Bonniesongs is the musical project of Irish-Australian songwriter, Bonnie Stewart. After spending the last few years catching the ear of an ever growing Australian audience, Bonnie is set to go global, with the September release of a brand new EP, “Energetic Mind”. Discussing the record, Bonnie has suggested it combines the folk-leaning of her previous material, with a, “a lot of darker grungy undertones”, as evidenced by the release, this week, of her new single, Ice Cream.
Discussing the inspiration, it’s perhaps unsurprisingly about the joys of summer, “it’s about fun, summer, friends, ice cream, being silly and not taking yourself too seriously”. The apparent joyful lyrical content, is somewhat contrasted by the musical content, which through pounding drums, clattering guitars and layered vocal howls, feels all together more serious and chilly. The whole track ends with the repeated cry of, “I’ll have vanilla”, although if you plan on buying Bonnie an ice-cream she advises, like most sensible people, she actually prefers the delights of Mint Choc Chip. Whatever flavour you fancy, Bonniesongs has got your gelato soundtrack covered.
Feel the heat in this new music video for Bonniesongs – ‘Ice Cream’. Taken from her forthcoming studio album ‘Energetic Mind’,
Energetic Mind is out September 6th via Small Pond Recordings.
The Black Keys‘ ninth studio album, “Let’s Rock”is a return to the straightforward rock of the singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney’s early days as a band. “When we’re together we are The Black Keys, that’s where that real magic is,” says Auerbach, “and always has been since we were sixteen.” “The record is like an homage to electric guitar,” says Carney. “We took a simple approach and trimmed all the fat like we used to.”
The Black Keys have shared a public service announcement. And remember, when you get your friends to pre-order the band’s new album, “Let’s Rock,” you can say: “This is the coolest thing you’ve ever done in your life.”
The band also shared their new video The Black Keys their new song “Go,” from their upcoming album “Let’s Rock.” The video is directed by Bryan Schlam and finds the band struggling to reconnect after five years apart. Pat Carney says, “It was great making this video with Bryan, partially because it was filmed at the very type of place it is making fun of,” and Dan Auerbach adds, “The video was fun, but we still haven’t spoken.” Watch the video for “Go”
Celebrating a debut headline tour with new music should be practised more often, and Californian indie punks Ogikubo Station have done just that. They come over to the UK on Monday 17th June for their first run of bill topping dates in this country and, to mark the occasion, have released a three track EP entitled Okinawan Loves Songs, released just prior to the tour via Asian Man Records. For the uninitiated, the band is the brainchild of Maura Weaver, best known for her work with MIXTAPES and Mike Park, who founded Asian Man Records himself back in 1996. Their debut album We Can Pretend Like was released late last year and for this current EP, Dan Adriano of ALKALINE TRIO has helped out on bass; the label helped launched their career of the band at the very start.
Clocking in at just over seven minutes in length, this will be one of the shortest releases of the year, even by EP standards. The opening track is “Would I Break My Heart Enough for You” and features Weaver’s sultry voice over melodious, upbeat pop rock, complimented nicely by Park’s backing vocals. The song has a lovely melancholic vibe to it, made even more noticeable by the poignant narrative contained within the lyrics; the line ‘I’m much too scared to say a thing’ cutting through at regular intervals to strike a chord within those who listen. The follow up is Spend Some Time With Me, the shortest track at exactly 105 seconds long. There’s a fuzzier guitar tone and a couple of hooks contained within the song this time around, but the tone remains constant, the contrast between the light and the dark reflected once more in the music and the lyrics.
The theme of the song seems to revolve around a particularly difficult situation in a relationship and Weaver conveys this much like Fleetwood Mac did on Rumours: her voice is soft and pleasant but the delivery is laced with an underlying aggression that doesn’t go unnoticed. To finish, the band have paid homage to alt-rock heavyweights They Might Be Giants with a cover of Dr Worm, performed in the style of the band’s Dial A Song’ sessions, where fans could call in and hear a song from the answering machine. More playful than the other tracks, the song is filled with a nostalgic warmth of yesteryear and has been produced expertly, the crackling phone line and distant acoustic guitar mimicking the analogue answering machines to a tee and ensuring an engaging and fun end to the EP.
For those who have loved the work of SPANISH LOVE SONGS, PKEW PKEW PKEW and SWMRS, this short trip into the world of emotion-laden storytelling combined with the lighter side of musicianship will be of considerable interest. The saying ‘Good things come in small packages’ is most definitely in place here; this is a lovely little EP that will endear to many and if Ogikubo Stationdon’t have a successful trek across these shores throughout June, it will be a crying shame indeed.
The music of Mike Deni — aka Geographer has always been more about emotional terrain than places on a map, but on his new EP “New Jersey,” the two are intertwined.
The new seven-song collection, Geographer’s fourth EP to go along with three full-lengths, is the first music Deni has released since relocating to Los Angeles, but it is not a West Coast album. Far from it. “New Jersey” is a meticulously layered and redolently orchestrated paean to the home state he left 12 years ago. In a way, it’s his origin story and as immersions in the past go, it’s quite possibly the least mawkish exercise in nostalgia ever.
Deni founded Geographer in 2007 in San Francisco, where he moved after the unexpected and tragic deaths of his sister, and then his father. The EP, written in a six-month span in 2018 during a bout of wanderlust, finds him opening the baggage he left in the Garden State. Old dreams, old disappointments, old crushes: All become iridescent anthems backed by Geographer’s characteristic blend of electronic and analog instrumentation.
“Summer of My Discontentment” imagines a brooding youngster, the ache unaffected by time. On “Hideout (Sparrow),” Deni shows he is a wordsmith as well as master arranger: “Listen to the ocean / tell you why it’s there / Turn it into words that / maybe can make them care.” And the closer is perhaps the songwriter’s version of “You Can’t Go Home Again” — a 3 1/2-minute blast of synth and falsetto that reaches M83 heights before receding into a bouquet of strings.
“I want the power in my music to come from lyrics and melody rather than trickery of the brain,” Marika Hackman said back in 2015, just before the release of her full-length debut We Slept At Last. Fast forward four years and one more album, and the singer-songwriter continues to live up to this promise on late single “i’m not where you are,” all about “breaking up with people, or self-sabotaging relationships,” as Hackman explains in a statement. Between her sultry, languorous delivery and synths that are at once toe-tapping and melancholic, the English artist once again crafts a powerful melody with lyrics that reveal a fraught emotional underbelly. Hackman adds that “i’m not where you are” meditates on “[t]hat feeling of not trusting one’s emotions because you can’t seem to get to the same place as the other person. On the surface, it seems like an arrogant ‘everybody falls in love with me’ kind of song but it’s actually incredibly lonely, introspective and self-deprecating.”
British singer/songwriter Marika Hackman is releasing a new album, Any Human Friend, on August 9th via Sub Pop. This week shared another song from the album titled, “the one,” which was the first song written for Any Human Friend.
It also might be Hackman’s catchiest song to date. In a press release Hackman concurs, saying “the one” is “probably the poppiest song I’ve ever written. I loved the idea of inhabiting this ridiculous arrogant rock star character who has totally fucked their career by writing too many sad songs.”
Previously she shared the album’s first single “i’m not where you are”
Any Human Friend is the follow-up to her 2017-released breakthrough release, sophomore album I’m Not Your Man. Hackman co-produced the album with David Wrench (Frank Ocean, The xx, Let’s Eat Grandma).
In a previous press release Hackman summed up the album this way: “This whole record is me diving into myself and peeling back the skin further and further, exposing myself in quite a big way. It can be quite sexual. It’s blunt, but not offensive. It’s mischievous.”
Hackman added: “I’m a hopeless romantic. I search for love and sexual experience, but also I’m terrified by it.”
Hackman is unabashed about tackling these themes, even if her only family is a little less enthused. “I sent ‘all night’ to my parents and they were quite shocked,” she said in the press release. “Why does it sound shocking coming out of my mouth? Women have sex with each other, and it seems to me we aren’t as freely allowed to discuss that as men are. But at no point am I disrespecting the women I’m having sex with. It can be fucking sexy without banging people over the head with a frying pan. It’s sexy sex.”
Out now on AMF / Sub Pop Published by Transgressive Records Ltd.
This week Bat For Lashes (aka Natasha Khan) has announced a new album, “Lost Girls”, and shared its first single, “Kids in the Dark.”Lost Girls is due out September 6th via AWAL Recordings. “Kids in the Dark” is not as immediate as some of Khan’s previous classic singles (such as “Daniel” or “What’s a Girl to Do”), but it’s still got some Bat For Lashes magic and plus Khan’s unmistakable voice.
Check out the album’s tracklist and over art here. In the last week, in the run up to the album announcement, Bat For Lashes also shared some intriguing teaser videos on Instagram so check those out too.
Lost Girls is the follow-up to 2016’s concept album The Bride, which came out via Parlophone/Warner Bros. Although in 2018 Khan scored the BBC/Netflix show Requiem, for which she picked up an Ivor Norvello Award.
A press release sets the scene for Lost Girls this way: “If her last album, The Bride, was melancholy and mournful, a tone poem of loss and regret, Lost Girls is her mischievous younger sister, widescreen in scope and bursting with Technicolour intensity. It’s an album for driving in the dark; holding hands at sunset; jumping off bridges with vampires; riding your bike across the moon…. Spanning 10 tracks, Lost Girls sees Khan dreaming up her own fully formed parallel universe, creating an off-kilter coming of age film in which gangs of marauding female bikers roam our streets, teenagers make out on car hoods and a powerful female energy casts spells and leave clues for us to follow. The women of Lost Girls are parallel to one of Khan’s previous female protagonists, the tough, darkness-driven Pearl, from her 2009 lauded album Two Suns. Within the women of Lost Girls and the character Nikki Pink, Khan unfolds elements of herself; within these songs, we do the same.”
Vagabon (aka Lætitia Tamko)’s new album, All The Women In Me, the follow up to her breakout debut, Infinite Worlds, is an artistic leap for Tamko, who wrote and produced the entire album. Guitar-driven melodies are largely absent, replaced by hybridized analog and digital arrangements,
All the Women in Me will be Vagabon’s second album, the follow-up to her 2017-released debut Infinite Worlds, and is her first for Nonesuch. Tamko wrote and produced the entire album herself and plays all the instruments on “Flood Hands,” for example.
Of the single Tamko says in a press release: “‘Flood Hands’ is a track I originally produced and arranged for a well-known pop-duo to have on their album. Knowing I was writing this song for musicians I admire, allowed me this relief from my writer’s block. I used this assignment as a chance to flex my production muscles and write something I wouldn’t have written as a ‘Vagabon’ song a couple years ago. The result felt like a triumph for me in my progression as an artist and I just couldn’t stand to part with the song by the time I was finished.”
The press release Tamko sets the scene for where she was at prior to recording the new album: “I was in a pretty tortured headspace when I returned home from touring Infinite Worlds. That album contained some of the first songs I’d ever written, and more people than I could have ever imagined heard it. I was proud to become a full-time musician and recognized how rare of a thing that is, but was also debilitated by the very same fact. Fear overtook me and I couldn’t write. I felt stagnant and unsure of what to do next.”
Unlike Infinite Worlds, All the Women in Me has less of a straight up indie rock guitar sound, with more electronic textures. “With this album, I wanted to impress myself,” Tamko says in the press release. “I wanted to be curious and I wanted to make big leaps as a producer. All I had access to on the road was my computer and Logic, so naturally I started writing songs electronically with what was at hand.”
Tamko adds: “The drums and vocal forward approach I took on All The Women In Me is drawn from my love for rap and hip-hop production as well as R&B and folk storytelling. That’s the music that got me excited about writing again.”
Vagabon’s “Flood Hands,” from the album ‘All The Women In Me,’ due September 27th on Nonesuch Records.
On the heels of her triumphant Matador Records debut Turn Out the Lights and the critically acclaimed collaborative EP boygenius, JulienBaker returns with her first new solo recordings in 18 months, “Red Door” b/w “Conversation Piece,” available exclusively for Record Store Day 2019. The 7″ features the first studio recording of a fan favorite “Red Door”, previously only heard live, and a previously unreleased cut begun during the Turn Out the Lights sessions, “Red Door” is a lush and atmospheric track driven by Baker’s complex fingerpicking and a hint of slide guitar, her voice soaring as she pleads “set me on fire in the middle of the street / bend my knees, paint the concrete / the color of my bloody knuckles / pulling splinters form the chapel door.” A previously unreleased cut begun during the Turn Out the Lights sessions, Its flip side “Conversation Piece” is a meditation on loneliness, backed by delicate percussion and chiming guitars.
“Conversation Piece.” Julien Baker’ s Turn Out the Lights received glowing reviews across international press outlets and continues to sell steadily, nearing 40k equivalent albums in the U.S. boygenius’ s/t EP has reached 14k scans in its first three months on sale.
Seven years after their last album release, Efterklang make a welcome return with a fifth studio recordAltid Sammen on 20th September. Today, the Danish trio also announce European tour dates and share the single ‘Vi er uendelig’ with a video starring Helena Christensen.
In support of Altid Sammen, Efterklang will perform the album in its entirety the day after release during a sold-out headline show at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie on 21st September. Efterklang will tour Europe throughout the year and into 2020. For a number of Efterklang’s newly announced headline shows, including the Barbican in London,
Altid Sammen album opener ‘Vi er uendelig’ (“We are infinite”) is released today digitally. The accompanying visuals, directed by Andreas Koefoed (behind the band’s film The Ghost Of Piramida), and featuring a fellow Dane, the model and photographer Helena Christensen, are a homage to an iconic Johnny Hallyday TV performance in 1964.
Altid Sammen(meaning “always together”) is deep and sonorous, steeped in the sonic experimentation that has long been their trademark since Tripper, the Danes’ 2004 debut. As bold and ambitious in scope as their last collection of songs, Piramida, Casper Clausen (vocals), Mads Brauer (synths, electronics) and Rasmus Stolberg (bass) have taken another creative U-turn, this time fusing baroque instrumentation with their signature expansive sound.
Efterklang’s last release, Piramida, centred around a ghost town in the Arctic, was a grand and all-encompassing project that spawned a movie, live album and a series of unforgettable shows (including a live debut at the Sydney Opera House). Their final performance in Sønderborg – the southern Danish town where the band grew up – marked a closing of a chapter, for Piramida and for Efterklang.
“We needed a break from the album and touring routine, and we needed a break from Efterklang,” says Clausen. “After the Sønderborg show, things felt very exciting – and a bit scary too. We could think freely, and move in new directions again, just focusing on the things that excited the 3 of us.”
The video is an homage to the video for Johnny Hallyday’s Le Penitentier from 1964
‘Vi er uendelig’ by Efterklang starring Helena Christensen and the band’s own Casper Clausen. Taken from the new album ‘Altid Sammen’. Out September 20th 2019 on 4AD/Rumraket,
Car Seat Headrest today announces Commit Yourself Completely – a new nine-track live album that will be released only via digital means June 17th. Culled from performances across the UK, US and France, the nine-track album spans material from 2016’s breakout Teens Of Denial and 2018’s reimagined epic Twin Fantasy – as well as the first officially released recording of longtime live staple ‘Ivy’ by Frank Ocean. A filmed version of the performance of ‘Fill In The Blank’ which appears on the album, recorded in Columbus, Ohio,
“This is a compilation of songs from shows we played in 2018,” says Will Toledo. “We recorded every show we did that year, and I went through about 50 of them to get the final tracklist for this album. This isn’t necessarily the best possible version of each track, but it’s some of the most fun we’ve had on stage. I particularly remember the show we did in the small French town of Amiens, maybe the smallest show we did that year, and how great it felt to be up in people’s faces with everyone plugging in to the music right away. The recordings we made of the shows came out very clean, so rather than try to artificially recreate how it sounded in the different venues night to night, I tried to give the whole album that in-your-face feeling, like we’re playing the songs right in front of you. When you’re onstage with everything happening at once, you never really know what it sounds like in the room anyways; all you know is how the music is feeling. Hopefully this will give you a sense of what these shows felt like.”
A snapshot of the 7-person lineup featuring members of Naked Giants experienced by crowds worldwide over the last two years, Commit Yourself Completely offers a visceral, loose and ebullient take on these much-loved songs, as well as an an incandescent capstone of a formative touring period as Car Seat Headrest readies his next studio album. Musicians featured on the album are Will Toledo (vocals), Seth Dalby (bass), Ethan Ives (guitar, vocals), Andrew Katz (drums, vocals), Grant Mullen (guitar, vocals) Gianni Aiello (guitar, keyboards, vocals), Henry LaVallee (additional percussion).
From Car Seat Headrest’s live album ‘Commit Yourself Completely’ released June 17th on Matador Records
‘Commit Yourself Completely’
Tracklist:
1. Cosmic Hero (Live at the Tramshed, Cardiff, Wales)
2. Fill In The Blank (Live at Newport Music Hall, Columbus, OH)
3. Drugs With Friends (Live at La Lune des Pirates, Amiens, France)
4. Bodys (Live at La Lune des Pirates, Amiens, France)
5. Cute Thing (Live at O2 Forum Kentish Town, London, England)
6. Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales (Live at O2 Forum Kentish Town, London, England)
7. Destroyed By Hippie Powers (Live at the Crystal Ballroom, Portland, OR)
8. Ivy (live at the Capitol Theater, Olympia, WA)
9. Beach Life-in-Death (Live at Crossroads, KC, Kansas City, MO)
