The Fat Angel Sings

As part of the Jim Beam Welcome Sessions series, Jack Garratt pulled together a nine-piece choir and six-piece horn section, plus a drummer and a keyboardist, for a performance of his single, “Time”, at the Village Underground in East London. The ensemble production was a departure from the norm for Garratt, who’s built a career around self-sufficiency. 

After releasing his debut album, Phase, in early 2016, the London-based performer tallied more than 100 shows around the world, all of which he played solo. To see Garratt in this mode is to witness a marvellous feat of multi-instrumental coordination, as he switches between guitars, sequencers, synths and electronic drums while creating loops in real time and singing with complete conviction. 

The Brit Award-winning songwriter’s onstage application mirrors his methods behind the scenes. Garratt is responsible for every layer of instrumentation on both Phase and his latest LP, 2020’s Love, Death & Dancing, and there’s always been a strong thread of soul-searching intimacy to his lyricism. 

But despite his solitary creative methods and confidential lyricism, Garratt’s music bears little trace of insularity. He’s an eminently contemporary artist whose sound is characterised by indiscriminate genre-merging. To describe Love, Death & Dancing as maximalist feels like an understatement, as Garratt sews together elements of house and dubstep with indie pop, arena rock and neo-R&B. 

Love, Death & Dancing was released in June 2020, in the midst of the COVID lockdowns. And even for a fiercely independent artist like Garratt, this period of compulsory seclusion left him yearning for human connection. 

“I kind of force myself into a weird solitary confinement when it comes to creating these songs,” he says. “Being in a venue with a bunch of people is then the first time these songs are allowed to breathe.”

As such, the release of Love, Death & Dancing felt incomplete for Garratt, which directly informed his decision to assemble the 17-strong collective for the debut Jim Beam Welcome Sessions performance. In “Time”, Garratt knew he had the ideal track for such a collaboration. 

“Time” is a mini-epic, beginning as a guitar-toting power ballad and gradually morphing into a euphoric dance pop number. The track’s dynamic constitution perfectly lends itself to a quasi-orchestral re-arrangement. Plus, with lyrics such as “Now everything you think you know / Of your design / Is trembling at the edges,” it’s hard to think of a more thematically salient song given the context.

“Since I finished touring Phase and having gone on a three year hiatus, the first song I released was ‘Time,’” says Garratt. “All of the emotions it conjures up… the song’s lyrical content [is] about the importance that I put on my future, the stress that I put on my future and how ill-advised that is and how unnecessary that is.” 

While no crowds were allowed in the Village Underground during the filming, Garratt worked with Parisian music video exemplars La Blogothèque to create a tactile and engrossing film experience. The idea was to break down the barrier between performer and audience, emphasising the extended network of people that contributes to making a great live show. 

“All of our roles are equally important: performer, coat check, security, bar staff, audience, crew,” Garratt says. “The whole point of the camera being on my shoulder the whole time is it’s supposed to be an immersive point of view experience about celebrating an audience’s role in a venue like that.”

Located in the heart of ultra-hip Shoreditch, the Village Underground holds deep significance for Garratt. The 700-capacity venue, housed within a retrofitted Victorian-era railway warehouse, was the site of his first major London headline show back in 2015. Suffice to say, there was a lot riding on the Village Underground show. “It was a sold out show, so that was exciting,” says Garratt. But nothing quite prepared him for the feedback he got from the crowd that night. “It confirmed to me that everything I was doing up until that point was working towards something that was bigger than me and bigger than everyone in the room,” he says.

“I got to celebrate that I was there to enjoy a moment with a group of people that I felt like accepted me, but on the other side, I also got to have the affirmation of knowing my music had got me there.”

Well the big one this week is Tom McLung’s newest album as Francis Lung, and it’s a doozie. There’s obvious nods to classic rock and prog of the 70’s, whilst retaining the sunshine pop aesthetic. Full of clever key changes and dual guitar solos, knowing references and soaring melodies akimbo, it’s stunningly clever and brilliantly written throughout, and a good distance from his equally excellent but entirely different early work. The video for ‘the Let Down’ is a particularly wonderful and decidedly oddball offering, but illustrates perfectly the humour and playfulness with which this record was conceived. It’s a fine line between playful and silly, and ‘Miracle’ is every bit the serious record that knows how to have fun, a perfect balance.

Kings Of Convenience, returning for the first time in twelve long years. Think rippling lyrical streams, dappled harmonies and percussive fjords, leading into easy listening tributaries before landing in a still and sun speckled sea. It’s immediately restful and gorgeously contemplative.

Also there’s a superb debut EP from West Yorkshire’s latest musical Wunderkinds, The Lounge Society hailing from (where else) Hebden Bridge. It’s a unique sounding but still comfortingly familiar mix of psychedelic rock (what do they put in the water there?), indie and more dancefloor orientated sounds like disco and rave. It’s great to hear so many wonderful bands coming out of the area, and exciting to think about what this promising band have coming in the future.

Francis Lung – Miracle

Miracle is the new album from Manchester singer songwriter Francis Lung on Memphis Industries Despite its serious subject matter, Miracle is far from austere in sound, marrying the cinematic, dreamlike quality of Francis’s earlier music with the pared-back charm of great singer-songwriters like Judee Sill, Jeff Tweedy and Elliott Smith.

Miracle was produced by Francis in collaboration with Brendan Williams (Dutch Uncles, Matthew Halsall, Kiran Leonard) and Robin Koob (who co-arranged and performed strings). The result is a cohesive, deeply personal record, which is as vital as it is vulnerable.

One random person will get a Signed Test Pressing. No purchase necessary to be with a chance to get this.

Frank Zappa  – Zappa ’88: The Last US Show

The first posthumous archival release from the 1988 touring band focuses on the historical last show Frank Zappa ever played in the U.S. The final U.S. concert was at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, NY, on March 25th, 1988, featuring the first official release of the much-talked-about “The Beatles Medley”; newly mixed by Craig Parker Adams from the 48-track digital master tapes;  Vinyl four-LP box set; Zappa / UMe records

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis – Carnage

Carnage is a new album by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, recorded over a period of weeks during lockdown. Although the pair have composed and recorded many soundtracks together, and Ellis is a long-term member of The Bad Seeds, this is the first time they have released an entire album of songs as a duo. Cave describes the album as “a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe.”

“Making Carnage was an accelerated process of intense creativity,” says Ellis, “the eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two and a half days.” Cave and Ellis’ sonic and lyrical adventurism continues apace on Carnage, an album that emerged almost by accident out of the downtime created by the long, anxious, global emergency. Carnage is a record for these uncertain times – one shot through with moments of distilled beauty and that resonates with an almost defiant sense of hope.

The Lounge Society – Silk For The Starving EP

Calder Valley’s The Lounge Society release their Dan Carey-produced debut EP Silk For The Starving – out on Speedy Wunderground (Squid, black midi, Loyle Carner, Black Country, New Road). With their first two singles under their belts – “Generation Game”, the fastest selling 7″ for the award-winning label, and “Burn The Heather” – plus a raft of Ones To Watch accolades for 2021, there is much anticipation for what lies next for the band.

In early 2020, “Generation Game” announced the band as artists shaping powerful narratives around a fast-fragmenting society. With the lyric “what will the US do?” they served up a painfully prescient prediction of American unrest. Follow-up single “Burn The Heather” made a left-hand turn for the more punk-funk, sneering at culture wars and the damaging impact of a class divide.

New single “Cain’s Heresy” shakes with the propulsion of a nimble rhythm section, full of bite and scorn, simultaneously swinging angrily at a negligent political class (“The death of four souls is less than a kick in the teeth, for them”), the threat of misinformation (“Poisonous ideals on the screen breed a vicious way of thinking, off the screen”) and the noxious follow-the-leader march of celebrity culture (“They’re servants to fame”). The EP title Silk For The Starving in itself probes at a society that routinely neglects the needs of the have-nots. The Lounge Society sing about what they know then. Make no mistake, this is the sound of young England: articulate, enraged and energised. And – perhaps crucially – highly danceable too. It should give hope to anyone who has lost faith in the future, because here the future is in safe hands.

Amythyst Kiah – Wary Strange

Amythyst Kiah is redefining the limits of roots music. Today, the mould-shattering singer / songwriter who Rolling Stone calls “one of Americana’s great up-and-coming secrets,” makes her Rounder Records debut with the release of a radically reimagined version of her song “Black Myself.”

With an unforgettable voice that’s both unfettered and exquisitely controlled, Amythyst’s ability to cross boundaries is born from struggle. Growing up a Black and LGBTQ+ woman in the Bible Belt, she experienced severe social anxiety, grief, alienation – and ultimately, the hard-won triumph of total self-acceptance.

Kings Of Convenience – Peace Or Love

Peace or Love is the sound of two old friends exploring the latest phase of their lives together and finding new ways to capture that elusive magic. recorded across five years in five different cities, the album sounds as fresh as spring: 11 songs about life and love with the alluring beauty, purity and emotional clarity that you would expect from Kings of Convenience.

The Catenary Wires – Birling Gap

Indie pop comes of age! Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey love pop songs, but pop songs with an edge. With their early bands Talulah Gosh and Heavenly, they were often dismissed by critics of the time as fey or ‘twee’, but this prejudice has since been revised: some of those sweet fizzy songs were about date-rape, and the band were an influential part of the movement that became riot grrrl.

On their new album as The Catenary Wires, the songs are as strong as ever, full of sweet melody and rich with vocal harmonies. But the tunes are now vehicles for startlingly honest adult concerns: the fractured relationships, anxieties, passions and politics of people who live on an island that’s turning in on itself. Like the Go-Betweens and XTC before them, The Catenary Wires know that pop music can convey dark, sardonic, complex emotions, just as well as it can celebrate teenage angst.

The album depicts England, not just in its lyrics, but in its music. The Catenary Wires have listened to the songs and stories England has comforted itself with over the decades, and re-imagined them. Canterbury Lanes presents a duetting couple, old now and worn down, but still aspiring to put their folk band back together, hoping to rekindle the idealistic flames of the early 1970s. Mirrorball, fizzy with syn-drums and Casio, presents another couple – middle-aged and unattached, who find unexpected love at a retro 80s disco. In the 70s-flavoured pop of Always on my Mind, love appears again, almost by surprise, conjured up by an old photo in a pile of memorabilia.

The opening track, Face on the Rail Line, is a love song set in the now, full of emotion, but shot through with the paranoia that we all feel, living at a time when we are constantly in contact, but rarely communicate the truth. The last two songs on the album, Like the Rain, and The Overview Effect, are anxious romances, set in a fragile world.

The Catenary Wires are now a five-piece band. The other members have impressive musical pedigrees of their own. Fay Hallam was in Makin’ Time, and now releases records in her own name. Andy Lewis played bass in the Weller Band, and has more recently worked with Louis Phillippe and Judy Dyble. Ian Button was in Thrashing Doves and Death in Vegas. These talented musicians elevate the songs, taking the arrangements onto another level.

Pink Floyd – Live In Montreux 1970

This double vinyl LP contains nine tracks originally broadcast by Swiss Radio in November 1970 in excellent quality. Material is taken from all sections of the Pink Floyd’s output to date with two tracks that do not appear on the band’s official albums. The instrumental interplay between the four members is particularly strong, reflecting the many gigs the band had played together.

Side One: 1. Astronomy Domine 2. Fat Old Sun.

Side Two: 1. Cymbaline 2. Embryo.

Side Three: 1. Green Is The Colour 2. Careful With That Axe, Eugene 3. Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun.

Side Four: 1. A Saucerful Of Secrets 2. Just Another Twelve Bar

The Allman Brothers Band – “Bear’s Sonic Journals Fillmore East, February 1970 deluxe edition

A three-CD set, offering the complete recordings from February. 11th, 13th-14th, 1970, with expanded booklet; Allman Brothers Band Recording Company.

New York-based duo Water From Your Eyes have a new album, “Structure”, due out on August 27th via Wharf Cat, their first album for the label. This week they shared its second single, the dreamy horn-backed love song “When You’re Around” which references the band’s name in the lyrics and has a very Beach Boys vibe. It’s the opening song to Structure.

The duo’s last album was 2019’s Somebody Else’s Song.

Water From Your Eyes is Nate Amos and Rachel Brown. Amos had this to say about the new song in a press release: “‘When You’re Around’ is the first ‘movie’ song on Structure. It was written for a karaoke scene that never came to fruition (I probably would’ve written something else if it had because I like this song too much). It was initially supposed to be a straight-forward love song but it gradually twisted and developed a weird sea-sick core. I was really obsessed with the album Climate of Hunter by Scott Walker (still am) and I think that had a lot to do with it.

‘Structure’s”…structure, as the album is arranged in what Amos describes as “two matching halves.” Each side of the LP begins with what he and Brown term “a movie song” (the first of these “When You’re Around” was originally written to soundtrack a karoake scene in a coming-of-age indie film), which is followed by a spoken word piece and then ends with different songs called “Quotations” Tracks 3,4,7 and 8 all contain re-arranged versions of the same lyrical phrases, and the song entitled “Track 5” is actually the album’s 6th track. All of this may sound bewildering, but the conceptual feints pale in comparison to the auditory hall of mirrors that Water From Your Eyes have created on the album.  

Light on the outside, spooky on the inside. It serves as sort of separate but thematically related scene to set the tone for the rest of the album.”

Previously Water From Your Eyes shared the album’s first single, “Quotations”. A previous press release said that “it’s a concept album that pokes fun of the idea of concept albums, exploring high-minded ideas while subverting them and applying a hyper-focused eye for detail in the service of a series of clever misdirections.”

Three months into the pandemic, Country Westerns full length debut LP was released without a release show, tour, or any of the usual fanfare. A departure from lockdown, Country Westerns recorded covers for fun. The resulting EP, “Country Westerns EP” was engineerd by Daniel Schlett and produced by Matt Sweeney. Originally planned a digital only EP, Available now is a release of limited edition 10″s. 

Country Westerns is a three-piece rock band from Nashville that sounds nothing like its name. Drummer Brian Kotzur (Trash Humpers, Silver Jews) and singer-songwriter-guitarist Joseph Plunket (The Weight, Gentleman Jesse) began working on songs together in 2016, after bonding over the shared desire to be in a band in a town full of solo artists and guns-for-hire. Following a couple of years writing and playing shows with varying lineups, Sabrina Rush (State Champion) joined the band as bassist. The now complete Country Westerns recorded their debut album in New York and Nashville, encouraged by friend and producer Matt Sweeney. Plunket’s raspy bravado and subtle twang, his insistent 12-string guitar riffs, Kotzur’s dynamic and metronomic drumming, and Rush’s harmonic bass playing create hyper catchy rock songs, with lyrics that bend towards poetry and punk rock sneer in equal measure.

Released June 18th, 2021

Welsh singer songwriter Ailsa Tully, last week is something of a landmark for Ailsa, as she has detailed the release of her debut EP, “Holy Isle”, due out next month on Dalliance Recordings. Alongside the announcement, Ailsa has shared a brand-new single, “Greedy”.

Discussing the inspiration behind the EP, Ailsa has suggested it is a record that looks in the rear-view mirror, reflecting on a past relationship with empathy and well-wishes rather than anger or sadness. As well as thematically looking back, the record also saw Ailsa re-connect with her first instrument, the cello. On “Greedy“, it plays a part in the delightfully fast-moving whole, this is a song that never stays still, shifting through musical ideas and moods and dragging the listener along for the thrilling ride. At times the track sounds like it’s going to slide into bass-driven rock, before instead floating off on a delightfully delicate vocal melody or a wave of dreamy guitars.

A song Ailsa describes as being about, “opening myself up to the world in a new and messy way”, Greedy might be a song that does exactly that. Ailsa has received support from BBC Radio’s Huw Stephens, BBC Introducing and Hoxton Radio. Her most recent accomplishment is signing to Dalliance Recordings (Home to acts including GIA Margaret and Wilsen).

Desperate Journalist’s new single “Personality Girlfriend” is out now. Their 4th album “Maximum Sorrow”! follows on July 2nd.

It was a damned Good Friday, as Easter 2021 saw the return of noirish alt.goth roustabouts Desperate Journalist, who piled back into the eerily empty marketplace with a brand new single called Fault on April 2nd. Fault is the first track to be hauled from Desperate Journalist’s thoroughly forthright fourth album, “Maximum Sorrow!”, recorded entirely in Crouch End in the midst of the Covid pandemic.

Driven along by Simon Drowner’s ear-popping bassline, Fault finds the quartet in impeccably brutalist form, all banshee howls and self-lacerating lyrics from singer Jo Bevan: “And those teenage hang ups are hard to beat / When your closet is piled up with defeat,” she snaps at one especially prickly point, as alongside her guitarist Rob Hardy and drummer Caz Hellbent can only add fiery fuel to the sonic flaming’s.

It fits, too: like much of the rest of the album Fault is both playful and, like the finest public house pint glass, half-full of rage; where swirling Heart Of Glass synths are serenaded by shattered lyrics and ‘Poison Pen’ manages to put down put-down lines like: “You are oh so tall and sesquipedalian,” without somehow sounding like a pompous arse. Because this is Desperate Journalist in hyper-dynamic form, super sleek, but never sickly slick; ambitious and expansive, but still self-effacingly DIY to the core. If the ‘Maximum Sorrow!’ title is punchy then the music ripples with alt.rock muscle built up over seven years of relentless gigging and releases, like a fierce panther on the prowl.

Releases July 2nd, 2021

Carnage is a new album by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, recorded over a period of weeks during lockdown. Although the pair have composed and recorded many soundtracks together, and Ellis is a long-term member of The Bad Seeds, this is the first time they have released an entire album of songs as a duo. Cave describes the album as “a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe.”

“Making Carnage was an accelerated process of intense creativity,” says Ellis, “the eight songs were there in one form or another within the first two and a half days.” Cave and Ellis‘ sonic and lyrical adventurism continues apace on Carnage, an album that emerged almost by accident out of the downtime created by the long, anxious, global emergency. Carnage is a record for these uncertain times – one shot through with moments of distilled beauty and that resonates with an almost defiant sense of hope.

Cave & Ellis’ sonic and lyrical adventurism continues apace on Carnage, an album that emerged almost by accident out of the downtime created by the long, anxious, global emergency. Carnage is a record for these uncertain times – one shot through with moments of distilled beauty and that resonates with an almost defiant sense of hope.

For such a literate person, Nick Cave does his new album with Warren Ellis a bit of a disservice by choosing to describe it as “a brutal but very beautiful record nested in a communal catastrophe.” That is, of course, an accurate description of what this music is, but it doesn’t really encompass everything Carnage can blossom into once it reaches the listener’s ear. Part of what’s made Cave and Ellis’ voluminous body of work so beguiling is the way that primary-colour descriptors like “brutal” and “beautiful” lose their meaning in the endless shades the two musicians have at their disposal. And to prime the audience to expect something that slots neatly into Cave’s setup is to constrain an extraordinarily complex work of art. Regardless of how the COVID backstory makes the music relatable, the ambiguity here—both disorienting and rewarding—is one of Carnage’s main selling points. 

Elvis Costello & The Attractions – “Goodbye Cruel World” is Elvis Costello’s ninth album, released on this day (June 18) in 1984. During the making of “Goodbye Cruel World” Costello was undergoing a multitude of personal problems, including a divorce, that resulted in a number of poor production decisions and ill-conceived, unformed songs.

Despite the fact that Costello was going through a song writing slump, there’s moments in Goodbye Cruel World that resemble something close to brilliance – when the production permits it, the charming bitterness of “Worthless Thing”, or “The Comedians”, can prove to be quite enjoyable. Overall, it’s a more cynical record than usual, which is sometimes ironically accentuated by the counterpoint of its overtly playful production. Other times however, the synthesized production either gets in the way (“The Deportees Club” may have been a worthy companion to Trust’s “Luxembourg”, had it been given to Nick Lowe production duties.

 “Goodbye Cruel World” was produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, who were the top British hitmakers of the ’80s. Consequently, most of the record suffers from a stiff, synthesized production that instantly dates the record. In some cases — like the duet with Daryl Hall, “The Only Flame in Town,” and the cover of the lost Hi R&B gem “I Wanna Be Loved” — the songs benefit from the shiny, streamlined production but it obscures the merits of the finest songs on the album. “Room with No Number,” “The Comedians,” “Sour Milk-Cow Blues,” and “Peace in Our Time” all cry out for a more simple, stripped-down presentation, but they’re weighted down with stylized sounds and trendy synthesizers; however, once the sound of the album settles in, the strength of these songs is apparent.

The remainder of “Goodbye Cruel World” isn’t as memorable, primarily because of Costello’s uninspired vocals and The Attractions’ muted performances fail to make the weaker songs musically compelling.

King Buffalo’s 3rd Full-Length album release, From the time Rochester, New York, trio King Buffalo announced last March that they’d be releasing three full-lengths over the course of the next 12 months

In today’s pandemic ridden world a challenge as much about logistics in pressing and distributing schedules, if not more so, as about recording the material itself with each one recorded in a different circumstance, anticipation has justly run high. The first of them, which is both part-one-of-three and the band’s third standalone long-player in its own right — a pivotal arrival for any act is “The Burden of Restlessness“, which collects seven tracks across 40 minutes of existence plainly derailed. That is to say, had 2020 not played out as it did in times of pandemic and sociopolitical unrest, King Buffalo‘s third LP would invariably be a much different outing.

The Burden of Restlessness captures the tension of paranoia and fear in its sharp guitar chugs, the notion of things going wrong but proceeding apace in its odd time signatures, churning and roiling grooves and the melancholy and languishing brought on by lockdown and lack of direction in its lyrics, as well as the inward and outward frustration brought on by the decaying of American political norms, the country nearly confronting its troubled history with racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, as well as the right wing anti-progress cacophony that eventually manifested in the (arguably successful) terrorist putsch on the US Capitol in January.

The Burden of Restlessness can only be considered a success. It not only realizes a bridge between progressive heavy rock and psychedelia in a manner that is their own, but perhaps serves just as an initial stretch in an even wider blossoming of sound and craft. No matter what the next one or the one after brings, The Burden of Restlessness is one of 2021’s best and a fittingly otherworldly document of this surreal era.

The new album, ‘The Burden of Restlessness’ available June 4th.

Written and recorded by King Buffalo in Rochester, NY at the Main Street Armory in December of 2020 & January of 2021