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 “IUsed 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 TheSpencer 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.
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 JaneRemover’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
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.
“A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night” is Brooklyn singer/songwriter Katie von Schleicher’s first full-length album since 2020, and it’s punctuated, psychedelic and beautiful at every turn. Her melancholic, angelic singing is just as spectral as ever here, though a song like “Every Step Is an Ocean” breaks her out of her comfort zone a bit—as she conjures avant-pop and electronica in confident and sublime ways. Elsewhere, von Schleicher delivers piercing ballads (“Texas” and “Jeanine”) and collaborates with LadyLamb to make groovy, folk-inspired bliss (“Elixir”).
“A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night” is magnetic and unavoidable, boasting the bravado of a musician at an immaculate apex. Album standout “Overjoyed” is one of the best songs von Schleicher has ever written, as it soars on a delightful, buoyant instrumentation that flirts with the gray area between twang-pop and Laurel Canyon folk rock.
Produced by Katie von Schleicher and Sam Griffin Owens (Sam Evian) – “A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night” was recorded with a bunch of poker buddies the two accumulated during the pandemic. Lyrically wry and classically lush with strings and horns, it’s a songwriter album that nuzzles up to the Arthur Russell and Kirsty MacColl LPs in one’s record collection. In narrowing the gap between her personality and her songwriting, von Schleicher has made her most untroubled album.
“A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night”, out October 20th on Sipsman.
Neil Young has announced a new album titled“Before and After”. The 13-track LP will arrive on December 8th and will feature solo acoustic re-recordings of songs from throughout Young’s catalogue. There’s also one previously unreleased track, “If You Got Love.”
Set to arrive on December 8th via Reprise Records, the album will see Young structure the trac-klist so that the songs blend together and create one continuous flow from beginning to end.
“The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece — designed to be listened to that way,” said Young of the new album. “This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organisation, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.” “Songs from my life, recently recorded, create a music montage with no beginnings or endings,” Young said in a statement posted to the album’s preorder page.
Neil Young’s new release called ‘Before & After’, out now via Reprise. But instead of writing and recording a batch of new material, the singer-songwriter took a cue from the Taylor Swift playbook, re-recording select songs from throughout his career. ‘Before & After’ is described as “a trip into his music history,” with Neil having picked some of his own favourite songs from his catalogue to re-visit. It’ll mostly be solo acoustic re-recordings, sequenced so its 13 songs blend seamlessly together from front to back.
“The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece — designed to be listened to that way,” Neil said in a statement. “This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organization, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.”
Tracks in the album include his earliest Buffalo Springfield appearance, ‘Burned’, and his more recent track ‘Don’t Forget Love’, taken from 2021’s ‘Barn’. The previously unreleased song titled ‘If You Got Love’ is featured too.
Neil Young recently broke his four-year touring hiatus. Over the summer, he embarked on a solo acoustic tour of the West Coast in which he performed songs he had never played live before.
“I don’t want to come back and do the same songs again,” Young said at the time . “I’ll feel like I was on some sort of carnival ride. I’d rather be doing these other songs I haven’t done. … I won’t have to compare how I’m doing ‘Heart of Gold’ to [how I played it in] 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020.”
“It’s over. The old days are gone,” he said in a message posted to his Neil Young Archives website. “Artists have to worry about ripped-off fans blaming them for Ticketmaster add-ons and scalpers.”
So far, no further tour dates have been announced, and Young has emphasized that performing live in today’s industry is strenuous for both artists and concertgoers. “Before And After’ was produced by the singer-songwriter, alongside Lou Adler. Young took on the role of mixing the album too with the help of Niko Bolas – recognised as The Volume Dealers.
Neil Young teamed with legendary producer Lou Adler (The Mamas and The Papas, Carole King’s Tapestry, The Rocky Horror Picture Show) for an album unlike any other he’s recorded. “Before and After” features Young revisiting some of the lesser-known gems in his discography, arranging them into a 48-minute suite meant to played continuously. The sequence is career-spanning, from his first Buffalo Springfield appearance “Burned” through “Don’t Forget Love” from 2021’s “Barn”. One previously unreleased song, “If You Got Love,” debuts. The album will be available in four formats: vinyl LP; clear vinyl LP (available only from independent record stores and Young’s Greedy Hand online store),
Neil Young recently posted a New Year’s thank-you message on his official website to those who helped him out in various aspects of his life and career in 2023. Nested in the note was a news tidbit that should excite fans—the folk-rock legend will be mounting a new tour in 2024.
In addition, Young expressed his gratitude for producer Lou Adler for co-producing his latest studio album, “Before and After”, with me. He added, I love that album. “It feels good to me.”
Before and After was released this past December 8. The album is a collection of newly recorded stripped-down acoustic renditions of 13 songs from throughout Young’s 50-plus-year career. The album boasts a mix of deep cuts and better-known tunes.
On Thanksgiving, a couple weeks prior to the release of “Before and After”, Neil Young premiered a new video dubbed “Stand for Peace.” The clip featured him performing a solo instrumental version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” reminiscent of the one Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock in 1969.
2023 also saw Young return to the stage after a three-year hiatus. His Coastal Tour 2023 featured 15 concerts, running from a June 30 performance in Los Angeles through a July 24 show in Stateline, Nevada.
Young also performed at Stephen Stills’ Light Up the Blues to Benefit Autism charity show on April 22 in L.A., and at the 2023 Farm Aid concert on September 23 in Noblesville, Indiana.
