This is a Record Store Day 2020 item. It will be available to purchase from our stores from 9am 20th June. Remaining stock will be available to purchase from this page at 12pm 21st June.
Hatchie and The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart cover the Jesus and Mary Chain. Both tracks are previously unreleased. Hatchie has released a new 7″ exclusive vinyl to Bandcamp and 100% of proceeds will also go to The Movement for Black Lives and The Loveland Foundation. The 7″ vinyl includes “Sometimes Always” — a collaborative cover with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, originally by The Jesus and Mary Chain and Hope Sandoval. Side B includes the 2018 Adult Swim single “Adored”
Hatchie is the world of Harriette Pilbeam. Step inside her mind; a dreamy landscape where cascading synths, jangling guitars, propulsive rhythms and white noise undulate beneath irresistible pop melodies. Rather than focusing on the external world of her life in Brisbane, Pilbeam turns her gaze inwards, making a soundtrack out of her daydreams, setting her emotional life to song,
“Sometimes Always”, originally performed by The Jesus and Mary Chain. A collaborative cover from Hatchie & The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart.
7″ vinyl available at midnight EST on June 5th. Items will not ship until
In 1964, still bruised after turning down The Beatles, Decca Records released an album by the woman who helped make the discovery of blues musician Mississippi Fred McDowell, whose music she had been discovered in Tennessee in the late 1950s and recorded McDowell for the masses: 29-year-old Sussex folk singer Shirley Collins.
Collins may not have looked like much of a rebel on the cover of that 1964 album, but she was. Five years earlier, she had crossed the Atlantic alone to visit prisons and remote Appalachian communities, meeting there with folklorist Alan Lomax to collect folk songs.
Collins’ 1964 album, Folk Roots, New Routes, is an uncompromising work that spearheaded innovation in the middle of the folk music revival. It set a template for all the folk-rock that followed it, and inspired 21st century psych-folk decades later. Bands like Pentangle and Fairport Convention would have been very different without her, while Will Oldham, Blur’s Graham Coxon and Angel Olsen are among the contemporary fans who have recorded her songs.
It was one of the best 1960’s folk music revival albums of the 20th Century. “Folk Roots New Routes” it is a beautiful, highly respected and often the go-to British folk album which has earnt a great deal of admiration from many musicians, critics and fans around the world. At the center of this extraordinary record is Collins’ startling voice. It is clear and stark, pure but free of prettiness, a vehicle for a song and its sentiments, entirely without ego.
Davy Graham and Shirley Collins’ pioneering arrangements and playing is unyielding and timeless, yet their uncompromising approach was also very innovative.
Pressed on 180grm vinyl, analogue remastered with many tracks in stereo for the first time, directly from tapes for RSD 2020.Comes with new additional liner notes and rare photos printed on the inner sleeve. Some tracks are released in stereo for the first time ever.
Our record/mini-album is out today on Bella Union. ‘Annual’ was written around a journal made over the course of a calendar year. It begins in winter and ends in winter. The track ‘Halo’ represents right now!
Please take the time to order the album from an independent business or via Bandcamp. Bandcamp are waiving their commission today, so any purchases will directly help the group make more records and play shows when the time is right.
Released in August 2019, Modern Nature’s debut album – How to Live – crossed the urban and rural into each other. Plaintive cello strains melted into motorik beats. Pastoral field recordings drifted through looping guitar figures. Rising melodies shone with reflective saxophone accents, placing the record somewhere between the subtle mediations of Talk Talk, the stirring folk of Anne Briggs and the atmospheric waves of Harmonia. The album was met with universal acclaim and featured in a number of publication’s ‘Best Of 2019’ lists. As the group took the album out on the road, Modern Nature became something even more expansive. “It feels like there’s scope and room to grow. I want the group to feel fluid and that whoever’s playing with us can express themselves and interpret what they think this music is” says bandleader Jack Cooper.
Their new mini-album Annual, recorded in December 2019 at Gizzard Studio in London, is another step towards something more liberated and a world away from the sound of Jack Cooper’s previous bands. Will Young sits this one out, concentrating on his work with Beak, but How To Live collaborator Jeff Tobias takes a more central role, alongside percussionist Jim Wallis. Annual acts as a companion piece to the band’s How To Live debut but also a pointer to the paths ahead.
Martha Ffion first came to our attention back in 2015 when she put out a single through the Turnstile label. Martha then picked up a much larger audience with her 2018 debut album, “Sunday Best”, released through the ever wonderful Lost Map Records, which was nominated for the Scottish Album of the Year Award. Having returned from a period of radio silence recently with the excellent single, After The Fact,Martha has this week confirmed a new album, Night To Forget will be out later this summer, as well as sharing the latest offering from it, Want You To Know.
Inspired by, “the delusional nostalgia celebrated by the MAGA / ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ sets”, Martha first came up with the chorus for Want You To Know almost a decade ago, before putting it to tape in, “an uncharacteristically hot Glasgow summer”. The result has a delightfully summery feel, the whole thing engulfed in an almost heat haze, dripping with wistful memories and a gently psychedelic quality. As with After The Fact, there’s a subtle re-imagination of Martha’s sound going on; the sounds of 60’s-pop and Americana that were the hallmark of Sunday Best replaced by a newly technicolour sonic pallet, as easy guitars, processed vocals and twitching electronics come to the fore.
Amid all the nostalgia and electro-pop perfection, there lies a certain sense of unease, the feeling that a bubble is about to burst, clinging onto the past can only last so long, a change is undeniably coming your way: “come, witness the end of pageantry, the cult is coming to your street”. Like all the best pop-songs the gorgeous sheen is masking something here, when Martha Ffion unveils her Nights To Forget it might well be one of the year’s most eye opening musical highlights.
The Long Weekend ain’t over yet, folks. If you haven’t given the brand new Green Hands single a look or a listen or both yet, there’s still plenty of time to be doing so, This is the second single to be taken from Green Hands’ upcoming debut album ‘Nebo’s Dream’, out later this year via Breakfast Records.
Following on from the glorious indie tones of recent single ‘I Found a Way’, Green Hands present a second taster from their upcoming album. The track in question is entitled ‘The Long Weekend’ and sees the band push aside the guitars and slide over to the organ.
‘The Long Weekend’ is an intimate piece of music that further showcases Jack Telford’s talent for emotive alternative pop songwriting, “I had probably spent too much time listening to ‘Godspeed’ by Frank Ocean and a bunch of Grandaddy..”, he mentions, “I really wanted to move away from guitars and lean in on some warmer organs and mellotrons”, and lean in he does. A departure it isn’t, but a crowning jewel within Green Hands’ new record perhaps. The bare-bones structure and lyrical content on ‘The Long Weekend’ oozes fragility and intimacy through it’s delicate soundscape, it brings the listener ever-closer to the songwriter.
Telford explains, “The Long Weekend” was written about a period a few years ago during my last months living in Oxford, where I spent a bit too much time cutting about bars and pubs. Trying to balance yourself out in your twenties can be difficult and the song is a reminder that some allures can be strong but after a while, they are temporary too.”
Elvis Costello has shared a new song. It’s called “No Flag.” Traveling alone to the Finnish capital on February 16th, Costello worked for three days at Suomenlinnan Studio, a recording facility a twenty-minute ferry ride from downtown Helsinki.
Asked about the choice of recording location, Costello, explained, “I wanted to go somewhere nobody knew me. So, this is ‘The Helsinki Sound.’”
Costello recorded “No Flag” earlier this year.
Last year, Costello and Amy Allison contributed a song to If You’re Going to the City: A Tribute to Mose Allison (they recorded “Monsters of the Id”). In April, Costello penned a lengthy letter in remembrance of the late singer-songwriter John Prine.
Elvis Costello and the Imposters released their most recent studio album Look Now in 2018.
Francis Of Delirium are a somewhat surprising duo, consisting of 18-year-old singer and songwriter Jana Bahrich and collaborator Chris Hewett, some 30 years her senior. The pair didn’t even share a country, splitting themselves between Canada and the US, before settling in their current home of Luxembourg. What they do share is a love of 90’s grunge, the influence of bands like Alice In Chains or Soundgarden colliding with millennial bedroom pop to make something compelling and intriguing. The band are set to release their debut album, “All Change”, next month, and have this week shared a new single, “Ashamed”.
Discussing the track, Jana has suggested it touches on ideas of, “navigating how much of yourself you should be giving out to other people”, and often feeling inadequate for not sharing more of yourself with the world. Musically, as you’d perhaps expect from the themes, Ashamed is a tightly wound-affair, Jana’s rapid tumble of vocals colliding with crunchy guitar lines, in a tense unravelling of emotion. You can almost hear the ideas cycling through Jana’s head, shaping into rapidly formed thoughts before quickly dancing off somewhere else, the music mirroring the whirring of a sleepless mind. A fascinating collision of ideas,
Francis Of Delirium feels like an intoxicating blend, there’s a restlessness and an urgency here, a demand to be heard that we can only recommend you give into, it’s well worthy of your time.
Band Members
Jana Bahrich,
Chris Hewett,
Jeff Hennico,
“All Change” is out June 19th via Dalliance Records.
Jimi Hendrix “Live at the Fillmore” It was 50 years ago this year that the iconic “Band of Gypsys” performances were immortalized on acetate.
On January 28th, 1970, at Madison Square Garden, Jimi Hendrix spoke his last words as a member of Band Of Gypsys: “That’s what happens when Earth fucks with space.”
He then left the stage, stumbling under the effects of either exhaustion or a psychedelic mickey, possibly slipped to him by his manager, Mike Jeffrey. A mere two songs into their set at the Winter Peace Concert, the show was over – as was the band. But just a month earlier, when the group had played four sets at the Fillmore East, things had seemed much more promising.
Consisting of Hendrix and the rhythm section of Billy Cox (bass) and Buddy Miles (drums), Band Of Gypsies evolved out of Gypsy Sun & Rainbows, the larger group Hendrix had assembled to play Woodstock. Cox was an old army buddy from Hendrix’s time in the 101st Airborne and Miles, late of the Electric Flag, had crossed paths with Hendrix at Monterey Pop a few years earlier. Hendrix had often bemoaned his lack of engagement with black audience so perhaps an all-black group would be the ticket, as well as allowing him to realize a funkier musical vision. As he told Al Aronowitz in an interview in the New York Post that ran January 2nd, 1970: “Now I want to bring it down to earth. I want to get back to the blues, because that’s what I am.”
Hendrix’s nagging insecurities about his voice also came into play. “I’d rather just play,” he told Aronowitz,”I never sang before. In England they made me sing, but Buddy has the right voice, he’s going to do the singing from now on.” According to his engineer Eddie Kramer in the April 2020 issue of Mojo Magazine, Hendrix came to regret that decision when it came to selecting the tracks and mixing the Band of Gypsys album. “We get to one of Buddy’s long rants where he goes on and on and on, and I could just see Jimi’s head with his hat on get lower and lower, and finally he folds his arms and rests his head down on the console. And he says, ‘Ahhh Buddy, I wish you would shut the fuck up.’”
With much of the impetus for the Fillmore East concerts coming from the need to deliver an album to Capitol Records, an obligation dating back to 1965, Hendrix might have rushed the gig a bit. He admitted as much in an April 1970 interview with Melody Maker’s Keith Altham, saying “I wasn’t too satisfied with the Band of Gypsys album. If it had been up to me I would have never put it out. From a musician’s point of view it was not a good recording and I was out of tune on a few things. Not enough preparation went into it and it came out a bit ‘grizzly’ – we all felt shaky. The thing was we owed the record company an album and they were pushing us – so here it is.”
And now here it is 50 years later and the Experience Hendrix promotional machine is wasting no time celebrating an album that was definitely the weakest of the four released during his lifetime. There’s also Songs For Groovy Children, a box set they released last year, which included all four concerts the Band of Gypsys played on December 31st 1969 and January 1st 1970. That set proved the risks of being a completist, with four ragged versions of “Stop,” a rote soul number by Jerry Ragavoy/Mort Shuman that sounded way better when Howard Tate sang it. But there were also a number of mind-blowing performances that had been left in the vaults. Using the benefit of hindsight – and as someone who agrees with Hendrix’s later opinion of Miles – here is my definitive single-disc distillation of those four nights at the Fillmore, a collection I’m calling:
SIDE ONE
“Power of Soul” (December 31st, 1969 – First Set) Why not start with the first song of the first set? While Hendrix’s voice sounds a little thin on this recording, his guitar snarls with a thrilling complexity, dealing out riffs and solos like winning hands in a high-stakes poker game. Buddy’s vocal contribution works, giving you an idea of why Hendrix thought their collaboration would work. The guitar does most of the talking anyway, with a dazzling introduction that goes on for over half the length of the song.
“Message to Love” (December 31st, 1969 – Second Set) While the vocal interaction is a little rough, this exuberant slice of funky soul keeps the energy going, with some thrilling unison work from Hendrix.
“Machine Gun” (January 1st, 1970 – Second Set) There is no bad live recording of this extraordinary anti-war tone poem. In fact, I was tempted to make Band of Gypsys into The Machine Gun Variations and leave it at that. Instead, I chose to have it end side one. What this take has over the one used on the original album (1/1/70 – 1st set) is the sense of pain on the part of the victims of war, with their screams getting equal time alongside the sounds of the weapons of war. Hendrix’s first solo is almost pure anguish, with the eerie backing vocals the only sign of humanity. The quieter sections seem to invent a new kind of dub blues, with Miles’ drums taking on a horrific inevitability, like putting one foot in front of the other even though each step takes you closer to certain doom. Among the many tragedies of Hendrix’s early death is the fact that he was never able to complete a fully realized studio version of “Machine Gun.”
SIDE TWO
“Izabella” (December 31st, 1969 – First Set) This loose bit of roadhouse, gutbucket riffage seems the perfect way to kick off side two after the dread of “Machine Gun.” Even though he played it first, it fits here well, as Hendrix introduced it by saying, “I’d like to do this song dedicated to maybe a soldier in the army, singing about his old lady that he dreams about and humping a machine gun instead.” Why they left this off the original to make room for two Buddy Miles originals (the clichéd “Changes” and the hippy jive of “We Gotta Live Together”) I’ll never know.
“Bleeding Heart” (December 31st, 1969 – First Set) This slow, elegant extrapolation of the Elmore James classic must be what Hendrix was talking about when he said he wanted to get back to the blues. While he also played “Hear My Train A-Comin’” (once) and “Earth Blues” (three times), this is the best pure blues of the the two-night stand.
“Who Knows” (December 31st, 1969 – Second Set) “Happy New Year, goodbye ’69,” Hendrix improvises at the start of this first-ever performance of “Who Knows.” While the song never rises above a jam, Hendrix seems to really enjoy trading lines with Miles, getting into the inconsequential fun of lyrics like, “They don’t know (they don’t know)/About my baby (about my baby),” before letting his Strat rip the Fillmore’s roof off.
“Ezy Ryder” (December 31st, 1969 – First Set) Another debut performance, this time for a song Hendrix would focus on for his next album and perform at many concerts to the end of his life. Perhaps he left it off Band of Gypsys because he was already holding the image of what it would become in his mind. But this version, which Hendrix introduces by saying, “I seen this picture called Easy Rider, and I was mad as hell…We’re going to call this thing “Ezy Ryder,” we’ll just make up the words as we go along because we’ve got about 20 verses of it,” is savagely entertaining. Miles and Cox can barely keep up as Hendrix alternates between stop-start riffs and furious soloing. The ascending chords at the end take it over the top – and then drag you down to earth, a perfect ending for my perfected Band of Gypsys.
In early 2003 a young Steve McBean was living in Vancouver and in the midst of a transition from his sorely overlooked rock band Jerk With A Bomb into an auspicious new chapter. JWAB was his umpteenth band in as many years woodshedding as both a frontman and a supporting musician in countless punk & hard core bands in the Canadian wilds starting in his teens and going through his twenties. JWAB was arguably the band in which he’d finally found his signature singing voice and started collaborating with drummer Joshua Wells and vocalist Amber Webber.
Around this time his friend Dan Bejar (Destroyer, New Pornographers) sent to Jagjaguwar Records a demo tape of new songs that Steve had been writing. He wasn’t sure if it they were JWAB songs or something new entirely. The songs were randy & ribald, with a primitive drum machine beat and a Bo Diddley guitar swagger. They were scintillating and taught us things that our parents were too scared to teach.
These were the demos for the songs that would be re-recorded as the debut album by Pink Mountaintops, a sister project to the other McBean-fronted rock band that was being born at the same time — Black Mountain. This was an exciting time not only for McBean — who was bubbling with songs & ideas — but a turning point for Jagjaguwar, thrilled to sign two of its most significant projects simultaneously. We’re very pleased to be able to share these first demos which bred so much inspiration and provided a horny clarion call for things to come.
Love is everyday magic. That’s the impression you get listening to “Water”, the new album by Chicago trio Dehd. Veterans of Chicago’s increasingly fruitful DIY scene Jason Balla ( Ne-Hi and Earring) Emily Kempf (Vail and formerly with Lala Lala) and drummer Eric McGrady share a strange and inexplicable chemistry. Love rises up into the atmosphere like steam off a summer sidewalk and makes you wild. Love breaks your heart and you consider yourself lucky for it. Like water itself, it surrounds us, it supports us; it’s what we’re made of. It takes the shape of its container.
The music is hazy and reverb-drenched, a scuzzy and hyped-up take on surf rock that could only come from the Third Coast. It’s all animated by the red-lining feel-good spirit of the Velvet Underground’s Loaded and the breezy melodicism of C86-era indie rock, with a dash of the Cramps’ spooky-hop bop courtesy of McGrady’s locomotive drumming. It’s a clear-eyed look at the wild nature of everyday life that’s been spun up in sugary sweet melodies and scratched-crystal sounds. More than anything, it’s the embodiment of Dehd’s m.o. from the start:
As Kempf puts it, “Work with what you have and make it magical.”
From Dehd’s sophomore LP ‘Water’ out May 10th on Fire Talk.
