American Football have shared a new video today for
The third self-titled record “LP3” from American Football might not have the famous Urbana, Ill., house on the cover, but it’s still got all the ingredients that make the post-rock quartet click. Spiraling guitars and math-rock-adjacent time signatures abound here to be sure, but there’s also a new collaborative spirit to be found on the band’s third record, with vocal features from Elizabeth Powell, Rachel Goswell of Slowdive and Hayley Williams of Paramore.
“Uncomfortably Numb,” featuring Hayley Williams, is taken from American Football’s third self-titled album, out March 22nd, 2019.
They’ve also added a new run of US dates to their touring schedule. The band will be returning to the UK for headline dates .
Los Angeles via upstate New York songwriter and guitarist Meg Duffy has been involved in many great indie rock records of the past decade. She has recorded guitar and slide guitar on The War On Drugs’ A Deeper Understanding, William Tyler’s Goes West, Weyes Blood’s Front Row Seat to Earth, and their former touring mate Kevin Morby’s City Music. But with Duffy’s solo vessel Hand Habits, the virtuosic guitarist steps away from the sidelines for their best work yet. On the just-released Placeholder, Duffy’s second album under the moniker, the patiently composed songs are filled with sharp emotional acuity, like on the title track, which looks back on a dissolved relationship, or the intimate and vulnerable
Hand Habits is Meg Duffy’s solo project assisted by a “continuous amoeba” of friends when performing live. She has spent the last few years touring in both Mega Bog and The Kevin Morby Band, and created Hand Habits as an outlet for her own interests and self-exploration. The result is a collection of droney tunes that languidly lumber to their conclusion with Meg’s soft, reassuring voice and sparse, echoing instrumental work.
Band Members
Keven Lareau – Bass
John Andrews – Drums and Backup Vocals
Meg Duffy – Guitar and Vocals
Session Tracklist
1. Flower Glass
2. The Book On How To Change
3. Actress
4. All The While
Veteran producer and engineer Sarah Tudzin has worked on albums for major players like Slowdive, Amen Dunes and Macklemore (oh, and the Hamilton soundtrack, ). This year, however, she has made an excellent album of her own, with some help from “a rotating selection of her bffs,” per the Illuminati Hotties Facebook page. The band’s debut, Kiss Yr Frenemies, is a really fun and smart indie-rock album among one of the year’s best, for that matter. Tudzin is bone dry in delivering her lyrics, which pair the everyday with the profound in a startling, hilarious fashion. On “(You’re Better) Than Ever,” something as mundane as a pair of socks triggers a nugget of wisdom: “All my favorite socks are getting holes in them / All my favorite people got a load on them.” In other words, handle the things (and people) you love with care. The world is rough on them
Illuminati Hotties – (You’re Better) Than Ever Recorded Live – Daytrotter Studios
It’s an anomaly to make a record created out of the pleasure and desire of simply making music together. A record with no commercial aspirational location. The new duo record from John Truscinski (drums, synths) and Steve Gunn (guitars), “Bay Head”, makes it look easy, carving out a space where none existed before with assurance, resonating beautiful along the way.
If I were forced to put what John and Steve play into a genre I would simply call it “music.” There’s a quality of timelessness to it without being nostalgic that is impossible to manufacture. It comes from their years of playing together based on a formula of chemistry. Bands are fragile ecosystems. The best ones have a melding that results in a musicality that otherwise can’t be found in a melody or lyric, or an effect pedal. While “Bay Head” is the third record the duo has recorded together, John has played drums and helped shape the songs and the sound on all Steve’s more song-configured albums. Their bond is tight, unique, and effective.
As an instrumental record “Bay Head” has no literal voice. It doesn’t need it, as the constant flow between the drums and guitar describe fully and without a narrator. Steve’s guitar leads you along a contemplative path that describes an inner monologue that is more expressive than if there were words. Some of the guitar parts are worked out and then set free, improvised in the playing. But it’s hard to tell. It all sounds deliberate. “Bay Head” is the accumulation of the duo’s years of playing music together where each can guess where the other is going to go next. The cover collage by their longtime friend Bill Nace reflects what is both abstract and figurative about this unique musical collaboration.
Flightless heroes The Murlocs are extremely excited to announce their fourth album ‘Manic Candid Episode’ is out today! It’s been a long time between drinks but Uncle Murl is at the peak of his powers from travelling his deliciously dangerous, distorted and dynamic RnB to packed houses around the world.
Five skinny kids with roots firmly placed in their own blown-out, distorted brand of soulful RnB.
Formed in early 2011 by harp player Ambrose Kenny-Smith, The Murlocs have already played alongside Thee Oh Sees, Graveyard Train and Dave Graney.
Their up-tempo snare cracks and noisy doom guitar – accompanied by Ambrose’s vocal screech – has been described as a mesmerising demented dance party.
To celebrate the release the band have announced a Massive five state, six date Australian tour taking them to Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
The Rolling Stones will release a new best-of compilation LP, Honk, on April 19th via Polydor/Interscope. The career-spanning project is available as a single-CD and 2-LP edition featuring 20 songs, along with a deluxe 3-CD/4-LP set with 46 cuts.
Both versions boast eight top 10 singles (“Brown Sugar,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Angie,” “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It),” “Fool to Cry,” “Miss You,” “Emotional Rescue” and “Start Me Up”), along with classic album cuts (1971’s “Bitch,” 1973’s “Dancing WithMr. D”) and material from the band’s most recent studio record, 2016’s Blue & Lonesome. The deluxe package includes a full disc of 10 live tracks recorded during the band’s recent stadium tours — several guests appear, including Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl (on “Bitch”), Ed Sheeran (“Beast of Burden”), Brad Paisley (“Dead Flowers”) and Florence and the Machine’s Florence Welch (“Wild Horses”).
The Florence Welch-featured “Wild Horses,” which also appears on the single-CD version, is available with pre-orders of the album. They will also release two digital editions of the compilation in North America: the deluxe set at all streaming and download services, and the 20-track set at download services only.
The Seduction of Kansas references some beloved American icons, like Superman and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, as well as some truly reprehensible characters. Priests’ highly danceable post-punk has satirized product placement, criticized virulent consumerism, denounced institutional abuses of power, and probed generational apathy. And on the title track from their forthcoming second album, The Seduction of Kansas, the Washington, D.C. band conjures a grim version of America.
Greer, alongside drummer Daniele Daniele and guitarist G.L. Jaguar, looks a little out of place among advertisements for a goblet of amber nectar called the Mucho LIT.
The record takes its title from What’s the Matter With Kansas?, a 2004 book by the political analyst Thomas Frank that explains the state’s shift from its liberal origins to rigid conservatism as a reflection of greater American ideological shifts. The characters that populate the record’s flyover sprawl boast vast superiority complexes and vices, from a man who believes that being the Savior’s son gives him license to destroy the world, to self-absorbed screen addicts, to the notoriously corrupt former Texas congressman Charlie Wilson.
“I don’t ever want it to seem that we’re writing about questionable people with this sort of both-sides-ism, or humanizing the bad guy,” Greer explains. “But we are trying to flesh out what is often a very black-and-white picture, and explore the trajectory of how a person becomes this thing that we all view as so awful. It’s not meant to excuse the things a person is doing, it’s meant to illuminate it.”
Two years ago, Priests broke through with Nothing Feels Natural, a full-length debut that cast a critical gaze upon modern society at an especially pivotal moment in American history. The record’s release coincided with Donald Trump’s inauguration, and suddenly, lyrics about “a puppet show in which you’re made to feel like you participate” felt all the more urgent. Though the album blended the band’s typically restless rock barrages with traces of jazz, surf, and country, most appraisals of Nothing Feels Natural deemed Priests a “political punk band,” a label they have long resented.
from the album The Seduction of Kansas, out April 5th 2019 on Sister Polygon Records
This month marks Cave’s triumphant return to Europe for a bonafide tour – including a single date in the Cave-thirsty UK, with a huge run through Spain, naturally! To celebrate, their first full-length Cave album, Psychic Psummer, is back in print after years out of it. Questing listeners can once again drop the needle on the launch-pad moment where Cave came into their own, evolving into a collective capable of full-length mastery. Their expertise in collating trippy dance jams of all colors started here, leading to further evolutions and triumphs on their subsequent releases Neverendless, Threace and last year’s incredibly fresh and fearsome jammer, Allways.
Psychic Psummer was made not long after Cave had migrated to Chicago from Columbia MO, and it reflects the hectic loft-style of the their punk/DIY/house show days. Ten years on, these are radical early soundings of their trademark studio style, with relentless tempo-keeping, drone-fascination, keys and neat-cut arrangement/production, alongside guitars and bass often in overdrive plus dubby, aggro’d-out chanting in and out of the mix. Fusing their fascinations with soaring energy, Cave covered lots of ground while making an oddly timeless album. Hopefully this PsychicPsummer’s the endless one
First full length album released by American Space/Psychedelic Rock band Cave.
Tracklist : 1. Gamm 00:00 2. Made In Malaysia 06:23 3. Encino Men 10:00 4. High, I Am 18:04 5. Requiem For John Sex 22:40 6. Machines & Muscles 29:16
Wand’s last two releases, 2017’s Plum and 2018’s Perfume EP, meshed Cory Hanson’s touching, beautiful melodies with ramping psych riffs. The Drag City Records psych-leaning five-piece is set to release their latest full-length, Laughing Matter, on April 19th and they made an appearance at Hotel Vegas for the Levitation showcase. Playing lots of new material, Hanson and co. brought zigzagging guitar jams (sometimes with a violin bow in hand) and melodies with an alluring, warm purity. Hanson’s delicate psych croon and wintery backing vocals from keyboardist Sofia Arreguin sounded sublime when paired together, and the Los Angeles-based Wand proved to be a charming, soothing oasis from much of the freakier psych rock acts on the bill.
Laughing Matter offers bits of fuzzy parable, travel diary, pep talk and lullaby, amid a joyous, eclectic sense of pastiche and ascendant choruses. Wand form new music from the ashes of a world that can no longer suffer its human abusers, to inspire us to hold the spirit close and do what’s next.
For a sample of these new reaches in the Wand-iverse, look no further than the track “Walkie Talkie”, the third pre-release single and latest video from Laughing Matter! Lookin’ like it might’ve beamed in directly from sideways post-punk pastward futures, “Walkie Talkie” shines brightly with the reflective sheen of Wand’s modern flicker. Muted neon colors swallow seething imagery as Lee Landey and Evan Burrows‘ emphatic rhythm section slams into Cory Hanson and Robbie Cody‘s screaming guitars, whilst Sofia Arrequin‘s warped Morse keyboards sew the song together at the edges. “Walkie Talkie” is a wheelhouse Wand jammer, a barely-contained swarm of alien and uncanny tones driven to the maximal edge.
Track from the Wand album “Laughing Matter,” available on 2xLP/CS/CD from Drag City on April 19th, 2019.
Auckland psych-rock behemoth Ounce have unleashed their hugely anticipated debut album OZ, following hot on the heels of a mind-altering run of singles and senses-defying live shows. The incendiary six-piece’s ten track collection, released today via local independent mavericks 1:12 Records, features previously released favourites ‘Electric Eye’, ‘Satan II’ and ‘Crocodile’ alongside a fistful of fresh tracks, drawing upon a diverse sonic melting pot of influences including propulsive ‘kraut rock’ grooves, surf guitar and 50’s exotica percussive workouts. You can experience Ounce’s blazed double drum attack for yourself on their national album release.
All words and music by Ounce except for Interstellar Overdrive riff by Pink Floyd in “Desert”. Recorded and mixed by Callum Rooney. Mastered by Patrick Haight. Art and design by Callum Rooney.
The Band
Antony Pike – Drums and percussion, some keys and backing vocals
Kieran Ruffles – Drums and percusion
Callum Rooney – Baritone guitar, vocals, keys
Yves Yang – Bass guitar
Fi Browne – Hand percussion
