“Is This Offensive And Loud?” is a deviously clever album. In that tiny, momentous window when live music seemed on the way back in, Nat Vazer and her band played a show and instantly captured the hearts of her audience.
Is This Offensive And Loud?is a deviously clever album which offers neither insult nor decibels, but somehow is effortlessly satisfying to all who hear it.
Reminiscent of Cat Power and Angel Olsen, Vazer takes glistening guitars over slightly distorted vocals to create beautiful pieces of audible art. It’s a supremely crafted and perfectly paced album that makes listeners want to hit the replay button the second it’s all over.
Official video for Nat Vazer’s single “Like Demi”, from the debut LP ‘Is This Offensive And Loud?’, released May 29th on Hotel Motel Records:
The new album, produced by Sturgill Simpson, commits her sky-high and scorching rock-and-roll show to record for the very first time. Whether she’s singing of motherhood or the mythologies of stardom, Nashville gentrification or the national healthcare crisis, relationships or growing pains, she’s crafted a collection of music that invites people to listen closer than ever before.
Margo Price’s take on classic sounds is at once familiar and daring, an infectious blend of Nashville country, Memphis soul, and Texas twang.
On May 8th, Margo Price will release “That’s How Rumours Get Started”, an album of ten new, original songs that commit her sky-high and scorching rock-and-roll show to record for the very first time. Produced by longtime friend Sturgill Simpson (co-produced by Margo and David Ferguson), the LP marks Price’s debut for Loma Vista Recordings, and whether she’s singing of motherhood or the mythologies of stardom, Nashville gentrification or the national healthcare crisis, relationships or growing pains, she’s crafted a collection of music that invites people to listen closer than ever before.
Margo primarily cut That’s How Rumors Get Started at Los Angeles’ EastWest Studios (Pet Sounds, “9 to 5”). Tracking occurred over several days while she was pregnant with daughter Ramona. “They’re both a creation process,” she says. “And I was being really good to my body and my mind during that time. I had a lot of clarity from sobriety.”
While Margo Price continued to collaborate on most of the song writing with her husband Jeremy Ivey, she recorded with an historic band assembled by Sturgill, and including guitarist Matt Sweeney (Adele, Iggy Pop), bassist Pino Palladino (D’Angelo, John Mayer), drummer James Gadson (Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye), and keyboardist Benmont Tench (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers). Background vocals were added by Simpson on “Letting Me Down,” and the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir, who raise the arrangements of “Hey Child” and “What Happened To Our Love?” to some of the album’s most soaring heights.
Margo Price and her steady touring band – Kevin Black (bass), Jamie Davis (guitar), Micah Hulsher (keys), and Dillon Napier (drums) – will perform songs from That’s How Rumors Get Started at dozens of shows with Chris Stapleton and The Head & The Heart this spring and summer, in addition to festival appearances and more to be announced soon. Find all dates here and below.
That’s How Rumors Get Started follows Margo’s 2017 album All American Made, which was named the #1 Country/Americana album of the year by Rolling Stone, and one of the top albums of the decade by Esquire, Pitchfork and Billboard, among others. In its wake, Margo sold out three nights at The Ryman Auditorium, earned her first Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and much more.
Since breaking through with her first two Eps, Arca’s created an unprecedented body of work drawing from club music, experimental noise, and the ballad tradition of her native Venezuela, while reaching beyond music to encompass performance, visual art, and technology. For KiCk i, Arca pursues pleasure, dignity, and dance floor liberation by refracting club music, reggaeton, and pop through her radical vision.
In Arca’s world, playfulness has long intertwined with terror, rigidity with fluidity, human existence with cyborg life, abrasiveness with gentleness. These contrasts have defined Alejandra Ghersi’s earliest co-productions for Kanye West and FKA twigs, her unnervingly misshapen first solo recordings and album covers, her later co-production and co-writing alongside Björk and her 2017 self-titled left turn of slow-as-molasses, Spanish-language torch songs. Ghersi’s unparalleled artistic versatility was on full display at last year’s immersive five-night Mutant; Faith experience at Manhattan performance art space The Shed. The unpredictable series—among her first performances since she began transitioning involved stripper pole theremins, mechanical bulls and a lack of setlists.
The Shed’s artistic director later called Ghersi “a glimpse of a future I hope for.” As she says on “Nonbinary,” the taunting-then-thrashing android missive that opens her new album KiCk i, “I do what I wanna do when I wanna do it.” Mutant;Faith culminated in a video shoot for “Time,” KiCk i’s second track.
In the video, Ghersi and her partner, Carlos Saez, embark on a winkingly devilish Manhattan romp that fits the song’s soft, warm heartbeat of alluring come-ons and hints at KiCk i’s myriad advances to what the Arca project even is. KiCk i is Ghersi’s first proper album post-transition (her 62-minute “single” from February is loosely related to KiCk i), and with her fully realized self comes ceaseless risk-taking, fully imploded boundaries and plain old joy. This is Arca’s most overt embrace of pop, her first album with guests, and her most spontaneous, lively, and even fun album. And all of those things are one and the same.
Where Arca’s past efforts sought to express states of dissociation, rendering a consciousness flitting in and out of reality, the songs on Kick I are noticeably present and tuned-in. Arca’s gender identity is infused in the playfulness of her lyrics and compositions. Despite the addition of actual pop hooks throughout the album, Arca’s beats continue to emphasize destabilization and change. Her songs are all bridge—stretches of evolution from one idea or mindset to the next. Just when you’ve grown accustomed to a sound or riff, the floor drops out, shifting to another mode and vibe altogether.
The production oscillates wildly between harsh and smooth, as in the way the kinetic, abrasive “Riquiquí” segues into the graceful ballad “Calor”; strings and clanking percussion mix, squaring off in striking juxtaposition. By far the bounciest, most ecstatic song cycle of Arca’s career, Kick I is a celebration of actualization, whether that’s spurned by finding harmony internally or in communion with another.
KiCk i is out now! Rip the Slit Thru Mutants! It’s already here KiCk i
London based Green Seagull return with their new album ‘Cloud Cover’. Since forming in 2016, Green Seagull has released a string of singles, received glowing reviews and regular airplay on UK national and local radio. Their shared enthusiasm for late-60s baroque psychedelia and 12-string jangle has blossomed into a prolific song writing team that now includes contributions from their keyboardist Sarah Gonputh.
‘Cloud Cover’, their second long-playing disc, sees the band develop their fascination for melodic 60s pop and combine it with glorious vocal harmonies that create a mellow Stateside vibe filtered through early 70s UK acts like Brinsley Schwarz and Danny Kirwan-era Fleetwood Mac.
Introducing our cover of Jeff Tweedy and Wilco’s “I Know What It’s Like.” We always love throwing a cover or two in the set, and were gearing up to learn this one as a band so we could play it on our Collector release tour, but we all know what happened to that. We hope that somebody might find some comfort in our version of this song like we’ve found comfort in Mister Tweedy’s original. I’ve been a big Wilco fan for the past few years and picked up Jeff Tweedy’s album Warm after Brendan had played it in the car a few times the track- “I Know What It’s Like” really stood out to me as a great pop/rock song that I could put my own spin on- the minimal structure of the original gave room for creative license. I sped up the original recording a decent amount so I’d have something to play along to and off I went. We decided it’d be fun to present the finished product as an interim release; post-Collector and pre-whatever’s next.
We always love throwing a fun cover or two in the set, and were gearing up to learn this one as a band so we could play it on our Collector release tour, but we all know what happened to that. My hope is that somebody who is a fan of Disq or Wilco (or both, or neither) could find some comfort in our version of this song. Isaac deBroux-Slone
June 2020
Released on 30th June 2020 Saddle Creek Composer: Jeff Tweedy
This Is The Kit is the musical project of Kate Stables and whoever joins her. You thought you didn’t like the banjo but you were wrong pal. Listen as Kate rips forward with her hypnotic twang pattern and a voice of rare, unaffected beauty. I have come here to bring you the news that we have made a new album called ‘off off on’ and that it will be released on october the 23rd by Rough Trade records. Since 2008’s debut album Krülle Bol, This Is The Kit (lead by Kate Stables) have unpicked emotional knots and woven remarkable stories, but even by their high standards, “Off Off On” is a beautifully clear distillation of Stables’ song-writing gifts.
By the end of 2018, the band had finished touring their last album, the talismanic Moonshine Freeze – leading to Kate’s Ivor Novello nomination, but when it came to Stables’ natural impulse to start the next record, her efforts were diverted by an invitation to join The National on the road for multiple tours and TV appearances – a continuation of the role she took on their album “I Am Easy To Find“ It was so brilliant when I was writing to be away from my songs and the responsibility of being in charge of a band or a project – I think it really helped my writing and my getting through whatever I needed to get through.”
Richly illuminating and acutely sensitive to the pulses and currents of life, “Off Off On” shows This Is The Kit overflowing with ideas. In difficult times, it’s a record that feels like a lifeline, moving against the tide, standing against the storm. Keep going.
From the forthcoming album ‘Off Off On’ which will be released by Rough Trade Records on October 23rd 2020. This is the fifth album by the band and is the follow up to 2017 critically acclaimed album ‘Moonshine Freeze’.
The tradition of sad men singing beautifully about their pain runs deep through the folk genre as well as popular music as a whole. But there’s something especially tender about the music of artists like Elliott Smith, Conor Oberst, Sufjan Stevens and Jason Molina, all self-deprecating masters of the English language who, through their own perpetual battles with depression and heartbreak and life in general, each taught (or are still teaching) us something new about the preciousness of the human condition.
Joining that lineage of great singer/songwriters is L.A.-based musician Christian Lee Hutson, who recently released his new album “Beginners” after a year or so of hype building. Hutson worked closely with Phoebe Bridgers, who produced the record, and he also co-wrote a song on Bridgers’ and Oberst’s Better Oblivion Community Center album from last year, plus opened/played guitar for them on that tour.
Hutson sounds so much like Smith you have to wonder if it’s cosplay—like Smith, his voice is airy and strained, yet so soft, and his lyrics possess a similar noir, but funny mood—but he also sings like Bridgers. While the similarities to both his contemporaries and those who came before him are impossible to ignore, there are few musicians who could pull off singing about an aspiring building inspector and make it so equally funny and sweet—but Hutson possesses a rare balance of critical wit and soul.
On album standout “Lose this Number,” he slips in anecdotal blips (“Bobby helped me track you down / ‘cause I just saw your name in the paper / You said, ’Of course that reminded you of me / Don’t you know that’s how a name works?’”) alongside vague, but vivid, imagery that will spark all one’s senses at once (“Where the whole time I’ve just been asleep here / Twenty years younger / Smell of sugar and seaweed / Indian summer.”)
Following the stripped back ‘Minsky Rock’ live performance of their 21-minute MEGAMIX, which premiered last Friday evening on YouTube, Working Men’s Club have announced details of a full-band live show to be broadcast from YES in Manchester on Friday July 3rd 2020.
Widely touted as one of the most exciting live bands around, Working Men’s Club have seized the opportunity the relaxation of lock-down restrictions have presented and quickly hatched plans for the show at their spiritual home, YES, where they played a sold-out residency in September of last year.
The first full-band performances in these pioneering times for ‘live shows’, Syd Minsky-Sargeant from the band said: We’ve been missing playing live a lot and even though we can’t recreate the full atmosphere of a proper gig, it’s one step closer for everyone.
Tickets for the show, which will be filmed in multi-camera HD with broadcast quality audio, go on general sale on Wednesday 24th June via: https://link.dice.fm/1BNVZSpXp7
Initially due to release their self-titled debut in June, the Ross Orton (The Fall, M.I.A., Arctic Monkeys) produced album is now set for October 2nd. Could be arguably one of the most anticipated debuts this year, the last 12 months have seen the band receive love from BBC 6Music, Beats 1, NME, The Guardian, DIY, Mojo and Q, tour with the Fat White Family and Mac De Marco.
The C33s are Punk/Garage/Surf tinged band from Manchester consisting of Judy Jones (drums, vocals), Cav Green (guitar, vocals) and Ste Phillips (bass).
Their sound is an East coast meets West coast affair, ramped up Ramones pop fused with full on Dick Dale twang. If Pulp Fiction were set in a satellite town The C33s just wrote the soundtrack to their future.
Heading for a lockdown break-out?. Then this song is one for the soundtrack! ‘Harpurhey Hostility’ is an explosive mix of garage punk and raging northern discontent. Not quite like anything else but reminds you of such past iconic delights such as The B52s, The Ramones & the more recent sounds of Oh Sees and Amyl and The Sniffers etc.
An uneasy and uncompromising visceral portrait of a small town in North Manchester whose strong will and attitude can often spill over into the extreme and unruly. Tragedy and comedy are at the core of The C33s and ‘Harpurhey Hostility’ represents this duality in both sound and statement.
Drummer Judy Jones takes lead vocals on this one and snarls her way through 3 minutes of slick guitar, bass runs and tribal drums that have become now recognisable to The C33s’ sound. Recorded at Magic Garden Studios, Wolverhampton under the spiritual umbrella of Gavin Monaghan and Joseph Murray.
The C33s “Harpurhey Hostility” available through The Hatchery Records Released on: 29th June 2020,
