In the summer of 1966, an 18-year-old Laura Nyro auditioned for Milt Okun, one of the most respected music producers of the day, and Artie Mogull, a noted A&R man. After the session, these eventual music business legends, were so blown away that Mogull became her manager, and Okun signed on to produce her debut record, “Go Find The Moon: The Audition Tape” puts the listener in the room at the very beginning of Nyro’s legendary career.
“Go Find the Moon: The Audition Tape” captures the summer 1966 performance of 18-year-old singer songwriter Laura Nyro auditioning for Milt Okun and Artie Mogull. The audition on which Nyro accompanied herself on piano, went so well that Mogull signed the young artist and budding songwriter to a management contract and Okun promptly booked studio time with arranger Herb Bernstein to record her debut album, More Than a New Discovery.
It’s not hard to realize why: Laura Nyro heard music differently than everyone else – and her songs reflected that. At the audition session, she performed a pair of the remarkable songs that would soon appear on that LP, the precociously mature “And When I Die” and “Lazy Susan.” She also previewed an embryonic “Luckie,” the final version of which would be included on her even more acclaimed sophomore album, “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession“. The ballad “Enough of You,” brief “In and Out,” and deliciously swooning “Go Find the Moon” were never released in studio form, making their appearances here all the more welcome.
The audition tape is rounded out with fragments of “When Sunny Gets Blue,” “Kansas City,” and “I Only Want to Be with You.” While Nyro was prompted to sing them when it was asked if she could perform something she hadn’t written, they hint at the stylistic diversity that informed her passionate song writing and performing. In just 18-1/2 fly-on-the-wall minutes, this is the sound of an incandescent talent. Omnivore’s first-time release is annotated by Jim Farber and mastered by Michael Graves.
Norway’s Ora The Molecule (aka Nora Schjelderup) released her debut album, “Human Safari”, via Mute . Ever since we were first sent the album several months back we’ve been enamoured by album closer “Souldigging” and now that the album is out.
Last February, Schjelderup shared the song “Creator” upon the album’s announcement, she then shared its next single “Die To Be A Butterfly”. There was then another single from it, “The Ball,” via a video that features lots of slow motion shots of her riding a horse (sometimes in reverse), as well as of her with a dog on a beach. “The Ball,” once again landed Ora the Molecule lots of acclaim on the blogging scene.
A press release for “Human Safari” says its songs alternate “between joyous, beat-driven avant-pop and slick synthwave.”
“It’s for sure two poles,” Schjelderup agrees. “The speaker is the storyteller and the instrumentals are nature or the way life goes. Sometimes you get scared, sometimes it opens up. It’s life. I wanted to make a landscape where the voice could guide you through and be a safe voice. So even when it’s a little bit darker, you’re still in the story and it continues.”
Ora The Molecule under exclusive license to Mute Artists Ltd
Glass Animals have released their first new music since the beginning of the pandemic, ‘I Don’t Wanna Talk (I Just Wanna Dance)’ is the first music since Glass Animals reached a new level of popularity and critical acclaim with their third album “Dreamland”.
Premiered on triple j Breakfast, ‘I Don’t Wanna Talk (I Just Wanna Dance)’ has all the sticky groove and psychedelia you’d expect from the British band. It’s a lot more urgent than ‘Heat Waves’ and with its cutting guitar lines and Wavey Davey’s spacey falsetto.
Frontman Dave Bayley said the new single is intended to provide a musical release from the pressure cooker of a global pandemic that’s rattled our lives and fed our worst insecurities.
“Being locked down in England for so long, you end up going a bit stir crazy. You start over-thinking everything. I was talking to myself in my head all night, staying up all night, not being able to sleep.”
“The song is about the realisation that what I wanted and needed most – what everyone probably needed most – is to just go out and see their friends and have fun. Have something to enjoy; we all need that little bit that makes us feel human. That’s what this song is about.”
“It’s really hard because you expect and hope you can play the songs live [after releasing an album] and see people smile and that is the whole reason you do it. We haven’t had that.”
Music video by Glass Animals performing I Don’t Wanna Talk (I Just Wanna Dance). Wolf Tone Records, a division of Universal Music Operations Limited.
Guitarists Neil Halstead & Lee Lavender join acclaimed HOO to create a synth and guitar heavy masterpiece with guests Jackie Oates & Farmer Dave Scher.
Producer-songwriter and organic gardener with a penchant for wah-wah, Nick Holton brings you the wide-screen, heartbreaking glory of HOO’s gothy toned second album “We Shall Never Speak”. A more song filled leap forward from debut “Centipede Wisdom’s” post-rock electro adventures.
Holton is a master builder of woozy dynamics, his songs unfurl with a mysterious, hooky logic all their own – this is cinematic and deeply emotive machine music. A glorious hybrid of electro, shoegaze, dubby ‘niceness’ and floating dream pop. The spooked, narcotic throb of opener “Ghost In You”. The pounding, chewy Kraut/Space rock of “Cranium”. The mighty’s exquisite slow build towards Can-like lift-off. Snarly hypnotic throb of first single ‘Still Dream’ pounds along like a wide-screen Spaceman 3. Its subject paints a picture of youthful arrogance veiled in a foil of anger & cowardliness, a loved one lost to an ocean of dark cold space. Moog battles with groovy bass while guitars try to take your head off. A brief flirt with musique concrète on the metronomic “No One Can See This”. The Halstead co-penned shoegazy, echoey swagger of “We Shall Never Speak”. The album’s poisoned chalice & peak song moment, “Powder Moon”. The synthpop of “You Changed The Way You Smile”. Closer “Sea Of Glass” sounds like Leonard Cohen visiting Kraftwerk’s Klingklang studio.
Let that sink in – the idea is perhaps the heart of this venture.
The detail and texture is extraordinary. A glorious hybrid of an album that over eight songs builds into something unique. Epic and homegrown. Upbeat and melancholic. Questing and questioning. Haunted by loss but future-facing. It’s a genuine marvel.
On Slothrust’s latest album, bandleader Leah Wellbaum pushed herself to try and understand her own spirituality on a deeper level, putting a lens on the core wound of the human experience, the idea that we’re alone. With Parallel Timeline , Wellbaum explores the feeling of being trapped inside her own consciousness while simultaneously searching for a meaningful connection to the universe, and all the mysteries it contains.
Leah Wellbaum reveals the inspirations behind the project’s new album,Parallel Timeline. Officially out September 10th via Dangerbird Records, “Parallel Timeline” finds Slothrust amplifying their sound with new, experimental production and performing techniques. Leaning heavily into audacious improvisation, the sonic landscapes became the perfect canvas on which bandleader Leah Wellbaum could paint with the brush of her inner child, “a voice that allows ideas to flow freely and without censorship.”
she explains, much of the LP is about realizing that what we see is not necessarily the way things are, both for ourselves and the world around us. There is an optical illusion that occurs if you stare at our album art and then look at a white space and blink,” she explains. “Your brain inverts the colours of the inverted rainbow we present on our cover and what you see is a traditional rainbow. For me this is a symbol of the way we can become so bound to our reality that we forget life is full of illusory experiences and there is always more to be seen.
The resulting 10 tracks are some of the strongest of Slothrust’s career, filled with poetic honesty and precise, captivating guitar work. Early singles showed off the album’s moments of bluesy garage rock “Cranium”, the haunting “Strange Astrology” and the catchy “Once More For The Ocean” indie, and melodic grunge (the Lzzy Hale-featuring “The Next Curse”. Co-produced by Billy Bush with mastering from Heba Kadry,
We think we know what a rainbow looks like. So many of us see the classic ROYGBIV arched rainbow when we picture one in our mind, but there are so many different types of lesser-imagined rainbows and these are the ones I have fallen in love with. I often wonder how many types of rainbows are out there that we cannot perceive. Rainbows are an optical illusion that occurs when light refracts through moisture in the atmosphere. As a child they feel like impossible magic, a gift from the sky. We are so certain we know what we are looking at and what we are experiencing in this world, but it is impossible to know a lens other than our own. This is a guiding theme that steered the material you hear on Parallel Timeline. These songs are about a search for the truth and an acceptance that we may never have the answers we are looking for.
One of my favourite rainbows is called the fogbow, or the “white rainbow.” These are incredibly rare and in many ways antithetical to what I understood rainbows to be when I was younger. They are a reminder to keep an open mind in order to access some of life’s greatest mysteries and delights.
The forthcoming record, “Parallel Timeline”. Out September 10 via Dangerbird Records.
Jana Bahrich’s Luxembourg-based indie-rock project Francis of Delirium are back with their first new track since the April release of their 2021 “Wading” Ep. The shoegaze/grunge-inspired “Come out and Play” is out now alongside a music video, animated by Bahrich herself. Mixed by Jolyon Thomas (Royal Blood, Slaves) and mastered by Joe Lambert (Sharon Van Etten, Deerhunter), “Come out and Play” is menacing from the start with its flickering synths and thrumming bassline. Bahrich’s moody vocals evoke Nirvana in the verses, and ride tidal waves of power-chord crunch in the choruses—”Wash me, wash me away / Come out and play,” she commands, her wordless vocalizations both powerfully melodic and unsettling in the song’s crashing outro.
Anna Meredith has now announced some exciting gigs. Prior to the release of “Varmints”, Meredith was already well known as a writer of music for other people, taking commissions from international orchestras, operas and cultural institutions, writing symphonies, songs and string quartets, exploring boomwhackers, beatboxing and body percussion, her music being heard at the Proms, in motorway service station flash-mob performances and on haute-couture catwalks. She has been Composer in Residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, regularly commissioned by orchestras around the world and the first female composer to be commissioned for the Last Night of the Proms.
Then, in 2016, following a pair of warmly received EPs, Meredith released “Varmints”, her debut studio album and first-ever feature-length self-commissioned work. It was a gamble not just financially, involving months of unpaid writing, but also psychologically: by putting herself in charge, and front and centre, rather than simply being told what to write, she had no-one to answer to but herself – the pressure was on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, given Meredith’s extensive experience for knocking together fairly impressive, genre-defying pieces of music, Varmints was an unqualified success. A suite that juxtaposed hulking slabs of cross-rhythm and electronics with brittle gusts of delicate confession and irresistibly addictive pop melody, the record garnered rave reviews, and has continued to win over new fans well beyond the standard album release campaign, meaning Meredith and her band were still touring it round the world and the festival circuit two years later, culminating in a sold-out performance of the album in full at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last April, backed by the Southbank Sinfonia.
Other major Meredith projects in 2018 included “Anno” – a boundary-pushing collaboration with the Scottish Ensemble, in which original pieces of her work are intertwined with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – and Five Telegrams – a collaboration with 59 Productions, which was performed at the opening night of the BBC Proms and Edinburgh International Festival (EIF). Then, earlier this year she released her first soundtrack, for the acclaimed Bo Burnham-directed A24 (Lady Bird, Moonlight, Ex Machina) film Eighth Grade. The film was released in the UK in April, following its successful premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and a wave of critical acclaim upon its 2018 US release.
A musical identity for the 18-dodgem installation at Somerset House, written and rewritten as the cars bump into each other, triggering new sounds and novel possibilities. The experience is an adrenaline burst, each aspect of the music functioning together to provide a high-octane antidote to the previous year’s dirge of lockdowns and restrictions. It’s a total sensory hit.”
Anna Meredith Metronome, Nottingham Wednesday 3rd November 2021
A Great Big Pile of Leaves released one of the most underrated albums of the 2010s with 2013’s “You’re Always On My Mind”, an album of smooth, mathy, super catchy indie/emo songs that picked up where early Minus The Bear left off and breathed new life into the niche subgenre. At the time, the TopshelfRecords-signed band seemed like they were on their way to the forefront of the still-emerging emo revival, but as the revival progressed throughout the decade, AGBPOL fizzled out. Now, eight years later, they’re finally set to return with new album “Pono” (due 8/13 via TopshelfRecords), and lead single “Beat Up Shoes” makes it feel like no time has passed since 2013. It channels the same charm as “You’re Always On My Mind“, but it doesn’t feel outdated, as very few bands attempted to fill the void that AGBOL left. And if they did try, they didn’t do it like A Great Big Pile of Leaves.
The new record—whether or not it’s named after Neil Young’s short-lived hi-res audio player—has a crispness to it that welcomes the not-too-distant change of seasons, providing each of the downtempo, mathy tunes a distinct personality defined by catchy guitar hooks, sentimental lyrics, and unique time signatures co-conspired by the band’s three members Pete Weiland, Tyler Soucy, and Tucker Yaro (and enhanced by mixing from Matt Weber). These elements reflect an array of sounds from a decade ago ranging from the pre-LVL UP outfit Spook Houses to, as the band notes, Somebody Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin.
With the record out today, Weiland, Soucy, and Yaro took the time to go into a bit of detail on each of the tracks
1. “Yesterday’s Clothes”
Tyler Soucy: Pete had this rhythm guitar part kicking around since the release of our last album, and it had always been stuck in my head. We originally envisioned it as being something much more stripped-back, which is sort of alluded to in the intro. We directly mic’d Pete’s electric guitar to get the string sound and added a bunch of plate reverb and tape saturation to it—I love the way it opens the record.
Tucker Yaro: I want to live in Pete’s childhood—this track gives me a glimpse. Like a lot of these songs, I wrote the bass part before hearing the lyrics, and after a lot of experimentation I decided to be almost purely supportive to enhance the existing rhythm guitar and drum parts, until the bridge where I couldn’t resist stretching out a little.
2. “Hit Reset”
TS: More often than not, the bridge of our songs takes shape later in the process. Once we tracked the lead guitar line at the top of the bridge, the entire song felt like it fell into place. It really took the song to a new level. I had this 13/4 drum pattern in my back pocket for years and I was very excited to finally use it.
TY: “Hit Reset” feels quintessential to our catalogue. I’m struck by that great lead part on the bridge that says just enough. This is something I love about working with Pete, he has incredible chops but in a section like this you hear his restraint and the power of a simple, well-executed part. I didn’t realize the track was in 13 until I read Tyler’s comment above. The odd time is not an exercise, the riff just feels right and Tyler’s part complements it perfectly.
3. “Beat Up Shoes”
Pete Weiland: This song is essentially about building ramps with friends. We used to spend weekend nights driving around looking for construction sites in hopes of finding usable wood scraps in the dumpsters to build with. We would work through the eerie hours of the night, and spend the next day testing out the construction, which always seemed to end up with a foot of vert on it, no matter how much attention was paid to measurements. This is an ode to those missions.
4. “Waiting For Your Love”
TY: In some ways Matt Weber was given an impossible mixing task, and this track highlights how well he knows his gear, his room, and us. We’ve played with Matt for years on the road—he just knows how to execute in a lot of settings, but particularly at the board. It’s tough to find real estate in a song like this with so many layers and Pete’s lower vocal range, which has so much detail and great tone. We’re always trying to help with our extensive, sometimes exhaustive mix notes, and Matt was able to take our suggestions and run with them in what became a very collaborative and satisfying process. I’m proud of the results, particularly here.
5.“Halloween”
TS: This is my favourite song on the record. I don’t know why, but it reminds me of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, and I love that band.
6. “Kitchen Concert”
PW: While the lyrical content may seem silly on the surface, it’s among the most meaningful and sentimental tracks on the record. The song is a celebration of joyous times spent with my son during his first year, filled with activities from making music with kitchen utensils to pretending a cardboard box was a spaceship.
7. “Swimmer”
PW: This one took many detours during its creation and was fun to work on together. It was especially memorable trying to explain the time signature to Tucker and Tyler using only onomatopoeias.
TS: None of us know which part of this song is the chorus or the verse.
8. “Water Cycle”
PW: This song was inspired by a grade six science class assignment from when I was working as a paraeducator. The students were supposed to create a comic strip that showed a representation of the water cycle, illustrating each stage. One student in particular created this amazing, elaborate story of a water droplet who was adventuring through the different stages of the cycle. I thought this would be a neat idea for a song and connected the concept with feeling lost and trying to get home; that paired with always ending up in Queens somehow, no matter what subway car you get on.
9. “Writing Utensils”
TS: We wrote and recorded a different version of “Writing Utensils” back in 2011 or 2012 for a 7-inch vinyl project with Motion City Soundtrack. It’s always been one of our favourite tracks, and since it was never on digital services we really wanted to give it a second life with a few changes. Kevin at Topshelf told us that the second chorus needed to come back at the end of the song, and that stuck with me for nine years.
10. “Simple Pleasures”
TY: This is my favorite track on the record. It’s one of the songs I’m most excited to play live when we’re able to tour again. I love how repetitive and staccato the verse is in contrast to the expansive, flowing chorus and bridge. I remember tracking this alone late at night after everyone went to sleep and cranking up the headphones. After struggling to find the part earlier in the day, everything suddenly felt easy and right.
TS: “Simple Pleasures” was the last song that came together for Pono. We had originally thought that “Writing Utensils” was going to be the closer until “Simple Pleasures” became what it did. We tracked all of the final drums at Gradwell House in NJ with Matt engineering, and they have a beautiful Bechstein grand piano that Pete used as a layer in the bridge. I still remember when we all heard the playback and looked over at each other with a silent “yes.” The low-volume talking that you hear on the bridge is only there because Pete accidentally played two audio files at the same time while listening to rough mixes in his car. We recreated that moment with the same file and kept it in the mix.
New Album ‘Pono’ – Available August 13th, Topshelf Records. All music written, performed, and produced by A Great Big Pile of Leaves
On her latest project as Francis of DeliriumJana Bahrich attempts to piece together a sense of self-understanding while traversing a collision of reds and blues, various deep waterways, and oscillating ridges of guitar distortion. Like a rabid cartographer, the Luxembourg-based musician realizes that mapping our own humanity is messy and inordinately confusing. Her reflections result is the visceral, affecting EP “Wading”.
Wadingjoins Bahrich’s dynamic vocals—ranging from rare moments of fragile falsetto to volcanic yells—and spacious grunge-inspired compositions. There are bits of soaring guitars on the opening track “Lakes” that recall Explosions in the Sky, while grit-fuelled moments conjure the experiments of noisy forebears like Car Seat Headrest or Fontaines D.C. Bahrich’s post-punk/grunge/noise mixture is buttressed to fruition with producer/drummer Chris Hewett; especially poignant is the dramatic closer “I Think I’m Losing,” when Hewett collapses into the chorus.
After last year’s All Change EP, her sophomore follow-up is an impressive continuation of Bahrich’s catalogue. “Wading” is an intimate snapshot of an upcoming artist figuring out how individuality manifests (and how it isn’t really individual at all); what happens when those closest to us leave? Are we still the same? How does one choose to make sense of life’s lessons? Are they meant to be metaphorical or literal? These are only a few of the questions Francis of Delirium pokes at amidst the riotously fun, melodically grounded instrumentation.
1. “Lakes”
“Lakes” sets up the rest of the EP by speaking about identity and a sense of self that eventually starts to erode until that idea of self is gone and changed. The main idea in “Lakes” is that we are all fed by other people (or other “rivers”) to eventually form who we are: one large lake fed by other water streams. We are essentially the amalgamation of hundreds of people rather than one singular person. A lot of my self identity was tied to the people in my community at school, so once those relationships shifted as I left school my identity was challenged. That anchor was no longer there, that structure was gone. The question I sort of pose throughout the EP is, who am I now as these relationships morph?
2. “Red”
“Red” is the pushing away of someone and justifying it with your anger rather than rationally discussing your feelings. It’s believing something you thought to be true and then that being switched. It’s the loss of trust in a relationship. You’re left angry and confused, unsure of yourself, or who to trust. Instead of communicating effectively, you start to push away, preemptively moving into isolation as a defense mechanism to stop yourself from more hurt. Simultaneously the song challenges the goodness I see in myself, as a good friend, someone filled with love is gone, which distances you from this idea of yourself even further. So you’re pushing away someone else and pushing away a version of yourself you enjoy.
3. “Let It All Go”
It’s set over one night at a party, and eventually resulting in the acceptance and letting go of a relationship that is broken. The song is very confessional so it’s written in this stream of consciousness, almost in a spoken word kind of way. “Let It All Go” chronicles a full commitment to isolation. To me the song feels like this vertigo, justifying and grappling and releasing. Trying to take back your anger from before, that how someone hurt you doesn’t matter and you can move past it: “I’m so sorry I was overbearing and I’m so sorry I thought this meant something.” Eventually there’s this acceptance, you have to let go. Although removing yourself is the healthier option, you also descend into a space of isolation.
4. “I Think I’m Losing”
It’s a reflection on everything that transpired in the previous songs, filled with self-doubt and uncertainty. A lot of the EP is pointing rage inwardly and this song reaches the peak of that. An entire question of the self, am I losing who I am? Was I good to the people who love me? Was everything that happened fabricated and blown out of proportion? Are my feelings valid? Was it all my fault pushing people away? Just a real good old spiral into uncertainty, imbalance, and emptiness. At the end of the day, though, maybe you should be feeling this, maybe you need to feel like you’re losing to motivate yourself to rebuild stronger and with more love and less anger at yourself and everywhere else.
As the EP progresses my perspective continues to distort. It felt interesting to take emotions that are rooted in truth and then pushing them to the extreme and exploring that heightened feeling.
Is it too early in the year to anoint a release as the Best Reissue of 2021? Because, for my money, it’s going to be hard to beat this archival release that gathers together almost all the material released by the first—and best—incarnation of this post-punk lodestar Gang Of Four. With the band finally taking ownership of their music, the quartet and Matador Records have the chance to give it its due with this handsome box. Inside are remastered editions of the band’s first two albums-—1979’s “Entertainment” and 1981’s “Solid Gold”—as well as a collection of singles, a recording of the band putting in a typically smouldering live performance in 1980 and a cassette of demos. The set puts Gang of Four’s music and legacy in context with a booklet packed with ephemera and testimonials from the band members and their many fans while also re-aggravating the calcified wounds that they exposed through slashing and brazenly funky songs of class warfare, unfettered capitalism and rampant inequality. It’s little wonder that the half life of this era of Gang of Four was so short. No group could burn this hot and expect to survive for the long haul. This set fans those embers anew, right when we need it most.
Released earlier this year as a five-LP, one-cassette package—crammed with 1979’s Entertainment!, 1981’s Solid Gold, an album combining their self-titled and Another Day/Another Dollar EPs, the first-ever release of a two-LP live album called Live at American Indian Center1980, and a C-90 cassette tape featuring 26 unreleased demos—77-81is a luxury and pricey package that seems quite the opposite of what Gang Of Four was about. Built in the immediacy of anarchistic British punk and the socialist student politics of working class Leeds, Andy Gill, Jon King, Hugo Burnham, and Dave Allen were beyond curios. A more efficient and workman-like all-CD box designed to look plebeian, wrapped in brown paper, and finally released in August after many delays signals what might be this period’s finest and most uniquely artful one-two punch.
Along with crusty New York no wave acts of the same period such as The Contortions and Mars, whose halting rhythms were heavy and angular and whose ravaged guitars slashed into each melody, Gang of Four created an aggressive noise-scape of their own: an icy, soldiering, and sinewy punk-funk not so much on the good foot, but with its own brand of swing (drummer Burnham, bassist Allen) and teeming with caustically insightful rhetoric and curt, even brusque originality. LCD Soundsystem, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bloc Party—there is no them without Go4.
The live album from San Francisco and the demos collections are the best place to start, as, save for a peculiar cleanliness on its bottom end (smoothed, but not entirely unfractured and mussed-up, is Solid Gold), it was the crisp, accuracy of Gang of Four’s studio sound (on Entertainment!) that made them potent, poppy, and—dare I say—entertaining. Like the work of an ace sniper rather than a machine gun’s scatter, the clear shot of the syncopated “Damaged Goods,” the stuttering “Not Great Men,” the swerving “I Found That Essence Rare,” and all the hurt personal, social, and sexual politics spit forth by Jon King are powerful because they’re served cold and with a bite—an all-vodka martini sans the olive, and with a punch in the face.
Having witnessed them live at this time, the captured 1980 San Francisco gig CD—like the salty demos collection—offers versions of their frank familiars such as “At Home He’s a Tourist” somehow blunter, briefer, and at a breakneck speed to rival hardcore’s finest (no wonder why, beyond just its politics, Go4 is a prime inspiration to Fugazi). Again going back to the no wave comparison, this was skinny frenetic poli-punk without gristle or fat. Just noise and hard intent.
![Slothrust - Parallel Timeline [Indie Exclusive Limited Edition Neon Yellow LP]](https://s3.amazonaws.com/broadtime_thumbnails/220/418464876220/418464876220:1000.jpg)
