David Blue quit high school at age 17, left home, and joined the Navy, but was soon thrown out for his “Inability to adjust to a military way of life.” Blue became an integral part of the “Greenwich Village” Folk music”scene in New York City which included singer songwriters Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Dave Van Ronk Tom Paxton, Bob Neuwirth, and Eric Andersen. … Of the singers and writers on the scene at this time, David Blue appears to have been closest to Dylan…” “He needed a friend,” Blue said. “So he started including me in his scene and I got tight with him.
David Blue is best known for writing the song “Outlaw Man” for the Eagles (band)” which was included on their 1973 “Desperado”.Blue’s original version of “Outlaw Man” was the lead track of his own Nice Baby and the Angel album, re-issued on CD, with the entire David Blue catalogue, in 2007 on Wounded Bird Records.
Blue joined Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” in 1975 and appeared in Renaldo and Clara the 1978 movie that was filmed during that tour. Blue acted in other films including, “The American Friend (1977), directed by Wim Wenders The Ordeal of Patty Hearst (a 1979 TV movie) and “Human Highway” by Neil Young” premiered in 1983 after Blue’s death. Blue also performed onstage in Stephen Poliakoff ‘s play “American Days” at the Manhattan Theatre Club” in New York City in December 1980, directed by Jacques Levy”
David Blue does write every track but the album is full of inventiveness and cracking tunes with a distinctly alternative edge to it, and dare I say tinges of psych on some tracks… There is, probably inevitably, the feel of a recently electrified Dylan on here including some occasional Bloomfield-esque guitar moments,
Blue died of Heart attack in December 1982 at the age of 41, while jogging in Washington Square Park New York
Do You Wonder About Me? Is the follow-up to 2017’s Swear I’m Good At This. The new record marks a more intentional, self-assured Diet Cig; not only in Luciano’s radically intimate, acerbic lyrics, but in the duo’s sound as well. Luciano and Bowman moved to Richmond, VA in the summer of 2017 as a place to “hide out and make music,” and it was there that they wrote Do You Wonder About Me?, Diet Cig’s ode to growing up.
“We spent a lot of time after the first record growing as people, being humans outside of tour for a little bit, and trying to shed the imposter syndrome.” Luciano says. Spending the time to make the kind of music they really wanted to make and making sure they felt good about it was crucial to the success of tracks like Night Terrors. It’s a slower-paced song than Diet Cig’s usual, but just as biting; a song about reckoning with all the past versions of yourself. As Luciano puts it, “Am I still these people, or have I shapeshifted?” It’s essentially the thesis of Do You Wonder About Me?, considering and accepting the embarrassing aspects of your identity, and how they’re just as much a part of you as the good stuff.
Our second album, “Do You Wonder About Me?” is coming out May 1st! Pre-order the record (https://orcd.co/dietcigwonder) and check out our new song, “Thriving.” Thriving was the first song we wrote for this record!!! Inspired by the melodrama of reality TV and musical theater, we wanted the song to bounce back and forth between a lavish personal anthem and the anguish of feeling forever beholden to others opinions.
Jamal Ruhe played all the bass
Karli Ashlyn Helm sang harmonies and additional vocals and played additional keys
Christopher Daly shredded the arpeggiator more than once
Travis de Jong played saxophone
Brian Christinzio, an American songwriter, wanted to write a road song. The problem was that in 2012 he had moved to Manchester in the north-west of England, a city which did not lend itself to Springsteen-esque anthems. So he wrote “Born to Cruise” instead, a four-on-the-floor drivetime banger that opened: “I’ve had my indicator on since leaving Crewe/That explains the gestures in my rearview.” “Shortly After Takeoff”, on which the track appears, is both desperately sad and unbearably funny.
Brian Christinzio channels ’70s singer-songwriters (Nilsson, Newman) in a very postmodern way on his sad, witty, and very tuneful fifth album. The amazing one-liners are too many to count on this unique, wonderful “examination of madness and loss” that’s his best yet.
When piano playing songwriter BC Camplight (AKA Brian Christinzio) drops a new record, the world takes notice. Blending indie rock with lo fi pop sensibilities, his cult following has swollen to breakthrough into the mainstream and both fans and critics alike have been eagerly awaiting the release of his new album ‘Shortly After Takeoff’.
Hopes were raised high with previous LPs ‘How To Die In The North’ and ‘Deportation Blues’, and fortunately the third and final part of what Christinzio is calling his Manchester Trilogy, All three albums were created after the native Philadelphian had moved to Manchester England. Like Deportation Blues, Shortly After Takeoff spans singer-songwriter classicism, gnarly synth-pop and ‘50s rock’n’roll, with Christinzio’s similarly distinctive, flexible vocal carrying a fearless approach to lyrical introspection, but the new album is a major leap forward in songwriting sophistication and lyrical communication.
It certainly does not disappoint. Continuing his aliens account of a Philadelphian’s experience of living in the north west, his idiosyncratic outlook is matched by an equally unique genre defying sound that blurs the lines between synth-pop, folk, country and space rock.
Seamlessly sophisticated, it’s a clever record loaded with witty insights and packed full of ideas without ever becoming too demanding of your attention to prove a point or explore a genre. See BC Camplight when he tours ‘Shortly After Takeoff’ from September onwards.
Taken from the album ‘Shortly After Takeoff’ by BC Camplight, released 24th April 2020 via Bella Union Records.
Rising slacker star Lauran Hibberd is getting her revenge on a shitty ex with her new track ‘Old Nudes’ which takes an embaresing moment from the past and transforms it into a huge life affirming anthem, striking back at all the crap guys out there.
“‘Old Nudes’ is unfortunately based upon a true story. We’ve all been there right!? The track looks back on the ‘mistake’, and almost mocks it using over confidence. It belittles the receiver, and oozes sarcasm and naivety. I keep writing songs about being young because I’m scared of getting too old to joke about these things”.
“I jumped into a pool of Weezer and found myself confessing my old nude anxieties. The song resents itself in a laughable way, and hints at how it really feels to hate someone you once loved.”
“The video felt appropriate to self record, not only because of isolation but because it encapsulates the setting in how we all get into this mess in the first place. The webcam on my old laptop has seen some sites in its life, but never quite to this extent. There’s something quite special about not giving a damn, and this song and this video cements that idea. I can’t wait to cringe at this in six months time.”
The new “Good Souls Better Angels!”, which Lucinda Williams recorded in just over 15 days in the fall of 2019, is another landmark release, though it might not do much to further expand her fan base. Largely co-written by Williams and her husband Tom Overby, it’s a challenging album that makes few if any concessions to achieve commercial success. And don’t look to this record for Williams to deliver any “Passionate Kisses” (the title of a popular early number); her mood here is much more often angry and foreboding than romantic.
Three-time Grammy Award winner Lucinda Williams unabashedly takes on some of the human, social and political issues of our day with her boldest and most direct album to date, Good Souls Better Angels.
During the course of her celebrated four-decade, pioneering career Williams has never rested on her laurels as she continues to push herself as a songwriter. On Good Souls Better Angels, she has much she needs to get out. In 2014 and 2015, Williams released two critically acclaimed double albums back to back with Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone and The Ghosts Of Highway 20, respectively. Both releases found her experimenting with arrangements, vocals, song structure and personal subject matter.
On Good Souls Better Angels, Williams changes course and chooses to forgo the personal and narrative-based song craft that has become synonymous with her name and instead speaks to some of the injustices permeating our society. The new songs cut straight to the core with frank and honest commentary on domestic abuse (Wakin’ Up), the constant barrage of news (Bad News Blues) the dangerous, quick to judge and convict aspects of social media (Shadows and Doubts) and the haunting reality of the Man Without A Soul.
Williams recorded Good Souls Better Angels backed by her remarkable, long time band, featuring Butch Norton (drums), Stuart Mathis (guitar) and David Sutton (bass). The rock-solid unit propels the music with both fire and finesse, particularly on the raw blues number You Can’t Rule Me, which kicks off the album with equal parts attitude and swing.
Good Souls Better Angels also features some of Williams’ most intimate and up front vocals on record. She addresses the pain of depression on the achingly beautiful Big Black Train and tenderly delivers a poignant song of hope with When The Way Gets Dark. She encourages us to push forward on the path of promise and perseverance on the deeply soulful and moving album closer Good Souls. Good Souls Better Angels marks the first time Williams’ husband / manager Tom Overby is credited as a co-writer on many of the new songs. The album was co-produced by Williams, Overby and Ray Kennedy, who last worked with Williams on her 1998 landmark classic album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.
Williams recorded Good Souls Better Angels backed by her remarkable, long time band, featuring Butch Norton (drums), Stuart Mathis (guitar) and David Sutton (bass). The rock-solid unit propels the music with both fire and finesse, particularly on the raw blues number You Can’t Rule Me, which kicks off the album with equal parts attitude and swing.
Good Souls Better Angels also features some of Williams’ most intimate and up front vocals on record. She addresses the pain of depression on the achingly beautiful Big Black Train and tenderly delivers a poignant song of hope with When The Way Gets Dark. She encourages us to push forward on the path of promise and perseverance on the deeply soulful and moving album closer Good Souls. Good Souls Better Angels marks the first time Williams’ husband / manager Tom Overby is credited as a co-writer on many of the new songs. The album was co-produced by Williams, Overby and Ray Kennedy, who last worked with Williams on her 1998 landmark classic album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.
The songs on Good Souls, while a perfect snapshot of enlightened anger, aren’t all brand new. The sludgy blues tune “Bone Of Contention” dates back to 2005, just missing the cutoff for the alt-country troubadour’s 2007 album West. “You’re the splinter in my finger / you’re the knife in my back / you’re the bone of contention,” Williams sings in her signature snarl that has made her a legend in the eyes of so many, sounding more furious than she ever has before. That fury is what makes this album, even the songs that were written a few years earlier, so topical. Similar to the way Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters has resonated so fiercely just a week ahead of Williams’ Good Souls Better Angels, these songs weren’t written about our current state of frenzied pandemic panic, but their arrival during spring 2020 gives them an especially clairvoyant air. A rebellious spirit is certainly seeping out from every angle on Good Souls Better Angels. “You can’t rule me,” Williams declares right out of the gate. She also bemoans the relentless news cycle on “Bad News Blues,” laments the content of those news cycles on “Big Rotator,”
She scorns evil men “of hate, envy and doubt” over a swirling vortex of guitar feedback on “Man Without A Soul.” While there’s one “man” in particular who lyrics like “You bring nothing good to this world / Beyond a web of cheating and stealing / You hide behind your wall of lies” may call to mind, it’s not necessarily a slam of Potus specifically—but it sure does work well as one.
Lucinda Williams is the opposite of every Boomer stereotype. She’s politically enraged, and she’s certainly not worthy of the “out of touch” label slapped on many Boomers.
On this new album Good Souls Better Angels, and during a recent phone call, she sounds just as fed up with everything as millennials are. “It’s pervasive—that feeling that you’re always getting, of being astounded and shocked and pissed off,” Williams, now 67 years of age, says. “I’m mad. I’m frustrated.” The songs on Good Souls, while a perfect snapshot of this enlightened anger, aren’t all brand new. Williams, one of the most decorated songwriters in Americana music, describes this phenomenon as “ironic.”
The Blinders release their new album, “Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath”, via Modern Sky UK. A dark blues-waltz underpinned by propulsive bass and evocatively prosaic lyricism, the track straddles the lines between ode and lament while addressing life’s confusing crossroads. The track is accompanied by an arresting video, which cuts between the band performing and wandering the atmospherically bleak landscape of the Peak District.
Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath, was recorded at Manchester’s Eve Studios alongside producer Rob Ellis (PJ Harvey, Anna Calvi), and mixed by Adrian Bushby (Foo Fighters, Muse).
The follow-up to their critically acclaimed debut album, Columbia, released in 2018, the album explores existential despair, mental health and society’s ills in a time of planetary crisis, and is both a riposte to, and commentary on, the rise of populist ideology. Delivering a blistering collection of powerful tracks, Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath is imbued with the visceral energy of IDLES, the twisted melodies of solo-era Lennon and the darkness of the Bad Seeds.
In the shadow of Brexit and the climate crisis, The Blinders return with their unique brand of outspoken anthemicism and a sensational album to rouse awareness and inject vital energy into a bleak 2020. Combined with their blistering live energy, get ready for The Blinders to accelerate furiously into the limelight.
Due to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, we have had to take the decision to postpone the album release date. ‘Fantasies of a Stay at Home Psychopath’ will now be released on July 17th.
The global pandemic has meant that, logistically, we cannot currently guarantee the release of the album in May. We also hope that the album will now be released at a time when it can fully be enjoyed and celebrated by everyone in the way we all hoped.
Steve Nicks visited Atlantic Records‘ president Doug Morris and made her pitch for her first solo record: “So, listen, what I’d really like to do is be in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ band. He said, ‘No. That’s not going to happen.'” She then asked: “So I can make, like, a Tom Petty girl album?” And so she made the album “Bella Donna”.
Bella Donna would mark the beginning of Nicks’ trend of calling upon her many musician friends and connections to fully realize her sparse demo recordings. Along with friends Tom Petty and Don Henley, Nicks brought in session musician Waddy Wachtel, Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band pianist Roy Bittan, and Stax session man Donald “Duck” Dunn of Booker T. & the MGs.
Though Bella Donna personnel list includes some 20 musicians, the album is very much Nicks’ own work, with all but one of the songs on the record written by her. The album also marked the first recording featuring Nicks’ backing vocalists, Sharon Celani and Lori Perry, who still record and tour with Nicks today.
Tom Petty met Nicks while he was recording his group’s album “Damn The Torpedoes”. She asked him half-jokingly if he could write her a song that she could record for her first solo album. Petty didn’t take her request seriously at first, but Nicks reiterated her request a year later as Petty was putting together his “Hard Promises” album. Petty had wrote a ballad called “Insider” at his home, played it to the Heartbreakers (to their approval), recorded a demo with his band, and sent the demo to Nicks. After listening to the demo of “Insider,” Nicks visited Petty at his studio, taped the song with Petty and the Heartbreakers, then gave the tape to Petty, saying, “You love this so much… You take the song.” He did, and included it on Hard Promises.
Shortly after Insider was finished, Petty and company recorded a song that he and guitarist Mike Campbell had composed about a year earlier…“Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” – and sent that demo to Nicks’ then producer, Jimmy Iovine. She loved it, saying, “That’s what I wanted all along.” Nicks and Petty ended up doing it as a duet.
Chrissie Hynde would often sing the Petty role in this song when she toured with Stevie Nicks in the ’00s. They would have a lot of fun with the song..
This song is about a couple with a complicated relationship. She wants to get rid of him, but he has a hold on her heart. When she tells him to stop dragging that heart around, he explains that he’s just trying to protect her, as “you need someone looking after you.”
Many of the songs Nicks has sung over the years involve hearts in different states of breaking, and many are about her intimate relationships, written either by her or her Fleetwood Mac bandmate/soulmate, Lindsey Buckingham. This song is one of the few she could sing without dealing with the emotional baggage behind it, as it has nothing to do with her personally. Nicks wanted Petty to produce “Bella Donna”. He gave it a shot, but it didn’t work out and Jimmy Iovine was brought in. This created an interesting dynamic as Iovine and Nicks began living together while they were making the album.
This was the biggest hit for either Stevie Nicks (as a solo act) or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (who had a competing single out at the time “Woman In Love” – that didn’t chart) In addition to being The Heartbreakers’ guitarist, Mike Campbell has played on albums by many other artists, including several by Stevie Nicks. He told us how this came together: “I had written the music and Tom had written the words. The Heartbreakers had recorded a version of it with Jimmy Iovine, and Jimmy being the entrepreneur that he was, he was working with Stevie, and I guess he asked Tom if she could try it, and it just developed from there. We cut the track as a Heartbreakers record and when she decided to do it we used that track and she came in and sang over it.”
This had the good fortune of being released around the time MTV went on the air. They didn’t have many videos at the time, so this got a lot of airplay. It introduced a younger audience to Nicks and Petty.
Bella Donna was Nicks’ first solo album. Her output with Fleetwood Mac sold extremely well, but solo success was hardly ensured. When Nicks finished the album, her producer Jimmy Iovine told her she didn’t have a single, and if she didn’t record “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “your record’s going to tank and then you’re not going to have a solo career.” Nicks was dismayed about removing one of the songs on the album to make room for the track, but she took Iovine’s advice. “I went home and said, ‘You’ve got to drop this self-esteem you’ve got going on right now and realize that the whole reason you even hired Jimmy Iovine was because he produced Tom Petty and you always wanted to be in Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers,“Nicks said while introducing the song in concert. “I said: ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ So, anyway, ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart’ became a huge single, all because Tom Petty was generous enough to give me that song.”
The song was released as the first single setting the stage for more hits. The next single was another duet: “Leather And Lace” with Don Henley, which reached #6. It wasn’t until the third single that Nicks was finally on her own: “Edge Of Seventeen”.
A few years after this was released, Dave Stewart of Euryhmics wrote “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” which he and Iovine started producing for Nicks. By this time, Iovine and Nicks had broken up, and when she came over to work on the song, things didn’t go well and she stormed out. Iovine brought in Tom Petty and they completed the song with him, something Nicks knew was fair considering “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” went on her album.
On her 2001 album Trouble In Shangri-La, Nicks thanked Petty in the liner notes. She asked him to write another song for her, but he refused and encouraged her to write it herself. After that conversation, she started writing songs for the album. Tom Petty had a connection to another song on the album. His wife, Jane, told Nicks that she was “at the age of 17” when she met Tom. Like her husband, Jane was from Gainesville, Florida, and had such a strong country accent that Stevie thought she said “edge of 17,” which provided the title for one of her most popular songs.In the liner notes to her Time Space album, Stevie Nicks said: “Jimmy (Iovine) played this song to me while he was still finishing Tom’s album; it was one of those songs that Tom was not going to do, and he told Jim that I could do it. I wasn’t used to doing other people’s songs, so I didn’t really like the idea at first, but I loved Tom Petty, so I agreed to try. So we went into the studio and sang it live, together. I was completely entranced, and I instantly fell into love with the song. Duets were the things I loved the most… maybe this was a second beginning. And we would sing like no one else, and nobody else would ever sing like us.”
Petty and Nicks reunited to perform this song when Petty was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year on February 10th, 2017. Before giving her induction speech, Harry Styles sang this with Nicks when she entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 as a solo artist.
Based in San Francisco, and active in the mid-to-late 1960s. The band gained interest after one of the Nuggets Vol 12, compilations in the 1980s, Their music was strongly influenced by Yardbirds and Rolling Stones. The Other Half were at their peak when the music scene was at its height in San Francisco and the Flower Power movement in full swing in Haight Ashbury. Their style changed from an earlier vocal based garage band, to the loudest big stage band sound of the time, taken in that direction by former Sons of Adam guitarist Randy Holden. Their sound has been compared to The Yardbirds, and contained elements of blues, hard rock, and Eastern melodic influences
‘Famous’ for their now legendary garage punk killer 45 ‘Mr. Pharmacist’, later covered by The Fall, this album came a couple of years later in ’68 and shows the move towards psychedelia. Recorded ‘live’ in the studio to sound like a gig, the album showcases some tasty guitarwork from Randy Holden, soon to join heavy duty rockers Blue Cheer.
Also interesting on this mainly self-written album is their lone cover, namely ‘Feathered Fish’, written by Love kingpin Arthur Lee but rather bizarrely credited to Country Joe McDonald!
A collection of their recordings, titled Mr. Pharmacist was issued in 1982. This included their entire 1968 album and several tracks from singles.Two songs, “Bad Day” and “Oz Lee Eaves Drops” appear in the 1968 pilot episode of The Mod Squad.
Ariel Rosenberg—a.k.a. the trailblazing lo-fi pop eccentric, Ariel Pink—has released more albums over the past twenty years than many bands do in their entire careers. Some of his most beloved releases, recorded under his Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti moniker, came from the artist’s days on Animal Collective’s now-defunct Paw Tracks label. However, these versions weren’t mixed properly, resulting in a subpar, mono audio transfer.
Now, Pink and the folks at Mexican Summer are making things right with the Ariel Archive Series, an ambitious project of remasters and reissues of the artist’s vast back catalog. The amount of time covered is staggering—starting from Pink’s scrappy debut, 1999’s Underground tape, all the way to a fresh odds-and-ends collection, Oddities Sodomies Vol. 2, which even has new songs from the Dedicated to Bobby Jameson sessions.
This week, the next wave of remasters is here, with some fan-favorite deep cuts—2000’s The Doldrums, 2002’s House Arrest, and 2003’s Worn Copy. There’s even a new experimental film on the way as a part of the series, entitled Dedicated to Boris Karloff, directed by Argentinian artist Salvador Cresta.
With Pink, hunkered down in his Los Angeles home, He talks about the archive series. He reflected on his legacy, praised his collaborators, and scoffed at the notion of giving his younger self advice.
When I originally recorded these things, I built up several generations’ worth of mistakes. There was so much slippage and waste. Remastering the albums was a matter of finding the original mixes I made on those master cassette tapes and using those to remaster to the proper stereo mix. We managed to find a bunch of them. Some of them were lost, but in the case of House Arrest, The Doldrums, and Loverboy, we managed to salvage true stereo mixes. In certain cases we weren’t able to find the originals. In those instances we had to make a mix that was comparable to the original from just straight off the eight-track.
House Arrest
Our favourite omnivorous media junkie from LA still has a few tricks left up his sleeve like the left-of-center House Arrest. Sure The Doldrums and Worn Copy had some hits and humdingers on them, but House Arrest never lets up.
It’s hit after hit after hit. Sorta like if you listened to your friend’s boom box mix tape from top 40 radio around 1985.
The Doldrums
After years of recording in relative seclusion in the hills of Los Angeles, Ariel Pink (the first non-Animal Collective member on the Paw Tracks roster) made his official Paw Tracks debut with The Doldrums. Originally a handmade CD-R release a couple years back,
The Doldrums by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Grafitti was discovered by the Animal Collective during one of their west coast tours and became an immediate favourite.
Recording at home with only a guitar, keyboard, and 8-track (the drum sounds are all unbelievably created with his vocals), Ariel Pink blends Lite FM and warped lo-fi pop into something beautiful and confusing, yet highly addictive.
Loverboy
More than just fetish material for Pink completists, the reissues are most notable because Pink’s equally demonized, glorified, and debated lo-fidelity has been officially tampered with. The original master tapes were made available to credible engineers with good intentions. Unlike the flawed Paw Tracks reissues, the squashed mono mixes of both Loverboy and Underground have been cracked open into a wide stereo field. While a thin layer of tape hiss still hangs above each record like freeway smog, the depths unlocked by the remaster clear space for us to participate in Pink’s original fantasy more than ever. The tumbling AM-radio confections “My Molly” and “Doggone (Shegone)” can be imagined, faintly at least, as actual AM-radio hits, lost soft-rock artifacts recovered on a Saturday morning drive pouring out from a busted rear speaker.
Loverboy is a futurist pop cycle. From the spectral, pulsing organs on “Ghosts” and “Don’t Talk to Strangers” to the shuffling mouth drums on “She’s My Girl,” Pink’s bedroom feels palatial, some hyper-baroque synth chamber hovering between this dimension and the next. It’s all very “time out of joint” as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described his original concept of “hauntology.”
Loverboy and Underground’s newfound fidelity muddies the bigger picture of Pink’s legacy. Specifically, the idea that his work as Haunted Graffiti was a mere prelude to studio budgets, the dismal sonics of these albums an arbitrary choice, a condition of some broke musician recording in a squat. Instead, the precision remastering bolsters the minority opinion of what Fisher described as “anamorphic sonic objects.” The anamorphic being the idea of sounds working on the periphery of comprehension, combining into something radically different.
Ariel Archives revisits Ariel Pink’s historic run of albums as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti with a series of definitive reissues and new collections. The first installment begins with Underground, the inaugural album in the series, Odditties Sodomies Vol. 2, a long-awaited second volume of outtakes and non-album tracks, and finally Loverboy, an exemplary disc recorded between October 2001 and July 2002, at which time Ariel also recorded House Arrest.
It was fun to do because I had [recording engineer] Paul Millar with me. He’s an amazing, thorough audiophile. He just really knows the technical stuff and fixates on things I didn’t even pay attention to. He’s very, very well-versed in the material. He came with his own notes and questions and curiosities. His energy really kind of carried the process, to tell you the truth. It was a pleasure to have him in my house.
I don’t know if it’s the right time. It’s the easiest time for me because all the rights reverted back to me after the licensing with Paw Tracks. Those were five- seven-year relationships that came and went. Paw Tracks folded, so those records were unavailable for a long time, unless I went on tour and they allowed me the albums for the tour merchandise.
But really, this is almost a perfect twenty-year anniversary. I’m forty-one now and I was twenty years old when I made a lot of these, roughly. It’s half of my life ago. It’s a nice twenty year retrospective. I probably won’t have to do it again for another twenty years, hopefully.
Hailing from the surprising West Yorkshire musical hot spot of Hebden Bridge, The Lounge Society are a teenage quartet, birthed out of the same “Calder sound” that has given the world The Orielles and WH Lung among others. A chance email from their band manager to Speedy Wunderground caught the label’s ears, and they recently became the 34th release in the label’s singles series, with their track, “Generation Game”.
Generation Game isn’t your average debut single; clocking in at five and half minutes, it’s a gradually evolving post-punk gem. The track begins with a Television-like swagger, before sliding into an easy driving rhythm as vocalist Cameron Davey repeats the line, “what will the US do”, sounding equal parts Beta Band and Fat White Family. Then three minutes in, just as you think you see where this is all going, it slips into a dreamy break-down, with more than a touch of Roxy Music, before gradually picking up for one final strutting crescendo. As debut singles go, Generation Game finds The Lounge Society making a real statement, there’s more ideas here than most debut albums and a lot of evidence to be excited to find out where they’re going next.
Released on: 2020-03-27
Composer: The Lounge Society
