As part of the “Let Go” 15th anniversary we’re releasing “Standing at the Gates: The Songs of Nada Surf’s Let Go,” an album benefitting the ACLU and The Pablove Foundation (which helps children with cancer). The album features covers by an incredible group of artists including Ron Gallo, Aimee Mann, Manchester Orchestra, Ed Harcourt, Rogue Wave and many more. A full track listing is below.
To ring in the announcement, the band has shared Ron Gallo’s cover of the song Happy Kid. Of his version, he says, “I first heard Nada Surf on a mix CD a friend made me in high school that was pretty life-changing. It was 20+ songs from bands I had never heard of before. It opened the door to “underground” or “indie” music for me, and also the door to actually good songs being written by weirdos in the present day, which I didn’t know existed from listening to mostly south jersey pop-punk and hardcore music. I’m pretty sure it was the song “Paper Boats” from Let Go. I really sucked at making music back then so it’s cool to have this resurface many years later and be able to be apart of the compilation.”
Car Seat Headrest, aka Will Toledo, has re-imagined and re-recorded his excellent 2011 Bandcamp masterpiece, Twin Fantasy, and it will come out on 16th February via Matador Records. It was a record Toldeo always knew he would return to (in fact it was part of his original deal with Matador), so far from a conventional re-recording, the follow up to 2016’s seismically brilliant Teens of Denial is a wholly revelatory, epic and visionary new work. With a seven-piece band in tow (including members of Naked Giants), Car Seat Headrest will bring its explosive and revelatory live show to Australia, Europe, and select West Coast cities through the first half of 2018.
The album announcement comes with the release of Nervous Young Inhumans and its accompanying video, which can be seen below. It is a frenetic, anthemic, split-screen choreographed crescendo that perfectly mirrors the album’s theme of duality.
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 “Bodys” climbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feel everything: 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 Fantasy’ is 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.
“It was never a finished work,” Toledo 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 Toledo, 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, Toledo says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.
Another Amazing record from Portland’s Mo Troper. It’s a well crafted slice of power pop where every song has it’s place and no tune overstays it’s welcome. More people should be striving to write the kind of timeless and insanely catchy music this guy seems to throw out like it’s as easy and automatic as putting pants on in the morning
This is Mo Troper’s second album it may not change the world, but it’s pristine orchestral pop will restore your faith in it. This is wide-eyed, wide-screen beautiful stuff likely influenced by albums by Jellyfish, Jeremy Egnik and Kay Kay and his Weathered Underground. released November 17th, 2017
The Low Anthem have announced their newest LP, The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea, along with an album trailer for the work. The Rhode Island natives come back in 2018 inspired by a car accident that changed the band.
“One second you’re dozing off in the passenger seat on the way to a gig, and the next, there’s fire and hell flames and black smoke and your face is bleeding and you can’t see, and you can’t process information, and you think it’s all over.” These are the words of Jeff Prystowsky, a founding member of the band, who describes the car accident that resulted in the cancellation of The Low Anthem’s 2016 tour after just four days on the road.
On the way to a show in Washington, D.C, The Low Anthem’s tour van crashed, wrecking a lot of the band’s gear and instruments in the process, and putting Prystowsky out of commission for several weeks as he receoved from minor injuries. The accident was said to be a driving force behind the band’s new album, created while Prystowsky was in recovery.
The album, conceptualized by Low Anthem cofounder Knox Miller, was inspired by John Cage biography Where the Heart Beats, written by Kay Larsen. The book tells the story of a salt doll who goes to the sea in search of herself. Each time, the salt doll puts a piece of her inside the ocean—she gains the wisdom that the ocean brings, but dissolves herself little by little until every part of her is lost in the sea. The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea is a concept album following the narrative of the salt doll in her quest for self-discovery.
From the album’s sound, we can count on the usual harmonic voices of the band accompanied by guitars and “subtle yet immersive” electronic ambiance. Miller had to record the album using stripped-down instruments, since most of the band’s gear was lost in the accident. What we can expect from this album is a band that’s matured far beyond their conception in 2006. With their collective life experiences and the band members’ personal highs and lows,
The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea is set to release February. 23rd
American alternative-rock heroes The Breeders have announced the details of their first new album in 10 years, “All Nerve”, out on March. 2nd,
The band’s classic lineup of Kim and Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs and Jim Macpherson will return for their new album. The Breeders returned to the stage in 2013 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their LP, Last Splash, and have been working on new material since then. A 2018 album release was confirmed back in November.
Lead All Nerve single “Wait in the Car,” released back in October, is a vindictive alternative-punk track featuring The Breeders’ trademark bratty lead vocals and a “Teenage Kicks”-like guitar riff. “All Nerve” itself is a dynamic track that ping-pongs between subdued verses and crunching choruses.
Revisit “Wait in the Car” and check out venues for The Breeders’ world tour dates.
The Breeders have released two albums since the turn of the century, but their forthcoming record will be the first made with the lineup of Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs and Jim McPherson since 1993’s Last Splash. They recruited Steve Albini to help out recording drums on a few tracks, and the album promises to feature a contribution from Courtney Barnett, too. If last year’s raucous “Wait in the Car” is any indication of what to expect, it should be a good time.
Just try not to get The Beautiful Monument‘s Disorder stuck in your head. The Melbourne group have been busy this year with the release of their debut album and touring around the country. They wowed crowds at BIGSOUND, with one The Music reviewer noting that with their ability to balance “both raw energy and an impressive stage presence, the Melbourne band dig deep”. In a scene that can be set in its ways, The Beautiful Monument are a much-needed change and certain to influence a new wave of acts.
Adelaide-based goth pop newcomer Mane, aka Paige Renee Court, has quickly developed a sound most artists spend a career trying to perfect. The singer builds immersive soundscapes with her haunting and distinctive vocals, which weave through dark electronic sounds; a captivating force channelled into new single What If The Love Dies. Having supported the likes of Ali Barter, City Calm Down and The Temper Trap in recent months, alongside a European/UK tour, we don’t think there’s any risk of the buzz fading anytime soon. With new music just around the corner, you can expect a stack more touring from Mane in 2018.
The Money War was conceived while Dylan Ollivierre (Rainy Day Women) and Carmen Pepper (Warning Birds) drove across the US in late 2015. Inspired by the trip, a pile of iPhone demos was created. After a chance meeting with producers Thom Monahan (Fruit Bats, Little Joy) and Arne Frager (Prince, Paul McCartney) in a dive bar in San Francisco, the duo were convinced of the value of the demos. Returning home with a load of stories, they then began work on materializing a record.
WA indie-rock duo The Money War have already established a solid presence in their hometown, forming from already revered local outfits Rainy Day Women and Warning Birds. With their latest single, Hold On – described by buzz label I Oh You as having “effortless magnificence embedded within” – the pair set their sights on the east coast, embarking on their first Australian headline stint in December. That’s after they caught Meg Mac’s attention earlier in the year and scored an opening slot on her album tour. They are currently recording their debut album, which will be released around April/May 2018.
It’s been over four years since Portland-based Typhoon released White Lighter, and in that time singer-songwriter Kyle Morton has been grappling with the idea of “losing it”—the struggles a person endures when battling a deteriorating brain. On the band’s fourth full-length, Offerings, Morton funnels his own fears through a fictional character who is losing both his mind and sense of self.
The record is split into four movements—”Floodplains,” “Flood,” “Reckoning,” and “Afterparty”—each one illustrating a phase of the the character’s journey, from his realization that something is wrong, and the long struggle that follows, to his acceptance of his fate, dreadful as it may be. The 11-piece folk-rock ensemble creates an eerie backdrop for Morton’s stories, full of delicately plucked guitars, screeching violins, and, on opener “Wake,” the faint sound of static, as Morton has a premonition: “Of all the things you’re about to lose, this will be the most painful.”
The record ebbs and flows, swinging from cacophonic sounds to joyous melodies, until arriving at calmness in the aptly titled closing track, “Sleep,” led by Morton’s forlorn vocals and a quietly strummed acoustic guitar.
Morton voices the doomed main character as he tries to navigate his condition—a situation complicated by the current political climate, which offers a compelling argument that the planet may need to be demolished before it can reset itself. The parallel between private and public chaos comes into full relief on “Rorschach,” which explores the age of information and collapse of meaning, which only adds to the narrator’s sense of disorientation and confusion.
Offeringsis a chilling journey through the workings of the inner mind, and though it’s not an easy listen, its intricacies gain greater depth on repeated listens.
Filmed at the BBC Radio Theatre, Sir Van Morrison performs an intimate “In Concert” show. The Belfast born “Van the Man” performs a selection of tracks, old and new, from his iconic back catalogue through to “Keep Me Singing”. Tracks include the classic hit “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Wild Night” and “Cleaning Windows”. This intimate show is an up close and personal performance by the Grammy award winning Celtic soul troubadour who is arguably one of the most influential songwriters and performers in the history of popular music.
