The Fat Angel Sings

“Music had always been a shared language between Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous and his younger brother Matt, and as Mark began work on what he planned to be the fifth Sparklehorse album in 2009, the two of them would talk through his plans for the record. Matt can clearly recall their conversations; Mark’s excitement about the influences feeding into it and the way the songs were starting to take shape. It was these conversations that Matt and Melissa — Mark’s sister-in-law, who had also worked with Sparklehorse — returned to years later as they began to sift through boxes of tapes to catalogue and preserve Mark’s unreleased recordings and bring his posthumous album, entitled Bird Machine, to life. Mark was famously perfectionist about his work and the question of whether to complete the album weighed heavily on Matt. “It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” says Matt. “It’s difficult making a choice about someone else’s art, even if you’ve known them all your life and worked with them, even if they were your brother and best friend. We had long conversations about not wanting to take this into a different direction. We wanted to bring out what was there.”

“A gorgeous collection of songs, etched with a familiar strangeness and beauty. It contains the contrasts and emotional depth that typified Linkous’s music: gentle and restrained in places, with blasts of exhilarating punkish energy elsewhere. And though subtly decorated with digital feints and touches – listen on headphones and you have the sense of lifting a rock in the woods to admire the teeming life beneath – the songs also carry a simplicity and directness that casts an immediate glow.”

orn and brought up in Virginia, Linkous formed Sparklehorse – essentially a solo project but with a changing cast of supporting musicians – in his early 30s, after spending much of his 20s in New York and LA seeking mainstream success with guitar pop quartet Dancing Hoods. When they split after two underperforming albums, he returned, disillusioned, to Virginia, and began slowly to develop Sparklehorse’s distinctive sound – a skewed combination of alt-rock, country and electronic pop, with melodies that emerge hauntingly from amid distortion and static, and lyrics that present the world in ways that feel revelatory and strange.

As Sparklehorse’s reputation grew, fellow musicians and artists were among the most devoted fans. He established an early musical kinship with Radiohead, supporting the band as they toured “OK Computer” and recording a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” with Thom Yorke. He later opened for the Flaming Lips and REM. And though he never had a big commercial breakthrough, not least because of a growing ambivalence about mainstream success, his “Dark Night of the Soul” album, recorded with producer Danger Mouse around the same time he was writing songs for his fifth album, shows how far his influence extended. Alongside vocals from musicians such as the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, Black Francis of Pixies and Iggy Pop, it also includes vocals and photographic artwork from David Lynch, a fellow observer of the unsettling beauty beneath the surface of American life.

‘Bird Machine’, the posthumous album by Sparklehorse aka Mark Linkous, uncovered from tapes and recordings archived by his brother Matt and sister-in-law Melissa. From the time that Mark began working on these songs to the record’s release today, 14 years have passed, a long time for a collection of tracks that were already well advanced at the time of Mark’s death. But there’s something too in the album’s long and complex gestation – the chaos of old tapes, the love and care that Mark’s family and his close musician friends have shown to every detail – that makes this so distinctively a Sparklehorse record.

“It means so much to me, this last batch of beautiful stuff that my brother was putting together,” says Matt. “When I sit down and put on a pair of headphones, I’ll put on the first track and run it all the way through. Everything from “It Will Never Stop” to “I Fucked it Up” to “Stay,” that’s Mark just letting it out.”

This month there are effectively two front cover stories: an exclusive 11-page interview with Chrissie Hynde about Pretenders all the way from their formation to their superb new album, “Relentless”; and a 22-page celebration of the pop annus mirabilis that was 1978. Arguably les feted than 1966 or 1977, it was, nevertheless, an amazing year: the year of new wave, power pop, disco, Britfunk, prog-lite, and AOR, the year that Pretenders formed, Gary Numan discovered a whole new type of recording technology and Nile Rodgers pioneered a new type of glacial, sleek dance music, the year of epochal singles and albums from Chic, Public Image Ltd, Gang Of Four, A Taste Of Honey, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, The Jam, Kraftwerk, The Human League, Funkadelic and more. Speaking to the stars of ’78 from Messrs Numan and Rodgers to Todd Rundgren, Chris Difford, Leo Sayer, Toyah,The Undertones and many others.

It’s a regular ’78-fest this month. We unearth the frontmen of two of the year’s biggest hitmakers – Darts and Racey – who seem to have disappeared without trace. Jeff Wayne talks about his progress from producer of David Essex singles to creator of that year’s double-LP meisterwerk, “War Of The Worlds”. Stewart Copeland of The Police talks us through their formative period, before they became the World’s Biggest Band, via a series of photos and period images. We look at the scenes and pop movements from proto-electronica to post-punk, reggae to Rock Against Racism and columnist Bob Stanley bemoans the demise of 1978 genres. There’s even a discography of 1978’s 50 Most Collectable Records, 10 Of The Best is all about 1978’s finest rock albums, and we shine a light on little-known musician Cindy Bullens, who almost but not quite launched their career that year.

Back in the present, we review new albums and reissues from The Breeders, Neil Young, R.E.M., Erasure, Slowdive, The Coral, and Steven Wilson, books and movies by and about Pulp, Sonic Youth, Nick Drake and Duran Duran, singles from outfits as diverse as Joy Division and Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band and concerts by The Who, Metallica and Porcupine Tree. 

 The Shop Of The Month is Rock On Records in Stamford. And in Not Forgotten we bid a sad farewell to Sinead O’Connor and Robbie Robertson.

The last John Mellencamp album—2022’s “Strictly a One-eyed Jack”, was his first release in five years, It didn’t sell well in the States, which may partly explain why he’s back so soon with a follow-up. “Orpheus Descending“, this will be his 25th studio LP, finds Mellencamp addressing political themes, like gun control in “Hey God” and homelessness in “The Eyes of Portland,” as well as personal struggles, such as in “The So-Called Free,” which might be about his failed romance with actress Meg Ryan. Bruce Springsteen, perform’s on three tracks on the last album, But he isn’t on here, but he contributes the wistful “Perfect World,” the LP’s only cover track

His vocals are more gravelly than ever on “Orpheus Descending” Mellencamp hardly sounds like the same singer who belted out hits like “Jack and Diane” and “Pink Houses” in the 1980s, which is no surprise, given that he’s been smoking like a chimney for more than half a century. Still, his vocals can be effective, especially on tracks like “Lightning and Luck,” where they’re backed by the sweet violin of Lisa Germano, who played on stand outs albums like 1987’s “The Lonesome Jubilee” and returns to the fold here after a quarter-century.

Compared with albums like that one, this new record, is relatively dark and downbeat; don’t expect any exuberant and instantly lovable toe-tappers like “Paper in Fire” or “Cherry Bomb.” That said, “Orpheus Descending” sounds heartfelt and contains more than a few understated numbers that will reward repeated listens.

released on June 16, 2023.

“Hey Everyone!,

I’m stoked to announce Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands and I are finally releasing our long lost track ‘Pelican Canyon’. We wrote and recorded this 10 years ago in a little studio in Los Angeles about a road trip we took around the states in 2013.

“Pelican Canyon” is a song that’s really close to my heart. It’s a time capsule of one of many trips I took in my early twenties, when the world was still new to me and I was adventurous enough to drive out into the desert with a total stranger. It encompasses a feeling and experience I’ve been looking to recreate ever since.

Recorded in one take in a haunted Los Angeles studio in 2013, “Pelican Canyon” is a stripped back acoustic track, reminiscent of the 70’s folk of John Prine and Joan Baez. Lyrics such as “So nice to meet you, what’s your name and where you been?” encapsulate the essence of two strangers hitting the road in search of distraction from their day-to-day lives. Over four weeks the pair visited 15 states, including California, Virgina, Maryland, New York, and North and South Carolina, finally deciding to name the song after the pelicans and canyons that flank the magical stretch of Pacific Coast Highway between Los Angeles and Malibu.

Really hope you enjoy this little acoustic song from the vaults!, All the best and thanks so much for your ongoing support. It really means a lot.

released May 9, 2023
Written and performed by Du Blonde & Samuel T. Herring.

Peter Gabriel is releasing his first album of new material in two decadess as singles released every month on the full moon. “The Super Moon / Blue Moon” edition is “Love Can Heal” which Gabriel has been playing live for a while. “Love Can Heal” was written around 2016 and I did start playing it midway through the tour and dedicated it to Jo Cox, who was the British MP brutally murdered by an extremist and someone that I had met at a leadership conference,” says Gabriel. “I think the song fits right in to the themes of the album in the sense that i/o is about feeling and being connected to everything and in a way, the next evolution of being connected to things is a feeling of love for everything.’”

Written and produced by Peter Gabriel, “Love Can Heal” is ‘a dreamy, experiential piece with some abstract imagery,’ says Gabriel, ‘a carpet of sound, a tapestry where things are woven together, but not necessarily supposed to stick out, but just form part of a whole.’ “Love Can Heal” is a song that has been performed during the recent i/o tour, but actually had its live premiere during Peter Gabriel and Sting’s Rock, Paper, Scissors tour of North America of 2016. ‘Love Can Heal” was written around 2016. I think the song fits right in to the themes of the album in the sense that “i/o” is about feeling and being connected to everything and in a way, the next evolution of being connected to things is a feeling of love for everything.’ This full moon release comes with artwork from the artist Antony Micallef and his work ‘a small painting of what I think love looks like’. ‘Antony Micallef is a stunning painter. I’d seen some of his portraits and they are with thick layers of paint, so there were references to Auerbach and Bacon for me, just very physical, very powerful and I just fell in love. Those paintings, in some ways, are more brutal, but this one is so tender and I think Antony manages to capture a lot of that intimate tenderness around love that is very hard to put into pictures. I was delighted when he was happy to be part of this.’ Antony Micallef adds: ‘I was listening to a few of the songs and it’s interesting because it’s like putting on clothes and going ‘oh, this suits me’ or ‘that doesn’t suit me.’ With “Love Can Heal” I could see my images coming up when I was hearing it so you begin to home-in and that’s how it starts. I love artists who take risks and Peter’s always chopped and changed and I like to do that too with my work and you know it doesn’t just rest on this one thing.’ Micallef also collaborated with Aardman on the video that accompanies the song, ‘working with Aardman was amazing,’ he says ‘I love processes, especially in other mediums and so I found the mechanics of how this stuff comes together really interesting.’ ‘Obviously I worked quite a lot with Aardman Animation in the past,’ says Gabriel, ‘and Antony loved their work, so we talked to them, not sure if this was something that they might want to do or not, and they did a beautiful job. Very simple, but very strong and I’m very pleased with it.’

It was 2008 and Tony Molina, musically speaking, was a man possessed. That year, over the span of six months, the then 24-year-old songwriter and San Francisco Peninsula native would record three different records at Bart Thurber’s studio, House of Faith. Two of these were with Ovens: their third album (Molina’s personal favorite, it kicks off with “Castillejo Scene”) recorded in February, and an eight-song 7-inch completed in July. The third session became a solo album, his first, called “Embarrassing Times”. It almost didn’t happen, until, unexpectedly, it did.

“I had these songs that were not totally in the Ovens style,” says Molina. Whereas Ovens, he explains, had a strong influence from classical music (particularly Bach), the Beatles, and Baroque ’60s pop, these new songs were something else. They had more of a woolly ’80s/’90s underground bent to them, channeling his and his friends’ love of bands like Dinosaur Jr., the Replacements, and Guided By Voices. Molina wasn’t sure whether this material would fit on an Ovens record. He demoed several of these songs in an aborted home recording session but didn’t have firm plans for them beyond that.

In May of that year, he got a call from his friend Amir Sberlo, whose band, heavy SF stoner-doom trio Flood, was about to have to cancel two days of scheduled studio time at House of Faith. One of them had just been in a bad car accident and needed time to recover. Sberlo asked Molina if he’d be interested in taking those studio dates off their hands. Without thinking too much about it he said yes.

“I just wanted to go back to Bart’s to fuck around,” he says. “I wasn’t really planning on recording a record or anything but I just loved going there.” He had a few days to mull it over, and decided it was a good opportunity to track these songs of his that didn’t quite fit Ovens: “I was just like, ‘OK, maybe I’ll try this one, maybe I’ll try that one…’”

The night before going in, he asked lifelong friend and Ovens drummer Beau Monnot if he’d be down to go with him to the studio for those two days, despite not having much of a plan. Monnot agreed, and “Embarrassing Times” is what came out of that session. The results are undoubtedly special. The album has a warm, casual, off-the-cuff charm that reflects its humble origins and provides a compelling snapshot of this moment in Molina’s life and development as a musician. The original songs on the album are terrific, and will hit the spot for fans of his music. But what Molina feels sets this record apart are the covers, all of which glow with a sweet nostalgia. The choices reflect what he and his friends were listening to back then, as well as some old favorites from high school. He kicks things off with a truncated version of Roy Wood’s “Songs of Praise,” and side two begins with “The Secret of Life” by the Dead Milkmen. It’s a song from that band’s first major-label record, “Soul Rotation”, that Molina, with a laugh, remembers “blew everyone’s minds” when Monnot played it for their group of friends in high school. (Fun fact: Ovens were originally named the Peels, a reference to the Milkmen’s “Smokin’ Banana Peels.”)

A much different cover closes the record: “She Divines Water”, a Camper Van Beethoven song that Molina says was “[his] favourite song from [his] favorite record” of theirs, “Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart”. It’s stirring and heartfelt, and may be the finest cover he’s ever recorded.

You may not know the original as it never saw proper release but “Devil Song” is a cover too. It’s a song by his friend Kyle Spleiss, who wrote it for Molina and Spleiss’s band Telly Savalas. Molina rearranges it into a fuzzy guitar-pop track that has since become a mainstay of his live sets, putting his old green (and now unfortunately lost) Big Muff pedal to excellent use.

At times the album and its sequencing invoke the era of Black Sabbath when that band’s sound seemed to start splitting in two, vacillating between gentle acoustic guitar instrumentals and the heaviest of riffs. This enjoyable contradiction is most apparent in the interludes, both the metallic ones that Molina and Monnot wrote on the spot (“Mighty Chuffed” and “Mid Life Crisis”) and the solo acoustic passages of “Still Lazy” and “Bullshit Riff.” They had a lot of fun recording over those two days but didn’t really know what they had until they listened back.

“When we finished it, I was actually amazed at the results of it,” Molina says. It’s a mix of fragments and full songs that, on paper, might make little sense together but somehow end up making perfect sense to the ear. Molina likens the way he sequenced everything together to what Guided By Voices would often do: taking pieces of varying size and ordering them in a way that, grouped together in the right order, turns them into a larger piece that flows like a song or musical suite.

Shortly after the session, Ovens went on a Pacific Northwest tour with their friends in Grass Widow and the Millbrae Brothers. Molina brought the CD-R of these new recordings with him and was excited to play it for his friends and bandmates who turned out to love it too. It’s a time he remembers fondly: recording music he is still really proud of, getting to take Ovens on tour, and feeling like the band was finally “coming out of the darkness of being a band that only plays [now-closed SF venue] Kimo’s on a Tuesday and no one comes.”

The recordings sat for a while, until Ovens connected with Andee Connors, co-owner of beloved SF shop Aquarius Records, who would release a three-album Ovens CD the following year on his label, tUMULt. (That collection just received a beautiful vinyl reissue on Tankcrimes and is a must-buy if you don’t already have it.) There was some talk of including “Embarrassing Times” in the CD compilation, but eventually Molina hatched a different plan.

He was reading Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, and the chapter on Dinosaur Jr. mentions that early pressings of You’re Living All Over Me came with the Sebadoh tape for free. “So then I was like, ‘Dude, let’s do some Dinosaur shit, and I’ll be Sebadoh,’” he remembers. He dubbed 50 copies of the cassette on his home stereo, printed J-card covers for them at Kinko’s, and included them with initial purchases of the Ovens compilation from Aquarius. Other than a subsequent small-scale cassette reissue a few years ago, the album has never been released in any other format. He’s long hoped to release it on vinyl, and this new release marks its first appearance on wax, with updated artwork and proper mastering giving it the treatment it deserves.

How does he feel about “Embarrassing Times” fifteen years later? “It’s one of my favourites,” he says. “Maybe just the fact of how it was made… it was kind of accidental, but it gave me incentive that I was like, ‘OK, maybe I can make another solo record someday.’” It would be another five years before he’d write and record his breakthrough second album, “Dissed and Dismissed”, but “Embarrassing Times”, despite not being quite as widely heard, is a great, endlessly listenable debut and a critical piece of the puzzle for fans of Molina’s music. 

released August 25th, 2023

This record is all kink and no shame,” explains Adam Weiner of South Philadelphia rock ’n’ roll outfit Low Cut Connie. “I try to create a safe space for you to just absolutely get your freak on.” “Art Dealers” is a love letter to Lou Reed and Patti Smith’s New York, and the reckless abandon of “the art life” laid against a gritty, decaying American backdrop. Arriving at the intersection of sleazy and soulful, the eighth album from Weiner is a 13-song collection of risky, romantic, life-affirming anthems dedicated to a total liberation of body, spirit, gender and sexuality in the face of an increasingly tense political age. Where it took Weiner over three years to record his 2020 breakthrough album “Private Lives”, “Art Dealers” was tracked in just over a week outside of Philadelphia. As with his previous album, Weiner produced “Art Dealers”, further establishing his own brand of raw, analogue rock ‘n’ roll.

The record depicts a grimy modern urban landscape, a soulful but damaged place that Weiner and his band (including guitarist Will Donnelly, in his ninth year with Low Cut Connie) has gravitated towards throughout the band’s history. Weiner grew up amidst the lawns and strip malls of suburban New Jersey, and his teen dreams were lit up by the beacon of the Big City, where he could shed his skin like so many artists before. “I just want to turn people on with what I do,” says Weiner. “The world is a dirty and broken place… we might as well live it the f up while we’re here.”

Kristin Hersh’s new album is a cinematic road trip; a series of personal vignettes from a fiercely independent auteur, sitting plush with layers of all-consuming strings and Mellotron. It’s a watershed moment in a career overflowing with creative firsts and inspirational thinking; an elegant piece of personal reportage, a home movie caught in time. Previously, the juxtaposition of light and dark has been essential to the drama of Throwing Muses and 50Footwave, but this solo set is something of a departure; more inward looking, quieter but outspoken, underpinned by background noise for ambience and awkwardness. 

“Clear Pond Road” is a life-affirming statement, a further part of the jigsaw, a very personal memoir, from street signs to snapshots; a late blossoming and coming-of-age from a true icon of independence. The record is both intimate yet expansive, written largely within the confines of Hersh’s home, making the proceedings ever more personal.”

“Clear Pond Road” through Fire Records Released on: 2023-09-08

“The Doors were a few months away from stardom in March 1967 when they played five sparsely attended shows at a small club in San Francisco called The Matrix. These uninhibited performances would have been fleeting if not for Peter Abram, who co-owned the pizza parlor-turned-nightclub with Jefferson Airplane founder Marty Balin. An avid recordist, Abram taped concerts at The Matrix regularly and his recordings of The Doors, made between March 7th-11th, 1967, spawned one of the band’s most storied bootlegs.

At long last, all known Matrix recordings, sourced entirely from Abram’s original master recordings, will be released. The recordings have been remastered by Bruce Botnick, The Doors’ longtime engineer/mixer. Most of the newly upgraded live recordings are making their debut in the collection, including eight that have never been featured on any of the previous Matrix releases.”

Soft Cell are releasing an expanded edition of their 1981 debut, “Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret“. It was the bands debut album “Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret” will be reissued in October across a number of formats including a 6CD box set with many previously unreleased tracks.

Initially released in November 1981, the 10-track song cycle, in the words of Marc Almond, “Tells a story of a bored ordinary bloke seething with his life wanting more and looking for excitement and adventure in a red neon lit Soho world of red-light cabarets, prostitutes and sex dwarves, looking back at his youth and wondering what happened.” The album was massively influential and paved the way for countless synth-based music duos, notably the Pet Shop Boys. It contains three top five singles in ‘Tainted Love’ (a No 1 and the best-selling UK single of 1981), ‘Bedsitter’ and ‘Say Hello Wave Goodbye’.

“The album was the other side of the coin of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain: I never felt it was
political at the time, but it seems it now. “Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret” was the secret seedy life that went on behind the mask of Conservative Britain” Marc Almond

It will now land as a 6-CD 98-track super deluxe edition featuring 40 unreleased tracks. Content includes new and old 12-inch mixes (including Dave Ball’s 2018 studio reworkings), BBC Radio One sessions, early versions (including a Daniel Miller-produced version of ‘Tainted Love’), instrumentals and live performances including from the band’s O2 show in 2021.

The box set is presented as al 10” x 10” package and includes an essay on the story of the album by Adrian Thrills, including new interviews with Marc and Dave, album and single sleeve scans and more.

Additionally, there’s a 2LP vinyl version (in black and coloured variants) which adds a bonus LP of single versions (A-sides and B-sides). “Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret” will be reissued on 20th October 2023 via by Mercury-EMI / UMR on October 20th