Brooklyn’s Las Rosas have announced their sophomore LP, Shadow By Your Side, due out May 11th via NYC’s Greenway Records. The album is currently available for pre-order digitally and on CD & limited-edition vinyl.
Shadow By Your Sidecomes as a follow-up to last year’s Everyone Gets Exactly What They Want, and showcases the band’s lean, pop-infused mix of psych and garage rock. Lead single “Christa” features twangy guitars, chugging rhythms, and playful, luminous vocal harmonies, and its accompanying video has mystical, otherworldly vibe that perfectly captures the band’s aesthetic
Las Rosas Announce Sophomore LP Shadow By Your Side, Out May 11th via Greenway Records
Celebrated neo-folk songwriter Nadia Reid is riding a wave of acclaim for her 2017 album “Preservation”which shows no sign of abating. She recently debuted new ballad ‘The Other Side Of The Wheel’ for RNZ amongst the chirping wildlife of Port Chalmers and has now unveiled two more previously unreleased songs recorded live in the cozy confines of RNZ’s studio. Wrap your ears around reflective tune ‘Are You High, Are You Lonely‘ and the soaring ‘Right On Time‘ below…
Nadia Reid performs the previously unreleased ‘Right On Time’ especially for RNZ.
Excited to share a brand new 3-song EP with you all I wrote these songs on the road and I am so excited to set them free! Here’s a conversation I had with Bob Boilen about it all for NPR Music. I wrote these songs on the road, in my hotel, on the plane, and at soundcheck. They were the product of the little time that I had to myself – three songs about different sides of love: love gone wrong, love gone right, and love at a distance. “Born Yesterday” is a bookend on the adventure that was my last record, “Emotions and Math”. In releasing it, I feel set free to sink deep into my new inspirations while taking a break from the road and make something entirely new. These songs are the end of this chapter and mark a new beginning!
The EP is available digitally only,
Margaret Glaspy performs the song, “Before We Were Together” from her EP “Born Yesterday,” live in The Current studio. Glaspy is joined by guitarist Julian Lage.
‘Circle The Sun’ is the new LP from Melbourne’s sonic-indie-rock charmers TV Haze. It’s the trio’s third full-length album in just 18 months! Lead by the infectious Byrds-esque single ‘Maple Leaves’ and closing with expansive master piece ‘Circle The Sun’, the Melbourne trio have showed they can dial back the fuzz while still keeping the urgency and raw beauty of years gone by. “It’s a powerful first statement for an album that stretches beyond the band’s admitted ’90s sweet spot into rough-and-tumble college rock and ’70s power pop and country.”
If 2016’s self-titled debut and last year’s Scrap Museum tapped the ragged, flannel-draped glory of bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Buffalo Tom, ‘Circle The Sun’ sees the Melbourne trio expanding their sound bringing forth a distinctive 70’s influence with 12 string guitar textures.
Lump is a collaboration between singer songwriter Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay, the founding member of Tunng and Throws. Their self-titled album will be released on 1st June via Dead Oceans Records.
The record is a heady blend of wonked-out guitars, Moog synths and pattering drums, set against droning, coiling clouds of flutes and voices.
The duo have shared the first track from the record. A somewhat cynical examination of the new age, Curse Of The Contemporary has a steady, pulsing bassline and divines a road snaking off towards the horizon, which gives a sense of gazing out of a car window as mountains and palm trees rush by.
Watch the excellent video below and the single will also be available for Record Store Day on hyper-limited 12” translucent green vinyl.
Norwegian experimentalist Jenny Hval has unveiled a new song ‘Spells’, the captivating lead track from her upcoming EP collection The Long Sleep. Replete with pulsing electronic grooves, ‘Spells’ conjures a dreamy soundscape of heart-tugging pianos, playful saxophones and Hval’s weightless vocals. Wading into balearic dance-pop territory, the song’s cascading melodies cast listeners adrift in whirlpools of sound as the artist cryptically sings
“You are your own disco ball hovering above you, like a comforting reminder that not even you belong to you.” The intoxicating track follows Hval’s winning recent collaboration with fellow Norwegian artist Lindstrøm‘Bungl (Like A Ghost)’, listen to ‘Spells’ .
BOYTOY announced their debut full-length album, Grackle, will be arriving soon through PaperCup Music, and premiered lead single, and lead track from the record, “Postal”, via Soundcloud. The Brooklyn trio will be previewing material this month with a run of tour dates .
BOYTOY emerged in 2014 with a ferocious live show, and a self-titled debut that caught the attention of fans and critics from outlets such as Noisey, Stereogum, SPIN, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, NYLON, and Rolling Stone. The band headed into the studio in Philadelphia this spring with producer Al Creedon (Eternal Summers/Bleeding Rainbow) to record, resulting in 11 tracks of no nonsense, rock n’ roll bangers, with three-part vocal harmonies, and melodic hooks galore.
With some buzz in their sound, and hints of ’90s alt-rock, this Brooklyn trio wouldn’t hesitate to lean out of the convertible and yell funny insults at the goons who were too stupid to talk to them at last night’s party. (Which, coincidentally, is another one of power pop’s recurring themes.) Bruising riffs and soaring hooks abound.
Sub Pop has something special on their hands with Melbourne’s Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. Yeah, this is surf rock, but RBCF sounds nothing like American surf rock bands. Each member of the quintet takes a turn on the mic and songs from the released The French Press EP were as great as we had hoped. Singles “Julie’s Place and “French Press,” with thick basslines, vocal harmonies and sticky guitar melodies.
In early 2016, the release of Talk Tight put Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever on the map with glowing reviews from Spin, Stereogum, and Pitchfork, praising them as stand-outs even among the fertile landcape of Melbourne music. Chock full of snappy riffs, spritely drumming and quick-witted wordplay, Talk Tight was praised for the precision of their melodies, the streamlined sophistication of their arrangements, and the undercurrent of melancholy that motivates every note.” The band was born from late night jam sessions in singer / guitarist Fran Keaney’s bedroom and honed in the thrumming confines of Melbourne’s live music venues. Sharing tastes and songwriting duties, cousins Joe White and Fran Keaney, are brothers Tom and Joe Russo, and drummer Marcel Tussie started out with softer, melody-focused songs.
The more shows they played, the more those driving rhythms that now trademark their songs emerged. Since then, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have rode that wave from strength to strength. Touring around the country on headline bills and festival slots all the way to Bigsound, the entrenched themselves with their thrilling live shows while prepping their next release. The French Presslevels up on everything that made Talk Tight such an immediate draw. Multi-tracked melodies which curl around one another, charging drums and addictive bass lines converge to give each track its driving momentum. Honed through their live shows, this relentless energy carries the record through new chapters in the band’s Australian storybook. Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s songs have always had all the page-turning qualities of a good yarn and The French Press is no different. Somewhere between impressionists and fabulists, lyricists Fran Keaney, Tom Russo and Joe White often start with something rooted in real life – the melancholy of travel on French Press, having a hopeless crush on Julie’s Place – before building them into clever, quick vignettes. The result is lines blurred between fiction and reality – vibrant stories which get closer at a particular truth than either could alone. Blending critical insight and literate love songs, The French Press cements Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever as one of Australia’s smartest working bands.
‘Sorry is Gone’ is available everywhere . The whole record is about me taking my life back, without really realizing it. I realized I’m the only person that is going to look out for me. I have to be my main person. No one else. I have to sing about things and write about things that have happened to me as therapy. That’s what connects me to other music I listen to. I want music to make me feel things. This is my inner dialogue, and my chance to get the last word.
Jessica Lea Mayfield might make some people uncomfortable with the level of honesty she projects on her forthcoming LP, “Sorry Is Gone”, but she’s not going to apologize – for that, or for anything else on her complex, confessional fourth album. Recorded with producer John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Kurt Vile, Phosphorescent and Dinosaur Jr.), Sorry Is Gone is a raw document of a woman in progress; one weathering cruel storms but finally able to blame the rain itself for the flood. Written as the truth of her own poisonous marriage unfolded before her eyes, Sorry Is Gone is a record of permission. Permission to create freely, to escape what is no longer safe and to stop bearing responsibility for things done to her, not by her. As Mayfield sings on the title track, “the sorry is gone.” Indeed, it is; kicked to the curb with every strum of her guitar.
Written in the years since her last solo LP, Make My Head Sing, in 2014, and her 2015 collaboration with Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield Sing Elliott Smith, Sorry Is Gone became the soundtrack to a highly personal and traumatic story. The Ohio-born Mayfield was quietly enduring years of domestic abuse, smiling and touring while she hid a brewing tempest – and the bruises, too. But lyrics don’t lie even as bruises fade, and they started to tell the tale of her marriage before she was even able to; songs often dark and dangerous and ready to confront and claim her life. Written primarily on an acoustic baritone guitar – out of necessity at first, in her thin-walled apartment – Mayfield started to process the years of hurt and uncertainly through words and melodies that helped her see the light in the darkness.
Though much of Make My Head Sing was written music-first, Sorry Is Gone began with those lyrics, and, so often, a path forward unfolded itself as the songs formed. “The cold hard truth is you love me too much,” she sings on “Meadow” a moody, echoey moment about finally realizing someone’s true colors. “The cold hard truth is you couldn’t love me enough.” It’s a brutal line from someone who refuses to be victimized. Evoking the pathos of nineties grunge, the folk confessions of her idol, Smith, and the cool blasé of bands like Luscious Jackson, the tracks that comprise Sorry Is Gone aren’t devised to make anyone comfortable but herself – but they are there to help share an emotional journal and a certain kind of healing that can only come through music.
“I have to sing about things and write about things that have happened to me as therapy,” says Mayfield, who shaped so many of these songs in the isolation of the small apartment she shared with her husband while their marriage fell apart in her hands – in many ways, those songs pointed to the way out before she could get there herself. “That’s what connects me to other music I listen to. I want music to make me feel things. This is my inner dialogue, and my chance to get the last word.”
Recorded with Agnello at Water Music and Electric Lady Studios, Mayfield recruited a stellar group of musicians for Sorry Is Gone, including Avett on backing vocals and keys, drummer Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth, Sun Kil Moon), bassist Emil Amos (Grails, Holy Sons), guitarist Cameron Deyell (Sia, Streets of Laredo) and Patrick Damphier (The Mynabirds, Field Days, who produced and played on “Offa My Hands”). Together, they worked to create an ominous take on love, where hope can exist among heartbreak and the end is only as finite as we make it to be. On songs like the title track and “Bum Me Out,” Mayfield bends the angelic notes of her voice over off-kilter orchestration, building an environment of warrior-style triumph; on “Safe 2 Connect 2” she takes stock of the digital world to a haunting, acoustic backdrop that gives a subtle ode to her bluegrass roots.
“Been though hell, there’s no telling what might happen in my future,” she sings. “All I can do is be thankful for each moment that’s my own.”
Mayfield has paved an unconventional lifestyle – playing in her family’s bluegrass band since the age of eight, she didn’t have any traditional schooling and released her first album at the age of fifteen, when she was discovered by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. Influenced by everything from that mountain sound to the modern garage, Mayfield has been able to come at songwriting from a pure perspective, lead more by her heart than any textbook. It’s what makes the tracks of Sorry Is Gone so striking and visceral – there is no filter on the emotions, no rulebook and certainly no excuses for anything she’s been through or the candor she fires.
“I’m not going to bite my lip on anything,” she says. “If there is one thing I am going to do, it’s talk and sing about what I want to. No one is going to manipulate me.”
The sorry is gone, once and for all – and Sorry Is Gone is a permission slip for anyone who wants to stop apologizing for others, and start living for themselves. ●
