“Watusi Rodeo” is the debut independent EP from the American jangle pop group Guadalcanal Diary. It was released in 1983 on DB Records. The EP was included by Rhino Handmade on the same CD as the reissue of the band’s debut LP, “Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man”.
A song called “Watusi Rodeo” by Guadalcanal Diary taken from the independent “Watusi Rodeo” from the American Indie guitar jangle pop group Guadalcanal Diary. It was released in 1983 on DB Records. I recall these guys being around the time of R.E.M and it gets better and better. This band had a sophisticated and spiritual bent to the band’s lyrics.
This song is off of the EP “Watusi Rodeo” released in 1983. The song writing in this band was a step above many of their peers…clever lyrics with a mixture of jangle and country. When you start listening to this band later on you can see a lot of eclecticism as they could bounce from one style to another.
They did get picked up by a major label after this release. Their LP Jamboree released in 1986 was on Elektra. They unsuccessfully attempted a commercial breakthrough, adopting the style of a country-rock band with some religious sentiment.
Jeff Walls and singer Murray Attaway were friends in high school in Marietta, Ga., just outside of Atlanta. Along with bassist Rhett Crowe and drummer John Poe, they formed Guadalcanal Diary. The band quickly became staples on the Athens and Atlanta club circuit, signed by Danny Brown’s Atlanta-based dB Records.
“Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man” produced by Don Dixon. Filled with rich but moody songs about faith, doubt, and the legacy of life in the Deep South, and driven by thundering drums and the clarion call of electric guitars, “Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man” quickly won an enthusiastic reception from critics and college radio programmers, and in 1985 Elektra Records signed Guadalcanal Diary and reissued the album.
In 2011, Guadalcanal Diary briefly reunited to play Athfest, and celebrated their 30th anniversary there. Jeff Walls died, May 29th, 2019, of a rare pulmonary disease
New York’s Acid Dad will return with their new album “Take It From The Dead”, which will be released on July 16th via Greenway Records and Levitation’s The reverberation Appreciation Society. Acid Dad is an American alternative-rock band composed of singer-guitarists, Vaughn Hunt and Sean Fahey, and drummer, Trevor Mustoe. Vaughn first started recording the band in his Bushwick, NY basement releasing singles “Brain Body” and their first EP “Let’s Plan a Robbery.” Appearing live in the New York City rock scene in 2016, Acid Dad quickly moved to a world stage with their self-titled debut album, released by Greenway Records in 2018.
They have recently returned with the psych-leaning “Searchin’” which captures. a bit of an old school classic rock groove with some more modern day jangly dream pop in the vein of Real Estate or Kevin Morby.
Searchin’ is the third single from the bands new record “Take It From The Dead” out July 16th via The Reverberation Appreciation Society and Greenway Records.
“Love Nobody” is the new EP from Jenn Champion and Oyster Kids. The three song EP is packed with as many sexy synth lines and longing looks as an 80s teen movie. The project was born when Champion met Andrew Eapen (Oyster Kids) at a party, not long after she moved to LA. They became fast friends after they realized they share a passion for sad pop songs. The two started writing music together only a few weeks later, and the song “Love Nobody” materialized in their very first session. The eponymous first track, Love Nobody is lithe and breezy with Champion’s signature vocal style. Champion says, “‘Love Nobody’ is about the fear of falling so hard for someone when you know it’s destined to crash and burn. Those crushes where it feels like your heart is cannibalizing your brain. We’ve all been there, when you look into someone’s eyes and know they will destroy you, and yet, nothing can pull you away. You are all in. You hate it and have never wanted anything more.”
She continues, ”’Push’ is about the imagined love we have with strangers in dance clubs. It’s a lo-fi new wave song that captures the moment of feeling both so good and so consumed, being crushed out on a dance floor. Where the music is loud and you have immediate sexual eye contact. Like invisible hands pushing you together. A song for that moment of lust and the unknown.”
The two also included a paired down version of Love Nobody – a down tempo piano version to play when your crush leaves the party with someone else. Because, isn’t that just the way?
Jenn Champion + Oyster Kids’ “Love Nobody” will be available worldwide on June 29th, 2021 from Hardly ArtRecords.
In building on a theme we have made a live stripped back version of my 3rd studio album “The House That Jack Built“. The result, The Deconstruction of Jack’s House will be released on white vinyl for Record Store Day on 17th July (UK Only, but it will be available online subsequently). ahead of that, I thought I’d share one the saddest tunes of the bunch. I hope it makes you sad. Shout out to my friend Tom Lloyd Goodwin who accompanied me on guitar.
Jesca Hoop has a tradition of reimagining and rerecording her own albums and having previously created beautifully stark versions of her albums “Kismet” and “Hunting my Dress” it is the turn of “The House That Jack Built”. Recorded in her Manchester based home-built studio in December 2020, these intimate and immediate reworkings shine the spotlight on Hoops intricate, complex song writing with her astonishing vocals front and centre.
In celebration of the Record Store Day release we are going to live stream a performance of The Deconstruction inJacks House on 17th July at 20:30 BST from a shed in my garden. Chloe Foy, Rachel Rimmer and Tom Lloyd Goodwin will join me to play the album to start to finish.
The title suggests a project of gravity and legacy, but Lily Konigsberg has only been releasing music since 2017. The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now is actually closer in theme to The Beta Band’s classic compilation The Three E.P.’s than, say, Abba Gold; it gathers the singer and instrumentalist’s first few extended plays and other recordings, some of which have been “mastered for the first time.”
Still, you have to admire the audacity of that title. The set itself is a dreamy collection of dinky synth and guitar pop songs: 2000s MySpace bedroom electronica infused with teen indie-movie quirkiness, forged by a cyber-dreamer with a twee voice and a laptop. “I Said” and “Summer in the City,” both from her “It’s Just Like All The Clouds” EP, are likable acoustic songs that display her natural pop inclinations. That the little guitar solo and neat drums of “7 Smile” sound reminiscent of McCartney at times underscores the collection’s homemade ethos, as well as its essentiality.
Lily Konigsberg: singer, instrumentalist, lifelong songwriter. Since her early childhood, the Brooklyn-born-and-based artist has occupied her time with music. “Basically I was born and immediately started wanting to be a rock star,” Konigsberg told Pitchfork in July of last year (she was a 2020 Pitchfork Rising Artist). By the time she won a five-borough battle-of-the-bands contest as a teenager Konigsberg had already been performing solo sets in cafes around her native Park Slope, and in 2013 she would link with fellow Bard classmates Nina Ryser and Ani Ivry-Block to form the egalitarian art-punk outfit Palberta, a beloved DIY scene fixture who have recently come to wider attention on the back of their critically-acclaimed 2021 album ‘Palberta5000“.
First 200 records are hand-numbered. Fist come, first-served.
There’s a mystery to Vanishing Twin – from their name to the multitude of sounds that inhabit their music. They don’t sound like many but they hint at plenty. ‘Ookii Gekkou’ (Japanese for Big Moonlight) is the sound of ordinary life under a different set of rules, a record conceived and created in dark times – a sort of dream catcher for all the madness of the past year.
Vanishing Twin explore new ground on ‘Ookii Gekkou’ incorporating elements of afrofunk, outer jazz and avant-garde, all while referencing Sun Ra to Alice Coltrane, Martin Denny to Morricone, Can’s Holger Czukay to meditative Gamelan, or The Free Design, to library music of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Locked into their strangely-accessible groove is a history of ‘other’ sound, a crafted hauntology that evinces something completely new.
“One of the most original and exciting acts of the moment” The Quietus
Hurricanes, organisms, vibes, bells, and percussive rallies purvey throughout ‘Ookii Gekkou’, each infiltrated with influences as diverse as Piero Umiliani, Art Ensemble of Chicago and ELO among others. Indeed, even a cursory earful adds to an ever-expanding palette of sound, no mean feat for the newly-trimmed quartet of songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti, bassist Susumu Mukai, and synth/guitar player PhilMFU, this reduction resulting in no fewer ideas and even bigger steps.
Vanishing Twin is a conundrum in these fragmenting times; familiar, yet different; appealing to this world, but from another, parallel one.
“A band that fearlessly floats in the hazy space between the real world and an imagined one, blurring the line between warmly nostalgic and eerily haunted” Pitchfork
Steve Gunn Brooklyn, New York, Acclaimed songwriter and guitarist returns this summer with his stunning new album “Other You”.
Recorded in Los Angeles with Grammy Award winning producer and engineer Rob Schnapf, Gunn sought to create an album that would push his melodic and compositional sensibilities to thrilling new heights. The resulting tracks find Gunn pushing his cosmic Americana to exciting new dimensions encompassing elements of prog, jazz, and contemporary classical music.
The album also features contributions from Mary Lattimore, Juliana Barwick, Bridget St. John and Jeff Parker.
ITS 25 YEARS (This month) Since the first Heads album was released.. .so.. for 2021..Rooster has decided to get the album back in print on vinyl.. but changing the artwork. With some silver foiling and bordering, the single sleeve has been boosted to a sweet gatefold, Rooster also got the Radio 1 sessions from the time remastered, and re-cut along with the huge b-side to their Television 7” “Jellystoned Park”. So there you have it, a double vinyl silver jubilee reissue of a fantastic debut album!
From the original reissue sales notes: “The Heads had self-released a couple of 7″‘, and then Cargo Uk’s inhouse label Headhunter UK got to release a further 7″, and then the Debut album in 1996. Amidst a world suffocating in Britpop smarm, the Heads cut a timely swathe with their unkempt rock psychedelique. The album contained 10 tracks of guitar driven, amp destroying rock, with cues taken straight from the US underground, Stooges, MC5, Mudhoney, Pussy Galore, early Monster Magnet too but with a disitinctly British stamp, some of the drone and fuzz from Loop / Spacemen 3, some of the attitude of the Fall, Pink Fairies and Walking Seeds and overlaid with the spaced rock of early Hawkwind. It was obvious that the four members of the Heads were music obsessives. The debut album was recorded at Foel studios (owned by DaveAnderson from Hawkwind) and engineered by Corin Dingley, it was mastered by John Dent at LOUD.”
We’ve asked for some new appraisal of the Heads for the Silver Jubilee edition from good friends….
Stewart Lee February 2021 “The Halley’s Comet victory orbits of historic heavy artefacts from Detroit, like The Stooges or The MC5, leave grateful onlookers aghast. But, hidden away in Bristol, The Heads are still with us now, our homegrown acid-garage godfathers, an ongoing thirty-two year old concern with a back catalogue arguably more consistent than the super-dense psyche-rock groups that inspired them. The Heads arrived fully formed and have spent three decades becoming more like themselves, a musical black hole that sucks in all surrounding matter. I love The Heads “
Phil Alexander February 2021 “The Heads make music for freaks in the know. If you were there in 1996, you’ll know just what that means…
Back then, they were gloriously out of step with the pop-cheese of the time and geezerly lumpiness of Britpop. Theirs was an altogether different take on music – a take inspired by the glorious burn-out of the ‘60s, the sonic overdrive of the ‘70s and the axis of joy created by the combination of excess volume and repetition.
We could name-check some inspirations and kindred spirits: The Stooges, Hawkwind, Floyd, Loop, Sabbath, Amon Düül II, Spacemen 3, Walking Seeds, Mudhoney, Monster Magnet among them… But in all honesty, The Heads have always existed in a world of their own, surfacing as and when the mood takes them, before returning to their subterranean rehearsal room to jam their way through yet more mind-altering riffs and mood-altering rhythms.
“Relaxing With The Heads” is their first defining statement. It is also possibly their most straight-forward release, the sound of a band attempting to find structure in their playing rather than abandoning themselves to their wildest impulses. That would come later…
And yet, 25 years on, this album blasts forth like few records from that time, its slacker charm welded to super-fuzzed riffs that propel its 10 tracks ever onwards. Righteous is probably the only word for it…”
And one our favourite quotes (ignoring the VOX review of 96)
John Peel 1995, on airing the first session // “..well if that’s not a freakout, then I am a dutch man”
Where once was Superwolf, now roam Superwolves, the new album and demon spawn of Sweeney and Billy. The twin forces united to save up from the complicity of our own deistruction.
16 years after Oldham’s tender singing and Sweeney’s cable-knit guitars made the original an underground classic, they return with “Superwolves”, an album that is, just as its title suggests, both a continuation of ‘Superwolf’ and something more. On the album, the duo let us in on a decades-long conversation, their respective instruments virtually finishing one another’s thoughts. Their bond is so deep, and their knowledge of one another is so profound, it’s essentially impossible to hear the boundary between them.”
These two eternal troubadours do not have the masses of fans and mainstream success as master crooner Nick Cave, but they sure are in the same league of remarkable singers/songwriters. A duo made in purgatory making heavenly music for the afterlife. This record will last for a long time, a very long time.
Cover art was designed by filmaker Harmonie Korine, also featuring a brand new portrait from world-renowned artist Peter Doig.
Track from the Matt Sweeney & Bonnie “Prince” Billy album “Superwolves,” out on Digital & Streaming on April 30th, 2021 and LP/CS/CD on June 18th, 2021 from Drag City/Palace Records and Domino.
Song written by Ahmoudou Madassane, Will Oldham & Matt Sweeney, and performed by Matt Sweeney & Bonnie “Prince” Billy with the Mdou Moctar ensemble.
When I was talking to Matt, Will and Dan about video concepts and cool ideas for this new record, I knew I had to involve Spanky because we’re both longtime Superwolf fans. I have directed a couple music videos involving skateboarding, but I always wanted to see a full video part with just one skater, and once I got asked to work on a video for this record, I knew that Kevin “Spanky” Long was perfect, in more ways than one. If you follow Spanky on Instagram you will see one of the most visually creative artists I have ever seen. His way of cutting out, resizing, moving and manipulating photos and videos is amazing, but also he is an amazing pro skater so the combo was perfect. I asked a lot of Spanky: I wanted him to star, direct, edit, film and do all of the artwork! It was a tall ask but I know his love for Matt and Will would shine thru. I am mostly a still photographer and I did film a lot of skateboarding in the mid 90’s, so I knew that it wouldn’t be hard to film Spanky. This video was made in the pandemic so it was just me and him going out and shooting together. We shot around LA for 14 days over 4 months. I wanted to shoot the skating on a Canon R5 at 24p giving it a film look. We also shot scenic stuff on Super-8 to give it that film look, then we had Cleigh Reed colour it so it all flows. It was great to work so closely with Spanky’s vision but still have him in front of the camera. This collaboration of directing together was great because we are 2 different generations of skateboarders, but both coming from the pro skater’s perspective. When I thought of this, I wanted a music video that was Spanky by Spanky but not is a selfie way, but a way he was directing me when I was filming.
“Resist the Urge” is from the Matt Sweeney & Bonnie “Prince” Billy album “Superwolves,” out on April 30th, 2021 and LP/CS/CD on June 18th, 2021 from Drag City/Palace Records and Domino.
After a successful roll up and down California this summer, Matt Sweeney and Bonnie Prince Billy are now set to prowl through select US cities again this fall in support of their sublime new “Superwolves” album! To bring the LP’s songs new and newer life, these ‘Wolves add frequent co-conspirator Emmett Kelly to the pack and promise to provide welcome assemblage for all creatures wherever they may roam! If the simple thought of such magical communion as Matt Sweeney’s guitar and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s voice doesn’t instantly send shivers down your spine (it’s been a while since you’ve seen a show, huh?), we suggest listening to “Superwolves” now to fully feel it – and consider, dear reader, what many critical minds have said thus far about this inimitable album: “a fantastic record.” – NPR Music “[Superwolf] had a specific quality to it, arcane and majestic. Their new one is called Superwolves. Like that first outing, it’s tremendous. Joined by sympathetic set of collaborators, the elemental dynamic remains clear at the center: Sweeney sings and plays electric guitar, Oldham sings with boundless grace about about grim realities, tender moments from hard people, and destiny.” – Aquarium Drunkard “This was an album that wasn’t promised, but somehow makes good on every silent expectation that was welled up inside the waiting rabble who didn’t know the call could be answered.”- Raven Sings The Blues “Superwolves serves the song, dressing up where needed, but always presenting them in the manner most direct, even when the songs may take a few listens to sink in and blossom. It’s an album that sneaks up on you — let it play through and play often.” – Brooklyn Vegan “a triumph of troubadour-ism, a lilting and sad album that sparkles with seasoned musicianship.” – Riff
Recorded 16 years after their cult classic Superwolf was launched into the world, Matt Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince”Billy release its follow up Superwolves and it’s already being hailed as a more than worthy successor.
“One of the finest records either has ever been involved in.” Uncut 8/10
