We’re delighted to announce The Brian Jonestown Massacre will be headlining SW IV, Saturday 20th October.
The event will be spread over three venues,Manchester Academy, The Students Union + Big Hands Bar
They’ll be joined by Flamingods + many more TBA. £19 earlybird tickets will be available for a limited time only from 10am, Wednesday 30th May
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Posted: June 1, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: Manchester Academy, Strange Waves IV
Though this band name can feel intimidating, don’t let that scare you off from this exciting Seattle rock outfit. They’ve already won the favour of Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready, who pops up on the album as a guest guitarist, as well as Corbin Reiff. According to him, it’s “one of the best rock albums of 2018.”
Song taken for the upcoming album Thunderpussy
Sub Pop Record’s latest introduction to the world, Jo Passed brings psych rock from a north-of-the-border region better known for more traditional indie. Pink Floyd and Sonic Youth are touchstones here, as this eclectic release establishes Jo Passed as the latest band to watch on a label that is known for bands to watch.
Jo Passed originally consisted of Jo and his friend and drummer Mac Lawrie. The two moved to Montreal together, and toured the far-right corner of North America. After Jo’s return to Vancouver, multi-instrumentalist Bella Bébé joined the band in January of 2016, and multimedia artist Megan-Magdalena Bourne joined on bass, after working on a video for the song “Rage” (from Jo Passed’s ‘Out’ EP). The nicest thing anyone has ever – ever – said to Jo Hirabayashi, frontman of Jo Passed, is that his band’s debut album sounds like “fucked-up Beatles”. ‘Their Prime’, the full-length follow-up to Jo Passed’s two EPs, ‘Up’ and ‘Out’, does sound like fucked-up Beatles. It sounds like Lennon and McCartney discovered Can and Neu!, and maybe a little Sonic Youth and XTC along the way. It demonstrates that timeless knack for dreamy melodies – chord progressions that sound like they were created in a land far, far away.
Musicians cover each other’s songs often enough that the results rarely qualify as news. But covering a whole album, song for song? That’s a labor of love ambitious enough to warrant attention.
The website Turntable Kitchen, which aims to bring food and music together in various ways, recently launched a monthly vinyl series called Sounds Delicious. Each month, a different artist covers an entire album, which the site makes available both as colored vinyl and as a digital download; the records can be ordered individually or by subscription. Participating artists include Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado (covering Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run) and Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard (who’ll tackle Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque), as well as The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, GEMS and more bands.
For the next entry, due out June 23rd, Mutual Benefit — whose gorgeous albums offer an ornate and stately take on vintage folk and pop sounds — will tackle Vashti Bunyan’s 1970 classic Just Another Diamond Day. As these covers of “Jog Along Bess” and “Glow Worms” suggest, Bunyan and Mutual Benefit bandleader Jordan Lee are ideally matched, with a similar affinity for gentle introspection.
“When I was approached about covering a full album, it was a no-brainer to attempt reinterpreting Just Another Diamond Day,” Lee writes via email. “Since my school days, it’s been one of those pieces of music that has been able to transport me to a calmer, more magical world than the one we currently inhabit. It was a unique assignment to use the downtime between tours to pay homage to an album I’ve spent so much time daydreaming with, especially since her songwriting style of soft-spoken observations — mixed with Robert Kirby’s intuitive string arrangements — has been such an enduring influence on my own music.
“The legend of Diamond Day is almost too good to be true. In the late ’60s, feeling disenchanted from the life of people trying to make her into a pop star, [Bunyan] dropped out of society and took this long journey across the country to get to a commune, writing songs along the way. Eventually, she recorded this incredible and deeply personal album, but it was a complete commercial flop, so she decided she’d rather be a farmer instead of a singer-songwriter. It wasn’t until decades later that an acquaintance came upon Just Another Diamond Day on eBay for thousands of dollars and realized that various contemporary folk artists were calling the album a lost masterpiece.
“While much of the album is pretty compatible with our aesthetic, ‘Jog Along Bess’ was actually one of the more difficult songs to do in our own voice. The sing-songy lyrics mixed with the rollicking ‘good times’ story is something we had never tried to do. We are definitely amateurs at rollicking. Eventually, I started to get really into the lyrics about this misfit crew of people and doggies trying to make it across the country in a half-broken vehicle. I could definitely relate. The more people we had over to collaborate, the more the song took on its own life.”
Mutual Benefit’s album-length cover of Just Another Diamond Day comes out June 23rd via Turntable Kitchen’s Sounds Delicious vinyl series.
This LA band has quietly amassed one of the more consistent catalogs in all of ’10s left-coast Americana, steadily putting out one very good album every year or two for the past decade. The forthcoming release Passwords (due out June 22nd) starts off on a ham-fisted note with the political number “Living In The Future,” but the rest of the album thankfully is in the vein of “Crack The Case,” a spare, synth-accented folk-pop number that ruminates on fake news and the value of forgiveness. Presented as a retro-future lyric video with its storyline scrolling across a space-race era computer console, the track appears to be asking one very big and very current question: “How can we all get along?” With delicate piano and acoustic guitar strains, ethereal steel-guitar runs and light synth accents – plus front man Taylor Goldsmith’s typically-poetic vocal delivery – the band comes to a compassionate conclusion.
Fans of Springsteen’s Tunnel Of Love period will want to pay special attention.
Be The Cowboy, is the much anticipated follow-up to Puberty 2, won’t be out until August 17th. But the first single “Geyser” has the sweep of an album, building from a quiet murmur to an arena-rock roar in just about two-and-a-half thrilling minutes. Mitski has hinted in interviews that Cowboy might be a departure, but “Geyser” is just as rousing as her signature song, “Your Best American Girl.”
“I think this is one of my vaguest songs,” Mitski says in this conversation about her new song, “Geyser.” “Usually my songs have a narrative of some sort. But this song is all feeling.“
“Geyser” is the leadoff song on her new album Be the Cowboy. And there’s nothing vague about the music — it builds with a powerful precision. Mitski has an intense desire to write songs. “I will be whatever it needs me to be. I will do whatever it needs me to do in order for me to continue to be able to make music.”
Mitski’s “Geyser” from Be The Cowboy. Out Aug 17th on Dead Oceans Records.
This en attendant ana record is really great. favourite rock-y thing I’ve heard in 2018. This French indie pop quintet En Attendant Ana earned a small but fervent fanship with their 2016 Cave EP, a noisy six-song set that melded strong melodic songwriting with elements of garage rock and a droning Velvet Underground influence. It was enough to earn the Parisian combo a distribution deal with American label Trouble in Mind, which released their full-length debut, “Lost and Found”, in 2018. Less ramshackle and overall more sophisticated than their EP, Lost and Found is a small wonder of naive pop charm and unexpected rock muscle. Frontwoman Margaux Bouchaudon has an effortless way of delivering pure melodies that seem both fresh and familiar, and the band, chugging along with earnest abandon, energetically prop up the tunes in all the right places.
Augmented here and there by piano, organ, and trumpet, En Attendant Ana are largely a guitar band with a penchant for group backing vocals that give the songs a lively, unified feeling. From the propulsive all-instrumental “Intro” to the dynamic “(Not) So Hard” and standout closer, “I Don’t Even Know Your Name,” the songs often take on the breathless feel of minor epics. The band’s craft is immediately apparent in their excellent songwriting, which is paradoxically supported by technical skills that haven’t quite caught up yet. It’s the slight greenness of their delivery that helps create that perfect recipe of youthful passion and sincerity without sinking into the snarky swagger of garage punk or the fey affectations of more straight-ahead indie pop. The result is a remarkably solid debut with intent and an infectious energy.
En Attendant Ana is :
Margaux Bouchaudon : lead vocals, keyboards, back up guitar
Romain Meaulard : lead guitar, back up vocals
Camille Fréchou – trumpet, back up guitar, backup vocals
Antoine Vaugelade – bass
Adrien Pollin – drums
Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour is pretty diverting. She has talked about the influence of Sade on her work, of “futurism … space country, galactic cosmic country” and of how the album’s closing track Rainbow is intended to speak to “LGBTQ youth”. There is also mention of a song called Mother, which you might reasonably describe as part of a grand country tradition of lachrymose songs about momma, or the absence thereof – “I’m just sitting here thinking about the time that’s slipping, and missing my mother,” she sings – albeit with a pretty distinctive twist. It was apparently written after Musgraves’ mum sent her a text with a photo of her hands, which the singer-songwriter received while she was tripping on LSD, an experience the song also describes: “Bursting with empathy, I’m feeling everything … It’s the music in me and all of the colours.”
Acid, futurism, LGTBQ rights: you don’t have to be a dedicated student of Nashville’s history to know that this is not the usual fare dished up by Music City’s mainstream stars. But then, as was established the moment her major label debut, Same Trailer Different Park, appeared in 2013, Musgraves is not your usual Nashville star. It was released just as bro country’s lunkheaded restatement of at least some of the genre’s core values – macho songs about boozing, babes, trucks and guns – was reaching its commercial zenith, and signalled the arrival of an artist not bent on iconoclasm so much as gently but firmly pushing at the boundaries of modern country music’s outlook. Her single Follow Your Arrow caused vast consternation among country radio programmers for advocating same-sex relationships and occasionally smoking a joint “if that’s what you’re into”. The critical acclaim was off the scale – here, claimed one writer, was the woman “who could save country music from itself” – but her sales were solid rather than spectacular. Nevertheless, when even bro country’s bantzmeister-in-chief starts writing songs about tolerance and marriage equality – “I believe you love who you love – ain’t nothing you should ever be ashamed of,” sang Luke Bryan on last year’s track Most People Are Good – it’s hard to argue that things haven’t shifted at least a little in her wake
The success of High Horse is indicative of the ease and confidence that courses through Golden Hour. Regardless of genre, you’ll be hard pushed to find a better collection of pop songs this year. Everything clicks perfectly, but the writing has an effortless air; it never sounds as if it’s trying too hard to make a commercial impact, it never cloys, and the influences never swallow the character of the artist who made it. In recent years, there have been plenty of artists who’ve clumsily tried to graft the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on to their own. On Lonely Weekend, possibly the best track here, Musgraves succeeds in capturing some of that album’s dreamy atmosphere
Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour
We’re excited to share our new single Twelve Divisions Of The Day – our first release via Captured Tracks. Blending wiry, dark post-punk with unpredictable art-rock, Drahla have established themselves as a formidable and distinctive band across their two sold out 7” singles and the 2017 Third Article EP. Formed in late 2015, Drahla quickly found their identity in Yorkshire’s fertile music scene with their minimal yet robust bass-heavy sound. Their reputation as a fervent live act is ever-growing, with the band being asked to share stages with the likes of Parquet Courts, METZ, Ought, Buzzcocks, Hookworms, The Cribs and more. Their Third Article EP, produced by Hookworms’ MJ, was released at the end of 2017 on the band’s own Blank Ad label followed by their first European tour supporting Metz. Third Article finds the band at their most captivating, with track ‘Silk Spirit’ exhibiting Luciel’s mesmerizing spoken drawl, paired with the steady unrelenting wall of sound from Rob Riggs on bass, and Mike Ainsley on drums.
After watching the band’s self-made video for ‘Silk Spirit’, Mike Sniper, founder of Brooklyn independent label Captured Tracks, was immediately hooked. The band signed to Captured Tracks shortly after.
The single will be released on limited clear 7” vinyl with an alternative mix by Black Ribbon and a fanzine on 20th July. This is a super limited 7″ on clear vinyl. It includes a 32 page fanzine made by Luciel Brown and Rob Riggs of Drahla.
Their tour begins on Saturday in Wakefield. We hope to see you at the shows.
Father John Misty has shared a new stop-motion video for his song ‘Please Don’t Die.’ A track and video which follows FJM in to the Underworld to literally confront death face to face.
With new album God’s Favourite Customer on it’s way to our ears on Friday 1st June, we are still as excited as little pups to see another instalment of the Josh Tillman experiment, and this one satisfies in so many ways.
Created by the brilliant artist Chris Hopewell (the man behind Father John’s “…Revolution” video, Radiohead’s ‘Burn the Witch,’ Run the Jewels’ ‘Don’t Get Captured,’ and a more) it’s a child-like view of mortality which is endearing and confusing. So while we wait for the new LP to drop via Sub-Pop/Bella Union this comng Friday, sit back and enjoy this brilliant piece of work from both the singer and the visual creator.
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