Sheffield duo Before Breakfast are a band that have always explored feminist issues through the telling of personal stories, fusing their classical knowledge and rich arrangements with raw expression, and their new album“I Could Be Asleep If It Weren’t For You” is no exception to this.
Before Breakfast are thrilled to announce that their debut album ‘I Could Be Asleep If It Weren’t For You’ will be released on 14th January 2022. The Sheffield duo have always explored feminist issues through the telling of personal stories – fusing their classical knowledge and rich arrangements with raw expression. Their debut album is no exception to this, exploring themes that will resonate with many women in their 30s who are experiencing the shift in perspectives that this decade can bring.
The debut album, which lands in early 2022, blends alt-folk with lyricism that touches on personal independence and feminism and explores shifts in perspectives, speaking to the malaise of the last “wasted” year. The two-piece are telling stories on their own terms and backed by two new live band members and as gig venues gradually open up again, the band are going for it.
Anna B Savage is a London based singer-songwriter and musician. Her songs are stark, skeletal paintings of moods and reflection, using a palette of mainly voice and guitar. Most prominent is her voice – strong and sonorous, yet with a vulnerability that feels as if she’s in the same room as you.
The debut album of London based singer-songwriter Anna B Savage. Her 2015 EP was deeply intriguing and quickly drew the attention of Father John Misty and later Jenny Hval, both of whom brought Savage out on European tours. Anna B Savage’s first full-length record “A Common Turn” is question mark music. Her songs are heavy with unanswered queries, with dilemmas and insecurities, or often just with wondering. Savage’s voice is endlessly warm, but producer William Doyle’ (East India Youth) consistently finds the iron in it. Even the darkest moments in this music don’t stick in their devastation, though – Savage’s fire burns too brightly. Her voice can drop to a whisper, but then it will open all the way up in a flash flood of cavernous guitar, echoes, and swelling strings that expand and then vanish just as suddenly as they arrived.
Savage’s music is deeply vulnerable, without being submissive. She lays claim to her own fragility, and the stories she tells are of taking up space, finding connections, and owning the power in not knowing all the answers. Hers are songs for anyone who thinks hard, feels deeply, and asks big questions.
“A Common Turn“ presents us a nest of fully-formed and room-filling artistry.
Los Angeles band Dummy refuses to slow down. After releasing two cassette EP’s in 2020 (on Popwig and Born Yesterday respectively), Dummy’s debut full-length album arrives via Chicago’s Trouble in Mind Records. Employing pummelling guitars and celestial ambience within the same breath, the band folds a myriad of reference points into their drone-pop style. Influence from ’60s melodicism and ’90s UK noise pop can be found woven in with inspiration from spiritual jazz, Japanese new age, and Italian minimalism.
Dummy dodges the brooding, dark, dramatic tropes of contemporary “artistic” music often found in punk, experimental, and electronic, instead insisting on joyous and euphoric sonic palettes. They refuse to be artistically stagnant, continuously shifting their approach to writing across 12 tracks. Shaped by performances around Los Angeles in 2019, songs like “Daffodils” and “Fissured Ceramics” feature relentless driving energy and ample psychedelic noise. Elsewhere, Dummy counterbalances the aggression with meditative synthscapes focused on sound design and studio experimentation, like on the motorik “X-Static Blanket”. Finally, centerpiece “H.V.A.C.” and the album’s final track, “Atonal Poem”, seek to synthesize these two poles, offering multi-part journeys through uncharted sonic territory.
In contrast to blissed-out instrumentation, Dummy’s sardonic lyricism examines “the burden of modern life, consumerism, environmental collapse, alienation, and other anxieties born out of living in this absurd moment in history”. Interior design, marine pollution, the psychology of commercial architecture, and nuclear testing are all featured subjects. Dummy’s restless creativity keeps them moving ever-forward, continuously challenging themselves and pushing their sound into exciting and exhilarating places. This is – as the album title suggests – “Mandatory Enjoyment”.
We’ve never been more excited to welcome you all to our festival and can’t wait to celebrate the best in new music with you this autumn! #d2dfest returns to the city centres of Bristol and Nottingham on 25-26th September 2021.
We’re back, and it feels so good! After a quiet year off in 2020, we can’t wait to return to Bristol and Nottingham later in the year for a September edition of Dot To Dot Festival!
As always we’ll be bringing you the hottest emerging musical talent across some of the best city-centre stages, and we’re sure that this year it’s going to feel extra special as we come back with a bang.
We’re thrilled to reveal that one of Britain’s best bands right now, SPORTS TEAM, will be headlining the festival! Dot To Dot will mark the band’s first live show since the release of their critically acclaimed and Mercury Prize nominated album ‘Deep Down Happy’.
Our 2021 festival will also see sets from PALACE, GIRL BAND, DO NOTHING, SAM WISE, STEAM DOWN and so many more,
We’re about to enter and highlight a bunch of great, (mostly) very obscure psych and krautrock releases so… pay attention Heads! We’ll kick it off with two from Motrik...Limited edition red colour vinyl. Møtrik are a krautrock four-piece from Portland who stick to the genre’s principles. Motorik grooves, harmonically ambiguous synths, curious snippets of vocal, not much else. Opener ‘Impossible/OK’ sounds like that War On Drugs song that got played to death a couple of years ago, except this time it’s good.
The long tail of krautrock in all its droney, repetitive permutations continues to be felt in modern music, some forty plus years after artists like Faust, Kraftwerk, and Can arrived in the world. It’s what one does with these influences that matters, and no one is doing more with the raw materials of this sound than Møtrik. This quartet from Portland, Oregon – bassist / vocalist Erik Goltz, drummer Lee Ritter, guitarist Cord Amato and synth wizard Dave Fulton – connect up with the sounds of the past like an M.C. Escher mural: it follows the same patterns but takes them in much different directions with much more colourful and mind-altering results.
Through seven extended jams, on the band’s long awaited second album “Safety Copy”, the band nod to their German forebears while applying their expertise in postrock, garage punk, prog, and more to those well-loved templates. Everything sounds clear and precise, thanks to being recorded DIY style by Jason Powers (Grails, Blue Cranes) in a remote coastal enclave.
The album is massive in scale, filling the stereo field with a cinematic grandeur.
Last year, Andy Shauf released his most recent and a terrific album, “The Neon Skyline”. (We named it among one of the vest albums of 2020 .) Now, Shauf’s finally about to hit the road and play these songs live, and ahead of kicking his tour off he’s shared a new single.
Shauf’s latest is called “Spanish On The Beach.” As usual with Shauf, it’s a story song — depicting a couple on a resort vacation. There is also reference to Judy, the character from The Neon Skyline. “It’s the same theme as the story ended up being at the Skyline but the narrator’s life is a little bit booze-fuelled,” Shauf said of the song. “And this vacation is kind of like the first stop on the way to destruction.”
“Spanish On The Beach” is out now via Anti-Records.
A couple months ago, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte and Palehound’s Ellen Kempner released a collaborative album together, “Doomin Sun” under the name Bachelor. Today, they’re back with a one-off single called “I See It Now,” a sticky and pinched sing-song tinged with bitterness. Its ending lines: “And when you guys fuck, do you lay and fake it?/ After he’s done, do you brush your teeth naked?/ Do you love him now?”
“Back in January when Bachelor was filming our music videos for Doomin’ Sun, we found ourselves with a day to kill at Ellen’s house in Poughkeepsie,” the pair wrote in a statement. “Ellen had assembled a small recording setup in her basement that she was mystified by and still figuring out how to work so we decided to record a song to mess around with the gear. Melina wrote the creepy intro keyboard part and we built the song from there. What came was ‘I See It Now,’ a kind of lethargic muse on sexual regret and insecurity.”
“I See It Now” is out now via Polyvinyl Records/Lucky Number/Milk! Records.
“I See It Now” is the new single from Bachelor (Jay Som & Palehound), out September 1st on Polyvinyl Records/Lucky Number/Milk! Records. Written, Arranged, and Performed by Melina Duterte and Ellen Kempner Produced by MelinaDuterte and Ellen Kempner
The solo project of Malmö songwriter Katja Nielsen, of acclaimed punk combo Arre! Arre!, is finally ready to unleash her debut LP “Violent Tendencies”, a ten-track deep dive into the stories of female murderers. Expertly produced by Joakim Lindberg, “Violent Tendencies”, takes its cues from ‘60s garage rock and girl groups rather than the eighties infused goth pop of her early EP’s, looking outward rather than inward for a rollercoaster that veers between a glut of different genres, themes and lyrical ideas, although still scored through with Nielsen’s sharp ear for melody.
If 2020 marked the birth of She/Beast, then 2021 is the year it evolves. When the pandemic cancelled Katja Nielsen’s best-laid plans, with her acclaimed punk outfit Arre! Arre! forced off the road, the singer and guitarist used the free time to develop her own identity as a singer-songwriter. That identity is She/Beast, and the fruits of her isolation writing sessions were two incendiary EPs: “In the Depths of Misery“, released last December, and “This Too Shall Pass“, which arrived back in March.
They held huge personal significance for Nielsen. Around a year before she began working on them, she finally received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, after more than a decade of suffering from it. She/Beast provided her with an outlet, one in which to pour a maelstrom of angst and complicated emotions surrounding her condition. “The lyrics on the two EPs were all about me and my mental disorder,” she explains. “Through the songs, I was putting all of my grief, trauma and anger to rest. It was a way of telling myself, “OK, so this happened, and now that you know why, you can do something about it when it happens again.” In fact, the disorder itself was something she found she was able to turn to her advantage; “for me, it comes with easy access to creative thinking and ‘flow’, even when I’m not having an episode.”
With those demons exorcised, Nielsen has moved on to break new ground with the first She/Beast full-length. Violent Tendencies is a ten-track rollercoaster that veers between a glut of different genres, themes and lyrical ideas, although still scored through with Nielsen’s sharp ear for melody. The eighties synth stylings of In the Depths of Misery and This Too Shall Pass are eschewed in favour of bringing the guitar to the forefront, forming the sonic backbone of the album, alongside a new reliance on organs. “I wanted to go from that 80s synth vibe to more of a pop-rock feeling.”
The tracks were again penned at home in Nielsen’s living room, while the songs were cut at Studio Sickan in her native Malmö, with Joakim Lindberg producing. The main focus, she says, was on developing the She/Beast sound, which meant shuffling the pack when it came to her influences; where bedroom pop and dark wave defined the sound of the EPs, Violent Tendencies owes a debt to everything from Motown to the Beatles. “I’ve always been a big fan of 50s and 60s pop, and I just knew I had an album inside of me, waiting to come out,” she says. “In my head, I already had ‘templates’ for songs that I wanted to work on, and when I decided on a main theme lyrically, it all came together quickly.”
That theme is a world away from the ones she was working with last time; whereas the EPs were introspective, the appropriately-titled Violent Tendencies has her looking outward, at a particularly dark historical thread: female murderers. Each track on the record looks unflinchingly at the topic, with every song looking at a different killer, from sinister tales of child kidnapping (‘Stranger Danger’) to the pitch-black, razor-sharp storytelling of ‘Two Wives, One Axe’. “I’m a big fan of true crime, and I never knew that there were so many women who’d killed somebody,” Nielsen explains. “It was very enticing to do the research needed for the lyrics – I found out that a lot of the murders were a crime of passion. So, I guess this is a way of highlighting women in history, even though they were sometimes vicious, and not well behaved.”
Having assembled a live band, it’s Nielsen’s eventual intention to take She/Beast on the road. By the time she does, she’ll have plenty of material to delve into; it’s difficult to believe that it remains such a fledgling project, with three varied and enthralling releases in the space of a year. “I always need a project to keep me busy,” she says. “It helps me to stay sane!”
Prog Rock classic band Yes have released a video for their new single “Dare To Know”, It’s the second single to be taken from the the band’s upcoming studio album “The Quest”, which will be released through InsideOut Music/SonyMusic on October 1st.
“Dare To Know” presents a guitar theme played within many different arrangements, with different chord structures and altered textures,” explains guitarist and album producer Steve Howe. “The ‘idea’ mentioned in the first verse gets described later as an awakening to the subtle goings on within our bodies and mind, all geared to nature’s scheme of things, all fluctuating and rearranging according to the principles of life, as we know it. The centrepiece leaves the orchestra alone to elaborate and develop the way the theme is heard, then augments the closing minutes of the song as it rests, with an acoustic guitar cadenza.
“Much of the music was written in late 2019 with the rest in 2020,” he adds of the new album. “We commissioned several orchestrations to augment and enhance the overall sound of these fresh new recordings, hoping that our emphasis on melody, coupled with some expansive instrumental solo breaks, keeps up the momentum for our listeners.”
“The Quest” is also now available for pre-order on various formats, including a limited deluxe box-set that features a gatefold 180g 2LP on exclusive coloured vinyl, 2CD+Blu-ray digipak (featuring 5.1 mix & backing tracks), 36-page perfect bound booklet, enamel pin badge, 60x90cm poster, slipmat & hand-numbered certificate of authenticity, all house in a rigid lift-off box, as well as a limited 2CD+Blu-ray artbook, 2CD Digipak, gatefold 2LP+2CD & as Digital Album.
YES, who are Steve Howe, Alan White, Geoff Downes, Jon Davison and Billy Sherwood,
“Dare To Know” is the second single from YES’ forthcoming album “The Quest”, released 1st October 2021.
