In 2017 British art-rockers Wild Beasts announced their breakup in a typed up statement, signed by the band and posted to Instagram. That was followed by a final EP, Punk Drunk and Trembling, three farewell concerts came in February 2018, and a final album, February 2018’s live in the studio release Last Night All My Dreams Came True (which featured new interpretations of songs from across their catalogue).
Hayden Thorpe formerly their singer is about to release his debut solo album, “Diviner”, via Domino Recordings. this week he shared one last pre-release song from it, “Earthly Needs,” a track built around a hypnotic beat and Thorpe’s very distinctive emotive vocals.
Back in February Thorpe shared the album’s title track, “Diviner,” via a video. When the album was announced in April he shared another song from it, “Love Crimes,” . Diviner was written in California, Cornwall, and at Thorpe’s home in London.
A previous press release described the album as such: “Diviner is a deeply emotional album: lyrically generous in its candid tone and self-awareness, the melodies resonant with sense memory. The album feels like a startling departure from Thorpe’s previous work with Wild Beasts and also unlike anything else being made at the moment.”
Thorpe had this to say about the album in the previous press release: “My adulthood was based on a certain belief system, a band, a family. When it shifted entirely, I had a ghost I had to find a new haunt for…. I believe in the medicinal properties of songs. I believe in their healing properties, Songs defy time, they don’t erode or denature, they come with you and reform anew in your mind as and when you need them…. I broke up with myself. So this is a break-up album, but not about a relationship. It’s a break-up from a past self, it’s a breakup from the old idea of yourself and therefore every relationship, of all kinds, that you’ve ever had.”
Hayden Thorpe – the debut album Diviner, out 24th May 2019 on Domino Recordings.
The Flaming Lips released their 15th album, ‘King’s Mouth: Music And Songs’, as a Record Store Day exclusive limited to 4000 gold vinyl copies back in April. Before being made available to the rest of the world on July 19th, the band have gifted fans with new single ‘Giant Baby’.
Featuring Mick Jones, The Clash guitarist narrates a story about a giant baby over the track’s spacious and simplistic backdrop. Thanks to the odd intro and acoustic guitar and electronic drum kick accompaniment, in the right setting the track could be described as refreshingly psychedelic.
Meanwhile, The Flaming Lips will mark the 20th anniversary of their album ‘The Soft Bulletin’ by performing the classic album in full during a special UK tour.
Released in 1999, the critically acclaimed ninth record from the band features the singles ‘Race for the Prize’ and ‘Waitin’ for a Superman’.
Originally released on CD in Japan in 2003, as a love letter & thank you to his Japanese fans, now for the first time available in August 2019, on a Limited Edition Green Vinyl from Glass Modern .
Recorded at home, produced, engineered & mixed by Matthew Sweet (bass, guirars & vocals) with the classic ‘Girlfriend’ era lineup of Ric Menck (drums), Greg Leisz (guitars) and the genius electric lead guitar of Television’s Richard Lloyd. The sleeve art is by renowned artist Yoshimoto Nara. In the liner notes, Sweet describes the album’s title as an attempt at reverse English: “If I did it correctly, the title should seem a little strange or wrong, but still meaningful! The true definition is supposed to be a ‘love you’ life, one devoted to loving someone or something, even life itself!”
“an excellent modern guitar pop album, filled with great hooks and harmonies and irresistible ringing six-strings” Allmusic
“Kimi crackles with Girlfriend‘s energy, as Lloyd and Sweet’s guitars provide antagonistic foils as they did more than a decade before on cuts like “Tonight We Ride.” Rolling Stone
Kyle Craft, along with his now solid backing band dubbed Showboat Honey, their self-titled album, the contemplative yet restless Showboat Honey (Sub Pop Records), due out July 12th, 2019 reflects that sturm und drang. “This is basically an album centered around bad luck and good fortune hitting at the same time,” Craft explains “Then, out of nowhere, I find love. Everything went to shit except that. I guess that’s how life works.”
No track better captures this duality than the sweeping “Sunday Driver,” about sticking to your guns, despite a universe of blowback. “At this point, you get baptized by certain fires and start to walk with the dead a little bit, like nothing can harm you anymore,” says the Portland-based musician. “That’s what self-love sounds like to me, as aggressive as that sounds.”
The sticky-sweet title of the album is lifted from the brightly choral “Buzzkill Caterwaul” (“Once you were the showboat honey/ But your ship sailed out”). “I wanted to make something that sounded like a raucous collision of Leon Russell and Patti Smith,” he says, “But ‘Buzzkill Caterwaul’ was the only tune that ended up showcasing that vision.”
Though aesthetics veer from song to song, Showboat Honey’s steadfast formula remains the same. Drummer Haven Mutlz holds down the machine with a ’60s/’70s fast-molasses groove that locks in with the slinky rolling bass of Billy Slater. When Kevin Clark isn’t bouncing across the piano, his mellotron strings swell in and out of frame. Jack of all trades Ben Steinmetz’s organ parts well up from the deep of the songs, while lead guitarist Jeremy Kale’s solos rip through them like electricity. On top of it all, sits the tongue-in-cheek phantasmagoria created by Craft’s lyrics.
Lyrically, perspectives shift to imbue life into a cast of intriguing, mysterious characters, à la Bob Dylan. (“There is not a single thing in my life that has affected me more than the first time I heard Dylan,” says Craft. “It immediately changed my life.”) “Johnny (Free & Easy)” is seemingly about a date gone awry at a swinger’s party in the Hollywood Hills. And the twangy pop of “O! Lucky Hand” appears to shadow a poor sod desperate to elude a hex. Its antidote is the stunning, cinematic “Deathwish Blue,” which sounds like a deep cut from the book of John Lennon, about the lovesick salvation found in his bride to be, Lydia.
If that’s not head-trippy enough, the carefree sing-along “2 Ugly 4 NY” features a lyrical reference to a previous incarnation of Craft. Its lyrics—“Don’t wanna see Death strum for cash downtown/ Or the look on his face when the change hits the case on the ground”—call out his early days in Portland when he went by the moniker of Hobo Grim. Busking downtown, he’d cover country tunes while dressed as the Grim Reaper so as to conceal his true identity.
Craft started writing about as soon as he could play the guitar at the age of 15. He grew up in the isolated Mississippi River town of Vidalia, Louisiana where his chops weren’t honed in a woodshed, but rather an old, dingy meat freezer that was out of commission. When asked about the first song he’d ever written, he laughs, saying it was an “angsty-rock tune” and “a rare bird of how bad a song could be.”
After years of touring, two LPs with Sub Pop Records, and solidifying the band, he’s since grown into a prodigious songwriter, to say the least. The band recorded Showboat Honey—co-produced by Craft, Clark, and Slater—at their own Moonbase Studios in Portland over 2018. “We approached this record differently for sure,” Craft says. “I’d make a demo, and after putting the songs together, shoot it to the band for ideas.” Tracks such as “Broken Mirror Pose” ended up being highly collaborative, while others settled into Craft’s original vision. “Deathwish Blue,” for instance, was tracked in a similar fashion to his solo debut, Dolls of Highland, with Craft tracking every instrument by himself.
Kyle and the members of Showboat Honey worked at such a feverish wine-fueled pace that they actually ended up with two completely different albums. But at the end of the day, they decided to combine the two into what is now Showboat Honey, a moonstruck rock ’n’ roll record teeming with reckless abandon.
“We thought we had the album done at one point. But at the last minute, I was like, ‘Shit, this isn’t the album. This isn’t it,’” Kyle says. “It was just a gut feeling. I’m glad for that because I feel like I ended up writing some of the best songs I’ve ever written.”
‘Showboat Honey’ (Release Date: July 12th, 2019) Sub Pop Records
The debut album from Amyl and the Sniffers is the sound of 21st century Australia recorded in Sheffield with producer Ross Orton. It’s primal and explosive with a love of glam, the 70’s Sharpie movement and good time rock n roll backed with lyrics that somehow are simultaneously bleak and nihilistic, yet humorous and celebratory. The album is full of beefy riffs and stomping drums that rages and rolls and lives up to all the hype. It has attitude, sass and Amy’s sore throat howl.
Australia’sAmyl and The Sniffers reputation for raucous garage-punk mayhem has garnered huge buzz around the world, and today they’ve finally released their hotly anticipated debut album. Amyl and The Sniffers was produced by Ross Orton (Arctic Monkeys) and features 11 blistering tracks boasting 70’s throwback anthemic guitars and breakneck drumming with human firecracker Amy Taylor leading the 29-minute auditory assault.
“Aussie punk outfit Amyl & The Sniffers continued to stake their claim as one of the planet’s most explosive new bands – NME “Amy Taylor cements her rock star status” – Pitchfork
“Taylor is a certified butt-kicking, drink-sculling, rock star…” 4/5The Herald Sun “Amid the aggro, Taylor’s intense stack-heeled charisma dominates: whether raging (Gacked On Anger) or romancing (“Beer in the cupboard, your eyes to mine”), she’s the queen of this glorious chunder from Down Under.” – Mojo 4/5 album review
“Its 11 breathless tracks bottle the barely-controlled explosion of energy that masquerades as their live show, then sprays it all out again like cheap lager.” – Q Magazine. 4/5 album review
“Amyl and The Sniffers is a thumping, screaming, wailing, magnet for misfits, losers, and outcasts, a clarion call for rejects and mis-shapes that is also an obscenely good time.” – Clash *8/10 Review
Stockholm band Melby bring a mildly psychedelic and moody outlook to dream pop on debut full-length, “None ofthe This Makes Me Worry”. While the band favors strong, instantly earworm-y melodies and baroque instrumental choices, the songs here are just slightly too long, sophisticated, and altogether downbeat to be pigeonholed as sunshine pop. But there’s also a playfulness in Melby’s approach that recalls psych’s more childlike impulses, with Matilda Wiezell’s subtly emotive vocals contributing to the band’s balance of modern and warmly nostalgic sounds.
Chris Forsyth’s All Time Present is an adventurous and, considering its length, remarkably tight double LP of riff-heavy rock solid enough to bang your head on, but not really to bang your head to as the overall vibe here is of a vintage that pre-dates punk. But that’s not to say this is dad rock—All Time Present gives the classics an almost ambient treatment, flattening out the edges of the songs while preserving the technical frills, ultimately landing somewhere around a less self-interested style of prog. This is rock music for the people. That said, fair warning to all ye who enter: things start to get real groovy around track three, “The Man Who Knows Too Much,” after which Forsyth and company plunge fully and without reservation into a heady well of eerie psychedelia and British folk-rock whimsy on the following track, the 11-minute long number “Dream Song,” which also features some appropriately hazy double tracked vocals from Rosali Middleman. But never fear, intrepid listener. Trust in Forsyth to lead the way through long stretches of extended, expansive jamming, and by the time you get to final track, “Techno Top,” it’s 1980 and we’re all dancing to the Talking Heads.
Chris Forsyth – guitar, vocal, Space Echo
with Shawn Edward Hansen – Prophet 12, Mellotron, piano, saxophone Ryan Jewell – drums, percussion Peter Kerlin – bass guitar Rosali Middleman – vocal on (4) Jeff Zeigler – Onde Magnétique on (5)
“…a near-perfect balance between 70s rock tradition and present day experimentation,”
“…one of rock’s most lyrical guitar improvisors,” -NPR Music
Mavis Staples has never shied away from making a statement, going all the way back to the raw vocal power and unshakeable commitment of The Staple Singers’ 1965 civil rights anthem “Freedom Highway.” The records she’s been making on ANTI for the last 15 years — the overt examples being We’ll Never Turn Back and If All I Was Was Black— have been increasingly oriented toward raising consciousness and, considering Americas’s current state, we need Staples’ fiery forward momentum more than ever.
The message is clear from the get-go on We Get By, as the dirty, grinding blues riffs of Staples’ bandleader/guitarist Rick Holmstrom power opening cut “Change.” “What good is freedom if we haven’t learned to be free?” asks Staples, and the band’s gritty rumble underlines her outrage.
Jeff Tweedy produced and wrote her last album, and wasn’t above gently pushing the envelope, but Ben Harper fills the writer/producer role by just letting Mavis be Mavis on We Get By. Harper takes her down a vintage Staple Singers path with the funky “Brothers and Sisters,” and when she sings, “trouble in the land, we can’t trust that man” her intentions aren’t exactly elliptical. The classic vibe is carried forward with Holmstrom’s doomy Pops Staples-style guitar licks on “Heavy on My Mind.”
Staples’ gospel repertoire comes to the fore on the sanctified stomper “Sometime,” when she utilizes simple, gospel-style lyrics to passionately reiterate the need for change. It’s not all current affairs though — for all the biblical allusions, when Mavis sings “Nothing in the world is stronger than my love for you” in blues-rocker “Stronger,” she seems to blur the line between earthly and spiritual. And she allows a peek at her intimate side on when she dips into her sensual side for the slow-burning, love-hungry, “Chance on Me.”
Nearly 80 upon the album’s release, Mavis is the last surviving member of the Staple Singers’ ’70s lineup. But closing out the album by calling for “One More Change,” she makes it plain that her struggle is our struggle, and it goes on.
Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real have released the title track from their forthcoming album Turn Off the News (Build a Garden). The song features backing vocals from Sheryl Crow. Take a listen below. The album is out June 14th (via Fantasy). It features guest appearances from Neil Young, Margo Price, Kesha, and Lucius, among others. Lukas’ father Willie Nelson and his brother Micah Nelson also contribute to the LP.
Along with Lukas Nelson, Promise of the Real features bassist Corey McCormick, drummer Anthony LoGerfo, percussionist Tato Melgar, and multi-instrumentalist Logan Metz. The band has toured and made multiple records with Neil Young. Lukas Nelson prominently appeared in A Star Is Born as a member of Bradley Cooper’s band. He also co-wrote several songs on the soundtrack.
“Turn Off The News (Build A Garden)” is the title track off the new album from Lukas Nelson & Promise Of The Real, available everywhere June 14th.
