The Fat Angel Sings

Do you still believe it?” John Ross asks that question after journeying through the wreckage, after singing of thunder rolling down the track and lighting in a bottle. These are tropes, and he knows it. It’s a moment where he’s returning to the ancient wisdom of his classic rock forebears, trying to find the answers all over again. This is the ground Ross travels in “The Fences Of Stonehenge,” the lead single, opening track, and mission statement of the new Wild Pink album “Dulling The Horns“. The question reverberates across the album: “Do you still believe it?” And what happens when you don’t anymore?

Ross’ response is to start anew. From the late ‘10s through the early ‘20s, Wild Pink was on the classic ascension arc. The otherworldly synth-Americana of 2018’s “Yolk In The Fur” garnered them press buzz and accolades, while the widescreen gloss and scope of its follow up, 2021’s “A Billion Little Lights”, swung for the fences at the cusp of the band’s breakthrough. Then everything changed: Ross received a shocking cancer diagnosis. Wild Pink’s subsequent release, 2022’s “ILYSM”, was inevitably saddled with the weight of being an album about mortality and love. On the other side of it all, Ross began to reimagine what Wild Pink was.

The genesis of “Dulling The Horns” goes back to late 2022, when Ross began workshopping new material during soundcheck on the ILYSM tour. Last summer, Wild Pink decamped to western Massachusetts to reunite with engineer Justin Pizzoferrato. Ross decided to record “Dulling The Horns” live in the room, in an effort to capture Wild Pink’s onstage style — rawer, grainier. Gone are the glimmering atmospherics and studio affectations of recent Wild Pink outings. Instead, Ross’ voice is haggard against the humid distortion coating every song. “I didn’t want to clean up anymore,” he says. “In doing so we’ve arrived at a new place.”

After the “digital lacquer” of “A Billion Little Lights”, Ross had already wanted “ILYSM” to be more organic and human. But “Dulling The Horns” takes that prompt further in every way. There will still be occasional synth plinks, sax drones, pedal steel courtesy of frequent collaborator Mike “Slo Mo” Brenner, and even a bit of fiddle.

But otherwise, “Dulling The Horns” is coarse, lived-in, visceral — music intended to be played live, with pounding rhythms and guitars bleeding all over. “I wanted to make economical songs,” Ross explains. “Music that is very much at its core three or four people rocking.” If before, Wild Pink took notes from Springsteen and Petty, they’ve now entered their Crazy Horse era.

“Dulling The Horns” is the sound of Wild Pink fraying at the edges. On the other side of his cancer battle and having to retell the story through an album cycle, he found himself exhausted — desperate for a new spark, a new story. “You zoom out, and I’m very fortunate,” he continues. “But “Dulling The Horns” came from the feeling of figuring out how do you deal with things and move forward and just keep creating.”

There’s a paradox at the core of the album: You can hear the toll the years took on Ross, but his new music sounds like a vital reclamation. Accordingly, the album’s overall mood conflicts with itself, too. Ross picked the phrase “dulling the horns” to refer to when a wild animal’s horns get worn down and thinking about the treadmill of the music industry. But now as Ross has also become a father, aging has meant wear and tear as well as those new joys.

But before you foist the parenthood album on Ross after his cancer album, “Dulling The Horns” is more a rangey, unruly eruption than the pristine epics of previous Wild Pink albums. Far from staid domestication or venturing out to pasture, Ross’s latest collection is wooly and wild with ideas. Throughout, his lyrics mirror the music in its scrappiness. Some connect, some are ellipses; some resonate poignantly and some tumble into hilarious asides. With “Dulling The Horns” as Wild Pink’s reset, it’s as if Ross is emptying all this loose, untamed energy both musically and spiritually.

That means “Eating The Egg Whole” rides a chugging road ramble of a beat while Ross muses on Michael Jordan documentaries and DC sports history, slyly connecting local vicissitudes to mortality with one raspy “Nothing lasts forever!” “Sprinter Brain” takes its name for a band in-joke — about one particularly stressful sprinter van tour that plagued Ross — but cloaks one of the album’s most touching stories as Ross juxtaposes his anxiety against his wife’s solidarity. Tiny moments of personal revelation sit right alongside a mesmerizing mess of disparate asides and themes. Take “Catholic Dracula,” a song in which Ross sings about how Dracula was, in fact, once a Catholic, before asking: “And I wonder what he thought about/ All that imagery of suffering/ The execution on the giant wooden pole/ And how it must have inspired his later work.”

The songs work almost as collage vignettes, Ross rattling himself out of ennui with loud, emphatic music chasing whichever thread his frazzled mind thought might lead somewhere surprising.

But in the end, he finds his way back to something like home. “Dulling The Horns’ was almost named for its closer, “Rung Cold,” the first song Ross began working on for the album. Instead, it becomes the final word, one last avalanche of modern day overstimulation and overdosing on cappuccins and Czech news on a TV in a bank before, finally, Ross concludes: “And if you can’t get along with it/ You gotta just get on with it.” Perhaps it’s a fittingly world-weary sentiment, an unsteady resolution for the ineffable “it” Ross was still trying to believe in at the beginning of the album. On “Dulling The Horns“, you can hear him rediscovering the fire in real time. Tropes discarded along the roadside, songs pulled from the formative DNA of rock music, all filtered through years of messy fog. “There is no answer to these problems,” Ross says, having eventually yielded. But as far “Dulling The Horns” is concerned, there’s at least one path forward: Burn it all away, and keep moving. 

released October 4th, 2024

Fifty years ago, Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey birthed a blistering punk missive called ‘(I’m) Stranded’.

On a late train to his parents’ house in the Brisbane suburbs, Kuepper developed the melody and the first verse of what would become The Saints‘ debut single, before passing it on to band mate Bailey to finish off. The Saints, comprised of Kuepper, Bailey, drummer Ivor Hay and Kym Bradshaw on bass, independently pressed and distributed just 500 copies, the single pre-dating the first releases by the likes of The Damned, The Sex Pistols and The Clash.

Their debut album, recorded in December 1976, was essentially the band’s live set comprised of songs like ‘Nights in Venice’ and ‘Messin’ with the Kid’, which they’d developed over the handful of gigs they’d played at that point.

The Saints had their fans, but also met with plenty of resistance. “We were hillbillies from Brisbane,” Bailey explained to the ABC’s Long Way to the Top series. “Apart from the Bee Gees, nothing had ever come out of here, and they were foreign as well. Anyway, we’d been given a record contract from overseas, and at that particular point in time, with cultural cringe, Australian acts just didn’t make it overseas. So that was like a double whammy. And quite frankly, most people at the time thought we were crap.

The band’s relocation to London in 1977 proved equally challenging. They refused to ingratiate themselves to the English press, nor align themselves with the stylised imagery or fashion of punk staying true to their DIY ethos and the rigorous strains of social alienation that permeate the debut record, “(I’m) Stranded”.

It seems decidedly ‘unpunk’ to romanticise the story but, half a century on from its genesis, our understanding of its impact on Australian music and its role in the explosion of punk, rock and grunge around the world only continues to grow.

The Australian rock legends The Saints are reuniting this November to celebrate the release of a special vinyl box set featuring their iconic 1977 debut album, “(I’m) Stranded”. Following the tragic death of former lead singer Chris Bailey in 2022, the touring line-up includes two founding members—guitarist Ed Kuepper and drummer Ivor Hay—alongside honorary Saints: Mudhoney’s Mark Arm on vocals, Sunnyboys’ Peter Oxley on bass, and former The Birthday Party/Bad Seeds guitarist Mick Harvey. Billed as ‘The Saints ‘73-’78 Tour’, the live shows will cover the sounds of their first three albums: “(I’m) Stranded (1977), Eternally Yours (1978), and Prehistoric Sounds (1978),

Upon announcing the vinyl box reissue, the process of putting it together both “thrilling and exhausting.”

The exhausting part was that—and it wasn’t like I was working on it day in and day out—it took a long time editing it. There’s a lot of stuff that we didn’t include, and yet there’s a shitload of stuff that was. It was the booklet that took the longest time, just getting things into the correct chronological order, so it’s like a photo essay of sorts. You start at one point and then move through to a number of months or years after. It all took place in a relatively short period of time, so it took some time choosing what to include and exclude.

It’s almost like doing a biography or something. Because I was involved right from ’71, going through the music was easier because we knew what had to be included. It was a bit of an effort getting all the tapes together, but we managed to get that together and get them remastered with Don Bartley. It’s the first time it’s been mastered for vinyl in 40 years, and it sounds great. I was really taken; in fact, I think it sounds better than the original release.

Following the release of Drop Nineteens’ first album in 30 years, “Hard Light”, and the re-issue of their 1992 shoegaze masterwork, “Delaware”, Wharf Cat come with the official release of Drop Nineteens’ “1991“. This LP comprises the band’s first two demo sessions which were mailed out via cassette to labels in 1991 finding their way to the UK music press and generating instant buzz and an ensuing feeding frenzy to sign the band. After signing with Caroline Records Drop Nineteens decided to write an entirely new record, “Delaware“, for their first official release, leaving the songs on “1991″ frozen in time. 

Swells of layered guitars and buried vocal harmonies adorn these tracks, displaying Drop Nineteens when the comparison to their UK contemporaries like Slowdive and Ride were apt. “1991’s” songs, recorded with a low fi charm, show an ambitious young band capable of writing songs filled with texture and hooks, on the eve of their breakthrough record.

Philadelphia psych rock mainstays Bardo Pond have a storage room of unreleased jams that’s seemingly without end, as evidenced by the steady drip of archival releases the band has shared between albums of newer material. “Melt Away” is another collection of lesser-heard excursions into fuzz, repetition, and delay from the Bardo crew, this time a highlight reel of outtakes and rarities from their late-’90s run, including tracks from the same time as the comfortable, home-recorded sessions that produced the band’s 1999 effort “Set and Setting”.

That comfortable, familiar warmth is present on the wooly grooves of “Shadow Puppet,” a song that sounds like Opal’s happy nightmares being covered by Royal Trux on a heavy metal downer. The band wander through a spacier version of their signature feedback freakout on the cosmic roots rock of “Olive Skin” and “Tapir Dub” blurs together stony percussion with blurts of guitar noise and vocals that leak out in a Thom Yorke mumble.

The ten tracks here feel a lot more like a fully conceived album than a cobbled-together collection of filler, and there’s not a miss among them. Tracks like “The Trail” exemplify just how locked in Bardo Pond was at this point in their creative arc, with the band zoning out on a sinister riff that would turn into boring redundancy or bad grunge in the hands of a lesser band. The collection ends with “Highlands,” a gentle but still uneasy track of pastoral fuzz that showcases the band’s Neil Young influence and sets the entire album down in a way that fits the restlessness of the songs that came before it. Bardo Pond has more supplementary albums than even the busiest of their psychedelic peers, but “Melt Away” is one that stands out, and will be essential for anyone who already counts themselves as a fan.

‘Satanic Slumber Party’ is a collaboration between Australian psych rockers King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard and fellow Australian experimental rock band Tropical Fuck Storm. This nineteen minute epic throws up heavy psych rock, noise rock, lots weird noises and the sound of two unshackled bands enjoying themselves. 

Joyful Noise is not your standard record label… We are artistic facilitators for a wide variety of adventurous musicians. We aren’t focused on any particular genre, nor are we particularly focused on popularity. We value art over commerce, and we exist to empower our artists to create the most meaningful work possible.

You demanded, you pleaded, and you also asked very nicely…and the wait is now over. Tropical Fuck Storm and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s raucous EP “Satanic Slumber Party” is being pressed on wax! Pumped full of booze and adrenaline, two of psych-rock’s most powerful joined forces for a 20-minute “Hatjam” chockfull of sax skronks, brick-heavy distortion, and punchy riffs. To the surprise of no one, TFS members Gareth Liddiard, Fiona Kitschin Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel bring their wild, destructive chaos to the  table for…for this unstoppable partnership. 

“Satanic Slumber Party” is out now digitally, so crank those speakers to 11 and bask in the sonic debauchery while you anxiously await your record..

Tropical Fuck Storm and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard with their collaborative EP “Satanic Slumber Party” out on Joyful Noise Recordings.

A stand-alone single that acts as a spiritual companion to Wand’s sixth studio album “Vertigo” that was released in 2024. ‘Help Desk’ and ‘Goldfish’ are both extensions of the dark, lavishly orchestrated vision that the American neo-psychedelic rock act laid out in that album (itself a bit of a departure from their earlier work). Beat Detectives, Dead Rider and Dean Spunt provide remixes.

“Goldfish” is a track by Wand from their release, ‘Help Desk/Goldfish’ EP out on October 25, 2024,

Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace has shared her first single with her The Mississippi Medicals band. “Back in 2021, I sat down in my office to do some songwriting,” she says. “Not knowing what specifically to write about that day, I challenged myself to write a song similar to whatever the current #1 hit in the world was at the time. I made the challenge to myself without knowing exactly what that song was so I had to look it up, and as it turned out at that moment, the current #1 song in the world was ‘Butter’ by BTS. Now, for those of you not familiar with the song ‘Butter’, it’s about how the singer is ‘smooth like butter’.’Hmmm…’ I thought to myself. ‘If they’re smooth like Butter, what am I?’ And the answer to that question is ‘All Fucked Out’ — not to be confused with ‘All Fucked Up’, mind you.

‘All Fucked Out’ as in zero fucks left to give. The song quickly became a staple in my live set and I’ve taken a couple different previous attempts at recording it, but it wasn’t until Me, Matt [Patton], Mikey [Erg] and Paris [Campbell Grace] got together this past December in Water Valley, Mississippi at Matt’s Studio, Dial Back Sound, that it all came together and the song was recorded the way it was meant to be heard.”

Toronto-born, London-based Tess Parks returns with her third solo album, “Pomegranate”. Released on Fuzz Club Records, Pomegranate is the most widescreen offering from Parks to date, featuring strings, flutes, and synthesizers. First single ‘Koalas’ is a lush slice of swaggering indie-psych that brings to mind The Brian Jonestown Massacre or Beth Orton. 

An emotionally charged effort from the psychedelic vocalist, ‘Koalas’ is the latest single to be released from Parks’ upcoming record “Pomegranate“, due out later this year. By now, the compelling nature of Parks’ vocals should come as no real surprise, but this new track still manages to build excitement for the upcoming release.

A five-year gap further on from his last solo album Humanworld in 2019, former The Only Ones singer Peter Perrett presents an expansive double album in the shape of The Cleansing. Featuring his sons Peter Jr. and Jamie in his backing band, on top of guest appearances from Johnny Marr, Bobby Gillespie and Fontaines D.C. guitarist Carlos O’Connell, it’s an accomplished testament to Perrett’s status as one of the finest songwriters of his generation.

“The Cleansing” doesn’t only match Peter Perrett’s best work but expands it: an ambitious double album comprising 20 songs, with his uniquely narcotic and alluring melodies, gorgeous South London drawl and ravishing rock dynamic now allied to a wider span of musical arrangements and lyrical concerns. 

Peter Perrett – “I Wanna Go With Dignity”, from the upcoming album ‘The Cleansing’, out 1st November 2024 on Domino Record Co.