A beautiful track from the album “One House Left Standing”, released in 1972 on Island Records.
Claire Hamill was only 17 when she recorded her debut album, “One House Left Standing”. Island Records was looking for an English version of Joni Mitchell, who was a huge influence on Hamill. Label owner and producer Chris Blackwell realized the potential but was worried about her young age. She remembers: “He tried to convince me to wait and pointed out all the bad things about the music business.
He saw how naïve and ingenious I was and was scared about the responsibility of introducing someone so young to a business steeped in sex and drugs! I turned all my girlish charm and even made him laugh when I asked if I could have shares in Island as part of my contract.” Shares where not forthcoming, but Blackwell got her a number of top notch musicians to play on that album. Paul Buckmaster was hired to arrange a few songs, including “The Man Who Cannot See Tomorrows Sunshine”, where he also plays the cello and John Martyn plays guitar.
Comprised of Sarah Harvey (vocals), Meg Fretwell (guitar/backing vocals), Romi Lawrence (guitar/backing vocals), Em Smith (bass) and Ed Barker (drums), the band were officially formed in late 2018 as an affront to how music can feel like a ‘members-only club’ at the best of times, a phallocracy at the worst. They’ve since built a word-of-mouth following for their frenetic live show with barely a shred of music available online.
It’s that sense of inclusiveness that permeates everything Panic Shack do: a band writing killer, off-kilter songs whose guitarists could barely play four chords a year ago having dusted off guitars from the attic; who got started covering Dead or Alive and Stealers Wheel from Googled tabs. It’s the kind of trajectory you could compare to a modern Young Marble Giants or ESG, but those bands rarely sounded this fun or alive. You could say there’s no one out there doing this right now, but that would probably defeat the point.
The EP presents the band’s first singles ‘Who’s Got My Lighter?’, ‘Jiu Jits You’ and ‘I Don’t Really Like It’ alongside brand new material, ‘Mannequin Man’ – ‘Baby’ and ‘The Ick’.
The core characteristic of New York rock has always been a raucous, youthful, devil-may-care energy—stumbling around the Lower East Side at 4 AM, or having a drunken conversation on an L train heading east. And it’s a description that aptly fits Been Stellar.
In preparation for a UK tour with The Goa Express, New York’s Been Stellar have just released their new single, “Kids 1995”. A jubilant celebration of youth, the song’s title is taken from Larry Clark’s seminal film. It’s exactly the sort of music a late night romp through city streets lends itself towards. The tune reflects the ruleless odyssey portrayed in the movie, traversing a scorching 90’s New York summer. It contemplates innocence lost and the acceptance of life as it is.
Viagra Boys have consumed the utterly incomprehensible chaos of our era and distilled it into 12 immaculate tracks of post-truth-cow-funk-kraut-wave-enlightenment. This album is a pure feral attack and an absolute immense release. In this time of strife, insanity and confusion, only one band is depraved enough to offer themselves up as herald. Like sin-eaters if sins had to be ingested from a very small spoon,
Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys shared a new single, “Troglodyte.” It is the latest release from their forthcoming album, “Cave World”, which will be out on July 8th via YEAR0001Records.
In a press release, frontman Sebastian Murphy states: “People look down at apes as primitive life forms, but we’re just this horrible, lazy society killing each other and starting wars, while they’re able to love and feel. Does that make them the true ape or us?”
Post rock band TRAAMS are releasing a new album, “Personal Best”, on July 22nd via FatCat Records. They have just released its third single, the nine-minute-long track “Breathe,” which features guest vocals from Softlizard (aka Liza Violet of Menace Beach).
In a press release, Hopkins had this to say about the new single: “During one of 2020’s seemingly endless lockdowns once it was legal to do so, we began meeting up in Stu’s basement (due to our regular rehearsal space being shut). It was a strange time and we all felt palpably odd. “We already had a couple of tracks from a previous session, but ‘Breathe’ felt new. It took us down a very different path, one that ultimately shaped the tone of the whole record—right down to the artwork.
“A soft, meandering lullaby, born out of a trip to the GP—waiting room imagery, mismatched furnishings, gaudy posters, and jarring slogans all coming together in a fleeting moment of calm, before expanding out into a celebration of life’s repetition.”
“Personal best”also includes “Sleeper,” a new song TRAAMS shared in February, When the album was announced the band shared its second single, “The Light at Night,” which features Joe Casey of Protomartyr and was shared via a video directed by Lee Kiernan of IDLES and Charlotte Gosch.
“I couldn’t really write, and I didn’t have the motivation to do anything musical. I’m pretty sure I didn’t pick up a guitar for two years,” Hopkins said in a previous press release of the long gap between albums. “I was waiting for that feeling to come back.”
In 2020, TRAAMS shared the songs “The Greyhound” and “Intercontinental Radio Waves”. Neither track is featured on the new album and both were leftover TRAAMS songs Hopkins finished.
“They had been left as instrumental demos with no vocal takes, and to be honest they were beginning to drive me a little mad,” Hopkins explained. “I needed them finished and out of my head.”
At the end of 2019 the trio reconvened to begin work on new music and they began recording in 2020 when pandemic lockdown restrictions in the UK began to ease. “I like the fact that it touches on old ideas and new ideas, created in this weird middle period of our lives when we were locked down and didn’t know when we’d get on stage again,” bassist Leigh Padley said. “We focused more on the writing than we had done before.”
Hopkins added: “Lockdown heightened how much we realized we needed to do this, after so many years inactive. We realized that TRAAMS was something we all really needed.”
“Personal best” is the band’s first full-length in seven years, since 2015’s “Modern Dancing“.
TRAAMS are Stu Hopkins (vocals, guitar), Leigh Padley (bass, vocals), and Adam Stock (drums, synths).
‘Breathe featuring Softlizard’, from TRAAMS new album ‘Personal Best’ available July 22nd 2022.
Australian singer/songwriter Stella Donnelly is back with word of her sophomore album, “Flood“, coming August 26th on Secretly Canadian, and with a world tour slated for this Autumn. Lead single “Lungs” is out now, complete with a music video. On “Lungs,” Flood’s opener, Donnelly writes from the perspective of a child whose family is being evicted, vocalizing acrobatically as she insists in its choruses, “Don’t watch us when we leave / Won’t let you see us.” Up-tempo percussion and a roomy arrangement of bass, distant guitar distortion and organ lend the song some lightness, but Donnelly’s lyrics, masked by the sing-song delivery she assumes so as to better inhabit her character, are quietly harrowing: “Stretching out the leather on your wallet / That my lungs are filling up / Long live the asbestos on the rental / Yeah it looks alright to me,” she sings, alluding to the ultimate cost of poverty. “I’ll be a child, rest of my life,” she swears as the song winds down, imploring, “History again, teach me like a friend, what you know and why.”
This is my song “Lungs“, an attempt to tell a story of classism and city limits suburbia through the honesty of a child.
It’s the first single from my new album, “Flood”, which will be released on Friday August 26th. “Flood” is another compilation of diary entries and fictional stories that allow me to expand on moments between humans.
“Lungs” by Stella Donnelly from the forthcoming album ‘Flood’, out August 26th on Secretly Canadian.
Vancouver collective Crack Cloud have announced the release of a new album, “Tough Baby”, which will be out on September 16th via Meat Machine and Crack Cloud Media Studio. They also shared a strange video for a new single from the album, “Please Yourself.” as in the video the song’s solo piano outro is partially obscured by dialogue from a fake sitcom.
In a press release, frontman Zach Choy states: “As a kid, my bedroom was an altar. The images on the wall represented much of what I idolized and aspired to be. This sort of deification of pop culture helped to reinforce my sense of self narrative, however fabricated. But it also provided a sense of solidarity…with a subculture that validated insecurities in a personable way. This is what makes the media industry such a profound paradox. It is as much a source of inspiration for people, as it is an engineered illusion.
“The subtext of the video is really as follows: art is a mechanism for healing and discovery. You learn through it, and you grow with it. In our culture we’re predisposed to quantifying art, to sanctioning it, and to manufacturing it. But underneath all of that, it is a form of living inquiry; it’s how we learn to unravel the extremities in life so that we may better understand ourselves, and each other.”
On her first full-length, Preacher’s Daughter, the Florida-reared artist Ethel Cain digs into the seedier sides of small-town life, the tumultous of youth, the strictures of conservative religion, and the pitfalls of getting ensnared in all of the above. She has so far released “Gibson Girl,” “Strangers,” and “American Teenager” as singles from “Preacher’s Daughter”.
Ethel Cain eulogises the seedy all-American glamour over doomy, expansive pop-rock sounds. Her debut album features breathless depictions of badly behaved men (“He’s never looked more beautiful on his Harley in the parking lot, breaking into the ATMs”), idealised romantic setups, road trips filled with motels, diners and pistols, and the cold glitz of a strip club.
Yet, as the title suggests, the album’s other preoccupation is religion. Cain’s father was a deacon, and as a teenager she was ostracised from the Southern Baptist church she grew up in after coming out as gay (she later realised she was transgender).
Between last year’s monster EP “Inbred” and a slated performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival, Ethel Cain is on a brilliant ascent. “Inbred” solidified her position as a force to be witnessed in American music as she wrestled with the uniquely Southern version of the American dream that shaped her young life. The divinity of gospel, the audacity of heartland rock and the frankness of 2010s Tumblr-era pop collide into an arresting narrative spectacle, portraying the experience of a woman who is intimately familiar with depraved violence, the gospel and the strict social hierarchies of the South and the Plains.
The EPs have only revealed a portion of Cain’s lore, but on her whopping 75-minute long debut LP “Preacher’s Daughter“, Ethel Cain, the narrative figure and the musical sensation, manifests a breath taking account of a woman, her mysterious partner and her troubled family. Much as “Inbred” mangled Americana, ambient folk and slow-core into a terrifying sonic experiment, “Preacher’s Daughter” is a sound all its own.
As the album progresses, however, the pop sensibility loosens: “Televangelism” is an intermittently warped piano instrumental; “Ptolemaea” recalls Arca’s fractious, challenging sound. By the end it’s impossible to ignore the fact that this is a long record with flagging momentum. But it’s also impossible to ignore this intriguing debut’s promise. “Preacher’s Daughter” has lyrical richness and atmospheric potency to spare.
There’s the glamorous and aphrodisiac sound of Lana Del Rey is undoubtedly there, but the thematic and instrumental elements on “Preacher’s Daughter” possess a weightiness and impulse away from ironic glamorization of the American dream and toward outright criticism that render the comparison only so relevant.
At times the record throbs with a noisy, immersive intensity before transitioning into the kind of epic guitar solos that decorated the cult of rock personalities in generations past. This collision of dark ambient and rock is uniquely American in the best way conceivable.
But on ‘Thoroughfare’, the album’s most epic track, Cain strips things down to acoustic guitar and harmonica, evoking the music of her youth, when the only non-Christian music she was exposed to were the country acts her dad would play in the truck. After outing her tumultuous relationship with father figures throughout the album, it makes sense that she subverts those tropes at this crucial point in the story: leaving home to chase a dream that turns out to be unattainable, the characters stumble upon a deeper kind of connection, and the promise of freedom suddenly seems more tangible than ever: “In your pickup truck with all of your dumb luck is the only place I think I’d ever wanna be.” Things then slowly take a turn, moving through songs that twist and bleed with images of violence, sexuality, and death, before disintegraing into something harder to pin down with two dark, ambient-leaning instrumentals.
Nashville-based ambient composer Rich Ruth has announced the upcoming release of their ambitious new album. “I Survived, It’s Over” arrives via Third Man Records on Friday, August 12th.
Mixed by renowned Chicago producer/engineer John McEntire (Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, Stereolab),
“ISurvived, It’s Over” is heralded by today’s premiere of the opening track, “Taken Back,” in which sitar, shells, and bass are slowly joined by piercing lead guitar, synth blasts and drums as the track bursts open into psychedelic orbit. Additional new music will follow in the coming weeks. “I Survived, It’s Over” is a meditation on healing, confronting trauma, surrendering, and finding peace,” Rich Ruth frontman MichaelRuth says. “I constantly experiment with sound until it reflects the way I am feeling and attempt to sculpt something meaningful from it.” Rick Ruth – a.k.a. veteran Nashville-based musician Michael Ruth – took a break from touring with various bands in 2018 and dedicated himself to composing ambient music in his small home studio, focusing on the diverse traditions of ambient, new age, spiritual jazz, Kosmiche, and minimalist music.
His ideas became fully realized with the inclusion of additional players, pairing his repetitive, droning synthesizer movements with spur-of-the-moment improvisation to transform the material into something much more lush and unpredictable. One summer morning, Ruth was held up at gunpoint and carjacked by two people outside of his home. His music allowed him to work through this personal struggle, infusing his 2019 debut album, “Calming Signals”, with striking layers of angst and emotion. “Where There’s Life” followed in 2021, a collection of meditative pieces written in the early months of the pandemic manifesting the collective sense of uncertainty and solitude of the time.
Recorded in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic and in the wake of a series of tornadoes which wreaked havoc upon his North Nashville neighbourhood, “I Survived, It’s Over” sees Rich Ruth pushing his music even further into heretofore untapped sonic and emotional terrain. Melding inventive sound exploration, complex instrumentation – from shredding guitars and swelling strings to flutes, saxophones, pedal steel, and more – and a transcendent passion for nature, Ruth has created a milestone work of organic, symphonic power, a deeply affirmative musical movement that transforms the unease and sorrow of this difficult era into something strong and true and beautiful. “Working on this music is a daily meditation,” says Rich Ruth. “I wanted to encapsulate the tranquillity and disarray found within this process.”
The original “Not About To Die” was an illegal bootleg, released at some point in the early 80s, by the dubiously named Amnesia Records. The album was made up of selections from demos recorded by the group for their second and third albums: “Chairs Missing” and “154″. These demos had been recorded for EMI, with cassette copies circulated amongst record company employees. However, they were never intended for release. A typically shoddy cash-in, the songs on “Not About To Die” were taken from a second or possibly third generation cassette, with the album housed in a grainy green and red photo-copied sleeve.
Previously released as a Record Store Day exclusive, the official wide release will be out June 24th via the group’s pinkflag imprint. It includes early versions of songs like “Once Is Enough,” “On Returning,” “Being Sucked In Again,” and “Two People in a Room,” as well as a long list of other tracks.
Compared with the high standards of production and design Wire have always been known for, it was something of an insult to band and fans alike. Now, in a classic act of Wire perversity, the group have decided to redress the balance and reclaim one of the shadier moments of its history, by giving “Not About To Die” its first official release on the bands own pinkflag imprint.. All the tracks have been properly remastered, with the relevant recording details in place.
As for the sleeve artwork, whilst it strongly references the original, it is decidedly more artful in its execution.Not About To Die emerges as a fascinating snapshot of Wire in transition with embryonic versions of classic songs such as ‘French Film (Blurred)’, ‘Used To’ and ‘Being Sucked In Again’, that the group would develop considerably for their epochal 1978 albumChairs Missing. Later demos such as ‘Once Is Enough’, ‘On Returning’ and ‘Two People In A Room’ would surface in radically altered form on 1979’s 154. Some songs, such as ‘The Other Window’, are virtually unrecognisable from their later iterations but the biggest prizes here may well be the tracks that were omitted from Wire’s later studio albums.
Track list: Oh No Not So (Save The Bullet) 4th Demo / Culture Vultures 4th Demo / It’s The Motive 4th Demo / Love Ain’t Polite 4th Demo / French Film (Blurred) 4th Demo / Underwater Experiences 4th Demo / Stalemate 4th Demo / Options R 4th Demo / Indirect Enquiries v1 5th Demo / Chairs Missing (Used To) 5th Demo / Being Sucked In Again 5th Demo / Ignorance No Plea (I Should Have Known Better) 6th Demo / Once Is Enough 6th Demo / The Other Window 6th Demo / Stepping Off Too Quick (Not About To Die) 6th Demo / On Returning 6th Demo / Former Airline 6th Demo / Two People In A Room 6th Demo
