Gemini was released as part of the 2010 guitar-pop mini-boom, but it could just as easily have been recorded in 1989. Jack Tatum’s first album as Wild Nothing is full of songs that exist just outside the margins of your memory: Haven’t I heard this before? Isn’t this guitar part familiar? Didn’t an ex-boyfriend make me a mixtape with “Drifter” sandwiched between Cocteau Twins deep cuts?,
The Version is a new, limited edition of the vinyl. Pressed on translucent blue vinyl, the album is housed in a silkscreened jacket with hand-stamped numbering and includes new liner notes from Tatum along with a 11″ x 17″ show poster from 2010.
From Jack Tatum:
“It’s fitting that listening back [to Gemini] now feels like a dream to me. I know I wrote these songs, but the memories of making them have become as blurred as the music,” says Tatum. “It’s such a rare thing to have this kind of living document of your youth and I think that’s what Gemini will always be for me: a part of my life that is at once so familiar and so unrecognizable.”
Tatum put Gemini together while studying at Virginia Tech, and its amateurish charm separates the album from his more expansive, polished later work. When songs like opener “Live in Dreams” and the chiming “Our Composition Book” fade in slowly, it’s easy to imagine hearing them streaming from a dorm room window overlooking a verdant quad. And while there isn’t much lyrical depth to Gemini, that’s a feature, not a bug. You can listen to “Summer Holiday” or the gloomy, glamorous “Chinatown” and fill in the blanks with your own memories of being young, sad, and in love.
“Summer Holiday” · Wild Nothing “Gemini” Released on Captured Tracks
At the core of Widowspeak’s allure is the creative chemistry between singer-songwriter Molly Hamilton and guitarist Robert Earl Thomas. In the decade since the group first formed in Brooklyn they have released four critically-acclaimed full-length albums and toured extensively. Sonically, the band remains perennially anchored by Hamilton’s honeyed vocals and Thomas’s warm, expansive arrangements—references to 90’s dream pop, 60’s psychedelia, and a certain unshakeable Pacific-Northwestness. It’s comfortable, lived-in: humble in structure, heavy on mood.
Widowspeak have returned, just when we needed them most. Their brand new song “Breadwinner” is a captivating reflection on shared burdens in life and love.
During their recent tenure in the Hudson Valley and Catskills region of New York State, the duo took to writing new songs unhurriedly amidst the reality of day jobs, with an intentional hiatus from touring as the grounding force. “Breadwinner” is the first of these newer songs and points towards an absorption with pragmatic observations, small and personal realities of a rapidly changing world.
The inspiration for “Breadwinner” came from the cover of a zine by Ian Vens, which had sat on display in their home for years. It read, “OH PLEASE BABY JUST QUIT OK IF ANYTHING COMES ALONG PLEASE PROMISE ME YOULL QUIT THAT JOB.” Hamilton felt there was a lot of truth in it, in her own experiences with dead-end work that felt unfulfilling, the economic instability that goes hand-in-hand with choosing to “follow one’s dreams,” and the pain of watching those close to you suffer just to pay for the realities of their existence. The lyrics were also inspired by a growing fascination with bread as allegory; the idea of proving oneself, and reaping the reward of labor. “Breadwinner” is a song about shared burdens in life and love, and hoping that there’s something transcendent, honest in whatever it is to work.
Bright Eyes are the Omaha, Nebraska based band consisting of Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, and Nathaniel Walcott.
Bright Eyes have returned with new song “One and Done,” the third track released from their upcoming new album, following the previously shared “Forced Convalescence” and “Persona Non Grata.”
“One and Done” is built with some lovely string arrangements that give reminds a bit of some of The Last Shadow Puppets earlier work, just with a more introspective and vulnerable folk performance from Obsert as well as some welcome horns.
It’s another wonderful new track from the band who are back in fine form. We need that album as soon as possible.
Protomartyr release their fifth album, Ultimate Success Today, on Domino. Following the release of Relatives In Descent, the band’s critically acclaimed headlong dive into the morass of American life in 2017, Ultimate Success Today continues to further expand the possibilities of what a Protomartyr album can sound like. The new album Ultimate Success Today on July 17th via Domino Records. They band has already shared “Worm in Heaven” and “Processed By The Boys”.
Ultimate Success Today was recorded at Dreamland Recording Studios, a late 19th century church, in upstate New York and co-produced by the band and David Tolomei (Dirty Projectors, Beach House) with mixing by Tolomei. Featured guest musicians on the album include Nandi Rose (vocals) a.k.a. Half Waif, jazz legend Jemeel Moondoc (alto sax), Izaak Mills (bass clarinet, sax, flute), and Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello).
Protomartyr – “Michigan Hammers”, taken from ‘Ultimate Success Today’, out July 17, 2020.
The Cool Greenhouse play hypnotic, home-brew postpunk with an almighty lyric bite. Having released a handful of celebrated 7’’s and EPs on DIY labels such as Lumpy Records, Market Square and Drunken Sailor over the past few years, the 29th May will see the release of their much-anticipated debut studio album on Melodic Records. Initially focussing on their bedroomatic lo-fi home-recordings, last year the band emerged from their hovel as a full line-up, disorientating and delighting their audiences in equal measure.
The Cool Greenhouse, my new favourite post-everything existential music happening. Hooray!” – Henry Rollins The Cool Greenhouse exist in diametric opposition to me and you and our stupid short attention spans.” – The Quietus
Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but The Cool Greenhouse are about to shatter glass ceilings with their self-titled debut LP.
Having caused a stir on the underground DIY label circuit with their inimitable, infectious brand of lo-fi post-punk in 2019, The Cool Greenhouse’s debut album shows off a newly developed, fuller sound, taking their signature style to previously unexplored heights while doubling down on their tried and tested formula of angular motoric riffs and no holds barred biting social commentary. The muffled 16-bit drum loops have been replaced with a full kit, the nonchalant vocal delivery has found a new edge and the sparse instrumentation has been augmented by the band’s finally agreeing to leave their bedrooms and enter the studio, yielding a fully-realised vision with fresh clarity and depth that makes their earlier recordings seem like mere blueprints.
Stubbornly refusing to engage with almost every fundamental musical tool available (the chord, melody, choruses, even the musical change), The Cool Greenhouse have somehow managed to compile an album of eleven songs that often comes astonishingly close to pop. Their attachment to long songs with single hooks that steamroll through their entireties has not abated, but neither has their inexplicable knack for keeping these strange creatures alarmingly engaging and accessible when by all logic they should be irritatingly avant-garde. It shouldn’t work on so many levels, but it absolutely does.
A large part of what makes this a winning formula is frontman Tom Greenhouse’s way with words. Frequently topical and clearly political in some sense, Greenhouse’s lyrics side-step the on-the-nose delivery of traditional yawn-inducing political rock in favour of a strange idiosyncratic blend of pop culture snippets, patchwork narratives and oblique literary references. Bursting with humour and irony, the album deftly meanders from Rotary Club jumble sales to Margaret Thatcher’s living room to futuristic voyages into musical VR, taking aim at the gammon classes, rural conservatism and a host of other late-capitalist absurdities with razor-sharp wit along the way.
Discovering that The Cool Greenhouse’s first 7” magically mentioned his own name, producer, sound engineer and mixer Phil Booth (Sleaford Mods, The Wave Pictures) invited the group to record the album in his JT Soar studio in Nottingham. The old potato-packing warehouse offered the ideal working environment for the band, who recorded the album over seven days as live between kipping on its couches, 4am whiskey-soaked sessions and Mario Kart ’64 on demand. “The sessions were stuffed with weird little synchronistic miracles” Tom tells. “Discussing a song then seeing its title on a shop window, finding things in pubs straight out of our songs…these zapped me onto some sort of Jungian plane where I didn’t need to sleep and knew exactly what to do.”
Having sufficiently impressed Melodic Records enough for them to sign them on the basis of their first ever show, the band have continued to delight and disorientate live audiences in equal measure, supporting the likes of The Stroppies and Do Nothing. Also championed by DIY and 6 music, their upward trajectory shows no sign of halting.
“The Sticks” is the first single from The Cool Greenhouse’s self-titled debut album, which is pre-orderable now on limited edition transparent green vinyl (300 copies only!) from Melodic records:
The Cool Greenhouse’s self titled debut is out on Friday & we couldn’t be happier with how #DinkedEdition no. 49 turned out. Also on Ultra clear vinyl, signed + numbered postcard, colour obi strip + D/L ft 2 bonus tracks. It’s picking up some fantastic reviews only 300 copies & they won’t last long!.
Blues pianist Eddie Boyd’s “7936 South Rhodes” was recorded in London in January 1968 with three members of the early line-up of Fleetwood Mac: Peter Green (guitar), John McVie (bass), and Mick Fleetwood (drums). It’s a tantalizing setting for Boyd’s straight up Chicago piano Blues, going heavier on the slow-to-mid-tempo numbers than the high-spirited ones.
Boyd was born either on Stovall’s Plantation, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, He learned to play the guitar and the piano. His piano playing was influenced by the styles of Roosevelt Sykes and Leroy Carr. An automobile accident in 1957 in which he was injured put his career on hold for a while Boyd toured Europe with Buddy Guy’s band in 1965 as part of the American Folk Blues Festival.
He later toured and recorded with Fleetwood Mac and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. Tired of the racial discrimination he experienced in the United States, he first moved to Belgium where he recorded with Dutch Blues band Cuby & The Blizzards. Boyd died in 1994 in Helsinki, Finland, just a few months before Eric Clapton released the chart-topping blues album, From The Cradle that included Boyd’s “Five Long Years” and “Third Degree”.
On June 25th, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Eddie Boyd among hundreds of artists whose recorded material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.
Recorded in London in January 1968 with three members of the early lineup of Fleetwood Mac (the one that played blues, not pop/rock):Peter Green (Guitar), John McVie (bass), and Mick Fleetwood (drums). It’s an adequate setting for Boyd’s straight Chicago piano blues, going heavier on the slow-to-mid-tempo numbers than the high-spirited ones, though is a far more sympathetic accompanist than the rhythm section.
Jason Isbell has not let the COVID-19 outbreak get in the way of celebrating his brand new album “Reunions”. Subbing in his creative collaborator and wife Amanda Shires for his 400 Unit band, Isbell performed the entirety of Reunions at the Brooklyn Bowl Nashville on Friday night, marking the live debut of almost every track as well as the first-ever live performance at the nascent venue.
Isbell and Shires enlisted FANS.com to help virtually populate the almost-empty room, as hundreds of fans tuned in via Zoom sending applause and messages to the duo,“Hey everybody I see y’all,” Isbell said waving to a screen filled with fans tuning in “…This crowd is ready.” “When people put new music out during this time it brings so much good to my life on the daily,” Shires added later in the performance, turning to Isbell. “And I know we could use more records. So I’m glad yours is out now.”
In addition to the slew of new music, Isbell used his encore to cover Warren Zevon’s “Mutineer” and look back at his own “Cover Me Up” from 2013’s Southeastern.
Jason Isbell & Amanda Shires May 15th, 2020
Brooklyn Bowl, Nashville – Crowdless Performance Broadcast Live by FANS.com Setlist : What’ve I Done to Help*, Dreamsicle*, Only Children*, Overseas, Running with Our Eyes Closed*, River*, Be Afraid, St. Peter’s Autograph*, It Gets Easier*, Letting You Go* Enc: Mutineer^, Cover Me Up
Some people simply should never, ever trip. Syd Barrett, the former singer/guitarist/central songwriter for Pink Floyd, was one of those people. The van Gogh of early rock music, Barrett cut off his mind to spite his face, still swallowing acid by the handful even as his increasingly deranged behavior dislocated him from his bandmates and, for that matter, everybody else back on planet Earth. Tragically, most of his genius escaped recording, though it did beam directly into the illuminated skulls of the Britpop vanguard, frugging stoned and immaculate at London underground clubs like the UFO where Barrett worked out early Floyd’s deathless outer-space-blues-Hobbit-hole-folk-trot.
By the time Floyd’s debut The Piper At The Gates of Dawn came out in August of 1967, Swingin’ London had gone mad–bathed in strobing mod Technicolor, drunk on the Day-Glo ambrosia of psychedelia and frugging to the blare of maximum R&B. Rock ‘n’ roll was reaching critical mass, outgrowing the three-chord friction of horny teen angst and expanding into the realm of art. Pop stars, the newly minted aristocracy of turned-on English youth, were now expected to be poets and seers, and the race was on to find strange new sounds to telegraph this strange new state of mind.
My initial hopes for “Saucerful of Secrets” were fairly low. I was thinking we’d play some pub gigs, but it spiralled slightly out of control. The other sad thing is that it wasn’t really my inspiration—it was [guitarist] Lee Harris who came up with the idea and thought that it was time that I went back to work.
So he suggested it to [touring Pink Floyd bassist] Guy Pratt and the band formed around me. There were no auditions. It was just like-minded people getting together, which is exactly how so many bands formed in the ‘60s. The Rolling Stones didn’t hold auditions; they were just people who liked the same music.
By the spring of 1968 he’d been fired by his own band. There were a couple of hard-to-listen-to but unforgettable solo records, painstakingly pieced together by his former bandmates from the intermittent moments of lucidity and focus they could get out of Barrett by that point.The Madcap Laughs and Barrett still sound as haunted and frayed as the man who mused aloud in his last song for Pink Floyd, “I’m wondering who could be writing this song.” After that he retired to his mother’s basement in Cambridge, more or less, never to be heard from again. He passed away in 2006, but his legend still looms large in the alterna-verse where he is regarded as the patron saint of rock’s psychedelic martyrs.
The Floyd, of course, carried on. David Gilmour was brought into replace Syd on guitar and vocals, and everyone pitched in on songwriting. By Dark Side Of The Moon, Roger Waters would become the band’s central songwriter/conceptualist and de facto leader, and Floyd would become the AOR FM colossus we’ve come to think of them as today. But in the six years betweenPiper and Dark Side, the band spent six albums — Saucerful Of Secrets, Ummagumma, More, Obscured By The Clouds, Meddle and Atom Heart Mother — groping in the dark for their sound and vision. And while those albums have their share of pointlessly overlong psychedelic dicking around, they also yielded some of Floyd’s greatest, albeit lesser known, songs: “Fearless,” “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun,” “The Nile Song,” “Cirrus Minor,” “One Of These Days,” and “Echoes” to name but a few. All of this and more — much, much more — is comprehensively curated on the 2016 box set The Early Years 1965-1972, which spans 29 hours over the course of 10 volumes (plus a bonus disc!).
It is this period, along with a generous number of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn tracks, that Floyd drummer Nick Mason is re-animating with his newish band Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets.
From the start, I said, “Let’s try one or two days in a rehearsal studio and see how we feel about it.” After about 10-12 days, I thought, “Right, we’ll go out and perform.” In America, especially—where so much of our audience only discovered us with Dark Side— all the music before that is almost unheard of. So the great thing about the early music is that it gives us the opportunity to be a little bit freer with it. The problem with playing “Comfortably Numb” is that the fans want to hear the guitar part played exactly as David [Gilmour] played it.
With this material, we don’t have to worry about every precise detail, which gives it a freshness. There is a lot of improvisation. When we made our first album [1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn], we spent a lot of time shortening the numbers to a reasonable vinyl length. “Interstellar Overdrive” is about nine minutes on the album, but when we played it at UFO Club, it would be 20-23 minutes. Now, we can extend it or shorten it. We are going for the spirit; the expectation is not to follow [the songs] slavishly.
[Pink Floyd] played some of these songs very rarely. We probably played these songs to promote them but, particularly if it was a single, once we couldn’t actually sell that single, we lost interest in it, and it would get sort of pushed to one side. Then, fairly shortly after that, we had Meddle and Dark Side and there was a sense of moving on a bit. Things got shelved that could have been developed but, in their own right, were not that interesting.
[In terms of Roger Waters’ emergence as Pink Floyd’s primary songwriter], it wasn’t that it was gradual, but there was so much going on with Syd [Barrett] leaving. It was a very odd transitory crossover, where David was miming to Syd’s songs when we were doing TV shows and stuff. There is a clear difference between Piper, where Roger had written “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk”—which I don’t think is a great song—and one album later where he’s doing “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” which is a great song. But there was no pinch-me moment, where there was that transition. The transition was slightly curious. What actually happened was that Syd’s presence, even though he wasn’t there, probably lasted for another three or four months before there was a sense of David being a fully integrated member.
The Peter Green/Fleetwood Mac story is fascinating to me— there’s that element in Pink Floyd, where you lose people and there’s someone there that sort of steps in. Genesis went through same thing. I’m the one they can’t fire. [Laughs.]
Basically, our aim is to explore any music that we made prior to Dark Side of the Moon. Once you hit that, you’re into some other territory. So far, we’ve probably only played 15 percent of the material that is out there. Some of it is not that interesting, but there’s certainly lots of material that we intend to add to the repertoire before we go out again.
Before [Pink Floyd toured in the United States], we’d heard a lot about America. We’d heard about the light shows and psychedelia and all the rest of it, but we had no idea what the actual music was. These names sounded exotic. But, the interesting thing is that Big Brother & The Holding Company was really an R&B band. For many years, we thought the 1910 Fruitgum Company was going to be a wild band, when actually they were pop. And Country Joe & the Fish were almost a country/western thing.
We actually met Zappa on our first American tour— he was a huge influence on everyone. Later on, when he was in Europe, he played with us at The Actuel Rock Festival. He was one of the great rock icons and philosophers. I say he was very influential partly because of the Mothers’ very high musical standards—just in terms of being radical, but also being extremely expert.
Now, when I look at the younger [psychedelic bands], I think, are we now the equivalent of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Howlin’ Wolf? In the 1960s, all the bands were picking up on the old R&B artists—taking that and making it modern.
There was a slight sense of alarm that I either had to do completely new music, which requires a different sort of band and months in a recording studio, or I had to play the greatest hits of Pink Floyd, in which case you almost become a tribute band.
I don’t think there was a formal decision [for Pink Floyd to stop touring], but what happened was that, between ‘87 and ‘94, we did an awful lot of touring, and they were long tours. And we reached a point—particularly with David—where he did not really want to go out for another year. The problem is that, with big tours, you tend to have to go out on quite lengthy runs to justify your expenses. I like touring, but not to the point where all home life disappears—and, by the time you get home, your wife’s left you and your children have left home. But things have changed. Touring was so linked to album releases, and now studio albums have become less a part of the mainstream music business. With streaming, pirating and everything else, the real activity is now in the live realm.
Another driving force for this was when we did the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition in London. I spent quite a lot of time working on [Pink Floyd’s] history and finding material for that. I really enjoyed doing that but, at the end of it, you feel like a monument because it’s all about the past and history and so on. And there was a bit missing—playing the music. I got to the point where I thought, “I would love to bang on the drums again rather than simply talking about it.”
With Pink Floyd, there is a shortage of material that shows where we were at any specific moment. It’s a regret for all of us. The only great piece of Pink Floyd playing on film, up until about the last couple of tours, was Live at Pompeii, which I’m very fond of. It was a great snapshot of where we were at the time. With Saucerful of Secrets, every show was just getting a little bit better. [The show we filmed for the new release Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets Live at The Roundhouse] was at the end of the British leg of the tour. The Roundhouse was also a great venue [to film at] because it is somewhere that I’ve worked since the dawn of time. Pink Floyd played there in October of 1966—before we had a record deal, before we had a manager or anything like that. So I have very fond memories of The Roundhouse. It felt like a home game. The setlist was basically what we had been playing. We added a few songs to it and it became a film about where we are now.
We all feel that we picked the right night, by luck. As far as we’re concerned, that’s probably the best show we’ve done. And hopefully, when we go out again, we will improve on it. But it was a good marker of where we are now.
I told both David and Roger that I would love for either of them—or both of them—to come play with us some night. And Roger was in New York, so we talked about him playing with us at the Beacon a few days before the show. And then he managed to leave his phone in a cab, so I didn’t hear anything from him for two days. I assumed he’d gone cold on it. Then on the day of the show, he said, “OK, I’ll come along.” So we really didn’t have a proper plan. We knew which song he would do but we hadn’t thought it through properly, which made it a lot more exciting because none of us knew whether he was going to remember the words to the song he was going to sing. He was great—he absolutely, inevitably, just picked it up and ran with it.
I don’t think that David and Roger are game to do anything together anytime soon. But, I would love Roger to come back and do something else with us, and I would be very happy to go and do something with him. Neither of us wants to be in each other’s band, though. We want to do things our own way—maybe just get together for bits and pieces. I don’t think we’re about to reform a band to go and do anything.
[In addition to playing music, I also race cars and those passions] complement each other. They are opposites. Music requires other people to make it work; when you’re in a race-car, you’re on your own. You need both prospects in your life.
I’m so happy to announce my new single, “It Must Be Someone Else’s Fault.” This is a song rooted in taking ownership of our own story and pain. I wrote this in Washington state one spring afternoon, and the message was something I’d tried to put to song for a long time. The video embodies the power of sisterhood, and our ancestral trauma through the power of movement. Through these movements, I hope to embody the strength of our lineage, and overcome this old pain. Featuring: Emmylou Casale, Catharine Drew-Wilkinson, Jennifer Casale, Sonia Allen, Claire Harlin, Marlee Grace.
“It Must Be Someone Else’s Fault” by Courtney Marie Andrews
Here is a video for my song “Wild Time” that was shot on 16mm pre-Pandemic, then edited together during isolation. Felt like the right time to let this video out into the world, seeing as we’re all getting saddled down by some pretty grim realities. This song is about yearning for wildness and Mother Nature in a time of chaos. It’s for sensitive people who worry about the fate of humanity and feel powerless to do anything about it.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking apocalyptic thoughts and realizing that won’t get you anywhere. What if the world has always been ending? What if the sprawl of our cities are just as wild as the forests? What if climate change and the destruction of our natural habitat is a reflection of the nature within us, however sublimely horrifying and hard to understand? We’re animals, we play out a very precarious drama of life, and we grasp for what’s left of the protective womb – but maybe the notion that we’re somehow separated from her is an illusion. Maybe it is, truly, a wild time to be alive. Maybe getting in touch with that as a culture and society would avert the worst case scenarios of ecological crisis and existential dread.
If you’ve gotten this far, wow, thank you for actually taking the time to read this. In other news, as you may have assumed, I am cancelling all of my headline shows for 2020, but I’m beginning to work on my next album that will come out in 2021- a different time, when hopefully we can see each other face to face once again.
Weyes Blood “Wild Time” from Titanic Rising (Released April 5th, 2019)
