The Fat Angel Sings

After nearly 30 years since the release of their debut album, Mercury Rev have become a buzz band all over again with the recent extensive shoegaze revival. Yet although their name has materialized upon countless listicles highlighting the genre’s first wave of artists, their influence extends far beyond the realm of dream-pop, as their psychedelically shaded sound has crossed over into chamber pop, alt-country, space rock, and beyond over the course of 10 albums.

This their eleventh album continues the experimental streak. The singles leading up to “Born Horses” the New Yorkers’ first album since “The Delta Sweet Revisited”,their 2019 collection of collaborations paying homage to country-soul icon Bobbie Gentry have suggested the influence of Beat poetry and minimalist composition, with jazz and classical instrumentation aiding the band’s ambient blend of sound.

Yet as the band’s members explain, that set of influences goes much deeper, with ’60s British prog-rockers Bachdenkel being listed on the influences playlist they’ve shared with us, alongside Chicago’s cult krautrockers Bitchin Bajas, Greek new-age figure Iasos, and a handful of iconic figures among jazz and classical music.

With Born Horses landing this Friday via Bella Union, 

Julianna Riolino knows how to capture and highlight beauty before it fades. She spent her days running up to the release of her solo debut helping restore the stained glass windows at St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto. Riolino couldn’t help but reflect on her own past and the memories of pains, healing, and love strewn through it. “It made me think about life as a balancing act, and we’re all just trying to do our best to navigate it,” she says. That focus on morality and the stretch of time seeped naturally into Riolino’s Americana-indebted songwriting, resulting in the golden, fluid album “All Blue”, “If I was a painter, this would be my blue period,” she says. “I’m looking at my life, all my decisions lined up, and either atoning for them or laughing them off.”

The true religious fervour both in Riolino’s life and in the LP is directed towards icons like Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and The Band. Inspired by those artists, Riolino asked for a guitar as a child, and began teaching herself how to bring similar life to the melodies in her head. And while she honed her voice by participating in school musicals, songwriting remained a deeply personal venture.

The stories are told with a hefty dose of wit and wordplay mixed into pitch-perfect representations of classic Americana tropes. Riolino has shown that same duality in her role as a member of cult favourite Daniel Romano’s backing band, The Outfit, here utilizing Romano as a guitarist and putting a tighter focus on her powerful vocals.

Leaning more heavily on emotional reality than diary details, the kernel of truth and experience always shines through in Riolino’s songwriting. Lodged somewhere between AM radio breeze and the florid wash of Waxahatchee. Trilling organ and Roddy Carlyle’s rangy bass play the perfect complement to Riolino’s sweetly strummed acoustic.

Blending past and present musically represents Riolino’s own experience as well, the songs written over a period of years, their meanings picking beyond that stretch and pulling lessons forward. And in that process, her philosophical lyrics bring that complexity forward to the listener in surreally sweet melodies, pouring growth and healing directly through the ear and into the heart. “For me it was about looking into a reflection of who you once were, letting go of that idea of who you thought you needed to be, and being okay with who you are.” 

While some of us are on the topic of Go Betweens-adjacent books and writing, it’s about time I mentioned here that the book, Pig City, has been reissued for its 20th anniversary. Even Tracey Thorn’s book references it!

Pig City is obviously a book about music: the subtitle is “From the Saints to Savage Garden”, which nods (with intended irony) to Clinton Heylin’s book on New York punk, From the Velvets to the Voidoids, an obvious influence. But really, it’s a book about Brisbane, during and immediately after the Bjelke-Petersen years; about the tension between art and politics, and how each can exert a push and pull on the other. From cult heroes the Saints and the Go – Betweens to national icons Powderfinger and international stars Savage Garden, Brisbane has produced more than its share of great bands. 

The Go-Betweens are, naturally, a massive part of that story both Robert Forster and Lindy Morrison were kind enough to offer their endorsements for the book’s reissue (as well as an alumni, the great Peter Milton Walsh, from the Apartments). Grant McLennan, a few weeks before his death, had said the book had been passed around the tour van on the band’s final run through Europe.

All these things make me proud and while it’s had its detractors too, I’m astonished to still be talking about it all these years later. At the very least it started a conversation, and maybe the best part is that conversation remains ongoing, here and elsewhere. 

“Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind” is a live box show from King Crimson, released September 2nd, 2016. It’s the first full-length release of the seven-member incarnation of the group that formed. in 2013. When it comes to quality live material, there’s never been a better time to be a King Crimson fan than the 2010s. In addition to the exhaustive 40th anniversary boxes, there have been multiple releases from the 2014-2015 seven-piece band culminating with “Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind”, a set that features every song performed on the tour in excellent audio and video quality.

The box set was recorded during King Crimson’s 2015 tours of Japan, Canada and France, mainly in Takamatsu, Japan. The material performed is mostly from the 1969-1974, and most hadn’t been performed live since the 1970s, although the songs were rearranged to accommodate the current formation. Also included are some parts from 1995 onwards, along with new material. The title comes from a song of the same name that the band has been playing in concert.

The set was released in two editions: a 4-disc standard edition featuring the full concert on a Blu-ray disc and three CD (“virtual studio albums” with individual tracks without an audible audience); and a 6-disc deluxe limited edition, which includes the same as the standard edition plus two DVDs with the full concert and an extended brochure. The Blu-ray disc has a “image disabled” mode that allows you to listen to music without the video.

The CDs dispense with the running order of the show (and the audience!) in favour of slightly arbitrary thematic groupings: “Mostly Metal,” “Easy Money Shots,” and “Crimson Classics.” These are different mixes than those on the Blu-ray set, specifically for audio-only. The different mixes and running order provide a different feeling to the sets, but both are equally powerful. This band is a juggernaut and hearing them tackle not just the ’70s repertoire they hadn’t performed in decades, but some ’90s tracks as well, is something fans could not have dreamed of at the turn of the century. Rarely has a band that’s been around for 45-plus years sounded so vital. This is essential for fans.

Kate Bollinger grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her mother was a music therapist, and her two older brothers played in local bands. As a child, she sang in the Ash Lawn Opera every summer and began writing songs. In 2011, her brother Will recorded a song of hers, and she uploaded it to SoundCloud. From then on, she made primitive home recordings, which she released online and burned to CDs for her friends. In high school, she spent two summers studying songwriting at Young Writers Workshop and played her first show opening for her former songwriting teacher, Gene Osborne. Serendipitously, the other act on the bill was her all-time favorite band, Philly-based, The Extraordinaires. They kept in touch, and she went to Philadelphia the following year to record her first EP, “Key West”, with The Extraordinaires as her backing band. By college, while studying poetry and cinematography, she continued to self-release folk-pop songs to the attention of The New York Times and NPR. After years of playing and recording in solitude, Bollinger formed a band to record her EP, “I Don’t Wanna Lose, followed by the 2020 EP, “A word becomes a sound“.

She made her Ghostly International debut in 2022 with “Look at it in the Light”, a six-song collection that saw her building out the project’s sound and visual scope, including a series of collaborative music videos. Since moving to Los Angeles, Bollinger has split time between recording new material, contributing to friends’ projects (Drugdealer, Paul Cherry), touring (with Faye Webster, Tennis, Devendra Banhart, and others), directing music videos (for Jessica Pratt and her own), and releasing several standalone singles including “You At Home,” a collaboration with Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors.

Bollinger’s full-length debut arrives in late summer 2024 on Ghostly International. Written during a period of transience and change, “Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind” was made to resemble a mixtape — something carefully crafted and delivered from just one person to another. Here, Bollinger and her band favour the eclectic, melodic, and majestic, supporting intimate, stream-of-consciousness lyricism with classic instrumentation inspired by touchstones of 1960s folk-pop and 1990s indie rock.

Kate Bollinger from the forthcoming album ‘Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind’, out September 27th on Ghostly International.

Is there any festival more aptly named than End of the Road? As people and performers gather at the woodland site in Larmar Tree Gardens, near the border of Dorset and Wiltshire, it does inevitably feel like an ending – festival season, and summer itself, drifting into a gentle and bittersweet close. More than 100 live music performances featuring artists from across the world were on the bill at this year’s End Of The Road Festival, held in a quiet corner of rural Dorset.

The independently run event, which is in its 18th year, is renowned for its cross-genre musical line-up, and for showcasing emerging talent alongside established acts.

Headlining on Friday were Bristol-based punk band Idles, riding high after their Glastonbury set earlier in the summer, while on Saturday, 90s shoegaze pioneers Slowdive – who released their fifth album last year – were also taking a turn on the main Woods Stage.

It’s something felt by the artists as much as the attendees. Introducing a moving, pared-back set on the scenic Talking Heads stage, Jess Williamson (one-half of the Waxahatchee collaboration Plains) remarks that it has “last day of school vibes”. For others, such as the brilliant and sonically mercurial electro-pop duo Jockstrap, the weekend also marks the end of a long summer run: a tour in lambent twilight.

The biggest coup of the weekend actually comes on Thursday, as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the indie-folk music project of actor-songwriter Will Oldham, holds court on End of the Road’s main Woods stage. His is a sound that has influenced a generation of songwriters: sparse, soulful and cerebral Americana. Oldham seldom plays festivals, and his booking here is said to be more than a decade in the making.

It’s worth the wait: watching him and his small band pluck and strum their way through songs such as “Like It Or Not” and the rousing anticapitalist ballad “In the Wilderness” feels like a rare privilege. Not many festivals would yield a primetime spot on their biggest stage to music this gentle and intimate; he is rewarded with an audience that’s pin-drop quiet. When people say that End of the Road is a music lover’s festival, one with audiences that are “more attentive” than typical festival punters, it’s easy to dismiss it as spiel or hyperbole. Oldham’s set suggests it’s right on the money.

On The Woods stage, though, it’s very much a gentle introduction to the weekend. Laetitia Sadier, following the Stereolab reunion that rolled through Larmer Tree Gardens a couple of years back, is here in support of her fifth solo album “Rooting For Love“, containing, in her own words “sonic balm[s] to aid the evolution of Earth’s traumatized civilizations”.

But it’s not all acoustic guitars and mellifluous choruses. The bill across the weekend spans a rich and eclectic range of sounds, from moshy young American outfit Lip Critic (playing in the darkened Big Top tent), to rowdy British rockers Idles, to Irish trad experimentalists Lankum, who headline Saturday’s garden stage slot with a set that’s by turns exhilarating and laden with doomy dissonance. The Irish folk group whose 2023 album became the first in the genre to be nominated for the Mercury Prize in more than a decade. Lebanese collective Sanam and Somali singer and cultural activist Sahra Halgan played the more intimate Garden Stage, 

Quirky singer-songwriter Joanna Sternberg is raw and captivating, performing twice, the second time in one of the festival’s many secret sets. Indie rock maven Julia Jacklin takes another, performing a terrific set of songs on her birthday – marked by a cake being brought out on stage.

Another of the highlights of the weekend is Irish country-pop powerhouse CMAT, whose athletic, funny and charismatic set includes an astonishingly well-executed cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”. “This is one of the best shows we’ve ever done,” she says towards the end.

Away from the music, the festival is just as eccentric in its choices, with the cinema tent – moved this year into a brick-and-mortar hall, in the part of the site patrolled by peacocks – featuring a diverse and unpredictable mix, from Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful indie Old Joy to classics such as Back to the Future. The comedy billing, meanwhile, includes Stewart Lee, Josie Long, and Fern Brady, who delivers a sharp half-hour about her experience turning down a slot on Strictly Come Dancing, one of the “most sinister programmes on TV”, and a magic mushrooms-dazed trip to Thailand.

A drop-out from Fever Ray due to illness sees indie rock veterans Yo La Tengo seamlessly upgraded to the main-stage headline slot, The US indie rock trio were announced to close proceedings on Sunday.at one point bringing out a young child to join them on guitar, to the delight of the crowd. Despite this, and a few other cancellations, it’s a weekend replete with great music and great vibes. The end has never looked so full of possibilities.

The forthcoming compilation album “Echoes / Anam Cara” will be released on Lost Map on 12” vinyl and via digital platforms on October 18th, 2024. Bringing together songs from Blind Yeo’s two EPs to date, including their newly re-mixed and re-mastered 2023 debut EP “Echoes” (previously only available on limited-edition cassette), it’s the perfect introduction to a band whose wild and freewheeling sound continues to grow and grow.

“‘Anam cara’ means ‘soul friend’ in Gaelic,” says Blind Yeo singer, songwriter and guitarist Will Greenham. “The human face is the window to the soul. Your soul friend can know more about you than you know about yourself. These connections can last seconds or a lifetime. Sometimes you have to say goodbye to that moment that will never happen again. We captured the song live in a turbulent and emotive time and in true Blind Yeo spirit you will never hear the song this way again.”

Led by Will Greenham, Blind Yeo features a shifting cast of members which at present includes Henry Greenham, Sam Pert, Anoushka Helm, Jake Sheridan, Phil Self, Phyllida Bluemel and Dan Gilbert. The project began in the quiet and solitude of lockdown, before coming alive in a creatively explosive residency at the newly opened Cornish Bank in 2022 – a vibrant not-for-profit community arts space in the centre of Falmouth which has become the heart of a thriving underground Cornish scene of which Blind Yeo are very much a part. The band has since grown into a psychedelic carnival of sound best experienced live, as their memorable sets at festivals including Lost Map’s Christmas Humbug in Edinburgh and Great Estate and Tropical Pressure in Cornwall have proved.

Blind Yeo self-released their debut EP “Echoes” in April 2023, with tracks receiving plays from NTS, Soho Radio and BBC Introducing. It was followed in May 2024 by their Lost Map debut single ‘Otherside’ – a six-and-a-half-minute blur of motorik beats, rave synths and jagged electric guitar runs which received support from BBC 6 Music’s New Music Fix. Blind Yeo’s second EP “Anam Cara” was recorded last summer in bassist Jake Sheridan’s cob house, off-grid, solar powered studio hidden in woodland just off the north coast of Cornwall. Instead of putting it out as a purely standalone release, they’ve decided to pair it up with “Echoes” to create a revealing document of the band’s first two years together, and the thrilling journey of discovery they’ve been on to date – a journey that shows no time of stopping anytime soon.

“We started with live sessions last summer,” says Sheridan of “Anam Cara”, “two guitars, bass, drums and synth, to create and capture a raw and improvised energy. Then we finessed the tracks over the winter months, adding synths and strings. We produced everything collaboratively, often writing parts as we went.”

“Once an idea for a song’s been brought to the band there’s lots of jamming and improvisation and we all write our own parts,” adds synth player Henry Greenham. “It means the songs mean something personal to all of us – and these meanings and interpretations all joining and moving and flowing together creates our unique sound. It feels very powerful to connect with other humans through music like this.” 

releases October 18th, 2024

Laurie Anderson’s brilliant new record for Nonesuch Records is a fine example of an artist pulling influence into a cohesive whole, and tracks Amelia Earhart’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937, and her impact on the world of aviation. It’s a touchingly delivered tribute by one of the greatest working avant garde composers today, and is an absolutely fascinating listen in both scope and sheer compositional beauty.

“I spend a lot of time in the studio by myself doing stuff with a bunch of instrument panels, and I felt like I was making something that was gonna go somewhere somehow, so I had a feel for her,” Laurie tells author and journalist Jonathan Cott in a conversation about her new album, ‘Amelia,’ and her connection to Amelia Earhart. You can watch that conversation plus one with conductor Dennis Russell Davies, see archival photographs and film, and hear songs from the album, in this video on the making of ‘Amelia.’

 ‘Amelia’ is Laurie Anderson’s beautiful tribute, charting the story of Amelia Earhart’s ambition to be the first female pilot to circumnavigate Earth in 1937. It’s full of soaring melodies and tender plucks of delayed guitar, topped with Anderson’s evocative reading of letters and reports of the time. A stunning dedication, and a rousing, transportive listen.

Between his fifth and sixth album as Pictish Trail, Johnny Lynch decided to rework tracks from the former album into pared-back affairs, working well alongside two new instrumental compositions. The three “Island Family” tracks, now with harp and cello, are converted from bright psych-pop to primal but muscular, lightly psychedelic, quirky folk which fans of everyone from The Beta Band and Beck to James Yorkston, Martha Ffion, Mitski and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy may enjoy.

Isle-of-Eigg dwelling electro-acoustic psych-pop wonder Pictish Trail, AKA Johnny Lynch, released his fifth album “Island Family” in 2022 to critical acclaim from all from The Observer and The Times to Mojo, Uncut, Loud & Quiet and BBC 6 Music. As he works on a much-anticipated follow-up, Johnny has decided to revisit the family of songs that made up “Island Family” once again, and present “reduxes” of three of them in brand new, stripped-back form, recorded together with a specially assembled trio of musicians:

Semay Wu on cello, Gillian Fleetwood on harp, and long-time collaborator Susan Bear on keys/bass. The resulting EP, “Follow Footsteps”, will be released on limited-edition 12” vinyl in a gold-foil print sleeve, via Lost Map Records on September 13th, 2024, as well as on digital platforms via Fire Records. Pictish Trail will be playing some of these re-duxes live at tour dates throughout the summer and autumn, including at Green Man in August, in his 22nd consecutive appearance at the Welsh festival.

By putting the wild, untamed euphoric-bucolic psychedelia of ‘Island Family’, ‘Melody Something’ and ‘Nuclear Sunflower Swamp’ through a softer filter – complimented by a pair of short incidental instrumentals in ‘Follow Footsteps’ and ‘Flowers Rising Into The Black’ – Pictish Trail has discovered delicately kaleidoscopic new resonance in the songs.

About the making of the “Follow Footsteps” EP, Johnny writes: I’ve been working on writing songs for my sixth album as Pictish Trail for the past year, and wanted to try out something a bit different. “Island Family” came out just as lock-down restrictions were being lifted. It was an energetic, noisy, and distorted record, very much mirroring the frustration of being kept at home. Over the course of the next two years, I performed it loads with my full band, multiple headline tours, playing a ton of festivals, as well as supporting artists such as Pavement and Mogwai. The shows were sweaty and loud; making a racket felt cathartic.

“I’ve worked closely with my dear friend Susan Bear for the past 10 years – releasing music she made with her band Tuff Love, as well as solo stuff under her own name (including this year’s album, “Algorithmic Mood Music“). She’s also been a member of the Pictish Trail live band since 2014, as well as performing with other Lost Map acts. A staple of the Glasgow music scene, she also performs with The Pastels, Sacred Paws, Goodnight Louisa and does sound design and composition for theatre productions.

“Suse got in touch with me after one of my solo shows, saying she wanted to record the songs acoustically, capturing the intimacy of the performance. For years I’ve resisted doing anything like this, as a way of fighting off the dreaded ‘folk’ term – which seems to follow me wherever I go, whether I release an electronic-dance record or an industrial noise pop song.

“At the very start of 2024 I travelled down to La Chunky Studios in Glasgow, spending a few days recording guitar and vocal takes, along with Suse on electric piano and bass. We worked on three songs from “Island Family” – they sounded beautiful, but immediately we knew that they would benefit from some further accompaniment.

Pictish Trail’s critically acclaimed first pair of albums “Secret Soundz Vols. 1 & 2″ released in 2008 and 2013 respectively were gloriously eclectic slices of lo-fi folk-pop, later revived as a deluxe double-vinyl in 2014 by Moshi Moshi. His third album “Future Echoes” was released to further critical acclaim in September 2016, and went on to be shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year Award by popular vote, before being re-issued by Fire Records in the summer of 2018. His fourth album “Thumb World” was released on Fire Records in February 2020.

When not putting out his own music as Pictish Trail, Johnny is a fulcrum of Scotland and the UK’s independent music community. Through his label Lost Map Records, he champions a diverse and idiosyncratic array of talent.  

Basically Nancy is a four-piece band based in Savannah, GA comprised of Alayna Bowen on bass and vocals, Greta Schroeder on guitar and vocals, Shea Benezra on drums, and Lakin Crawford on guitar. The group started by playing local open mics and sloppily playing punk covers around town in venues they couldn’t legally drink in. Now years later, Basically Nancy performs all over the US and commands a room with original songs made up of heavy tones and aggressive lyrics combined with melodic sweetness.  Their music portrays the experience of being a young woman and the frustrations that come with it.

Their latest EP, a testament to their creative vision, was recorded with the late great Steve Albini. Albini’s influence on the band was profound, and his collaboration with Basically Nancy marks a significant moment in their career.

released August 30th, 2024

Recorded live-to-tape & mixed by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio