Austin psych-blues four-piece White Denim released their last album, Performance, less than a year ago, and they’re already dropping singles off their new one. ‘Shanalala’ is one of two new tracks they just debuted in the lead up to the release of their eighth album in 11 years, titled Side Effects. There are no words to express how lazy this paragraph makes me feel.
Taken from the new album ‘Side Effects’, out March 29th
Los Angeles psych-rockers Wand have announced the follow-up to their 2017 album Plum and 2018 EP Perfume. Their new album, Laughing Matter, will be released on April 19th via Drag City Records, they’ve shared the first single, “Scarecrow,” with an accompanying video directed by Gordon De Los Santos.
“Scarecrow” picks up where the understated psychedelics of Perfume left off with its rippling guitar line, downtempo rhythms, sparse piano and frontman Cory Hanson’s benevolent coo. Wand have always excelled at pretty, somber ballads, so if they decide to fill out the rest of their LP with a similarly quiet and majestic take on their transcendent sound, it should make for a soothing listen.
According to their Bandcamp page, “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.”
Listen to “Scarecrow” check out the Laughing Matter album artwork . You can preorder Laughing Matter on double LP, CD, cassette or MP3 via Drag City Records.
After releasing 2016’s critically acclaimed Apocalipstick, Cherry Glazerr spent the next 18 months touring the world on their own steam. Between DIY All Ages venues, rock clubs, large festival stages, and massive theaters with some of the world’s best and most beloved bands (The Pixies, Flaming Lips, Slowdive, and The Breeders, among others), the band has really only stopped to work on their follow up, “Stuffed & Ready”. While furiously building the band’s sound and ideas, front person Clem Creevy enlisted Carlos de La Garza to be the band’s studio co-collaborator as they evolved the songs and refined the recordings.
“Wasted Nun” from ‘Stuffed & Ready’ by Cherry Glazerr out February 1st, 2019 on Secretly Canadian
David Loca, also known as David Speck, has been making ’80s-indebted weird-pop under the name Part Time for a long while now. (We named the project a Band To Watch way back in 2011.) And now he’s teamed up with fellow ’80s weird-pop auteur Ariel Pink for new song “I Can Treat You Better,” the lead single from his forthcoming full-length Spell #6. The album finds Loca nudging his murky lo-fi songcraft into the light — he rerecorded the LP in his drummer’s studio, as opposed to keeping things in his bedroom — and “I Can Treat You Better” is a synth-flecked soft-rock jam with a killer sax solo.
Spell #6 is out 11/2 via Burger/Tough Love Records.
“I Can Treat You Better ft. Ariel Pink” Spell #6 Burger / Tough Love Records (2018)
In the first 15 seconds of his new video, Bob Mould tells the world: “Dictators, terrorists and tech companies have created an apocalyptic surveillance state. The Western world has fallen into a deep state of paranoia and disinformation.”
The video for Bob Mould’s new song, “Lost Faith” cuts to a scene of our protagonist, living in Germany, being interviewed by the media. From Mould’s paranoid point of view, all he can see are drones following him. And when the reporter asks, “What are you running from?” the music kicks in and Mould sings: “I’ve lost faith in everything / Everything, everything.” This could simply be the perfect song for our times, but what Mould does in “Lost Faith” (and elsewhere on his forthcoming album Sunshine Rock) is take the negativity and fear and locate the positive. “I know we all lose faith from time to time,” he sings. “You better find your way back home.”
New album ‘Sunshine Rock’ out Feb 8th, 2019!
Bob Mould is a legend, and his band Hüsker Dü informed a huge swath of music in the ’90s. These days, he is, in fact, living in Germany; it’s been a few years and he says he’s newly inspired. The new album is full of themes of sunshine instead of “black sheets of rain.”
Writing via email, Mould says of “Lost Faith” that “there’s a hint of migration, a dash of border security and a whisper of government surveillance, climaxing across the multicolored canvas of an abandoned NSA listening station perched atop the highest hill in Berlin. But at the end of the day, it’s a high-end music video for a catchy, inspirational, uplifting pop song.”
From the album Sunshine Rock, out February 8th, 2019 on Merge Records.
Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberstunveiled their video for “Dylan Thomas,” the lead single off Better Oblivion Community Center’s self-titled debut, surprise-released last week and set for a physical release on February. 22nd via Dead Oceans.
Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst come from the same musical orbit. One could even argue, the two songwriters—age 24 and 38 respectively—are like long-lost musical siblings. Though at vastly different points in their careers, both musicians know how to crush and revive listeners with inspired woe, romantic poignancy and their instantly recognizable, consoling pipes. The stars aligned just in time for Bridgers and Oberst to write, record and surprise-drop a haunting new album together for a brand new project: Better Oblivion Community Center—which really is their band name and not actually the name of a utopian old folks home. Better Oblivion Community Center is an unsurprisingly tender, affecting excursion. Its largely upbeat instrumentation ebbs and flows with understated folky strums and scintillating keyboards, and the occasional ray of buoyant rock ’n’ roll peeks out just when you need some lighthearted relief from their lyrics. Though many male-female vocal duos lean heavily on duets, this pair elected to skirt that norm by singing mostly in unison and in harmony rather than engaging in the sometimes cheesy call and response.
The Michelle Zauner-directed video finds Bridgers and Oberst showing up to a gig at a swanky establishment—the Better Oblivion Community Center itself—only to find they’ve been booked to perform at what looks like a very genial cult meet-up taking place inside David Lynch’s brain. The musicians and their cultist audience wear blindfolds and VR goggles interchangeably, playing eyeball bingo and doing trust falls, until Bridgers and Oberst come face-to-face with the smirking observer who would appear to be the author of all this oddity. The video ends with the duo doing the only reasonable thing: fleeing the Better Oblivion Community Center .
Much of the record could still loosely fall into the folk camp, but there are moments that you wouldn’t expect from Oberst and Bridgers. The throbbing electro keyboards of “Exception to the Rule,” the fuzzy rock surge at the end of “Big Black Heart” and the psychedelic guitar swells on “My City” all represent a venture into new frontiers
Better Oblivion Community Center is pleased to share with you a commercial for our cherished center directed by ranking Community Center member Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast.
As promised, in the coming months Better Oblivion Community Center will hold meetings across the US and Europe. We welcome you to experience a healing sound bath – live in concert.
This is three minutes and thirty seconds of bombastic youth, all ramshackle and rambunctious, full of sweaty anxiety and shouted brashness, and I love it more than I should. Also: we should all admire the way lead singer Stefan Babcock pulls off his wordy, Craig Finn-like disregard of the rhythm/time signature. Also: more songs with words like ‘calamity’ in them please. Also: I am a sucker for hook-laden melodic punk that reminds me of when I was much younger/not so, so, so old.
“Kids,” the lead single from the Canadian punk outfit’s forthcoming album Morbid Stuff, careens in the background with their usual furious energy as PUP find themselves in Toronto in the year 2059. They’re not exactly where you’d expect. Bassist Nestor Chumak is dealing with a resentful daughter, Zack Mykula plays drums on the street for apathetic passersby, guitarist Steve Sladkowski clings onto his youth with an ageless head device and as for vocalist Stefan Babcock—well, you’ll have to watch to find out what happens to him.
We are so so stoked to let you know that our third album, MORBID STUFF, will be out on April 5th! We worked so hard on this thing and cannot wait to share it with ya!!! If you ordered our latest zine, you’ve probably already heard our new song “Kids”. New album ‘Morbid Stuff’ out April 5th
There’s something simultaneously wonderful and woeful about being able to meet up with friends for a fleeting moment. Despite enjoying your time together, you know it won’t last long and something’s changed about them that you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s a bittersweet feeling that increases as adulthood marches on, and gets thrown into high gear if you’re a touring musician spending most of your time on the road. Australian singer/songwriter Stella Donnelly explores the consequences of a transitory life on her newly released single “Lunch,” from her debut album “Beware of the Dogs”. Her voice rises up high and clear, like an Australian version of CHVRCHES’ Lauren Mayberry, as she sings, “You’ve got plots and persuasions and time to explain / But I’ve only got time for lunch / And I get homesick before I go away.”
This is taken from Stella Donnelly’s debut album, Beware Of The Dogs, due out 8th March. “This is my favourite song on the record,” she says. “I wrote this about the feeling of displacement I get when I go on tour and come back and nothing feels the same. There’s a disconnect there.”
“Lunch” by Stella Donnelly off ‘Beware of the Dogs,’ out March 8th on Secretly Canadian
Today, Joe Jackson reveals the second song from his upcoming studio album “Fool”. Undoubtedly musical, touchingly beautiful and lyrically powerful, “Strange Land” explores a sense of place in today’s world.
“I never have an overall theme in mind when I start trying to write songs for an album, but sometimes one will develop. In this case it’s Comedy and Tragedy, and the way they’re intertwined in all our lives. The songs are about fear and anger and alienation and loss, but also about the things that still make life worth living: friendship, laughter, and music, or art, itself. I couldn’t have done this in 1979. I just hadn’t lived enough.
The title track Fool is about my favorite super-hero: the one whose special power is to make us laugh. He is immortal and invulnerable – you can’t kill humor. And like Shakespeare’s Fools, he is really no fool at all. I think it’s the title track because in this battle of Comedy and Tragedy, he’s the good guy, the one I’m rooting for.”
– Joe Jackson
“Long live the jester!” Joe Jackson crows in “Fool,” the title track for his 20th album. Written as Jackson heads into his fourth decade as a career musician, his tongue is as acidic as it ever was, and it’s hard to tell where the comedy ends and the tragedy begins. “Fool” cribs, appropriately, from Twelfth Night’s “The Wind and The Rain,” but adds a sitar and a punk rock snarl, partially howled through a megaphone like a tea-sipping Tom Waits. It’s a telling homage to snarkier catalogue entries like I’m the Man and Look Sharp, but it’s also the most energetic song on the album. It shouldn’t work—is that a tango I hear?—but Jackson has the marvelous ability to fuse genres without ever resorting to the cliched.
Similarly, “Fabulously Absolute” has the same discordant punk posturing, more John Lydon than the “Steppin’ Out” songwriter we may recall, but the chorus brings that lovely piano back to the forefront, at least for a moment. The clever rage that put him alongside contemporaries like Elvis Costello and Graham Parker has not mellowed with age, but has sharpened to a dagger-like point, a single bullet directly aimed.
It’s easy to fall instantly in love with Jackson’s earlier work, like Night & Day or Body & Soul but Fool is a bit of a commitment. You have to make a dedicated effort to give it a couple of listens; no song immediately jumps out. But like a delicious meal, it’s worth chewing over slowly, savoring what each song brings to the palate, and each listen brings out something new.
“Fool”, the 20th studio album celebrating the artist’s 40th anniversary, is going to be released (incl. 2 previously unreleased songs) on January 18th, 2019 on earMUSIC. The album was co-produced by Jackson and producer Pat Dillett (David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens, Glen Hansard, etc.) The band in question was the same group that Jackson has played live with ever since the release of “Fast Forward”: Teddy Kumpel on guitar, Doug Yowell on drums, and long-time collaborator Graham Maby on bass (Maby was on that first recording session 40 years ago as well). Starting February 2019, Jackson and the band will embark on a new world tour, playing shows throughout the US and Europe and performing material drawn off five albums (“Look Sharp (1979)”, “Night And Day (1982)”, “Laughter And Lust (1991)”, “Rain (2008)” and “Fool (2019)”) as well as a couple of songs from other albums and some new covers.
April 18th / O2 Birmingham Institute / Birmingham, UK
We’re releasing a brand new song today to celebrate the announcement of a brand new record called “Me You They We”, out on April 5th! This album is the culmination of an 18 month process of releasing singles as we’ve written them. Please enjoy “Just My Luck”.
It’s the band’s fourth studio album since debut Alright You Restless in 2011, which was followed by Divisionary in 2014 and Something to Ruin in 2016. As with the last two albums, Me You They We is on Partisan Records.
A “statement of purpose” from the band, Me You They We promises to pull no punches and not shy away from confronting our modern state of ennui. The album was recorded largely at Oberdorfer’s home studio, with occasional guest vocals and appearances, including from the band’s newest member, Lizzy Rose Allen. Perry and Oberdorfer describe their latest effort as one benefiting from slow, methodical work and “complete control over the sessions,” free from the chaos of the street. In the end, they hope the album sparks a sense of resilience and hope.
“We just want to make good music,” Oberdorfer says. “And we want to be real with other people who want to be real. We want to challenge ourselves and our friends to break down barriers as much as we can to lead each other back to sanity.”
To that end, we present “Just My Luck,” is a bouncy but slightly macabre sounding track that fills the room with nuanced, ethereal harmonies, spacey keys and the tiniest bit of irresistible xylophone. Perry’s delicate vocal is front and center, but it gets some key support from his compatriots as the song swells to its big conclusion, where crashing cymbals put an exclamation point on the proceedings. Oberdorfer notes that the song proved to be something of a bear in the studio, being “discarded and reinvented” 14 times before the final version came together.
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