The Fat Angel Sings

Chroma are one of Wales’s best-kept secrets, this fearsome Welsh three-piece have been producing righteous bilingual noise pop for the last few years, powered by visceral guitars, pummeling drums and Katie Hall’s powerhouse vocal performances. Now they’ve signed to Alcopop! Records, and shared their new single ‘Don’t Mind Me’ It also serves as the first taste of their forthcoming debut album, due out later in 2023. Laced with chunky fuzzy bar chords, and twitchy drums, it serves as a platform for Katie’s incendiary vocals that chart her struggles with mental health, magnifying her personal experiences and raging at the unfairness of the mental health system, it’s a universal struggle and offers an “I’ve been there too” lifeline to many who have suffered with their mental health, especially since lockdown. “Oh my head is hazardous!” she exclaims over this most explosive chorus, ‘Don’t Mind Me’ hits hard in more ways than one! Katie Hall: “Don’t Mind Me” is about my personal struggles with my mental health.

When we started Chroma, writing lyrics quickly became one of my main outlets to process my feelings. The song is about recognising when you’re in a spiral and trying to catch yourself. Also, I wanted the lyric ‘Don’t mind me I’m just having a breakdown’ to help people who are feeling isolated feel like they’re not alone. When I’m going through a rough patch, I always turn to music to make me feel better. I want people who are going through something, whatever it is, to listen to the song and feel seen.”The track arrives ahead of the band’s appearances at SXSW in Texas, which include a slot on the Focus Wales showcase on March 16th, and the Alcopop! Records showcase the following day.

Debut album is coming via Alcopop! Records in 2023

Vocalist and guitarist with the Los Angeles’ psychedelic rock band, Wand – has announced his third solo album, “Western Cum”. It will be out on June 28th via Drag City. Hanson produced the album himself, and it also features his brother, Casey, on bass, drummer Evan Backer, and pedal steel player Tyler Nuffer.

The first single from the upcoming album is ‘Housefly’. And it’s a cracker. Bringing readily, and very happily to mind Crazy Horse’s 1971 debut album – in particular, the song ‘Downtown’ – ‘Housefly’ is a bright, breezy, rollicking country-rocker that springs right out of the traps, full-to-bursting with feeling and groove. The western themes of Cory’s previous “Pale Horse Rider”, made flesh in the form of an electric band, lashed with gleaming guitar strings to tracks whose gnarled, proggy path only climes to the top of the listener’s Compulsion Index. From steel to synth, from old-school ballad to nu hardcore and ambient, Cory Hanson and band run the table of modern rocks.

For fans of ragged, sagging but melodic amp death…Cory from psych-rock beasts WAND is back with a solo gem.

After finding an old 60’s amp in a guitar store Cory has been inspired to release an album of glassy chimes and torn speaker roughness all iced by his Young-esque vocal melodies.

“Housefly” is from “Western Cum”, available on LP/CS/CD/Digital on June 23rd, 2023, from Drag City Records.

Chicago’s Slow Pulp recently signed to ANTI- Records and have shared a new single, ‘Cramps‘, Big-hearted scuffed up noise pop, that’s dynamics hints at bands from the ’90s like Celebrity Skin era Hole but keeps its eyes firmly fixed on the horizon. Fuzzy riff trailed, barrelling percussion and fists aloft chorus lines, it’s both exultant yet also about searching for more in your partner, the anthemic squall of singer Emily Massey’s “I want everything” scream, is kickass; I love this!

“The song came out of a jam at practice right after I had proclaimed that my period cramps were particularly bad that day,” the group’s Emily Massey said in a statement. “It is about searching for things you wish you had in other people and creating this character in your head that has all the physical and emotional attributes you feel that you are lacking.”

Slow Pulp are about to head out on a European tour with Death Cab For Cutie, and then they’ll be opening for the Pixies stateside in May.  

Life’s full of complicated decisions, supporting Slow Pulp isn’t one of them. A great track that straddles the line between making you want to bust out on the one hand, but also contemplate where you’re at and where you’re going on the other.

Slow Pulp released their debut album ‘Moveys’ in late 2020, “a record that is packed with a thousand deft little flourishes of texture which together add up to a deeply entrancing whole,” said NME. It was not crafted quickly; Massey moved home to Wisconsin during the album’s writing process after a trifecta of issues arose: the COVID pandemic, a Lyme disease diagnosis and a car accident her parents were in that required her help in getting them back on their feet. Slowly but surely her health improved, and the band was able to collaborate in a new way and click into place.  

released February 27th, 2023

Written by Slow Pulp

“Manzanita” is the common name for a kind of small evergreen tree endemic to California which has strong medicinal properties. It’s also the name of the brand new full length by visual artist, writer, songwriter, and musician Shana Cleveland. “This is a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness,” Cleveland explains. The combinations of words and song structure are so strong throughout that one hardly notices Cleveland’s nimble fingerpicking on first listen, or how much is packed into the arrangements. The lyrics are satisfyingly direct, with the buoyantly whimsical descriptions typical of the 1960s New York School of poetry. It’s peppered with the kind of unexpected turns that make the words more modern, and in their spookiness they are more West Coast, Cleveland says:

This is a love album that’s somehow populated with the insect world, ghosts, and evil spirits. Sonically, “Manzanita” sits in a meadow similar to her previous solo records, set back and away from the genre-recombinant garage pop of her band La Luz. This is part due to the fact that there’s a different sonic palette in use here. While Cleveland continues to play guitar and vocals; Abbey Blackwell (Alvvays, La Luz) play the bass; Will Sprott plays the keyboards, dulcimer, glockenspiel, and harpsichord—little of which would have been out of place on her previous two solo records—Sprott also adds layers of synthesizer infused with the sounds of the natural world. 

Shana Cleveland performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded February 8th, 2023.

Songs: Quick Winter Sun Faces In The Firelight A Ghost Walking Through Morning Dew

Shana Cleveland – Guitar / Vocals Will Sprott – Keyboards / Vocals Chris Icasiano – Drums Abbey Blackwell – Bass

Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles has released a cover of the Stones’ “Under My Thumb” from her upcoming album, “The Deep End”.

The covers LP, which was produced by Peter Asher, features 13 songs made famous by the Stones, Squeeze and Leslie Gore, as well as more recent artists like Billie Eilish, Ed Sheeran and Brandy Clark. “The Deep End” will be released on April 7th, just a few days after Hoffs publishes her debut novel, This Bird Has Flown.

“I’ve listened to that song on repeat since it came out in the mid-’60s,” Hoffs said in a press release. “I had an epiphany when I really thought about what the song is about, and it ignited this idea to do my own spin on it — to change the gender and see how it felt. What if the roles are/were reversed and the boy is under her thumb? It was exhilarating to give it a new spin, to flip it on its head, or on its ass. It’s a sassy, irreverent song, so it was extremely pleasurable to turn the tables.”

Backing the Bangles co-founder on the track are famous sidemen, guitarist Waddy Wachtel, bassist Leland Sklar, drummer Russ Kunkel and backing singer Ledisi, plus Jeff Alan Ross on vibes and a string quartet arranged by Steve Aho.

Baroque Folk Records Released on: 2023-03-08

Peter Gabriel knows a thing or two about lunar cycles, which he is happy to espouse on at length in our cover story. Stand by for tales involving full moons, gabble ratchets and foxheads when Gabriel reveals all about i/o – his first album of new music for 21 years. There’s more, of course – not least some beautiful unseen shots of The Band by Elliott Landy and The Beatles by Terry O’Neill, the swaggering return of Rickie Lee Jones, the sardonic brilliance of the late David Berman and a revelatory trip to Senegal to meet the towering Baaba Maal. There’s also OMD, The Damned, Huggy Bear and Lonnie Liston Smith. Back to new music quickly and check out Melbourne’s Brown Spirits, whose psych jams are causing a significant stir in the Uncut office. And don’t forget our free CD rounds up the month’s best new music, including tracks from North Americans, Purling Hiss, Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection, Fruit Bats and that Steve Gunn/ David Moore collaboration I mentioned at the top.

Lanterns On The Lake have just announced news of their highly anticipated new album, “Versions Of Us”, out on 2nd June via Bella Union. This self-produced fifth studio LP follows 2020’s Mercury-nominated “Spook the Herd”, with Radiohead’s Philip Selway joining the band on drums and percussion throughout the album. To accompany the announcement, the Newcastle quintet have shared a visualizer for the first single and album opener ‘The Likes of Us.’ 

Opener and lead single ‘The Likes of Us’ documents the state of things (“Oblivion howls for these gutted streets / Boarded shops cower in defeat”) but sublimates observations into a mantra of resolve (“I won’t let this spark die in me”). It heralds “Versions of Us” as the band’s most cohesive and concise record yet, with its pervading sense of empowerment encapsulated in Wilde’s startling vocal performances.

The nine songs of “Versions Of Us” are existential meditations examining life’s possibilities; facing the hand we’ve been dealt and the question of whether we can change our individual and collective destinies. Singer and song writer Hazel Wilde has no doubt that motherhood fundamentally shifted her perspective. “Writing songs requires a certain level of self-indulgence, and songwriters can be prone to dwelling on themselves,” she says. “Motherhood made me aware of having a different stake in the world. I’ve got to believe that there’s a better way and an alternative future to the one we’ve been hurtling towards. I’ve also got to believe that I could be better as a person, too.”

Her voice soars with previously unheard force on an album austere in its beauty, with its shifting sands of searing guitar, fluttering vintage synths and swarming melodic lines, topped with glistening strings from Angela Chan.

Tyneside’s Lanterns On The Lake have been releasing music on Bella Union records since 2011. Mixed by the band’s guitarist Paul Gregory, in the bedroom of his home in North Shields, there is a sense of time and place that runs deep throughout this record.

‘The Likes Of Us’ is taken from the new Lanterns On The Lake album ‘Versions Of Us’ out on 2nd June

Creep Show brings together John Grant with the dark analogue electro of Wrangler (Stephen Mallinder / Phil Winter / Benge) to create “Mr Dynamite” which is a debut album packed with experimental pop and surreal funk. “Mr Dynamite” will be released 16th March via Bella Union Records.  Creep Show shared thier first track from the LP entitled “Pink Squirrel” 

Recorded in Cornwall with a lifetime’s collection of drum machines and synthesisers assembled by Benge and explored by every member of Creep Show, there’s a real sense of freedom in the shackles-off grooves, channelling the early pioneering spirit of the Sugarhill Gang through wires and random electric noise.

“Yawning Abyss” the second track by the Creep Show featuring John Grant a collaboration of Stephen Mallinder, Benge and Phil Winter

According to Mallinder the band “sprang fully formed a couple of years ago but in truth had been bubbling away for decades in a petri dish containing spores of seventies sci-fi, post–punk electronic music, bad taste, broken synthesizers, luscious film soundtracks, and dubious band t-shirts.” Their first show – their name hadn’t yet come to Benge in a dream – was at the Barbican in London late 2016 as part of an event celebrating 40 years of Rough Trade. Preferring not to live on past glories, Grant and Wrangler wrote a whole new set of material together. As Mallinder explains, “we thought the only way to work with someone was to lock the doors and wrestle each other until we could come out with entirely new and original stuff. Why not? If you work with someone, test yourself, see what’s buried under the soil.”

“Yawning Abyss” to be released on Bella Union 2023-03-07

Hollywood Vampires, the supergroup featuring Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, actor/musician Johnny Depp, and shock rock icon Alice Cooper, have release a video for “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory”, featured on the “Rise” album, released in June 2019 via earMusic.

The legend of the Hollywood Vampires began in the upstairs rooms inside the wicked halls of legendary Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset Strip in Hollywood in 1972. Surrounded by plenty of memorabilia on the walls, the location became the home away from home for stars like Alice Cooper, Ringo Starr, John Belushi, John Lennon, Keith Moon, Keith Emerson, Harry Nilsson, Marc Bolan and many more to get their (often) daily fixture. The staff at the Rainbow dubbed the crew the Hollywood Vampires – their very own secret late-night drinking club.
 
More than 40 years later, Cooper and good friend Johnny Depp got together and decided the spirit of the Hollywood Vampires should live on (minus the drinking). They were joined by Aerosmith lead guitarist Joe Perry, who is an old friend of both and Tommy Henriksen, longtime friend of Alice Cooper, band member and producer.

Originally by the great Johnny Thunders, “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory” features Joe Perry on lead vocals.