The Fat Angel Sings

Led by frontman and master songwriter Roddy Frame, Aztec Camera successfully turned indie- darling status into mainstream success when they signed with WEA in 1984. Taking inspiration from his own record collection, Frame set about recording a series of style-hopping albums, collaborating with his personal wish list of musical inspirations and producing a remarkable run of emotive, honest songs to rival any of his contemporaries. Admired and adored in equal measure, Roddy remains one of Scotland’s most gifted musical treasures. There are two ways of looking at this incomplete history of Roddy Frames as Aztec Camera. You can gaze at the contents – everything except for the band’s two Postcard Records singles and then High Land, Hard Rain, the album that established Frame as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation – and come to the conclusion that a career-spanning boxset without High Land, Hard Rain. But, without that record, Backwards & Forwards – The WEA Recordings 1984-1995 tells an equally fascinating tale.

The box set includes all five studio albums issued on WEA: Knife (1984, Love (1987), Stray (1990), Dreamland (1993) and Frestonia (1995). The only other Aztec Camera album – which is not included in this set – is the band’s 1983 debut High Land, Hard Rain (which was released on Rough Trade).

“Backwards and Forwards: The WEA Recordings 1984-1995″ is a forthcoming nine-CD box set that collects the music of Aztec Camera via five studio albums, B-sides, live recordings, remixes and rarities.

Each album on CD comes with bonus tracks, but on top of that are two further discs collecting remixes, B-sides and extra tracks. Additional CDs, In Concert 1984 and Live at Ronnie Scott’s complete this nine-disc collection. There are 112 tracks in total.

Demon Music previously released ‘casebound book’ deluxe editions of all six of the band’s albums back in 2012.

Backwards and Forwards: The WEA Recordings 1984-1995 is being released by Cherry Red. There is no word on remastering. It is out on 27th August 2021.

• DELUXE BOX SET COMPILING FIVE ALBUMS, SINGLES, B-SIDES, LIVE RECORDINGS, REMIXES, COMPILATION APPEARANCES AND VINYL-ONLY RARITIES.

• 112 TRACKS SPANNING THE BAND’S ELEVEN YEAR SPELL WITH WEA, INCLUDING MANY NEVER BEFORE ISSUED ON CD.

• FEATURING THE HITS ‘SOMEWHERE IN MY HEART’, ‘GOOD MORNING BRITAIN’, ‘DEEP & WIDE & TALL’, ‘ALL I NEED IS EVERYTHING’, AND MORE, ALONGSIDE LIVE RENDITIONS OF THE BAND’S PRE-WEA HIGHLIGHTS.

• INCLUDING COLLABORATIONS WITH JOE STRUMMER, EDWYN COLLINS, RYUICHI SAKAMOTO (YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA) AND MARK KNOPFLER.

• INCLUDES PROMOTIONAL RELEASE ONLY MATERIAL, THE ENTIRE LIVE AT RONNIE SCOTT’S RECORDING AND A VINYL ONLY INTERVIEW WITH AZTEC CAMERA FOUNDER AND MAINSTAY RODDY FRAME.

Eilish Gilligan is a songwriter and feelings-feeler from Melbourne, Australia.
Harbouring an unwavering love for all things pop, Eilish creates deep, intricate and vulnerable music that will restore your faith in the genre.

On the creation of “Get Well Soon”, Eilish stated, ‘I wrote Get Well Soon with Gab Strum and Lach Bostock from Mansionair, in the midst of grieving a relationship – you know that part in the grieving process, where you start getting impatient that you’re not better yet? Yeah. That part. I dreamt of telling this person that I was so sick over them, still, after all this time – and I didn’t want them back, but I just wanted them to know that I still felt awful about the whole thing. And that I missed them.

Dave Haddad and I produced this one at the end of 2020, and I really love the Japanese Breakfast style vocal synth (that was also something that we’d worked on in the writing room with Gab and Lach). The main synth part is all my voice and I think it turned out so cool. I think there’s something very evocative about this track, particularly the bridge – I wanted it to feel like a dream, and I reckon it really does.’

Melbourne/Naarm based singer and songwriter Eilish Gilligan will be releasing her forthcoming EP, ‘First One To Leave The Party’ on August the 6th. It’s lead single ‘Get Well Soon’ grapples with the despair of grieving relationships and the process of moving on, wrapped in the glistening glow of Gilligan’s exceptional song writing. Her swelling voice through the tracks chorus is harrowing, combining elegantly with the a dancey drum line and rousing synths. Showcased on ‘Get Well Soon’ is her ability to perfectly capture an emotive period of time, packaging up an array of emotions, moods and feelings and presenting them through excellent, introspective music.

Releases June 25th, 2021

Over plucked acoustic guitar or deftly weighted piano chords, Maple Glider shares vignettes of her life; growing up in a restrictive religious household, falling in an out of love, interstate and international relocations, the new perspectives travel can bring along with the alienation of being away from the familiar.

Maple Glider is the new project of solo artist Tori Zietsch (Peach with a Z). In the singer-songwriter tradition, the music is centred around the lyrics, exploring intimate themes and often serving as a self-catharsis. Offsetting the heavy-nature of some of the words, Maple Glider herself is humorous, fabulous and warm.

Brought up in a restrictive religious household, Zietsch relocated to Melbourne, spent some years overseas, and returned with a SoundCloud account (literally) full of demos. She’d experienced heavy loneliness abroad, but it was during that time that she entered a pool of self-reflection. The resulting songs relate to working through her experience as a child raised in religion, and the years she spent trying to extract that from her identity.. but many are also about love and relationships – the end of, middle of, confusion of.

And, in her words..
“This is what the album looks like to me:
Walking past tinsel covered trees in mid-September, swimming along the calanques in the south of France, car-bonnet frost, darkness at 4pm, lightness until 10pm, a muted feeling, the perpetual grey fog that swallows the Silver Coast, the colour red, this ugly green dress, red wine, red blood, red lips, red is the colour of the cardinal’s robe, Switzerland, my mother’s diaries, a coroner’s report, the sun on my face, the end of love, “To enjoy is the only thing. BTCH$”.”

Based in Brighton abroad in the UK was where Zietsch experienced heavy loneliness. But it was during this time that she entered a pool of self-reflection. She returned to Melbourne late 2019 with a soundcloud literally full of demos. She enlisted Tom Iansek (Big Scary / #1 Dads / The Paper Kites / Hockey Dad) to record, mix and produce the first batch of songs she was ready to get down. During the shared time spent at Pieater’s studio BellBird with Iansek, the wider team got to fully appreciate the wonderful artistry and beauty of Maple Glider, and welcomed her to the Pieater family. 

Released June 25th, 2021

All songs written and arranged by Tori Zietsch and Tom Iansek.

Aerial East’s music explores the space between the conscious and unconscious mind, between what was and what will be. She dives into what she has known – adolescence, heartbreak, coming into a new social consciousness, and managing a perpetual unanchored-ness – in order to find a most surprising place to rest inside: the unknowable.

As the daughter of a military family, East spent her late childhood in Europe and teenage years in Abilene, Texas. After dropping out of community college, she moved to New York City where she’d meet a group of musicians whom she would come to befriend and collaborate with (including Okay Kaya, Kelsey Lu, Wet + more). She hopes to tell stories we don’t hear often. “I want to tell stories about people in Texas,” she says, “I want to humanize different characters.”

‘Try Harder’ is a tight yet eclectic record, both sonically and emotionally. “I didn’t want to hear any drums,” East says. “I was going through a period of high anxiety,” she explains, adding that she listened to a lot of solo-piano to calm down during moments of ungroundedness. “I wanted to make a record to be soothing in the same way [as the piano was for her].” So, much to the initial skepticism of her collaborators, East decided against adding drums to her songs. “I just wanted it to be healing and calm, something you can listen to even if the world is ending,” a feeling we can all relate to. She also visualized the record as feeling like the desert at night. “Western but quiet and intimate. I wanted it to have gravity but didn’t want it to be heavy.”

Among many films, artists, and musicians, East drew inspiration from 20th minimalist century painter Agnes Martin. “I wanted the record to feel harmonizing to people. When I look at an Agnes Martin painting I feel realigned,” adding, “I wanted to make something like that.”

A departure from her previous work, on ‘Try Harder’ East’s delicate voice takes centre stage, creating an unvarnished intimacy between her and the listener, a reflection of her live performances. “I wanted the album to be easily translatable into a live show,” she says. “Rooms’ was about a very painful time for me, but it also has a lot of silliness that I still relate to,” she said. “With ‘Try Harder’ I’m moving away from fantasy.”

her new album, ‘Try Harder,’ out now on Partisan Records.

Siouxsie and the Banshees released their fourth studio album, Juju, featuring “Spellbound,” on this day in 1981. Having become one of the pivotal figures in punk rock during the late seventies, by the early part of the next decade, Siouxsie and her band were beginning to find their own feet and creating a brand new sound of their own. There are hits all over the LP too. ‘Spellbound’ and ‘Arabian Knights’ are obvious bangers while a similarly dark territory is explored on ‘Voodoo Dolly’ and ‘Night Shift’, as two fine pieces of goth-pop gone right. While the album was just a stepping stone for the band towards their neo-psyche-pop stardom, the LP is a clear cultural touchpoint for any fledgeling goth.

In 1981 they released the brilliant “Juju”, and it signified a big change, not only in The Banshees’ sound but also in Britain’s culture entirely. The brazen and bratty side of punk had resided, and now there was something more artistic awaiting the group. With Steve Severin’s basslines and Siouxsie’s theatrical vocals, the move into something new was always likely to be a touch darker.

One of the band’s masterworks, “Juju” sees Siouxsie and the Banshees operating in a squalid wall of sound dominated by tribal drums, swirling and piercing guitars, and Siouxsie Sioux’s fractured art-attack vocals. If not for John McGeoch’s  marvellous high-pitched guitars, here as reminiscent of his own work in Magazine, the album would rank as the band’s most gothic release. Siouxsie and company took things to an entirely new level of darkness on “Juju”, with the singer taking delight in sinister wordplay on the disturbing “Head Cut,” creeping out listeners in the somewhat tongue-in-cheek “Halloween,” and inspiring her bandmates to push their rhythmic witches brew to poisonous levels of toxicity. 

Album opener “Spellbound,” one of the band’s classics, ranks among their finest moments and bristles with storming energy. Siouxsie’s mysterious voice emerges from dense guitar picking, Budgie lays into his drums as if calling soldiers to war, and things get more tense from there. “Into the Light” is perhaps the only track where a listener gets a breath of oxygen, as the remainder of the album screams claustrophobia, whether by creepy carnival waterfalls of guitar notes or Siouxsie’s unsettling lyrics. “Arabian Nights” at least offers a gorgeously melodic chorus, but after that the band performs a symphony of bizarre wailings and freaky imagery. As ominous as the cacophony is on its own, close attention to Siouxsie’s nearly subliminal chants paints a scarier picture. A passage such as “I saw you…a huge smiling central face with eyes and lips cut out but smiling and eating lots of other lips” doesn’t exactly brighten one’s day. 

Siouxsie and the Banshees performing “Sin in My Heart” live at Rockpalast in 1981 in Cologne, Germany. “Sin in My Heart” was included on Side Two of Juju, their fourth studio album. It was recorded at Surrey Sound studio with Nigel Gray as co-producer, and released in June 1981 by Polydor. Featuring John McGeoch’s brilliant guitar work, Siouxsie’s rich vocal performances, Steven Severin’s spare bass lines and Budgie’s standout drumming are all evident on this live performance, and what made Juju a post-punk classic.

Steve Severin (guitarist/producer): “Juju was the first time we’d made a “concept”
album that drew on darker elements. It wasn’t pre-planned, but, as we were writing, we saw a definite thread running through the songs, almost a narrative to the album as a whole”.

Her attack-the-world dynamic range on “Voodoo Dolly” predates and out-weirds Bjork’s similar styling years later.  McGeoch and Budgie and bassist Steven Severin deserve just as much credit for crafting an original sound that would inspire a diverse group of future bands.

All the while, producer Nigel Gray maintains the sense that the album is an immediate, edgy performance unfolding right in front of the listener. The upfront intensity of “Juju” probably isn’t matched anywhere else in the catalogue of the band. Thanks to its killer singles, unrelenting force, and invigorating dynamics, 

Flock of Dimes have released “Live At Betty’s” a two-song live EP featuring the “Head Of Roses” album standouts “One More Hour” and “Two,”. The songs were recorded live with a full band – which includes members of Mountain Man and Sylvan Esso – at Betty’s in Durham, North Carolina in the Spring of 2021. Jenn Wasner recorded the acclaimed Head of Roses at the studio in the summer of 2020, and these performances bring the songs to life in the very space in which they were conceived.

The Live at Betty’s EP also celebrates the announcement of Flock Of Dimes’ first headlining US tour dates in support of Head of Roses this fall. Her live band for these shows will include Matt McCaughan (Bon Iver), Alan Good Parker (Natalie Prass, Matthew E. White), and Michael Libramento (Hiss Golden Messenger, Dr. Dog, Floating Action), who also performed on the Live At Betty’s release.

Jenn Wasner – guitar, keys, vocals Matt McCaughan – drums, electronics Michael Libramento – bass, synth bass, keys Nick Sanborn – keys, electronics, percussion Alan Good Parker – guitar Joe Westerlund – percussion Amelia Meath – vocals Molly Sarlé – vocals Alexandra Sauser-Monnig – vocals

Assorted Orchids debut full-length from Massachusetts folk project inspired by Nick Drake, Donovan + early Devendra Banhart

Recorded in the Autumn of 2020 at Wonka Sound Studio in Lowell, Massachusetts, Assorted Orchids’ self-titled debut album consists entirely of steel and nylon-stringed acoustic guitar inspired by the ornate and intricate yet rhythmic and pulsating fingerpicking patterns of Mississippi John Hurt, Donovan, and Nick Drake. Additional instrumentation is kept to a bare minimum and vocals are up front in the mix, fragile but forceful, delicate but precise. With a total running time just shy of 30 minutes, the album was designed and sequenced like a short story: a pure distillation of a single mood. As Pete Seeger would say, it’s “sit-down music”.

Whale Watch Records (Mariee Sioux, Bingo Club) is proud to present these first ten songs of Assorted Orchids. It is music best paired with driving alone at night or sitting in a circle with friends, drinking, smoking, and talking. Don’t forget to dim the lights.” – Whale Watch Records

Produced by longtime friend Cate Le Bon, ‘Boy from Michigan’ is Grant’s most autobiographical and melodic work to date. Grant stopped being a boy in Michigan aged twelve, when his family moved to Denver, Colorado, shifting rust to bible belt, a further vantage point to watch collective dreams unravel. Across 12 tracks, Grant lays out his past for careful cross-examination. In a decade of making records by himself, he has playfully experimented with mood, texture and sound, all the better for actualizing the seriousness of his thoughts.

At one end of his musical rainbow, he is the battle-scarred piano-man, at the other, a robust electronic auteur. ‘Boy from Michigan’ seamlessly marries both. With Le Bon at the helm, Grant pared back his zingers, maximizing the emotional impact of the melodies. A clarinet forms the bedrock of a song. One pre-chorus feels lifted from vintage Human League. There is a saxophone solo. ‘Boy from Michigan’ ultimately swings between ambient and progressive, calm and livid. The album’s narrative journey opens with Grant at his artistic prettiest, three songs drawn from his pre-Denver life (the Michigan Trilogy, as Grant calls them): the title track, “The Rusty Bull,” and “County Fair.” Each draws the listener in to a specific sense of place, before untangling its significance with a rich cast-list of local characters, often symbolizing the uncultivated faith of childhood.

Elsewhere, tracks like “Mike and Julie” and “The Cruise Room” offer an affecting plunge deep into Grant’s late teenage years in Denver, while the midpoint of the album is highlighted by “Best in Me” and “Rhetorical Figure,” a pair of skittish, scholarly dance tunes that build on the lineage of Grant’s electropop heroes, Devo.

Childhood as a horror narrative is the theme of “Dandy Star,” which observes a tiny Grant watching the Mia Farrow horror movie ‘See No Evil’ on an old family TV set, and finally on “The Only Baby” (released this January) Grant removes his razor blade from a pocket to cleanly slit the throat of Trump’s America, authoring a scathing epitaph to an era of acute national exposition.

Though he has lived in Iceland since 2011 – the same year he was also diagnosed HIV-positive – Grant spent his childhood and formative years in the US and maintains US citizenship. Growing up, Grant was subjected to a deeply ingrained hatred of anyone perceived as homosexual at school. Following the demise of his first band The Czars, Grant left music entirely for over five years, only to achieve greater success as a solo artist (his acclaimed 2015 solo LP ‘Grey Tickles, Black Pressure’ went Top Five in the UK). Grant has sold out Royal Albert Hall, performed at Glastonbury, Latitude + more, and his song “Snug Snacks” was featured on Pitchfork’s ‘Songs That Define LGBTQ Pride’.

BBC Radio 6 host Mary Anne Hobbs described Grant’s music: “Most song writing, even if it’s based on a true story … is embellished in some way. But John’s lyrics — they’re so true they might as well be written in blood.”

Growth with no reward. Finding strength in your less desirable traits. Coming up with the perfect comeback hours later in bed, glaring at the ceiling. Asking yourself: am I improving, or am I just changing into something unrecognizable? Chicago quartet Ganser probe the futility of striving for self-growth during the chaos of our times for dark comedy and jagged sounds on their potent new album “Just Look at That Sky”, out July 31st on Felte Records.

Equal parts Space Odyssey and Ghost World, Ganser released their debut LP Odd Talk in 2018 to favourable coverage from The New York Times, Billboard, and Stereogum. Building on their dissociative disorder namesake, the album’s tone vacillated between frenzied and contemplative, probing on questions of communication, intimacy, and avoidance. On Just Look at That Sky, Ganser further explores the personal inner climate of uncertain times.

Opening track “Lucky” announces an explosive energy that evokes the Midwest noise-rock legacy of bands like Jesus Lizard and Shellac, while embracing a more colourful palette of post-punk and art rock influences. Nadia Garofalo and Alicia Gaines, a self-described two-headed monster who share lead vocal duties, can bring both a recalcitrant cool worthy of Kim Gordon and a booming sneer that recalls Poly Styrene; the discordant interplay of Charlie Landsman’s guitar and Brian Cundiff’s drums on standouts “Self Service” and “Bad Form” build to blistering climaxes that wouldn’t feel out of place on Red Medicine-era Fugazi.

And then there’s Ganser’s lyrics: manic explorations of worry and dread mark this record, the epic messiness of daily life in our damaged times attacked with sardonic specificity as often as generalized doom. Just Look at That Sky isn’t afraid to acknowledge that we’re all Extremely Online all the time, but rather explicitly owns it. These songs chart inner monologues of emphatic confusion, emotions already deeply felt further ratcheted up by the anxiety of always having too much information about other people, and always being just one tweet or status update away from knowing what everyone really thinks about us. This culminates in closing track “Bags for Life,” which imagines how online discourse might tackle a front-row seat for the end of the world.

Nadia Garofalo (keyboards/vocals) and Alicia Gaines (bass/vocals) met in art school, bonding over their shared love of The Residents, outsider communities, and transgressive filmmakers like John Waters and David Lynch. The hands-on, DIY craftsmanship honed in those years has carried over into a group that shares writing duties, collaborates closely on music videos and album art, and crafts Brechtian visuals to accompany their maximalist live show. Having shared stages with the likes of Daughters, Oh Sees, Algiers, as well as Modern English, Ganser is a band that refuses to be pinned down, four individuals of diverse backgrounds functioning with the collective consciousness of four people in uncertain times.

These are songs that never shy away from ugliness and confusion, that believe embracing the totality of the self sometimes means leaning into our dickish behavior. In the past, some listeners have had trouble reconciling non-male voices with the sorts of topics Ganser writes about, but that comes to an end with Just Look at That Sky. Co-produced with Electrelane’s Mia Clarke and engineer Brian Fox, this is an assured, fully realized triumph of a record from an art-punk band that’s figured out how to focus on making great art, even if everything else around them falls apart. 

Ganser is Alicia Gaines, Nadia Garofalo, Brian Cundiff, & Charlie Landsman. All songs written & performed by Ganser except “Bags for Life” trumpet and trombone performance by Kevin Natoli & Michael Cox.

Released July 31st, 2020