Christopher Owens, the former frontman of 2010s indie figureheads Girls, returns with his new solo album. The tone here is profoundly impacted by the tragedies that struck Owens in the years prior, such as the loss of a bandmate and homelessness, a perfect partner to the melancholic, ’60s influenced jangle pop of Girls which the songwriter returns to.
“I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair” is the fourth studio album by American singer-songwriter Christopher Owens. available through True Panther Records. It is his first album in nearly a decade, following the release of “Chrissybaby Forever“ in 2015. Owens co-produced the album mainly in San Francisco with Doug Boehm. It was supported by three singles: “I Think About Heaven”, “No Good” and “This Is My Guitar”.
The Clean‘s influence is everywhere. It always was. All the guitar bands from Rolling Blackouts to Ducks Ltd back to Pavement, back further to the Flying Nun scene all owe something to The Clean. Although they didn’t release an album during their first incarnation they more than made up for it later on. “ModernRock” was their second album of the 1990s and now comes revamped for its 30th anniversary.
LP on Merge. Remastered from the original tapes by Tex Houston.
Watch Gillian Welch and David Rawlings perform three songs from “Woodland” On Friday, November 8th, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ 10th studio album, “Woodland”, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Folk Album, and the lead track, “Empty Trainload of Sky,” received a nomination for Best Americana Performance. “Woodland” marks the 10th full-length studio album for the duo, who have been releasing their albums using alternating names based on “whoever was singing lead,” as Rawlings explains. With “Woodland”, Welch and Rawlings put both their names on it — along with the name of the studio where they not only record, but also the space they saved after it was struck by a tornado in 2020.
While in St. Paul for two nights of concerts at the Fitzgerald Theater, Welch and Rawlings walked over to The Current where Radio Heartland host and producer Mike Pengra welcomed them, along with bassist Paul Kowert, for a studio session. After playing a selection of songs from “Woodland”, Welch and Rawlings stuck around for a conversation with Mike Pengra.
Watch the performances above.
Songs Performed 00:00:00 Hashtag 00:03:43 Empty Trainload of Sky 00:07:10 Howdy Howdy 00:11:10 Interview with host Mike Pengra All songs from Gillian Welch & David Rawlings’ 2024 album, “Woodland”, available on aconyrecords.
Musicians Gillian Welch – guitar, vocals David Rawlings – guitar, vocals Paul Kowert – bass
Forced into a rethink during the pandemic from his favoured jamming-it-out-in-the-studio process of creation, James Petralli reformulates White Denim on their twelfth studio album. Functionally titled “12”, it’s arguably the least spontaneous and most obviously ‘planned’ White Denim album, yet it’s of a piece with the band’s scuzzy, off-the-cuff garage/psych rock explorations of the past.
The songs on ’12’ are intricate, hi-tech and forward-facing, yet also somehow still of a piece with the questing ambition, rootsy swing and uplifting way with melody we’ve come to adore about Petralli’s music. It’s always been hard to keep pace with James Petralli’s group, ever since they first exploded out of Austin, Texas in ’08 with hyper-kinetic post-punk bangers like “Shake Shake Shake” and “I Start To Run“. There was delicious romance in the original trio’s MO, as they hatched intrepid sounds together via lengthy jams in a 1940s Spartan trailer parked up in woodland outside the city. James duly raced on through shifting line-ups and kaleidoscopic shades of soul, jazz and Southern rock, always with a feel of in-the-moment authenticity.
As for so many musicians, the pandemic forced Petralli into a radical rethink in both life and creative process. Going into White Denim’s twelfth long- player, he relocated his family to Los Angeles, and, barred from the usual workouts “on the floor” with his latest group members under COVID, he plunged deep into the science of assembling tracks digitally, with contributions from players he’d sometimes never even meet.
Shower Curtain are a New York group reviving the ’90s shoegaze trend in emotive new ways. Their debut album layers its dense, reverb-washed guitars around equally abstract and enigmatic vocals from bandleader Victoria Winter, who introspectively details early adulthood amid the tension of the bustling metropolis.
Putting the ‘Cor!’ in slowcore, Duster’s exhilarating 5th album snuck up on us unawares in a cloud of flourishing drones, restrained rhythms, and those trademark vocals that just seem to ooze out of the speakers. Half asleep you hear a guitar echo through the early morning haze, you’re so zonked you cant tell if its a dream or if the droney reverb is coming from real life, you sit up, now starting to understand what is afoot. Thats right, its the errant kings of slowcore Duster returning with yet another surprise release – “In Dreams“. Disintegrated, half remembered melodies permeate this record like a slow tide of static soaking into a discarded slice of sponge cake, proving somehow inventive and nostalgic at the same time, in other words Duster on top form.
The San Jose slowcore/space rock outfit returns with surprise album, “In Dreams”, continuing their inclination of sonically capturing an open-ended question. These thirteen tracks hone in on their trademark dark, droning guitar tones, dialed back percussion, and alluring hard-panned vocals while expanding and exploring synth-heavy and drum machine avenues. It’s the fifth Duster album, ok
Regularly hailed as one of the greatest live bands in existence, Queens of the Stone Age will headline Victorious Festival on Friday night!
Join Josh Homme, Troy Van, Leeuwen, Michael Shuman, Dean Fertita and Jon Theodore as they rip through an incredible live set. Expect classics like “No One Knows'”, “Go With The Flow” and “Little Sister”.
Get ready for a mind-blowing set packed with raw energy, and heavy hitters to start the festival weekend off with a bang!
“It’s deliberately very succinct and straight to the point,” says Courting’s Sean Murphy-O’Neill of the band’s latest, and third, album. “We wanted to keep everything incredibly direct – to hit everyone in the face and leave.”
“Lust for Life, Or: ‘How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story’ is an album full of dualities, contrasts and contradictions. It contains some of the most straight-up pop music the band have ever made, but it’s also arguably their most experimental work to date. It is fun and silly, peppered with in-jokes, references, and easter eggs, but it is detailed, deeply considered, and masterfully produced and mixed. “It’s meant to feel very contradictory and confusing but it’s also fully realised,” Murphy-O’Neill says. “It’s a real culmination of things. ”
The album title may be a sprawling mouthful but it belies its contents, with this containing just eight perfectly considered and pristinely executed songs. “I’ve always wanted a big, ridiculous title,” says Murphy-O’Neill. “I love albums that have a very self-important vibe. “Lust for Life” is such an overused title but it’s a great one. It could be referencing so many things, from Iggy Pop to Lana Del Ray and maybe that’s kind of its whole schtick – it’s as equally as influenced by 70s proto-punk as it is modern pop. It just all melts together. Everything we do is like a collage. We just take all the things we like and blend them together.”
This is what has made the Liverpool band – made up of Murphy-O’Neill, Sean Thomas, Joshua Cope, and Connor McCann – such a unique proposition in recent years. Over three albums and one EP in just three years, they have shown they can do unashamed indie bangers with as much flair as they can pull off jittery hyperpop or innovative electronic rock. “It’s equally gratifying to write something that is as big and stupid as it is to write something really weird,” says Murphy-O’Neill. “As a band we exist in those two separate worlds at the same time.”
Encompassing, as well as delivering, such distinct sonic worlds is one of the things that has made the band such an arresting outfit. For 2024’s “New Last Name”, the band went big and theatrical, overloading on style, themes and ideas, by turning the album into an ostensible play. So this time they wanted a smaller approach. “I was bored of overthinking that kind of stuff,” says Murphy-O’Neill. “I just wanted to make something immediate. There’s no shit around it. It is what it is. Something more initiative focused.”
However, as is always the case with Courting, a great deal of thought has gone into this record despite its immediacy and direct hit approach. In many ways, it’s a record that came to Murphy-O’Neill as a complete package in his head and then it was just a case of piecing it together. “We had the title and the artwork idea before we had the songs,” he says. “But I knew what all the songs should be called, how many songs there should be, how they should be structured, and then I just made songs that fit into that. I don’t really know how to write a song for an album that doesn’t serve a purpose.”
Further themes around duality are reflected via this approach too. The album artwork is black and white (two colours) and features two figures on a motorbike (two wheels). The even number of eight tracks is also crucial. “All of the songs on the album have a twin song, symmetrically,” Murphy-O’Neill explains. So, the opening ‘Intro’, with a beautiful motif of looping strings, is repeated on the album’s closer ‘Likely place for them to be’ but this time played with a sharp buzz of electric guitar.
The album’s second track, ‘Stealth Rollback’ is a literal rollercoaster of a song that runs the gauntlet from Prodigy-esque rave via Death Grips-like noise before landing on something more akin to an experimental reinterpretation of The Small Faces. “I think the cliche for me would be starting a song off very peacefully and twisting it into something harsh and electronic,” Murphy-O’Neill explains. “So we started it incredibly harshly and just kicked everyone in the teeth.”
‘Eleven Sent (This Time)’ is about as breezy and infectious a piece of melodic indie pop as you’re likely to come across all year, while ‘Pause at You’ sounds like it may have come out of a NYC loft in the early 2000s. Agitated guitar melds with a killer bassline groove to produce a bouncing and invigorating piece of dance punk that, in true Courting style, then mushrooms into something else for its soaring chorus. ‘Namcy’ is a perfect example of how in the midst of an album so bursting with variety, the band can also produce just a straight-down-the-line and simply undeniably great rock song, with guitar lines and melodic hooks that will bounce around your head for days.
The two-part narrative of ‘Lust for Life’ represents a song that Murphy-O’Neill is very proud of. “I think it might be the best song we’ve ever written,” he says, of the six-plus minute track, which shifts from an eerie, sparse, almost Berlin-era Bowie opening segment, but with mangled auto-tune, before shifting into a different beast altogether. “It’s about a credit card scam,” he explains.
That song does a lot to me. I find it quite touching.” That song, and this album as a whole, feels like a real milestone moment for the band. “We’ve hit expectations but we’ve also subverted them,” Murphy-O’Neill says. “It does feel like an end to something, but I’m not really sure what. It’s really all come together on this one and maybe that’s why it feels final. I don’t know if it’s the end of an era but it feels like everything that I’ve ever done has all culminated together in this one record.”
The debut album of the South London five-piece is aptly titled “WOOF”., and it’s a microcosm of their live show: rambunctious and odd and best when it’s loud. But the real tension that keeps “WOOF”. afloat is that, like their live shows, you can never quite tell if you’re in on the joke. And that’s because, as hard as they go, Fat Dog songs are also kind of silly.
Take “King of the Slugs,” the seven-minute lead single: Over a thick, acidic bassline, Love rants and raves about his titular royalty status. He barks it out, and the band crests to a drop. But instead of a punkish release, they veer into a melody that sounds like it was pulled from a Klezmer band (for my music theory nerds: it’s the fifth mode of the harmonic minor, traditionally used in Klezmer).
Halfway through the track, Love chants “the wall,” and the song accelerates like a demented, half-awake polka. “King of the Slugs” takes the path of most resistance from its start to end, tumbling through tempo changes and halftimes like the town drunk. But still, it’s dance music, warped through Fat Dog’s perverse, vampiric sensibility. The “WOOF”. opener, “Vigilante,” commences with a timpani hit and Love bellowing, “It’s fucking Fat Dog, baby!”
The South London five-piece Fat Dog released their debut album, “WOOF“., in September via Domino Recordings. The brand new track, “Peace Song,” features a children’s choir.
Love monologues over a villainous orchestra, proclaiming that he “watched the first man draw blood from the second man, saw the first death and the failure of flesh.” It’s so cinematic and macabre that it crests into irony. Still, they churn out a hook from all that verbose nonsense. Almost every track on “WOOF”. follows this pattern. They layer up synths and strings until they’re comically grandiose, and then the band snaps into a bouncy hook. The build-up is just hot air. When they drop, they mean business.
When the album was announced, the band shared its lead single “Running,” via a music video. Then they shared its next single, “I am the King,” The album’s next single, “Wither,” was released via a music video inspired by ’90s video games .
Love produced the album with James Ford and Jimmy Robertson. Influences mentioned in the press release include: Bicep, I.R.O.K, Kamasi Washington, and the Russian experimental EDM group Little Big.
“A lot of music at the moment is very cerebral and people won’t dance to it,” says Hughes. “Our music is the polar opposite of thinking music.” Joe Love fronts Fat Dog and the band also features Chris Hughes (keyboards/synths), Ben Harris (bass), Johnny Hutchinson (drums) and Morgan Wallace (keyboards/saxophone).
The Fat Angel Sings 