhouse “

Posted: August 30, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS
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Based out of Brooklyn, Caitlin Pasko is a songwriter, pianist and, “weaver of dreamy, elegiac meditations”. Caitlin first emerged back in 2017 with the beautiful Glass Period, “a small chapel to personal grief”. After three years, this week Caitlin has released the much anticipated follow-up, “Greenhouse”, named in tribute to the, “structures that protect plant life from unfavorable external conditions, and from environments in which flora adapt in order to survive and sustain other life forms”.

Caitlin Pasko’s songs are rooms where silence and language are granted equal weight. Her singing is precise, but soft and reserved, and her piano-playing drifts and floats. Caitlin talks openly of how the album emerged from an emotionally abusive partnership, and the record chronicles the wider themes of relationships failing, be they romantic, familial or otherwise. Working with producer Henry Terepka, Caitlin sets these ideas into a stunning musical landscape; a world of spacious, elegant piano lines, intricate, deliberate vocals and swirling electronics. It’s a sound entirely Caitlin’s own, equally nodding to classical composers as it does to Caitlin’s contemporaries from Cross Record to Tenci. Particularly jarring and wonderful is the album’s centrepiece Horrible Person, a fusion of gorgeous vocal melodies with unnerving electronics and a lyric that seeks to flip the tables on an abuser who has always dragged you down; “you know you are a horrible person, and I could never really be fully at ease around you, like a cat on a hot tin roof wondering when it should move”. While this is undeniably a record that walks the darker streets, at its close it does offer a certain resolution, in the shape of final track, Intimate Distance. The track finds Caitlin at her piano, picking out bold piano chords and singing to herself of fresh growth and progress, “it took a fallen snow to feel that growth and letting go are so complexly intertwined”. Few albums live up to their title like Greenhouse does, it is a record that exists like a bubble, a place where emotions are laid raw and protected from the toxicity and harshness of the world at large, a place where against the odds, new shoots of life, love and hope will find a way.

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Piano, Vocals, & Synths (Dave Smith Tetra, Moog Minitaur)
by Caitlin Pasko
Guitar, Percussion, & Synths (Dave Smith Tetra, Moog Sub 37, Yamaha TX7)
& Additional Piano on “Horrible Person” & “Mother” by Henry Terepka

Released August 28th, 2020

All songs written by Caitlin Pasko

LAURA FELL – ” Bone Of Contention “

Posted: August 30, 2020 in MUSIC
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Based out of London, Laura Fell is a songwriter by night, and a psychotherapist by day. Laura is the first signing to the fabulous music-blog, turned soon-to-be fabulous record label, Ballon Machine, and is gearing up to the November release of her debut LP, “Safe From Me”, a record described as, “a search for answers from a woman always expected to have them to hand”. This week Laura has shared the first single from the record, “Bone Of Contention”.

“Bone of contention is an exercise in anger”, explains Laura, a song about, “allowing myself to sit with my anger, and ending up finding clarity and power within it”. While Laura started her creative journey writing poetry, it’s arguably the skilled arrangement here that shines brightest, as Laura’s lithe lyricism is combined with steady acoustic guitars, the warm pulse of upright bass and the contrasting flutter of lightweight synths, that dance atop the mix like leaves blown around by the wind. Ambitious musicality, sitting alongside an undeniable way with words and a voice every bit the match of Nadine Shah or Aldous Harding: on this evidence Laura Fell is a talent the world won’t be able to ignore for long.

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Fell’s dedication to this journey of self-discovery was unquestionable from the off, so much so that her peers questioned her sanity. Holding down three jobs to fund the record, Fell was determined that the songs would go far beyond their acoustic guitar genesis, assembling classically trained musicians to fully realise her vision.

Safe From Me is out November 20th via Balloon Machine.

LAURA STEVENSON and The CANS – ” Sit Resist “

Posted: August 30, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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After releasing the critically-acclaimed album The Big Freeze in 2019, a recent performance at NPR’s Tiny Desk, and giving birth to her first child mid-pandemic, Laura Stevenson has announced that her long out-of-print sophomore album “Sit Resist” is receiving the deluxe reissue treatment with a special edition double LP gatefold vinyl packaging, to be released on September 4th, 2020. The collection is available for a limited pre-order now. Sit Resist, is remarkable. It is unafraid of the darkness, and allows itself to be playful– the lyrics are tender, honest, inviting you into a vulnerable place but quelling the vulnerability with candid, gentle testaments of living drawn from a deep well of experience.” – Julien Baker

“Laura’s records are full of the sensitivity and awareness that are her particular magic… She is one of my favourite writers because she is clearly a listener, listening to herself and clearing a path for the songs to go where they want to go.” – Lucy Dacus

“This record is a great document of a bunch of scrappy weird kids laughing through the terror of an uncertain future together. Sit Resist would be THE ONE if Laura didn’t continue to put out records that feel like THE ONE.” – Jeff Rosenstock

The thirteen song album has been remastered by Miles Showell at the hallowed Abbey Road Studios in London from the original 1/4” analog master tapes, with a new half-speed processing to ensure that the vinyl represents the highest quality audio possible. The bonus LP is a collection of outtakes of nearly every album track, including never before heard pre-production demo recordings, alternate mixes and arrangements, live material, an Archers of Loaf cover, as well as a newly recorded version of the album track “Caretaker” that was recorded in 2019 on the literal last night in the house Stevenson grew up in, ten years after the song was originally written there.

The album features liner note essays written by musicians Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus who drew early inspiration for their own music and song writing from the album. Also contributing liner notes are Pitchfork, NPR and Stereogum writer Nina Corcoran, as well as long time friend and collaborator Jeff Rosenstock who produced and played guitar on some of the bonus demo material contained in the collection.

The packaging also features many never before seen studio photos and tour photography from the era in which the album was written, produced and released, and outtakes from the photo session at which the album’s iconic cover artwork was shot by photographer Orlando Perez.

Don Giovanni and Better Yet Podcasts are co-producing a limited episodic podcast series chronicling the making of, and lasting influence of the album. Episode One is out now, available wherever podcasts are found, and new episodes will be released every Wednesday until the reissue is released on September 4th. The podcast features interviews with Stevenson, album engineer Eric Bennet, as well as long time collaborators Mike Campbell, Jeff Rosenstock and Don Giovanni owner Joe Steinhardt. Musicians Lucy Dacus and Adult Mom’s Stevie Knipe are interviewed about Stevenson’s song writing, and how it has influenced their own careers. Also interviewed is comedian Chris Gethard who stated “the album was a game-changer for me.”

The limited Remastered Deluxe 2xLP of Sit Resist is available via Don Giovanni Records. It will be released digitally on all streaming platforms and Bandcamp.  Vinyl will ship on or around November 13th.

MOSELEY FOLK and ARTS FESTIVAL 3rd-5th September 2021

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The SMASHING PUMPKINS – ” Cyr / The Colour of Love “

Posted: August 28, 2020 in MUSIC
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The Smashing Pumpkins have unveiled two new songs, ‘Cyr’ and ‘The Colour of Love’.

“Cyr is dystopic folly,” Billy Corgan explains of the track, “one soul against the world sort of stuff, set against a backdrop of shifting loyalties and sped up time. To me it stands as both hopeful and dismissive of what is and isn’t possible with faith.” The track arrives with a special live performance, shot remotely in lockdown, split between Chicago and Los Angeles. The clip was directed by Linda Strawberry.

“This is a goth fever dream of pent up emotion – an artistic visual release attempting to create a momentary escape from the emotional black cloud hanging over all of us this year,” Strawberry explains. “A dark seduction filmed in quarantine at a social distance.”

It marks the first new material we’ve heard from the band since their 2018 Rick Rubin-produced album, Shiny And Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / Lp: No Past. No Future. No Sun. The record was recorded with the line up of founding members Billy Corgan, James Iha, and Jimmy Chamberlin alongside longtime guitarist Jeff Schroeder.

In an interview with Tennessean Corgan revealed that the band had plans to release a double album later this year. Heralding the forthcoming record “the first real album” since the band’s reunion, a subtly snarky takedown of the band’s 2018 effort. “This is the first album since the album that came out in 2000, Machina, where me, James [Iha] and Jimmy [Chamberlin] worked on something for a very long time,” Corgan explained. “It’s got a greater conceptual base, and it’s probably a wider swath of music.

“The last one was kind of like, “Let’s just jump in, record some stuff real fast, and let it be what it is… so I’m excited about this because we’re kind of back in the lane of taking a risk, and trying to bring something new to the table, as opposed to just aping what we’re known for. ”

BDRMM – ” Gush “

Posted: August 28, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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“‘Gush’ was written back in 2016 at a particularly hard time in my life as I was going through the most significant loss I have endured. I remember coming home from work one day and luckily my brother Jordan (bass) was staying over at mine that evening so we just set the equipment up, which at this time was just a laptop, a DI and my iPhone which I used for vocals. We smashed the demo out in about two hours and that was that, it was just a track, a track I never expected to be our most played to this date.

We had always played it live, but I never thought that it would end up being on the album, simply because of the amount we played it, it was just a filler in the set, well, it felt like that to me anyways. Joe (guitar) always had a soft spot for it. When we went in to record the album, I wouldn’t say reluctantly, but definitely with the least confidence of its place on the album, we decided to include it, and I am so glad we did. It was the track that we finished last, as it always felt something was lacking on it. The last day of recording, I was just playing around over the last minute of the ‘for that mistake i’m sorry’ change in the track, and that’s where the final guitar run came from, it almost fit too perfectly and went from it being the most underrated track on the record, to arguably everybody’s favourite.

I am so glad it’s got the recognition that it has, purely because the more I see people enjoying it, the more it reminds me of the main message of the track: ‘You have to go through shit, to realise it gets better’” – Ryan Smith

bdrmm have shared a brand new short film to accompany their single, ‘Gush’, which is released on all digital platforms today.

“Gush” – A Short Film is available to watch on YouTube and the band’s Instagram TV account now. It was filmed by Sam Joyce at Gorilla Studios in Hull, and features a performance of the single as well as candid interviews with the band about the genesis of the song.

“‘Gush’ is an honest track, so I wanted a video to reflect that by understanding the interpretations of the people who helped create it,” explains singer/guitarist Ryan Smith.

He continues: “It’s a very personal track, probably the most I’ve ever delved into my own life. As much as I would love to share this topic, I feel it’s too much. I shared something very special with somebody which we lost. It was a very upsetting couple of months for us, but we got through it. The track is filled with optimism because things do get better, no matter how bad they get. Be there for your loved ones, always.”

To coincide with the single release, a new limited-edition red vinyl version of the band’s debut album, Bedroom, is available now from selected indie shops: buy a copy now. bdrmm have rearranged their UK tour dates for 2021. Tickets for the original dates remain valid, and further shows will be announced soon.

April 2nd – Nottingham – Chameleon Arts Cafe

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