Chuck Prophet & His Cumbia Shoes with a new KEXP session just out, this is amazing but live in front of a big audience takes it all to another level. Always a treat to chill with Kevin Cole in the KEXP studios. Punchy mix courtesy of Kevin Suggs (legend). It’s been a while. First time in their new studios. And man, do we like what they’ve done with the place. The first time we did a KEXP taping, we pulled in to the parking lot with KEXP dialled on the radio. Dick Dale was killing it. Within a couple minutes, a door flew open and Dick Dale and his guys were rolling their amps out of there. And we rolled our stuff in.
Everything flows. This session was a whirlwind. Kevin Suggs doing the hand-to-hand combat! Amazing.
During lockdown I spent a lot of time watching bands on KEXP. And fantasizing about what it might be like to play again. Much of the inspiration for “Wake The Dead” came from those sessions, especially the ones they taped in Mexico City with @sonidogallonegro among others. We taped this on the first day of our tour. That took us to the Pacific Northwest and over to the continent for five weeks worth of shows. We were fresh. Mystery train of a journey. Make sure you don’t miss the UK run this next February.
Songs: Same Old Crime 00:48 Wake The Dead 03:32 Betty’s Song 07:36 Sugar Into Water 11:58 In The Shadows (For Elon) 15:42 First Came The Thunder 19:08
The Band: Chuck Prophet – Vocals, Electric & Acoustic Guitar James DePrato – Vocals, Electric Guitar Vicente Rodriguez – Vocals, Drums Joaquin Zamudio Garcia – Bass, Guitar Mario Cortez – Vocals, Percussion Alejandro Gomez – Vocals, Keyboard, Acoustic Guitar
Chuck Prophet performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded October 22nd, 2024.
Royel Otis are cool with enjoying life one wave at a time. The Australian guitar-pop duo made up of 20-somethings Royel Maddell and Otis Pavlovic have been on a meteoric rise in the past year with a few EP jams (‘Motels’, ‘Kool Aid’), a midsummer setup single (‘Oysters In My Pocket’) spiralling into blissed-out versions of The Cranberries’‘Linger’ and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’, and close to half a billion streams of their entire catalogue.
Their debut album, ‘Pratts & Pain’ (out now via Ourness), is merely a vignette of their pop-inspired heartache but it’s one that magnifies imperfections with tones you’d expect to find in the aisles of Amoeba Music. If you say you haven’t heard Royel Otis’ cover of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder On The Dancefloor”, you’re lying. The Live A Versionperformance went global, amassing millions of views and garnering the duo a fresh batch of fans. Top that off with eight ARIA nominations and the success of their second album, “Pratts & Pain”,and you’ll start to understand why 2024 was such a stellar year for Royel Otis.
‘Pratts & Pain’ recorded alongside producer Dan Carey (Wet Leg, Foals, Fontaines D.C.), isn’t a concept project. In fact, the sophomore album touches on a number of themes, according to the duo themselves: love, fights, being young and a bit stupid. Despite switching the salty air and sunshine of Bondi for the cold of London, the feel of summer is present all the way throughout the indie record – most notably in “Sofa King”,a cheeky play on words. A sense of fun reigns supreme in ‘Pratts & Pain’ even in “Big Ciggie”, where death is the main topic of conversation, the upbeat track takes an almost jester-like approach.
There’s a reason Royel Otis won Best Group and Best Rock Album at this year’s ARIAs. They deserved it. “It will be easy to remember exactly where you were when you first heard this project. Think skin mottled with sweat and the aftertaste of an alcohol-inspired kiss on your breath; a beautifully warm sunset as the sun tucks itself away under the dashboard of your first car; a little bit of heartbreak – but Royel Otis promise to help you get through it.”
It’s difficult to think of another album that’s left such a mark on music in 2024 than “Ramona“. After hitting play, the feelings are instant: awe at Grace Cummings’ powerful, dramatic voice, storytelling, vocal abilities, songs, and talent. This is an artist who keeps growing and crafts music that feels like it is not from this world. “Ramona” is timeless, classic, poignant, and moving. “Ramona“ is a work of raw truth rendered in its most beautiful form. In a departure from the self-produced approach of her 2019 debut “ Refuge Cove” and its 2022 follow-up“Storm Queen” – the artist worked with producer Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty, Margo Price) and dreamed up a lavishly orchestrated sound that fully accommodates the depth and scope of her vocal prowess. With its visceral reflection on grief and self-destruction and emotional violence, “Ramona“ brings a stunning new grandeur to Cummings’ music while refusing to soften or temper its humanity.
On “Ramona”, this MelbourneAustralia-based singer songwriter artist embraces lush, striking orchestral arrangements, raw, bluesy songs of heartbreak and reflection, and moments of delicacy. A deeply personal record for Cummings, perhaps what’s so surprising about it is the universality within the songs. It’s a masterwork.
Who knew what to expect from Powderfinger Bernard Fanning and Paul Dempsey (of Something For Kate fame) when they announced they’d joined forces for a new project called Fanning Dempsey National Park?
What could have been “My Happiness” meets “Monsters” and made a lot of people happy wasn’t what the pair presented on their debut album, “The Deluge“. This is an album that wouldn’t sound out of place besides the likes of bands like Split Enz, Kraftwerk, and even David Bowie.
There are keyboards and bright, chirpy synthesizers, sunny guitars, and lyrics and soaring melodies to match their optimistic vibes. It’s simultaneously a throwback, with calls to modern production techniques and instruments and a daring look to the future.
It’s an exciting, ambitious release that proves two of the country’s strongest songwriters still have plenty of room for growth, curiosity, and pumping out thrilling new tunes.
Co-produced by Guy Massey (Spiritualised, The Divine Comedy, Kylie) and Sophie Jamieson, I still want to share is an album exploring the push and pull, merry-go-round nature of anxious attachment and how it weaves, cuts and steals through familial and romantic relationships. Throughout the record is a perpetual longing to belong, a yearning to learn how to love and let go, and a continual missing of the mark.
Each song clings tightly to the possibility of home, but never arrives there. The album was recorded in North London between Guy’s studio and Konk Studios, with string arrangements from Josephine Stephenson (Daughter, Ex:Re, Lisa Hannigan) and drums from Ed Riman (Hilang Child).
Formed in Austin, Texas, Sun June released their first full-length album in 2018 titled “Years” released via Keeled Scales. In October 2020, the group announced their second full-length album. The group released that album, “Somewhere”, in 2021 again through Keeled Scales and Run for Cover. In 2023 they released their third album, “Bad Dream Jaguar”, The third album was created while Colwell and Salisbury lived 1,300 miles apart, sending demos back and forth.
Sun June’s music often feels like a shared memory – the details so close to the edge of a song that you can touch them. And as an Austin-based project, their music has also always felt strangely and specifically Texan – unhurried, long drives across an impossible expanse of openness, refractions shimmering off the pavement in the heat. Originallybased in Austin, TX-based five-piece make unhurried, expansive indie-rock songs that are delicately, almost psychedelically stretched out; time, for them, is less a constraint as much as it is a new instrument to play with, a form to bend and subvert.”
Colwell has an ear for restraint, for editing it down and embracing emptiness; Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy sounding in the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured foundation in a sense of ease.
Years
Initially formed by Laura Colwell and Stephen Salisbury, Austin’s five-piece band successfully released their debut album “Years” in 2018. The 10-track record is about to get a second pressing on Keeled Scales
Colwell and the band’s other primary songwriter and lyricist, Stephen Salisbury, met while working on the production of Terrence Malick’s 2017 film, Song to Song. “Stephen was an editor and I was a production assistant,” Colwell explains. “Ryan Gosling was in the movie and was bringing his guitar around when they were editing some songs. So Stephen and I usually worked late and started writing joke songs using the guitar,” “and thought ‘Let’s just keep doing this, it’s fun.’”
Younger EP
Sun June unveiled “Younger”, a 4-track digital only EP including two new songs.
Co-produced by Evan Kaspar, the first single was “Monster Moon” is already available. Warmful and mid-tempo, the regret pop song showcases a dreamy self-reflection on a failed relationship.
Somewhere
Though the group trades on the “regret pop” tagline, Colwell explains that her and Salisbury’s songwriting has turned to their own current relationship as romantic partners and their future. “You can’t really regret the present or the future,” she says. “We are trying to live more in the moment. I deal with grief and Stephen deals with sobriety. And then there’s our relationship in the middle of that.”
One of “Somewhere’s” central songs, “Karen O,” seems to deal in the past of a night spent wandering around New York City. Catching a Karen O live set, ambling across the Brooklyn Bridge to the city, missing phone calls from a parent, and climbing the stairs to an ex-lover’s apartment are palpable in their detail. Aside from admitting that Cat Power’s “Manhattan” was a blueprint for the album, Colwell says the remainder of “Karen O” is purely fictional. “I’m sorry. It’s a dream,” she admits. “The song is about heartache and having a hard time letting go. And I’ve done that in New York, but we never saw Karen O. A friend of mine has and heard the song and said, ‘Were we at the same show?’”
The album’s opener, “Bad With Time,” also has cinematic images, borrowing Neil Young’s line from “Unknown Legend” about a woman set free on her Harley Davidson out on the desert highway. Colwell admits that her and Salisbury’s time spent in film has impacted their writing. “I was realizing the other day that all of our songs are a little montage-y,” she says. The way they put the listener into the set of the song makes this particularly evident.
Bad Dream Jaguar
There’s a constant push-and-pull in Sun June’s songwriting. Vocalist and band leader Colwell and guitarist Stephen Salisbury have always shared song writing duties since the band’s inception, but “BadDream Jaguar” is the first time that they collaborated from afar. Salisbury left Texas for North Carolina in 2020, shifting the way the band recorded, and beginning a long-distance relationship between him and Colwell. It gave more room to Sun June’s other members – lead guitarist Michael Bain (whose lithe guitar parts Colwell credits as imparting that “dust ol’ Texas sound”), bassist Justin Harris, and drummer Sarah Schultz – to explore other projects. And for Colwell, it made it easier to explore song writing as an individual, living and writing songs alone.
It also meant there was a newfound privacy to these songs, as Colwell and Salisbury wrote songs for and about one another some 1300 miles apart. The distance strained their relationship, and they poured those struggles into songs. When Salisbury sent the first iteration of “Washington Square” to Colwell, it felt like a gut punch – a, “Damn, he’s really going through it” moment. It felt heavier to be collaborating and songwriting in this way, not inhabiting the same room but instead the same lonely sadness. But it also allowed for a new type of intimacy. And it was a comfort in some ways, to be allowed into someone else’s psyche and pain.
Colwell left Texas in 2022 for North Carolina. The record was recorded in spurts, the first Sun June LP that wasn’t just born out of five musicians in a room. It took five or six sessions across a number of studios, with the bulk of it coming together at producer Duszynski’s Dandy Sounds. They also invited in more collaborators to flesh out their cinematic, spacious sound. Here, the existing line-up of Colwell, Salisbury, Bain, Harris, and Schultz, alongside guitars/vocals from new touring member Santiago Dietche, is built out with woodwinds from Alexis Marsh, Justin Morris’ pedal steel, and Duszynski’s guitars and synths. It required trust in new collaborators, and in each other, in a new process.
The bulk of the record was written after the release of 2021’s “Somewhere”. “Bad Dream Jaguar” is the most disparate yet, a collage of soundscapes, of fever dreams. It toes the line between country and pop, like putting on a cowboy hat and sitting in your bedroom alone, or getting all dressed up in glitter and just staying home.
Colwell has an ear for restraint, for editing it down and embracing emptiness; Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy sounding in the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured foundation in a sense of ease. The layers on “Bad Dream Jaguar” don’t tangle they float, sheaths of divergent and luminescent sonics hanging together as the sun goes down, darkness seeping in.
“Bad Dream Jaguar” exists in the chasm between giving up and going all-in. And a flicker of quiet confidence powering through, a small hopeful glow at its core.
The definitive documentary on legendary metal icon Ronnie James Dio. Dio’s story transcends the standard rock documentary. Beautifully highlighting both his powerful voice and his gentle heart, “DIO: Dreamers Never Die” delves deep into the singer’s incredible rise from ’50s doo-wop crooner to his early rock days in Ritchie Blackmore’s RAINBOW, replacing Ozzy Osbourne in BLACK SABBATH, and finally cementing his rock star status with DIO.
The first documentary to be authorized by the artist’s estate, the film incorporates never-before-seen footage and personal photos from Dio’s archives as well as offering intimate scenes with his closest peers, family, and friends, including Wendy Dio, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, Vinny Appice, Lita Ford,Rob Halford, Sebastian Bach, Eddie Trunk and Jack Black, as they bring viewers inside the life of one of rock and roll’s true heroes.
Taking inspiration from the likes of Mazzy Star and The Smiths, Bleach Lab have fused their own introspective yet emotionally frenetic soundscape, After forging their trio of explorative indie-rock EPs during the isolation of lockdown, Bleach Lab found the recording of their debut album ‘Lost In A Rush of Emptiness’ live in a room together to be a transformative experience, which garnered them critical acclaim from Clash, Dork, DIY and fans alike upon its release in September 2023.
Bleach Lab are now back with ‘Drown’, produced by new guitarist Louis Takooree alongside drummer Kieran Weston. Bassist Josh Longman describes, “We spent a lot of time writing to try to progress our sound, whilst also staying true to what we love. We wanted to challenge ourselves to write something a bit grungier with this one.”
Lead vocalist Jenna Kyle adds, “’Drown’ is about being stuck in a toxic cycle of going back to the same person, or always ending up with the same person even though they may not be that good for you. It’s trying to break out of that cycle and find the confidence to move on”.
Further elevating their reputation with their dynamic live shows – which have included a headline show at London’s Scala and international festivals across the US and Europe – Bleach Lab are gearing up for a special show in London on 19th February at the Lower Third, to showcase the new music the band have been working on.
released November 13th, 2024 Produced by Louis Takooree & Kieran Weston (Bleach Lab)
A uniquely patient and indifferent artist setting out to serve The Music, not The Machine, Sacramented: Extended (2024) is an extension of 2023’s “Sacramented”, produced by Micah Tawlks in Nashville. This extension includes a lost track from the Peptalk sessions, remixes by Boston’s drab and LA’s Benjamin Lazar Davis, as well as 4 voice memos floating in and around the record.
Molly Parden’s third full-length album, “Sacramented“, feels wholly realized in the way that only the lengthy and deep passage of time can bring about. With the ideation of some cuts, like single “Dandy Blend,” dating as far back as 2016, the singer-songwriter’s lush yet gentle voice tiptoes through the 39-minute collection with gravity and grace as she vulnerably persists at the one thing anyone can ever meaningfully do when one thinks and writes about love—ask questions. In full collaboration with Nashville staple Micah Tawlks (COIN, Hayley Williams, The Brook & The Bluff), “Sacramented” earthy and playfully poignant textures bubble up while tasteful breakbeats and expansive string arrangements reveal themselves with purpose.
Alongside Parden’s carefully constructed lyrical contributions, each song grounds and envelops itself in a clarity and warmth that becomes essential, much like an every-morning cup of coffee.
Sometimes the human voice is all you need, communicating something essential about our drive to exist together as a species, to sound our internal worlds in union, at volume. Named after an Irish term for a cloak for protection, a breastplate and a hymn, this Irish quartet’s second album is incredibly simple on paper: a collection of 10 songs about bold women featuring four exceptional female singers (Méabh Meir,Lily Power, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch). But these interpretations of songs such as “The Newry Highwayman”, “Blackwaterside” and “Death and the Lady”, produced by John “Spud” Murphy (who also produces Lankum), are astonishingly mighty and moving.
Landless are Lily Power, Meabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinead Lynch. Formed in 2013 and based in Ireland, they sing unaccompanied traditional songs in four-part harmony.
Occasional, minimal accompaniment by pipe organ, clavichord, shruti box and strings only lifts the weight of their harmonies higher.
Released 7th June on Glitterbeat Records. Traditional, arranged by Landless Recorded, mixed and produced by John ‘Spud’ Murphy
The Fat Angel Sings 