Legendary indie-folk trio Bright Eyes has released the next single off their highly anticipated upcoming reunion album. Bright Eyes’ last studio LP, titled The People’s Key, was as long ago as 2011. Since then, the band has been relatively inactive, although frontman Conor Oberst has continued a steady stream of releases. Most recently, Oberst teamed up with Dead Oceans-signee Phoebe Bridgers to form the Better Oblivion Community Center supergroup. The duo’s eponymous debut album was released in 2019.
In February 2020, Bright Eyes joined Bridgers and quietly signed to Dead Oceans, leading many to speculate a new album was in the works. Since then, three singles have been released: “Persona Non Grata,” “Forced Convalescence,” and now most recently, “One and Done.”
Each single has been a clear continuation of past Bright Eyes releases, with fresh twists. “One and Done” features almost psychedelic production set against Oberst’s characteristically pointed, folksy vocals. There’s also a heavy emphasis on strings in this track, providing extra depth and a sense of melodrama.
In a recent interview with NME, Oberst described the upcoming album as an extension and improvement of past work:
“We wanted to invoke some elements of our oldest records… The sounds aren’t all pristine and super-manicured. We wanted to feel like the band we started as kids who were into punk rock and stuff like that. My favorite stuff walks the line between the human, raw, emotional and unhinged qualities, but with a little more sophisticated approach.”
Despite having released three singles, neither the band nor Dead Oceans have provided any further details regarding the record’s title or its release date. Additionally, Bright Eyes has had to postpone upcoming 2020 tour dates (the first in almost a decade) including a performance at End Of The Road Festival in light of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. There are many uncertainties regarding Bright Eyes’ reunion, yet the three singles released so far are incredibly compelling: keep an eye out for upcoming announcements.
Dublin band Fontaines D.C. have shared a second single from their upcoming second album A Hero’s Death. Powered by a descending bassline played high on the neck and slashing guitars, “I Don’t Belong” is a brooding, smoldering track that owes just a little to Joy Division. It’s the opening song on the album and you can listen below. A Hero’s Death is out July 31st via Partisan Records.
The new album from Fontaines D.C.—‘A Hero’s Death’—arrives July 31. Available on deluxe gatefold 2x 180g vinyl, limited edition stormy blue vinyl, standard black vinyl, two pocket wallet CD, limited edition cassette, and MP3, lossless or 24-bit WAV digital album. Each album purchase comes with an instant grat download of “A Hero’s Death” (the single), and the full digital album to be delivered on release day.
Barely a year after the release of their hugely acclaimed debut album ‘Dogrel’, which earned a Mercury Prize nomination and Album of the Year 2019 at both BBC 6Music and Rough Trade record store, Dublin’s Fontaines D.C. have returned with an intensely confident, patient, and complex follow up album. ‘A Hero’s Death’ arrives battered and bruised, albeit beautiful – a heady and philosophical take on the modern world, and its great uncertainty.
“Call Me Out” was written in 2017. It’s an acknowledgement of the need for open listening, active learning, inward study and accountability towards personal and social change. It’s an owning of our privilege and responsibilities. We’re not looking to take up a lot of space with this release, but thought it might do some good to put it out now, rather than hiding it away any longer.
It won’t be available on spotify, applemusic, etc, or as a physical release. Please don’t post it on youtube. The purpose of this release is to raise money for the folks All $ from the sale of this song will be donated to Black Lives Matter Toronto: blacklivesmatter.ca
and Unist’ot’en Camp Legal Fund for Land Defenders: unistoten.camp/support-us/donate/
Glen Hansard released a new album, This Wild Willing, last year via ANTI-Rcords. Now he has shared a video for the album’s “Good Life of Song.” The video was shared in honor of Danny Sheehy—a writer and poet Hansard met during his “life-changing” experience in 2016 working on a boat that travelled across the north coast of Spain. Sheehy died three years ago today in a boating accident. The video is made up of footage from the 2018 documentary The Camino Voyage, which chonicled the boat journey.
“I wrote this song in Paris while in residence at the Irish Cultural Centre,” Hansard says in a press release. “It’s a tribute to the life of bards and troubadours on their lifelong march through the towns and villages of the world, singing and drinking, expressing the sorrows and the joys of the age as they court darkness and light with equal knowing. A song of gratitude for the gift of singing. I raise it here to the memory of our boat captain Danny Sheehy.”
Hansard also recently shared the new song about life in lockdown, “Cold Comfort,”Hansard calls “Cold Comfort” “a hand made video for a homemade song written for the time that’s in it” in a press release. The song and video were created in quarantine.
A handmade video for a homemade song written this week for the time that’s in it.
The Cribs have reunited with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, virtually, to record a lockdown version of their collaboration “Be Safe” which was originally on 2007’s Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever. Say The Cribs: “Got the old band back together (despite being separated by thousands of miles!) for a fashionably late isolation video, our first ‘live’ performance in almost 2 years! Feel like the title of the song is quite pertinent at the minute, and hope you’re all looking out for each other.” Love, The Cribs
For the video, Ranaldo filmed himself in a very Sonic Youth-y looking location, while drummer Ross Jarman is joined by his kid on a second kit.
Lee Ranaldo and the rest of Sonic Youth have been digging through their archives and sharing rarities and more via Bandcamp. The Cribs and Lee Ranaldo played “Be Safe” live together at Pop Montreal 2015.
Steve Earle released an acoustic version of a new song, “Times Like These” today via SPIN magazine. A full-band rendition will drop on August 29th as the first of three Record Store Day events.
“This is a song I wrote for a moment at the beginning of the Trumpian nightmare that I planned on releasing closer to the election, but I reckon its time has come today,” Earle said of the song.
A full-band rendition of “Times Like These” is out on August 29th as the first of three Record Store Day Drops events. But last Friday, Earle went back into the studio to give us a preview of the song with a stripped-down version.
The bare-bones recording, with Earle unaccompanied on acoustic guitar, stresses the urgency of ending the Trump administration. The song was written early in 45’s reign and was originally supposed to be part of a new full-length before it became the Ghosts of West Virginia concept album. Its lyrics are sadly evergreen and reflect the problems that the country continues to face today.
In 1970, there was no band working harder than Creedence Clearwater Revival, the swamp-rock kingpins from California. “Cosmo’s Factory”, was their fifth LP in 24 months, It came out in May that year, and even though it was part of on onslaught that would continue with another LP later in 1970 (they’d finally take 1971 off from releasing new albums), it would become the band’s biggest album, launching their biggest hits and topping the charts around the world.
Now, 50 years later, Cosmo’s Factory is back on vinyl for its anniversary, pressed by VMP on color vinyl and half-speed remastered from original sources. Creedence Clearwater Revival went on rock radio sometime in the ‘60s, and basically never left. If you’ve listened to classic rock radio anytime since the format was invented, you’ve heard dozens of their songs, and Cosmo’s Factory is largely why. This album has wall-to-wall hits, which is why it topped the charts in at least six countries, and strangely, even charted as an R&B album thanks to the stellar cover of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” .
But that’s not the only hit on this album: Cosmo’s Factory has “Run Through The Jungle” and “Who’ll Stop The Rain,” two songs that spoke to the Vietnam experience happening for many of the group’s hometown peers. While other bands spoke to the counterculture and were considered “cooler” than CCR ever was, Creedence made music for the Middle American teenagers forced into serving in Vietnam by the draft.
Those three songs would be enough to make the album a hit, but this one tacked on “Lookin’ Out My Back Door,”“Ramble Tamble,” “Up Around the Bend,” and “Long As I Can See The Light,” all deepcut staples of classic rock. The group would tour the world as conquering heroes in 1970 and 1971, and disband after 1972’s Mardi Gras, their impact on rock cemented in just one presidential term.
The album was mastered at half-speed at Abbey Road Studios, pressed on 180g vinyl comes housed in a ‘tip-on’ jacket (high quality thick card sleeve with cover art ‘pasted on’) replicating the original pressing packaging.
Here & Elsewhere is a loose assortment of singers and players, originally gathered together in Orange County, CA, including Emily, Nick, Ken, Mark, Travis, Mary (in spirit), Chris A. (in spirit), and Dan. All music was/is recorded on an 8 track Korg D888 Digital Recording Studio, in hallways and on headphones.
Composer Daniel McClure has said For the last few months I’ve been working on a soundtrack for a movie set in Mississippi, and the directors asked for open-tuned slide/dobro/drone blues (no strumming acoustic – which is my comfort zone). At the same time, I finally bought Carruthers’ Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands, which led me to do a deep chronological study of Spacemen 3 (go through LPs, singles, live stuff (thanks to all who put those incredible live downloads up!) – including a re-read of the 2004 book). As I was going through the Spacemen 3 catalog and playing dobro/slide/drone music for the soundtrack, I got an itch to record some songs (the Velvets/Stooges/Spacemen 3 lineage really makes you want to play music). The style that usually works for me (and my voice) is acoustic drone with a fluttering background. For side project, see Lazy Fair.
With heavy hearts, we share the devastating news of Dwight Twilley’s passing. Today, he peacefully departed this world, surrounded by the love of his life, Jan, and close friends. The loss is immeasurable, and our words can’t capture the depth of our grief. Dwight’s musical prowess touched countless lives, leaving an indelible mark on the hearts of many. We are profoundly thankful for the enduring musical legacy he has bestowed upon us all.Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour performed as the Dwight Twilley Band through 1978, and Twilley has performed as a solo act since then. Twilley and Phil Seymour met in Tulsa in 1967 at a theater where they had gone to see the movie The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, and soon began writing songs and recording together. They continued their partnership over the next several years under the band name Oister. Twilley wrote all the songs and played guitar and piano, Seymour played drums and bass, and both sang leads and harmonies. Later, guitarist Bill Pitcock IV played lead guitar on most of their tracks.
Twilley and Seymour eventually decided to leave Tulsa and try to be discovered in Memphis, Tennessee. By sheer chance, the first recording studio that they wandered into was Sun Studio’s, where they met, according to Twilley, “some guy named Phillips.” After listening to a cassette of their folk/pop/country blend, Jerry Phillips (son of Sun founder Sam Phillips) referred them to the Tupelo, Mississippi studio of former Sun artist Ray Harris, whom both Twilley and Seymour credited for introducing them to rockabilly and adding a harder edge to their sound.
Ultimately, Twilley and Seymour left Tulsa and went to Los Angeles in 1974 to find a record label, where they signed with Shelter Records, a label with offices in Los Angeles and Tulsa that was co-owned by Denny Cordell and Tulsa native Leon Russell. Cordell promptly changed the group’s name from Oister to the Dwight Twilley Band, which set the seeds for future problems arising from Seymour’s anonymity in the partnership. Because of Shelter’s Tulsa headquarters, they were able to self-produce many songs in their hometown, frequently without Shelter’s knowledge. One of those songs, “I’m on Fire”, became their debut single and reached the Billboard charts in 1975 with relatively little promotion, largely because the band was in England recording its first album, tentatively called Fire, with producer Robin Cable at Trident Studios. The photos used on the single’s picture sleeve were low quality from a photo booth, even less professional than the band’s first promo picture. The unexpected success of the self-produced “I’m On Fire” caused most of the English tracks recorded with Cable to be relegated to a second album, thereafter known as The B Album. Leon Russell then permitted the band to record new tracks at his 40-track home studio, where one of the engineers was Roger Linn, who also contributed lead guitars and bass to some of their recordings.
During an appearance on American Bandstand, the band played what was to be its follow-up single, “Shark (in the Dark)”, produced by Twilley, Seymour and Russell. The success of the film Jaws, however, caused Cordell and Shelter to reject the single, apparently to keep the group from being perceived as a cash-in novelty act. The eventual follow-up single, “You Were So Warm” backed with “Sincerely”, failed due to distribution problems; just after the single was released, Shelter Records collapsed in the midst of a lawsuit between Russell and Cordell. The Dwight TwilleyBand’s completed album went unreleased for 10 months due to Shelter’s switch from MCA Records to ABC Records for distribution, and The B Album was left unreleased. When the album “Sincerely” was finally released in 1976, it failed as well, During this time, Seymour and Twilley befriended labelmate Tom Petty and Phil sang backing vocals on “Breakdown” and “American Girl”, creating a long-lasting friendship.
In 1977, the Dwight Twilley Band performed on the short-lived CBS Saturday morning kids show Wacko!. Shelter then switched distribution again to Arista Records. ABC elected to keep Petty and J. J. Cale, leaving Twilley alone on the Shelter/Arista label. Pitcock became a credited member of the Dwight Twilley Band during touring and recording of the second album. However, that album, Twilley Don’t Mind, proved to be another commercial disappointment in 1977.
Seymour left the band the following year, pursuing a solo career with some success until he developed what proved to be terminal cancer. He died of lymphoma in 1993, and as of 2007 Twilley still did not perform Dwight Twilley Band songs that featured lead vocals by Seymour. The Dwight Twilley Band albums were reissued in CD form with bonus tracks by the audiophile DCC Compact Classics label in 1989 and 1990. In 1993, shortly before Phil Seymour’s death, the Dwight Twilley Band released The Great Lost Twilley Album, which collected a fraction of the “hundreds” of early unreleased songs Twilley and Seymour had recorded for Shelter, including several songs from The B Album and Blueprint as well as a few alternate versions of released songs. However, once again the Dwight Twilley Band fell victim to some label politics, as EMI bought the rights to Shelter just weeks after the release, and all three of the DCC Dwight Twilley Band albums went out of print again.
In 1997, The Right Stuff, a reissue label owned by EMI, reissued Sincerely and Twilley Don’t Mind with somewhat different bonus tracks from the DCC versions. They both went out of print the following year, when EMI discontinued the label.
The Dwight Twilley Band albums Sincerely and Twilley Don’t Mind were reissued again in a two-disk compilations by Australia’s Raven Records in 2007 with still different bonus tracks. Finally, in 2009, a tape of the Dwight Twilley Band’s October 1976 concert at the Agora Theatre and Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio, which had been recorded for broadcast on Cleveland radio station WMMS, was remastered and released as a live album entitled “Live From Agora”.
dt>The Dwight Twilley Band
Sincerely (1976, reissued 1989, 1997, 2007)
Twilley Don’t Mind (1977, reissued 1990, 1997, 2007)
Australian musician Gordi shares the new single, “Volcanic,” from her new album, Our Two Skins, on Jagjaguwar Records. The release date for Our Two Skins has moved to June 26th due to disruptions related to COVID-19. Following previously released songs “Aeroplane Bathroom” and “Sandwiches,” “Volcanic” fizzles with a sense of urgency and swirling mania. Payten wrote the track in 2018 while in Sweden, when travelling with her parents and grappling with a new truth in her identity, against the backdrop of a Christian family and Australia’s same-sex marriage vote. The instrumentation came out of hours sitting at the piano behind the kitchen at Berlin’s Michelberger Hotel during PEOPLE Festival, the piano of which made it into the final version on the record (if you listen hard you can hear plates, pots and pans clinking from the kitchen). “Volcanic” is cathartic, driven by Payten’s deeply rich voice and frank lyrics.
“It speaks to a rush of anxiety – about why, about what is real and what is not, about the drama of it, about the vortex of it,” says Payten. “When it surges you can feel paralysed and out of control at the same time – ‘shut down’ and ‘manic.’ Its self-destructive nature can be so crippling. I wanted the song to feel like a wave of anxiety. The tempo never changes but the piano solo starts at half-time and rushes until it is double the speed, though the beat never changes. And then suddenly; it’s over.”
The accompanying video was directed by Madeleine Purdy and shot around Payten’s hometown of Canowindra, mostly on her family’s property.
“Volcanic” the new song by Gordi off ‘Our Two Skins’ out June 26th on Jagjaguwar
