Pkwy is a garage-y indie rock band from Los Angeles whose first single “Come on Baby, Let’s Go” was featured in many a music blog. This week they dropped a brand new track called “Punisher” and announced the upcoming release of their debut EP Giant.
Whereas “Come on Baby, Let’s Go” was a sparse, minimal indie slow-jam, “Punisher” is uptempo and features lush, shreddy guitar power chords and pummeling percussion. The song opens slowly and slithers along as the instrumentation snowballs and eventually crescendos into a huge, thrashy ending climax. It’s a cathartic garage-rock song with lyrics full of vibrant imagery and heavy on the matter-of-fact slacker vibes: “Slackers are acting tough/ Born in Los Angeles/ Light up a Camel Crush just for fun/ Just for fun…” Overall, it’s an impressive sonic leap forward for pkwy, and a perfect single for those low-stakes summer hang-out vibes.
The band hasn’t yet announced an official release date for Giant yet, but recently indicated that it’s coming out “soon.” .
Kristin Hersh’s prolific career has seen her heralded queen of the alternative release. Her tenth studio album, ‘Possible Dust Clouds’ is a highly personalised sociopathic gem delivered as a futuristic rewriting of how music works, a melodious breeze with a tail wind of venomous din.
Enveloping the juxtaposition of the concept of ‘dark sunshine’, a brooding solo record created with friends to expand her off-kilter sonic vision; a squally, squeaky mix of discordant beauty.
Feedback and phasing gyrate from simply strummed normality, imagine Dinosaur Jr and My Bloody Valentine cranking up a Dylan couplet.
‘Possible Dust Clouds’ is a glorious return to form for one of alternative rock’s true innovators. “She’s still as powerful a presence as she ever was.” Pitchfork
“The prodigious output and commitment to quality is pretty staggering, but then Kristin Hersh is a very, very special musician.” The Quietus
“Throwing Muses became a byword for college-rock feminism in the late 80s, largely because of Hersh’s uncompromising impressionist poetry of emotional anguish, subjugated womanhood and mental illness.” The Guardian
Sonic City curated by Courtney Barnett will take place in Kortrijk at Départ (Nelson Mandela Square) on Saturday 10th & Sunday 11th November. We added an extra day on Friday Nov 9th: this Sonic City ‘pre-party’ is curated by the Sonic City crew. Day tickets, weekend tickets (Sat & Sun) & 3 day passes NOW on sale. Follow SC on Facebook to stay tuned.
Drenge are set to release new EP ‘Autonomy’ on October 5th.
The indie punk duo are back, with new song ‘This Dance’ ending a three year wait for new material back in May.
They have released two critically acclaimed albums, Drenge (2013) and Undertow (2015), headlined shows worldwide and toured with the likes of wolf alice, the maccabees and arctic monkeys. Heading into the studio with Ross Orton, ‘Autonomy’ – their first EP release – features four brand new songs.
“We are very proud to unveil our first foray into the Extended Player format,” say the band. “Recorded at McCall Sound on Sheffield’s own Sunset Strip with Ross Orton. Autonomy showcases some of our recent work, by way of verses, choruses, middle eights and all that other stuff you learn at BRIT school.”
“There’ll be a run of Robot-Coloured ® vinyl which will be about the size and shape of a supermarket pizza. On the cover you can see our temporary mascot, DR3-NG3, a scientific research robot nearing the end of his functional capabilities and pursuing a quest for validation. Made in Sheffield.”
New song ‘Before The War Begins’ is “half a love-song and half a hate-song”
‘Before The War Begins’ is taken from the upcoming ‘Autonomy EP’ released 5th October 2018.
Each Anthony Green album has been a invitation to read his most personal pages of his secrete journals. We get to experience every drop of the grief, joy, anguish, torment, self-doubt, destruction, hope, unification and brilliance this one man has to offer. His bare soul lives between the melodies. These albums are a measure of not only his own self-preservation and redemption but throwing the rest of us a life line;
Keep Your Mouth Shut by· Anthony Green from the album Would You Still Be In Love on Memory Music Records
In 2011, Deafheaven founders George Clarke and Kerry McCoy used their debut album, Roads to Judah, to establish their new band’s sound: a mix of sparkling post-rock guitars, wistful shoegaze, blast beats and, most conspicuously, Clarke’s strangled, hissing vocals, obviously influenced by screamo and black metal bands.
Then in 2013, the rest of the world caught on via the band’s second album Sunbather, which presented Clarke and McCoy’s yearning romanticism, genre-blind approach and clean-cut look through a polished lens. Reviews were overwhelmingly positive and the band’s audience grew significantly, but purists from many corners of the musical world
Clarke and McCoy did what any good punks would do: They went harsher and heavier and darker on their third album, New Bermuda, stripping away some of the daydreamy haze of their previous works. Not that it mattered much. For most listeners (the ones who would ever encounter Deafheaven, at least) their opinion of the band had been formed. They were either brilliant stylistic synthesists or eternal poseurs. There is no in between,
On Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, Deafheaven gets back to being exactly what it wants to be, and they waste no time diving way down into the deep end. Opening track “You Without End” is more or less a piano-pop song with a vaguely ’80s vibe, adorned with a spoken-word piece by Nadia Kury, decidedly non-blast drum beats and guitars that swoop and soar. Deafheaven, without question, has a distinctive sound. Here, however, they don’t sound like themselves until Clarke comes in halfway through, howling about dark tunnels and glowing orbs and love. Later, “Night People” and “Near continue the band’s explorations; the former a goth-rock duet with Chelsea Wolfe, and the latter a pillowy psych number reminiscent of Pink Floyd. Clarke sings cleanly on both; no snarls, no growls, and so on. The guitars have always been Deafheaven’s bleeding edge, even when they were obscured by black metal vocals or handsome haircuts or bright pink album cover art. Deafheaven is a ambitious heavy rock band, a gathering of innovative musical minds, and one of the very best guitar bands on Earth. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is strong evidence of all three.
For nearing a decade, Sydney 5 piece Richard In Your Mind have created a kaleidoscope of Psych-Pop, made manifest in their recent 4th album – the critically acclaimed, meticulously crafted, joyous and bizarre ‘Ponderosa’. From sitars to synthezizers, ‘Ponderosa’ sees RIYM traverse a sonic landscape as comfortable in the world of modern hip hop and electronica as it is neo-psychedelia. Drawing on a vast catalogue (6 releases in total) and utilizing a range of instruments (from acoustic guitars and sitars to samples and synthesizers) to reproduce the full spectrum of their recorded work married with creative re-imaginings of it, RIYM’s live show features both lush arrangements of pure pop moments and bombast psych outs, punctuated by a super fun and often shambolic stage show featuring elaborate decorations and props. RIYM’s live credits include International supports for Ariel Pink, Cibo Matto, Os Mutantes and Warpaint plus beloved locals You Am I and Cloud Control .
Here’s music with a great backstory and unique evolution. “Music for Wood and Strings” began with an idea from Bryce Dessner who not only conceived of the music but invented the instrument the music was played on. As So Percussion’s Adam Sliwinski has been playing these “chordsticks” while they perform “Music for Wood and Strings” and explains that “chordsticks are a hybrid instrument which cross the sound properties of an electric guitar with the playing action of hammered dulcimers. In order to write any of this music, Bryce first had to commission the instruments from Aron Sanchez (Buke and Gase). Once he had a few built, he brought them to us (So Percussion) to discover what they could do.“Music for Wood and Strings“grew out of Bryce watching us play the chordsticks. He decided that playing string instruments didn’t prevent us from still playing intricate rhythmic patterns! Aside from one string on the bass instrument, none of the chordsticks have frets — each chord is fixed and the musical texture is achieved by bouncing notes around the ensemble. We play them with plain #2 pencils, which started as placeholder beaters but ended up doing the job well.”
Adam Sliwinski says that this track is one of the bands most appealing tracks in live performance even as an instrumental track. “On this new version of the track — we think of it as more than a simple remix — Bryce, Justin and Sean (the latter two, members of Bon Iver) turn the original piece into a compelling background for a beautiful song. We never worked directly with Justin or Sean on the track because our portion is just the first four minutes of our recording. We Love what they have done with it, and are honored that musicians from a band that people hold in such high regard wanted to make something with it that is entirely their own.”
“The chains of collaboration and community that led to this song cover a lot of ground: Some of the members of So Percussion have known Bryce since his days studying music at Yale — Bryce knows Aron Sanchez from his band Buke and Gase who record for Bryce’s record label Brassland — and we’ve since become collaborators with Buke and Gase and recently cut an album with them (yet unreleased). Finally, Bryce knows the Bon Iver folks from his travels with his indie rock band The National, whom So Percussion has also collaborated with. This is a simple song, but the family tree that led to it arises from very rich soil.”
As for the video, it was created by A Noah Harrison, He wrote to say that the video considers “the relationship between man’s creative process and the greater forces of nature that permit it. The video juxtaposes human creation with the destruction of our natural world, and the inherent connection between them. As we zoom into this man-made grid, we see the artist create a form reminiscent of a snowflake alongside the artificial re-forming of polar ice caps. Reversed, water here is sucked from the sea and adheres to the glacier. Near the end of the video, these processes flip: the snow begins to melt in a natural way as man begins to un-create in an artificial way. It seems as we continue to build up our material world, we remix, edit and delete our natural world.”
This group of teenagers from Brisbane could be your favorite new band. The Goon Sax frontman Louis Forster sings with a David Byrne-like delivery when he says the line that won me over, to his tenuous lover: “Let’s get nervous in your room again.” That’s the moment I turned up the volume.
As often as songs tackle the subject of love, (the wanting, the yearning, the rejection) what’s often missing is earnestness. The Goon Sax are full of that and a dose of humor as well. “Make Time 4 Love” is a song about defeat. Louis Forster wrote to say it’s also about “learning to live with yourself and accepting that everyone’s impulses seem irrational to someone else.”
Musically the Australian trio of James Harrison, Louis Forster and Riley Jones, takes creative impulse from ’80s, punky dance bands. “It was really inspired by [the bands] ESG and Liquid, Liquid, who we were all listening to a whole lot. And we just wanted to make the song really dancey.” In fact, Louis Forster’s dad was in a band from that time period that did pretty well, The Go-Betweens.
The video for “Make Time 4 Love” is directed by Ryan Daniel Browne and is inspired in part by a 1926 animated German fairytale, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, as well as by the 1968 Hungarian animated short, The Kidnapping of the Sun and the Moon. “The video takes place in three worlds,” says Louis Forster. “Wicked, regular, and a third – removed fantasy.” It also draws some of its dark imagery from album art. “The album covers of Tilt and The Drift by Scott Walker were another critical clue for us, and Riley actually bought a copy of Tilt on tour which we listened to and it got us in the right head space.”
Taken from the fothcoming album, We’re Not Talking (out September 14th on LP, CD and digital) via Wichita Recordings and Chapter Music
The Goon Sax are headed to UK/Europe in September/October to celebrate the September 14th release of their second album We’re Not Talking.
Amber Arcades has shared glorious psychedelic hymn ‘Alpine Town’.
The Dutch musician will return on September 28th, when new album ‘European Heartbreak‘ drops via Heavenly Recordings. New song ‘Alpine Town’ is online now, and it opens in sparse, languid territory, before the arrangement suddenly powers forward.
Annelotte De Graaf’s wonderfully moving vocal sits at the forefront, and the songwriter comments:
“I wrote this song exactly a year ago while on holiday in Guillestre, a small town in the French Alps. I was kind of in a sad place and my boyfriend had dragged me along to get away from all that, but I guess it doesn’t really work like that, ha. It just made me reflect on the sad part of the tourist condition as a metaphor for life, man.”
Tour Dates:
July
26 Cambridge The Portland Arms
27 Oxford The Cellar
28 Derbyshire Indietracks
