The Fat Angel Sings

On the tribute album Songs for Tres, Psychic Ills band members come together to commemorate the late Tres Warren who passed away just as the world turned upside down in March of 2020. Isolated, feeling helpless and lost by the death of her musical soul mate and collaborator of 18 years, bassist Elizabeth Hart found making music to be her only outlet in a time where people were unable to be physically together to mourn. So, she reached out to Adam Amram, Jon Catfish DeLorme and Brent Cordero, the main players in the Ills line up since the release of their last full length album Inner Journey Out (2016), to ask if they would embark on this cathartic journey with her. This was a different kind of production endeavor for Hart driven solely by “the aching need and urgency” to do something to honour her friend.

The album consists of five original tracks and four cover songs. Initially, learning the covers was just a method for the musicians to “break the ice” and play together again for the first time without their band leader. However, those tracks became just as important to include as the originals because of their essential role in the process of coming together to make the album. The cover songs were chosen because of their unique connections to the band’s memories of Warren. Dennis Wilson’s “Rainbows” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Station Man” come from two of Warren’s favorite albums, Pacific Ocean Blue and Kiln House. The band also recorded Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons” and Powell St. John’s “Right Track Now.” The idea for the latter was suggested by Amram. Warren once sent him a clip of Roky Erikson singing a moving rendition of that song in the film Demon Angel and it had stuck with him ever since.

Hart wrote “I’ll Walk With You” on the day of Warrens’ passing, at the time not knowing what it meant. When she got the call with the heartbreaking news, it became clear to her what the song was about. Relying on a gently lilting string arrangement to set the tone, this duet features Mazzy Star vocalist Hope Sandoval alongside Hart. Sandoval previously collaborated with Psychic Ills accompanying Warren on “I Don’t Mind” (2016). The ideas for “Home” and “Walk Around,” two other songs on the album by Hart, started simply with an acoustic guitar and lyrics, a hopeful exercise to connect with her lost friend. Brent Cordero’s instrumental “Whole Lotta Piece of Mind” is nothing short of a transcendental experience. By running his pedal steel through a Leslie speaker, Jon Catfish DeLorme crafts the unique tone showcased on Wonderful Feeling, a moving example of studio experimentation combined with old school techniques. DeLorme describes it as “an attempt to highlight the musical experience I shared with Tres both sonically and thematically. What resulted is the unguarded exaltation I feel lucky to have shared with my fellow bandmates.” Adam Amram’s “Into the Sea” was composed spontaneously the week Warren passed. The melodic tune has a hopeful lightness and Amram describes it simply as “a song to my brother”. Their connection shines through.

A majority of the proceeds from the album will be donated to RAICES, a charity who aids children who have been displaced at the Texas/Mexico

Releases 11/5/21 (digital) early 2022 (vinyl) on Sacred Bones Records

With only 2,000 residents, Enterprise, Oregon is the largest town in Wallowa County. It’s surrounded by vast cattle ranches and boxed in by the stunning Wallowa Mountains and a foreboding 8000-foot-deep gorge called Hells Canyon that straddles the Idaho border to the east.

Despite that remoteness, it’s also home to a music community that nurtures the work of artists like Margo Cilker, whose debut record “Pohorylle” was released this week. Cilker’s arresting voice is the latest in a line of songwriters inspired by this wild corner of northeast Oregon.

Cilker, who’s worked day jobs as a server at local restaurants and most recently on a poultry farm, is fascinated by the people she comes across in everyday life. “And that’s why I love music and song writing, it’s because it’s fun to profile people. I love meeting colorful characters. I could strike up a conversation with the wall.” “If you’ve got to ramble, ram.”

The third single from Margo Cilker’s upcoming debut album ‘Pohorylle’. Out 5th November,

Cilker’s enthusiasm for documenting the human condition has earned her supporters from well beyond the shadow of the Wallowa Mountains, including respected Seattle-based musician Sera Cahoone. “I love her lyrics,” said Cahoone. “She’s witty. She’s just a great songwriter. It was pretty immediate for me. I was like ‘Whoa, that is such a tricky lyric that you did there!’ So I knew that she had something special going on.” Cahoone produced Cilker’s debut record, “Pohorylle.” The new album features 11 songs punctuated by barroom piano, pedal steel guitars and bouncing horn arrangements. But surprisingly, Cahoone’s favorite song is also one of its simplest— a goosebump-inducing confessional called “Flood Plain.”

Cilker wrote the piece about her relationship with husband Forrest Van Tuyl, a musician who works seasonally on horseback as a professional cowboy. It’s a stunning performance that showcases her versatility as an observational writer who can also look inward.

“Yeah, that’s just a song about marriage,” said Cilker. “It’s a song about giving each other space. It’s a powerful message of ‘things are really hard right now, but I’m not letting go. I’m going to hang on.’ I had this image of an elastic—sometimes someone does have to ramble. If you’ve got to ramble, ram. Go and come back. It’s that kind of leniency I would want someone to offer me, too.”

2022 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Cilker, who recently signed a record deal with Portland-based label Fluff and Gravy. She and Van Tuyl plan to overwinter on a ranch near the Columbia River Gorge before heading out on tour together. It’s a much-needed break from two years of COVID-19 imposed isolation in Enterprise, which is already one of the most secluded places in the country.

But after that extended ramble, Cilker plans to return to the wide-open spaces of the American West.

“I mean, why shouldn’t someone live in the middle of nowhere—center of the universe—and make art?”

The Uprising Tour ran in Europe from May to July 1980 with five further dates in the USA in September. It was Bob Marley’s last tour before his tragically early death in May 1981 at the age of just 36 years of age. A few days after the release of the “Uprising” album Marley played this now legendary live show from Dortmund’s Westfalenhalle on June 13th. Bob Marley is on superb form and delivers a set of hit singles and classic album tracks.

The “Uprising” Tour ran for a few months around Europe, The tour was in support of the “Uprising” album released on June 10th 1980. A few days later on June 13th the live show from Dortmund’s Westfalenhalle was filmed for the famous German music TV series Rockpalast and is presented here for the first time with footage restored to the best possible quality. Bob Marley and the Wailers are on superb form and deliver a set of hit singles and classic album tracks. Marley’s energetic, charismatic performance gives no indication that he was already ill with the cancer that would take his life less than a year later.

With very few Bob Marley live concerts available this will be a welcome addition for any fan.

TRACKLISTING I Threes Set: 1) Precious World 2) Slave Queen 3) Steppin’ Out Of Babylon 4) That’s The Way Jah Planned It Bob Marley Main Show: 5) Marley Chant 6) Natural Mystic 7) Positive Vibration 8) Revolution 9) I Shot The Sheriff 10) War / No More Trouble 11) Zimbabwe 12) Jamming 13) No Woman, No Cry 14) Zion Train 15) Exodus 16) Redemption Song 17) Could You Be Loved 18) We Can Make It Work 19) Natty Dread 20) Is This Love 21) Get Up, Stand Up 22) Coming In From The Cold 23) Lively Up Yourself

His energetic, charismatic performance gives no indication that he was already ill with the cancer that would take his life less than a year later and this release is testament to his spirit and his musicianship.This special 3LP edition is released to celebrate what would have been his 75th year.

In January of 2020, Emma Ruth Rundle checked herself into a cottage in rural Wales for a month. Searching for time alone with her guitar in order to sink into the isolation and write new music after a month-long European tour, the rugged hills and the fact that, unlike in America, there’s ​“5,000-year-old Neolithic burial chambers that are just there”, provided a perfect setting in which to work.

What she was also looking for was a break. Something of a gypsy by nature, the successes of her music – solo with 2018’s excellent On “Dark Horses“, her collaborations with artists like U.S. doom outfit Thou – had afforded her the opportunity to have a bohemian, rock’n’roll life, one in which there were few concerns besides music, touring and art. Money wasn’t bountiful, but that wasn’t so important when balanced out by doing what you love. Only, ​“It wasn’t working for me anymore.” She had begun to feel out of focus with her own life. Things weren’t quite lining up. Drink, drugs and a feeling of disconnection were beginning to outweigh the good. “I started to realise I’d lost touch with who I was and my feelings,” she says. ​“I spent a long time trying to run away and push it all down.”

In Wales, Emma began to write what would become her fifth album, “Engine Of Hell“, intentionally to be a ​“stark” record, performed in bare-bones fashion on guitar and piano, in which in simplicity and lack of fuss would allow for an emotional intimacy. As she wrote and tuned into the darkness, and the darkness began to gaze back, she kept following it. And things began to come up.

“The more you uncover, the more the corpses reveal themselves,” she says. ​“I was excavating myself, like soul retrieval, trying to find my history again.

Emma Ruth Rundle’s Engine of Hell is stark, intimate, and unflinching. For anyone that’s endured trauma and grief, there’s a beautiful solace in hearing Rundle articulate and humanize that particular type of pain not only with her words, but with her particular mysterious language of melody and timbre. The album captures a moment where a masterful songwriter strips away all flourishes and embellishments in order to make every note and word hit with maximum impact, leaving little to hide behind.

Nowhere is this sense of cleansing more clear than on the haunting “Blooms Of Oblivion“. Unlike her usual, relatively quick, creative process, it took a year to write. In it the language of the lyrics is unflinching – ​‘Down at the methadone clinic we waited / hoping to take home your cure / The curdling cowards, the crackle of china / you say that it’s making you pure’ – and although she wants to keep the box closed on some details, the story she’s telling is unambiguous.

“I wanted to say exactly what I said. It reveals enough, but it obscures just enough that I’m not calling anyone out, or necessarily including anyone else in my story in a way that could put them or their memory and into the public sphere in a disrespectful way,” she says. ​“But I’m telling my own story in an honest manner. It’s pretty explicit. It’s pretty intense thing to say, but it happened and it’s true. It’s part of life, and I think I think it’s okay to discuss ugliness. I mean, I knew I wanted to say the things I do.”

The sense of relief in the song comes in its almost uplifting ending. If you are to change, you must move on, and to move on, you must let people and things go. And to do that, you need to make a form of peace.

Engine Of Hell is a beautiful record. Stripped-down to bare elements that highlight the frailty at the soul of these songs, Emma describes this vision as ​“the most punk thing I could think to do”, to the point where recording was done in as few takes as possible, with no overdubs to correct mistakes, and even declining to have reverb on her vocals to preserve what was captured as purely as possible. In this vessel, with no distraction, the gently sung words take on an even deeper resonance.

From the upcoming album “Engine of Hell”, out 11/05 on Sargent House Records

I like to stumble towards a band with no agenda, no purpose, uncovering sound almost on accident. This is how I first heard Wednesday. The band came to me and I don’t remember how, or why. They simply arrived, as if we’d been traveling toward each other our whole lives. I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone soaked into my summer of 2020, and in sound, in spirit, in central concerns and the execution of them, it took me back to an era before the current era, The past can feel less hellish than the present if we are, sometimes, not fully honest with ourselves.

I love “Twin Plagues” first for its songs, plainly. If you, listening to Wednesday for the first time around or even the second time around, stumble onto this album, I promise you the songs will be what grab you first, beyond any of my foolish high-level emotional theorizing or projections. Every band that loves the pursuit of their craft the way this band does is one to follow, because getting to sit on the side lines and watch them level up is a real generosity. “Twin Plagues” is overflowing with hooks, but what most delighted me about the band from the start has taken a leap: they have managed, somehow, to get even better at structuring their noise from one movement of a song to the next. The idea of the “song” itself is flexible in their hands, so much so that each song holds two, or three songs within. This, again, generosity. “Cody’s Only” is a ballad until it begins to threaten a storm of volume, and then, in its final act, it becomes something else altogether. “One More Last One” is a shoegaze-y trip that swells and swells until it overflows, but it doesn’t stop. It keeps offering and offering and offering. I say “noise,” and never in a dismissive sense. Everything has a place, and so much of its place is to serve the true heart of this album, and the true heart of Wednesday’s music, which is allowing cracks through which tenderness can enter and exit as needed. Tenderness that, it seems to me, is always wrestling underneath whatever else might be happening on a song’s surface.

“The Burned Down Dairy Queen” when Karly sings I was hiding in a room in my mind / and I made me take a look at myself. Because if you, like me, have been avoiding mirrors – both metaphorical and real – this is where the album becomes a lighthouse, echoing bright across the darkness of my otherwise dark and empty chambers. So much of these songs meditate on the past in far less romantic ways than I have found myself meditating on the past, and I was desperate for the recalibration that this album provided. I was desperate for making myself less blurry in my own memories and reckoning with my full, multitudinous self. The self that was once unkind, or less gentle, or less curious than I am now. I needed this album to remind me to embrace the fullness of my unfinished nature, the years I have lived and – with any luck – the years I have to go.

Wednesday’s music feels like an exorcism, an attempt to burn away Karly Hartzman’s most haunting memories in the searing noise of Jake Lenderman’s fuzzed-out guitar. Or perhaps it’s more like a seance — because some ghosts, like the slight Southern twang in Wednesday’s gnarled shoegaze, never really leave you. Wednesday’s sophomore album “Twin Plagues” is an aching, bittersweet reminder of the past, drawing from indie rock’s history while charting a course for their own future. 

So, yes, the songs are good. You will maybe roll down your windows on a comfortable day on the right stretch of road in a warm season and turn the volume up when “Birthday Song” gets good and loud and sing-along-able. You might sit atop a rooftop at night, closer to the moon than you were on the ground, and let “Ghost Of A Dog” churn and rattle you to some nighttime realization that you couldn’t have had in silence.

But, even on top of all of this, on top of all the pleasures and the mercies that the sounds on this album might afford. I hope and think, too, that it will remind anyone who listens that we are a collection of many reflections. All of them deserving patience.

Released August 13th, 2021

Vocals/ Guitar: Karly Hartzman
Guitar: Jake Lenderman
Lap Steel/ Vocals on “One More Last One”: Xandy Chelmis
Bass : Margo Schultz
Drums: Alan Miller

The fresh-faced rockers in Soul Blind must’ve been babies in the ’90s, but their sound is utterly immersed in that decade’s different varieties of guitar music. In Soul Blind’s heavy blur, you can detect echoes of all sorts of ’90s bands: Ride, Smashing Pumpkins, the Catherine Wheel, Quicksand, Deftones. But when the band is playing live at gut-liquefying volumes, you’d be well-advised to stop playing spot-the-influence and to let the bittersweet roar sweep you away. Like those ’90s bands, Soul Blind understand the melancholy power that you can conjure when you combine sighing, downcast melodies with overwhelming pedal-stomp riffs.

These guys’ sound is awesome! Great blend of shoegaze and grunge. Can’t wait to hear what comes next!, “Bands like Failure, Hum, Sunny Day Real Estate, My Bloody Valentine, and Deftones all influence our sound,” Soul Blind bassist/vocalist Cen told us last year when we first profiled the then new band. “We wanted to make music that captured the sound of our youth while adding our own modern touch to it.”

Released September 16th, 2021

My debut album “Great Big Wild Oak” will be out on July 30th via Double Double Whammy, Alex Montenegro said that recording her band Skirts’ debut album “felt like a whirlwind,” but “Great Big Wild Oak” certainly doesn’t sound like a whirlwind. It’s placidly calm, sun-speckled and operating in the grand folk tradition of being inspired by nature. 

“Great Big Wild Oak” is hushed and intimate and reverent, with twangy guitars and a whole lot of open space. Highlights like “Remember” and “Sapling” sound like flipping through old photo albums, shocked and enlightened by how much time has passed and how quickly things have changed.

The first single “Always” is out now along with preorders for the new album! 

Releases July 30th, 2021

All songs written by Alex Montenegro

The members of Rid Of Me have spent time in noisy, intense punk bands like Soul Glo and Fight Amp. With Rid Of Me, they’ve been playing shows on the DIY hardcore circuit ever since that circuit rumbled back to life post-pandemic. But Rid Of Me’s sound is a hooky, exuberant take on ’90s alt-rock. The band is even named after the PJ Harvey LP that still stands as one of the noisiest, most intense records ever to get modern-rock radio airplay. Rid Of Me’s full-length debut “Traveling” is one of the hardest, most immediate rock records in recent memory.

Releases December 3rd, 2021

RID OF ME is
Itarya Rosenberg, Mike McGinnis, Ruben Polo & Mike Howard