The Fontaines D.C. frontman releases his debut solo album. Amongst brief rests from relentless tours with the critically acclaimed Dublin post-punk band, Chatten decided to challenge his creativity and occupy a different sound world, expanding his artistic voice. With Dan Carey behind the sound board, the first single opts for drum machine downtempo and soft nylon finger picking guitar. It seems that Chatten finds a new sense of curiosity in his storytelling on this record, developing his lucid lyricism.
Having released three albums in only marginally more years at the helm of Fontaines D.C, Grian Chatten’s solo debut arrived in the promo-shunning manner of a true passion project. An immediate tonal departure from his day job, ‘Chaos For The Fly’ was a record of melancholy introversions, laced with strings and acoustic plucks, and written as an escape from the frustrations of fame and touring. Where FDC have increasingly found themselves thrust into the glare of awards shows and mainstream adoration, ‘Chaos…’ reminded the world that, beneath the bright lights,
Chatten is a songwriter’s songwriter in the great tradition of them; a modern-day bard of the broken spirit, capable of spinning darkness into real beauty.
On white coloured vinyl with signed print., “Chaos For The Fly”, out 30th June on Partisan Records:
Returning six years after the release of their funky-pop opus ‘After Laughter’, Paramore’s latest boasts another deft sonic transformation for the trio. Inspired more by the rough-edged indie-rock of the likes of Bloc Party, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Rapture, ‘This Is Why’ is a darkly seductive record that sees the band growing ever more comfortable in their skin, all while staring squarely at the growing sense of discomfort and disillusionment that haunts our current lives.
A far cry from the emo heartland of their early discography, ‘This Is Why’ is blistering (‘The News’, ‘You First’) and breathtaking (‘Liar’, ‘Thick Skull’) in equal measure.
Dublin’s “False Lankum” feels like it has been dug up like hidden treasure beneath the belly of the bog, gleaming beneath the earth like a Celtic axe, cutting to the core of the human condition. It will take you on a Shamanic journey so intense that you will come out the other side feeling like your soul has been in a speed wash – in a good way. The first track ‘Go Dig My Grave’ is so visceral that it will shake you to the core. A reworking of an old folk song with several incarnations Lankum have constructed the piece so cleverly that it grips and tricks the listener with a haunting narrative, swelling like a Celtic demon layered on a dark bed full of drones and dulcimers, putting a shiver down your spine. Breathing space comes in the swell and sway of ‘Clear Away In the Morning’ followed by the first of three ambient Fugues. In ‘Master Crowley‘s’ trad instrumental you can hear every wheeze of the living and breathing concertinas, leading to an unexpected demonic siren swirling and pulling the listener slowly underwater. Just when you start to feel comfortable, they take the listener down another spiral, creating a purposeful sense of disorientation, but trust the journey and you will soon arrive at the stunningly accomplished ‘Netta Perseus’ with unexpected shadows in the soundscapes.
Lankum is pure punk, pushing the genre to its limit, amalgamating the best of folk with elements of metal, krautrock, punk and psychedelia, creating a new genre of its own, transcending cultural boundaries using Indian harmoniums, echoing the drones of the uilleann pipes perfectly and bringing a depth and harmony to the tracks and recognition of the universality of the human condition. It’s as twisted and stunning as a Celtic Knot. As the legendary Irish singer Frank Harte said, “Those in power write the history while those who suffer write the songs.”
Succinctly summing up a Mercury Prize shortlisted magnum opus like ‘False Lankum’ is a daunting task. Lankum’s fourth LP will surely be studied for its contribution to expanding contemporary sonic landscapes, but limiting the body of work as a triumph of ‘traditional’ or ‘folk’ genres misses the mark on exactly how experimental and fearless it is. From Radie Peat’s haunting voice that could make a spine-tingling impact in any era (her take on The Deadlians’ song ‘Newcastle’ is a must-listen), to the unbelievable amount of instruments the Dublin quartet perform, it’s impossible to come away from ‘False Lankum’ without hearing genius.
Our 4th album “False Lankum” is out now on Rough Trade Records.
North Carolina fuzz-guitar collective Wednesday have announced their debut Aotearoa headline dates, gracing local stages at Pōneke’s Meow and Tāmaki Makaurau’s Whammy Bar this summer. Incredibly prolific since launching their 2018 debut album “Yep, Definitely”, the US quintet helmed by songwriter / guitarist Karly Hartzman are touring down under following the recent release of their fifth studio long player “Rat Saw God” via Dead Oceans — which prompted Pitchfork to gush “Their outstanding new album is why they’re one of the best indie rock bands around”.
Wednesday is fronted by singer and guitarist Karly Hartzman who, alongside guitarist MJ Lenderman (a rising song writing star in his own right), bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, will bring their raucous and rousing live set to fill these intimate venues with a truly unique wall of noise.
“Rat Saw God”, the follow-up to “Twin Plagues” and Wednesday’s Dead Oceans debut, is a triumph of razor-sharp focus, churning intensity, and natural ambition. By this point, the group is so in sync that it sounds like they’re carrying stimuli through the same nervous system while eliciting different responses. For all the darkness that the album digs into, what it drags along with it is never a lack of clarity. On the contrary, these mostly coming-of-age tales, lived or otherwise absorbed, seem to have sharpened so many human senses: Karly Hartzman is acutely aware of irony, especially as it pertains to religion, and, on songs like ‘Bull Believer’, fuses allegory and truth to striking effect. Her descriptions never feel overbearing or exaggerated, but heightened in their reality, zoning in on the blurry space between pain as an experience and tragedy as a story. The blood stays fresh on the page but the pain takes on different dimensions; comedy is an unintended consequence, not an antidote. It all blends together in ways that are immediate, glorious, and totally arresting.
The band are touring in support of their 2023 album “Rat Saw God”, which garnered unanimous praise from across the board with its tales of life in suburban America, both winning hearts and breaking them in equal measure. Wednesday’s sound may have echoes of the best parts of the 90s, but truly is a musical blend all their own, with their wild mash-up of shoegaze, alt-country, emo, and grunge.
With songs that tell stories of stomach pumping, nostalgic small-town bike rides, drugs, and Mortal Kombat, the band’s fifth album is, as perfectly put by NPR, “distinctly, youthfully, chaotically American”, while Uncut gifted it a near perfect score and praised its ability to match horror with humour.
Wednesday’s live shows are reported to be distorted, dangerous, and fearsome affairs, with squalls of fuzzed out pedal steel melding with duelling guitars, pummelling bass, and cacophonous drums, all cut through like a knife by Karly Hartzman’s unmistakable vocal.
Threading emotionally disarming autobiographic narratives through passages of stormy shoegaze distortion, frazzled grunge riffage and lilting alt-country, the ten songs on “Rat Saw God” illustrate everyday epics drawn from the suburban backwaters of the US south. Possessors of an impressively un-Googleable band name, don’t miss Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap / pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis
released April 7th, 2023
Karly Hartzman – Guitar & Vocals MJ Lenderman – Guitar & Back-up Vocals Xandy Chelmis – Lap Steel Margo Schultz – Bass Alan Miller – Drums
Mitski — “the most alluring and enigmatic musician in indie rock” (Rolling Stone) — announces her new album, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We“, out September 15th on Dead Oceans, and presents its anthemic lead single, “Bug Like an Angel.” In this album, which is Mitski’s most sonically expansive, epic, and wise album to-date, 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. The album is full of the ache of the grown-up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love.
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 Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles, and incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people — 12 in Los Angeles and 5 in Nashville arranged by Mitski. 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.
Lead single “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love.
“The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” reads as a dramatic title, but stress the second to last word and you hear the beginning of a question. The songs on Mitski’s seventh album sound like that, too: bold yet tentative, elegant yet knotty, drawing you in with their organic beauty until you realize you’re stranded in the dark alongside her, wondering what awaits us.
The follow-up to 2022’s “Laurel Hell” is both her warmest and most challenging effort to date – not even handing out the questions to you, let alone any answers, but moving with multitudes – and so the first to vividly capture the ostensible contradictions and chilling intricacies that have long been a mark of her song writing. Though the songs don’t quite explode or follow conventional paths the way some of her older material did, this is the least detached Mitski has sounded. Even the most dissociative songs sound alive, making the loneliest thing burn brightly and beautifully.
For hardcore Mitski fans, each of the singular artist’s releases are akin to a prophetic message. But there’s something about ‘The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We’ – her seventh album – that felt particularly ecclesiastical. Be it the orchestral swell of ‘Heaven’, the ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ essence of ‘I Don’t Like My Mind’, or the choral backing vocals peppered throughout, it’s as if she crafted the record with a spellbound congregation in mind. Which, given the record’s rapturous reception, isn’t too far from the truth. Utterly enveloping and borderline transportive, it’s a hauntingly beautiful handling of hope amidst sorrow.
In January this year, Damon, Alex, Dave and Graham came together at Damon’s West London studio to discuss the possibility of recording a new album. No-one in that room could have imagined what was to follow…
Six months; one surprise album announcement; 10 songs; 4 tiny warm-up shows; one lost (and found) gold tooth; a knee injury; two transcendent Wembley Stadium shows; one newly-famous Scottish lido; a global livestream; one European tour seen by 2 million fans; and one critically-acclaimed studio album later… blur have topped the charts once again eith their new album “The Ballad of Darren”
A divorce album in all but name, “The Ballad Of Darren” strikes a similar melancholic chord as “13”, the turn-of-the-millennium album from Blur. The difference of nearly 25 years makes a considerable difference: there’s a collective heft to the album that stems from a band that reconvenes with the knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses, a group that recognizes their peculiar chemistry. After dispensing with the barbed rush of “St. Charles Square,” Blur spends the rest of the record floating on a melancholy sea, never succumbing to its sad undercurrent but always aware of its undertow.
Damon Albarn is not one to rest on his laurels and so, when Blur agreed to this summer’s rapturously-received pair of Wembley Stadiums shows, he quietly began work on what would become Blur’s ninth studio album, later bringing the band and producer James Ford in to finish and record ‘The Ballad of Darren’ in a matter of months.
As such, there’s an easiness to these songs that comes from four childhood friends acting on chemistry and instinct, buoyed by an innate understanding of each other’s musical quirks. A band with a legendary knack for elegiac, suckerpunch ballads, ‘…Darren’ is bursting with the sort of melodies that only Albarn could concoct (plus a glorious wink to their cranky, rowdy side in ‘St. Charles Square’), all held aloft by a quartet who proved they could still make magic, all these years later.
Singer, songwriter, and DJ Romy — one-third of UK outfit The XX recorded three critically lauded albums with her band, but in 2023 was finally ready to share her own 11-song debut solo album, “Mid Air”. A gorgeous recording about celebration, sanctuary, and salvation on the dance floor that doubles as a postcard to the queer clubs that provided comfort and connection, the album’s standout is “Loveher”: Right from the start, we catch the soft-spoken Romy politely requesting to “turn it up more,” as she launches in. You can feel the scope of her love for her new partner as they cut loose on the dance floor, yet are still a little reserved, wanting to hold hands under the table for a private moment of bliss.
While Romy came out long ago, it’s rare to find an artist who is so candid about her own life and shares her unique perspective. This was an exceptional track released in 2023.
“I don’t mean to be the last one standing / only meant to be the next best thing” are the damn-near-perfect opening lines to The New Pornographers’ “Cat and Mouse With the Light,” a simultaneously hilarious and heart-breaking vignette of a relationship not meant to be. Neko Case takes the lead on this prismatic pop gem, and by the time she gets to the chorus with “I can’t stand that you love me,” you’ll also fall hopelessly head-over-heels.
Official audio for The New Pornographers’ song “Cat And Mouse With The Light” from the new album ‘Continue as a Guest’ out now on Merge Records.
If “Nothing Left To Lose,” the first single released from “Fuse”, Everything But The Girl’s first new album in nearly a quarter-century, is anything to go by, the duo is picking up both right where they left off and smack dab in the centre of our current musical epoch. That track is a soulful banger with gobs of sub-bass that stick to the ribs and flickering synths that briefly reveal the trysts and break ups happening in the darker corners of the dance club. The rest of the record follows suit, while sliding easily into lush ambient tracks suffused with cloudy memories.
The world hardly deserved the return of Everything But The Girl this year. But Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn’s surprise new album “Fuse” was a balm for the soul in 2023. The album’s first two singles foregrounded the more club-ready aspects of their musical personality. But “Fuse’s” third single, “Run A Red Light,” burrowed deep into the melancholic heart of their best work. Watt and Thorn have always been first-rate balladeers, with a particular flair for chronicling the highs and lows of urban nightlife. “Run A Red Light” is a masterclass of the form: a portrait of reckless, drug-fuelled arrogance given a hauntingly beautiful turn by Thorn’s velvet-textured voice.
Like later-period Billie Holiday or Joni Mitchell, her vocal tone has acquired a gorgeous, lived-in quality that suits the dissolute disposition of the song’s protagonist. And Watt’s production has never felt more sympathetic, knowing precisely when to hover and when to bump. A perfect soundtrack for the 3AM of the soul, literal and otherwise.
After 40+ years and countless hits, Depeche Mode is still hungry to push their sound forward, not content to “just be a greatest hits band,” as guitarist/lead songwriter Martin Gore said earlier this year. When the rumblings of new music surfaced, the anticipation was massive, and their fifteenth album, “Memento Mori”, did not disappoint. “Ghosts Again” captures the group where they are today — now, and for the first time, a duo, following the death of founding member and keyboardist Andy “Fletch”Fletcher in 2020, shortly before album recording was set to begin.
The track is a powerful groover, with rich lyrics that combine to evocative effect. With so much that happened within the family, it’s beautiful to see these legends continue to grow, evolve, and just get better with time — ever finding grace in darkness.
The Fat Angel Sings 