With Falling, Dude York show that they are a prime example of a band owning their adolescent renaissance by channeling, rather than imitating, their music influences (some of which include The Cure, Black Sabbath, Blink-182 and Carly Rae Jepsen) and echoing the emotions of yesteryear. Listening to Dude York’s latest power pop album, the Seattle band’s fourth to date, sends teenage pangs through your heart that remind us how intense and overwhelming every crush or heartbreak used to be (or still is).
Claire England (bass, vocals) opens up Falling with the sweet daydream that is “Longest Time,” which swings like a pendulum between her earnest voice and electrifying guitar. She romanticizes the honeymoon period of relationships, singing, “This is the best part / When you believe I can do nothing wrong.”
“Box,” the album highlight, takes a different approach in its post-punk revival sound, still managing to absolutely yank on your heartstrings. The first line more than tips its hat to the Killers’ ever-beltable “Mr. Brightside,” as Peter Richards (guitar, vocals) laments that “It started with a kiss / Who would have thought that it would end like this,” bringing back middle school dance flashbacks of Brandon Flowers deciding “It was only a kiss.” Life in 2019 can be so overwhelming that numbness seems like our only defense,
Dude York is ready to put you back in touch with your most visceral, excruciatingly intense emotions. Fair warning, though—if you put Falling on, you may be tempted to doodle your crush’s name all over your binder.
“Should’ve” is from Dude York’s 2019 album “Falling”.
“Stars Are the Light”, the luminous seventh album by the American psych explorers Moon Duo, marks a progression into significantly new territory. From a preoccupation with the transcendental and occult that informed Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada’s guitar-driven psych rock, and reached its apotheosis in the acclaimed Occult Architecture diptych, Stars Are the Light sees the band synthesize the abstract and metaphysical with the embodied and terrestrial. Branching out from Occult Architecture Vol. 2, the album has a sonic physicality that is at once propulsive and undulating; it puts dance at the heart of an expansive nexus that connects the body to the stars. These are songs about embodied human experience — love, change, misunderstanding, internal struggle, joy, misery, alienation, discord, harmony, celebration — rendered as a kind of dance of the self, both in relation to other selves and to the eternal dance of the cosmos. Taking disco as its groove-oriented departure point, Stars Are the Light shimmers with elements of ’70s funk and ’90s rave. Johnson’s signature guitar sound is at its most languid and refined, while Yamada’s synths and oneiric vocals are foregrounded to create a spacious percussiveness that invites the body to move with its mesmeric rhythms. With Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, Spectrum) at the mixing desk in Portugal’s Serra de Sintra, (known to the Romans as “The Mountains of the Moon”) the area’s lush landscape and powerful lunar energies exerted a strong influence on the vibe and sonic texture of the album. On embracing disco as an inspiration, Yamada says, “It’s something we hadn’t referenced in our music before, but its core concepts really align with what we were circling around as we made the album.
We were also very inspired by the space and community of a disco – a space of free self-expression through dance, fashion, and mode of being; where everyone was welcome, diversity was celebrated, and identity could be fluid; where the life force that animates each of us differently could flower.”
From ‘Stars Are the Light,’ out September. 27th.out on Sacred Bones Records.
One of the year’s best folk records is by a supergroup comprised of some of the most accomplished artists in music today. We’ve got Anaïs Mitchell, the force behind Hadestown, Eric D. Johnson, leader of the Fruit Bats, and Josh Kaufman, composer/writer/arranger who’s penned music for everyone from Bob Weir to The National. Their debut LP finds the trio reimagining centuries-old English, Irish and Appalachian tunes in a way that sounds modern and new. Take the set’s lead track “Bonny Light Horseman,” for example, a ballad about a soldier killed during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century. The trio’s storytelling prowess is on full display here.
Fresh off their debut appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, Anaïs Mitchell (whose Hadestown recently led the 2019 Tony Awards with eight wins, including ‘Best Musical’), Eric D. Johnson (Fruit Bats), and Josh Kaufman (Craig Finn, Josh Ritter, The National) officially announce their new group, Bonny Light Horseman. The trio has also shared their debut single “Bonny Light Horseman,” a cover of the folk ballad that features Aaron Dessner on hi string guitar, as well as JT Bates (Big Red Machine, Phil Cook) on drums and Michael Lewis (Bon Iver) on tenor sax — both of whom also perform with Bonny Light Horseman live. Johnson explains, “This is a song about a handsome soldier who may or may not ever come home. And we named our band after it not just because it sounds kind of cool, but because it’s somewhat emblematic of what we’re trying to do here: sing you ancient love songs of timeless humanity and heartbreak. Songs that are gonna make you feel something no matter what century you’re in.”
This past weekend, Bonny Light Horseman performed one of their first shows (“our fourth or five,” Johnson approximated) to a packed crowd at Newport Folk Festival. The group first formed in 2018 during a residency at Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires Festival. Bonny Light Horseman will go on the road with Mandolin Orange next month.
U.K. singer-songwriter Maisie Peters debuted an acoustic video for her song “Stay Young,” In the clip, the 19-year-old folk-pop singer performs a stripped-down version of the track in a cozy studio setting, with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a keyboard.
“‘Stay Young’ is a song I wrote last summer, inspired by the song ‘America’ by Simon & Garfunkel,” Peters tells us. “I vividly remember listening to it on the train and being amazed by how clever and beautiful it is, how much of a literal and emotional journey it takes you on. I got to my session and the first verse of ‘Stay Young’ just poured out in practically one sentence as my friend and producer Sam Romans played the bass riff. To me, it says everything I want to say to everyone I love in my life, and hope it does the same to everyone who listens.”
Hot on the heels of her sold out debut headline UK tour earlier this year, this emerging young star, Maisie Peters, announced her biggest headline show to date at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire on November 14th. She will also play Nottingham’s Rescue Rooms the night prior on November 13th. Tickets for both shows will be on sale at 10am on Friday 2nd August.
A gifted observational lyricist with a distinctively delicate voice, 19-year-old Peters continues to cement herself as one of the UK’s brightest new talents. She currently boasts over 150m global streams, 4.7m views on YouTube, 3.4m monthly Spotify listeners and has famous fans in global superstar Sam Smith and Lewis Capaldi. Most recently, her track ‘Feels Like This’ (taken from debut EP ‘Dressed Too Nice For A Jacket’) was named Scott Mills’ Tune of the Week on BBC Radio 1, becoming Maisie’s first entry to the iTunes Top 40 Chart in the process. A captivating live act, Peters has toured with the likes of George Ezra, Mahalia and Tom Walker. This summer has also seen her making the festival rounds, playing memorable sets to packed-out tents at Latitude, All Points East, The Great Escape and more.
Originally teenage friends from Limerick in Ireland, the trio moved to London a few years ago to pursue their dreams of living life like The Velvet Underground. Now under the watchful guidance of Florence and The Machine’s former manager, with a string of striking and instant indie-pop belters under their name and a live show that’s as short and sharp as it is acutely addictive, whenyoung are ready to grow up.
“The Others” is the second single from whenyoung’s debut album ‘Reasons To Dream’, out Friday 24th May. The Others was written after the Grenfell Tower fire in London. At this time Aoife was working for a gardening company that served clients in this area, some of whom were influential politicians. The juxtaposition between the safe homes of these politicians and the burning towerblock streets away were startling and upsetting. Living in safety should not be a luxury.
There is transformative power bursting through the 12 songs on “Emily Alone”, the new album from indie-folk project Florist. It’s not loud or showy or self-serving or generous. It’s just there, simple and plainspoken, waiting to be engaged and willing to move through anyone who needs it. Presumably, that’s what happened to Emily Sprague, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter named in the album’s title. Last winter, she wrote and recorded Emily Alone during a period of isolation and personal reflection spurred by the unexpected death of her mother and a move across the country, away from her collaborators in Florist (the band’s home base is still listed as New York on their Bandcamp). On Emily Alone, Sprague strips down her songs to their barest elements, leaving only her voice, words and plucked acoustic guitar (plus an occasional exception) to carry the message. What’s left is not just bedroom-recorded confessional music, but pure introspection, confusion, revelation and emotion rubbed raw and exposed to the world.
These songs are not sad so much as they channel the ebbs and flows of life lived inside a human brain with startling accuracy. Perhaps you have to be in the right place—emotionally, spiritually, spatially or whatever—for Emily Alone to impact you fully. But if you’re there, you’ll feel it. And if you’re not there, that’s okay. When you’re ready, Florist will be there waiting for you.
There is a metaphysical quality to the songs as they search for meaning in existence, swaying between the mundane and the spiritual. Emily believes deeply in the magic and connectedness of all things. The album Emily Alone is the creation of a self reflective lens through which we can view that omnipresence of love and life and the energy of all things around us as well as within us.
Featuring Emily Sprague Additional Vocals by Marguerite Sprague on Double Double Whammy Records
On their third full-length ”Remembering The Rockets” out 26th July through Tiny Engines, Strange Ranger continue to excel at translating the way intimacy can feel so overwhelmingly gigantic. With a dozen releases across their 10 years as a band, the Philly-via-Portland-via-Montana group, currently featuring Isaac Eiger (guitars, vocals), Fred Nixon (bass, piano, vocals), Nathan Tucker (drums), and Fiona Woodman (vocals), have traversed genres, moods, and textures while maintaining one important throughline: an exploration of closeness.
“Trying to close the distance between yourself and another person and wondering how much can really be done about that gap,” Eiger says. “Sometimes you don’t want to be close with others but you feel guilty, and sometimes you do but you can’t.”
Eiger, who writes the bulk of Strange Ranger’s lyrics, is a modern master of conveying the anxiety and uncertainty of growing older through a mixture of childhood nostalgia and interpersonal tidbits. There’s plenty of that on Remembering The Rockets, but after all of these years of singing about his own coming-of-age story, the album approaches the quandary of whether he’ll ever be able to impart that process—through which he’s reaped so much artistic joy and curiosity—onto someone else.
“So much suffering and horror is coming if we don’t seriously restructure our entire society, and I just really hope we get it together. I want to be a dad more than basically anything, and it’s unclear if that’d be an OK decision to make,” he says.
For a topic as severe as ecological collapse affecting his own parental aspirations—as well as other melancholy ruminations on loneliness, the passing of time, and the complications of emotional intimacy—Strange Ranger still ended up making the lushest, smoothest, and most pleasingly hypnotic album of their careers.
“After making Daymoon, I think Isaac and myself were both feeling pretty creatively exhausted with the rock band format,” Nixon says. “We wanted the feel of the next record to put you in a trance.”
Opener “Leona” is a celestial pop song with a springy bassline and a shimmering, magical synth effect that dusts over its punchy outro groove. “Nothing Else To Think About” is a bobbing sunset soundtrack with a drum sample that puffs and clacks behind its ASMR-inducing bassline. For “Beneath The Lights,” Eiger pulls out the drawly, prickly croon of a Daymoon ballad like “Most Perfect Gold of the Century” and then contorts it with warbling, Justin Vernon-esque auto-tune. Ambient interludes like “athens, ga” and “‘02” are void of vocals and “traditional” rock elements altogether.
“It was definitely a learning curve figuring out how to do some of the weirder stuff,” Eiger says. “We’ve been using keyboards for a while now, but before we made this record we got this old Japanese synthesizer [Korg M1] which has like a trillion sounds. So that was a totally different experience.”
“We really didn’t know what we were doing and probably stumbled our way into a bunch of sounds we wouldn’t be able to recreate if we tried,” Nixon adds.
Portland, OR producer Dylan M. Howe was an essential contributor in this regard. Most of the samples and electronic beats were designed with Howe’s assistance, and he helped the band navigate the archaic software of the Korg M1—which was used for nearly every synth sound on the album. For many of the songs, such as “Message To You”, which Fiona Woodman sings the entirety of, the only component the band had going into their home studio was the drum loop. From there, they experimented with different arrangements and benefitted from Nathan Tucker’s versatile drumming abilities to build that song, and many others, outward.
“I think we’ve always been attracted to music that you can nod your head to, and this time around I think we really tried to emphasize that,” Eiger says.
Tracks like “Pete’s Hill,” “Planes in Front of the Sun” and “Leona” lock into a pleasing breed of entrancing, rhythmic bliss. And they hit with maximum impact every time because they’re tastefully offset by a cheeky alt-country burner like “Ranch Style Home,” or a Lemonheads- esque cruiser like “Sunday.” But like all Strange Ranger albums, the band saved the most emotionally devastating songs for its finale.
“Living Free” and “Cold Hands Warm Heart” play like they’re in conversation with one another. The former is a synth-soaked reckoning with age (“all the years as blurry cars and trees / screaming right past me”) and purpose (“awkward angels in the snow / what if I just want a family?”). The latter is a sparse, two-and-a-half-minute piano ballad where Eiger acknowledges tepid hope as the only way forward. “Flickers of a world to come / here but lovelier than this one / see it rippling in the river,” he sings with a shaky intonation.
“The image of a rocket in the sky just feels very beautiful to me and full of possibility,” Eiger says. “If you’re someone who wants to have kids and you decide not to, that kinda feels like folding and just saying, “yeah everything is fucked, there is no future.” And why even live at that point? It sucks that ‘hope’ has—for good reason—become this cheesy, lame idea. But if you’ve got no hope, you’re completely fucked in a situation like this one.”
Since the 2015 release of Drab Majesty’s debut Careless, and the release of the acclaimed sophomore album The Demonstration the following year, artist Deb Demure and collaborator Mona D. have firmly established themselves amongst the pantheon of dark synth-pop greats, establishing a devoted fan base worldwide with their singular hypnotic sound and mysterious, constantly-evolving presence.
Following intense and extensive touring in support of the first two albums, Drab Majesty escaped to the inspirational landscapes of Athens, Greece to channel the songs for their most ambitious album creation yet: Modern Mirror.
On their third album Modern Mirror, Los Angeles synth-pop duo Drab Majesty sound more majestic than ever. Their futuristic vocals, entrancing rhythms, bittersweet sentiments and lush guitars emit forces of woe and uplift that never feel contradictory. The record was inspired by the group’s trip to Greece, and they take influence from the ancient myth “Echo and Narcissus,” taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They explore the story of the dangerously ego-driven Narcissus who falls in love with his own reflection, but it’s retold through the lens of postmodern triggers for self-obsession like technological proliferation and lack of quiet self-reflection. Drab Majesty’s lustrous synth escapades and intergalactic bleeps are just as slick as their commentary on modern day romance and personal conundrums.
Blowing the dust off the antiquarian myth of Ovid’s “Narcissus”, Drab Majesty uses its premise as groundwork for a modern reinterpretation. Each song tells a piece of the story, in which the listener’s own self-identity has become warped and dissociated through rapidly expanding technology, losing touch with the origins of their own personalities. Setting the stage as a romantic saga of antiquity, “A Dialogue” asks the listener if they are truly in love amid a building wash of guitars and reverb. Elements of classic tragedy weigh heavily in the reflection of Modern Mirror in songs like “The Other Side”, possessing a fundamental sound that is energetic, luminous and hopeful. Fusing the sonic aesthetics of predecessors like New Order and The Cure within the cautious instruction of Greek mythology and modern science fiction, Drab Majesty has birthed a hybrid of dreamy malaise, captured for a future moment.
The first single “Ellipsis”, romantically plays up the distorted concept of courting through modern technology in a world that has yet to adapt, while on “Long Division”, Deb’s resounding guitar cascades around the chorus shared with No Joy’s Jasamine White-Gluz,wistfully warning us against our vanity and self-obsession. Even when hope for everlasting love peeks through in “Oxytocin”, a sparkling and stoic track sung by Mona D., we are firmly reminded our fleeting existence.
The third single “Oxytocin” from Drab Majesty’s third album: Modern Mirror, out 7.12.19 on Dais.
The second single from Drab Majesty’s third album “Modern Mirror”, released July 12th 2019 on Dais Records. “Long Division points to an elusive impasse one may face in a personal relationship; a fundamental difference whether it be culturally, physically, or emotionally, that reaches a tipping point where both people involved have ultimately lost sight of their own identities through the futile act of trying to accommodate one another. It’s about a crafted dissonance in an attempt to harmonize.” Produced by Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel-Aviv) with guest vocals by No Joy’s Jasamine White-Gluz
Modern Mirror is a journey of self-reflection, nostalgia, love, beauty, and heartbreak told across eight addictive and emotional synth pop anthems – a seemingly classic tale delivered unblinkingly through the frame of the modern world.
Toronto group Ducks Unlimited have a jangly sound that owes much to ’80s indiepop like The Go-Betweens and the rosters of Flying Nun and Sarah Records. They’ve opened for The Goon Sax and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever and have just released this cracking slice of strummy goodness, “Get Bleak.”
Ducks Unlimited Featuring guest vocals from Laura Hermiston of fellow Toronto band Twist, “Get Bleak” is a jaunty slice of C86 indie-pop. The song pokes fun at the wishful thinking that simply moving to a new city will fix your problems, and it also sulks in that reality. “You flew across an ocean to / Get bleak,” sings lead vocalist Tom Mcgreevy against chunky guitar plucks.
Elbow have shared the first single from their upcoming new album ‘Giants Of All Sizes’. The lengthy track ‘Dexter & Sinister’ With echoes of the sonic textures from across their albums, the first taster of album No8 sees the band blending bluesy basslines, a soulful chorus, subtle electronica and a little bit of Manchester swagger beneath some typically vivid Guy Garvey lyrics as he pines of being, “Unstuck and the whole archipelago is rocking like a suicide pedalo at high tide“.
Garvey said that the track deals with “a great, big, bewildered question dealing with my feelings on Brexit, the loss of family and friends and the general sense of disaffection you see all around at the moment.” . Recent weeks have seen the band teasing their new album with social media posts and billboards baring its title.
Due for release on October 11th, ‘Giants Of All Sizes’ is the follow-up to 2017’s ‘Little Fictions’.
Elbow will headline the Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival in Scotland this evening (Thursday August 1), before their tour continues across to European festivals. UK and European headline tour dates are expected to be announced shortly.
Elbow have also been announced as one of four ambassadors for this year’s National Album Day, which takes place on Saturday October 12th, representing the North of England.
The track is available to pre-order as a limited edition 10 inch single.
Band Members
Guy Garvey, Craig Potter, Mark Potter and Pete Turner
