The Fat Angel Sings

New book series of Yes Album Listening Guides announced beginning with “Tales from Topographic Oceans” as the first in the series. Following the success of his multi-award nominated, Amazon Bestselling first book about the progressive rock band, Yes – The Tormato Story, Kevin Mulryne returns
with the first in a spectacular new series of Yes Album Listening Guides.

Never one to shy away from controversial topics, Kevin has chosen to begin the in-depth
new series with perhaps the most divisive album of all time amongst Yes fans, progressive
rock fans and classic rock fans. 1973’s epic double album, ‘Tales from Topographic Oceans’,
saw Yes climb to uncharted heights of musical and thematic invention.

Depending on your point of view, this culminated in a creative work destined to define the excess and
pointlessness of the whole prog rock movement or to be crowned as its most intense and
glorious pinnacle. Kevin delves deeply into many aspects of the album – the context and
details of writing and rehearsals, the recording process at Morgan Studios, the instruments
and techniques used to create its unique sound, the critical and fan reactions to its release,
the concerts, venues, live sound, merchandise and scenery of the following tour and much
more!

Kevin has spoken to many people who worked with the band in the period ‘Tales’ was
created as well as co-author Steve Howe. He has also consulted the most highly-regarded
Yes instrument experts and collectors to paint an amazingly full picture of this seminal
progressive work. All this painstaking, original research has fed into the creation of the
centrepiece of the book – the detailed guide to each of the four movements of the album.
Never before has the music of ‘Tales’ come under such intense scrutiny. Kevin has
discovered many fascinating and mind-blowing facets to one of the most important records
of the 1970s and travelled down unending rabbit holes to uncover previously hidden detail.
Also available separately, at time of publishing, will be a 40-page A5 magazine-style full
colour supplement, including newly-annotated black and white and colour photographs,
mainly from the listening guide, a map of important Tales locations and more!.

Dreamy indie heads building a strong cult following after some great songs over the past few months. The Scottish three-piece indie rock band. Formed in Edinburgh in late 2018, the band initially comprised Alice Johnson and Lewis Bunting, before Bunting’s schoolmate Matt Mitchell and their friend Nairn Milne joined the band. Mitchell and Milne later left the band, with Billy McMahon joining in June 2020.

We’ve been asked so many times by you guys when we’ll be releasing a physical record and it’s something we’ve always dreamed of doing so it’s beyond exciting to announce that pre-order for our first ever vinyl record is now, Bringing together our EP’s “Duality” & “Seeing it Now”, this is a limited edition of just 300 and comes in a beautiful deep red velvet record.

Swim School might just be the ideal mid-afternoon guitar band every festival needs – armed with a mighty crowd-pleaser from the EA Sports FC 24 soundtrack (‘Bored’) for good measure. But the Edinburgh trio won’t be hanging around there for long, with their steadily growing cult fanbase and catalogue of bangers undoubtedly set to see the band to follow their indie heroes and steadily make their way through to the top of line-up in years to come.

This double album showcases Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ electrifying gig at the Paradiso, in Amsterdam, on 3rd June 1992, during the “Henry’s Dream” Tour.

Featured here are stellar renditions of classics such as “The Mercy Seat”, “From Her to Eternity”, “Tupelo”, “The Ship Song” and many more.

Nick Cave’s remarkable baritone voice, emotional intensity and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love and violence grabs audiences by the throat. This captures the dark poet and his band after the release of their album ‘Henry’s Dream’, touring the world and stopping by the legendary Amsterdam pop temple Paradiso for an unforgettable performance featuring: ‘The Mercy Seat’, ‘Tupelo’, ‘Jack The Ripper’ and the heart wrenching classic ‘In The Ghetto’.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ seventh studio album, “Henry’s Dream“, was released on April 1992. The band promoted the album with an initial tour across Europe, North America, Japan and Australia in 1992. The tour consisted of five legs and fifty-five concerts, and began in Norwich, England in April 1992 and concluded in Brisbane, Australia in December. In 1993, the band continued touring, adding a further two legs and twenty-three concerts in Australia, Europe and Israel.

Trace Mountains, is the project of Dave Benton, shared the second single from his highly anticipated new album “Into The Burning Blue”, due out September 27th via Lame-O Records. In contrast to the widescreen production and frantic pace of opener “In A Dream,” the next single “Friend” highlights a core intention of the album – that each song had the integrity to stand alone in a stripped-back setting. Over fingerpicked guitars and spry drumming, Benton reflects on confronting loneliness and finding solace in community.

Written as Benton grappled with the end of an 8-year romantic relationship, songs were pouring out of him in quick succession, often urgently before he had logically processed the emotions himself. The pressure of this period crystallized Benton’s adventurous spirit and self-renewal as he embraced new high-fidelity sounds and conviction. Writing routinely over a Roland CR-68 drum machine and enamored with the dramatic precision of 80s music, Benton enlisted Craig Hendrix (Japanese Breakfast) to bring his indie rock to immersive new heights.

Benton recalls the Tom Petty-inspired “Friend” as his proudest and most honest moment. “I like to joke that I’m a ‘loner in recovery,’” said Benton, “When I wrote “Friend,” I was facing a pretty big transition in my life. I needed to address my own loneliness, and writing the song was like my first step on that path. It was my way of saying, “Yep, I feel lonely sometimes,” and dealing with that good old millennial malaise. I’m just really grateful for the people in my life and trying to tackle the meaning of a word like “Friend” feels impossible, but it’s fun to try.”

Watch the surreal video below, directed by brothers Alyx & Sam Soard. On the video Sam shares “When Dave and I were brainstorming ideas for “Friend,” we found ourselves reflecting on the bizarre nature of the loneliness epidemic. During one of our phone calls, I suggested portraying him as a werewolf. We both laughed at the idea initially but soon realized it was a playful way to capture the surreal social experience we’re all enduring. Dave and his reputation as a well-known cat mom brought a unique perspective to this concept. Exaggerating his personality in this creature-feature felt like a fun way to explore the song’s themes. Our goal was to use humor to emphasize the importance of genuine companionship in a world that often feels chaotic and disconnected.”

After a run of North American shows ranging from stadium dates supporting Foo Fighters to a sold-out two-night finale at the Fonda in L.A., Amyl and The Sniffers are to announce the release of their third album “Cartoon Darkness” via B2B Records / Virgin Music Group on October 25th, the album was recorded with producer Nick Launay (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in Los Angeles in early 2024. The album will be available in multiple formats, including limited edition glow in the dark vinyl with alternate artwork, and will feature lead track and BBC Radio 1 Hottest Record “Chewing Gum,” as well as previously released “U Should Not Be Doing That,” and no less than 11 tracks that showcase the band’s quantum progression and boundless energy.

Singer Amy Taylor explains, “Cartoon Darkness is about climate crisis, war, AI, tiptoeing on the eggshells of politics, and people feeling like they’re helping by having a voice online when we’re all just feeding the data beast of Big Tech, our modern-day god. It’s about the fact that our generation is spoon-fed information. We look like adults, but we’re children forever cocooned in a shell. We’re all passively gulping up distractions that don’t even cause pleasure, sensation or joy, they just cause numbness.”

“Cartoon Darkness” is driving headfirst into the unknown, into this looming sketch of the future that feels terrible but doesn’t even exist yet. A childlike darkness. I don’t want to meet the devil half-way and mourn what we have right now. The future is cartoon, the prescription is dark, but it’s novelty. It’s just a joke. It’s fun.”

Regarding lead track “Chewing Gum,” Taylor comments, “The adversity of life is desire never fulfilled. Doing the dishes cleaning, but never the one eating the meal, so close but it’s never enough, and trying to celebrate the ignorance of youth despite it being robbed away, so choosing ignorance, choosing to be dumb and choosing love, despite everything, choosing bad decisions for love, for life, because it is short, or is it long? Surrendering to joy, surrendering to being a vision, in your own power, because making decisions based on emotion rather than logic is liberating, and despite the external inferno, you walk away unscathed, through flames, burnt but only superficially, unstopped, unaffected, unhuman. Life is work, life is not free, we can never work enough because the end goal doesn’t exist, so all we can do is choose to be wrong.”

“Into The Light” is the new 6CD box set from Whitesnake, and is based on David Coverdale’s three solo records. The “Into The Light” album was originally released as David Coverdale’s 3rd solo album, in September 2000, and was his first solo record in 22 years. Now it will be released remixed with extra tracks and presented as a Whitesnake album. With an impressive musical lineup, David is joined on “Into The Light” by guitarists Earl Slick and Doug Bossi, bassist Marco Mendoza, who would later join Whitesnake, legendary drummer Denny Carmassi, who as well as Whitesnake, has played with Montrose and Heart, and Mike Finningan on keyboards, who had previously played with Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s.

As well as plenty of unreleased songs and bonus tracks, the set includes “Too Many Tears,” a song David wrote with Adrian Vandenberg and originally featured on Whitesnake’s “Restless Heart” album.

Also included is “River Song,” David’s tribute to Jimi Hendrix, and “With All Of My Heart,” a song David wrote for his wife, and in his own words, one of top ten songs that he’s written. “Into The Light” also features the singles “Slave,” “Love Is Blind” and “Don’t You Cry.”

The box set will also include David’s first two solo records, Whitesnake “MCMLXXVII” from 1977 and Northwinds from 1978, the two titles he recorded immediately after leaving Deep Purple in 1976, in both remixed, expanded and remastered form.

Release Date: 25th October, 2024

Why Bonnie have unveiled a new single, ‘Three Big Moons’, which appears on their forthcoming LP “Wish on the Bone“. Following previous entries ‘Dotted Line’, ‘Fake Out’, and ‘Rhyme or Reason’, the track is “about how isolation can be equal parts comforting and lonely,” according to the band’s Blair Howerton. When Blair Howerton brought bandmates Chance Williams and Josh Malett together to work on Why Bonnie’s latest album.

Why Bonnie released their debut, “90 in November”, an album praised for its nostalgic depictions of wide-open spaces that earned comparisons to Waxahatchee and Wednesday. That album captured who Howerton felt like she was at the time – a twenty-something living in New York, yearning for the Texas of her adolescence through rose-colored glasses – but her self-conception is forever in flux. On “Wish on the Bone”, Why Bonnie is untethered from the particulars of landscape or genre, but a fixation on what it might look like to lead an authentic life grounds the record in place.

“Wish on the Bone” is set to arrive on August 30th via Fire Talk.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds are back after a five-year break with their new album “Wild God!” the upcoming 18th studio album by the Australian is set to be released on 30th August 2024 through PIAS.

It marks their first studio album in five years, following “Ghosteen” Across it’s ten tracks, the band dances between convention and experimentation, taking left turns and detours that enhance the rich imagery and emotion in Cave’s heartfelt narratives. There are moments that fondly recall the Bad Seeds’ past, but they are fleeting and only serve to add another facet to the band’s relentless and restless forward momentum. Nick Cave says of the album: “It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It’s a complicated record, but it’s also deeply and joyously infectious.”

The journey to creating ‘Wild God’ began with sweeping epic ‘Frogs’. The first lines Nick Cave penned for the album were powerfully evocative, referencing the first murder in the Bible, Cain’s slaying of Abel. He wrote, “Ushering in the week he knelt down and crushed his brother’s head in with a bone/It’s my great privilege to walk you home.” This striking couplet became the opening lines to the song, and set the tone for the imagery and themes that followed.

Nick Cave says, “The sheer exuberance of a song like ‘Frogs’, it just puts a big fucking smile on my face.”

Produced by Cave and Warren Ellis and mixed by David Fridmann, Cave began writing the album on New Year’s Day 2023. Recording in Provence and London, the Bad Seeds finally added their unique alchemy, with additional appearances from Colin Greenwood (bass) and Luis Almau (nylon string guitar, acoustic guitar).

“Wild God...there’s no fucking around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.” – Nick Cave

‘Wild God’, the new album from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds will be released on 30th August.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have released their first new album in four years. “Woodland“, which follows their 2020 covers LP “All the Good Times“, was recorded at the couple’s own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville. “Woodland is at the heart of everything we do, and has been for the last twenty some years,” they said in a statement. “The past four years were spent almost entirely within its walls, bringing it back to life after the 2020 tornado and making this record. The music is (songs are) a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, joy, grief, destruction, permanence. Now.”

In November, 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.

A tight 10-track record that muses on loss and destruction, renewal and perseverance, the folk icons have brought another harmonic, thoughtful and sonically sparkling record our way yet again.

Acony Records is proud to present “Woodland“, the new album by the preeminent song writing team Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Following up their homespun Grammy-winning release “All The Good Times“, this ambitious 10 song album mingles full band tracks with intricate duet performances all tied together with the duo’s signature sound and remarkable lyricism. “Woodland” was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee at Welch and Rawlings’ own Woodland Sound Studio (newly rebuilt after the 2020 tornado) and cements the duo’s iconoclastic position at the forefront of acoustic music. 

A wonderful collection of songs. The range of styles and yet connected as well. Well worth waiting for.

released August 23rd, 2024