The Fat Angel Sings

Back in October 2018, New Jersey alt-pop legends The Feelies played a special show at Jersey City’s White Eagle Hall where their main set was all VELVET UNDERGROUND covers. (It was in conjunction with the Velvet Underground Experience exhibit that was running in NYC at the time.) In that set, they played 18 classic covers of Velvet Underground tracks including “Who Loves The Sun”, “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, “That’s The Story Of My Life”, “White Light/White Heat”, “I’m Waiting For The Man”, “Sweet Jane”, and “Rock and Roll”. 

The Feelies are one of the most influential bands to emerge from the NY post punk scene of the late 1970s and have continued to perform together and make records for 4 decades.

That show, featuring appearances by THE BONGOS‘ Richard Barone & James Maestro, was recorded & is now being released as a double live album, ‘Some Kinda Love: Performing The Music Of The Velvet Underground’, that will be out October 13th via Bar/None.

The Feelies left their underrated mark back in 1980 with their Stiff Records classic, “Crazy Rhythms”. Shored up by Bill Million, and Glenn Mercer, The Feelies released five more albums over a period of about 30 years. If you enjoyed the Stiff eclectic catalogue, then you would be overjoyed by their music with all six albums.

The Feelies certainly know their way around The Velvet Underground — they’ve probably covered a song at every shows they’ve played in the last 20 years — as you can hear on their version of ‘Loaded’ classic “Rock & Roll”.

Includes VU standards “Sweet Jane,” “Rock & Roll” and “I’m Waiting for the Man” as well as rarely covered material like “I Heard Her Call My Name” and “That’s the Story of My Life.” Double LP

Available October 13th, 2023. “Some Kinda Love.” 18 classic songs from the Velvet Underground catalogue performed by The Feelies at White Eagle Hall/ Jersey City, NJ – October 13th, 2018.

Limited Edition of 1000 copies

The 10th anniversary of Speedy Ortiz’s breakthrough debut “Major Arcana”, the band has announced a deluxe edition to be released on November 10th. In addition to a tracklist remastered by The Lodge’s Emily Lazar and Chris Allgood, the limited vinyl colour pressings come with a photo spread from vocalist Sadie Dupuis’ archives and special liner notes by Lars Gotrich of NPR Music.

“Speedy made “Major Arcana” in a flash of momentum four days of recording at Sonelab with our pal Justin Pizzoferrato, paid for with the cash we scrounged up on a summer tour of this country’s basements,” said Dupuis. “‘Tour tight’-ness was always our paramount goal, and I’d say we were sufficiently road-tested when we hammered out these fourteen songs, all of them stuffed to the brim with harmonies, guitarmonies, percussion, key overdubs written on the fly.”

Dupuis continued, “Though the 10 songs that made the album have morphed and mutated thanks to the stages they’ve graced across the past decade, when I listen back to the original recordings, I still hear our boundless energy, hunger for the highway, and excitement to play with our friends—and our dearest wish, to pay homage to the Massachusetts scenes that welcomed us so warmly.”

Check out a remastered version of “Tiger Tank”, Speedy Ortiz is currently touring their most recent release, “Rabbit Rabbit”

The special vinyl release will arrive on November 10th.

Spiritualized and Fat Possum Records have announced the reissue of the band’s 2003 classic “Amazing Grace”. The album will be released on January 19th as part of the second volume of “The Spaceman Reissue Program: Curated by J Spaceman”. Overlooked at the time, “Amazing Grace” is possibly the heaviest and most intimate Spiritualized record of all. A wild collection of blazing garage rock songs and beautifully tender, sometimes devastatingly sad, ballads. They are songs that reach for help from a broken place, ragged and lonely, in love with a world hanging by a thread. The feeling of the gospel standard that inspired the title – “through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come” – hangs like a shadow over the whole record, and J Spaceman’s heart and soul lies very close to the microphone.

Remastered for vinyl in London by engineer Matt Colton, the 180 gram album features a gatefold jacket designed by Mark Farrow. It will be available in both a standard black vinyl pressing and limited edition dove grey vinyl.

Absolute nihilism bleeds through the opening song “This Little Life of Mine”: “This little life of mine / I’m gonna let it slide / I’m gonna let it burn / I’m getting sick of trying.” In “The Ballad of Richie Lee”, a lament to the late Acetone singer, we have maybe the most brutally sad moment of the entire Spiritualized catalogue “He’s got his name on a rock again / And this time it’s the last”.

Then, out of the blackest nights of the soul, beautiful hymns appear, odes to falling in love and staying in love. Songs like “Hold On”, “Oh Baby” and “Rated X” where we “Put your hand in my hand and maybe we’ll forget / That life had even started before the day we met.”

Accompanying this announcement are a bevy of official videos, including visuals for “Cheapster,” “She Kissed Me (It Felt Like a Hit),” and the previously-unreleased “Rated X” video. In addition to the reissue, Spiritualized will tour the East Coast of the USA throughout November, ahead of December shows supporting Queens of the Stone Age.

The recording of “Amazing Grace” was fast and experimental, executed in three weeks at Rockfield Studios in Wales. Spaceman would present the band with an idea for each song on the day of recording, and they would experiment until it felt right. The core musicians, John Coxon, Tony Foster and Tim Lewis were players au fait with the abstract and experimental, finding the sweet spots where The Stooges meet Arvo Part, where Patsy Cline meets 13th Floor Elevators and Aretha Franklin is down with Miles Davis’ Get Up With It. The result of this method is a polar opposite to the symphonic grandeur of its predecessor “Let It Come Down” but more powerful in its emotional impact.

The first stage of The Spaceman Reissue Program included the release of “Lazer Guided Melodies” (1992), “Pure Phase” (1995), “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space” (1997) and “Let It Come Down” (2001) over the course of 2021. Spiritualized also released their latest new record, “Everything Was Beautiful“, in 2022 to great acclaim.

20th anniversary edition of “Amazing Grace” January 19th, 2024 

Once you’ve listened to an album hundreds of times, read everything there is to read about it, and seen it performed live on multiple occasions, how do you get even deeper and closer to that album? In the case of Alvvays’ latest record, you might try slurping the sweet sugary drink that gave Rev its name.

The band’s third album, “Blue Rev”, has made such an impact in its short lifespan just mere months after “Blue Rev’s” release, many publications crowned it as the very best album of 2022. It enchanted the likes of other musicians like Belinda Carlisle, Keanu Reeves, and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, whose acoustic dissection of “Pharmacist” O’Hanley called the “cherry on top” of their album cycle (“It was beautiful, devastating”). It led to sold-out shows in North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. There was a breathtaking performance on the “The Tonight Show”; an exchange with Narduwar; and the band got the creator of their favourite video game to make them a music video.

Even on Late Night, I was colouring the drum skin with a Sharpie at, like, three in the morning before we flew out,” Rankin says, belying the magnificence of the “Belinda Says” performance. “We’re still on our hands and knees, piecing things together, and pulling pedals out of Mono bags on the airport floor.

Guitarist Alec O’Hanley says, reflecting on “Blue Rev” for its one-year anniversary and concurrent vinyl reissue. “You don’t know until you go down the garden path whether there’s a beautiful meadow at the end, or a dump,” O’Hanley agrees. And while each song on “Blue Rev” ended up a verdant meadow, a couple of dumps had to be passed en route, such as a bridge section to their Smiths homage “Pressed,” which was ostensibly left among the soiled couch cushions and rusting tricycles. “We spent, like, two days trying to graft that in there,” O’Hanley says. “It kind of sounded like Laurie Anderson or something. Usually when we get into the weeds it’s because we haven’t listened to Molly [Rankin]. She’s got a good sense for what’s a viable route and what’s just meandering.” 

“We try to subject our songs to the same scrutiny as the bands we hold dear, like The Smiths or even ABBA. We’ll truly look in the mirror, holding up those giant records, and try to get there. And we never do, but because we have at least unflinchingly attempted to, we get somewhere reasonably cool.”

Elsewhere, innovative techniques included taping iPod earbuds to hi-hat cymbals and to vocalist Rankin’s throat, various layering experiments, and recording straight through all 14 songs with only 10-second pauses between each. “They had to keep playing as if they were playing a live show; it just gets you out of your head a little bit,” Everett explains. Also in his toy chest was his artificial skull microphone, which mimics the human head for binaural recording. “His grasp on the science of sound is really interesting; he has one foot in the future and one foot in analog tape, and that’s really exciting to me, how those worlds collide,” Rankin muses. “Shawn remarked to us that he hadn’t met people who were quite so willing to do the deep dives—either tonally or arrangement-wise or emotionally, I guess—in some time,” O’Hanley adds. “I think we’ve found another kindred Canadian buddy in Shawn.”

The only topic on which they diverged, at least initially, was the album’s track listing. “In the beginning, he thought our sequence was bonkers and now he’s like, ‘It’s perfect—I can’t believe we did that at 6:30 in the morning,’” Rankin laughs. “But I was actually crying at the time because I was so devastated that we were having to do it in that state of mind after spending so long writing and making the album.”

Opening with the fighter-jet Fender Jaguar tones of “Pharmacist,” “Blue Rev” begins to wind down with quite the opposite: “Pretty quiet out here, it’s abundantly clear / That no one’s been coming for me / No encouraging sounds, helicopters or hounds,” Rankin whispers on penultimate track “Lottery Noises,” an electric piano cooing beneath her. The one-two-three punch of “Pharmacist,” “Easy on Your Own?,” and ebullient fan-favourite “After the Earthquake”—the opening that Everett refers to above—gradually gives way to these more reserved offerings, beginning with the gossamer night breeze of “Tom Verlaine” at number four and continuing from there to smile and sigh in roughly equal measure.

The bared punk spin-off “Pomeranian Spinster” (one of Everett’s favorites) to sink into anything other than the stirring, Carlisle-inspired fable of new beginnings; for the mordacious machine-pop of “Very Online Guy” to release into anything other than “Velveteen” in all of its silky, sorrowful glory. 

Tele Novella is a project out of Lockhart, Texas–a small town lost in time–where their classic and sincere pop songwriting is slowly processed through a loner medieval-tonk machine and then captured on cassette 8-track. Their latest record was the music they wanted to be making all along but didn’t know until it happened accidentally. It’s out now on Kill Rock Stars. 

Along with the release of Poet’s Tooth the band shares a brand new video for the track “Funeral” directed by Vanessa Pla! It all began with a bath. As Tele Novella’s Natalie Ribbons ran the water and listened to a guided meditation, she never anticipated arriving on the other side with an idea for an album, “Poet’s Tooth”. “I ended up sitting in that bath and going on quite a visualization journey,” says Ribbons, who resides in Lockhart, Texas, and performs in Tele Novella with Jason Chronis. “The images and feelings that came over me that night made me feel like I had a power that I had been ignoring and taking for granted for years. It was sad and happy at the same time,” Ribbons continues.

As Tele Novella, Chronis (who performs in the beloved and rekindled indie pop band Voxtrot) and Ribbons (who previously performed in the long-running “Victorian punk” project Agent Ribbons) have spent their past two albums creating “Medieval outsider country” on 2016’s “House Of Souls” and 2021’s “Merlynn Belle“. 

“Poet’s Tooth” – the band’s second album for Kill Rock Stars – steers the duo’s whimsical western-tinted quality into fascinating new directions: cinematic-pop balladry on the autoharp-tinged opener “Young & Free,” gently clip-clopping Americana-folk on “Hard-Hearted Way,” and bass-driven funk on the wry “Eggs In One Basket.” With help from producer Danny Reisch, Tele Novella have crafted their most genre-rich, poetic, and sincere album yet.

“Funeral” by Tele Novella. Taken from their album “Poet’s Tooth”. Out now via Kill Rock Stars.

released October 6th, 2023

Natalie Ribbons– vocals, backing vocals, nylon string guitar and garden weasel.

Jason Chronis– Electric guitar, 12 string guitar, baritone guitar, nylon string guitar, bass, autoharp, backing vocals, aux percussion, piano, organ and other keyboard sounds.

Danny Reisch– Drums, aux percussion, loops, samples and field recordings.

Opening with the acidic “Jesus What A Jerk”, While the band is more effective on the more traditional straightahead rock than on the experiments. While it’s not as cohesive an effort, “Jesus What a Jerk” is probably their best pop song to date. “Some Disenchanted Evening” was The Verlaines third album and has all the brilliance of the band’s previous “Bird Dog“.

Released in 1990, “Some Disenchanted Evening” sees Graeme Downes and co. taking a more traditional rock approach – and one that can be bitterly sardonic at times. The result is eleven tracks, stripped-back to reveal the gossamer beauty that underlies the band. Alongside the cut-and-thrust structure of the songs, “Some Disenchanted Evening” yet again displays the breadth, depth and subtlety of Downes musical ideas.

Trouser Press wrote that “the album’s coda, a piano ballad styled after Randy Newman, is actually the collection’s crowning achievement; harnessing a dapper melody to a bitterly sardonic lyric about failure, it reveals new-found subtlety and clarity in [Graeme] Downes’ writing.

The New York Times called the album “full of complex melodic variations, crescendos and elegant tempo shifts; the music has the theatrical grandeur of a symphony within the confines of rock.

After years of leading the Verlaines as a trio, Downes added a second guitarist to the group for this record, and the results are apparent from the very first moments of the album’s bracing opener, “Mission of Love,” by far the band’s most electrified tune ever. With the strings, reeds and genre exercises largely shelved, this is a true rock’n’roll album (arguably the Verlaines’ first), and Downes rises to the occasion with enough top-drawer material to mark him as one of the best singer/songwriters currently plying the trade. Choice cuts abound, including “This Valentine” (an exhortation for a romantic fool to get over it already), “Stay Gone” (a send-off to a departed lover) and the title track (one of rock’s most effective odes to a raped environment). 

The Verlaines are a New Zealand rock band from Dunedin. Named after the French symbolist poet and fronted by a classical music student, the Verlaines hail from Dunedin, New Zealand, the same hometown as the Chills and the Clean. originally formed in 1981 by Graeme Downes, Craig Easton, Anita Pillai, Phillip Higham and Greg Kerr, the band went through multiple line-ups.

Originally released April 30th, 1990

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have announced the details of their second album release of 2023, “The Silver Cord”. The synth-heavy LP is out October 27th and follows the progressive thrash metal album “PetroDragonic Apocalypse or Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation”, issued back in June.

The band revealed little else besides the seven-song track-list and cover art in its social media announcement of the album. One thing we do know, however, is that the album will arrive in both standard and extended editions. This falls in line with KGLW’s move over the past several years into lengthier compositions, inspired by the band’s jam-friendly approach to group song writing. Singer/guitarist Stu Mackenzie said prior to the release of 2022’s “Omnium Gatherum” that the band had entered its “jamming period,” a trend that extended into this year’s return to thrash on “PetroDragonic, which featured lengthy, multi-part songs.

The other piece of information Gizzard supplied to fans in the post, the album cover, hints at a Kraftwerk influence. The band’s six members appear in all-black outfits, donning matching red sunglasses, and are walled in by a fortress of vintage synthesizers. Other in-studio photos posted by the band earlier this week, in which just about every member is shown playing some sort of synth, also hit at the significance of that aesthetic on the album.

“It’s definitely more synth-y,” said guitarist/vocalist Joey Walker  which compared it to 2020’s pandemic-assembled dance record “Butterfly 3000“. “You could draw comparisons in many ways, but just in the nature of us being in the same room and playing and writing together, it’s vastly different than “Butterfly.”

“The Silver Cord” also completes another yin-yang album cycle for King Gizzard. The stylistic chameleons often jump radically from one genre to the next, just as the synth-heavy “Butterfly 3000” preceded the jam-focused “Omnium Gatherum“, with plenty more examples going back through two dozen prior albums.

“I probably wouldn’t use the term ‘companion piece’ myself because I’m thinking of it like they are two records with completely different DNA and completely different personalities,” Mackenzie said of “The Silver Cord‘s” relationship with its predecessor.

 “The Silver Cord“, available for pre-order October 12th

A. Savage the Parquet Courts frontman has made “Several Songs About Fire” in Bristol, supported by singer/composer Jack Cooper and Welsh firebrand Cate Le Bon, who recently lent her production skills to Wilco’s phonetically-intricate “Cousin”. Savage’s topics sprawl from meditations on family and friends to indictments on modern society and nostalgia for a dangerous, masculinized Old West.

If it is anything, “Several Songs About Fire” is meticulously planned out: A brooding, flippant, precocious album that, in its best moments, roars to life in flickers of swelling guitars, burning harmonics and ingenious witticisms. At times, though, the album’s kindling fails to keep it alight, and it fades low under the weight of its own erudition. Andrew “A.” Savage’s voice is unmissable, iconic and, dare I say it, generational. So few singers or poets have soundtracked my life more viscerally than he has, be it via his 2017 debut “Thawing Dawn” or, honestly, anything he’s made across 11 years fronting Parquet Courts.

He hops from genre to genre with swift deftness, signalling a familiarity with musical stylings from ‘90s Brit-rock on the brash, lively “Elvis in the Army” to acoustic ‘60’s folk on the softly contemplative “Hurtin’ or Healed.” His lyrics are colourful and heady, hinting at the sort of lone-wolf singer-songwriter persona Savage is working toward. There’s no doubt that Savage has the ability to tap into real musical profundity, the kind you can’t fake or half-ass. And, when he moulds that depth correctly, the results are mountainous.

His singing, it’s gritty and harbouring chaos even when it’s presented as subdued and gentle; when he croons across tracks like “Eyeballs” and “Buffalo Calf Road,” you can hear the punk atoms coalescing with a rewarding branch of delicacy.

Savage had this to say about “David’s Dead” in a press release: “What can I say about the song ‘David’s Dead?’ Well I can tell you that it’s a portrait of the block in New York City that I called home for over a decade, each line sort of a tally of things that had changed in that time. I can tell you that David’s passing made some of those changes much more evident than they were before. I can tell you that the last time I saw David I bought him both a black coffee and a can of Crazy Stallion, and that we drank a coffee together on my stoop, but I said ‘see ya later’ when he cracked open the tallboy.”

His instrumentals, especially a frequently-wielded acoustic guitar, swell and ebb with a feeling of utter talent, folksy and thought-out without veering nihilistic. His dips into sonic maximalism are triumphs (All Hail Ms. Le Bon!), and his breadth of musical styling is undeniably impressive. Savage embraces his precocity rather than veiling it in an honest, Silver Jews-y way that mostly reads experienced rather than egomaniacal. “Several Songs About Fire” is a bold creative endeavor, and one I think I can deem a triumph. At its peaks, it is capacious, melancholy and beautifully indicative of the human desire for connection and meaning. It is also, at times, simpering and molasses-y, when Savage has proven he knows how to succeed without shackling himself to those tropes. When it burns low, its ashes are suffocating—but when it flares, it blazes high, “Several Songs About Fire” is exactly the type of solo record you should want from someone like Savage; it’s got sonics not too distant from those of Parquet Courts, but there are intricacies and small details that make it obvious just how dense of a world he’s built on his own. It’s the perfect spectrum of push and pull, “Several Songs About Fire” is a bold creative endeavor, and one I think I can deem a triumph. At its peaks, it is capacious, melancholy and beautifully indicative of the human desire for connection and meaning.

Alt-rock legends Sleater-Kinney are back with their first new record since 2021’s “Path of Wellness”. “Little Rope” is set to released on January 19th of next year via Loma Vista Recordings. Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker have returned with their 11th studio album and, perhaps, their most ferocious and emotional yet. Part of the album was conceived after Brownstein’s mother and stepfather were killed in a car accident last year, and that tragedy proved vital to the backbone of the record’s thematic spectrum.

“Little Rope” was produced by John Congleton, and lead single “Hell” arrives as this loud, unfettered volcano of rock ‘n’ roll that traverses across several distortions and melodies. Through racing guitars and piercing, confident and unrestrained vocals, “Hell” is big, bold, ferocious and plainspoken. “Hell don’t have no worries, Hell don’t have no past,” the track rings out. “Hell is just a signpost when you take a certain path.”

Tucker said that “Hell” wrestles with many injustices while “dropping us in a place and a time and a feeling and an emotion of helplessness and frustration. And revelation: of how much control we had conceded at that present moment in time.”

The Ashley Connor-directed and Miranda July-starring music video for “Hell” releases January 19th, 2024

Johnny Marr has announced that he’ll be releasing a best-of compilation album, ‘Spirit Power: The Best of Johnny Marr’, due out on November 3rd via BMG Records. The album will feature some of Johnny’s favorite recent songs, as well as two brand new tunes, including the album’s lead single, “Somewhere”, .

Personally curated by Johnny, ‘Spirit Power’ will celebrate his past decade of output, focusing on highlights from the string of solo albums he released between 2013 & 2022. Joining those tracks are previously-released singles “Armatopia” & “The Priest,” as well as a 2015 cover of Depeche Mode’s “I Feel You”. For the deluxe 2xCD version of the album, fans will also get to hear a handful of previously-unheard demos & rarities.

Arriving with a cheerful, green-screen-heavy music video, “Somewhere” captures the sense of melody & jangly, poppy goodness that Johnny has spent decades honing-in on. With uplifting lyrics about dreams waiting to come true to boot, it conveys his optimism, as well as his skills at writing anthemic rock bops…

Personally curated and compiled by Johnny Marr, ‘Spirit Power: The Best Of Johnny Marr’ encompasses music from across his four widely acclaimed solo albums released over the last decade (2013’s ‘The Messenger’, 2014’s ‘Playland’, 2018’s ‘Call the Comet’, 2022 double album ‘Fever Dreams Pts 1-4’), non-album single releases ‘Armatopia’ and ‘The Priest’ (w/ Maxine Peake). The collection also includes two brand new studio recordings ‘Somewhere’ and ‘The Answer’.