Tele Novella is a project out of Lockhart, Texas–a small town lost in time–where their classic and sincere pop song writing is slowly processed through a loner medieval-tonk machine and then captured on cassette 8-track. Their forthcoming record, Merlynn Belle, was the music they wanted to be making all along but didn’t know until it happened accidentally.
Sometimes the best things happen by accident and for Natalie Ribbons and Jason Chronis of Tele Novella, that is exactly the case with their latest single, “Paper Crown.”Ribbons recalls how she wrote part of this upbeat song to keep herself occupied while at work. “I wrote the very first verse of this song about nine years ago when I was a cook at a Thai restaurant,” Ribbons shares. “I used to make up little ditties to sing while I would chop up lime leaves and chilies, and this just happened to be one that stayed in my head all these years.”
Although this verse was written with the assumption that it would only remain a verse, with their sophomore album, Merlynn Belle, out now, it became much more.
“When I considered this little song fragment, I was immediately very inspired and wrote the rest of the song in one sitting,” says Ribbons. With its enchanting lyrics, “Paper Crown” is the perfect tune to make you feel inspired, and make you want to live every day to the fullest. It’s the type of melody to stick with you, even when you’re chopping lime leaves and chilies.
“This song embodies a feeling that sometimes spontaneously overcomes me, where I am just heart bursting-ly, madly in love with life and with the moment,” adds Ribbons. “Times like these, I just want to do anything within the realm of my abilities to leave a mark on this world and play a part in decorating time as it passes.
Since forming little over a year ago, London’s desert-rockers The Howlers have quickly identified themselves as one of the UK’s must-see live acts. Though forming so relatively recently, vocalist Adam Young explains that they’ve been playing music most of their lives, in various bands and cover bands. “Gus, our bass player, is from the Netherlands originally and he was in a wedding covers band from the age of fourteen. So we’ve got interesting backgrounds. We’ve not been playing music together that long but were one of the tightest bands out there, and it feels like a lifetime.”
“Last year I lost a family member to Covid 19”, he tells me, when asked about any happy moments in the previous few months. “Which isn’t the answer to that question,” he quickly adds, “but it is to answer it. So it was shit, and the way we dealt with it as a band was probably my most happiest moment, because we used music as a way to get through that. We ended up having this week of normality, and that for me was … life changing’s a bit too profound, but I look back and think, I wouldn’t change it for the world. And I know the person I lost would see that.”
Though the group have mentioned before that they don’t believe music should be political, an analysis of their lyrics reveals an abundance of political themes. “Our generation is very much politically aligned”, Adam says. “We all know who the dickheads are in power. But that doesn’t mean we have to shout about it. It seems like every band out there at the moment thinks that to be a musician, you need to buy a pair of Dr Martins and you need to be angry and shout and it’s like, I get that … but can we not give someone a bit of hope about something else?.
Adam explains that like many artists, they think fashion and music goes hand in hand. “How we dress is very important to us,” he explains. “We’ve always been extroverted even before we were a band. I’d walk into a room wearing a neckerchief and a 70s shirt and jacket, and I’m from a working class town where everyone’s wearing Adidas or Lacoste tracksuits. He elaborates that when you play gig after gig, you realise people do want that performance – the escapism it helps provide. “It’s just what we enjoy. And I love the iconography of the 70s – the Western films and stuff, and my character on stage is exactly that. It’s almost like putting on a uniform.”
“Bowie wouldn’t have done that well if he was just wearing a nike t-shirt,” he laughs. “The geezer dressed in glittery catsuits – you can’t sing Ziggy Stardust dressed as if you’re about to go on an away day. That’s not to compare us to Bowie – that’s unbelievably egotistical.” And egotistical, the group are definitely not.
Interestingly, they thought their most successful track, ‘Matador’, would be a failure. “We thought it’d be shit. Honestly. We wrote it and we were like, it’s not radio worthy. Its got something like 27 words in the whole song. It’s not a song, it’s a bit of music. There is talk of an upcoming tour, coming in the spring of 2021. “If it goes ahead I’ll be very excited,” Young says. “But it probably will be postponed. We actually took our set, ripped it up and threw it out the window, and wrote a whole new set. So were just excited to play it all now.”
Undoubtedly, The Howlers have all the passion and dedication needed to make it a long, long way in their industry, and release a debut album that sky rockets itself to great heights of popularity. Keep your eyes on this 3 piece band for 2021,
This last year, indie rockers Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers all released acclaimed solo albums. The three Singer Songwriters guitarist-vocalists were booked on a North American tour together, with Baker and Bridgers co-headlining and Dacus opening. But that wasn’t enough: They also quickly formed a supergroup, and gave it a tongue-in-cheek name that nods to how women are rarely called geniuses with the frequency the way their male peers are. After the trio released its self-titled EP, on which they take turns in the frontwoman role and elsewhere blend their voices and instruments together in perfect bliss. The EP’s uniting thread, though, will surely be the clear-cut lyricism they all have in common, which packs a witty punch line after line. Some might even call it genius.
The debut from rock supergroup boygenius has only one real flaw: it’s much too short. Its length (still on the longer side for an EP, at six songs) is forgivable, though: The women behind boygenius—Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus—are busy artists. They’ve each released a critically-adored solo LP in the last year or so and have thusly been swamped with promotional duties and live performances. So although these ladies aren’t technically “new artists,” their supergroup is new, and music is better for it. On boygenius, the three become one, miraculously and pristinely so. Bridgers, Baker and Dacus pack a novel’s worth of narrative and as many masterful melodies (not to mention harmonies) into just 21 minutes that will leave you feeling as if you’ve had the wind knocked right out of you.
The album ends on an especially magical note. On “Ketchum, ID,” Bridgers, Dacus and Baker assume soprano, alto and tenor and churn up a harmony so handsomely melancholic you’ll find yourself snatching tissues without even knowing why. It’s a fitting epilogue, too, that chronicles the band’s shared experience as touring musicians, and the emotional heaviness following those long nights in unfamiliar places. “I am never anywhere / Anywhere I go,” they sing in unison. “When I’m home I’m never there / Long enough to know.” Those are devastating words, but, at the same time, you get the feeling Bridgers, Baker and Dacus have found some sense of home in one another.
boygenius performed songs off their first EP live at Brooklyn Steel for Pitchfork Live
Setlist:0:50 Souvenir 5:10 Bite the Hand 8:50 Stay Down 13:35 Me & My Dog 17:50 Salt in the Wound 23:35 Ketchum, ID
Their mutual experiences are what unite them, and that bond bleeds through this music in every buzzing, beautiful bar.
Pale Waves have just dropped ‘She’s My Religion’, another track to be released from their upcoming album “Who Am I?”.
A track following the story of a cynical girl and the speaker’s love for her, it fights against the usual stigma that darker characters are unlovable and Hollywood’s preference for positive love interests. This normalisation of unhappy characters still being necessary to our lives can be heard in the lyrics, “She helped me find a different kind of love, made me feel like I was finally enough / She’s cold, she’s dark, she’s cynical, she’s forever angry at the world / She’s no angel but she’s my religion”.
Opening with a soft solo guitar, Heather’s vocals join in a whispery tone and set the scene for the love story. Suddenly, the chorus of the song brings the power that we’re used to from Pale Waves. With blasted vocals that’ll be screamed by everyone who can relate, the verses go back to a slow paced track creating a nice balance between passion and sincerity.
In an age where hetrosexual couples are still the focus of popular media unless being the feature of a dramatic and often overwhelming and exaggerated hollywood film, it’s refreshing to see Pale Waves talking about homosexuality in such a casual and accessible way. It allows young people to find themselves without being scared to ask questions or feeling isolated from a community because they haven’t felt the struggles of past generations. This accessibility along with the erasure of the usual clichés of over-sexualisation or experimentation is exactly why Pale Waves made the cover of Gay Times this year.
‘Who Am I?’ is the second album from indie-pop icons Pale Waves, due for release on February 12th 2021.
Recorded in Los Angeles over early 2020 with Rich Costey (muse, biffy clyro, sigur ros), and led by the unabashedly huge lead single ‘Change’, it finds the Manchester band stepping up once more, fulfilling the promise of that widely-lauded debut album and striding towards pop megastardom.
From the new album ‘Who Am I?’, out February 12th – Dirty Hit Records.
The introduction to “Friends On Ice” reverberates like the switching on of machinery, the transfer of emotion through engagement or the wheel of cognitive thought ahead of comprehension. The thought-provoking new single by Danish collective Yung is cut from their upcoming LP which arrives this month on PNKSLM Recordings.“Friends on Ice” came about as a consequence of Mikkel being challenged to strum the most difficult guitar chord he could come up with. This approach has since become a go-to suggestion to any kind of creative block we encounter.
The instrumental repetition and momentum that Yung develop in the track seems to embody grief itself, allowing a contemplative and confessional lyrical delivery to drift ghostlike through the mix. On the subject of lyricism, vocalist and songwriter Mikkel Holm Silkjær explains, “It’s a song about alienation, loneliness and the immediate remedies we, as individuals in western society, turn to when confronted with pain or struggle.”
Previous singles taken from the band’s upcoming record – “Such a Man” and “Above Water” – offer a more combative and dynamic post-punk sound, which reveals “Friends On Ice” as a unique feat and a perfect album closer. Mikkel Holm Silkjær reiterates, “Capitalism promotes individualism, which makes a lot of people think they have to deal with issues and problems in life on an individual level, when often we’d be much better off if we dealt with things on a collective level.”
The sophomore record by the Aarhus quartet is entitled “Ongoing Dispute” and arrives January 22nd.
Taking influence from 80’s post-punk, Factory & Creation era bands, Winter Gardens have developed their own ‘dream-punk’ sound, with all the ethereal haze of shoegaze & dream-pop combined with the energy of punk.
Based out of East Sussex, Winter Gardens caught the ear of many back in 2020 with their debut EP, “Tapestry”. While there are no plans announced for this year yet, it was a collection of tracks that hinted at a band with a very bright future. Released through Austerity Records, a new socially-conscious independent record label part-owned by the band’s guitarist Jamie Windless,Tapestry is a record heavily influenced by the 80’s indie sounds of labels like Creation and 4AD, bands who fused the worlds of dream-pop and the rawness of punk
Across its four tracks, “Tapestry” incorporates moments of lush introspection, such as the Lanterns On The Lake-like title track, as well as moments of ferocious energy, with the excellently titled Zigzanny, reminiscent of The Joy Formidable. Even if no further new music arrives this year, I can only hope 2021 gives the band the opportunity to take this record out to the live environment, and having already played with the likes of Penelope Isles and Say Sue Me, that’s something well worth being very excited about.
We The People were a garage rock supergroup from Orlando, Florida, formed from members of The Coachmen, the Nation Rocking Shadows, and The Offbeets. The band boasted two songwriters, Tommy Talton and Wayne Proctor. Talton’s ‘You Burn Me Up and Down’ is the second song from We The People featured on Nuggets. It was originally released as a b-side to their third single ‘He Doesn’t Go About It Right’. Note that the header art is taken from a later We The People single – it was the only hi-resolution artwork that I could find.
It’s commendable that the Nuggetscompilers sifted through the group’s b-sides for material, but ‘You Burn Me Up and Down’ is one of the lesser tracks I’ve encountered on Nuggets so far. It sounds inspired by Van Morrison’s Them, with a bluesy feel and authoritative lead vocal.
We The People never released a studio album, but did release enough singles to justify several compilations; notably 1983’s Declaration of Independence. Like The Band and The The, We The People’s Declaration of Independence is not an easy item to find on Google! In an interesting piece of timing, today’s post shares its date with the “We The People” inauguration concert, featuring Fall Out Boy, Carole King, Ben Harper, and James Taylor.
Proctor wrote most of We The People’s material, but it was Tommy Talton who went onto a professional music career. He was part of the country rock band Cowboy who played with the Allman Brothers and Bonnie Bramlett. Cowboy released a reunion album in 2018, titled 10’ll Getcha Twenty.
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era is a compilation album of American psychedelic and garage rock singles released in the mid-to-late 1960s. It was assembled by Lenny Kaye, who at the time was a writer and clerk at the Village Oldies record shop in New York. He would later become the lead guitarist for the Patti Smith Group. Kaye worked on Nuggets under the supervision of Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records. Kaye initially conceived the project as a series of approximately eight individual LP installments, each focusing on US geographical regions, but Elektra convinced him that one 2-disc LP would be a more commercially viable format. The resulting double album was released on LP by Elektra in 1972 with liner notes by Kaye that contained one of the first uses of the term “punk rock”. It was reissued with a new cover design by Sire Records in 1976. In the 1980s Rhino Records issued Nuggets in a series of fifteen installments, and in 1998 as a 4-cd box set.
Neil Young was not kidding when he said he was going to start releasing archival material at a much faster rate this year. Just weeks after the release of the 10-disc set Archives Volume II 1972-1976 and the live album/film Return to Greendale, he has announced that “Way Down in the Rust Bucket”, a 1990 Crazy Horse club gig, will come out on February 26th as a film and double album. The show took place November 13th, 1990 in front of 800 lucky fans at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, California, two months after the release of “Ragged Glory” and shortly before the start of a long arena tour with Sonic Youth and Social Distortion.
Recorded on November 13th 1990 in Santa Cruz, CA, where the band were rehearsing for their upcoming Weld tour, Neil Young and Crazy Horse played a club show at The Catalyst which is now released here for the first time. The show comprised three different sets along with a 12 minute encore of Cortez The Killer and all 3 sets including that encore are brought together here in over 2 hours of music.
The 20-song set ran more than three hours and is noted for being the first time Young ever played “Danger Bird,” a track from 1975’s “Zuma”, onstage. He also performed live for the first time six Ragged Glory songs – “Love to Burn,” “Farmer John,” “Over and Over,” “Fuckin’ Up,” “Mansion on the Hill” and “Love and Only Love” – and another obscurity, Re-ac-tor’s “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze.”
Way Down in the Rust Bucket will be released as both a two-CD and four-LP set, with a Deluxe Edition that adds the video of that performance on DVD. The film was directed by Young using his Bernard Shakey pseudonym and contains a 13-minute performance of “Cowgirl in the Sand” that’s not available on the CD or vinyl versions.
You can check out a preview video of “Country Home” on the Neil Young Archives. “This show is one of my all-time Crazy Horse favourites,” Young wrote. “More songs will be added here before the official release. ”Way Down in the Rust Bucket” is the first in a long list of archival releases that Young is planning for 2021. There are no release dates at this point, but he’s plotting a third Archive Series box set, the 2019 Promise of the Real live album “Noise and Flowers”, the Eighties rarities collection “Road of Plenty”, and an extensive Bootleg Series that will spotlight fan-favourite shows like Carnegie Hall 1970, the Rainbow Theater 1973, and the Bottom Line 1974. Young hasn’t released a new album since 2019’s Colorado, but he recently said that new material is coming. “I have started a new album,” he wrote in response to a fan letter last month. “It’s solo. I’ve been waiting a long time.”
Way Down in the Rust Bucket—which is #11.5 in Neil Young’s Performance Series—is available in a number of variations. A numbered deluxe edition box set contains a DVD of the electrifying live concert—directed by Bernard Shakey and produced and directed for Shakey Pictures by LA Johnson—alongside four LPs and two CDs. The DVD contains one additional performance of “Cowgirl In The Sand” (13 minutes’ worth!), which does not appear on the vinyl or CD editions. The other versions released include a 4LP vinyl box set, a 2CD set and the DVD. Purchasers of Way Down in the Rust Bucket on CD or LP from the Greedy Hand Store
NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE
“WAY DOWN IN THE RUST BUCKET”
Live 1990
2CD, 4LP or Deluxe Box set ( 2CD/4LP/DVD )
Recorded on November 13th 1990 in Santa Cruz, CA, where the band were rehearsing for their upcoming Weld tour, Neil Young and Crazy Horse played a club show at The Catalyst which is now released here for the first time.
The show comprised three different sets along with a 12 minute encore of Cortez The Killer and all 3 sets including that encore are brought together here in over 2 hours of music.What It Is: Two months after Neil Young & Crazy Horse released their excellent “Ragged Glory” album in September 1990, they played a bar in Santa Cruz, Calif. For three hours and three sets, they tore through a career-spanning show.
What’s on It: Ragged Glory songs like “Over and Over” and “Love and Only Love” are here, but so are “Cinnamon Girl,” “Like a Hurricane” and “Cortez the Killer.” The set is filled with raw, sprawling versions of old and new cuts, some making their live debut.
Best Song You Know: This is a previously unreleased record from Young’s archives, so you haven’t heard any of these particular versions before. But the set includes some of his greatest songs played by his greatest backing band during one of their best eras.
Best Song You Don’t Know: “Country Home” opened the original Ragged Glory album, and it was the first song performed at the Catalyst on November. 13th, 1990. There’s no slow build for Young and the band: They start strong and don’t let up at all.
A couple months after Neil Young & Crazy Horse released their great 1990 album “Ragged Glory“, they hopped onstage at a small bar in Santa Cruz, Calif., and played songs from the record for the first time in front of an audience. The nearly two-and-a-half-hour performance includes older classics like “Cortez the Killer” and “Like a Hurricane,” but epic run-throughs of Glory cuts “Over and Over” and “Love and Only Love” fuel this live album, one of Young’s best concert documents.
Finn Wolfhard’s Band The Aubreys Team Up in collaboration with Atlanta rockers Lunar Vacation, the project takes a more psychedelic turn. The Aubreys is a duo consisting of Wolfhard and his fellow former Calpurnia member, drummer Malcolm Craig. Together with producer Lawrence Rothman, they recorded the track “Getting Better (otherwise)” for The Turning. According to Rothman, the song was influenced by Jay Reatard’s ’90s project The Reatards, which was “blasted” during breaks in their “chaotic 8 hour session.”
It was almost exactly a year ago that Finn Wolfhard revealed his debut track with his post-Calpurnia outfit The Aubreys for the original soundtrack to the Floria Sigismondi feature The Turning. With Calpurnia bandmate Malcolm Craig by his side. The Aubreys Team Up with Lunar Vacation for New Track “No Offerings” from the same session.
“The song pretty much wrote itself, which is real neat,” where the song premiered this afternoon. “The first two lines of the songs are from a text I got from our friend Ben while he was living in New York City for college—literal poetry. So with that, I just wrote the lyrics centred around a person who is trying to find their place in the world, as cliche as that sounds, and all the weird feelings you encounter when doing so. New places, people, things, and feelings—especially in a pandemic.”
“Getting Better (otherwise)” is the latest single released from The Turning OST following Courtney Love’s “Mother”, Soccer Mommy’s “Feed”, and Pale Waves’ “Skin Deep”. Take a listen to the first song from Wolfhard’s The Aubreys via the in-studio music video below.
Directed by Floria Sigismondi, The Turning opens in theatre’s January 24th. The soundtrack — which also features Warpaint, Kali Uchis, Alison Mosshart, Kim Gordon, Living Things with Sunflower Bean, Cherry Glazerr, and others
Lost Map Records, the Isle-of-Eigg based label ran by Pictish Trail’s Johnny Lynch, still seems to constantly find ways to make things a little bit better, via releases from the likes of Martha Ffion, Firestations, Savage Mansion and Alexia Avina. With plenty already in the pipelines for the year ahead, they’ve recently announced the signing of Sulka, “the lo-fi melodic scuzz-rock songwriting and recording project of Glasgow-based Lukas Clasen”, who will release his debut album, “Take Care“, at the end of this month.
DIY in the truest sense, Lukas played every instrument on Take Care, a record that explores a particular period in his life, the post break-up summer of 2019, when he was feeling, “lonely and a bit reckless”. The resultant record seems to be a beautifully explorative affair, channelling the genre mashing style of Alex G, the emotive intensity of Kane Strang and the bedroom exploration of Elvis Depressedly. Having previously supported the likes of Jeffrey Lewis and PAWS, Sulka looks well placed to make a delightfully lo-fi splash.
