The Fat Angel Sings

The Cure have announced their first new song in 16 years, entitled “Alone” The Symphonic ballad is ahead of new album “Songs of a Lost World” which awaits an official announcement, A post on the band’s social media contains a snippet of the song: a symphonic ballad with heavy drums and lurching electric guitar, with frontman Robert Smith singing: “This is the end of every song that we sing / the fire burned out to ash, the stars grow dim with tears.”

The song’s premiere will be on Mary Anne Hobbs’s BBC Radio 6 Music show, airing at noon in the UK. It brings to an end one of the longest-awaited returns in rock, one that the Cure have been teasing for a number of years.

The band’s last music was 2008’s “4:13 Dream“, described at the time as “admirably taut and vibrant, though nothing here scales classic heights”. Smith said a sister record, entitled “4:14 Scream“, would be released in 2014 but it was later scrapped. In 2018, he told : “I’ve hardly written any words since then. I think there’s only so many times you can sing certain emotions. I have tried to write songs about something other than how I felt but they’re dry, they’re intellectual, and that’s not me.”

But in the same interview, partly inspired by the Meltdown festival he curated, he said that the band was committed to going back to the studio. Subsequent sessions in 2019 produced a huge amount of music, according to Smith: “The songs are like 10 minutes, 12 minutes long. We recorded 19 songs,” he told Rolling Stone. “We just played music for three weeks. And it’s great. I know everyone says that. But it really is fucking great. It’s so dark. It’s incredibly intense.”

Details went quiet until 2022, when Smith announced the album had an intended title, “Songs of a Lost World. The album, probably containing “Alone”, hasn’t been officially announced, but that title looks to be unchanged. 

Every Cure fan knows, the band’s albums exist somewhere on a sliding scale between two extremes. At one end lurk the albums on which Robert Smith gives free rein to his natural facility for pop songwriting: “The Head on the Door”, “Wish”, the oft-reviled “Wild Mood Swings”. At the other are the albums on which one imagines Smith thinks his legacy really rests: pitch-black explorations of existential despair on which songs sprawl lengthily and radio-friendly melodies are in short supply, 1982’s notorious “Pornography” and 2000’s “Bloodflowers” among them. In a world where the actual singles chart no longer really matters to a band like the Cure – their period as reliable, if idiosyncratic hitmakers drew to a close in the mid-90s, a change in status that had no effect whatsoever on their capacity to fill stadiums and arenas – their first new single in 16 years suggests their forthcoming album “Songs of a Lost World” tends towards the second category.

“Alone” is the best part of seven minutes long, and more than half of that time is consumed by a lengthy instrumental introduction: the first track on the forthcoming album, its structure brings to mind “Plainsong“, the opener from 1989’s career highpoint “Disintegration“. There’s something deliberately disjointed about its sound: Simon Gallup’s bass doesn’t drive the song so much as decorate it with distorted retorts; the glacial synth and a very Cure-esque guitar line come and go, and there are moments when the whole enterprise feels on the verge of falling apart. It has a beautiful, rather majestic-sounding chord sequence – even at their bleakest, the Cure were almost never tuneless – but it is funereally paced and somehow sounds even slower still because the rhythm track features no hi-hats, just the pounding of a bass drum and snare and the occasional cathartic cymbal crash. If you’re after a comparison from the Cure’s past for that aspect of its sound, you could do worse than think of the similarly brutal and austere drums that underpin “Pornography”, most specifically “Cold”.

When Smith’s voice finally appears, it’s singing lyrics that seem to be based on Dregs, an 1899 work by the Decadent poet Ernest Dowson. Dowson’s poetry has inspired songs before – it was him that came up with the phrase “days of wine and roses” (and, for that matter, “gone with the wind”), and both Cole Porter and Morrissey paraphrased his famous line about being “faithful to you … in my fashion”. But Dregs is something else entirely: written shortly before his death, it is filled with ghosts, hopelessness and morbidity. And so is “Alone”. In among the images it borrows from Dowson, it throws in some intimations of mortality of Smith’s own devising: birds fall from the sky, broken voices call us home, youthful dreams are dashed against the transience of life. At 65, Smith sounds horrified by the idea of life ending: “Where did it go? Where did it go?” he pleads at one affecting juncture. His voice hasn’t changed much over the years, but the singer of “Alone” sounds very different indeed from the twentysomething who opened “One Hundred Years” with a nihilistic shrug of “it doesn’t matter if we all die”.

Smith clearly has personal reasons for fixating on mortality – he’s talked about how losing both his parents and his older brother during the lengthy process of making “Songs for a Lost World” shaped the material, and we’ll clearly find out just how much in the fullness of time. But as an opening salvo, a teaser for what’s to come, the overall message of “Alone” to his audience seems to be: abandon hope all ye who think the Cure’s best song is “The Lovecats” or “Friday I’m in Love“. But for those who ultimately prefer the Cure when they’re wreathed in misery and despair – as you suspect Smith does – “Alone” is quite the appetiser. impressive.

On Monday evening, September 23rd, Neil Young returned to The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., for the first time in nearly six years. The performance arrived after Young and his new band participated in the 39th annual Farm Aid events in Saratoga, N.Y., on Saturday, Sept. 21st. The artist’s follow-up represented his first billed appearance with his new band, The Chrome Hearts; guitarist Micah Nelson, organist Spooner Oldham, drummer Anthony LoGerfo and bassist Corey McCormick. During the night, the bandleader interspersed classic acoustic compositions beside raging rock epics from the Crazy Horse ether, finding balance as he worked through 14 selected arrangements. 

Beginning on a high note, Young and The Chrome Hearts performed an electric take on “I’m the Ocean,” in line with 1995’s “Mirror Ball” cut, instead of delving into acoustics akin to his 2023 “Before and After” rendition. Next, the artist and his accompaniment dusted off a classic, “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.”

From electric to acoustic, Young and company tapped into a classic take on “Comes A Time” with its signature harmonica interludes. Keeping the aforementioned tone, the ensemble arrived at “From Hank to Hendrix,” before adding “Harvest Moon,” and “Unknown Legend.” The lead turned his attention from guitar to piano with the arrival of “Journey Through the Past.” Young remained behind the keys while reverberating his love and respect for the natural environment with the aptly titled “Love Earth,” from the birds in the sky/ to the fishes deep in the sea.

Back cradling his acoustic guitar, Young took the audience through “Homegrown” and “Big Time” before a soft and subtle take on “One of These Days,” which represented a dust-off, last played live in 2019. For the final songs of the night’s main frame, it was an all-electric affair, beginning with a rousing delivery of “Powderfinger” and the night’s highlight, a 13min-rendition of “Down by the River” with extensive instrumental back and forth between Young and Nelson.

After band introductions, the group picked up their final offering of night one in Port Chester, delivering a fittingly placed “Roll Another Number (For the Road)” as their encore. 

Set: I’m The Ocean, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, Comes a Time, From Hank to Hendrix, Harvest Moon, Unknown Legend, Journey Through the Past, Love Earth+, Homegrown, Big Time, One of These Days, Powderfinger, Down by the River Enc.: Roll Another Number (For the Road) 

Justin Vernon has announced a new Bon Iver EP, “Sable”, which finds him stripping back down to his solo acoustic roots. The three songs that comprise Bon Iver’s new record “Sable”, emerged from a long-gestating breakdown. Think about the journey Justin Vernon has been on across the past two decades: “For Emma Forever Ago”, high profile collaborations on records by artists like Kanye West and Taylor Swift, throwing music festivals in his city, and the increasingly layered and elaborate touring and recording machine that Bon Iver became.

An electricity began to swell in Vernon’s chest. Being Bon Iver meant playing a part, and intentionally leaning into that role meant frequently pressing hard on a metaphorical bruise. He developed literal physical symptoms from deep anxiety and constant pressure. At the end of his rope, maybe done with music, and thinking increasingly about the process of healing, he finally found the time to unpack years of built-up darkness just as the lockdown began.

While there are the usual collaborators on this record providing pedal steel (Greg Leisz), fiddle (Rob Moose), saxophone (Michael Lewis), and trumpet (Trever Hagen), “Sable”, is largely defined by Vernon’s voice and guitar. The dense layers of i,i are nowhere to be found, as Vernon bears the weight of these songs largely on his own. It’s a retreat and reset. Stripped back to the primary elements that the project was founded on, the intimacy of “Sable”, is perhaps most prominent on “S P E Y S I D E,” recorded in such a way that individual guitar strings resonate in individual speakers. It’s a song that spilled out of him as an apology to a couple of people he loved and hurt, written in 2021 during a moment of reflection and clarity while decamped in Key West. Listening from the guts of his guitar, his lyrics are autobiographical and direct; gone is the veil of maximalist mystery from albums’ past. He can’t make good, can’t go back, can’t undo what he’s done. “I really damn been on such a violent spree,” he admits.

Recorded in the April Base compound in Wisconsin, these songs were each written at different periods of processing. “Things Behind Things Behind Things” came first in 2020, born of the restless anxiety and facing up to everything that leads to it. Written almost as a surprise while he was unsure of his future as an artist—a meditation on the process of unpacking the contexts that inform his contexts—it stares down the long road of putting oneself back together. “Awards Season” is the most recent. He wrote entire stanzas on long walks around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis last year. It’s a song that takes stock of a major and wrenching change.

These songs are reflections of unfinished business, of guilt and anguish. “I’m a sable/ and honey, us the fable,” he sings in the record’s closing track. Some of Vernon’s best songs are the saddest ones, and there’s a kind of unintentional toxic reinforcement that comes when everyone praises your most depressed instincts. “Sable”, is named for near-blackness, the record an externalized projection of his turmoil. This trio of songs represents an unburdening from one of the most trying eras in Vernon’s life. There was a time not long ago where Vernon intentionally hid his face. Here, the blinds are open.

Bon Iver from the ‘Sable,’ EP out 10/18 on Jagjaguwar.

Sarah Jarosz has released a deluxe edition of her 2024 album “Polaroid Lovers“, which includes the bonus track “Just Like Paradise.” On her seventh studio album, “Polaroid Lovers” Sarah Jarosz captures little portraits of life and love. Like a good photographer, she knows how to capture the shadows and light of a scene, bringing sometimes-hidden features into relief and focusing on life at the edges and at the centre.

Cascading piano notes create a sonic undercurrent on the album opener, “Jealous Moon,” a propulsive folk rock ode to regret about misunderstandings in relationships as well as a defiant celebration of the acceptance of the future. The song’s a snapshot of the insights to which we are often blind in the moment and the sure-sightedness we gain through hindsight. The cantering rhythms of “When the Lights Go Out” transport lovers as they discover where the edges of their own identities end and the points at which they “fade into each other.” Lines from the first verse provide the album’s title—“In a dream we were Polaroid lovers/In the deep where the edges don’t lie”—as the singer wonders aloud whether her lover’s identity remains constant, or inconstant, when he doesn’t need to put on a display for her (“Who are you when the lights go out”).

“I wrote ‘Just Like Paradise’ with Daniel Tashian in the same few days as “Columbus & 89th” and “Days Can Turn Around,” she says. “We were overlooking the Gulf of Mexico and taking in the cool ocean breeze. The way the sunlight was sparkling on the water led us to imagine a place where you never have to be cold or worried or lonesome and you can let go of all your darkness and fears.”

released January 26th, 2024

Irish band The Murder Capital are back with their first new music since great sophomore album, “Gigi’s Recovery“. “Can’t Pretend to Know” was produced by John Congleton and is a real rager, but still with that melodic sense that bloomed on their most recent album. The Murder Capital share new single aside of touring with Nick Cave.

“‘Can’t Pretend To Know’ is a whip of a tune that we made to feel like a hurricane of colour and breathlessness,” says frontman James McGovern. “A surreal look at childhood innocence and all its replacers, those delicate bridges we burn as we move through the strangeways of our youth. Moulded by everything we come into contact with. Learning lessons from toys. Playing the parts that are asked of us.” 

The Murder Capital’s first album “When I Have Fears” had all its songs written and recorded within the first 9 months of the band knowing each other.

The band will soon be on tour with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds across Europe, and they’ve just announced 2025 dates in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. They say North American dates will be announced soon. 

Hand-break off, Sports Team are back. With musical pedals to the metal and saxophones at full throttle, the Mercury-nominated six-piece bring us their third studio album, “Boys These Days”. After their first two, Top 3 records – the Mercury Prize-nominated “Deep Down Happy” (2020) and “Gulp!”(2022).

Sports Team singer Alex Rice calls “Condensation” a “big, sweat-slicked, saucer-eyed song,” while bandmate Rob Knaggs says, “If Adam Sandler remade ‘Nymphomaniac,’ this song would play over the credits.

We recorded versions with brass bands, and Jools Holland, but it never quite felt right. All came together very quickly in Bergen. It’s the song on the album we’re most excited to play live.” New album “Boys These Days is out in February 2025.

Think Prefab Sprout meets Roxy Music the band ally a seer-like lyrical insight with their most dynamic musical performances to date, Sports Team are piercing the content abyss. A “carousel of 21st-century sins”, this witty and insightful examination of modern life is both a critique and a celebration of its times. Yes, ‘Boys These Days’ takes aim at everything from advertising hype to relationship dysfunction, stationed at the point where the digital tide crashes onto IRL shores, but their perspective is fuelled by immersion in that landscape as Sports Team are scrolling along with the rest of us.

Though recorded in Bergen, the birthplace of black metal, the sessions at the start of 2024 saw Sports Team create their brightest and most beguiling record yet.

new album “Boys These Days” out Feb 28th

Naima Bock, whose second solo album is out this month, Most of the writing of Naima Bock’s second album, “Below A Massive Dark Land” (out 27th September via Sub Pop), was a solitary affair. It may not sound it – it’s made up of strong, purposeful arrangements with a huge host of musicians; filled with cradling space and warm light. This will also come as a surprise to anyone who has seen Naima perform in the time since the release of her 2022 debut “Giant Palm”, as it’s undoubtedly a communal experience.

With a band of ten, three, or even just solo, when Naima plays there’s a rare bond between the musicians on stage and the audience. In their interview with her, The Quietus declared “after every song the applause and cheering is immense, so immense in fact that it seems to be coming from a different place than the usual formalities of a live show, a link between performer and artist forged somewhere deeper and more personal.”

This results in a record that may occasionally appear to contradict itself; communal but solitary, rooted in place but free, intimate but spacious. This, however, is what makes Below… comforting and familiar. Who doesn’t contain within them these contradictions, who doesn’t want things that are directly at odds with each other. Like the safe spaces Naima has found the world over, “Below…” doesn’t require all the answers, not yet, but provides a safe place to look. 

Naima’s list of “foundation” albums includes records by Elliott Smith, Palace Music, Baden Powell & Vinicius de Moraes, Alabaster de Plume, and more.

“Below a Massive Dark Land” is out Friday, September 27th via Sub Pop Records 

A favorite single of 1967 is The Box Tops‘ “The Letter.” We’ll try to tell its story in about the length of time that the song lasts: a super short 1:58. The song was written by a 23-year-old named Wayne Carson Thompson more on him below – whose country music-singing father had spoon fed him a lyric which would ultimately become the first line of the song: “Give me a ticket for an aer-o-plane.” The younger Thompson got the completed song to the Memphis-based “Chips” Moman, who though just 29 was already a veteran producer, songwriter, label exec and studio owner.

Moman gave the song to a staff production assistant, Dan Penn, who corralled a local quintet into the studio to record the tune.  The lead singer, Alex Chilton, was just 16 years old he was born December 28th, 1950 – when the song was recorded. Penn is quoted as saying: I hadn’t even paid any attention to how good he sang because I was busy trying to put the band together… I had a bunch of greenhorns who’d never cut a record, including me… I borrowed everything from Wayne Thompson’s original demo – drums, bass, guitar.”

The band’s other original members included lead guitarist Gary Talley, bassist Bill Cunningham, John Evans on keyboards and drummer Danny Smythe, who died (at 67) on July 6th, 2016. No cause of death was announced. Alex Chilton died March 17th, 2010.

That sound you hear at the 1:34 mark? An aer-o-plane taking off via a special effects recording that Penn edited in, against Moman’s wishes. Penn, steadfast, won the argument. The single was released in the summer of 1967 and on September 23 it was No1 in the U.S., where it would stay for four weeks, selling over one million copies. It ranked as the No2 song on Billboard‘s 1967 singles chart. (Joe Cocker would famously record a version of it in 1970.

The Box Tops would have another huge hit in 1968 with “Cry Like a Baby.” The group disbanded a few years later. Chilton went on to form the influential power pop group Big Star. He died at 59 of a heart attack in 2010. And what of songwriter Wayne Carson Thompson? Five years later, in 1972, he wrote “Always on My Mind.”

Following the original, digital only, release of Goat’s score for ‘The Gallows Pole’ TV series, we are now thrilled to announce an expanded, ltd edition vinyl version, which will be released as part of Record Store Day 2024.

‘The Gallows Pole’ is a three-part Element Pictures production, written and directed by Shane Meadows which was aired in the UK on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.

This new vinyl version of the ‘The Gallows Pole: Original Score’ differs from the previous digital release as it now only features the music which was specifically written for the series itself – it doesn’t include the three, previously released back catalogue tracks. Instead, this vinyl edition contains three ‘unused/unreleased’ tracks: ‘Goat Witch’, ‘Timeless Awareness’ and ‘Kampsång (Instrumental)’. These tracks have not, up-to-now, been heard by anyone apart from Shane Meadows himself.

The themes and imagery of Benjamin Myers’ source novel are the perfect fit for Goat’s mystical, pagan aesthetic. The story, based in rural 18th century Yorkshire, tells a fictionalised, psychedelic tale based on the true story of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners, which became the biggest fraud in British history.

Rather than ‘writing to picture’ in the traditional way, Goat approached the creative process differently, explaining: “In the beginning, we would get inspiration just through reading the book, trying to get a sense of its vibration and then translate that into music, with passages from the book as a springboard for the initial jams.”

Goat were already fans of Meadows’ work, in particular ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ and the various iterations of ‘This Is England’, and understood the importance of music to him, noting that: “Music is a central part to everything Shane has created” and describing the opportunity as a “blessing” when they were approached about the project.

Working on the score for ‘The Gallows Pole’ also provided an ongoing inspiration for Goat, resulting in the germs of music that formed the bands most recent album, the critically acclaimed ‘Medicine’. “Although it may seem an abstract or unorthodox way to work with film, a lot of interesting new ideas and music came out of those sessions that went beyond just the score.” said the band.

Sometimes, the results of musical exploration are best heard (and seen). As Goat themselves conclude, “music is never easily explained with words”.

‘The Gallows Pole: Original Score’ is ltd to only 3,000 copies worldwide – the package comes as a colour vinyl LP + 7” and is housed in a special gatefold sleeve. 

Originally released April 20th, 2024