The Fat Angel Sings

‘Never Exhale’ is the sound of a band that hasn’t stopped for a breath. DITZ have toured relentlessly since the release of their first album ‘The Great Regression’ and even before that, travelling at least 100 days a year since COVID. The songs that form their newest offering were written across Europe, often on off days and in borrowed rehearsal rooms just to break up the long drives.

It could be said that the band treat recording and release of music as an afterthought. Often playing songs live years before their release, tweaking them as they go. The songs on the final record may change before they are ever heard as part of the album.

‘Never Exhale’ was largely recorded at Holy Mountain studios in London during a freezing cold January. The process was fraught with obstacles. The original plan, to go and record in Rhode Island, was abandoned when DITZ were offered a support tour with IDLES, although the album was still mixed by the originally intended engineer, Seth Manchester (Model/Actriz, Lingua Ignota, Big Brave). The result is an album hardened by the pressure of its own making. Laboured but not loved.

The album themes reveal themselves more on further listens. The opening gambit ‘Taxi Man’ is an exploration into what it would be like to weigh up your impact of the world. The eponymous taxi man could be seen as a St Peter type figure, or like Charon, ferrying the dead into the underworld.

Further on the album explores themes of unnecessary hatred and division, ‘Space/Smile’ and ‘It smells like something died in here’, aging, ‘Senor Siniestro’ and the separation of the physical from reality, ‘The Body As A Structure’. It’s political, but ultimately personal. More Genet or Kafka than Orwell or Huxley.

Sonically the album has its roots in the usual DITZ influences, classic noise rock such as The Jesus Lizard or Shellac, or the obtuse post punk of the Fall, but also brings in fresh influences. The closing track ‘Britney’ could be compared to Radiohead or Mogwai. Overall, the album is a clear development from their first effort. A sign of things to come.

the new DITZ album ‘Never Exhale’ due on 24th January 2025

Having delivered two acclaimed records of bluesy, retro garage rock indebted to T. Rex and Jon Spencer, the Virginian singer and songwriter Benjamin Booker seemed to disappear off the face of the Earth after 2017’s “Witness“. Nearly eight years later, he returns with a radically different sounding effort his third album, “Lower” is out January 24th, 2025 and available for pre-order on vinyl. I co-produced this record with the masterful Kenny Segal and I am beyond happy to share it with you. “Lwa In the Trailer Park,” off the upcoming “Lower“, marks a big departure from the blues-punk of Booker’s first two celebrated albums

The video for “LWA In The Trailer Park” is out now made in collaboration with nofilmprojects.

It’s out January 24th on Booker’s new label, Fire Next Time Records. Booker co-produced his album with Kenny Segal, who will join the singer on a North American tour next year.

“Lower’s” lead single is “Lwa in the Trailer Park,” and it comes with a black-and-white music video that you can watch below. “I felt particularly connected to Paul Schrader’s work making this album,” Booker said of his visual in a press statement. “Like several of his movies, I wanted to look at a troubled character on the edge, reaching for transcendence. Now that I’m working on a series of connected videos, Schrader has had an influence in that arena as well, along with Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.”

Benjamin Booker is a musician reared in the swampy Floridian DIY scene whose primary inspirations are blues god Blind Willie Johnson and glam figurehead T. Rex, who plays a smartly lyrical blend of soulful garage rock and noisy art pop. Booker dropped his third album at the top of 2025, “Lower”, featuring its distortion-heavy single and opening track “Black Opps.” Cleverly, Booker compares the Black experience of being forever paranoid and living under a microscope (“They’ll kill you while you sleep”) to the willful trauma of playing the newest Call of Duty game. “Can you even call yourself a man if you haven’t helped this country control global politics through hidden acts of violence while eating pizza rolls?” Booker  has said upon the album’s release. “When my virtual country calls me to serve, I’m there.”

Last year, Booker featured on “Baby Steps,” a cut from Billy Woods and Kenny Segal’s “Maps“. He also featured on Armand Hammer’s “Doves,” co-producing the nearly nine-minute track with Segal.

Songhoy Blues’ fourth album Héritage comes out in January, and they’ve given us another preview of it with “Gara.” “Gara means ‘blessing’ in the Songhoy language,” they say. “This song is an ode to the guidance and blessings of the elders in society – particularly one’s parents. There is an African adage, which says ‘A ripe fruit never rots at the top’ and so in this song we encourage younger generations to do good and seek blessing from their elders.”

From the first listening to “Héritage”, the much-awaited fourth album by Songhoy Blues, it is clear that the 4-piece rock band from northern Mali are in a new frame of mind.  With “Héritage”, they move into a more acoustic, creative re-imagining of the “desert blues” style that has brought them to world fame.

 Charismatic, articulate and creative, the band burst onto the scene in 2013 with a powerful style and stage manner once described as “Timbuktu Punk”. Their songs deal with issues of life and love in Mali, and are based on five-note scales, rock rhythms, gritty vocals, and glittering guitar. These elements are ever present in their new album “Héritage”, but with a more intimate groove laced with other sounds from different ethnic traditions from around the country.  Migration and forced displacement bring new perspectives to the notion of heritage in their music.

“Héritage” was recorded in the Remote Records Studio and Studio Moffou in Bamako, with producer Paul Chandler, and draws on the remarkable wealth of musical talent in the city. The album presents new compositions and reworkings of old classics. It is infused with the ethereal sounds of various traditional instruments, all in the hands of great Malian masters.

“Héritage” is compulsive listening for Songhoy Blues’ fans – at home and abroad – and more widely, fans of desert blues, rock, or just good music.

Transgressive Records Ltd. Released on: 13th November.

When the Weather Station released their critically acclaimed album “Ignorance” in 2021, Tamara Lindeman, the band’s driving force, became the accidental orator on the ongoing climate crisis. Revisiting “Ignorance’s” infectious palette and embracing improvisation, Tamara Lindeman overcomes pain and uncertainty to reconnect with herself on this her seventh album.

That record spoke of an ever-increasing sense of fear, decay and grief whilst also trying to hold onto the wonderment and beauty in nature. Four years on, the state of the world hasn’t shown much sign of improvement, and the Weather Station’s seventh record, “Humanhood”, shifts its focus from external anxieties to a paralyzing internal strife. In the process of reconnecting with herself, Lindeman fought to keep her head above water, her gaze searching for the sky.

“Ignorance” was a watershed moment for Lindeman, taking a detour from the understated indie-folk that had steered the Canadian outfit’s earlier output. Songs like “Tried To Tell You,” “Parking Lot” and “Loss” boasted anthemic qualities that presented themselves not as polite invitations to dance, but as insistences of joyous movement. The growth in her lyrical narratives were matched with the impressive breadth of the record’s enveloping instrumentation, which required a broader field of musicians. However, just as fans had adapted to the Weather Station’s newfound exuberance, Lindeman promptly revisited the songs she’d penned during “Ignorance’s” conception, seeking closure on its themes with the sparser and delicate follow-up in 2022, “How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars” (2022).

The sonic differences between those companion albums left audiences wondering what direction the Weather Station would explore next. For Lindeman, however, making those first steps didn’t feel possible. It wasn’t that the path was unclear–she simply didn’t have a vessel to make the journey. Before she could make progress with new music, she had to reconnect with all aspects of her being first.

On “Humanhood”. “Your body fooled you,” Lindeman sings on “Body Moves,” a smooth, celestial jazz song that wraps around the listener with a welcome warmth emanating from an infectious piano and sax motif completed with softly brushed drums. A skilled lyricist and earnest performer, when Lindeman presents audiences with her vignettes characterized by a defining feeling. The sincerity coursing through the song, elevated by the dynamic and rich arrangements, are so immediately effective in drawing you further into a world where its imperfections are highlighted instead of hidden.

Over the course of the record, we follow Lindeman as she finds healing in natural surroundings. Water, in particular, provides a crucial lifeline as expressed on the title track: “Maybe if I go down to the water / Maybe I can get back into my body.” In an interview preceding “Humanhood’s” release, Lindeman described the vitality and security she gets from being outdoors, calling the woods “the place [she’s] always felt the safest, the most free, or the most [herself].” “If no one can see or hear me, I feel very free,” she said. “When I write about the natural world, which I do on every record and often every song, it’s returning to the source or connecting back to the deepest thing for me.”

Along with the Weather Station’s core recording band (Ben Whiteley, Kieran Adams, Karen Ng), Lindeman welcomed Sam Amidon, Drew Jurecka and Joseph Shabason to add even more colour and depth to what are some of her most ambitious compositions to date. Elsewhere, Laurel Sprengelmeyer—the Montreal-based artist better known as Little Scream—is credited with providing lyric consultation. The fullness in the studio is felt in the deft turns these songs take, particularly in the closing moments of “Neon Signs” and “Sewing.” splits itself with a blanket of luminous synths which momentarily brings a sense of security before retreating and leaving Lindeman alone with nothing but the pulse of a fragile piano accompaniment.

“Descent.” An improvised piece, it serves as an extended intro for the propulsive stomp of “Neon Signs,” a song in which consumerism and recollections of desire are in conflict in “a world without trust.”

“Descent” is one of three brief instrumental tracks acting as either an extended intro (along with “Passage”) or ambient pieces (“Fleuve” and “Aurora”); “Irreversible Damage” falls into the latter category, with a Radiohead-like inflection and artful composition.

Comparisons to Joni Mitchell have followed Lindeman from the beginning of her musical career, and there’s no denying the similarities in their cadences, especially when she engages the higher register of her vocal. However, “Humanhood“, evokes a far more compelling range of reference points.

Lindeman’s contemplative closing statement “Sewing,” on which she’s uniting the different patterns of her life (made from “pride and shame, beauty and guilt”) to make a blanket. In bringing these contrasting elements together, she appreciates the comfort in seeing a full and fulfilling image of what the future might hold.

King Hannah crafts a musical tapestry that seamlessly weaves between the serene depths of meditative pop and the expansive, sonorous landscapes brimming with darkness, wit, and wry humour. Merrick’s vocals, a smoky delight, imbue her words with profound weight and potency, complemented by the bluesy canvases Whittle masterfully paints beneath them. Their sound effortlessly transitions from moments of post-rock expansiveness to evoking the sensation of Springsteen straying onto a gritty side-street off his highway to freedom.

In recent times, the duo has graced stages alongside esteemed artists such as Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore, Kevin Morby, and DIIV, captivating audiences at festivals across Europe and North America including End of the Road, Green Man, Primavera Sound, and Fusion, among others. King Hannah’s accolades include being hailed as Stereogum’s Band to Watch, The Guardian’s Ones to Watch, Paste’s Best of What’s Next, and featured in DIY Magazine’s NEU segment, SPIN’s rising artists, and many more.

Wussy is a four-piece rock band hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio. Fronted by ex-Ass Ponys frontman Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker, the band formed in 2001 after Cleaver’s stage fright led to them performing together for a brief run of solo shows. The duo’s first show went well, prompting them to continue and expand their musical journey.

Joining forces with Mark Messerly on bass and utility man duties, as well as Dawn Burman on drums, Wussy released three full-length albums and one EP on their native Cincinnati’s Shake It! Records. Their music has garnered critical acclaim from Rolling Stone, SPIN, Village Voice, NPR, Washington Post, Uncut, and other press outlets.

The first single from Wussy’s LP Cincinnati Ohio, out November 15th on Shake It Records.

The band underwent changes when Burman left in 2009 and was replaced by veteran Cincinnati drummer Joe Klug. The revamped line-up embarked on an Eastern U.S. tour in 2009 while also recording two vinyl-only singles. Wussy continues to captivate audiences with their unique sound and are set to release their fourth full-length album.

Chuck Cleaver – guitar, vocals, piano / Lisa Walker – guitar, vocals, synth / Mark Messerly – bass / Joe Klug – drums, percussion, synth

Live album from The Jesus and Mary Chain, feat. tracks from ‘Psychocandy’, ‘Darklands’, ‘Automatic’, ‘Honey’s Dead’, ‘Stoned and Dethroned’, ‘Munki’ and ‘Damage and Joy’.

Recorded at the Hollywood Palladium, Los Angeles in 2018, ‘Sunset 666’ is a live aIbum from The Jesus and Mary Chain, In 1990, a young American band, full of a precise kind of noise and darkness, were special guests on the US tour being undertaken by a group who had noise and darkness, poise and catharsis of their own. The young band: Nine Inch Nails. Those headliners: The Jesus and Mary Chain. Almost thirty years later, an invitation was extended. Would the Reid brothers care to reverse the roles and open for Nine Inch Nails on their own North American tour? Trent Reznor had been a fan of the Mary Chain, and influenced by them since hearing ‘Psychocandy’, so it felt a good fit and the Reid brothers accepted.

The resulting tour ended with a run of six shows at LA’s Hollywood Palladium and the seventeen tracks captured on the ‘Sunset 666’ double album were recorded from the desk on two of those nights. Those twelve songs were the full set that night, in sequence, meaning the show began with the here-we-f*cking-go drums of ‘Just Like Honey’ and ended with the ferocious euphoria of an eight-and-a-half minute ‘Reverence’. The final side serves almost as a mini-showcase of the ‘Automatic’ album, featuring versions of ‘Blues From A Gun’, ‘Between Planets’ and ‘Halfway To Crazy’.

Sides A, B and C are from the final show, December 15th. Side D of the vinyl record is taken from the December 11th show

Track-list: 1 Just Like Honey, 2 Sometimes Always (feat. Isobel Campbell), 3. Black and Blues (feat. Isobel Campbell), 4 Amputation, 5 All Things Pass, 6 Some Candy Talking, 7 Head On, 8 The Living End, 9 Cracking Up, 10 Teenage Lust, 11 I Hate Rock ‘N’ Roll, 12 Reverence, 13 Blues from a Gun, 14 Far Gone and Out, 15 Between Planets, 16 Halfway To Crazy, 17 In A Hole

Available on gatefold 180g double LP and CD. The black w/ white splatter version is limited to 2000 copies and exclusive to the Fuzz Club and Mary Chain stores.