Dean Wareham has been sounding like this since Galaxie 500 first plugged in 1987, but it’s a timeless style that dates back to Lou Reed meeting John Cale. Wry musings sit atop gently strummed guitars, punctuated by mostly elegant — but sometimes ragged — guitar solos and the occasional hilarious one-liner. Through Luna, Dean & Britta and a solo career, Wareham has never really changed his tune and you wouldn’t want it any other way. Like the oxford shirts he favours, it never goes out of style.
“I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A.”, which is a great title, is Dean’s first album of original songs in seven years. For it he’s surrounded himself with able collaborators: Jason Quever of Papercuts produces and adds welcome splashes of organ, cello and guitar, Dean’s partner Britta Phillips lays down bass, keyboards and backing vocals, and drummer Roger Brogan keeps a steady beat. This team really bring out the best in the songs which, as usual, are terrific. This is Twilight Time music, with Dean in especially reflective mode. “Tonight I am playing my three-thirty-five while gazing at your photograph,” he sings on “The Past is Our Plaything” (the album gets its title from the song’s opening line), adding “We’re living inside a beautiful dream / a winter where memory sleeps.” There’s lovely, swelling pedal steel that really compliments the song’s chorus and is as perfect a match for Dean’s reedy voice as Britta’s harmonies. Likewise, the swirling keyboards on “Cashing In” give a feel of hazy memories. There’s a definite mood here.
Wareham is a master of the simple solo, perfectly imperfect, and the guitar-work across the board is just terrific, from the snaking leads that run through “Robin & Richard” to the wonderful arpeggiated filigrees on “Cashing In,” to the very Galaxie 500-esque squall on his cover of Lazy Smoke’s 1969 obscurity “Under Skys” that sounds meant for Wareham to play. The other cover, also from 1969 Scott Walker’s “Duchess” — is equally as sublime, dialling things down from Walker’s original just a smidge.
The album ends with “What Are We Doing in Vietnam?” a song that dips a toe in political commentary, by way of stoned existential musings, and self-deprecating urban ennui. It’s also got a rhyme only Dean would make, a joke that only makes sense when you read the lyrics (and know guitar chords): “why are we in Tripoli? / Why are we in Baghdad? / Why am I stuck in Echo Park / Writing songs in DADGAD.” Stretching out across five languid minutes, it’s the kind of song you can imaging going twice as long live, hearkening back to Galaxie 500’s cover of Jonathan Richman’s “Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste.” It’s an album that wonders about youth and where it’s gone, but Dean doesn’t seem to miss it, all while still circling around those same basic chords he began with.
10 songs: 8 brand new Dean Wareham compositions plus covers of Scott Walker and Lazy Smoke, these are Dean Wareham’s first new songs since his eponymous solo album in 2014.
Produced and mixed by Jason Quever. With Britta Phillips (bass, keys, additional production), Roger Brogan (drums), Jason Quever (guitar, keys)
Released October 15th, 2021
The Luna and Galaxie 500 frontman keeps on strummin’ on his first proper solo album in seven years. Wouldn’t want it any other way
Australian band The Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have a new album on the way, and while they haven’t shared details on that, they have shared a new single from it. “After Shyga! I wanted to write something a bit heavier, get back to the Sabbath roots and chug on a riff for yonks till it hums like a Novocaine mantra,” says PPC’s Jack McEwan. “I wanted it to feel like it was constantly progressing, getting more chaotic with drones, swirling between dissonant layers and get the body jangling with a Tyson hook.”
We’ve unshackled ourselves from bouncing late 60’s Beach Boys jingles and have turned a corner into something heavier, dirtier and more sonically rounded to give your speakers the biggest kick in the teeth we could possibly create. The first single ‘Lava Lamp Pisco’ is a good taste of what to expect from the album, it’s chaotic, driving, beautiful in moments and blasts straight out the gates.
Lava Lamp Pisco is out! And our 5th studio album is days away from completion! Check out the video for LLP, we teamed up with Gina Tratt, an incredible animator. Gina’s created a marvel of a video to accompany the darkness of the track, but there’s still an abundance of vibrance and colour to the animation.
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets ‘Lava Lamp Pisco’ – The New Single
Crane Like The Bird is the brain-child of drummer and songwriter Kyle Crane, who has collaborated with folk like Neko Case, M. Ward, and Kurt Vile, and worked as the drum double for the young jazz drummer in the movie “Whiplash.”
Crane Like The Bird (the project of in-demand drummer Kyle Crane) released a guest-filled album in 2020 featuring Ben Bridwell, James Mercer, Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and more, and now he’s got another new song out with the Band of Horses frontman. It’s a snappy, upbeat song that fans of Ben’s work should not miss.
Brighton band Thyla release their self-titled debut LP on January 28th 2022 via Easy Life Records, and the latest single is “3,” which the band says is “about ego, pride and suffering and the folly of living in the past. It’s also about bouncing back from past traumas and coming to learn that suffering makes you who you are. It’s about not needing validation from anyone other than yourself. Whatever you decide to do in life has to be for you, not because you should but because you could!”.
This one is for any of you struggling to fight off your demons. Imagine you had three skeletons locked in the proverbial closet each one representing a toxic behaviour or mindset, imagine opening the closet and confronting them. ‘3’ is about Denial, Shame, and Resentment – harbour any of these in tandem and you have a recipe for sheer pain. Let it go, life is happening for you not to you. However bad your hand of cards seems, know that it’s uniquely yours and a hand can always be played! I love you, I believe in you, only you have the power to change. I’m hoping this song is like a set of keys to that closet of yours, fucking open it, things couldn’t possibly get worse so what have you got to lose. Millie x
Thyla · Millie Duthie · Danny Southwell · Dan Hole · Mitch Duce
The Horrors are back, right in time for the apocalypse – if you are receiving this you may already be aware of our upcoming November shows. We have put together three special line-ups with some of our favourite new bands, bringing Giant Swan – Scalping – Mandy, Indiana – PC World – and Proteus to Bristol, Manchester and London..
Following the release of their gnarly EP ‘Lout’ earlier this year, The Horrors have announced that new EP ‘Against The Blade’ will be landing on 5th November.
“The ‘Against the Blade’ EP is a further descent into chaos” says singer Faris Badwan, “it’s about the freedom that comes with abandoning all hope, giving up control, and accepting that you will always be at odds with the world around you.” There’s something about our recent writing that has felt really free and liberated, like being let off a leash – slightly ironic given the fact that lockdown forced us into certain ways of working. This almost feels like a new band now – a new beginning right in time for the apocalypse.”
Sharing the title track today, The Horrors have dabbled in all sorts of different styles over the last 15 years but seem to be circling back around to where they started — crazed, manic, noise rock — with their upcoming “Against the Blade” EP. You can check out the title track and its freaky video, and the EP’s out in November.
‘Against The Blade’ EP Tracklisting: 1. Against The Blade 2. Twisted Skin 3. I Took A Deep Breath And I Kept My Mouth Shut
“I can’t remember the exact genesis of the track,” says Elbow’s Guy Garvey of their new single “Six Words,” “but it is definitely one of Craig’s. In some ways it’s familiar territory lyrically, it has similar sentiments to ‘Mirrorball’ but it draws heavily on my teenage years: the bottle green in the song is the colour of my school uniform and the six lanes is the traffic on the road to school in Prestwich.
Though that six lanes line was something I originally wrote back in the early Elbow days when I sat in The Cornerhouse people watching so it’s a double reminisce and a return to my love of writing about love. The musical revelation came when we heard the backing singers that now end the track. We had this pyramid of voices making something incredible that reminded me of the early classic Disney soundtracks. It was so powerful that we knew we had to throw the spotlight onto them so that is why they end the track.” Elbow’s new album “Flying Dream 1” is out November 19th.
‘Flying Dream 1’ was written remotely in the band’s home studios before coming together at the empty Brighton Theatre Royal to perfect, perform, and record the songs. ‘We don’t phone each other for a chat. We don’t talk about life outside the music until we’re together. These hushed night-time missives told us how each other were doing. When we finally got together, all that was to do was record the songs, honour them with amazing additional singers and players in a gorgeous space and catch up. It was beautiful.’ Guy Garvey, August 2021.
Elbow release their ninth studio album, ‘Flying Dream 1’, on 19th November 2021.
The Grateful Dead have announced they will be releasing a 20-CD box, that will feature seven previously unreleased live shows that were performed in St. Louis, Mo. between ’71 and ’73.
The unreleased concerts were recorded on: December 9th and 10th, 1971 at the Fox Theatre; October 17th-19th, 1972 at the Fox Theatre; and October 29th and 30th, 1973 at Kiel Auditorium. Each show was restored, and speed corrected by Plangent Processes and mastered by Jeffrey Norman. Jeffery Norman mastered the 2017 release of the Grateful Dead’s Cornell 5/8/77 performances, which were also speed corrected by Plangent Processes.
“There are only a few truly great eras in the Grateful Dead’s performing history that span more than a year and one of the very best is the transitional period that covers December 1971 through Fall of 1973. This was a period during which the Dead solidified their touring format (several distinct, somewhat short, geographically defined tours every year), where every night the Dead would wow their fans with a mix of over six years of music that clearly demonstrated their many transitions and transmutations,” said David Lemieux, Grateful Dead archivist and the set’s producer in a press release.
Fox Theatre, St. Louis, MO (12/10/71) will be released as a 3-CD Set And A Limited-Edition 5-LP Set On 180-Gram Vinyl.
A previously unreleased performance of “Sugaree” from the Fox Theatre show on December 10th, 1971,
Steamboats and BBQ, ice cream cones and Mardi Gras – are you ready to laissez les bons temps rouler with the “gateway” to the Grateful Dead? Meet us, won’t you, in St. Louis for a series of releases celebrating the Dead’s early 70s ride along the river including the Dead set, LISTEN TO THE RIVER: ST. LOUIS ’71 ’72 ’73. You can hear a previously unreleased performance of “Sugaree” from the Fox Theatre show on December 10, 1971 now.
Bear recorded 9 of the 20 CDs and the booklet includes three full-page photos of him — the most we’ve ever seen in a release, including OSF releases!! It’s also a treat to read the rich and insightful notes by our friends Nicholas Meriwether, Sam Cutler, and others. Sam’s piece about the Tour Manager’s remit dovetails beautifully with our section, which focuses on Bear’s bumpy re-entry into the scene after 2 years in prison, which Sam also had the dubious pleasure of managing. We are grateful for his candid, first hand account. We also spoke with Bobby about Bear’s approach to sound (“He was a wizard”) and with Betty Cantor-Jackson about the similarities and differences in their respective tapes.
Two special gigs comes to Leicester with an afternoon with Kate Stables performing an intimate 135 cap all seated at the MusicianVenue and then the fully blown thisisthekit set on the evening at TheQ Room, International Arts Centre, Garden St, Leicester
Carl “Buffalo” Nichols opens his self-titled debut with a crisp acoustic blues riff, bending the notes upwards while he depicts himself as a deeply and irredeemably lonely man. “If you see me in your town, looking tired with my head hanging down,” he sings on “Lost & Lonesome“, “you may wonder what went wrong and why I’m alone”.
It’s a bracing introduction to an artist who uses blues to examine the world around him and who understands the historical weight of the music without being burdened by it. Nichols spends the rest of the album trying to explain himself – why he’s weary, what went wrong, how he found himself alone. He tells a sad story but one enlivened by his skills as a guitarist, his expressiveness as a singer and his insights as a lyricist.
Nichols sings and plays with the understanding that this musical form is an apt vehicle to capture this current moment in America, not despite its long history but because of it. Blues is a means of contextualising police violence, gentrification, Black Lives Matter and income inequality within a larger framework. “When my grandpa was young, he had to hold his tongue,” Nichols sings on the harrowing “Another Man“, “’cause they’d hang you from a bridge downtown/Now they call it stand your ground”. For him, 2021 is no different than 1921. Blues remains powerful and relevant because the conditions that inspired so much of the music still persist.
It took Nichols years to come to that conclusion. Born in Milwaukee, he taught himself to play guitar and specifically to play guitar like the artists in his mother’s record collection, such as Robert Cray and BB King. But few cities have a robust blues scene these days, let alone a blues scene open to young kids trying to learn the rules and pick up some techniques. Instead, he played in punk bands around town and, while the form didn’t leave much room for the kind of self-expression that he craved, it taught him important lessons about intensity, concision, and targeted outrage. He saw blues as a roomy museum in the United States, the province of boxsets and high-brow documentaries, something that spoke to the past rather than to the present.
Travelling throughout Europe and visiting clubs and coffeeshops, however, Nichols saw how this American music might be more closely integrated into everyday life. Upon returning to the States, he began writing songs about the state of his world, then made rough demos and field recordings at his apartment or nearby at National Recording: spare, often desolate acoustic performances usually featuring just his husk of a voice and his nimble guitar playing. Those demos became the foundation for his self-titled debut, a stunning collection of songs that treats blues less as a musical style and more as a way of seeing the world in all its glory and horror. Buffalo Nichols is not a blues revival record. It’s just a blues record.
“It’s hard to write a song while folks get murdered every day,” he exclaims on Another Man, a song he shelved after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 . As difficult as this creative enterprise may be, Nichols emerges as a sharp, succinct, inventive and insightful songwriter, one who can convey complex ideas with just a few words. In fact, every song has at least one line that will stop you in your tracks, some songs two or three. One of his finest moments comes at the beginning of “Living Hell“, when he sings, “Only two kinds of people come here after 3:00/That’s police and crooks and they’re the same to me”. It’s a tidy rhyme but it’s that simplicity that makes it all the more powerful and persuasive.
The world Nichols evokes is treacherous, with each song testifying to great pain and paranoia. Without sounding preachy, he lets you know that this is the state of being black in America, where death is one traffic stop away, where small mistakes have impossibly dire consequences. On “Living Hell” he admits that he goes to church just to hear fire-and-brimstone sermons, because the Hell of the Bible may be the only place where wrongdoings are punished, where evil men get their comeuppance. When he sings “I’m clinging to the memory of a bright and peaceful day but I really don’t remember that things ever were that way,” it’s one of the saddest moments on the entire album.
Not every song on Buffalo Nichols is explicitly political but every song bears the weight of these constant tragedies. His protest songs mingle with love songs until you can’t distinguish one from the other: the horrors of the world drive lovers together but also rip them apart. “You’re gonna suffer anyway but it’s better with a friend,” he decides on “Lost & Lonesome“. “How To Love” is even more heartsore, as Nichols counts the lessons and scars he took from a relationship, knowing his lover took just as many of both. “The way they hurt you showed you how to love,” he sings over a jumpy guitar theme, “the way you hurt me showed me how to love”. It’s a pain that gets passed around from person to person, like a disease. However, these aren’t songs of recrimination and blame. They’re disarmingly generous, startlingly tender, especially “These Things“. Nichols apologises for not being a better, stronger man, for not being able to create a safehaven for himself and his lover, finally admitting that “I can’t be saved from all these things” – by which he means the things that these other songs are about.
These songs skirt pessimism by virtue of Nichols’ committed and unflinching performances as both a singer and a guitarist. His voice is always sensitive to the complexities of his lyrics, never steamrolling through a song or overplaying the emotions. As an instrumentalist, he’s energetic and nimble, pushing even the slower songs along at a brisk pace. On the first few tracks his guitar is a useful foil that can convey a certain sardonic anger, that can push back against the world when he sounds too weary to do it himself. As the album progresses, however, Nichols builds up the arrangements, adding a feverish cymbal roll to “Sick Bed Blues“, then a sympathetic fiddle to “These Things”. A full band rambles through “Back On Top”, which sounds like a particularly lively night at a North Mississippi juke joint.
On closer “Sorry It Was You” he’s joined by a tight rhythm section and an organ that sneaks around the shadows of the arrangement, before everything finally falls away so that he can add a short acoustic flourish like an exclamation point to the album. Partly because Nichols plays almost all the instruments, he doesn’t sound any less lonely with all that activity around him. But it does imply a trajectory, a journey, perhaps even an epiphany about the power of the blues to defy and to console. The world doesn’t get better, nor does he learn to view it in a different light, but Nichols knows he has a listener at the other end of the song. It’s better with a friend.
“Anything Can’t Happen” is the long-awaited debut album from Dorothea Paas, one of Canada’s most beloved singer-songwriters. For over a decade, Paas has played her unique, prismatic style of folk songcraft for audiences across North America, and lent her talents as a guitarist and vocalist to artists like Jennifer Castle, U.S. Girls and Badge Epoque Ensemble. The songs on this album have been through a near-infinite number of forms – Paas has played them solo and with a full band, electric and acoustic, at house shows and in sold-out venues. they manage to fit inside each context, like water taking the shape of its container.
All of this makes “Anything Can’t Happen” feel far more mature and complex than a debut album. It’s a statement of purpose, a next step in a decade-long process of artistic growth and evolution, and a bridge between the DIY style of Paas’s previous cassette releases and a more refined studio sensibility.
Recorded in studios in Hamilton and Toronto, and mixed by Max Turnbull of Badge Epoque and U.S. Girls and Steve Chahley, these songs bring a diverse range of musical influences into conversation: inflected with the layered reverberations of Grouper, shot through with the piercing harmonies of the Roches, electrified with the searing energy of Sonic Youth. You can hear Neil Young in the grittiness of the title track’s guitar; Joni Mitchell’s Hejira in the album’s lyrics, Fairport Convention in Paas’s voice. The influence of Stevie Wonder – one of Paas’s greatest musical role models – is present too, in the album’s conceptual foundations.
Personnel: Dorothea Paas Liam Cole Paul Saulnier Robin Dann Thom Gill
Guitar, drum and bass beds recorded to tape at Fort Rose in Hamilton with Dan Edmonds, Wayne Petti and Aaron Hutchinson
All vocals, additional guitars, synthesizers, and Rhodes recorded at Palace Sound with Chris Sandes and Maximilian “Twig” Turnbull
All music and lyrics written by Dorothea Paas Recorded over 2018-19
