The Fat Angel Sings

Duran Duran fans got an earful this weekend, when five of the British band’s albums dropped on streaming platforms for the first time. The trove includes the Mark Ronson-produced “All You Need Is Now”, a fan-favourite which this year celebrates its 10th anniversary; and 2004’s “Astronaut”, which featured the reunited classic line-up of Simon Le Bon (vocals), Nick Rhodes (keys), John Taylor (bass), Roger Taylor (drums) and Andy Taylor (guitar), who has since departed the group once again.

Also out now the band’s latest release a concept album at heart, Duran Duran’s “Danse Macabre” was triggered by a Halloween 2022 concert in Las Vegas in which the band worked through its catalogue, pulling out obscurities that tied into the theme as well as some choice covers by artists such as the Rolling Stones, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Specials. The LP embraced Duran Duran’s legacy by dipping into their musical past with songs that looked ahead by glancing backward.

“Danse Macabre” goes deeper into that past by pulling vintage songs like “Nightboat” (from their 1981 debut) and “Secret Oktober” (originally the B-side of 1983 single “Union of the Snake”), slapping on some appropriate new textures and placing them alongside covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black,” Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” and Billie Eilish’s “Bury a Friend.”

The best songs, though, are the new ones. “Black Moonlight” glides along a slinky nostalgic groove – provided by an instantly recognizable Nile Rodgers guitar riff – laced with “Thriller”-style sound effects, while “Danse Macabre” loads up on eerie synths, and an even more frightening rap by Simon Le Bon, for the album’s centerline. The covers are mere side attractions, the threads that pull together the album’s moody concept. “Ghost Town” and “Super Lonely Freak” (a reworking of Rick James‘ classic song) won’t replace the originals, not by a long shot, but their place on “Danse Macabre” serves a purpose on this fun but fleeting LP.

Their 16th record, a spinoff from that spooky show, carries over several songs from the set while adding a handful of new tracks to fit the occasion. The result is a work that feels both mannered and effortless, a loosely connected collection of songs Duran Duran knows well enough to deliver with confidence without ever having to try too hard.

Also new to DSPs is “Medazzaland” (1997), “Pop Trash” (2000), “Red Carpet Massacre” (2007), and “Bored of Prozac and the Internet“, the TV Mania side project led by Rhodes and former Duran Duran guitarist Warren Cuccurullo.

With 14 studios albums, hits and remix collections, plus sides projects including Arcadia and The Power Station, the Duran Duran streaming collection is now complete.

Earlier this year, the British band released a cover of Bowie’s “Five Years,” a string of outdoor shows have been announced for the U.K., Ireland and Spain,

The alternative rock outfit last month marked 40 years since the release of their debut single, “Planet Earth”.

Last year, the lackadaisical Philadelphian indie rock prince Kurt Vile released his album “Watch My Moves”. Since then, Vile has covered Charli XCX and played live with a whole lot of luminaries. Next month, Kurt Vile will release “Back To Moon Beach”, a new record that he’s calling an EP even though it’s almost an hour long.

The songs on “Back To Moon Beach” come from sessions that Kurt Vile recorded over the past four years, and they include tracks recorded with musicians like Chris Cohen, Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, and Vile’s late bandmate Rob Laasko. It includes Vile’s covers of Bob Dylan’s “Must Be Santa” and Wilco’s “Passenger Side.” Recent Wilco collaborator Cate Le Bon co-produced three tracks, including the EP opener and first single “Another Good Year For the Roses.”

“Another good year for the roses” has nothing to do with George Jones’ “A Good Year For The Roses,” though I imagine that the reference is intentional. Instead, “Another good year for the roses” is a sprawling track that lasts for nearly six minutes. It starts off as an ambling groove with some nifty pedal steel and cowbell action, and it builds into a psychedelic jam. Kurt Vile co-directed the video with Drew Saracco, and it features the great character actors Michael Shannon, Kevin Corrigan, and David Wike, 

“Back To Moon Beach” (Verve Records) is an EP by no one’s definition but Kurt Vile’s. For Kurt, this collection is an expression of just how deep his well of non-album material runs.

Wow can you believe it’s been 6 years since Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile released their collaboration album “Lotta Sea Lice”  What’s better than Kurt and Courtney?, Answer Kurt and Courtney each covering a Chastity Belt song!!!
Listen to CB covering “Different Now” , Suicide Squeeze celebrates the band Chastity Belt with the latest in its split 7″ single series–a pair of covers by Friends of the Band and tour mates Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett. For this release, Kurt and Courtney each recorded a song from the band’s third album, 2017’s “I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone“, in their signature styles. Side K is Kurt’s version of “This Time of Night,” on which he lovingly recreates the anxious interplay of Julia Shapiro and Lydia Lund’s guitars, stretching each note of the song’s fraught vocal melody to its breaking point.

Flip the record to Side C for Courtney’s take on “Different Now,” where she pulls the song from its Pacific Northwest haze, leaves it out to dry in the middle of the desert, and wrings something almost joyous from the original’s ambiguity.

“This Time of Night” / “Different Now” will be available on vinyl and digital platforms, with a one-time retail vinyl pressing limited to 1500 (250 pink, 250 black, 1000 blue) copies on heavyweight vinyl.

releases October 27th, 2023

Written by Chastity Belt
Guitars and Vocals by Courtney Barnett
Drums and Synths by Stella Mozgawa

First-ever complete collection of all the recordings made by 60’s Hammond driven R&B Pop stars The Spencer Davis Group during the period 1967-1969. Disc One features their 1967 singles recorded with Stevie Winwood replacements Phil Sawyer and Eddie Hardin, including the pop classics ‘Time Seller’ and ‘Mr Second Class’. Also their recordings used in the film soundtrack “Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush”.

The second half of Disc One comprises their 1968 single and album recorded with Sawyer’s replacement Ray Fenwick, who brought with him the excellent ‘After Tea’ (co-written with Dutch Tee Set pop master Hans Van Eijck). Album With Their New Face On is a mix of jazzy R&B and pop psychedelia. The standout R&B track is ‘Don’t Want You No More’, which was later covered by The Allman Brothers.

the second disc Two boasts their rare, Germany-only single, and the US only LP Funky recorded in 1969 by Fenwick and Davis plus Nigel Olsson and Dee Murray (just before they joined Elton John). Also included is the theme to the TV show Magpie, originally recorded in 1968, and the groovy, heavy psych single ‘Short Change’.

RPM is pleased to finally be able to serve up previously unreleased BBC Sessions, recorded through 1968 around the promotion of “With Their New Face On”. These are coupled on Disc Three with live tracks and other rarities for which tapes have been archived, plus interesting alternative versions discovered down the years.

This 3CD clamshell packaged box set is crammed full of fascinating details in booklet notes from Andy Neill, photo’s from various archives, and input from original members Ray Fenwick, Pete York and Spencer Davis.

publishing house Callaway will release Mixing Up the Medicine, a 600+-page tome promised to be “the most comprehensive book yet published on the work of Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter-poet and cultural icon, Bob Dylan.”  As entire libraries could be filled with the books written on Dylan, that’s no small boast – but this hefty coffee table volume looks like it might live up to the hype.  Written and edited by Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, the book celebrates both Dylan himself and The Bob Dylan Center, the expansive Tulsa, Oklahoma museum that opened to the public in May 2022 which has become ground zero for studies of the artist’s life and work.  Though the book is massive – filled with over 1,100 images by 135 photographers plus 30 original essays, an introduction by Sean Wilentz, and an epilogue by Douglas Brinkley – its companion CD/LP is a brief Dylan primer with just a dozen tracks spanning 1964-2000 including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” and “Things Have Changed.”

Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine is the landmark magnum opus every Bob Dylan fan has been waiting for since the 60s: lavishly illustrated with hundreds of previously unseen photographs and spanning from Dylan’s childhood in Hibbing, Minnesota, to the Nobel Prize for Literature and beyond, this is a treasure trove that promises to be of vast interest to Bob Dylan musical fans as well as a broader cultural audience. 

Former Muncie Girls leader shines with great songs and harmonies on her second solo album, LANDE HEKT Sometimes with artists you just need the right entry point. Exeter indie punks Muncie Girls passed me by; likewise with singer/bassist Lande Hekt’s 2021 solo debut, But when Lande, now based out of Brighton, released a fantastic cover of  The Wedding Present’s “Seamonsters’ standout “Octopussy” she had my attention. “House Without A View” follows in much the path as “Going to Hell”, full of expertly crafted, jangly indie pop that really showcases what a wonderful songwriter she is. Also, what a voice. Her crystal clear pipes cut through Muncie Girls’ fuzzy punk with ease but it’s more of a natural fit here where her lilt is given more nuanced backing on these 11 songs that range from acoustic folk-rock to glistening shoegazy numbers to strummy, snarling guitar pop. 

Her lyrics are vulnerable — “I’m not someone who works at lightning speed/ I’m not even someone who knows what I need,” she sings on on the jaunty “Backstreet Snow” — but there is strength in her delivery that makes it clear she’s working things out, thank you very much.  Listening to “House Without a View”, I keep thinking of the late Kirsty MacColl who made similarly smart, tuneful pop 35 years earlier and who also had a way with ethereal harmonies that can lift you six inches off the ground.

 The second full-length solo offering from Muncie Girls leader Lande Hekt effectively follows up last year’s equally impressive “Going To Hell.” This record is filled with often intimate ’90s-style alt-rock with quite personal lyrics. There’s immense joy in key single “Gay Space Cadets” and touching sadness in the breakup energy of “Half of You.” “Backstreet Snow” and “Cut My Hair” are the kind of songs that would have gotten loads of airplay in 1997, while “Lola” is a strong character study where Hekt sings, “You’re really nothing like me/ I wonder how we are built so differently.” Her delivery is always warm and engaging.

released September 23rd, 2022

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood talk the past, present and future of The Rolling Stones. “Hackney Diamonds”, pop and blues, the band and the establishment, Bill and Charlie (did he really punch Mick?) and more. Also in this issue: Bob Dylan’s archive treasures; Peter Gabriel checks in; Sly Stone’s peak madness; Joni Mitchell’s mid-’70s; Carly Simon speaks! Plus: Joe Walsh, Thurston Moore, Black Pumas, Graham Parker, Talking Heads, Micky Dolenz sings R.E.M., Mike Stoller, Meat Puppets, Jimmy Buffett, Suicide and more.

A little groggy from MOJO’s 30th birthday celebrations last month, it’s sobering to be reminded of what longevity can really mean. The Rolling Stones have now existed for over twice as long as MOJO, and while other artists of their vintage have grappled with the ageing process for a good couple of decades, Messrs Jagger, Richards and Wood mostly remain impervious to such trifling distractions as mortality. “It’s a weird feeling to be an elder statesman,” Keith Richards tells us in a notable new interview this month, though most of us would’ve called him as much since about 1989.

Mick Jagger, meanwhile, confesses to a few “slightly tongue-in-cheek references to ageing” on “Hackney Diamonds”, the 24th Rolling Stones album and the pretext for MOJO’s chat with the core three, their pugnacious new drummer Steve Jordan, and their young producer Andrew Watt. It is, hand on heart, the best Stones feature you’ll read in years: one that’s as strong on historic myth-busting as it is on unpicking the new record, and which – amidst a justifiable blizzard of namedropping – has a superb Hoagy Carmichael anecdote.

 “raising the middle finger to death,” Peter Gabriel tells us all about his forthcoming album, i/o, plus mind-reading, “grandad-dancing” and why he had to be present at the last Genesis gig.

Unveiled… Bob’s secret treasures! MOJO digs ever deeper into the Dylan Archive and, via new book Mixing Up The Medicine, finds rare pics and exotic artefacts to surprise even the most obsessive Bobcat.

THIS MONTH’S COVERMOUNT CD is “Love In Vain”, a collection of the spooky country blues embedded in the Stones’ DNA. Stars Robert Johnson, Sleepy John Estes, Charley Patton, Skip James, Geeshie Wiley and more.

19-year-old hyper-pop sensation Jane Remover continues to impress, and her sophomore album might just cement her budding stardom. Look no further for that truth than in the title track, “Census Designated.” The six-minute song slowly unfurls into its own immersive world; crass and visceral but utterly celestial.

Written and produced entirely by Jane herself, the song blends her typical fuzzy, industrial glitch with gossamer keys and a smoothly robotic vocal performance—one that is comforting, not off putting, to the more terminally online of Jane’s fans (which, in all honesty, is likely most of them). She sings, “I’m young blood, fresh meat, and I like that,” ushering in a tongue-in-cheek awareness to the genre while remaining beholden to no limits in which the sounds her work can subsume.

Songs like “Holding a Leash” and the seven-minute epic “Idling Somewhere” conjure the same feverish, distorted digital footprint.

The world on this record is grand, pixelated and harmonic, industrial yet sublime. On “Census Designated”, Jane Remover knows exactly what she is doing—and she’s doing a damn good job at it.

You won’t hear another album like “Census Designated”, the sophomore effort by Jane Remover, this year, or most years: the singer-producer, who reconfigured her sound (as well as came out as a trans woman) following 2021 debut “Frailty”, has mastered a singular blend of shoegaze, noise rock, pop melodies and indie balladry across these 10 tracks, while also prodding at her personal evolution and identity. Parts of “Census Designated” work best during a late-night headphones listen, while others beg to be blasted from car speakers; conceptually, the album begins at sundown and ends at dawn, but Jane Remover’s latest will affect you in any setting.

“Bad Dream Jaguar” is a collection of songs threading their way through the uncertainty. The Austin band made the album during a period of dislocation: guitarist Stephen Salisbury moved from Texas to North Carolina in 2020, changing the nature of his creative (and romantic) relationship with singer and bandleader Laura Colwell until she joined him in 2022. The dozen tracks on “Bad Dream Jaguar” seek to make sense of that distance, their solitude and, in an overarching way, a fractured nostalgia for what had come before—and the often painful work of letting it go.

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 sound, 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 is unmoored. The back drop of Texas is replaced by longing, by distance, by transience, and aquiet fear. The only sense of certainty comes from the murky past.It’s a dispatch from aging, when you’re in the strange in-betweenof yourself: there’s a clear image of the person you once wereand the places you inhabited, generational curses and our fami-lies, but the future feels vast, unclear – and the present can’t help but slip through your fingers.

There’s a mix of hi-fi and lo-fi; some songs, like “Texas,” whichthe band had to learn at a breakneck pace ahead of their record-ing session, was recorded on a first take, live in the room, while “Eager” and “Easy Violence” feature early vocal takes from Colwell, the final songs built atop the demos. The latter track details staying up all night, being a menace to society, falling into bad patterns, but is followed by “John Prine,” a drumless, piano-based ballad, a mash of pedal steel manipulated to sound closer to synths.

Sun June’s records have always been deceptively airy sounding in the face of melancholia, belying its densely textured foundation 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. 

It’s a subtle album, built around gentle, dream-like musical arrangements that belie the tougher sentiments underpinning these songs. The narrators here are often trying to figure out where they stand, in relation to a significant other, themselves, the past, the future. “You were searching for a reason to be mad / Babe, I got plenty of them,” Colwell sings on “Mixed Bag,” her soft voice wrapped in layers of guitar, ghostly backing vocals and a piano vamp that lands just so between lyrics.

Befitting an album that took shape around a long-distance relationship, there’s a lot of road imagery on “Bad Dream Jaguar”. Colwell sings about long drives and headlights in the distance, and the lyrics often play like the reveries that blossom between the highway lines on road trips. She lets her mind wander through remembered scenes and settings that have the feel of creased snapshots she found tucked away in the glove compartment. Colwell is fighting to stay awake behind the wheel, and true to herself, while singing along in the car on “John Prine.” On “Washington Square,” her narrator is remembering when she and a partner were young and foolish “back when all the things to come hadn’t yet,” while “Sage” finds her holding tight to glimpses of the past while staving off the melancholy of a solitary present

Released 20/10/2023

After collaborating together for more than a decade, Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden released their first album under the Lost Girls moniker in 2021: “Menneskekollektivet”. The record received rave reviews, including a Best New Music mark at Pitchfork. Now the duo release their second album “Selvutsletter”.

This the second album from Jenny Hval and Håvard Volden’s collaborative project Lost Girls, “Selvutslette”r is eight songs packed to the brim with avant-garde pop music and post-modern reflections on pleasure, dancing and experimentalism. It’s as primitive as a Bjӧrk record, as intoxicating as Hounds of Love-era Kate Bush. It’s not quite as immediately accessible as the pop radio workings of Hval’s own solo work, especially her 2022 album “Classic Objects” but “Selvutsletter” is relentless in its own pursuit towards organic electronica. Guitars and synthesizers flicker and haunt, as Hval and Volden solidify the magnetism of their own creative partnership.

Songs like “With the Other Hand” and “World on Fire” sound like they’re straight from a time capsule but, like the standout track “Ruins,” “Selvutsletter” sounds unlike anything Hval and Volden have ever made. It’s one of the best electronic albums of 2023. 

Where “Menneskekollektivet” was about exploring club beats, and expanding and trying out structures, “Selvutsletter” is about disappearing in experiences. It combines the intuitive, late night feel of Lost Girls’ previous work with experimental rock music as its object. The result is more adventurous than nostalgic: A fiery, bilingual whirl of colours, words, vegetation and electricity.