Since the late nineties, Fruit Bats has been the music of Eric D. Johnson. including Bloody Marys, major 7th chords, Nashville tuning, tibetan singing bowls and many other things. On “Mouthfuls”, the Fruit Bats tone down the twang of their debut, Echolocation, and offer something closer to a mix of late-’60s/early-’70s folk and bubble-gum shot through with unpredictable electronic elements that, paradoxically, make the group’s music seem even more homemade and organic.
Most of the songs have sunny, winding melodies and arrangements that twist and turn until they end up in a completely different place than where they began; “A Bit of Wind” starts out as a simple, jangly singalong and gradually adds a brass band, strings, and flutes until it becomes a sweeping pop symphony. The lilting vocals and bittersweet harmonies on “Rainbow Sign” and “Magic Hour” call to mind the Fruit Bats’ labelmates, the Shins, at times although the Fruit Bats’ brand of summery, psych-tinged pop is much mellower. From beginning to end, Mouthfuls radiates laid-back contentment, but it’s to the band’s credit that this vibe rarely dips into laziness or complacency, even on relatively simple pastoral interludes like “Track Rabbits.” Actually, there’s a lot going on within the album’s serenity, especially on tracks like “Union Blankets,” which features an intricate mix of programmed and live percussion underneath its strummy acoustic guitars and close harmonies, and on “The Little Acorn,” which begins as a drifting,
Radar Brothers-esque ballad before adding sparkling synths and soft rock-inspired backing vocals. Toward the end of Mouthfuls, the Fruit Bats return to the country-folk fusions of Echolocation, and while they’re still very pretty, they don’t quite capture the imagination the way the album’s earlier, more experimental tracks do. Still, when an album is as effortlessly warm and pretty as this one is, it’s hard to begrudge the band a return to more familiar sonic pastures, and even more so when Mouthfuls suggests that the Fruit Bats’ next album will be even more winning in its ways.
Merge Records is an independent record label based in Durham, North Carolina. It was founded in 1989 by Laura Ballance andMac McCaughan. It began as a way to release music from their band Superchunk and music created by friends, and has expanded to include artists from around the world and records reaching the top of the Billboard music charts.
We live in North Carolina, where a racist Republican legislature has worked for a generation to undermine democracy through unprecedented voter suppression. Our neighbours in Georgia have successfully fought back, through the efforts of Fair Fight and other organizations. The voters who turned Georgia blue in November can now elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, take back power in the Senate, and make true progress possible in this country.
The Merge Records artists on this comp came together quickly, recording in various quarantine situations, to pay tribute to their favourite artists from Georgia, or maybe just record their favourite songs with “Georgia” in the title, and to support those working hard in Georgia to make sure everyone’s voice is heard.
Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys released a new album, “Welfare Jazz”, this week via YEAR0001 Records. Now that it’s out you can stream the whole thing here. It includes “Girls & Boys,” a new song they shared earlier this week. Since their founding in 2015, Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys have made a name for themselves burning up stages around the world. There’s a little Iggy Pop spit and seethe, a David Yow drunken stumble, and a bite of Nick Cave’s haunted bark. Add a dash of motorik groove, a pinch of post-punk grime, and a dose of no wave howl.
For every gruff and gritty croak in the outfit’s catalogue, they come back with a pair of bongos, squared-off synths, and a squonky saxophone, with songs that deftly lay waste to society’s normalization of toxic masculinity, racism, misogyny, classism, and self-obsession.
Viagra Boys’ Sebastian Murphy dreams about everyone hating his guts. A lot. “I kept having this recurring nightmare where my mom was crying and my friends were all pissed off at me,” he recalls, almost reverently.
Viagra Boys previously released a video for Welfare Jazz’s “Creatures” . They also shared the album’s cover of the 1999 John Prine song “In Spite of Ourselves” featuring Amy Taylor of Australian rock band Amyl and the Sniffers. The band’s most recent release was their Common Sense EP, which came out back in March 2020 again on YEAR0001.
The band’s new album, Welfare Jazz, doesn’t bargain with the anxiety in that defeated feeling, but rather a boiling certainty that nothing and no one is absolute. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and things are just a lot more interesting when you admit that you’re not always going to be nice, you’re not always going to pick the right words in a fist-fight. So why not keep moving forward, swaying and strutting into the night.
Shame are releasing a new album, “Drunk Tank Pink”, next Friday (January 15) via Dead Oceans Records. This week they shared another song from it, “Nigel Hitter,” via a video for it. Maxim Kelly directed the video, reworking archival footage to make it seem like babies are singing along to the song.
Frontman Charlie Steen had this to say about the song in a press release: “The song is at the heart of what Drunk Tank Pink is about. After we finished touring I was left with a lot of silence as I stumbled around trying to figure out the daily routine. On top of that, I was confronting my subconscious at night through a series of intense dreams which left me in a daze during the day. ‘Nigel Hitter’ feels like a cathartic expression of that period.”
Frontman Charlie Steen had this to say about the song and upcoming album in a press release: “A lot of this album focuses on the subconscious and dreams, this song being the pivotal moment of these themes. A song about love that is lost and the comfort and displeasure that comes after you close your eyes, fall into sleep, and are forced to confront yourself.”
Drunk Tank Pink includes “Water in the Well,” and “Snow Day,”Shame’s previous album, Songs of Praise, was released in January 2018 on Dead Oceans.
It’s tempting to think that you have all the answers, screaming your gospel every day with certainty and anger. Life isn’t quite like that though, and the debut album from London four-piece TV Priest instead embraces the beautiful and terrifying unknowns that exist personally, politically and culturally.
Posing as many questions as it answers, “Uppers” is a thunderous opening statement that continues the UK’s recent resurgence of grubby, furious post-punk music. It says something very different though – something completely its own. Four childhood friends who made music together as teenagers before drifting apart and then, somewhat inevitably, back together late in 2019, TV Priest was born out of a need to create together once again, and brings with it a wealth of experience and exhaustion picked up in the band’s years of pursuing “real life” and “real jobs,” something those teenagers never had.
In November 2019, the band – vocalist Charlie Drinkwater, guitarist Alex Sprogis, bass and keys player Nic Bueth, and drummer Ed Kelland – played their first show, to a smattering of friends in what they describe as an “industrial freezer” in the warehouse district of Hackney Wick. “It was like the pub in Peep Show with a washing machine just in the middle…” Charlie laughs, Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a precedent for introducing an album during a global pandemic, but among the general sense of anxiety and unease pervading everything at the moment, TV Priest’s entrance in April with the release of debut single “House of York” – a searing examination of the Monarchy – served as a breath of fresh air among the chaos, its anger and confusion making some kind of twisted sense to the nation’s fried brains.
It’s the same continued global sense of anxiety that will greet the release of Uppers, and it’s an album that has a lot to say right now. Taking musical cues from The Fall and Protomartyr as well as the mechanical, pulsating grooves of Kosmische Musik, it’s a record that moves with an untamed energy. Over the top of this rumbling musical machine is vocalist Charlie, a cuttingly funny, angry, confused, real frontman.
“Decoration,” Uppers’ center-piece, has a streamlined groove soundtracking Charlie’s lyrical vignettes that captures the absurdity and mundanity of life. Its opening and closing line (“I’ve never seen a dog do what that dog does”) is a misremembered quote by Simon Cowell about a performing dog on Britain’s Got Talent. Charlie says, “We often said it in the studio as a kind of in-joke when someone did something good or unexpected. Having already toyed around with the ‘Through to the next round’ line,’ this seemed too good to leave out.” And the chorus “It’s all just decoration” is credited to 2-year old niece of Alex’s fiancé, who reassured him after he pretended to be scared by Halloween decorations.
“Press Gang” is inspired by Charlie’s grandfather’s life’s work as a photojournalist and war correspondent on the UK’s Fleet Street from the 1950s to the early 1980s. The song is about the shifting role in the dissemination of information and ideas, and how the prevailing narrative that the “Death of Print Media” has contributed to a “post truth” world.
Album closer “Saintless” is the most personal and raw moment on Uppers. Charlie wrote a note to his son after his birth, following a difficult period his wife had faced during and after the pregnancy. The song is about how as parents we’re fallible and human, and while the world can be a difficult place at times the one thing that gets you through is giving your love to those that need and appreciate it. “Saintless” rides a motorik beat, with guitars, bass and synths building layers of intensity and emotion that replicate and swell with the message of the track.
Uppers sees TV Priest explicitly and outwardly trying to avoid narrowmindedness. Uppers sees TV Priest taking musical and personal risks, reaching outside of themselves and trying to make sense of this increasingly messy world. It’s a band and a record that couldn’t arrive at a more perfect time.
“Press Gang” is Out now – our new one from our album ‘Uppers’, out on Sub Pop Records next month. “Uppers” It’s about Charlie’s grandad, news cycles, truth, chip paper, and information. It’s also pretty loud. Lots of love to Joe Wheatly for another wild ride making the video & big love to all the crew who helped us out over a very cold weekend.
“Press Gang” by TV Priest from their album “Uppers” (Release Date: 02/05/2021)
Whitesnake celebrates the blues sound that helped inspire its multi-platinum career on a new collection that features remixed and remastered versions of the group’s best blues-rock songs. “The Blues Album” is the third and final release in the band’s “Red, White and Blues Trilogy”, a series of compilations organised by musical themes that began earlier in 2020 with Love Songs (red) and The Rock Album (white). The new compilation delivers a potent mix of hits and deep tracks that originally appeared between 1984 and 2011 on six Whitesnake studio albums and Coverdale’s solo album, “Into the Light“.
Whitesnake’s singer-songwriter David Coverdale says, the music reflects how blues artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and the three Kings (Albert, B.B. and Freddie) continue to inspire him. In the album’s liner notes, he writes: “It’s hard to find the words to show how profoundly they connected with my soul. But ‘blues’ to me is a beautiful word that describes emotional expression… feelings, be it feelings of sadness, loneliness, emptiness… but, also those that express great joy, celebration and dance, sexiness and love!!!”
In the liner notes, Coverdale described how hearing blues legends like Muddy Waters, Albert King and Howlin’ Wolf affected him throughout his life. “It’s hard to find the words to show how profoundly they connected with my soul,” he writes. “But ‘blues’ to me is a beautiful word that describes emotional expression … feelings, be it feelings of sadness, loneliness, emptiness … but, also those that express great joy, celebration and dance, sexiness and love.”
The Blues Album includes two hits, “Slow an’ Easy” and “Give Me All Your Love,” which has been remixed to focus on the track’s guitars. You can check out the set’s opening track, “Steal Your Heart Away,” below.
“The Blues Album” showcases two of the band’s biggest songs: “Slow An’ Easy,” a big hit in 1984 from Whitesnake’s massive album “Slide It In”, and the smash “Give Me All Your Love” from the band’s 1987 self-titled globally successful album. Other choice tracks from Whitesnake are also featured: “Looking For Love” and “Crying In The Rain,” and “Steal Your Heart Away.” The collection also includes “If You Want Me,” a studio recording released in 2006 as a bonus track on the live album, “Live…in the Shadows of the Blues“. Coverdale also taps his 2000 solo album, “Into the Light”, for “The River Song.”
Quavering vocal harmonies and delicate acoustic accents roll through a blissful backcountry scene on Valley Maker‘s “No One Is Missing”, in part recalling the dusky lo-fi plains of Kurt Vile and Cass McCombs – lyrics interpreting the organic unison of nature and the art of music as a form of remedying the pandemic’s myriad social repercussions.
Seattle-based for the last ten years, Crane, along with his family, recently decamped to South Carolina – an uprooting and re-assimilation that finds a voice in the upcoming third album “When The Day Leaves”. Crane expands upon the bearing this had on the premise of his latest track: “I wrote this song, along with much of When The Day Leaves, as a way of grappling with the partiality and temporality of how we connect with one another, I guess as an attempt to collect and reflect on recent experiences of loss, love, leaving, returning, missing, etc. While recent months of social distancing have often felt isolating, I’m continually grateful for how music and the natural world can remind us we’re not alone.”
Latest video from the new album. Probably the most progressive (by their standards) and challenging track on the new album. I think it works in the context of the album but is a poor choice of single. I think enough has been released already.
The Black Crowes have announced a 30th-anniversary reissue of their breakthrough debut album, “Shake Your Money Maker”. The Super Deluxe version – available on either four LPs or three CDs – will include a newly remastered version of the original 1990 album, as well as three previously unheard studio recordings. One track, “Charming Mess,” is a song that was originally earmarked to be the Black Crowes’ first single but eventually was left off Shake Your Money Maker.
The Black Crowes’ debut album, “Shake Your Money Maker”, may borrow heavily from the bluesy hard rock grooves of the Rolling Stones and Faces (plus a bit of classic soul), but the band gets away with it due to sharp song writing and an ear for strong riffs and chorus melodies, not to mention the gritty, muscular rhythm guitar of Rich Robinson and brother Chris’ appropriate vocal swagger. Unlike their later records, the Crowes don’t really stretch out and jam that much on Money Maker, but that helps distill their virtues into a handful of memorable singles (“Jealous Again,” “She Talks to Angels,” a cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle”), and most of the album tracks maintain an equally high standard.
Shake Your Money Maker may not be stunningly original, but it doesn’t need to be; it’s the most concise demonstration of the fact that the Black Crowes are a great, classic rock & roll band. Other material on the Super Deluxe edition includes two demos from the band’s early years (when they were known as Mr. Crowe’s Garden), a collection of B-sides and a previously unreleased 14-song concert recording from a 1990 performance in their hometown of Atlanta. Reproductions of early band flyers, a tour laminate, a Black Crowes patch and a 20-page booklet highlight the collectibles included in the set.
Originally released in February 1990, the Black Crowes‘ debut album defied rock sensibilities at the time. While spandex and hair metal were dominating the airwaves, the Crowes offered a back-to-basics approach, full of Southern-rock influences and Rolling Stones-style swagger.
The album would go on to sell more than 5 million copies, spawning radio favourites like “Jealous Again,” “Twice as Hard,” “She Talks to Angels” and a hit cover of Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle.”
The group had intended to celebrate Shake Your Money Maker’s 30th anniversary with a nationwide tour in 2020, but those plans were put on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic. A 2021 trek is tentatively scheduled to kick off next June. The Black Crowes ‘Shake Your Money Maker’ 30th Anniversary Edition Box Set!! Featuring the original studio album remastered by George Drakoulias, 3 never before heard studio recordings, 2 unreleased demos from Mr. Crowe’s Garden, a 14 song unreleased live album from Atlanta GA 1990, vintage The Black Crowes artwork, archived photos, liner notes from David Fricke, plus a 4” Patch.
Available February 26th,
The Black Crowes, ‘Shake Your Money Maker’ 30th Anniversary
Punk legend Alice Bag has announced a new album and shared the lead single, which features Allison Wolfe (of Bratmobile and much more). Alicia Armendariz (aka Alice Bag) is a Los Angeles punk legend, not just for her ground breaking first band the Bags (featured in Penelope Spheeris’s Decline of Western Civilization), but for her outspokenness, activism, writings, and embodying the D.I.Y. ethic instilled in her by her mother.
When L.A. punk legend Alice Bag and I recently talked on the phone, she began the conversation by telling me her dog, Cinnamon, had died three weeks earlier. She said thinking about the Rainbow Bridge—a poem that has been adopted by the pet-loss grief community—has really helped her. Her voice is light and calm, and sounds like many flowers opening, undulating. It is melodic and sweet, like an extract of something very powerful, and philosophical. But when she sings, that extract explodes.
Since the mid-1970s, her voice has exploded on stage and on record with the Bags, which she co-founded as part of the first wave of L.A.’s punk bands. She described her tough childhood in East Los Angeles and her coming of age into the punk music scene in her powerful 2011 memoir .
Alice told me that “Punk rock is my therapy,” and singing has always just come naturally to her. The first money she ever earned was from singing. Miss Yonkers, her fifth-grade teacher in Los Angeles, asked her to sing on an educational bilingual cartoon, and Bag earned $100—more than the monthly rent her parents paid. Said Bag, “I thought, ‘maybe I could be a singer when I grow up’”. She is still singing at 62, having released a solo album, Alice Bag in 2016, Blueprint in 2018, and Sister Dynamite in 2020.
But she didn’t tell her dad about her dream of becoming a singer because he would tell her she should strive to own the record company instead. “I think he treated me the way some men of his generation would’ve treated their firstborn son,” she said. “That’s why he filled my head with dreams.”
In The Red, Bob Baker Marionette Theater and Pancake Mountain present: Breadcrumbs! The first single from the forthcoming record SISTER DYNAMITE out April 24th 2020 on In The Red Records.
Musicians: Alice Bag, David Jones, Rikki Watson, Sharif Dumani Special guest vocalists: Allison Wolfe and Lysa Flores
