This month the New Jersey alt-country outfit Pinegrove will share “Marigold”, the group’s debut on their new label, Rough Trade Records, and the announcement arrived with a single and video for one of its tracks, “Phase.”“Phase” feels like a return to the Pinegrove’ former sound on their acclaimed record, Cardinal. In it, there’s a driving drum beat and palm-muted guitar setting the stage for frontman Evan Stephens Hall’s ardent yelps. The restrained verse builds to a chorus where everything comes to a crescendo at Hall’s cry of “I’m torn right through / Divided right in two.” There’s some fantastic slide guitar fills within, giving the track Pinegrove’s signature almost-country feeling. Pinegrove took a year-long hiatus after Hall issued a statement in response to an allegation of “sexual coercion” made against him in 2017. Since then, their self-release of Skylight in 2018 and new record deal with Rough Trade have shown the group attempting to put those events behind them.
Taken from Pinegrove’s new album ‘Marigold’, coming January 17, 2020 on Rough Trade Records.
Danish singer-songwriter Agnes Obel specialises in otherworldly folk, the kind best suited to solo journeys and hours spent alone, creating a fort and shutting the curtains. It’s apt, then, that her next album should be titled ‘Myopia’, meaning nearsightedness. “The albums I’ve worked on have all required that I build a bubble of some kind, in which everything becomes about the album,” she says.“I need to create my own myopia to make music,” Obel adds of an album that sees the avant-folk performer experimenting with obscure instrumentation (cello pizzicato, celesta, luthéal piano) and different production techniques.
“For me ‘Myopia’ is an album about trust and doubt. Can you trust yourself or not? Can you trust your own judgments? Can you trust that you will do the right thing? Can you trust your instincts and what you are feeling? Or are your feelings skewed?”
Although Obel’s music can often curate a monologue of modern-day dystopian-esque news stories that we are all now subject to, the contents of Island Of Doom are much more personal, as she explains: “The song is made up of pitched-down piano and cello pizzicato and vocals, all choirs are pitched down and up… In my experience when someone close to you dies it is simply impossible to comprehend that you can’t ever talk to them or reach them somehow ever again. They are in many ways still alive because in your consciousness nothing has changed, they’re still there with everyone else you know.”
Agnes Obel’s single ‘Island Of Doom’ taken from her album ‘Myopia’. the new album now ahead of it’s release on February 21st 2020
The post-punk legends Wire announced a new album, “Mind Hive”, and shared its first single, “Cactused.” They also announced some tour dates. Mind Hive is due out January 24th, 2020 via the band’s own pinkflag label.
Mind Hive is the band’s seventeenth studio album and the follow-up to 2017’s Silver/Lead. Wire’s line-up consists of founding members Colin Newman (vocals/guitar), Robert Grey (drums), and Graham Lewis (bass guitar, vocals), as well as guitarist Matthew Simms, who has been with the band since 2010.
Wire exhibit little inclination to look back – rather they remain resolutely focused on producing music which is smart, vital and defiantly modern.
“Mind Hive” is the group’s first newly recorded material since 2017’s “Silver/Lead”. that album garnered rave reviews and career best sales. yet, if “Silver/Lead” set the bar pretty high, “Mind Hive” seems to have no problem vaulting over it. be like them is a super-angular composition, utilizing a recently rediscovered Wire lyric from 1977. Colin Newman and Matthew Simms’ guitars constantly mesh and diverge, whilst the rhythm section ensures the song prowls forward with an unstoppable menace. cactused is the first of Mind Hive’s pop moments. the vocal is wide eyed and wired, with effects-heavy guitar work creating a bright web of noise, with the song’s stop/start moments providing a series of precise energy bursts. primed and ready rides out on a tightly pulsing synth sequence punctuated by icy slivers of guitar.
This is Wire at their most compressed yet propulsive. “Off the Beach” is another prime pop song. with its breezy, optimistic melody, and blend of electric and acoustic guitars, the song initially sees the group seemingly celebrating the joys of everyday life but things are destined to turn a shade stranger. unrepentant explores the kind of bucolic soundscape early Floyd would have been proud to call their own. boasting one of the album’s finest texts, the song radiates out into a shimmering sonic heat haze. “Shadows” pulls the classic Wire trick of placing a dark and cruel lyric in a musical setting of tender beauty. never has the recounting of atrocity been so seductively pitched. “Oklahoma” is the muscular and dramatic joker in the pack. Lewis’ dark vocal swims through a rich compound of guitar textures and synth tones, building into a masterclass of tension and release. hung is the album’s centrepiece. this 8-minute excursion matches a brief but evocative lyric with a dense, mesmeric guitar grind. Simms and Newman’s keyboards add a plaintive note, as the song moves through a series of sections, each with its own distinct atmosphere. humming is a beatless autumnal drift fashioned from delicate keyboard textures and rich soaring guitar tones. Newman delivers a state of the world lyric with a touching sense of innocence, whilst the piece ends with Lewis’ husky baritone listing locations and their difficult associations. an elegiac end to a supremely confident album. Mind Hive arrives at a time when wire are being cited as an influence by yet another generation of bands. a career spanning feature documentary called people in a film is due for release late 2020. quite how a group that has been operating for such a long period is still able to produce such exciting and essential work is difficult to understand. and yet here we are
Peggy Sue have always looked to the darkness as well as the light, often playing each side of the coin out in the same song. The album cover art, a photograph of a glass of orange juice by Joana Polonia, taps into that fundamental equivocation, which is such a big part of “Vices”. “It’s so bright and full of energy and light,” says Young, of the photograph. “That’s the simple energy we wanted for this album. But we also loved the ambiguity of it as something that could equally be a vice or a remedy.”
“Vices” was a working title initially, but it soon came to feel as if it suited the record in its entirety. “Lots of songs on the record are sort of messed-up love songs for things that feel good, but aren’t necessarily good for you – like getting staying out too late, or taking too much comfort from certain people,” Young explains. “That kind of interplay between the positive and the negative has always been in Peggy Sue songs, but it’s particularly true of this album. It’s about the things you do to lift you up when you’re down, or distract you when you’re sad, that can end up circling back.”
After four years, Peggy Sue have found themselves again. “I know, from looking at your mouth, how you’re going to sing something” says Slade, addressing her bandmate; “I know what harmony to add. We’ve been singing in Deep Throat Choir, and it’s beautiful to be among those voices, but your voice is the voice that I know the best.”
“We’ve never had an album that bookmarks such an incredible period of time,” says Slade. “It’s a really powerful thing. It has seen us through very difficult times personally, and as a band.” That Vices has ended up sounding so positive and so celebratory is a testament to the power of the songs that emerged from those living rooms.
Band Members:
Rosa Bowler Slade,
Katy Beth Young,
Benjamin Gregory,
Dan Blackett
When Americana pioneers Uncle Tupelo released their major-label debut, “Anodyne” on October 5th, 1993, it should have been the beginning of something big. They were following up their left-turn acoustic record, March 16-20, 1992, recorded with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, with their best record yet
Recorded live in the studio amid mounting tension between singer / songwriters Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, “Anodyne” proved to be Uncle Tupelo’s last and finest album. These final sessions find Farrar and Tweedy crafting a seamless mesh of country, folk and rock that both encompasses and exceeds the range of previous albums.
Anodyne smoothed the jarring, start-stop rhythms of the band’s first two records, No Depression and Still Feel Gone, into a straight-ahead steamroll behind new drummer Ken Coomer. Farrar’s barbed guitar riffs sear on “Chickamauga,” where he compares a crumbling relationship to a Civil War bloodbath. Quieter moments such as the title track flex the strength of new multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston, who played dobro, banjo and fiddle, and former guitar tech John Stirratt, who held down bass when Tweedy switched to guitar.
With the straight-up country of Acuff-rose (a tribute to the famed songwriting duo), and the folky New Madrid, Tupelo displays the traditional leanings found on March 16-20, 1992, while both the bass-heavy The Long Cut and the barnstorming Chickamauga broaden the punk-tinged sound of No Depression and Still Feel Gone. While Anodyne also features a raucous collaboration with the late Doug Sahm on Give Back the Key to My Heart, its most transcendent moments are the world-weary Slate and the sublime title track, one of the most beautifully bittersweet songs penned since Neil Young’s Helpless. Although anodyne proved to be the end of the line for Uncle Tupelo, it opened up more expansive roads for Farrar and Tweedy,
Eventually, the friction between lifelong friends Farrar and Tweedy brought down the band at their biggest moment. Tweedy rushed the remaining members of Uncle Tupelo into the studio to record Wilco’s 1995 debut A.M., while Farrar took the long cut and found success with the hit single “Drown” on Son Volt’s Trace a year later.
Farrar has continued to wrestle with obscure, early country and folk music and his textured guitar wranglings over eight solid albums. Wilco has evolved from a Tupelo-twin to an engine of reinvention, from the deconstructionist country-rock of 1996’s Being There to the shimmering heartbreak of 1999’s Summerteeth and 2001’s experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Ask a dozen people to define the term “indie rock” and you’ll probably get a dozen different answers that include word combinations like “Archers of Loaf” and “Foster the People” and “indie rock is dead” . Artist: Kiwi Jr. Album: Football Money. Football Money is a 10-track album that has been five years in the making. The album opens with the track “Murder In The Cathedral.” Right off , I knew this was going to be a different kind of album:
As the term has evolved over the past few decades—from its origins denoting music released by an independent record label to a vague descriptor of a certain kind of sound—it’s no wonder the words have lost much of their meaning. Make no mistake, however: Kiwi Jr. is an indie rock band. You can hear evidence of that all over their fine debut album “Football Money”, which has been released worldwide by Mint Records. (It came out only in Canada last year.) Someday, other band names will disappear from Kiwi Jr.’s reviews as the quartet further develops its sound.
Football Money is evidence they’ve clearly got the ability and the point of view to do exactly that. Until then, they’re working from a world-class playbook.
Band Members:
Brohan Moore: Drums, Backing Vocals
Brian Murphy: Guitars, Backing Vocals
Jeremy Gaudet: Vocals, Guitars, Keys
Mike Walker: Bass, Backing Vocals, Keys
Aaron Goldstein: Pedal Steel
Alec O’hanley: Backing Vocals, Keys
Hunk and Junk: Backing Vocals
Peter Rankin: Keys
Kiwi Jr. – Salary Man From the LP “Football Money” available on Mint Records (Canada) Available everywhere Friday 1/17/20 via Persona Non Grata
Three chords and boredom are a powerful concoction. Just ask Australian “shed rock” trio The Chats, just back off a sell-out UK tour on the back of a full-length debut. The sheer explosion of teenage joy at each live date proves they are more than viral-video sensations (yeah, you love “Smoko” – we all do!) but they are the garage-punk heroes we need right now. Revelling in the mundanity of modern teenage life, The Chats write tongue-in-cheek odes to smoke-breaks, masturbation, online issues and not being told what to do. There is complexity in their simplicity with solid, driven rhythms propelling the garage rock riffs. It’s perfect punk party music.
Sometimes just living life, how you want to live, is a revolutionary act. The Chats live that, and even if they don’t, they don’t care! They are readying a punk classic for 2020.
By the time they had released “Spend The Night”, the members of The Donnas had been playing together since their days at Palo Alto High School, which may explain why the 2002 collection sounds so tight. The quartet’s fifth studio album (and first for a major label, Atlantic Records) delivers the punchy Ramones-meets-Runaways attack of previous releases while adding sharper production and more accomplished performances.
Party anthems and tales of teen romance and rivalry abound on these 13 originals, which include “Take Me to the Backseat,” “Who Invited You” and “Take It Off,” a single whose success helped put the album on the Billboard chart – a first for the group. Hard rock fans looking for a good time should Spend The Night with The Donnas.
This summer, Torres (aka Mackenzie Scott) announced that she was readying an album with her new label, Merge Records, after being dropped by 4AD in 2018 for “not being commercially successful enough.
The return of Torres, the project of New York-based musician Mackenzie Scott, might just be one of the most exciting events of the musical year. While never quite hitting that break through moment, Torres is a songwriter we’ve always loved, and with each new single she shares, her upcoming album, “Silver Tongue”, just seems to get all the more exciting. Possibly the best to date came this week in the shape of the sublime, Dressing America.
“Dressing America” is a track that seems to gently unfurl itself, as the initial strum of muted guitar gradually blossoms, into a Bowie-like slice of hypnotic New Wave glamour, resplendent with motorik rhythms and Mackenzie’s strikingly commanding vocal delivery. Lyrically, it seems to set Mackenzie as a wannabe romantic-hero, a macho cowboy, who might not understand the subtleties of the human heart, yet is ready and waiting to go rescue a damsel in distress, “you’re always telling’ me I don’t know who you are, come on, woman, I tend to sleep with my boots on should I need to gallop over dark waters to you on short notice”.
From the singles delivered, Silver Tongue already feels like Torres’ most immediate release to date, a study of infatuation, lust and human connections, that might just end up being her break-out moment.
Along with the Silver Tongue album announcement, Scott released the lead single, LP opener “Good Scare.” Like the material on Three Futures, “Good Scare” melds oceanic guitar, percussion and synth, offering a lush and layered complement to Scott’s gravelly lows and tender falsetto. The new track takes up the stops and starts of a budding romance, when the prospect of love feels both terrifying and predestined.
Silver Tongue is out January 31st via Merge Records.
