The Fat Angel Sings

This year, PJ Harvey has announced several reissues of her music on vinyl, including 2000’s “Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea“, 2004’s “Uh Huh Her“, and 2007’s “White Chalk“. Today, she’s announced another with the reissue of 2011’s “Let England Shake“. Her eighth studio album will be released on CD, vinyl, and digitally with unreleased demos. Along with the announcement today, she’s shared the demo of the title track.

PJ Harvey followed her ghostly collection of ballads, “White Chalk“, with “Let England Shake”, an album strikingly different from what came before it except in its Englishness. “White Chalk’s” haunted piano ballads seemed to emanate from an isolated manse on a moor, but here Harvey chronicles her relationship with her homeland through songs revolving around war. Throughout the album, she subverts the concept of the anthem — a love song to one’s country — exploring the forces that shape nations and people. This isn’t the first time Harvey has been inspired by a place, or even by England: she sang the praises of New York City and her home county of Dorset on “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea”. Harvey recorded this album in Dorset, so the setting couldn’t be more personal, or more English. Yet she and her long time collaborators John Parish, Mick Harvey, and Flood travel to the Turkish battleground of Gallipoli for several of “Let England Shake’s” songs, touching on the disastrous World War I naval strike that left more than 30,000 English soldiers dead.

Her musical allusions are just as fascinating and pointed: the title track sets seemingly cavalier lyrics like “Let’s head out to the fountain of death and splash about” to a xylophone melody borrowed from the Four Lads’ “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” a mischievous echo of the questions of national identity Harvey explores on the rest of the album (that she debuted the song by performing it on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show for then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown just adds to its mischief). “The Words That Maketh Murder” culminates its grisly playground/battleground chant with a nod to Eddie Cochran’s anthem for disenfranchised ’50s teens “Summertime Blues,” while “Written on the Forehead” samples Niney’s “Blood and Fire” to equally sorrowful and joyful effect.

As conceptually and contextually bold as “Let England Shake” is, it features some of Harvey’s softest-sounding music. She continues to sing in the upper register that made “White Chalk” so divisive for her fans, but it’s tempered by airy production and eclectic arrangements — fittingly for an album revolving around war, brass is a major motif — that sometimes disguise how angry and mournful many of these songs are. “The Last Living Rose” recalls Harvey’s “Dry” era sound in its simplicity and finds weary beauty even in her homeland’s “grey, damp filthiness of ages,” but on “England,” she wails, “You leave a taste/A bitter one.” In its own way, Let England Shake may be even more singular and unsettling than “White Chalk” was, and its complexities make it one of Harvey’s most powerful works.

“Let England Shake” was written over two and a half years and recorded in five weeks, between April and May 2010, at a church in Dorset. Harvey cited “Harold Pinter, Francisco de Goya, the First World War poets, Ari Folman, and The Doors as influences for the album, as well as researching the history of conflict and searching for modern-day testimonies from civilians and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan,” reads the press release.

The reissue is out January 28th.

Father John Misty (aka Josh Tillman) has announced the release of a new album via a spoken word flexi disc record sent to a select handful of fans on his mailing list. The new album, entitled “Chloe And The Next 20th Century”, will be out on April 8th, 2022 via Sub Pop/Bella Union. One recipient of the flexi disc uploaded a video of the record being played on Reddit.

When the bells toll and 2021 turns to 2022 in a few weeks, it will mark four calendar years since the last time the world got a new album out of Father John Misty. This would have been an unthinkably long time to wait during the run that gave us not one but three album cycles full of mordant folk-rock philosophizing and off-the-wall interviews between 2015 and 2018, but a lot has happened in the world since then, and anyway, papa’s vacation appears to be ending soon.

“Available April 8th, 2022 on Sub Pop and Bella Union. Father John Misty’s new album: “Chloe And The Next 20th Century.” Get it on vinyl, CD, the other one, uh, cassette. And in beautiful deluxe hardback edition with expanded artwork and much more. This is the album. Eleven new tracks produced by Jonathan Wilson and Josh Tillman. “Chloe And The Next 20th Century”. It’s technically new.”

The album’s limited deluxe edition comes in a hardcover book featuring bonus 7″ singles. One includes Lana Del Rey’s cover of the album track “Buddy’s Rendezvous,” and the other features Jack Cruz’s version of “Kiss Me (I Loved You).”

Father John Misty’s last album, “God’s Favorite Customer”, was released in 2018 via Sub Pop Records,

Cheval Sombre releases his third album, “Time Waits for No One“. It is his first solo release for more than eight years, following 2018’s critically acclaimed collaboration with Galaxie 500 and Luna frontman Dean Wareham, and the first of two new albums scheduled for 2021, both of which have been produced by Sonic Boom. Cheval Sombre is the nome d’arte of Chris Porpora, a poet from upstate New York whose otherworldly psychedelic lullabies on his self-titled album from 2009 and its follow-up, “Mad Love” (2012), won him a cult following. “Time Waits for No One” ushers in his most prolific period, and serendipitously the world has finally slowed down to his pace. This is no lockdown record, but Cheval Sombre’s reclusive, reflective music is its perfect soundtrack.

“Time Waits for No One” is his finest and most fully realised body of work to date and, appropriately enough for a record that has taken so many years to come to fruition, across eight original songs, an instrumental and a closing cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘No Place to Fall’, its overarching theme is time itself; what it is and what role it inevitably plays in all of our lives. But the record is also timeless, contrasting the musical simplicity of Cheval Sombre’s open-tuned acoustic guitar curlicues with the beautiful, sweeping and ornate arrangements of Sonic Boom’s keyboards and Gillian Rivers’ and Yuiko Kamakari’s strings. The end result is something akin to Daniel Johnston backed by the Mercury Rev of Deserter’s Songs. Elemental and earthbound, but simultaneously and very subtly shooting for the stratosphere.

One of two Cheval Sombre albums to come out this year, “Time Waits For No One” was a strong collection of reflective psychedelic folk. Sonic Boom (him again!) served as the album’s producer, and really there’s nobody out there who understands this kind of dreamy narco rock better (think Spacemen 3’s “Transparent Radiation”).

Cheval Sombre under exclusive licence to Sonic Cathedral Released on: 2021-02-26

“Dream Violence”, Michael Beach’s fourth full-length, is an epic album that explores the duality of the human condition. Or, as Beach himself puts it, the album is about “human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time. ”Dream Violence“, then, addresses the existential crisis of being an artist in 2021.

Known for his work touring with the Australian guitar pop band Thigh Master and the late, brilliantly eccentric Israeli guitarist Charlie Megira, currently the focus of a number of reissues by the Numero Group, Beach is the architect of a sound that is both well-built and ramshackle, straightforward and indeterminably complex, out of the norm yet familiar in all the best ways.

“Dream Violence” unfolds like a revelation, filled with sonic tumbleweeds that reference Neil Young’s On the Beach, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, and the Go Betweens’ Before Hollywood. Influences ranging from the enigmatic outlier Megira to Glenn Branca to the Oblivians are combined to create a new, exhilarating sound, part of the path that Beach has been on since 2008’s Blood Courses. A veteran of year-end indie rock round ups beginning with Golden Theft in 2013 and continuing with Gravity/Repulsion, released in 2017, Beach distills the best of those early albums and adds sharpened intent.

“Dream Violence” works beautifully as a start-to-finish album. There are magnificent stand-alone moments: “Spring,” a raggedly building ballad that perfectly captures the ennui attached to new beginnings; “De Facto Blues,” a born-to-lose anthem that, says Beach, “is the sound of people totally at their wits end;” “Curtain of Night,” a simultaneously derelict and bright tribute to the late Megira, which sounds like it could’ve been cut at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio after the Rolling Stones wrapped up sessions for Sticky Fingers; and the delicately vulnerable “You Found Me Out,” which evokes equal parts Lou Reed and Joni Mitchell. On the latter, the lyrics “You found me out, on a ship at sea, you pulled me in, made a wreck of me,” encapsulate “the aimless of a modern world view in a future without hope and the draw/dependence of love in those times,” Beach explains.

“Dream Violence” splits its considerable artistic breadth between mid-‘70s and ‘90s alt rock sounds, with occasional bouts of perfectly executed Neil Young worship. “You Know Life Is Cheap” has been a go-to song for most of the year.

Through music, Beach strives to convey both passion and compassion, energy and action. “My hope is that something gets communicated that makes people think outside of themselves or their surroundings,” he says. “To ask questions, and consider the effects of their decisions. To communicate some essential part of the human spirit that understands intuitively how to feel connected to each other rather than divide, exploit, separate, ignore, and all the other heinous shit we have the ability to do with each other.”

Recorded on two continents, “Dream Violence” documents Beach’s move from Oakland, California to Melbourne, Australia as he navigated a new music scene, plenty of bureaucratic red tape, and, ultimately, citizenship. Parts of the album were recorded and mixed at Tiny Telephone Recording in Oakland, at the end of a 2019 tour with Kelley Stoltz producing. Other tracks were recorded at Beach’s new home in Melbourne, where he could be “relaxed and sloppy in all the right ways,” and partially remixed at Phaedra Studios.

In Melbourne, Beach worked with Matthew Ford and Innez Tulloch of Thigh Master (Beach has played bass on tour with the group), with Peter Warden on drums, to capture an off-the-cuff feel on songs like “Curtain of Night,” “Spring,” and “Life is Cheap.”

“The dynamic of Pete, Matt, and Innez is a totally unique, very Australian sound,” says Beach, describing those sessions as “loose and tight, serious and taking the piss. A great balance and really fun. As a songwriter, I have a pretty laborious process of writing, editing, and arranging, and Matt and Innez were a perfect foil for that. Likewise, Pete’s self-taught and totally intuitive drumming complements perfectly.”

Beach went for more production on “De Facto Blues,” “Metaphysical Dice,” and “Irregardless,” which were recorded at Tiny Telephone with drummer Utrillo Kushner of Colossal Yes and Comets on Fire. “We had jammed in Oakland earlier in the year, then mostly made up stuff on the spot. Utrillo is an absolute pro at that sort of thing no performance is ever the same, but they are always great,” Beach says. “We were totally fried from a month of sleeping on tours, we were stressed financially, we were pretty tired of each other, but despite that, everyone worked hard.”

At the Memphis-based Goner label, Beach joins an increasingly unique roster of international musicians that reaches far beyond garage or indie rock to encompass artists like gospel singer Rev. John Wilkins, Kentucky rockers Archaeas, New Orleans iconoclasts Quintron and Miss Pussycat, and no-wavers Optic Sink. Dream Violence will be released on Goner Records on March 19th, 2021. In Australia and New Zealand the album will be released on Melbourne-based Poison City Records. 

Released March 19th, 2021

On Des Demonas’ new 7-track EP, “Cure For Love” there’s a walloping drum beat driving everything. But the throbbing, pumping bass, clanging, slashing guitar and whirling, swirling Farfisa are no mere passengers in this vehicle! I’m told by the other band members Paul, Joe, Mark and Ryan that vocalist Jacky Cougar Abok is the loudest drummer they’ve ever heard.  But here he sings! In motifs. He sings out a beat, he sings minimalist melodic hooks. He half speaks half shouts his lyrical content in rapid fire that is closer to beat poetry than rap. His voice is insistent and demanding to be heard! And it is! By having it slightly submerged, the listener is forced to strain to hear the words because they won’t wanna miss something important!  

The sonic fuel of the band is a blend of post punk, punk, funk, blues, psych rock, Afro beat, even bubble gum but the noise you hear is pure Des Demonas! Titles like the “Ballad of Ike And Tina” and “Black Orpheus Blues” add to the intrigue rather than explain the content. The listener is both confronted and lured by something bigger than themselves!  Desire, intrigue, fear and exuberance are the rewards to those unable to resist! But will Your love be cured? You could look to Shakespeare, or simpler, you could buy this record and find out!

From the new EP: “Cure For Love“

Back in November, Peter Wagner released “Fisher King”, his debut album as Furrows. Tip-toeing the line between chamber pop and psychedelic folk rock, the release was a synthesthetic’s dream, composed of colourful, textured melodies that seemed to float in the air before you, shimmering and morphing with grace in a manner akin to the northern lights. “An attempt to work through the feelings of alienation that come from pursuing an artistic life in a society that only finds value in profit,” the Wagner embedded in the music the quiet frustrations of the transient lifestyle he found himself in for most of his life, which he later discovered only music can reconcile. Within “Fisher King’s” vast, atmospheric expanse lies something beautifully tangible and material, a far-away chance, however hazy and fragile, to be rooted, stable, safe after so many years without a sense of place. 

Released October 15th, 2021

All Songs by Peter Wagner

Citizen have always eluded definition. The Toledo, Ohio-based three-piece have been making dynamic, wide-ranging guitar music for over ten years, challenging expectations with each new album and refusing to fit neatly in a box. On their fourth full-length, “Life In Your Glass World“, Citizen have crafted their most singular work to date completely on their own terms—proving that only the band themselves can define their identity.

Since forming in 2009, Citizen—vocalist Mat Kerekes, guitarist Nick Hamm, and bassist Eric Hamm—have endlessly pushed themselves with each successive release, actively resisting the comfort zones that often plague bands as they grow. The band has fearlessly taken risks with their sound on each new album, and shown themselves capable of exploring impassioned post-hardcore, raw noise rock, shimmering indie pop, anthemic alternative, and more—often on the same album, and sometimes even the same track. But growth isn’t always painless, and the band has been navigating the fraught music industry from a young age—learning as they went and sometimes feeling pulled in different directions at once.

When it came time to make “Life In Your Glass World”, Citizen’s need to continue moving forward creatively went hand in hand with their desire to be fully in control of their creative destiny. Nick Hamm explains: “I don’t have a lot of regret but there have definitely been times when we felt powerless during the band’s existence. This time we really owned every part of the process. It’s easy to feel like you’re on autopilot when you’re in a band, but that’s not a good place to be this far into our existence. We consciously knew we wanted to break free.”

For Citizen that meant taking the entire album-making process home to Toledo (the Glass City) and creating everything in-house. Kerekes built a studio in his garage, a project that was both empowering and practical. “It’s super easy and convenient,” he says. “But I also felt like building the studio was a way to prove we don’t need anything but ourselves.” Hamm adds, “This is the first self-sufficient Citizen record. There was no pressure at all and moving at our own pace allowed the songs to be a little more fleshed out.” The looser recording process afforded the band time to focus on each song’s individual mood, making their signature blend of aggression and melody all the more pronounced, and even capturing appealing imperfections. The result is an album that represents the members’ vision in its purest form, something that feels distinctly Citizen while also marking the start of a fresh chapter.

One of the most immediately striking elements of Life In Your Glass World is the band’s attention to rhythm. Many of the songs feature undeniably danceable beats and sharply grooving guitar lines, which give both the barnburners and the brooding atmospheric tracks a pulsating heart. “When you write songs the same way for X amount of years, you start to want to try something new,” Kerekes says. “These songs were mostly built from drums and bass first, which was different for us. I’d start with a completely different beat every time to get a certain energy.” The band’s desire to assert themselves is palpable both in the music and Kerekes’ lyrics, mirroring not only their creative frustrations but also a long year of personal upheavals. “There’s a lot of anger in these songs and we wanted the music to communicate that,” Hamm says. “I think a lot of people expect bands to slow down or chill out when they get to where we are, but we consciously didn’t want to do that.”

The opening one-two punch of “Death Dance Approximately” and “I Want To Kill You” exemplifies the acerbic-yet-buoyant feel of “Life In Your Glass World“, and the latter sums up the album’s defiant themes. Kerekes puts it plainly: “Sometimes you feel like you’re being used. A lot of the lyrics are liberating, they’re reclaiming control.” The band wastes no time in showing their range, pivoting to the melancholy haze of “Blue Sunday” and the bounce of “Thin Air,” both of which meditate on the struggle to invest so much in something only to be let down and retreat inside oneself instead. Elsewhere tracks like “Call Your Bluff” and “Black and Red” showcase Citizen’s knack for big choruses, while “Pedestal” features towering drums and a distorted bass line that’s as malevolent sounding as Kerekes’ vitriolic words. “Fight Beat,” with its tense mix of otherworldly menace and memorable hooks, takes the band’s rhythmic-centric writing to its furthest point yet; lyrically, the song grapples with the realization that one has passed a point of no return, a sentiment that permeates the attitude of “Life In Your Glass World“. “This isn’t a baby step,” Hamm says. “It’s exactly what we want to do.”

Much of Life In Your Glass World deals with the bleak and challenging aspects of being human, and the album often feels like an exorcism of pent up negative feelings. But those feelings give way to a sense of hope with the closing track “Edge of The World.” Interweaving guitars rise around Kerekes’ voice as he considers past pain with the kind of clarity that can only come from time and distance—and finds promise in looking towards the future. The song builds to a soaring finale as the clouds part and Kerekes declares, “At the end of the day there was beauty in tragedy.” It’s one last turn, the kind of affirmation that makes you re-examine everything you just heard with a newfound perspective. It’s a fitting conclusion for “Life In Your Glass World” – borne of the confidence gained through years of trials, tribulations, and self reflection – and one that asserts that Citizen’s true identity is rooted in the raw energy of constant evolution. 

Released March 26th, 2021

In “Rattler“, his previous album as Petite League, Lorenzo Gillis-Cook swapped out the signature baseball bat that has always more or less graced every previous release for a cowboy hat, hinting at the idea of constant movement, a nomadic rambler’s life marked by his ex-pat status. However, in this year’s offering, “Joyrider”, the persona changed ever so slightly and gracefully – this time, we saw Gillis-Cook hang up the hat, sit for a spell, pull out a worn guitar, and reminisce for a moment before hitting the road again. 

The majority of “Joyrider” felt heavier, more lived in than in albums past, with the vocals and instrumentals, while warm and inviting, always clawing and clutching at the deeper, darker recesses of the sentimental human heart, armed with narratives full of some of the finest writing Gillis-Cook has ever done. This is also the feeling that I feel only Petite League’s specific brand of hyper-jangly, gorgeously unquiet lo-fi can facilitate, something that seems akin to half-lit fireworks locked in a glass jar – muffled, but always threatening to shatter into a million pieces. What makes “Joyrider” wonderful is how familiar it feels, yes, but moreover, it’s music that tells us that what we should rely on, at the end of the day, is ourselves, our shortcomings, our future potentials. 

Lorenzo Gillis Cook: Vocals, guitar, bass
Henry Schoonmaker: Drums

Released January 8th, 2021

Inspired by the storage units she was forced to familiarize herself with from moving every few years with her family while growing up, Hana Vu’s sophomore album “Public Storage” speaks to the essence of compartmentalization – the conscious containment of the material versus the immaterial. An accumulation of concentrated bursts of memory in one windowless sonic room, each of the twelve boxes and containers of sound are packaged differently with the same bright red tape, with Vu standing before them, knife at the ready, eager to unpack. “Public Storage” is a perfectly balanced mix of grunge and dream pop, always at the edge of catharsis; when writing these songs, Vu explained that, though she is not religious, she was imagining “a sort of desolate character crying out to an ultimately punitive force for something more.” As a result, it’s vulnerable and honest, and often, about the existential, though not always obvious on the surface.

Los Angeles-based artist Hana Vu makes her Ghostly International debut with “Maker,” a commanding first glimpse into new material. The track builds on the sound of the 20-year old’s previous work: brooding, melodic pop driven by guitar and Vu’s distinct contralto. For the first time, she welcomes a co-producer, Jackson Phillips (Day Wave), who helps Vu create an atmosphere with a deeper sense of luster, sophistication, and urgency. 

Vu’s relationship with music began when she picked up a guitar her dad had lying around and taught herself to play. She’d wake up every day and listen to LA’s ALT 98.7, home to ‘90s and ‘00s alternative rock; later in high school, she found LA’s DIY scene. She remembers, “A lot of my peer musicians were surf rock/punk type bands and so I tried to fit into that when I was gigging around. But what I was listening to at that time [St. Vincent, Sufjan Stevens] was very different from what I performed.” Ultimately she’d do her own thing, keeping a journal of bedroom pop experiments on Bandcamp, including a low-key Willow Smith collaboration and covers of The Cure and Phil Collins. She caught the ear of Gorilla vs. Bear, who released Vu’s self-produced debut EP in 2018 on their imprint Luminelle Recordings, followed by a double EP the next year. 
Unpacking “Maker,” Vu explains, “I am not religious but I imagined a sort of desolate character crying out to an ultimately punitive force for something more.” Tender banjo plucks and piano keys serve as the base for Vu’s escalating harmonies, overcome by remorseful exhalations, the song culminates on the lines: “save me oh my angel / are you angry / cos I’m not stronger and I crumble / oh that’s my nature / just like you.”  

Released November 5th, 2021

 I loved Van Halen during their original David Lee Roth era, and being a guy who pays too much attention to the “wrong” members of bands, I was really into bassist-vocalist Michael Anthony. So when Roth returned late in the group’s run, I was happy, but then disappointed to learn that Anthony was replaced by Eddie Van Halen’s son, Wolfgang. After Eddie’s death, and with this, Wolf’s debut album out, Wolfgang is an incredibly talented musician, writing, singing and playing every note on this exceptional album. Plus, “Distance,” his song about his Dad’s death, made my eyes admittedly misty. And that takes some doing, .

Wolfgang Van Halen had to thread quite a narrow needle while launching his solo career: establishing a musical identity separate from his father Eddie’s massive shadow while still living up to his family’s high standards, just months after the guitar legend’s death. No pressure, right? But he pulls it off with seeming ease on “Mammoth WVH“, acting as a one-man band on an impressively sharp and hook-filled collection of songs that draw from a completely different set of influences than Van Halen. You won’t find any of David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar’s cocky vocal swagger or winking sexual foreplay here. But there’s a big dose of pop smarts along with plenty of clever, complex instrumental bits to reward repeated listens.

Mammoth WVH is the debut, self-titled album of Mammoth WVH – the band created by Wolfgang Van Halen – that includes 14 new songs on a double vinyl, CD, Digital Download and streaming. This collection includes the #1 Hit Single, “Distance” plus “You’re to Blame”, “Don’t Back Down,” “Epiphany,” and more. At the beginning of 2015, Wolf broke ground on what would become Mammoth WVH with producer Michael “Elvis” Baskette [Alter Bridge, Slash] behind the board. Wolf began to embrace his voice, inspired by everyone from his father, to bands like AC/DC, Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails, TOOL, and Jimmy Eat World. In addition to writing and singing every song on the self-title debut album, remarkably Wolfgang plays every instrument.

For those who are unaware, the WVH in Mammoth WVH are the initials of the band’s creator Wolfgang Van Halen. And whether you want to embrace or ignore the last name, what’s clear is that Wolf is ready to chart a legacy all his own. Like Prince and Dave Grohl before him, Wolf wrote every song, played every instrument, and sang every song on this album. That is a tall task for any artist, but especially for one making their debut album, and the offspring of a man forever linked to rock and roll greatness. From the hard rocking “The Big Picture,” and “Don’t Back Down,” to the grungy, Alice In Chains-esqe “Circles” with it’s harmonizing vocals, Wolf took various approaches to the songs on this album, and as a whole, put together an excellent rock record.

Mammoth WVH Album features the Hit Song ‘Distance’, ‘Don’t Back Down’ + many more!