The Fat Angel Sings

On 2018’s “Happy & Sad,” Kacey Musgraves innocently sings, “I never felt so high / And I’ve never been this far off the ground / And they say everything that goes up must come down,” as she absorbs the euphoria (and fears) of being a newlywed. In 2021, these lyrics feel like a haunting precursor to her latest project, “star-crossed“, which dissects the emotional rollercoaster she experienced following her divorce to country singer Ruston Kelly. Following the triumph of “Golden Hour“, which won the 2018 Album of the Year Grammy Award, Musgraves then went through a divorce and a long period of self-discovery and healing. “star-crossed” is the story of this chapter in her journey—a “modern tragedy” that takes listeners through the stages of complicated and conflicting emotions in ways that feel all too familiar for most of us.

Musgraves chronicles this journey in her version of a Shakespearean three-act structure, questioning the validity of their relationship in “good wife,” realizing she gave more than what she received on “breadwinner,” and ultimately touching base with reality on “what doesn’t kill me.” The delicate synths and laid-back production on this album gives space for listeners to submerge themselves in Musgraves’ comforting, twangy voice and pry intently on her inner psyche. In the aftermath, Musgraves has a full-circle moment on “keep lookin’ up” by revisiting her perspective on her aforementioned 2018 song, now singing, “But I keep looking up / Won’t let the world bring me down / Keep your head in thе clouds / And your feet on the ground.”

She’s teaching us that in the wake of your divorce, it’s all about maintaining balance—you can fantasize and yearn for love, but learn to be grounded and not lose sight of yourself. 

Every stage of a breakup is sung in chronological order here: marital worries, hope for the relationship being good enough, worsening arguments, split, poignant staring at old photos, perspective gained, exciting/depressing ventures on to dating apps, eventual feeling of true freedom. Swerve a couple of tepid chillout-compilation moments and along the journey you alight at some of Musgraves’ prettiest song writing, nicely leavened with her straight-talking, wearily dismayed tone of voice.

Singer-songwriter Stevie Knipe has been making music for close to a decade, since they were a college student in upstate New York recording in a dorm room. But Knipe (who uses they/their pronouns) has really taken a leap forward in terms of both sonics and songcraft with the excellent “Driver”. While previous Adult Mom albums had a spare, bedroom-recording feel, “Driver” is more of a band album, with bright production and songs that carefully and vividly map out an early-twenties travelogue full of crisis, memory, hope, and the kind of intense moments that feel almost debilitatingly hard-hitting at that age — even if you’re just starting to become wise enough to know they’re ephemeral. 

Adult Mom’s Stevie Knipe has been out here for years as one of indie rock’s great bedroom storytellers, with gems like “Sometimes Bad Happens” and “Momentary Lapse of Happily“. But “Driver” is a real breakthrough. As an obsessive fan of both R.E.M. and Taylor Swift, Knipe combines the best of both, as if hearing “Nightswimming” and “You Belong With Me” as part of the same queer-punk underdog story. The songs are full of tenderness and rage, even in lines like “The only thing I’ve done this month is drink beer and masturbate and ignore phone calls from you.” “Dancing” has the perfect credo for marching into next year with your head held high: “I’m dancing to the song I crashed my car to.”

“Berlin” is the new digital single from Adult Mom, available everywhere February 12th, 2020.

Existing in a kind of dream world stretched between reality and fiction, Manchester Orchestra’s sixth full-length is a beautiful and at times harrowing rumination on existence and death, and what happens when the latter cancels out the former. Initially conceived as a concept album that follows one man’s journey with the Angel of Death, life started to imitate art when the father of multi-instrumentalist Robert McDowell lost his battle with cancer.

The resulting record is a deeply melancholy yet strangely soothing collection of sophisticated indie rock that wrestles, as Manchester Orchestra albums always have, with the big questions—not just life and death, but faith, purpose, love, and the meaning of all those things. Frontman Andy Hull’s vocals are as radiant and rich as the melodies and layers of instrumentation that carry it, drawing you into the record’s distinctive otherworld—a parallel universe that contains an elucidation of all your hopes and dreams and fears in gloriously gloomy technicolour. 

“The Million Masks Of God” out now

Torres the moniker of Mackenzie Scott released her new album, “Thirstier”, on 30th July on Merge Records. “Thirstier” revolts against the grey drag of time, a searing and life-affirming eruption of an album that wonders what could happen if we found a way to make our fantasies inexhaustible.

She presents its title track, a thesis statement for the album as a whole that highlights its strive towards abundance. Scott sings of love that never knows scarcity: “The more of you I drink / The thirstier I get.” Following a stretch of melancholy guitar, thunderous percussion crashes in along with Scott’s voice: “Keep me in your fantasies / Even though you live with me.” It’s an urgent and intense encapsulation of desire.

“For a while, I was sinking/ But from here on out, I swear I’m swimming,” TORRES’ Mackenzie Scott declares on ‘Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head’, a standout track from her latest album “Thirstier“. It’s a moment that could’ve been lost between the song’s titanic choruses, but Scott delivers the line with such fervour that it’s impossible not to believe her, let alone pay attention. It’s this rock-solid, wide-eyed conviction that marks the Brooklyn-based artist’s third album under the moniker, which is packed with one anthemically bombastic song after another, save for a few welcome electronic experiments. Thundering, exuberant hooks become a vehicle for Scott’s outsized ambition, but it’s the yearning that persists and powers her performances, taking the songs to another level: “The more of you I drink, the thirstier I get,” she admits on the title track. Scott’s song writing has rarely sounded more potent, or joy more restless.

Recorded in the Autumn of 2020 at Middle Farm Studios in the UK and co-produced by Scott, Rob Ellis and Peter Miles, “Thirstier” marks a turn towards a bigger, more bombastic sound for Torres. The anxious hush that fell over much of Scott’s previous music gets turned inside-out in songs tailored for post-plague celebration. Guitar-driven walls of sound surge and dissipate like surf in high winds, carrying Scott’s commanding voice to the fore, as displayed in the album’s first two singles “Hug From a Dinosaur” and “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head.”

Never one to be afraid of doing things her own way, TORRES once again shook things up for this, her fifth full-length. Ostensibly, it’s a relationship record, but one that celebrates love rather than laments its loss. That attitude is enmeshed in the generally upbeat nature of its confident, anachronistic songs. They look both forward and backward at the same time, and fizzle with the excited energy of lasting love and companionship, as well as the ups and downs that come with that.

Full of stadium-friendly pop hooks and electronic undercurrents, “Thirstier” is a powerful and bold record that feels like it exists both in the past and the future. 

Thirstier is out July 30th, 2021, on Merge Records

The Sydney-based three-piece Middle Kids released their second album, “Today We’re The Greatest” via Lucky Number. Recorded and produced in Los Angeles by Lars Stalfors (St. Vincent, Soccer Mummy, Purity Ring), the follow-up to the band’s award-winning 2018 debut, “Lost Friends“, is their most personal and courageous effort to date. Moving away from lyrics of a more conceptual nature, “Today We’re The Greatest” is the open, uninhibited product of fearless collaboration. Showing a real vulnerability, Joy is pulling directly from her own experiences and breaking down barriers she had previously set for herself.

The album includes “nervy Strokes-esque floorfiller” (The Guardian) “R U 4 Me?” and their monumental new single, “Questions”, a charged three-minute odyssey which sees Joy struggle poetically with concepts of honesty and intimacy over an explosive rhythm section and a stunningly orchestrated brass-filled climax.

Other tracks like “Run With You”, were written when Joy was a few months into pregnancy with her and Tim Fitz, her husband and bandmate’s, first child. They recorded her 20-week sonogram, and wove the gentle, rapid thump of their baby boy’s beating heart into the last 20 seconds of the track -an exuberant declaration of devotion. Joy’s journey to motherhood and her marriage with Fitz has imbued her songs with a vibrancy that’s unabashedly romantic yet free of clichés.

There’s also “Stacking Chairs,” with its unique allegories and Joy’s sunny vocals, that strikes this delicate balance beautifully: it’s a testament to her deep connection with Fitz and the new, “infinitesimal” love that transformed their lives with their son’s arrival.

from the new album ‘Today We’re The Greatest,’ out now:

The indie rock superhero duo of the year, starring two of the sharpest songwriters in the game, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte and Palehound’s Ellen Kempner. The guitars slither in Elliott Smith/Mary Timony mode, while both women whisper and growl about twisted love in “Back of My Hand” and “Stay in the Car.” Best of all: “Sand Angel,” about dreaming about somebody you miss, then grinding your teeth all night, knowing you won’t fall back to sleep. Both songwriters know this emotional turf inside out, as in Palehound’s Black Friday or Jay Som’s Everybody Works. But together, they reach somewhere new.

“Back Of My Hand” was the final single from Bachelor (Jay Som & Palehound) The debut full-length ‘Doomin’ Sun’, came out May 28th on Polyvinyl Records, Lucky Number, and Milk! Records.

Bachelor, became the new project from Melina Duterte (Jay Som) and Ellen Kempner (Palehound), it is not a band, it’s a friend-ship. After being mutual fans for years, they finally met when sharing the bill at a show in Sacramento in 2017. Keeping in touch over text and Instagram posts, Duterte and Kempner started recording together for fun in 2018, resulting with what would become “Sand Angel”, the seductive slow-burner that convinced the pair to write an album together.

Reconvening in January 2020, the duo packed the entirety of Duterte’s recording equipment into two cars and headed to a rental house in Topanga, CA. In this space Kempner and Duterte hybridized their individual song-writing talents, producing a collection that slips between moods with ease and showcases their lyrical prowess. Arriving with almost no songs written and no solid plan, they finished the 10 songs that make up “Doomin’ Sun” after two short weeks. That much work in so little time may sound exhausting, but it wasn’t, it was blissful and freeing.

There was a lot of pain that went into the record, especially around themes of queerness and climate change inspired by the red skies and wildfires subsuming Australia at the time. However, when the duo did shed tears during the creative process, they weren’t tears of sadness, they were tears of laughter. When Kempner and Duterte look back on those weeks, what they remember first is shortness of breath and the inability to track vocal takes without falling to the floor howling. They couldn’t remember a time they’d ever been so delirious with creativity, so overwhelmed with joy.

Half Waif, the project of Nandi Rose, returns with the new album, “Mythopoetics”. It’s a record about processing past traumas in the quest for a new, sun dappled pathway, and the transformation that takes place as we take each tentative step.  Here, Half Waif is shunning the shadowed mass of generational trauma and the patterns passed down to her. Instead, she plants a seed, urging the orange blossom to sprout through the cracks in the concrete. To bring together the world of “Mythopoetics”, Rose once again collaborated with multi-instrumentalist, film composer and producer Zubin Hensler.

On her fifth record as Half Waif, “Mythopoetics”, Nandi Rose performs her artistic hat trick. Not that much time has passed since her 2018 breakthrough, Lavender, and much less time has elapsed since last year’s “The Caretaker”. Nevertheless, she has proven herself a formidable force. Rose is consistently productive, but the quality of her music has never wavered; it has only blossomed. It’s rare for an artist with this much creative output to be this consistently excellent, and the streaming industrial complex has only incentivized quantity over quality. Rose, however, is on a streak, and she continues that thread with Mythopoetics.

She’s once again reunited with her frequent collaborator since Probable Depths, film score composer and producer Zubin Hensler. The duo worked together on Lavender, and the melancholia that permeated that record resurfaces on Mythopoetics, albeit in a different form. Where Lavender felt despondent, especially on tracks such as “Lavender Burning” and “Back in Brooklyn,” Mythopoetics imbues that loneliness with a sense of triumph.

This album finds Rose at her most revelatory with swooning, resplendent compositions like “Midnight Asks” and the stunning closer, “Powder.” 

Half Waif from the album ‘Mythopoetics’, available now