Among the news of Aoife Nessa Frances signing to PartisanRecords for her new album is this beautiful song accompanying it. “Emptiness Follows’ is about the intimacy and deep emotional connection of friendship. The song captures these moments – the water as the weight of the emotional connection we share, the small details we remember ‘the shape sits beneath your earlobe’. The movement and colour of the music, the harp constantly flowing throughout, are emphasising a profound importance in acknowledging an eternal kind of love. I wanted my voice to be close and up front and vulnerable like Serge Ginsberg’s ‘ Histoire de Melody Nelson’’.
Aoife Nessa Frances Limited edition gold cassettes from Aoife Nessa Frances are out today! Side A features “Emptiness Follows” and side B contains “Dreams of Our Love.”
“That I Mean To Shine” sounds a bit dated turns out not to be surprising, because the album dates from 1970, although it was never released at the time. Linda Hoover was fourteen years old when she was discovered in 1966 by producer Gary Katz, who would become known in the 70s for the perfectly produced albums of Steely Dan. Gary Katz promised the very young Linda Hoover a record deal when she finished school and kept this promise when Linda Hoover soon left college in 1970 and opted for an uncertain existence as a musician.
Gary Katz produced “I Mean To Shine” and called in the help of the at that time unknown Steely Dan foremen Walter Becker and Donald Fagen for the music on the album, who also co-wrote quite a few songs on the album. Quite a few other top musicians came to the studio in New York, because the record company had big plans with Linda Hoover. Gary Katz took 19 year-old singer-songwriter Linda Hoover into the studio to record her first album, Joining them were the duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen leading a team of musicians including guitarists Denny Dias, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and Eric Weissberg, saxophonist Jerome Richardson, plus members of the Dick Cavett Show’s orchestra. The album was to feature three songs from Hoover, two covers (The Band’s “In A Station” and Stephen Stills’ “4+20”), and six songs from the up-and-coming team of Becker and Fagen. But the release was not to be. The owner of Roulette Records, Morris Levy, would shelve the album due to a dispute over publishing. The title song by Becker and Fagen was then given to Barbra Streisand who included it on her contemporary-focused Barbra Joan Streisand album. Fagen and Becker would form Steely Dan in 1971 (with Katz onboard to produce and Dias and Baxter joining the band) and start a career which lead to ground breaking albums and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
However, a somewhat dull business conflict arose over the rights, which eventually put the album on the shelf. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen would soon become world famous with Steely Dan, but Linda Hoover disappeared disillusioned with anonymity.
Decades later, the American musician got her hands on the original tapes of “I Mean To Shine” and after a number of special arrangements, including twelve hours in an oven, everything fortunately turned out to be flawless on the tape and thought could be given to a release of the album. That release is now here, 52 years after the album was recorded.
It may take some getting used to the somewhat dated sound on the album, but that is a lot easier when you know that it is a forgotten classic from a distant past. Musically, “I Mean To Shine” is an interesting album, especially when you hear snippets of the recognizable Steely Dan sound or top guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter shine.
“I Mean To Shine” is a pretty versatile album with influences from folk, country, jazz and pop. It is an album with perhaps somewhat old-fashioned looking, but also surprisingly timeless sounding songs, which, just like the music, come into their own better when you know that they are more than fifty years old.
Linda Hoover makes the most impression with her special voice and all the feeling with which she interprets her songs. It’s an achievement that gets even better when you realize that she was only 18 years old during the recording of the album. It is also a voice that becomes more beautiful the more you listen to the album.
It’s not hard to imagine what would have happened if “I Mean To Shine” had appeared in 1970. I myself am convinced that in that case the album would now be known as a classic. Linda Hoover’s debut is probably not going to be that anymore, but it is definitely a forgotten gem. Probably not the most popular RSD release of today, but a very nice and a very special one.
You’ll find “I Mean To Shine” by Linda Hoover with a bit of luck among the Record Store Day releases of June 18th, 2022
London-based duo Jockstrap (Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye) announced the release of their debut album, “I Love You Jennifer B”, which will be out on September 9th via Rough Trade. They also shared a video for a new album single, “Glasgow” in addition to announcing a North American tour in support of the album.
In a press release, the band state: “I Love You Jennifer B” is a collection of Jockstrap tracks that have been three years in the making. Everything on it is pretty singular sounding so we hope there is a track on there for everyone and something that speaks to you and says ‘I’m a banger.’”
They add, regarding the new single: “‘Glasgow’ is our coming of age, moving forward, long-distance, travelling, beautiful bosk, wonderful thicket song. Glasgow is a great city, perhaps my favourite city in the U.K. Only downside is that it’s so damn cold all the time.”
when georgia ellery and taylor skye make music as jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy.
With their debut album “I Love You Jennifer B”, Jockstrap will cement themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures in years. commenting on the album.
Last November, the duo shared the album track “50/50.” They later shared the album track “Concrete Over Water,” Their most recent music project was the EP “Beavercore”, which came out in 2020 via WarpRecords.
“She Said” was one of the first songs written for this album. It was at the beginning of the pandemic and Henri came to my window and played me the demo, and we wrote the lyrics together like Romeo and Juliet. It’s what really kicked off the writing process of this album, and it was such a powerful moment that we wanted to name the record after that song.
Beabadoobee has shared “10:36,” the latest single from her forthcoming album “Beatopia“. The song follows the previously released “Talk,” “Lovesong,” and “See You Soon.” “Beatopia” is out July 15th via DirtyHit. Scroll down to stream the new track now.
“‘10:36’ was written after [2020 debut album] Fake It Flowers and just before Our Extended Play, and I had envisioned it to be on that EP,” beabadoobee said in a statement. “I was just sitting on that riff for ages and then I properly made a demo during lockdown. It was called ’10:36′ because that was the time I finished writing it. It’s basically about how I have this weird dependency on human contact to sleep.”
She is also scheduled to perform at Glastonbury Festival in the U.K.
Big news in the world of Art Moore! We are incredibly excited to announce our debut self titled album out August 5th on Anti Records! The first song we ever wrote together, ‘Muscle Memory’ is out now!
It’s about the different phases in life. How friendships and relationships change over time and how we come to deal with it. Art Moore make vivid, heart breaking short stories. Each song on the newly formed three-piece’s self-titled debut album is its own individual universe of bittersweet feeling: a brief snapshot of a moment in time that captures the fragility and occasional impossibility of human connection. The ten tracks that comprise the record are deft character studies, zeroing in on restless widows, shy beginners, jilted friends and friendly exes, chronicling minute moments — road trips, casual dates, games of truth or dare — with rich detail and subtle wit. The result is a world of remarkable emotional complexity, an album-length study of loneliness, heartache, and loss that’s sweet but never saccharine, sad but never maudlin. Featuring the inimitable song writing of beloved Oakland luminary Taylor Vick of Boy Scouts set in sharp relief against lush production from Ezra Furman collaborators Sam Durkes and Trevor Brooks, it’s a quietly wondrous record — a set of songs that sketch out the struggle and beauty of coping with everyday life.
The idea of Art Moore, as a band, or Art Moore, as a cohesive, ingratiating record, was still a ways away. “We all met up at the studio, and it was never even like, ‘Let’s be a band’, that was never a thing,” recalls Durkes. “It was more like, ‘Let’s write for movies and art projects’ — let’s think of a movie scene or a photograph or still image and see if we can write some shit around it to see if we can pitch it.”
A mutual admiration for each others’ work guided the initial days of Art Moore, says Durkes. “Taylor can just nail harmonies right off the bat, like, no bullshit — it’s an incredible skill,” he says admiringly. “It’s amazing to see, because a lot of singers, they gotta work at it a lot harder. Taylor works at it too, but it seems so fucking effortless.”
Writing synth- and drum machine-led songs for the project proved to be a kind of full-circle moment for Brooks, who, prior to Art Moore, had spent time making ambient music as part of the Bay Area experimental electronic group Awefekt. “I spent a few years where I sort of left the whole indie-rock [world] and I was making a lot of ambient synth and improv modular stuff,” Brooks recalls. “I realized through that process that I really missed writing more traditional songs.
The electronic elements that gild Art Moore are subtle, but add distinctive shading to each story. The strobing synth pulse that undergirds “A Different Life” shifts the weight of the song dramatically from a heartbroken lament to something that bristles with the endless possibility that comes part-and-parcel with a breakup. “Something Holy’s dubby drum machine beat places it in the realm of atmospheric ambient pop a la HTRK or Tropic of Cancer, while the rhythmic electronic spines of “Rewind” and “October” place Taylor’s inventive vocal phrasing in a milieu closer to R&B than indie rock.
“The way the chorus of ‘Sixish’ sounded to me at first listen was heart breaking, so I wanted to write lyrics to match that feeling,” Vick recalls. Art Moore finds her writing fiction in song for the first time — but the emotions at the core of these songs always ring profoundly true. .
We filmed an amazing, West Coast gothic music video with visionaries Rocco Rivetti and Gilles O’Kane
“A Different Life” by Art Moore from the self-titled album, available August 5th
Sun’s Signature, is the new project from former Cocteau Twins Elizabeth Fraser along with her partner DamonReece, their self-titled debut EP comes out this Saturday via Partisan Records. Elizabeth needs no introduction. The unforgettable voice of the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil’s haunting, epic cover of “Song to the Siren,” she is internationally recognized for her vocal contributions to Massive Attack’s trail-blazing “Mezzanine” LP – most notably their biggest hit, “Teardrop”. She has revisited this material live, to devastating effect, on the recent Mezzanine XXI world tour.
This week they shared its third single, the seven-and-a-half-minute long “Apples.”
Previously they its shared its first single, “Golden Air,” which was also Fraser’s first original music in 13 years. Then they shared its second single, “Underwater,” via a lyric video. The song was originally released in 2000 as a limited-edition single.
The EP was unofficially announced in February and is due out on Record Store Day, with a digital release to follow sometime in July. The EP features Fraser’s 2000 limited-edition single “Underwater” as well as two songs that she performed at the 2012 Meltdown Festival, “Golden Air” and “Make Lovely the Day.”
Back in 2016, Fraser and Reece composed the score for the British TV series The Nightmare Worlds of H.G.Wells. Fraser’s most recent solo release was the 2009 single “Moses.” In 2020, she was featured on the Jónsi song “Cannibal”.
Reece has been the longtime drummer in Massive Attack, who Fraser has also collaborated with. He was previously a member of Spiritualized and Lupine Howl (an offshoot of Spiritualized), as well as Echo and the Bunnymen. He also recorded and performed with Baxter Dury, Goldfrapp, The Flies, Butch Vig’s 5 Billion in Diamond, and more.
The songs on Sun’s Signature have been in the works for over two decades, since the breakup of CocteauTwins in 1997.
Following on from their signing to Captured Tracks, Vermont’s newest group, Thus Love, share their debut single ‘Inamorato’. Utterly engrossing right from the slacker-ish get-go, Thus Love, with their pink hair, poetic nonchalance, and suburban sense of DIY, are the perfect band for a new-generation of articulately-nimble guitar-music.
Sprawling, hook-laden and pristinely drooled, ‘Inamorato’ gently seeps into every crevice it touches with effortless cool. Like city rain dripping down the up-turned collar of a leather jacket; all oversized comfort and adolescent identification, we should all know better by now than to brandish our delicate’s during an internal-hail-storm and yet, Thus Love turn naturally murky substance matter, into durable bright-ideas.
With notions of routinely-mesmerising-mundanity- Sunday morning’s turning into a mid-week-crisis all in the stroke of some obsessively peculiar-riffage, this is “alternative” at its most sophisticated. When apprehension in its eye, ‘Inamorato’ smartly charms with displayable-sincerity; texturally pliable in the same manner mohair demonstrates fuzzy resilience with stylish warmth and lustre.
Now that their windows of opportunity are flung wide-open, there’s no shadow of a doubt there’ll be plenty more of Thus Love nimbly-authentic outlook, in the not so distant future.
Long overdue and welcome re-issue of this 1992 debut album and shoegaze classic, Plus six additional bonus tracks chosen by the band including the limited edition 2,000-only pressing of the ‘30 Century Man’ EP, the non-album single ‘Balloon’ and live fan favourite ‘Intravenous’ which fans have been trying to get hold of for years.
Centred around re-recorded versions of four songs from the band’s two Wilde Club singles and the seven minute lovelorn “Black Metallic” – which was referred to as the “Like a Hurricane” of the ‘90s – the deeply rich “Ferment” firmly established Catherine Wheel amongst the shoegaze contingent of the early ‘90s. The band would proceed to denounce the shoegaze tag, but it was a fitting one, at least with everything they released prior to 1993’s harder edged “Chrome“.
Catherine Wheel buried their sing-along melodies in wafts of distortion and blurry production values. Rob Dickinson had yet to find comfort as a lead singer, so his somewhat fey and dazed emoting blended perfectly with Tim Friese-Greene’s comfy production. The employment of numerous guitar pedals didn’t serve as a smoke-and-mirrors ruse, and Friese-Greene knew enough to allow room for bassist Dave Hawes and drummer Neil Sims to flex their able muscles. Dickinson and lead guitarist Brian Futter were immensely skilled and complementary to each other from the band’s inception; certainly they were one of the most unrecognized guitar duos of their stylistic brethren.
Hailing from Great Yarmouth, Catherine Wheel were one of the original shoegaze bands of the early ’90s time along with Ride, Slowdive and Chapterhouse.
They had already released two independent single and recorded a Peel session before signing to the Phonogram Records imprint Fontana in 1991. Their epic debut single for Fontana, ‘Black Metallic’ brought them attention and praise from the press and fans, it also became their biggest hit in the States making the top ten in the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and is still name checked now as indie classic of the early ’90s.
The band followed this with two more singles, ‘Balloon’ and ‘I Want To Touch You’ before releasing their debut album ‘Ferment’ in mid-1992. The album was produced by Talk Talk’s Tim Friese-Greene.
Like all fine debuts, “Ferment” is varied emotionally, ranging from lust (“I Want to Touch You”) to bliss (“Shallow” and “Salt”). It’s a record that makes you want to crawl inside its sleeve and remain. It’s as welcoming as it is insular and sheltered.
