The Julia Steiner-led Ratboys have been quietly putting out high quality content for the past dozen years. Their last full length of new material, “Printer’s Devil”, came out at an inopportune moment (February 2020), which makes their return with “The Window” all that more of a moment to celebrate. And celebrate, The Window does well. Whether the spotlight is on Mother Earth “It’s Alive”, being spitting mad “Empty”, or lives well lived “The Window”, Steiner knows no mode other than wearing her heart on her sleeve. Here with a production assist from Chris Walla (formerly of Death Cab for Cutie), every song is a set piece with its own distinct dynamic and every single one of them is fantastic. For a band that already had a well-earned pedigree,
There are approximately 11 very good songs on Ratboys’ newest record “The Window”, but there are two that best illustrate what this band can do better than almost any other on this, or any other, list. “Black Earth, WI” arrived back in March, a few months before the group even announced the album proper, and it immediately entered the pantheon of this decade’s rush on rootsy, twangy indie-rock epics, gliding through its eight-minute runtime like a boozy August night laid bare.
Then, in June, they hit us with the record’s devastating title track. Subdued and sweet, “The Window” is vocalist Julia Steiner at her best, presenting an achingly personal love story through the prism of the catchiest indie rock released this year.
Ratboys are a band of tight hooks and catchy melodies, but it’s the specificity of their song writing that makes the project so endlessly endearing. For a band that arrived so fully formed nearly a decade ago, they continue to outdo themselves with every release. “The Window” will be hard to top, but I don’t think we have any reason to doubt them.
On Mitski’s previous two albums, 2018’s “Be the Cowboy” and 2022’s “Laurel Hell“, the songwriter filled every open space with buzzing effects, disco rhythms, and bright synthesizers—as if to drown out the feelings of loneliness and isolation with the company of flashy sounds. “Bug Like an Angel,” the leadoff track from “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”, opens with nothing more than the spare strum of an acoustic guitar, which until its ascendant chorus backed by a choir, is the barest her music’s ever sounded.
Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land.
Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis.
But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star.
Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles.
The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people – 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville – arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young.
Mitski has always known how to write music that creates a lush and shimmering atmosphere while simultaneously piercing directly into a listener’s heart. “The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We” sees the artist in her most boundless state thus far, with dramatic orchestral swells on tracks like “Bug Like AnAngel” and “When Memories Snow” paired with searingly intimate lyricism on “My Love Mine All Mine” and “I’m Your Man.” After considering retirement a few years ago, this album is a stunning declaration that Mitski isn’t going anywhere.
“Good intentions that you keep / Don’t change the fact that you’re a beast,” sings Sunny War on the rollicking “No Reason.” Her fascination with duality and oxymoron predates her ascent as one of Americana’s most exciting voices (she named herself “Sunny War,” for folk’s sake). “Anarchist Gospel” just refines her thesis on the contradictory essence of human nature even as it refines her blues-rooted sound.
Here, with Andrija Tokic (Alabama Shakes, Margo Price) at the production desk and a slew of guests on the track list including Allison Russell and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, War’s LA busker roots collide with a slicker Nashville sensibility that can lull you into a false feeling of security.
Get caught up in her smooth alto and you might not notice the weighty core of hopelessness and surrender at the heart of “I Got No Fight,” or the apparent children’s choir backing her on…wait a minute, is that Ween’s “Baby Bitch”? No matter who shows up with her in the studio, of course, Sunny War remains a beast of a country blues guitarist—technically dizzying, but also loose, jaunty, and fun all at once.
Austin, Texas band Sun June has a new record on the way. “Bad Dream Jaguar” released in October via Run For Cover Records, marking their first proper follow-up to 2022’s “Somewhere”. Lead single “Get Enough” is a dynamic, expansive folk-pop track that lends an unhurried, gorgeous instrumental to Laura Colwell’s dreamy vocal affectation.
The first two minutes of Sun June’s third album, “Bad Dream Jaguar”, is a reverie – Laura Colwell’s voice floats above a slow-burn, sparse synth, conjuring a tipsy loneliness, a hazy recollection, a disco ball spinning at the end of the night for an empty dancefloor. Sun June’s music often feels like a shared memory – the details so close to the edge of a song that you can touch them. And as an Austin-based project, their music has also always felt strangely and specifically Texan – unhurried, long drives across an impossible expanse of openness, refractions shimmering off the pavement in the heat.
But on “Bad Dream Jaguar”, Sun June sound with the back drop of Texas is replaced by longing, by distance, by transience, and a quiet fear. “Drag me down with the weight, it’s a drug. I never get enough,” Colwell sings. “Even the sky looks menacing. I stayed awake for 48 hours, and it’s all I can do to be lonely. Me and you.” Affixed with Beatles references and psychedelic flair, “Get Enough” is a low-key gem that quickly morphs into a twangy, experimental stunner.
‘Get Enough’ is about spring-time mania, justifying delusions, and losing it but still loving it (Macca forever). It was written when Laura and Stephen [Salisbury] were bouncing back and forth between Texas and North Carolina, each unsure of where life was headed,” the band says about the track. “For the ‘Get Enough” video we wanted to lean into Texas kitsch.
With the album release via Run for Cover, the group—rounded out by vocalist/guitarist Laura Colwell, guitarist Michael Bain, bassist Justin Harris, and drummer Sarah Schultz—on each track, which range in subject matter from unsettling unconscious recollections, to their complicated feelings about their home state, to ultimately “letting go of desire for structure” .
“Most of us are transplants, but we’ve become Texans whether we like it or not. We liked the images of fake cowboying and Texan expanses beneath a busy flight path, and we thought it fit a song that’s about being pulled in different directions and wanting competing things. Visually, we were inspired by “Punch Drunk Love”. We bought a big blue suit and used 1970s anamorphic lenses to distort the image and bend the light.”
Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy soundingin the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured founda-tion in a sense of ease. The layers on “Bad Dream Jaguar” don’t tangle but they float, sheaths of divergent and luminescent sonics hanging together as the sun goes down, darkness seeping in.
The record exists in the chasm between giving up and going all-in. And a flicker of quiet confidence powering through, a small hopeful glow at its core.
Trio HotWax have shared their new single ‘Drop’ and confirmed they will be supporting Royal Blood on their forthcoming UK and US dates. The new track was mixed by Alan Moulder (Foo Fighters, Wet Leg) and marks the Hastings trio’s first new music since the release of their debut EP ‘A Thousand Times’.
Despite being younger than Fever to Tell and Sea Change, The British rockers from Hastings thoughofficially forming in Brighton Tallulah Sim-Savage, Lola Sam, and Alfie Sayers have already earned the praise of Karen O and Beck Their much-hyped debut EP “A Thousand Times”, which has already taken on cult status among fans of alt-rock,With the band’s second EP “Invite me, kindly” unleashed upon the world, HotWax is gearing up for a string of US tour dates
The release is accompanied by a UFO-themed official music video directed by Josh Quinton, “My aim for this video was to create an explosive & exciting journey through the band members’ brains that matches the exhilarating energy of the song, whilst also fusing their own personal style with my love for trashy 70s B movies and 90s kids TV,” said Quinton in a press release. “I wanted to use the symbolism of space travel to represent the band’s momentum and fresh landing into the world whilst adhering to a strong DIY ethos and reaching maximum altitudes of fun.”
“We didn’t overthink the first EP,” Tallulah says of their impressive debut project, “A Thousand Times”. “But on these songs we really went into more detail.” For example, HotWax tinkered with their bass-led sound. “We tried to even it out a bit and add more lead guitar parts,” she says. The aim, according to Lola, was simply to pare the production back: “This EP is a lot more raw—super dry, no reverb—than the last one.”
Songs like “Phone Machine” and “High Tea,” which are essentially about untangling uncomfortable feelings. The former conveys the pervasive sense of confusion that accompanies young adulthood via its frantic DIY production. “I was just messing around with amp settings in Logic and we came up with the riff,” Lola says. “It sounded a bit like a phone machine.” The latter, on the other hand, covers darker territory. “It’s about the two people you love the most arguing and not really getting along,” Tallulah says of “High Tea.” “Sometimes you just have to spit out the doubt that it causes you.”
The trio will also be supporting Royal Blood on their forthcoming UK and US dates, They will also play two of their own UK headline shows at Colours in Hoxton on September and Manchester Deaf Institute on the following night
Cat Power and Iggy Pop have shared a cover of “Working Class Hero” from the new compilation “The Faithful: A Tribute to Marianne Faithfull”, which will be released this weeky (Marianne Faithfull initially took a crack at the John Lennon track for her 1979 album, “Broken English”). The new covers collection also features Lydia Lunch, Bush Tetras, Peaches, Shirley Manson, and more, and all proceeds from the release will be donated to Faithfull, who’s been recovering from long COVID.
“Marianne has lived a life,” Chan Marshall said in a statement. “She is a queen to all who know her, and all who adore her! Her framework of contributions to the world of music is unmistakable! Every time I hear her gorgeous vocal sway, I am moved, I am closer to permanence. In a world of dizzying, new fizzling arrows of song and voices, Marianne has always struck the bullseye of my heart and soul. I adore her like no other. A true Dame, beyond words. Royalty forever.”
In 2020, news came that Marianne Faithfull was deathly ill from Covid. The virus was at a murderous high then and it affected her in the worst way possible, causing her to lose consciousness, necessitating a rush to an intensive care unit where she was intubated with little hope of survival. “All I know is that I was in a very dark place,” Faithfull said “Presumably, it was death.”
Faithfull survived, but the intensity of the virus, combined with her underlying condition of emphysema, compromised her lungs to the point where she may never be able to sing again. That left her with a double whammy – the potential loss of any fresh source of income and the steep cost of recovery from long Covid. While her situation has been deeply concerning for many fans, one of them actually decided to do something about it.
Tanya Donelly, who helped form the bands Throwing Muses, the Breeders and Belly, came to Faithfull’s music from a very different angle. When she was growing up, her parents played Faithfull’s 60s recordings, back when her voice had a light quaver and her music a folk tinge. For the tribute, Donelly paired with the harmony trio Parkington Sisters on a cover of “This Little Bird”, a major hit for Faithfull in 1965. “Her voice on that song was very much a part of my childhood,” Donelly said. “I also sang it to my kids as a lullaby.”
Despite the delicacy of Faithfull’s original recording, Donelly detected a tug of sadness in it. “Her singing in that song has that sweetness and that darkness,” she said. “She’s a master at balancing the two.”
“I wanted to come up with something that would make as much money for Marianne as possible,” said Tanya Pearson, who heads the Women of Rock Oral History Project, which chronicles the work of female rock musicians. “I considered organizing a benefit concert, but at the time the pandemic was still going.”
Instead, she decided to try to create a combination tribute/benefit album featuring stars covering songs Faithfull has famously recorded. “The easy part was finding musicians who were willing to donate their time and effort,” Pearson said of the project, which began more than two years ago. “Finding a label to forgo any profit was a lot harder.”
After much searching, Pearson finally found a small label called In the Q, which this week, in conjunction with Bandbox, will issue a double vinyl set titled The Faithfull. The package, which will also be available on streaming services, boasts 19 tracks by stars such as Shirley Manson, Cat Power, Iggy Pop, Peaches, the Bush Tetras and more. Though most of the artists involved are women, Pearson said that was solely due to the industry contacts she has through the Women of Rock Oral Oral History Project.
Recorded in March of 2022 at Brooklyn Steel, this live album goes a long way in expressing both the charms and limitations of Will Toledo’s bedroom-pop project over a decade since its inception.
There was a brief moment where it seemed like Car Seat Headrest might have been poised to be one of the biggest indie bands to emerge from the last decade. This was in 2016, and to that point they’d hit every checkpoint you’d want a buzzy mid-2010s project to hit on both a critical and fan-based level, thanks largely in part to to-be classic LPs like “Twin Fantasy” and “Teens of Denial“.
Prior to 2016, Car Seat Headrest’s creative engine Will Toledo embodied a new kind of indie star. Like noted contemporary Alex G, Toledo was a wellspring of creativity, releasing music that felt raw, and a pace that felt almost frenetic. Uploaded to Bandcamp in 2010, his first album featured a note that would define his shy, withdrawn, vulnerable persona: “I probably would not have been able to make this album if I had thought anyone was going to listen to it,” wrote Toledo. This was bedroom pop promised.
But after 2016 and a deal with Matador Records, people were listening, and what’s come since has been mystifyingly sparse. “Teens of Denial” his 13th release in seven years. But in the seven since, the band has released only a single album of original material .
Which brings us to today and the band’s latest release. The nearly 90-minute record, which captures shows played at NYC’s Brooklyn Steel in support of their 2020 LP “Making a Door Less Open“, The band chooses to include from that record on “Masquerade” is one of its most perplexing aspects. A live LP should play as part greatest hits, but sometimes it can be risky to leave that up to the creator. when they do reach deep into their bag of actualgreatest hits, there are some truly inspiring moments. They make us wait a bit, but the opening riff to “Fill in the Blank” hits as hard as ever, a reminder of how good this band can sound when they’re running on all cylinders. Ultimately, the highlights probably won’t surprise you: the dance-floor thrum of Twin Fantasy’s “Bodys,” the swelling “Something Soon,” the digressive brilliance of “Beach Life-in-Death.” Sure, for the most part these are pretty faithful renditions of Car Seat Headrest favourites.
The Fat Angel Sings 