The Fat Angel Sings

The Minneapolis Uranium Club Band, along with Static Shock Records and the newly contracted Anti Fade Records, are proud to present “Infants Under the Bulb”; The Uranium Club’s fourth album and first full length since 2018’s “The Cosmo Cleaners”.

Precisely timed and released ahead of the band’s debut tour of Australia “Infants Under the Bulb” will light up stores across the globe . Recorded in Minneapolis over the course of 2023 by long time collaborator Grant Richardson and just as rampant and agitated as ever, The Uranium Club once again win their dear listeners over with eccentrically wild guitar parts, revolving voices, elastic-tight drums and the addition of their very own Saints-styled horn section. 

Lyrically, “Under the Bulb” opens up the history books of unsolved mysteries – unidentified, unsolved, unanswered subjects of suspicious acts or individuals across the last century. Who, what, when and where… but mostly, why? Ignorant humanity of earth orbits the sun once again. The Somerton Man, Bergmann, Bauby, Denton, phone phreakers, and just what is lurking behind the cosmic organ of The Wall?
As always, the artwork was handled in-house by the Club and ambitious as ever. The spectacular cover shot captures a carefully coordinated event orchestrated by the Club to photograph a crowd of the local volunteers wearing ponchos standing together in an open field to make the shape of a giant spiral.

The spiral pictured is 120 feet (36.5 meters) wide, photographed by drone, and was plotted out on the ground using a protractor specially fabricated for the occasion by the band with a pivoting centre and 60ft long adjustable arm.
“Infants Under the Bulb” is out on Anti Fade and Static Shock,

Post punk / experimental garage rock from USA. Released March 1st, 2024 on Anti Fade Records (Australia) and Static Shock Records (UK).

Bruce Springsteen rarely stumbles when he covers another artist, but we may be looking at a rare instance today. Technically, though, he hasn’t actually performed this one in concert; he only soundchecked it once, and it appears to have been a spontaneous arrangement, so maybe we can cut him some slack.

On the evening of May 23rd, 1988, At the Madison Square Garden crowd was admitted into the arena a bit early. Bruce and the band were still finishing up their soundcheck, and noticing the “paying customers,” Bruce decided to give them a special treat before heading backstage until showtime.

Bruce’s selection was an obscure one: the sweet, romantic “For Your Love.” Not the Yardbirds’ song, mind you, but the 1957 Ed Townsend version by the same name.

“For Your Love” was Townsend’s first and last great hit, But if you’re only going to have one big song, this is a great one to stand on. Townsend’s warm vocals and lush arrangement are evergreen; that sax solo and those soaring backing vocals make me swoon every time. This spring & summer ballad was Ed’s only significant national hit.

Although “For Your Love” certainly fit the theme of Bruce’s Tunnel of Love Tour, I’m guessing most of the fans in the room didn’t recognize it. Thirty years after it charted, “For Your Love” was an obscure choice, but Bruce’s soundchecks were full of wild cards at the time–in part due to the presence of the Miami Horns (renamed The Horns of Love for that tour), who seemed to be up for anything Bruce could throw at them.

The Horns followed Bruce’s lead,

Bruce threw a curve ball with “For Your Love,” though. Rather than follow a more faithful reading, Bruce steered the band toward a decidedly reggae arrangement. (He’d been experimenting with reggae arrangements since transforming “My Hometown,” “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Jersey Girl” the summer before.

“For Your Love” (Live at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY – 05/23/1988) · Bruce Springsteen

“Not God” is the new album from Chicago’s beloved two-headed monster, Finom (fka Ohmme). You can ask them to go into more detail about the boring reasons why they changed their name, but for now, the answer is going to be polite refusal.  

Co-fronted by Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, Finom’s influences run vast and varied, and they put a premium on change. Produced by Jeff Tweedy in the Wilco Loft, “Not God” is a marvel of growth, a progression from the roots of this collaborative band whose history can be traced back to its improvised conception. This is owed in no small part to their hometown of Chicago, the life raft to so many persisters in musical adventurosity. That energy combined with Finom’s dramatic vocal and musical gifts puts them in the peripheries of the legacies cemented by The Roches, Roxy Music, the B52s, Kate Bush, Cate Le Bon, and Wilco.  

Cunningham and Stewart are brilliant harmonizers, but harmony doesn’t equate to a utopia. In Finom’s maws harmony can also be a fight, holding the line until the volcano erupts. This realistic depiction of a creative relationship jolts throughout the songs of “Not God“, and brings the whole damn thing to life. Finom are more than one person with more than one dream. But still, they grow together, harnessed by their shared love of pop songwriting, control, chaos, and being generally freaky-deaky. Freaky in that way that is only really fun when you’re doing it with a friend.

As the globe spins and advancements advance, it can feel essential to return to relationships that make us feel whole, that generate energy of strength and relief. Which puts double the weight on the reality that Sima and Macie continue to pledge allegiance to each other, at the base of the volcano, in the front seat of the car as it pulls off the highway. 

their album of the same name ‘Not God’ out on Joyful Noise Recordings.

Straddling the elusive boundary between the corporeal and the transcendent, Montreal-based psych-pop band Elephant Stone has cemented its reputation as a band deeply invested in probing the contours of dreams and consciousness. Over a 14-year odyssey, their sonic tapestry has evolved into a rich and intricate form of art, capable of capturing the boundless terrain of human emotion and cognition. Set for release on February 23rd 2024, their upcoming album, ‘Back Into the Dream’, serves as the ultimate culmination of this musical evolution, offering listeners an entrancing passage through realms of introspection and wonder. The band’s driving force, Rishi Dhir, has an innate ability to bare his soul through music, plumbing the depths of his vulnerabilities and musings. “I’m often caught in the web of intense, recurring dreams, which I think reflect my ongoing quest for identity and a sense of belonging,” Rishi divulges.

Centred on the enigma of dreams—whether they’re subconscious murmurings or portals to parallel universes—’Back Into the Dream’ encapsulates the eternal cycle of waking and dreaming. “We’re perpetually oscillating between two realms, trying to comprehend each,” says Rishi. “If 7 our music can serve as a bridge between these worlds, then we’ve accomplished our mission.”

Elephant Stone “Back Into The Dream” (Fuzz Club/Little Cloud/Elephants On Parade, 2024) The 6th album from this Canadian band led by Rishi Dhir from The High Dials/MIEN/The Datsons starts with “Lost In A Dream”. It’s a joyously vibrant pop number built on an addictively smooth rhythm and swirling sounds of dreamy psychedelic bliss that sets a pattern for what’s to come. “Godstar” and “The Imaginary, Nameless Everybody in the World” bring a jazzy Eastern glimmer to the tone.

The usual guitar/bass/drums power is augmented by sitar, synths, Farfisa & Hammond organ, mellotron, piano, saxophone, tabla. Lush harmonies and instruments, radiant riffs, swooning strings and horns all play a part in the album’s hook-infested accessibility. The overall feel is an odd sort of breezy, ‘easy listening’ pop sound that’s occasionally interrupted by trippy flares of cosmic wandering. Initially, it seems almost too saccharine sweet, but the drawing power of the melodies is undeniable, and the subtle presence of lysergic brain flurries colors the music with a kaleidoscopic glow. “Back Into The Dream” temporarily puts the world’s troubles on a back burner. It is beautifully weird, a compellingly hypnotic opiate that opens up that part of your being which desires to float in a celestial paradise of dreamy euphony. RIYL: Elf Power, psychedelic Beatles, Ocean Colour Scene, Cornershop, Prefab Sprout, XTC, The High Llamas, The Kinks, Stereolab, The Beach Boys, Tame Impala, Electric Light Orchestra, The Coral, The Left Banke, Pugwash, MGMT.

Following the acclaim of their 2018 debut LP “Digital Mountain” and 2021 EPs “Create Simulate” and “Passing Over”, Nice Biscuit’s eagerly-awaited second album, “SOS” is released via Bad Vibrations in Europe. Written and recorded during 2022-23 at Swan Pond Studios (QLD) and mixed by Mildlife’s Jim Rindfleish, the nine track album embodies the fuzzy groove-laden psych that Nice Biscuit is renowned for, while introducing new danceable feels influenced by their love of disco, jazz fusion and world music.

With the beautifully hypnotic and soothing vocals of front women, Billie Star and Grace Cuell, “SOS” is about finding calm and balance in our chaotic world. While writing the album, the band often discussed the weight and compounding of the various crises of the world, thus each song is a different response to these turbulent times. The band explains; “Sometimes we feel hopeful and grateful, sometimes pessimistic and desolate, sometimes mournful and angry at the system, sometimes we feel that love can solve it all and sometimes we just become overwhelmed and apathetic about everything.”

“SOS” was written over one year as the band enjoyed multiple long weekends, out at Swan Pond Studios with their friend, Alistair Richardson (The Cairos, Clea). After road-testing a few of the new songs on tour in Europe in 2023, Nice Biscuit went back to Swan Pond Studios to record the album over a 6 month period. It is the final album with the band’s original guitarist and producer, Jess Ferronato, who recorded all the instruments on the record, while Richardson tracked all the vocals.

Unlike their debut album and EPs, for “SOS” the band decided to split up the recording sessions into two groups — bass, guitar, drums (the boys: Nick Cavendish, Jess Ferronato, Kurt Melvin) and vocals and percussion (the girls: Star and Cuell). The band explains their recording process; “The boys laid down the foundations of the songs on the weekend prior and then Billie and Grace would head out to add vocals and write lyrics.

Often we would not have the lyrics or melodies finished before going out there, which allowed more focus and energy to be poured into the instrumentation and vocals. It fostered greater creativity and space by doing it separately and felt like a fun back and forth between the two groups, being excited to share what we have created. Then in the weeks after we got together and added more synth and percussion parts.”

Sliding between the bodies in the street, cutting across the contrails that bisect our sky, Wand find melody and the anxiety beats as they hum the soundtrack for a new gravitational center. Seeking connections against the plan of niche interest and anonymity, “Vertigo” is the sound of slippage, rocks of contradiction (in soft focus); feet lost, regained, lost again, a multi-chromatic swaying, more automatic, associative, directed, in time.

New album release bonus offer for the hardcore among yer: now, you can Turn On, Turn Off, and Tune Into the “Vertigo” Bundle – your choice of format on the new Wand record (LP-CD-or-CS), complete with Black Light Poster and Bumper Sticker! Check the graphics and you’ll see that all items come branded not only with the title of their boggling new album, but also with the impeccably absurd sense of DEEP aesthetics, designed to make you go not only Hmmm, but HAAAAAAA as well. 

Coming off the heels of 2022’s “A New Kind of Love”, “A Trip To The Moon” sees Ghost Funk Orchestra diving even deeper in the worlds of film music, exotica, and psychedelic surf rock. The aim is to create a layered and collaged listening experience with more elements than you could possibly pick out in a single listen.

The guitars are fuzzy and flooded with spring reverb, and the horns are arranged in a studio big band fashion. It’s full of big compositions with garage rock attitude.

Influences range everywhere from Eddie Palmieri and Esquivel to The Lively Ones, Dusty Springfield, and War. The tracks are tied together by real recorded transmissions from the Apollo moon missions. The concept for the album is a story about a woman stranded on earth by her cosmonaut partner, left to ponder his whereabouts and whether or not he’ll make it back from the cosmos alive.

For Fans Of… Orions Belte, Temples, Allah-Las, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, ‘A Trip To The Moon’ came out February 23rd, 2024!

Distance as a measure of time and place informs Kelly Finnigan’s, “A Lover Was Born” with a grit and grace that turns passion into virtue. The latest solo release from The Monophonics frontman roots itself in the best traditions of midwest soul labels like King, Curtom, Dakar, and the Bodie Recording Company. “A Lover Was Born” is a testimony that these deep cut grooves are not resigned to nostalgia, instead, they are at the burning heart of longing and hope. 

The journey Finnigan takes listeners on over “Lover’s” eleven tracks echo the state of motion and growth since his solo debut, “The Tales People Tell” (2019). These two records bookend a prolific period of output, including a pair of Monophonics albums, a Christmas album, a mixtape, and a full slate of producing other artists (The Ironsides, Alanna Royale, the Sextones). “There’s nothing like making records,” says Finnigan. “It feels like that’s my purpose — the reason I was put on this earth.” 

Written in California, Ohio, and Staten Island, Kelly Finnigan collaborated with old friends in and outside the studio. “I enjoy working alone but it’s not how you want to make a record…almost everybody I brought in for this album I’ve worked with, toured with or spent a great deal of time with.” Max and Joe Ramey (The Ironsides), Jimmy James (Parlor Greens), Sergio Rios (Orgone), Joey Crispiano (Dap Kings) and Jay Mumford (aka J-Zone) all contribute to the overall sound of “A Lover Was Born”.

Dramatic influences like Isaac Hayes (check out the piano on “Be Your Own Shelter”) and Jerry Ragovoy are chopped and folded into Northern Soul uptempo numbers to create stompers like “Get a Hold of Yourself” or “Chosen Few”. Finnigan’s take on Deep Soul is captured brilliantly on “Walk Away from Me” and “Love (Your Pain Goes Deep)”, while Boom Bap pervades on hard hitters “His Love Ain’t Real” & “Cold World”. Slower songs such as “Let Me Count the Reasons”, the emotional “All That’s Left”, and the soul-stirring album closer “Count Me Out” show the honest and tender side that has become Finnigan’s calling card. All the while, the voice is raw and earthy — in the best tradition of R&B shouters like Otis Redding, Lee Moses, and David Ruffin.

The songs on “A Lover Was Born” reconfigure the spliced and sampled DNA of hip hop (extracted by crate diggers like Dilla and RZA) to create something new, underscoring both the spectrum and depth of soul while making a case to the timelessness of Finnigan’s sound. 

After three decades of being bent and beaten with divine art rock hammers, Kim Deal’s delightfully fragile songwriting deserved some pampering. Long-gestating and coloured lyrically darker by the deaths of her parents during its making, Deal’s first proper solo album finds her wrapped in ballroom strings, slick brass and soft-focus textures. “Let me go where there’s no memory of you, where everything is new,” Deal sings over lustrous blue bayou guitars on “Are You Mine?”, one of music’s most poignant depictions of Alzheimer’s. This is no flapping palm frond of a record, however.

Plenty of room is found for the former Pixie and Breeder’s trademark grunge pop, alongside forays into electro rock, slowcore, crank ambience and, on “Big Ben Beat”, the invention of shoe metal. The collection of 11 songs is the Dayton, Ohio resident’s first full-length album under her own name.

“Nobody Loves You More” is Kim Deal’s album although it’s not the first time she has gone solo – she self-released a five-part, ten-song seven-inch vinyl series in 2013. In keeping with Deal’s meticulous approach to her art, the album was refined over several years. Its oldest songs, ‘Are You Mine?’ and ‘Wish I Was’, were written and originally recorded in 2011 shortly after Deal came off the Pixies’ “Lost Cities Tour” and relocated to Los Angeles (early versions of those songs were included in said vinyl series); the last recording for “Nobody Loves You More” took place in November 2022 with legendary engineer and close friend Steve Albini, who helmed final track ‘A Good Time Pushed’ at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.

Along the way she has brought in a variety of collaborators from Breeders past and present (Mando Lopez, twin sister Kelley Deal, Jim Macpherson, Britt Walford), to Raymond McGinley (Teenage Fanclub), Jack Lawrence (Raconteurs) and Savages’ Fay Milton and Ayse Hassan. “Nobody Loves You More” was mixed by Marta Salogni and mastered by Heba Kadry.

Every song has a story behind it, from the winter vacations with her parents in Florida Keys (‘Summerland’), wedding band covers of ‘Margaritaville’ (‘Coast’) to her mother’s dementia (‘Are You Mine?’). All in all, the record is a celebration of Deal’s unmatched artistry, nodding not only to her career highlights with celebrated bands across the alternative landscape (Pixies, The Amps, The Breeders), but also to her immovable cultural weight influencing musicians like Kurt Cobain and Olivia Rodrigo through the generations. 

We’ve been obsessed with the title track for a long time and were overjoyed when the album came out. It dances the line between being playful, bubbly and laugh out loud funny without venturing in to being cringey or silly. Perfect feet tapping music without being afraid of a sudden left turn in to being different and weird. 

Out now on Radicalis, Anna Erhard’s new album, her third, marks another massive creative step in the career of a singular artist. On “Botanical Garden” Anna is celebrating this super smart release with an extensive European tour.

Anna has come a long way since leaving the chamber-folk-pop trio Serafyn in the late 2010s. Always a fan of the British sense of humour embodied by Fawlty Towers, as well as the laconic lyrics of the Roches or Jonathan Richman, she has now clearly found her voice. “Botanical Garden” is a lot less scattershot than what’s gone before focusing with scalpel-sharp precision on the satirical dissection of modern-day hipster mores, accompanied by subversively subtle indie guitars. Her devilish analysis of her conflict of emotions about an opportunistic pal joining the Blue Man Group is very enjoyable. “Botanical Garden” was produced by Pola Roy and recorded with a bunch of musicians from Anna’s circle of Berlin friends.

“Botanical Garden” from Anna Erhard · Pola Roy · released under exclusive license to Radicalis Music GmbH Released on: 2024-03-29