Hailing from Cincinnati in the heart of the mid-west, The Ophelias are a collision of musical backgrounds, incorporating everything from garage-rock to opera. What brought them together was a desire to not be the token girl in, “dude-bands”. The resultant album, Almost, is a celebration of not being sidelined, of embracing the limelight and revelling in a freedom from censorship.
Ahead of dates with WHY? and the brilliant Lala Lala, The Ophelia’s have this week shared a brand new video to one of their album’s finest moments, Moon Like Sour Candy. The track is one of the more laid back offerings on the record; muted guitar strums give-way to pulsing synth bass, rich violins and twinkling electronics, all added to the melancholy vocal delivery. There’s a touch of the bedroom pop of Frankie Cosmos or early Waxahatchee. Proof, were it needed, that you don’t need to make a racket to have a huge impact, Moon Like Sour Candy is an understated triumph.
“DTMFA” was the last song I wrote and recorded for the Sad13 album, but something about it felt yacht rock i.e. better suited for Speedy Ortiz. So with some synth leads swapped for guitar lines, it was one of the first we worked on as a band for Twerp Verse, and a live staple in 2016. The Poet’s Seat is an observation tower in Western Mass, which I was visiting around the time I wrote this. I was also carrying around a tincture that was supposed to help me commune with ghosts. Basically, looking for guidance any place I could find it, because I really needed to DTMFA, the motherfucker being all my stupid baggage. We’re happy it has a home with the Adult Swim Singles Series alongside our 2014 entry “Bigger Party,” one of the earliest Speedy demos I made which was quite literally about a time I made out with all of the person I liked’s friends. Faux pas!!! I’m way older and wiser now and hopefully I’ve been forgiven!!! Even though I’m never that sorry.
Over the course of the past six years, Omaha, NB musician David Nance has released three full-length albums for labels Grapefruit and Ba Da Bing Records, a 7-inch, numerous cassettes, CDRs and unlicensed “cover albums”. His latest full-length is credited to the David Nance Group and features Nance alongside his recent hot-shit live band of fellow Omaha musicians. “Peaced and Slightly Pulverized’s” sounds are alternatingly tender and brusque.
The anthemic Poison with its fuzzed-out guitar riff that leans into a Crazy-Horsian guitar maelstrom and white-hot solo, to Ham Sandwich; a blisteringly frantic rant about a lunchtime torment – uncomfortable in its directness. Side one closes with the epic seven and a half minute Amethyst; an emotional odyssey with Nance and Schroeder strangling their guitars into a twin-guitar, barbed-wire duel. The album’s centerpiece is In Her Kingdom, an emotive ballad that fades into view with a plaintive guitar strum that ebbs and flows with a ris ing tide of swelling guitars, it’s riffs gilding the melody and adding flecks of gold to Nance’s tale of poverty and grace. The album closes with Prophet’s Profit’s biting commentary on false idolatry utilizing the group’s not-so-secret weaponry of Nance and Schroeder’s six-string simpatico to bring the listener home.
For an artist who’s released so much, it’s easy to forget Kiran Leonard is just still 22 year’s old. The Saddleworth-born musician already has an enviable back catalogue, with two home recorded albums and 2017’s ambitious literate concept album, Dervaun Seraun. Kiran’s latest album, Western Culture out next month, is also his first to be recorded in a professional studio, and is a record Kiran describes as, “both more accessible and more peculiar than my other records”, which Kiran Leonard fans will know makes for something really quite peculiar!
Ahead of the release, this week Kiran has shared the video to the latest single from the record, “Unreflective Life”, notable not least for what Kiran describes as, “a nice Bon Jovi solo at the end”. Lyrically as ambitious as always, Kiran suggests the track is what he sees as a total misunderstanding of how we use the internet, “the internet is not about total self-absorption, or attracting users to look in our direction,” says Kiran, “it is a complete paralysis, a disarticulation of the self which is caused by the act of looking outwards and being subsumed by the vastness of the violence we witness”. Musically, there’s a focus and a drive here, perhaps the result of recording with his live band for the first time. As always the track ebbs and flows, clattering from visceral crescendos to lush, intense periods of calm, and that guitar solo really is quite something! Kiran Leonard remains one of the most intriguing artists this planet has to offer, as challenging, rewarding and boundary pushing as ever, the constant re-invention of Kiran Leonard is a wonderful thing to behold.
Western Culture is out November 9th via Moshi Moshi Records.
The 9-track eponymous album was recorded in Anton Newcombe’s Cobra Studios in Berlin last year and was mostly co-written by the duo and, to celebrate, the duo have revealed the new video for their lead song ‘Life After Youth’.
The pair first collaborated in 2015 on the album ‘I Declare Nothing’, Park’s vocals were desribed as “unique and smoke-laden, and hypnotic” .A native of Toronto, Parks moved to London at the age of seventeen where she briefly studied photography before deciding to focus on music. Parks went on to make a lasting impression on Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records, and she became one of his first signings on 359 Music, releasing her debut record ‘Blood Hot’ in November 2013 to excellent reviews. “She’s only 24 and is already an amazing songwriter,” McGee once said. She just doesn’t quite know she is yet, her most beautiful quality is her lack of ego. Tess is an amazing lady”.
Tess said, this is my third record and second record with Anton Newcombe. We started recording this in February 2017, I ended up having to leave halfway through because my beautiful aunt Pina, my mother’s baby sister, passed away on Valentine’s day. I came home for her funeral, straight off the plane to her viewing. The funeral was the next day. I had one day at home and then I was back to Berlin, after a 22 hour day of traveling due to various stopovers, to finish recording. The preciousness of life and family and love and friendship gave me the momentum to try to put everything I could into this music. We finished the record in July 2017. I grew up making this record and I’ve grown so much as a person and as an artist after working with Anton.
I am forever grateful for him helping my little songs come alive. I have to thank Andrea Wright who engineered and co-produced this record and Ruari Meehan for writing ‘Right On’ with me, which is one of my favourite songs I’ve ever had the chance to be part of. I am currently in California driving through desert mountains and if anyone had told me when I started writing songs that I’d have had three records out by the time I was 27 and traveling around to play those songs I would have laughed and shook my head and cried.
Thank you to all of the friends and family that have carried me through, and everyone who has believed in me, even when my belief in myself has wavered. I hope you like this record and it adds something to your sweet life.
from the new self- titled album “tess parks & anton newcombe” out on October 12th 2018 on ‘a Recordings’
When the world does not look the way you want it to, you have to create your own. I’ve been dreaming of silhouettes and mystical creatures, existing in total darkness where even the smallest light can illuminate everything.
I have always loved the dark edges of this Depeche Mode song, many thanks to Anna Hafner (makeup/wardrobe), Bon Jane (film) and D. James Goodwin (Producer, The IsOkOn studio) for helping bring this to life!
Shana Falana is an experimental dream-pop band emerging from New York’s vast drone/psych scene. Combining live looping of reverb-drenched vocals and guitar with tribal drums and stunning visual projections, Shana’s live experience has often been described as transcendental. “Contrary to the light-infused title, Lightning Fire is a record of psychedelic dream pop dashed on the rocks of goth defiance” listen to her 2nd LP “Here Comes The Wave” is out on Team Love Records.
The Eclipse Sessions, John Hiatt’s newest album, offers up his strongest set of songs in years. From the breezy opener “Cry To Me,” to the stark “Nothing In My Heart” the lost-love lamentation “Aces Up Your Sleeve” to the rollicking “Poor Imitation Of God”The Eclipse Sessions proves that the singer-songwriter, now 66, is only getting better with age. There’s a grit to these songs – a craggy, perfectly-imperfect quality that colors every aspect of the performances, right down to Hiatt’s vocals, which are quite possibly his most raw and expressive to date.
Long celebrated as a skilled storyteller and keen observer of life’s twists and turns, Hiatt can get at the heart of a knotty emotion or a moment in time with just a sharp, incisive lyric or witty turn of phrase. The 11 tracks presented in The Eclipse Sessions, His guitar playing more rugged and rootsy, his words wiser and more wry.
Hiatt goes all in with The Eclipse Sessions. “They ain’t pretty, that’s for sure,” he says about the creaks and cracks that punctuate his phrases in songs like Poor Imitation Of God and One Stiff Breeze. “But I don’t mind a bit. All the catches and the glitches and the gruffness, that sounds right to me. That sounds like who I am.” The Eclipse Sessions is the sound of an artist not only living in but also capturing the moment.
Arc Iris releases Icon Of Ego, its third groundbreaking album, as a trio that packs the heft of a far bigger band with fully realized sonic and visual intensity. On this latest album, vocalist / guitarist Jocie Adams, keyboardist / sample artist Zach Tenorio-Miller and drummer Ray Belli have crafted a vividly expressionistic new album that reflects both the group’s protean talents as well as its journey of survival. After its self-named 2014 debut on the nti- label, Arc Iris achieved critical acclaim, along with tours with St. Vincent and Jeff Tweedy and festivals like Bonnaroo followed. Within two years, the band self-released Moon Saloon in the US while Bella Union released the album in Europe. Tours supporting Kimbra, Gene Ween, and a complete re-imagination of Joni
Mitchell’s Blue performed at Washington’s Kennedy Center followed, which added to a growing, international fan base that has remained dedicated throughout.Icon of Ego finds a stronger, more experienced band. Recording at Providence’s Columbus Theater, home to silent movies and vaudeville during the ’20s, the band has evolved into a concentrated pop-prog explosion, mixing styles with disparate elements that captivate and surprise. With heavy synthesizer work by Tenorio and Adams, and seemingly impossible transitions executed effortlessly by Belli, the songs here carry a thick, analog electronic sound that harks back to the ’70s. Presiding over these are Adams’ powerful vocals that house the energy under pop forms.
Featuring members of Breakfast Muff, Spinning Coin, Lush Purr and Kaputt, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Glasgow quintet, Hairband are really rather brilliant. The band are set to release their debut EP next month and have this week shared the latest offering from it, “Flying”. Featured new song from the excellent charity fundraiser album “Glasgow Nights”, released as a fundraiser for anti-poverty charity Money Advice Scotland. Hairband are new on the Glasgow music scene and “Flying” is a delightful gravity-defying slice of loping melodic guitar pop.
Flying is an ode to the power of gravity, about the world’s ability to pull us back to the ground even as it spins and sometimes leaves us utterly bewildered by what’s going on around us: “Everytime I leave the ground, I wonder will it be my last time, so I say goodbye to the feeling of my feet with the earth beneath and take to the sky. Thank you gravity for all you’ve done for me, but don’t let me go”. There’s an innocence and a poetry to the words, a moment where clarity of thought allows the noise of the world to fade out. Paired with intricate swaggering guitar lines and understated rhythms, before the whole thing fades to a moment of lucid vocal isolation.
Hairband are five songwriters, each bringing ideas to the table and making them work as something rooted in music’s history but equally carving its own niche, a thrilling ode to friendship and the creativity that can come with it.
Hairband’s debut EP is out October 19th via Monorail Music.
It was 10 years ago, in a house on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, that Ives Sepúlveda Minho and Manuel Parra started playing music together, and The Holydrug Couple was effectively born. A decade later, they’ve made “Hyper Super Mega”, an album that represents the culmination of everything they’ve learned in their years as a band.
If Hyper Super Mega feels like a classic pop record, that’s because Sepúlveda and Parra spent much of the recording process thinking about the classic pop records of the ’60s and ’70s. Masterpieces by bands like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Fleetwood Mac were all reference points, not always explicitly in sound, but certainly in spirit. The duo approached the mythos of the “classic album” from their own inimitable psych-pop perspective, hoping to make a record that felt authentically like The Holydrug Couple that could fit into the same canon. By that criterion, Hyper Super Mega is a massive success. All the elements that made the band’s previous albums Noctuary and Moonlust great are distilled to their purest essence and rendered in obsessive detail.
Not only is Hyper Super Mega the most fully realized Holydrug Couple album to date, it’s also the best-sounding. In the three years since the release of the relatively low-budget Moonlust, the band went out and got a bunch of new gear, including high-end mics and synths. For Sepúlveda, that was revelatory. “It gave me a wider palette of sounds that I wasn’t aware of,” he explains. “That helped me to center more on details and the different emotions that different sounds and ways of singing can give you.”
That expanded palette led to songs like “Waterfalls” and “I’ll Only Say This,” which trade the bedroom vibes of the band’s earlier work for widescreen pop bliss. Even the experiments, like the electronic-meets-acoustic “Easy,” are as self-assured as anything the band has done. Hyper Super Mega is a capsule history of The HolydrugCouple, incorporating a decade of experience recording, touring the world, and absorbing the sights and sounds of their native Chile. It marks the 10th anniversary of a band whose next 10 years look even brighter.
