The Pretenders‘ Chrissie Hynde has shared details of a new Bob Dylan covers album that she recorded largely over text. “Standing In The Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan” will comprises nine renditions of Dylan’s songs and it’s due for release on 21st May – a few days before the icon’s 80th birthday.
Hynde made the record “almost entirely by text message” with her Pretenders bandmate James Walbourne who, according to a press release, would record an initial idea on his phone and send it to Hynde to add her vocal before the tracks were mixed by Tchad Blake.
Speaking about how the album came together and its inspiration, Hynde said: “A few weeks into lockdown last year, James sent me the new Dylan track, “Murder Most Foul”. Listening to that song completely changed everything for me. I was lifted out of this morose mood that I’d been in.
“I remember where I was sitting the day that Kennedy was shot – every reference in the song. Whatever Bob does, he still manages somewhere in there to make you laugh because as much as anything, he’s a comedian. He’s always funny and always has something to say. That’s when I called James and said, ‘Let’s do some Dylan covers’ and that’s what started this whole thing.”
Accompanying the release of Hynde’s album is Tomorrow Is A Long Time, a new film that captures the recording process of her Dylan covers. The Michael Nunn and William Trevitt-directed film features exclusive filmed performances of all nine songs. It airs on Sky Arts on May 24th, Dylan’s birthday.
“Standing In The Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan“
John Hiatt and Jerry Douglas released a live performance video for their new song, “Mississippi Phone Booth”. Filmed at the Cannery Ballroom in Nashville, TN, the video highlights Hiatt’s stellar vocals and lyricism, and Douglas’ thoughtful and innovative instrumentals.
“John Hiattwith The Jerry Douglas Band’s Leftover Feelings was produced by Douglas and recorded at Historic RCA Studio B in Nashville. A meeting of two American music giants in a legendary setting, Leftover Feelings is neither a bluegrass album nor a return to Hiatt’s 1980s days with slide guitar greats Ry Cooder and Sonny Landreth. There’s no drummer, yet these grooves are deep and true. And while the up-tempo songs are, as ever, filled with delightful internal rhyme and sly aggression, The Jerry Douglas Band’s empathetic musicianship nudges Hiatt to performances that are startlingly vulnerable.”
Hiatt and Douglas have known each other for years, but Leftover Feelings is the first time the duo have recorded music together.
Happy to release another track today from my forthcoming album with The Jerry Douglas Band, Leftover Feelings.
From the new album ‘Leftover Feelings,’ out May 21st (New West Records):
UV-TV formed in 2015 when songwriters Rose Vastola and Ian Bernacett were living in Gainesville, Florida. In their earliest days, the band started out making raw, speedy punk songs with the edges softened out by bright melodic sensibilities and faint hints of jangle hiding just beneath the surface.
It’s Always Something with New York City-via-Gainesville trio UV-TV, who are gearing up to release their third album their first entirely written and recorded since their NYC exodus—on May 28th via PaperCup Music. Written and recorded under lockdown in early 2020, the follow-up to their 2017 debut Glass and 2019 second effort Happy promises post-punk angularity, new-wave sheen and jangle-pop hooks, if singles “Distant Lullaby” and this week’s “Back to Nowhere” are any indication.
You’d expect “Back to Nowhere” to find the band overwhelmed and on edge, but instead, they sound more clear-eyed than ever, with songwriters Ian Bernacett and Rose Vastola (now joined by drummer Ian Rose as a full-time member) intertwining their vocals and guitars with slick precision; meanwhile, Rose’s drums and tambourine keep the energy high. The track feels like a modern-day take on The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary,” a fitting kinship, given UV-TV’s drive to find peace in a chaotic world on Always Something.
With third album “Always Something”, UV-TV reach a new plateau, with some of the most intentionally crafted and cleanly rendered songs they’ve delivered so far. The first album to be completely written and recorded since the band’s relocation to New York, and the first since new drummer Ian Rose joined on, Always Something was written and recorded during the intense isolation of early 2020. Day jobs were paused indefinitely and the distractions of everyday life ground to a half, allowing for complete focus on the creative process. While demoing the new material, Vastola and Bernacett pushed their lyrical content to more thoughtful, deliberate places while loosening the grip on their arrangement choices, striking a new balance between control and spontaneity.
Musically, the nine songs that make upAlways Something are a continuation of the sonic identity UV-TV established on earlier albums, with straightforward pop songs ornamented by surreptitiously complex dual guitar work, but there’s a newfound clarity in both the production and the songs themselves. “Distant Lullaby” charges out of the gates with warped guitar hooks that bring to mind pre-Loveless MBV, but instead of drowning the song in predictable shoegazey murk, the instrumentation is bold and the vocals sit confidently at the top of the mix. Where the lyrics on earlier albums were sometimes cloaked in vagueness, the sentiments here are overt and uncluttered. None of this is to say the band has taken a turn toward sterile blandness by any means. The title track weaves together as many different anxieties as it does beautifully overdriven countermelodies, and album centrepiece “Plume” builds slowly from reverb-doused percussion and gentle verses into a roaring wall of gloriously cathartic noise. All of this new growth is anchored by deft but understated guitar work, with some of the band’s strongest material threaded together by guitar parts that range from soft and textural to jaggedly intricate.
Back to Nowhere · UV-TV · Rose Vastola · Ian Bernacett Back to NowherePaperCup Music Released on: 2021-04-20
Mia Berrin-led, Brooklyn-based indie-rock outfit Pom Pom Squad announced their debut album “Death of a Cheerleader”, coming June 25th on City Slang Records, and shared its latest single, “Head Cheerleader,” along with a self-co-directed video. The record is produced by Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties and co-produced by Berrin, while Tegan Quin of Tegan and Sara contributes vocals to “Head Cheerleader.”
In a statement, Berrin describes “Head Cheerleader” as “a celebration of the discomfort that comes with stepping into your new skin—your own power”—on the song itself, she lays claim to that power over cascading power chords and nimble low end, declaring, “I’m learning how to be someone I could put my faith in,” and tossing off clever, self-deprecating one-liners like, “My worst decisions are the ones I like the best” and “My feelings always make a fucking fool of me.” It’s only fitting that a song about Berrin coming into her own also finds her doing exactly that as a songwriter, rising to the occasion of Pom Pom Squad’s much-anticipated first full-length statement as a band.
‘Head Cheerleader’ is taken from Pom Pom Squad’s debut album ‘Death of a Cheerleader’ out June 25th.
Brooklyn alternative-pop duo Overcoats announced a new EP released on April 7th, featuring a new single with fellow pop innovators Tennis. “Used To Be Scared Of The Dark” features contributions from Middle Kids, Lawrence Rothman, and Ryan Hahn of Local Natives.
The EP is based on self-growth and the quest for stability, and all of the collaboration was done remotely to show how trust transcends physicality. Lead single “The Hardest Part” is a summery folk-pop jam aided by Alaina Moore of Tennis’ buttery-smooth vocals and sparkly keyboards to create immersive harmonies that are easy to get lost in. Reflecting on the making of the song, the Overcoats said: “This song is about coming to terms with a relationship being over. And the hard reality that you may never know where that person ends up or what they do. It’s about letting go. We brought this song to Tennis because it needed their nostalgic retro pop sound to help tell this story. And it needed to be cooler.”
Used To Be Scared Of The Dark EP out June 4th! Listen to “The Hardest Part [feat. Tennis]”, out now
We got to make an EP with some of our favourite artists! Used To Be Scared Of The Dark is out June 4th 2021 on Loma Vista Recordings.
This week, Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter, guitarist, and producer Kolezanka (aka Kristina Moore) announced a new album titled “Place Is” and shared a new single from it, “7th St/7th Ave” via a video for it. Place Iswill be out July 30th on Bar/None Records, her debut for the label.
Moore talks about the new song in a press release: “This song lyrically encapsulates a lot of what the record was written about; being here while being there. I was feeling physically split between different homes. I had a home in Phoenix, a home in Brooklyn, and various homes I’d found while being on the road. As I spent time in one place, I felt the other grow farther. I have thought often about ‘place’ vs. ‘space’ the past three years. What makes space a place. If a place is only physically spaced. I used to have awful PTSD flashbacks and heavy dissociation, both of which would function differently, but would leave me feeling disoriented as if I had truly left my body and gone to another place and then come back and forget where I actually am.
More recently, I’ve found myself caught in bouts of nostalgia, where I get caught in a memory and lose my footing in a physical space because the memory is so cinematic. Or I found myself returning home to Phoenix after moving and every part of the city felt filled entirely by events spanning years and it felt overwhelming. The song moves in three parts between three separate homes I was feeling all at once: walking from 7th st. to 7th ave. in Phoenix while the sun was setting, leaving Darlings at 3 a.m. one night in Bushwick and feeling this urge to run back to my apartment as fast as I could, and being at Barton Springs in Austin Texas on a tour, after visiting Barton Springs several times on several tours over a few years, and watching some kids climb a high tree and swinging into the spring from a rope over and over.”
This new track is a trip to the ’70s and a psychedelic vision with overlaying guitar synths and tones of percussion from drummer Ark Calkins. Koleżanka includes lyrics about existing in an “in-between” space much like truckers, flight attendants, and musicians on tour where home has no permanent meaning, and explores instead the emotional connection to a physical realm. “Place Is”continues to grapple the emotional and psychedelic experiences in life by turning them into sound.
She adopted the koleżanka name, which roughly translates to colleague, or a friendly acquaintance, a tongue-in-cheek comment on the competitive and male-dominated music scene she was navigating, and a nod to the bond she felt with the other women coming up against these same obstacles. “We were a minority presence, instant colleagues”, she explains. It was around this same time that she met the members of Triathalon, a rising indie band from New York, and struck up a friendship. Before long, she’d been invited to join the band, handling keys and backing vocals on their first national headline tour, and eventually moving out east to join them full time. One whirlwind year later, her stint with the group was over, and her life in the new city a burning question mark.
The last time we heard new music from St. Vincent, she delivered a pair of radically different albums. There was 2017’s MassEducation, which found Annie Clark teaming with Jack Antonoff for the most immediate and danceable music of her career. And then there was the companion album, 2018’s MassEducation, which reimagined those songs in stark, solo piano arrangements.
Her new album “Daddy’s Home” follow-up appears to be another reinvention, with Clark citing Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, and Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic Taxi Driver as influences. “Can’t wait for you to hear it,” she teased.
St Vincent released the new album, “Daddy’s Home” this weekend via Loma Vista. On Monday she shared the album’s third track, “Down” via a video for it. Bill Benz directed the video, which seems to feature Clark as a private detective in 1970s New York City.
Previously St. Vincent shared the album’s first single, “Pay Your Way In Pain” via a video for the track. The sleazy and funky “Pay Your Way In Pain” sounds like something from Beck’s Midnite Vulturesalbum (from 1999)
Then she shared “The Melting Of The Sun” St. Vincent also performed the track on Saturday Night Live, along with “Pay Your Way In Pain.”
Daddy’s Homewas teased with a series of advertisements. Jack Antonoff co-produced the album with Clark, which was recorded by Laura Sisk, mixed by Cian Riordan, and mastered by Chris Gehringer. In 2019 Clark’s father was released from prison after being incarserated for nine years, hence the album’s title, Daddy’s Home. This led her to revisiting the vinyl records her dad used to play her when she was a child. As a press release puts it: “The records she has probably listened to more than any other music in her entire life. Music made in sepia-toned downtown New York from 1971-1975.” Hence the vibe of the album’s promotion and packaging is decidedly ’70s.
In the press release Clark puts it this way: “Daddy’s Home” collects stories of being down and out in downtown NYC. Last night’s heels on the morning train. Glamour that’s been up for three days straight.”
Torres (aka MacKenzie Scott) announced her new album, “Thirster”, its first single, “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head” via a video for it. She has also announced some North American and European tour dates. Thirstier is due out July 30th via Merge Records.
“Thirstier”will be the follow-up to 2020’s “Silver Tongue” which was her first album for Merge following a one-album stint with 4AD Records“Three Futures”. Thirstier was recorded in the fall of 2020 at Middle Farm Studios in the UK and Scott co-produced the album with Rob Ellis and Peter Miles (she self-produced Silver Tongue). A press release says the album “marks a turn towards a bigger, more bombastic sound for Torres. The anxious hush that fell over much of Scott’s previous music gets turned inside-out in songs tailored for post-plague celebration.” The press release also compares the production to that by Butch Vig on ’90s albums by Nirvana and Garbage.
“I wanted to channel my intensity into something that felt positive and constructive, as opposed to being intense in a destructive or eviscerating way,” Scott says in the press release. “I love the idea that intensity can actually be something life-saving or something joyous.”
Scott indicates that she’s in a good place in her life right now and that the album stems from that. “I’ve been conjuring this deep, deep joy that I honestly didn’t feel for most of my life,” she says. “I feel like a rock within myself. And I’ve started to feel that I have what it takes to help other people conjure their joy, too.”
Scott calls “Don’t Go Puttin Wishes in My Head” her “relentless arena country star moment. “Thirstier” is out July 30th, 2021, on Merge Records
Glass Animals have shared a bizzare new video for ‘Space Ghost Coast To Coast’ The surreal new visual is the latest video to land from the Oxford quartet’s 2020 album “Dreamland”.
“Space Ghost’ is about someone I knew growing up in Texas…” frontman Dave Bayley explained of the track in a statement. “We drifted apart when I moved away at 13, but I found out a few years later he did something truly awful.
“The lyrics of the track are just wondering what makes someone change so much from being an innocent kid to someone who can even consider doing what he did. It talks about how in the 2000s, violent video games and lyrics were blamed by the media for that type of misbehaviour in teenagers…but really I think there were much bigger societal problems at play.
Discussing the video, Bayley added: The video is a twist on those video games. Every video we have made in the last year has been made in peak lockdown…we had to get creative. In this case, Max came up with the idea that he could film me dancing in the park while sitting in his apartment. He was giving me direction the whole time via phone in my earbuds. It starts there and gets more and more surreal.”
“DREAMLAND” Is out now, I’m feeling somewhere between absolute terror & super excitement. I really hope you enjoy it.
The Black Keys are an American rock band formed in Akron, Ohio, in 2001. The group consists of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney.
The new album “Delta Kream” from America’s Most Trusted Band came out today and it already has everybody talking. Here are The Black Keys with “Going Down South,” the first of Two songs they will perform for A Late Show special today! Stick around tonight when Stephen Colbert will introduce Dan, Patrick, and the band for a special televised performance of their hot new single, “Crawling Kingsnake.” as well.
For their second performance on the A Late Show today, our friends The Black Keys jam out on their latest single, “Crawling Kingsnake,” from their new album “Delta Kream,” which is out now!
The album celebrates the band’s roots and features eleven Mississippi hill country blues songs by R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, among others. Recorded at Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville, the album takes its name from William Eggleston’s iconic Mississippi photograph that is on its cover. Delta Kream features musicians Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton, long-time members of the bands of blues legends including R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, and Sam Bacco on auxiliary percussion.
Dan Auerbach commented, We made Delta Kream to honour the Mississippi hill country blues tradition that influenced us when we started out. These songs are still as important to us today as they were the first day Pat and I started playing together and picked up our instruments. It was a very inspiring session with Pat and me, along with Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton, in a circle playing these songs. It felt so natural.
We’ve also been working on so many new things at Easy Eye. We got a new Robert Finley record coming out called Sharecropper’s Son later this month, and we were on TV a little while ago with Aaron Frazer for his new album, Introducing…, that we recorded at the studio, and we’ve been working in the studio with Yola for her album Stand for Myself that’s due out in July. Everyone is really excited about that record.
