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 landscape 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.”
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, the band began to take shape as audiences got moving. Sharing tastes and songwriting duties, cousins Joe White and Fran Keaney, 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 rode that wave from strength to strength.
Since the band’s inception, Rolling Blackouts C.F. have carved out a unique place in the local musical landscape with their penchant for hooky guitars and undeniable melodies, married to lyrics that are intelligent and wide-eyed, with an unmistakably-Australian dry wit.
‘The French Press’ EP landed on many ‘Best Of 2017’ lists, including The Guardian/The Observer ‘Hidden Gems’. Meanwhile, lead single ‘French Press‘ made countless end of year lists
I can’t imagine one single person without a happy face when leaving the hall after being at this show. Even so, this recording has one big problem: it is too short!
So, here’s about 51 minutes of Rory Gallagher at De Hanenhof, Geleen, Holland on the 12th of November 1987 and beware, this is the kind of show that turns you addicted to Rory’s music!
Rory Gallagher -Live set from De Hanehof, Geleen, Holland 12th November 1987
Setlist:
1 Walkin Blues 2 Pistol Slapper Blues 3 Messin With The Kid 4 Out On The Western Plain 5 Don’t Start Me Talkin 6 When My Baby She Left Me 7 Bullfrog Blues 8 All Around Man 9 Nadine
The second album from Stockholm-based songwriter Hannes Ferm, aka HOLY, considers where our subconscious goes at night: dreams, pent-up emotions, possibilities of unknown dimensions. “I wanted to go beyond my outer limits,” he says, leaving behind the garage pop of his 2015 debut for widescreen studio-science and rock opera ambition. The record borrows its name from astronomer Jon Willis’ book All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life. “Ferm’s search starts within his own head, “says KEXP, likening his sound to Tame Impala and glam-era David Bowie. “A pervasive feeling of alienation feeds into the dynamism of the album.” It sees release on PNKSLM Recordings.
Brooklyn noise-pop duo Sleigh Bells – vocalist Alexis Krauss and guitarist Derek Edward Miller – have shared their new video, directed by Miller, for ‘Favorite Transgressions’, taken from last year’s ‘Kid Kruschev’ mini-album. Last year, Sleigh Bells released a new mini-album, Kid Kruschev, and today they’ve shared a video for one of the tracks from it, “Favorite Transgressions.” It was directed by the duo’s own Derek Miller, and it acts as a sort of frantic, bloody eulogy for both him and Alexis Krauss who, according to the video, both died in a car crash in Florida in 1999
Dead Meadow are happy to announce they will be releasing a new album, ‘The Nothing They Need’ at Xemu Records, on 30th March 2018 in the UK. They have just shared their first single, “Keep Your Head” which perfectly exemplifies the band’s unique marriage of Sabbath riffs, dreamy layers of guitar-fuzz bliss, and singer Jason Simon’s melodic croon
Five Songs is actually a four track album, because before I slid on my headphones and listened to it, I was desperately searching for that fifth song. There really are only four songs on an album entitled Five Songs. This alone intrigued me, so by the time I had finished listening to the four songs, I was more than intrigued by this young, Pittsburgh-based band.
“Bemis Point” opens the album and is undoubtedly my favorite song. The barely two and a half minute track holds its own against other songs in the album that contain more hardcore elements. Ryan Yester completely solidifies the song with his crisp, perfectly timed drumming. Not to mention the ripping on the electric guitar toward the latter end of the song. The chorus is great lyrically, as well as catchy, which takes a bit away from the disheartening factor that comes with it, but still maintains the idea of an unequal love in a relationship. “But I always thought that we would meet an end together/You talked about a way out/I talked about forever.”
“Corsages” begins almost as an angsty poem, with every other line being yelled more than spoken or sung. Despite that interesting choice of vocals, the song is dynamite. The whole album is — as described by the band themselves — all about breakups, but they dwell on them in the simplest of ways. “Corsages” is a short story of a girl who saves all her flowers and holds onto them, and emotions, for too long. It’s a melancholy song, for sure, but showcases talent from every edge of the band; from guitar riffs to songwriting ability.
“You Turned Everything To Paper” is similar to “Corsages” but focuses more on the spoken word than the music, which I feel drains the listener. As someone who loves to truly immerse myself in music, I found that the two songs in the row like that were not ideal (for its despondent tone) and elevated it by taking away head-banging beats or toe tapping rhythms.
Even so, that is not to say that the song is not lyrically intriguing to listen to. Especially since it flows into the concluding song “Flubline.” This track is a hole in wall, mosh pit rager. It has so much potential. It feels like Nirvana and Yellowcard came together to create a Bring Me The Horizon song. It suits Shin Guard’s style, but the overall sound of it is a bit too reminiscent of other post hardcore or emo groups. But, I can’t deny my pull towards its beat and verses that Shin Guard so eloquently created.
we love the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and we love this song. here’s our cover of “Soft Shock!” , this California punk rock band is more than force to be reckoned with. Frontwoman, Lydia Night, is everything you want in a lead singer: talented, dedicated and charismatic. It’s hard to imagine her and her über talented band anywhere but on a stage, playing their hearts out. Take the Spice Girls, the Ramones, and Bikini Kill and put them all in a blender. Take a sip of that mix and enjoy all that The Regrettes have to offer.
Will Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.
Even so, even awkward and amateurish, Twin Fantasy is deeply, truly adored. Legions of reverent listeners carve rituals out of it: sobbing over Famous Prophets, making out to Cute Thing, dancing their asses off as Bodysclimbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feeleverything: his hope, his despair, his wild overjoy. He’s trusting you – plural you, thousands of you – with the things he can’t say out loud. I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends, he sings – and then, caught between truths, backtracks: I never came out to my friends. We were all on Skype, and I laughed and changed the subject.
You might be imagining an extended diary entry, an angsty transmission from a bygone LiveJournal set to power chords and cranked to eleven. You would be wrong. Twin Fantasy is not a monologue. Twin Fantasyis a conversation. You know, he sings, that I’m mostly singing about you. This is Will’s greatest strength as a songwriter: he spins his own story, but he’s always telling yours, too. Between nods to local details – Harper’s Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat – he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.
Early next year, Car Seat Headrest will release a new version of Twin Fantasy. “It was never a finished work,” Will says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.
It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Will, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those apologies to future me’s and you’s, there is more forgiveness than fury.
This, Will says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy. From the new ‘Twin Fantasy’ available February 16th on Matador Records
Leicester duo comprising of Jamie Ward (producer/multi-instrumentalist) and James Stafford (vocalist), better known as Dark Dark Horse are back to recording and releasing music as a group and it has never sounded better. After breaks working on their own projects, they are back and have unveiled a new song as Dark Dark Horse titled “And Then We Had Nothing At All.”
The song features Stafford’s soaring vocals over a track that slowly builds into a large crescendo. The drums slowly build alongside synths, piano, strings and eventually electric guitar in an epic finale.
“‘And Then We Had Nothing At All’ is perhaps the most epic and ambitious song we’ve recorded so far. At over seven minutes long it defies the typical conventions of a single but it’s power, beauty and grandeur was something we felt needed its own space,” Jamie Ward says. He continues, calling the track a “kaleidoscope of swirling reverse synths, dusty samples from my mother’s children’s music classes, pounding drums and sweeping violin… we really threw the kitchen sink at this one.”
This is the first release of the year from the pair following their 2017 EP Luna II.
Kevin Morby and Waxahatchee toured together and collaborated on stage last year, and now they have teamed up once again to cover two songs by the late Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia, Magnolia Electric Co). They did “Farewell Transmission” from Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Co and “The Dark Don’t Hide It” from Magnolia Electric Co’s What Comes After the Blues. They turned both songs into duets, and they also sing some gorgeous harmonies together in the chorus of the latter. Here’s what Morby says about the project:
My love for Jason Molina began only a few years ago. I had overlooked him for years, too overwhelmed by his many monikers and sprawling catalogue. Then on a European tour in 2016 our driver put on Magnolia Electric Company and my mind was blown – and so began my obsession with the man and his music. A few months after hearing him I was on tour with Waxahatchee where Katie and I bonded over our mutual love for Molina, and we got the idea to record two of our favorite Songs: Ohia songs – which is what you have here today; Farewell Transmission b/w The Dark Don’t Hide It.These were recorded in Upstate New York with my live band at my drummer’s studio, The Chicken Shack, with both Katie and I splitting vocals duties. We would record all day, eating eggs from all the chickens running around, taking breaks to read old articles and watch live footage of Jason and his band. He’s a true inspiration and there’s no other songwriter or vocalist quite like him. We are deeply honored to be able to sing his songs, and we do hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed creating them. The cover art was done by William Schaff, who is responsible for the iconic Magnolia Electric Co. album art. All proceeds of the digital sales will go to MusiCares® – an organization that provides support and community services to musicians in need of medical, personal & financial assistance – and also helped Jason in his struggle with addiction, as well as paid to have a polyp removed from my vocal chords in 2014. A truly wonderful cause.”
Peace and Happy New Year, Kevin Morby, 2018
Kevin Morby & Waxahatchee – Farewell Transmission
Kevin Morby & Waxahatchee – The Dark Don’t Hide It
