Phoebe Bridgers gave indie rock a shot in the arm last year with the wonderful “Stranger In The Alps”, the Los Angeles musician’s debut album – she became one of our favorite artists of 2017, and her song “Funeral” was among our most played tracks of the year’s roundup. Today, she’s back with a beautiful cover of “The Gold” by Manchester Orchestra, and contrary to the title, the Elliott Smith-harkening song is about a relationship that’s lost its lustre
Phoebe’s cover of Manchester Orchestra‘s “The Gold,” the excellent single from last year’s A Black Mile to the Surface.Phoebe doesn’t change the song up too drastically, but she performs it in that same intimate, instantly-gripping way that she performs her own music, and really makes the song sound like one of her own (as she has done with other covers, like the Mark Kozelek song she did for her great 2017 album Stranger in the Alps.
Manchester Orchestra – “The Gold (Phoebe Bridgers Version),” out now on Dead Oceans Records.
The Dirty Nil play rock and roll. Loud, distorted, and out of control, they play like it’s a fever they’re trying to sweat out. Reveling in the din of distorted guitars, pounding drums, and desperately howled vocals, the Hamilton Ontario three-piece makes music for turntables and hi-fi’s – music for dive bars and house parties – for beer drinking and joint smoking – for road trips and barbecues – for fighting and yelling and shouting and singing and screaming and howling – for sweating and bleeding – trying and failing and trying again anyways. Gravel-in-your guts, spit-in-your-eye, staggering, bloodthirsty rock and roll. They have two 7″s available that capture the snarl and destructive noise they create. The Dirty Nil play rock and roll – cause they couldn’t do a damn thing else if they tried. The Dirty Nil present their second single Pain Of Infinity from their upcoming album Master Volume, out September 2018 on Dine Alone Records.
Is it blues? Is it world music? Is it underground pop? You can choose whichever you want, it’s not important for Orions Belte to be pigeonholed. They’re playing instrumental music inspired by Nigerian 70’s rock, postcards from the French Riviera, Formula One races at the Monza track in Italy, Eclectic and unique – are you able to “hear” how it sounds? . Sitting somewhere between gloriously Scandinavian psychedelia and long lost Nigerian fuzz rock from the 70s, the band’s crate-digging tendencies is matching to some stellar songcraft.
Led by Øyvind Blomstrøm and Chris Holm, the band’s debut album ‘Mint’ occupies a world of its own, heavy-duty instrumental fare that effortlessly breaks new boundaries.
‘Atlantic Surfing’ is a dazzling piece of guitar music, all sharp corners, unexpected reverses, and curious effects.
The animated video is engrossing as well, using illustrations design by Steph Hope. Lurid colours with a DIY feel, ‘Atlantic Surfing’ seems to encapsulate Orions Belte in one three minute chunk.
With a heart – stopping voice & wide – ranging instrumental talent, Odetta Hartman carries cowboy soul into an era where country can clash with computers, and bluegrass isn’t afraid of bass. Her debut LP 222 – an experimental, bedroom-produced hybrid of folk, musique concrète and psychedelia – was released on Northern Spy Records in 2015 to critical acclaim. Alongside her partner, sound artist & radio producer Jack Inslee, Odetta continues to explore the sonic vernacular created by their uncanny collaboration: badass banjos, detuned violins, field recordings, superstitious soundscapes, and vocal stylings ranging from sensual to spooky. A new album, Old Rockhounds Never Die, is slated for release on Northern Spy Records / Memphis Industries on August 10th, 2018.
This NYC art-punk/new wave group is one of the most interesting new bands I’ve heard in 2018. At times I’m reminded of The B-52’s, Pylon, X, Cake and Lithics. They are an exciting live band too:
That image-heavy universe which Bodega operate in is essential to their make-up. They talk of their on-stage light boxes as “the sixth member of Bodega, while their sound – equal parts Matrix-esque futurism (they all walk on stage later this evening clad head-to-toe in black and copious amounts of leather and PVC), and dusty, New York-indebted post-punk – occupies the kind of stylistic realm that art students dribble over.
“I think we were all really excited about a kind of rock minimalism,” says Ben, “which can mean a lot of different things. For example, not having cymbals in the drum set, or doing anything frilly in the guitar parts; not repeating parts or lyrics, just in and out.”
It’s easily picked up on ‘Endless Scroll’, and its brittle, brilliant lead single ‘How Did This Happen?’, a track that’s all sharp angles and cutting pontifications on consumerism – “This machine? You know it don’t kill fascists? / This machine, it’s just a guitar,” Ben quips at one point. He calls that stark approach to music-making their “sonic mission statement”, while also referring separately to an ethical one.
The first moment of Endless Scroll’s winkingly-titled second track, “Bodega Birth,” states the album’s thesis: “I use my computer for everything / Heaven knows I’m miserable now.” In both its content and its monotone delivery, the line addresses the ways our technological access leads to a kind of internal deadening. “Bookmarks” is even more direct: “All day at work / Stare at computer/ Come home from work / Stare at computer,” drilling down on the banality of constant access. It’s not all screens, though: On opener “How Did This Happen?!,”Bodega A lament how technology has led to political complacency and “slacktivism”; “Can’t Knock The Hustle,” with its quips about nine-dollar smoothies and hourly salaries—and a sardonic chorus that goes, “You can’t knock the hustle / When the cats are making capital”—is an anti-capitalist anthem that socialist organizations could adopt as their fight song.
Such straightforward lyricism demands music that’s equally unflashy, and Bodega’s simple, wiry arrangements rise to the occasion. The songs are built from little more than slightly overdriven guitars, simple, driving drums, and Belfiglio and Hozie’s yelped vocals. Just as Bodega’s lyrics plainly and boldly analyze our current state, so too are the songs striking in their direct, yet incisive, arrangements.
Band Members
Ben Hozie
Nikki Belfiglio
Montana Simone
Heather Elle
Madison Velding-VanDam
In the years I’ve been a watcher and a huge Katie Crutchfield fan, I always thought there was something intrinsically melancholy about her indie-pop tunes, but damn, the joy in this music, not a moment of it forced, the way “I went out in the storm and I’m never turning back” dissolves into falsetto oooos and delirious guitar frills. From “Silver” to “8-Ball,” her melodic finesse glistens like never before. (If you play this album back to back with Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage, you really hear how much Lindsey Buckingham has seeped into her guitar, and Lindsey never did anyone’s guitar anything but good.) The clincher: “Sparks Fly,” with a vocal assist from her twin sister Alison Crutchfield, whose Tourist in This Town album is on the same level and another must listen.
Chelsea Wolfe’s steady descent into goth-metal territory has produced some of the most wicked iconography in music video history. Her latest, “The Culling,” is an eerie barrage of gothic symbols: a sea of candles, white roses, red cloaks, a dead pig’s head, and Chelsea caked in face powder and smoky eye shadow, choking up black entrails. It’s all shot in a serene, collage style that’s both calming and overwhelming all at once. Overall, it’s some oppressive stuff.
Chelsea Wolfe’s “The Culling” from the album “Hiss Spun,” released September 22nd, 2017 on Sargent House Records.
Alice Bag’s Blueprint album is a lesson in archetypes. In the 1970s, the Chicana L.A. punk pioneer of The Bags proclaimed herself a “Violence Girl”: a woman who, like certain chrome alloys, becomes only moreunbreakable when tempered with fire. On Blueprint, Bag paints complex portraits of nameless (brown by default) individuals with characteristic pith and violence-girl riffs. On “Invisible,” a man who drinks too much holds himself together for his daughter and craves invisibility, a state many immigrants inhabit to survive, only to remain invisible to the American public eye. On “The Sparkling Path,” Bag alludes to escape by suicide, urging a message of survival beyond the kind of Maslow-diagnosed magical thinking for the oppressed who seek fulfillment beyond a lack of food, water and, most pressing of all, shelter. And on “77,” she enlists the help of Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill) and Alison Wolfe (Bratmobile) to inhabit the working women of 9 to 5 and tie up their male boss.
In other songs, Bag is herself again, defending her blue hair against chismosas on “Se Cree Joven” or delivering the starkest gut punch against self-loathing in “Etched Deep”: “All that rubbing at the pages / Won’t make them white,” she says to us and to our history. There’s no performative Twitter-shock at the plight of brown people on this album. There’s only the solemn self-vindication of a woman too long kept in the dark by ostensibly radical punk. “White justice,” after all, “just isn’t just.”
John Grant has announced his new album ‘Love Is Magic’ and unveiled its title track – check it out below.
The US singer-songwriter’s last album, ‘Grey Tickles, Black Pressure’, was released in 2015. described as “moving, funny, unnerving and angry; one of the albums of the year.” His debut ‘Queen of Denmark’ came in 2010, followed by ‘Pale Green Ghosts’ in 2013.
Now, Grant has shared news of his fourth studio effort, which he co-produced alongside Midlake’s Paul Alexander.
Describing the upcoming release, Grant says: “Love’s a shitshow that requires work. It’s not all lollipops and rainbows and ’67 Dodge Dart Hemis and STD’s and macaroni and cheese and John Carpenter. But nothing can distract from the fact that, in spite of it all, love is still magic.”
The six-and-a-half-minute title track opens with pulsing synth brass and crashing drums. The colourful lyric video features the lines “Have you got depression? / Passive aggression? /Did they stop loving you / And you’re the only one who doesn’t know?”
‘Love Is Magic’ is released October 12th on Partisan Records and Bella Union. It features track titles such as ‘Metamorphosis’, ‘Smug Cunt’ and ‘Diet Gum’. John Grant will tour the UK in support of ‘Love Is Magic’ in October and November see the full schedule below.
Oct 30 – O2 Academy Brixton, London Oct 31 – Bath Forum, Bath Nov 2 – Octagon, Sheffield Nov 3 – Albert Hall, Manchester
