The Fat Angel Sings

The Bookshop Band are the musical offspring of an artistic love-affair between a group of award winning folk songwriters, Beth Porter and Ben Please, and an independent bookshop in the UK, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. The songs are the musical outpouring of the band’s own response to books they have read, curated by the bookshop. 

After hearing the band’s previous albums, Pete Townshend reached out and offered to produce their next record, and ended up playing on every track too. “EMERGE, RETURN” is the result of this and comes out on June 28th, 2024. 

It features songs inspired by books by authors including Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood, Shaun Bythell, Yann Martel, Carol Birch, Barney Norris, Robert Macfarlane, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Aldous Huxley. The cover art is by Stanley Donwood, and it was mixed by Nick Drake’s recording engineer, John Wood.

We are on a huge UK tour at the moment, kids in tow to promote our new album, so we thought it might be a nice moment to release this music video, of a song called “Why I Travel This Way“, inspired by The High Mountains Of Portugal, by Canadian author Yann Martel, who also features on the track, playing glockenspiel.

Filmed and edited by Ben Please, with help from all the fire crew at the glorious Eden Festival. Music by The Bookshop Band, ft. Pete Townshend. Music produced by Pete Townshend, engineered by Myles Clarke and Michael Nyondoro, mixed by John Wood.

LA psych band go Devo on the first single from their upcoming album “Trash Classic”.

The Los Angeles psych band Frankie & The Witch Fingers have announced a new album, “Trash Classic”, which will be out June 6th via Reverberation Appreciation Society / Greenway Records. They made it at LA’s Tiny Telephone Studio with producer Maryam Qudus (La Luz, Spacemoth).

First single “Economy” owes a lot to Devo/B-52’s both musically and thematically. The band say: “’Economy’ invades your brain like a late-night infomercial, ruthlessly selling the shiny nightmare of consumer paradise. Synthetic basslines pound like a debt collector that knows you’re home, while jagged guitars slice like overdue bills stamped in red. Urgent synth melodies buzz and ring like reminders to refill prescriptions you can’t afford. Everything throbs to a hammering blown-out beat, teetering on the edge of assembly-line-collapse. Cold electronically layered vocals chant over the frenzy: WORK. SPEND. REPEAT. Grotesque and irresistible, it’s all circling the drain.

Families sell their life-force for dinner while corporations rake in unimaginable profits from the very sickness they created. Sound familiar? By the time the electro-punk fuelled finale kicks into overdrive, it injects itself straight into your bloodstream, hijacking your senses and stripping everything down to its raw, naked truth. “Economy” distorts everyday despair into a mutant disco soundtrack—absurd, biting, and disturbingly fun.”

Frankie & The Witch Fingers will be in Austin this week for SXSW where they are playing a lot of shows, 

Frankie and the Witch Fingers · Dylan Sizemore · Josh Menashe · Nikki Pickle · Nick Aguilar “Economy” will be released on Greenway 2025-03-11

Mannequin Pussy‘s music feels like a resilient and galvanizing shout that demands to be heard. Across four albums, the Philadelphia rock band that consists of Colins “Bear” Regisford (bass, vocals), Kaleen Reading (drums, percussion), Maxine Steen (guitar, synths), and Marisa Dabice (guitar, vocals) has made cathartic tunes about despairing times. “There’s just so much constantly going on that feels intentionally evil that trying to make something beautiful feels like a radical act,” says Dabice. “The ethos of this band has always been to bring people together.”

Their new album, “I Got Heaven”, which is out March 1st via Epitaph Records, is the band’s most fully realized recording yet. Over ten ambitious tracks which abruptly turn from searing punk to inviting alternative pop, the album is deeply concerned with desire, the power in being alone, and how to live in an unfeeling and unkind world. It’s a document of a band doubling down on their unshakable bond to make something furious, thrilling, and wholly alive. Following the 2019 release of their critically acclaimed third album “Patience”, Mannequin Pussy returned in 2021 for their EP “Perfect”. They toured that release relentlessly and added guitarist Maxine Steen to the band’s official lineup.

The band changed their entire creative formula, choosing to write together in the studio in Los Angeles with producer John Congleton, over slowly crafting tracks at home. “Everyone felt empowered to speak up about their own ideas to make this thing the best it could possibly be,” says Regisford.

Ty Segall releases a lot of albums but his upcoming “Possession” could have much wider appeal.

The first single from the album is “Fantastic Tomb,” which shows off the ambition and tunefulness of “Possession”, not to mention Cronin’s sax arrangements. This is a real step up for Ty and you can listen below.

Ty Segall has announced a new album, “Possession“, which will be out May 30th via Drag City. This is his 16th solo album and Ty made it at his own Harmonizer studio, producing it himself. Mikal Cronin provided string and horn arrangements (he also plays sax), and lyrics were co-written with filmmaker and longtime associate Matt Yoka.

So for “Possession”, Ty’s 16th album, he strikes up the orchestra in his head with an abiding view of some quintessentially American stories, a quest channelled into ten non-stop bangers.

A year and a half removed from the trenchant identity opus of his “Three Bells”
song cycle, Ty’s beamed himself out from deep within psychic interiors. Hitting the 
trail beneath the big skies of our good ol’ frontier empire, he’s on the hunt for new horizons—and it’s frankly astonishing to hear, at this mature point in his discography, the discovery of invigorated new sonics around every bend. That’s simply what Ty does with his music. Here, compulsive rhythm arrangements are joined in battle by sweeping movements of strings and horns that further the charge righteously.

One of the keys to this new music involved tapping an old friend and collaborator, filmmaker Matt Yoka, to write with him. As a non-musician, Matt’s language sense is different from the one Ty’s amassed as a player of music. With the trust they’ve developed over the years—brainstorming the visual worlds of “Goodbye Bread”, “Manipulator”, “Emotional Mugger”, and plenty more—they throw the conceptual ball back and forth to translate general vibes and feels into wicked lyric imagery, each acting as writer and editor in the process. Through these lyric sets, Ty found new scansion and different shapes suggesting the qualities of the songs, and of an overall arrangement sense. That’s where the other keys came in—piano keys! Ty’s been woodshedding on the 88s, the 76s and/or the 61s; they add new outlines and shadings to the music, fortifying his fantastic plastic vision left and right. Rife with singing guitar leads and Wizzardian brass n’ reeds lustily riffin’ on the banks of Ty’s harmony vocal choir,

“Fantastic Tomb” is from the Ty Segall album “Possession“, out on LP/CD/CS from Drag City on May 30th, 2025.

Radiohead haven’t released an album since 2016, but the band’s frontman, Thom Yorke, has been on an extraordinary run of studio creativity lately, laying down three great albums with the Smile, his band with Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and jazz drummer Tom Skinner. And it turns out that since 2020, Yorke has been quietly enmeshed in another collaboration, piecing together a sublime new album with veteran electronic producer Mark Pritchard. “Tall Tales”, due May 9th on Warp Records. It’s accompanied by an intensely trippy animated film by artist Jonathan Zawada, which is set for a one-day theatrical release sometime soon. The duo already dropped the eerie single “Back in the Game”; with a second song, “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice,” . 

From the haunted-house ballad “The White Cliffs” to the pulsing, drumless uplift of “The Spirit” (“I keep the spirit alive,” Yorke sings, in one of his most unabashedly anthemic moments since “The Bends“) to the eight-bit freak-out of “Gangsters,” “Tall Tales” feels like the most fully realized of Yorke’s non-band projects, a prog-tronic sonic journey with a dystopian kick that evokes the best of Radiohead. Pritchard, a Brit currently based in Australia, spent four years kicking tracks back and forth with Yorke for the album, with the singer manically layering and electronically treating his vocals and adding his own synth parts.

In 2012, Radiohead came to play Sydney, Australia. And at the time, a friend of mine became their second drummer — Clive Deamer, who’d drummed with Roni Size and Portishead and Robert Plant. I’d worked with him years ago and kind of kept in contact with him, and he said, “I can’t tell you at the moment, but something’s happening and I might be coming to Australia.” Obviously it was a secret kind of thing. Everything has to be kept secret with Radiohead.

I started sending him things, one of which became the single “Beautiful People” from my “Under the Sun” album. He tried three or four things, he was really busy at the time. When I heard “Beautiful People,” I said, “Look, this is amazing, let’s just finish that one and put it on the album.” And then kept in contact from there on in really, via e-mail. Just every now and again, we’d have a little catch-up.

Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard reveal “Tall Tales” – their debut collaborative album, a decade in the making.

Landscapes of synth-pop, prog, dub, meet 70s synth, Joe Meek, Ivor Cutler, Library, kraut and classic Warp. Transmitted by visual artist and long time MP collaborator Jonathan Zawada. 

“Tall Tales” is available Friday 9th May across digital and physical formats, including a limited first edition 2xLP and special edition CD – both including a 36-page booklet designed by Jonathan Zawada.

Ezra Furman is set to release a new record “Goodbye Small Head” is dropping 16th May via Bella Union Records. The first single from that record is out today, it’s called “Grand Mal,” with a beautiful video directed by Eleanor Petry. Her tenth studio album, “Goodbye Small Head”  Twelve songs, twelve variations on the experience of completely losing control, whether by weakness, illness, mysticism, BDSM, drugs, heartbreak or just living in a sick society with one’s eyes open. These songs are vivid with overwhelm. They’re not about someone going off the rails, they are inside that person’s heart,” Furman explains..

Furman has previously posted about: We are going on tour in various places this year, those tickets are all on sale starting tomorrow.You can pre-order the new record, other new merchandise that’s just been made available, a tshirt, a notebook… Ezra Furman dot com slash merch.

We wanted to make something beautiful in this world and so “Goodbye Small Head” is coming out on May 16th Recorded in Chicago with my band, same bandmates I’ve played with since 2012: Ben Joseph, Jorgen Jorgensen and Sam Durkes

Produced by Brian Deck

“The songwriting here is a revision to William Wordsworth’s famous proclamation that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” I can agree with that, except for the tranquillity part. I wanted somewhere to put my amazement and trembling. My yearning and aching and total bewilderment The experience of complete loss of control in the face of overwhelming beauty and hurt And so “Goodbye Small Head” A phrase lifted from the Sleater-Kinney song “get up” thank you Sleater-Kinney The first single is called “Grand Mal” An outdated term for a major seizure I have never had a seizure but Stephanie told me a lot about hers The song is dedicated to you, Stephanie, and to all who live with epilepsy.

“Goodbye Small Head” will be released on 16th May via Bella Union

Since his neo-psychedelic Green On Red days, Chuck Prophet has been turning out country, folk, blues, and Brill Building classicism.

“Wake The Dead” is the California singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer Chuck Prophet’s newest collaborative album with Cumbia group ¿Qiensave? An extraordinary and unlikely pairing, Prophet and ¿Qiensave? blend seamlessly together as the collection dives headfirst into the world of Cumbia music, which consumed and comforted Prophet during a recent bout with stage four lymphoma and subsequent recovery.

The result is a profoundly adventurous celebration of life that balances hope and fear in equal measure, a rich and exultant meditation on what really matters from an artist who always manages to find the light, even in the face of the most oppressing darkness.

The songs are intoxicatingly rhythmic, all but demanding you move your body while you listen, with arrangements that blur the lines between tradition and innovation, between past and present, between cultures and countries. There are flashes of rock and roll, punk, surf, and soul, all filtered through the streets of San Francisco and wrapped up in the rich legacy of a genre that traces its roots back hundreds of years and thousands of miles.

released October 25th, 2024

Co-founder member of Drive-By Truckers releases his first solo album in over a decade is an expansive but subtle collection of songs. Highly textured, intimate & rich as he reflects on his youth, his most impressive and freshest work in some time.

Patterson Hood’s debut solo record in over a decade was born out of a friendship with producer Chris Funk (The Decemberists). The pair would often perform together for fun and during Hood’s solo tours, making far-off plans to make a record together. They eventually went into Jackpot Studios in Portland. Many of the songs were composed on piano marking a bigger departure from his work with Drive-By Truckers than prior solo efforts. With guest appearances from: Waxahatchee, Wednesday and Lydia Loveless.

Tales steeped so deep and dark you can hear the moss dripping off the cypress trees. And the production is outstanding. The sound…the Sound. I hear this album in the pit of my soul. There is blood on these tracks.

“A Werewolf And A Girl (ft. Lydia Loveless)” is from Patterson Hood’s new album ‘Exploding Trees & Airplane Screams’, out on February 21st.

The new MOJO stars Queen with new Brian May & Roger Taylor interviews. Plus Sex Pistols, The Pogues, Dionne Warwick, Alan Sparhawk, Japanese Breakfast, The Beatles, Rick Buckler, Sly & The Family Stone, Kraftwerk, Bill Fay, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Bridges and a Pogues-inspired CD of rowdy Irish folk’n’roll! On sale Tuesday March 18th.