Phoebe Bridgers will return with her new album “Punisher”, which will be released on June 19th via Dead Oceans. She’s already shared both “Kyoto” and “Garden Song” from the album and now she’s most recently returned with third single, “I See You.”
Originally entitled “ICU,” the song’s spelling was changed to “I See You” and is actually about her break-up from her drummer Marshall Vore, who she co-wrote the song with. It’s a sprawling take on the sound that Bridgers created on her debut, with a more expansive reach than before, but it doesn’t stray too far from the sound that listeners fell in love with.
Says Bridgers of “I See You”: It’s about my breakup with my drummer. We dated for a few years, made music every day, and were extremely codependent. We became like family to each other, so our breakup was extremely tough. But if this tells you anything about our relationship, we wrote this song together, just like everything else.”
She’s also creatively launched her “Phoebe Bridgers World Tour” which will see her live stream from places in her house, such as her kitchen, bathroom and bed.
Punisher is her sophomore album, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut album, Stranger in the Alps, released in September 2017 via Dead Oceans. For Punisher she reteamed with Stranger in the Alps’ producers/collaborators Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, although this time Bridgers co-produced the album with them. Mike Mogis mixed the album, as he did with her debut.
Bridgers is releasing a new album, Punisher, on June 19th the next track she has shared “I See You,” via a lyric video featuring hand shadow puppets. She has also announced “Phoebe Bridgers’ World, Tour,” which is really Bridgers doing live streamed concerts from different rooms in her house, each in conjunction with a different media outlet.
“I See You” by Phoebe Bridgers from her upcoming record ‘Punisher,’ out June 19th on Dead Oceans.
Release classic: Willie Dixon – “I Am The Blues” On this 1970 LP, the quintessential blues songwriter performs his own tunes – each one a classic: “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man”, “The Little Red Rooster”, ” Spoonful” and of course “Back Door Man”, to name but a few! Long overdue, the album was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1986, whereas Willie Dixon was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
Available May 29th as a 50th-anniversary edition of 1500 individually numbered copies on transparent blue vinyl.
Look, I’m easy to please. Give me a banjo (bonus points for claw hammer!), a husband-wife harmony duo and a song about waiting for the “coffee to brew” and I’m happy. And so begins The Yoke is Easy, the Burden Is Full, the peacefully pensive new album from North Carolina old-time group Chatham Rabbits, aka married duo Sarah Osborne McCombie and Austin McCombie.
The footage in this video is from the film The High Lonesome Sound (1963) by John Cohen, and is being used with permission by Folkstreams. We chose these specific scenes because they inspire us deeply. Community and music are depicted as essential to life.
The text is an animation made from Kelley Will’s hand-lettered font based on an old wood-type specimen from the turn of the 20th century. We hope this song, both its triumphant melody and hopeful lyrics bring you hope as we continue to lean on each other in the midst of Covid-19.
You can certainly hear the echoes of Chatham Rabbits’ predecessors here: Over the Rhine, The Civil Wars, Mandolin Orange and other bands who were/are bound in matrimony as well as music. But Chatham Rabbits’ back-porch ballads land in a lighter and different way—there’s very little production clouding their rushing harmonies, clear as a mountain stream, and crunchy Applachian jams (We named “Oxen” as one of the best folk songs of the year so far). The Yoke (which arrived on May 1st) is a stable album with few peaks and valleys, but I’ve found its steadiness to be oh-so-very comforting during an otherwise choppy time. That aforementioned first song is album opener “Clean Slate,” a pretty poem about “the innocent youthful glow” of mornings, “the best part of the day.” As a recovering night owl, this is a sentiment I probably wouldn’t have jiived with a couple of years ago.
With a cool May breeze drifting through the open window, “Clean Slate” sounds like a pretty excellent way to think about the time of day that could be viewed as just another daily reminder of our habitual new tedium.
Jerry Williams’—aka Swamp Dogg—first love was country music, listening to it as a Navy family kid growing up in Portsmouth, Virginia. “My granddaddy, he just bought country records out the asshole,” Swamp remembers. “Every Friday when he came home from the Navy yard he’d stop off and get his records, like ‘Mule Train’ by Frankie Laine, or ‘Riders in the Sky’ by Vaughn Monroe. His first time performing on stage, in fact, was a country song at a talent show when he was six years old: “I did Red Foley’s version of ‘Peace in the Valley.’
While the 77 year-old Williams’ most enduring persona is the psychedelic soul superhero Swamp Dogg—a musical vigilante upholding truths both personal and political since 1970’s immortal album, Total Destruction To Your Mind he will tell anybody who will listen that he’s considered himself country this entire time. “If you notice I use a lot of horns,” Swamp says. “But actually, if you listen to my records before I start stacking shit on it, I’m country. I sound country.
Swamp began his professional singing career as Little Jerry Williams back in the ‘50s before working as an A&R man for Atlantic Records in the late ‘60s. His biggest hit is actually a country song: 1970’s “Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got).” Written with his best friend Gary U.S. Bonds, the track is country in that woeful, underdog-baring-their-soul sort of way that for some reason only country songs really ever allow themselves to be. Freddie North covered it first and made it a Top 40 pop song, but Johnny Paycheck took it all the way to #2 on the country charts in 1971.
Following 2018’s critically acclaimed, Ryan Olson-produced Love, Loss, And Auto-Tune his first LP to debut on the Billboard charts and his first chart ink since his 1970 song “Mama’s Baby – Daddy’s Maybe” Sorry You Couldn’t Make It allows Swamp to finally dive into the sound he grew up playing. With the support of Pioneer Works Press, they recorded the album at Nashville’sSound Emporium with Olson as producer once again, and backed by a crack studio band led by Derick Lee, a keyboard virtuoso who worked as the musical director of BET’s Bobby Jones Gospel Show for nearly four decades. Nashville guitar firebrand Jim Oblon combusts his way through lead duties, while frequent collaborator Moogstar and special guests Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), John Prine, Jenny Lewis, Channy Leaneagh and Chris Beirden of Poliça, and Sam Amidon join the action throughout.
A band of 14 players, including Vernon, Lee, Beirden, and Moogstar, among others, provides the background for Swamp’s devastating new take on “Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got).” Lead single “Sleeping Without You Is A Dragg” is one of Swamp’s most heartfelt songs to date and features Vernon on piano as well as backing vocals by Lewis and Leaneagh. He duets with country-folk legend JohnPrine on two songs (“It’s the first time I had seen John since the sixties!” laughs Swamp): the indelible, psychedelic ballad “Memories” and the reflective “Please Let Me Go Round Again.” Originally written and demoed in his forties, “Please Let Me Go Round Again” is a plea for one more chance at life, sung with acute emotional connection.
These are narratives about love, of missing the one you love, of compassion, family and friends, and even the kind of love that transcends death. “I was looking for a new way for Swamp Dogg to go,” he explains. “Apart from me singing and writing most of the songs, I didn’t participate—in other words, I told ‘em, ‘Don’t ask me, I wanna see what happens without my influence.’ It was hard for me to do, ego-wise.
Sorry You Couldn’t Make It sees Swamp come full circle, and closes what has felt to him like unfinished business. “They didn’t have any blacks in country until Charlie Pride came along,” he says. “But in time, all things change and that’s what has happened to country music.” Surveying today’s Nashville reality, Swamp sees opportunity: artists as divergent as Darius Rucker and Lil Nas X are converging in a genre that he once worried might never give him his shot. “I’m anxious because it’s like I’ve taken all my money and put it on one horse,” he says. “But I believe in this horse.
“Sleeping Without You Is a Dragg” from Swamp Dogg off the album ‘Sorry You Couldn’t Make It’ out on Joyful Noise Recordings & Pioneer Works Press.
Activity are an avant four-piece featuring Travis Johnson, and drummer Steve Levine, both from the band Grooms, bassist Zoë Browne from Field Mouse, and guitarist Jess Rees from Russian Baths. Produced by engineer Jeff Berner of Psychic TV, their debut forms a casually menacing framework for lyrical themes of paranoia, exposed character flaws, and the broader human capacity for growth when an ugly truth is laid bare.
Lead single “Calls Your Name,” establishes the record’s spectral aura with nauseated electronic bells, and a relentless Geoff Barrow-esque drum beat beneath a half-sung, half-spoken lyrics inspired by C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel The Great Divorce. In the novel, characters stuck in a grey, joyless conception of hell repeatedly deny opportunities to be taken into heaven, instead making excuses as to why they should remain in their embittered purgatory states. Allegorically, this speaks to the kind of opportunity for metamorphosis and positive change that’s possible when the depths of disillusionment are reached, an idea which permeates much of the album. Despite recurrent aches of discontentment, each track glows with radiant waves of catharsis while elegantly evoking jubilation and anguish within the same breadth, showing that the two are always around the corner from one another.
Sinister and calming sounds might seem mutually exclusive, but New York City’s Activity beg to differ. The experimental quartet’s debut album, “Unmask Whoever”, which came out earlier this year via Western Vinyl, delights with its warm psych-pop bluster, but sufficiently would deter me from graveyard listening due to its ominous undercurrents. Its dark, understated melodies and hushed vocals make it feel like a fever dream, but one where you’re weirdly comforted by the surreal, slow-moving confusion. The witchy lead single “Calls Your Name” led me to believe the album would contain 10 songs of nightmarish, sacrificial moods, but it’s actually an outlier in that regard. Unmask Whoever is a beautiful, detailed LP of wonder.
Earth Angel released on Western Vinyl
Released on: 2020-02-18
Margo Price has released a new live album, “Perfectly Imperfect at The Ryman”, which documents her sold-out three-night run at the iconic Nashville, TN venue in 2018. The album comes after Price announced back in March she would delay the May 8th release of her new Sturgill Simpson produced studio album, “That’s How Rumors Get Started”, due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.
“I am so excited that we are releasing it today,” said Price in a press release. “The recordings are rough and the performances are raw, but there was a magic there and the band was on fire. We played unreleased songs, alternative album versions and had lots of special guests. I hope it moves you.”
The 11-track album features collaborations with Emmylou Harris on Margo’s original, “Wild Women”, Sturgill Simpson on a rendition of Rodney Crowell‘s “Ain’t Livin Long Like This”, and Jack White on a duet of the rare White Stripes track, “Honey We Can’t Afford to Look This Cheap”. Additionally, Perfectly Imperfect at The Ryman also features a “funk version” of Price’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter track, “Weekender”, and a take on the title track of her 2017 LP, All American Made.
“Perfectly Imperfect at The Ryman” is available now via Bandcamp. Preview the album below, scroll down for the full tracklist and credits, and purchase it for $10, All proceeds will benefit the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund.
Way back when bands were still able to perform for live audiences Local Natives debuted a new version of their song “Dark Days” featuring Sylvan Esso’s Amealia Meath they’ve shared the studio version of this indie collaboration. The update of the track from their 2016’ album “Sunlit Youth” finds Meath adding a brand new verse that, as Local Natives puts it, “taps into the nostalgia and the longing we all feel for a different time.” The new take was mixed by Spike Stent, known for his work with Madonna and Björk.
“It was a joy to dip into summertime with Local Natives,” Meath said of working with the band. “Dark Days’ is a beautiful illustration of being young, riding bikes, and trying to figure out how to love on and be vulnerable with someone. It was an honour to be asked to write a new verse and lend my voice to the story.”
Local Natives’ latest LP was last year’s Violet Street. Sylvan Esso, meanwhile, has recently released their live album and concert film WITH.
Local Natives performed the new version of their song “Dark Days” featuring Sylvan Esso’s Amealia Meath on Live with Jimmy Kimmel.
Galaxie 500’s output is a force stronger than you might realise. Sure, the original Harvard via New York band of Dean Wareham (guitarist/singer), Damon Krukowski (drummer) and Naomi Yang (bassist), no longer exists as that line up, but what they have gone on to achieve, and the other bands and artists they have influenced – Low, Liz Phair and Sonic Youth, to name a few – further cements their relevance in musical history. Back then John Peel got in on the act and Rough Trade signed them up, for their last album, before going bankrupt. After that Dean went on to form dream popping band Luna, more recently remerging under the recording name Dean and Britta, who floated into the peaceful shoegaze revival on Rob da Bank’s recent Sci Fi Lo Fi Vol. 3 compilation. And in case one couple wasn’t enough, Damon and Naomi are also doing their own softcore folk rock thing too and are about to embark on a 2010 Euro tour.
Inspired by the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Jonathan Richman, and New Zealand’s Flying Nun label, Galaxie 500 stood out in the rollicking Boston underground thanks to their introspective minimalism. The 10 tracks on their 1988 debut, “Today”, are sprawling washes of sound that manage to capture an ineffable sensation: a nostalgia both known and unknown, intensely familiar yet completely mystical. But any shot at shoegazing here is thwarted by a subtle restraint. No matter how high Damon Krukowski’s primal, jazz-inspired drums, Dean Wareham’s psychedelic guitar ramblings, and Naomi Yang’s robust basslines soar, their playing always returns to Earth.
You get gentle off beat drums rattling away in the background, the hypnotic day glow of bass, contrasted with the brightness of the guitar and sedate tones of Wareham’s voice. Later tracks build up the sound even more, with Wareham layering his vocals with simple, but pleasing to the ear harmonies on tracks like ‘Pictures’ and the shockingly upbeat ‘Parking Lot’. From this album it soon becomes clear that Galaxie 500 was not a vocal led project by any means; in fact on the Jonathan Richman cover ‘Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste’, the first third of the song is purely a meditative, barren instrumental soundscape and the last third a guitar solo freak out.
Their heads, however, stay in the clouds on songs like “Flowers” and “Oblivious,” in which the trio ponder the trappings of romance. And then of course there’s the fuzzy and careening “Tugboat,” in which Wareham declares his humble resolution to buoy his love through whatever choppy waters they face.
For the first time ever on vinyl, a special limited edition of Galaxie 500’s only live recording, “Copenhagen” . Galaxie 500’s last show of their last European tour was captured to 24-track tape by Danish National Radio on December 1st, 1990, and first released (on CD only) by Rykodisc in 1997, following the success of their 1996 box set reissue of all Galaxie 500’s studio albums.
3-sided double LP (side 4 is custom etching). Limited edition of 2000 black vinyl copies. For the first time ever on vinyl, a special limited edition of Galaxie 500’s only live recording, Copenhagen. Galaxie 500’s last show of their last European tour was captured to 24-track tape by Danish National Radio on December 1st, 1990, and first released (on CD only) by Rykodisc in 1997, following the success of their 1996 box set reissue of all Galaxie 500’s studio albums.
The live album, Copenhagen, which is heavy on songs from This Is Our Music and in almost every case improves upon them, turns out to be the ideal closing chapter. During the 1990 show in Denmark, Galaxie 500 play magnificently to what sounds like a pretty small crowd. But that small crowd is into it. Sometimes bands work like that. They never made it big, but during their short run, Galaxie 500’s often quiet and always beautifully rendered music had a profound impact on a few people, including this writer. It needs to stay out there, where it has a chance of finding a few more.
Copenhagen “is a bullet to the head of those who maintain that the band was best heard on record,” as critic/sage Byron Coley has written.”It is abundantly clear, as the trio spirals through an inspired set of covers and originals, that the introverted disengagement of their early live work has been replaced by a unique, powerful and controlled presence that allows them to deliver the goods emotionally as well as sonically. The blend of heart and hand is stunning.” Mark Richardson wrote in Pitchfork: “The live album, Copenhagen, which is heavy on songs from This Is Our Music and in almost every case improves upon them, turns out to be the ideal closing chapter.
An official Record Store Day release, co-sponsored by Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales, who are releasing a limited edition Danish-style beer to enjoy alongside, and staging a RSD 2020 live tribute to Galaxie 500 at Brooklyn’s Rough Trade Records featuring Magnetic Fields, Xiu Xiu, Surfer Blood and others.
Recorded live by Danish National Radio, 1990, This 3-sided double LP (side 4 is custom etching) Limited edition of 2000 black vinyl copies.
Jade imagine is a four piece band based out of Melbourne, Australia lead by singer, songwriter and general good vibe bringer Jade McInally (formally a member of Teeth & Tongue and Jess Ribeiro).
