While the previous Amen Dunes records had all been largely improvisational first-take affairs, recorded in a matter of weeks at most, the forthcoming full-length, “Love”, is the product of close to a year and a half of continuous work.
Damon McMahon (aka Amen Dunes) chose to hold the main recording sessions in Montreal with Dave Bryant and Efrim Menuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. In addition to recording the sessions that McMahon produced, members of Godspeed also played on several of the songs, along with Colin Stetson on saxophone and Elias Bender-Ronnenfelt of Iceage, who duets with McMahon on two tracks. The result is definitively the most substantial Amen Dunes record to date. These are elemental songs about time, love and memory, as much about the listener as they are about the writer: pure, open, and beautiful.
The Rolling Stones have announced dates for the No Filter tour that will bring them to the U.K. and Europe from May to July. It’s the band’s first run of U.K. dates in five years. Pre-sale tickets for most of the 11 stadium shows starts on February. 27th, with sales for the Dublin, France and Czech Republic shows to follow. General sales begin on March 2nd. You can see the full list of dates below.
The Stones won a Grammy last month for their return-to-roots LP Blue & Lonesome in the Best Traditional Blues Album category. It was their third-ever Grammy, not including a Lifetime Achievement Award. A few weeks earlier, Billboard listed Blue & Lonesome as the ninth-biggest album of 2017. The covers set came about by accident as the band prepared to record an album of new original songs; they’d become distracted during the sessions by playing some of their favorite older tunes instead.
The original record remains on hold. Singer Mick Jagger had noted they had only “half an album” of material recorded. ”It’s like putting it on top of the strainer and seeing what soaks through by the time you come back to them again,” guitarist Ron Wood said. “The lumps that are left on top after time has gone by, that’s what you make your dough out of. It wouldn’t surprise me if we recut them all again. It’s one of those things.”
The Stones have now been in business for 56 years, but guitarist Keith Richards wrote on the band’s Twitter account that they “haven’t finished yet. It’s still too early to talk about the Stones’ legacy. There’s one thing that we haven’t yet achieved and that’s to really find out how long you can do this. It’s still such a joy to play with this band that you can’t really let go of it.”
Warren Zevon’s self-titled 1976 album announced he was one of the most striking talents to emerge from the LosAngeles soft rock singer/songwriter community, and Linda Ronstadt (a shrewd judge of talent if a sometimes questionable interpreter) recorded three of its songs on two of her biggest-selling albums, which doubtlessly earned Zevon bigger royalty checks than the album itself ever did.
His own breakthrough album from the songwriter’s songwriter from LA. Warren Zevon had been knocking around since the late ‘60s, but with the championing of Jackson Browne, the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt (who recorded a bunch of his tunes) and subsequently the patronage of David Geffen at Asylum Records, he finally connected in a big way. The fact that it was with “Werewolves of London”, the most throwaway song he’d recorded for the label at that point didn’t matter; it was still a great song, and a great entre to Zevon’s weird and violent world. The title track, “Lawyers, Guns & Money”, “Accidentally Like a Martyr” and the seriously wacko “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” are the stuff of genius. Oh, and did you know “Werewolves…” (which peaked at #11 in Australia and was Zevon’s only charting single) features the rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood?.
The tracks “Excitable Boy” and “Werewolves of London” were considered macabrely humorous by critics. The historical “Veracruz” dramatizes the United States occupation of Veracruz, and likewise “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” is a fictionalization of a mercenary in Africa. “Lawyers, Guns and Money” is a tongue-in-cheek tale of a young American man’s adventures in Cold War era Latin America. In addition, there are two ballads about life and relationships (“Accidentally Like a Martyr” and “Tenderness on the Block”), as well as a dance tune (“Nighttime in the Switching Yard”).
Street Hassle is the eighth solo album by rock icon Lou Reed, originally released on Arista Records. The album is notable as the first commercially released pop album to employ binaural recording technology.
Arguably, Street Hassle – the apogee of Reed’s adventures in the New York junkie underworld, made up of three “movements” , The first part is titled “Waltzing Matilda” but has nothing to do with the Australian song of the same name; we’re guessing the title stuck with him after Australian tours in both ’74 and ’77. Street Hassle and Slipaway. But each movement bleeds into and informs the other, adding up to a stark meditation on the fragility of human life. Besides, if the track ended after the second movement, with an overdose victim’s corpse dumped unceremoniously in the street, it would simply be too harrowing; instead, a ruminative coda – with guest vocals from Bruce Springsteen – provides a sliver of solace. Ultimately, though, the message is heart-wrenchingly bleak, with Bruce adapting the words of Born To Run to fit Lou’s more pessimistic worldview: “Tramps like us, we were born to pay.” this amazing rock opera written in 1978 by the best living rock songwriter, the NYC man Lou Reed. The song is divided into three parts (Walzing Matilda, Street Hassle, Slip Away), which have all the same music structure that meets first the orchestra, then acoustic guitars and rock bass guitars, and at the end the prayer of a penitent man, made of tears..
This was Lou’s eighth solo album, and one of many a fan’s favourites, “Street Hassle” is most often noted for its epic three-part title track. As was common on ‘70s Lou Reed solo albums, Street Hassle contained a song originally written during his days in the Velvet Underground—in this case, “Real Good Time Together” (which more recently Patti Smith had been using as a set opener) – and the album the first pop album to employ binaural recording technology aka Dummy Head Recording, a recording technique that sounds so odd we suggest you look it up.
Street Hassle combines live concert tapes and studio recordings. All of the songs on Street Hassle were written by Lou Reed, The album was met with mostly positive reviews, Its Raw, wounded, and unapologetically difficult, Street Hassle isn’t the masterpiece Reed was shooting for, but it’s still among the most powerful and compelling albums he released during the 1970s, and too personal and affecting to ignore.
Rhode Island-based folk band The Low Anthem have just released their newest LP, The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea, via Joyful Noise Recordings. Per the band’s announcement earlier this year, the concept album tells a story inspired by one found inside the Kay Larsen-written biography of JohnCage, Where the Heart Beats: A salt doll goes into the depths of the sea to find herself but loses her body in the process. The beautiful story comes to a pivotal point during the third song on the LP, “Give My Body Back.” The Low Anthem now share the music video for this song .
The music video is hauntingly beautiful. Created by Dann Dodd and The Low Anthem co-founder Ben KnoxMiller, it follows the narrative of a cube-shaped salt doll as she enters the waters of the ocean to discover who she really is. Knox Miller shares what brought about the salt doll’s unique shape:
In its lyrics, “Give My Body Back” describes the underwater landscape in which the salt doll now finds herself. Still unclear about who she is, the salt doll observes herself in relation to her new world and realizes she is dissolving: “Under the wilder cyclones / Tearing at my skin / I see the edges soften / As I shed some part back in.”
The themes of self-discovery found on The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea come at the end of a period of reflection and profound evolution for the band and its respective members, after having survived a car accident that ended their 2016 tour. The band now find purpose at a grass-roots level, giving back to their community by running a vaudeville-era theater in Providence, R.I., managed by band co-founders Knox Miller and Jeff Prystowsky. “I like to call it a palace of music,” says Prystowsky. “You’re walking into a theatre from almost a hundred years ago, still intact, built for the acoustics of music, pre-the invention of the PA. It’s so unlike anything in the 21st century that it ignites your creative muscles to work. You immediately lose your frame of reference, in a good way.”
Our new single, “Twentytwo” is out now! We’ve been waiting to share this song with you for so long. It’s about resilience, enduring the tide, standing through the waves. It’s one of our favorite songs on the upcoming album, Twenty Two in Blue, due out March 23rd. We hope you love it as much as we do. It’s available now everywhere you listen to music.
The track sees the band, and especially lead vocalist Julia Cumming, channel their inner Fleetwood Mac for a glam-folk that’s gorgeous and lush while feeling fragile in places. Even paraphrasing some Dylan Thomas poetry for extra poignancy.
It’s a truly beautiful number and sees Sunflower Bean grow from their former anarchic roots to find a common thread among us all. If it’s an evolution seen on the album .
Dorset quartet The Death Of Pop are returning next month with a new EP, coming in the form of its first taster, new single ‘700 Spas’.
The track is the first preview of ‘Heads West’, which comes out via the Bristol-based Leisure Records on 16th March. A jangly, retro cut that barely scrapes the two-minute mark, ‘700 Spas’ is a sunny return that feels completely uninhibited.
“700 Spas is inspired by a spelling error that I saw a student at school make,” the band’s vocalist Angus James tells us over email. “I started to consider how isolating it would be if you struggled with communication. The song is about knowing everyone around you is leaving you behind but being powerless to understand why or do anything about it.”
The band are set to play a headline show in London, on 28th April at Shacklewell Arms.
John Peel’s legendary status is defined by the vast amount of bands and artists he championed. His urge to “hear something he hadn’t heard before” led to a relentless search through demo tapes sent in to his radio show from songwriters and musicians looking for a break. His conviction in not following conventional programming formats, and offering his listeners an alternative to daytime pop pap would ensure that his relevance to broadcasting would remain vital right up to his untimely death in 2004.
His sessions would become an important outlet for new listeners to sample live selections from fledgling and established artists. Many of these recordings have been released to the public, some remain in the vaults. Here is a continuing history of all the sessions, starting in 1967 for his “Top Gear” show right up to the final recording in October 2004.
recorded 15th December 1967: Jimi Hendrix Session
Tracklist
Day Tripper
Spanish Castle Magic
Radio One Jingle
Wait Until Tomorrow
After debuting with an album that captured the good-time, easy feeling of the early-’70s version of the Grateful Dead at their warmest, GospelbeacH returned with a second album that jumps ahead a decade or so, switches gears sonically, and in the process makes a bigger impression.
Under the guidance of Beachwood Spark’s Brent Rademaker, on “Another Summer Of Love” the band shelves its impressively deep Dead worship in favor of some serious Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers vibes. From the jangling warmth of the guitars to the hooky choruses, the subtle keyboards to the ringing, overdriven guitar solos that feel lifted from Mike Campbell’s bag of tricks, the album is like a lost Heartbreakers classic made just before Petty went solo on Full Moon Fever in the late ’80s.
On Another Summer Of Love GospelbeacH debuted on European soil for a short tour including Green Man Festival and a handful of club shows in the UK and Scandinavia.
