Bob Dylan will release a new compilation, Bob Dylan – 1970 (50th Anniversary Collection), featuring studio performances with George Harrison and more. The set will arrive on February 26th, 2021 via Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings.
Recordings from the three-disc set were released in a limited edition on December 4th as part of the Bob Dylan – 50th Anniversary Collection copyright extension series. The buzz around the recordings, especially those with George Harrison, garnered the recordings a wider release.
Still, arguably the most notable material on the three-disc collection is the complete May 1st, 1970 studio recordings alongside George Harrison. They performed a total of nine tracks together, including Dylan originals, cover songs and even a rendition of the Beatles classic “Yesterday.” Dylan and Harrison sat down in the studio and performed Dylan originals including “One Too Many Mornings,” “Gates of Eden” and “Mama, You Been On My Mind” along with covers like the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” Carl Perkins’ “Matchbox” and more. The set also features outtakes from the sessions around Dylan’s Self Portrait and New Morning albums, which feature frequent Dylan collaborators like drummer Russ Kunkel and Al Kooper on organ along with renowned session guitarist and singer-songwriter David Bromberg.
The material has never seen wide public release, but this isn’t the first time it has seen the light of day. These songs were earlier put on sale in a very limited edition in the U.K. to circumvent a European law stipulating that recordings enter the public domain 50 years after their creation if they aren’t officially released by their copyright holder. The collection sold out in seconds, as Dylan continues issuing archival material in order to avoid the legal distribution of third-party bootleg.
A 50th anniversary collection of recordings by Bob Dylan is scheduled for release on February 26th.
Zachary Cale is an American songwriter/musician based in NYC. “False Spring” is his 6th full length album. To be released May 29th, 2020.
“False Spring”, Zachary Cale’s sixth full-length album, explores the spaces between the cold we left behind and the uncertainty ahead, between that fleeting, green warmth and its lack. “Shine a light on the path so I can see,” Cale sings on the album opener, “Shine,” making a plea for hope and happiness rather than merely claiming it, starting the search for whatever possibility may exist. And the album explores so many possible paths in ever-shifting textures. On “Come Morning,” Cale admits “I’m just sitting on a fence, two fingers out to test the wind” while on others songs — the disorienting anxiety of “Mad Season”; the bittersweet travel of “By Starlight”; the mix of hope and regret that comes from staying afloat on “Slide” — False Spring vacillates between facing down the troubling now, reckoning with and paying tribute to then, and sifting through the dark to find the faintest match-head of light for tomorrow.
Cale’s poetic lyrics etches out all these themes in complex layers and careful melodies, but the band he assembled for False Spring drives home the sense of openness and possibility in these songs. Cale is accompanied here by Brent Cordero on piano, Wurlitzer and organ, James Preston on bass, and Charles Burst and Jason Labbe on drums. Cale brought the songs to the studio and enlisted the players to flesh them out. He didn’t write parts for the musicians; they figured out their own way through these tunes. The record is the sound of the band finding itself, capturing these songs live in all their subtle, ragged glory. The album’s 16 songs run just over an hour, but the expansive record is, at every turn, an intimate affair, the listener invited in as these players find connections between this part and that, between one song and another, between melody and feeling.
Stylistically, the band never hems itself in, expanding its sound and morphing it over the album’s extended playing time. Early tracks set up shop within lean, dusty folk rock, but things change from there. There are touches of cosmic Americana and country and some Petty-esque tight yet gauzy rompers. Several tracks are instrumentals, acknowledging roots and stretching exercises for Cale and the band. The sweet, solo guitar of the title track, for instance, uncovers some of the early country-blues sounds humming under these tunes, while “Magnetic North” whips up a full-band blues stomper. These instrumentals, and the album as a whole, explore tangents and push at borders, but while they add variety they also — on a more fundamental level — suggest cohesion at the heart of the album’s wide-open sound and aesthetic.
False Spring is Cale’s first album in five years, since the gauzy and atmospheric gem, “Duskland”. The album was received well, a tour followed but within the year Cale refocused his energy on writing new material. In 2016 he went on a solo tour opening for Dan Bejar of Destroyer in smaller cities across America. More recently he’s been playing in a spattering of other bands and supporting other musical projects.
And all that time, he’s kept one foot in the studio, recording lots of material, several albums worth. And all of this on top of a full-time job. In short, like so many independent musicians, Zachary Cale has been working.
This new album, though, isn’t the sound of work at all. It’s the sound of setting thought aside to feel the music. This doesn’t set out to make a product; this album explores a process. And, as a result, these dusty, bittersweet tunes stretch out, they breathe. They live in all the in-between spaces Cale evokes so beautifully in his lyrics. The fleeting spring can leave, the new growth may get marred by frost, but the warmth of these songs — in all their hope and worry and anxiety and open possibility — will stay with you long after the final note ripples out of the speaker.
Released May 29th, 2020
Performed by:
Zachary Cale: vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, electric piano, synthesizer James Preston: bass Brent Cordero: piano, wurlitzer, organ Jason Labbe: drums, percussion Charles Burst: drums, percussion
We’re not entirely sure what we are seeing in Perfume Genius’ “Describe” but we’re digging it nonetheless. Set on a dusty ranch, the music video shows the life of a cult-like group of people who eat, dance, and apparently sleep on the floor together. The video gives off major Midsommar and Wild Wild Country vibes (albeit with a much happier ending). Mike Hadreas has stated that the song is about being in a dark place and needing someone to describe what goodness feels like, which explains the overall introspective feel to the music video.
Mid-lockdown, here was my reminder that the world out there is vast and oppressive, beautiful and foul, almost psychedelically diverse and yet the very definition of mundane; sometimes fun, sometimes shit, always confusing. Perfume Genius has a way of capturing what feels like the whole human experience in a single album – heck, even a single song. Gone are the minimalist confessionals that made his name. On ‘Set My Heart on Fire Immediately’, grand, melodramatic laments on earthly fragility and the passage of time rub up against snatched reminiscences of hook-ups. It’s a sprawling, detailed masterpiece, shot through with typical Mike Hadreas yearning, that embodies just how rich and radiant and fucked up life can be.
Like an oil puddle rainbow, it shimmers. He shimmies. Hope seems to be a waking dream. It simmers. Elongates. Reverberates. You’re cradled by sumptuous arrangements, whilst sadness slow dances in the shadows. There are glimmers that you can’t quite discern. Björk? Eno’s ambient chambers? Soap&Skin? Zola Jesus? John Grant’s molten disco? There’s a sensation of the weight of the world being lifted and, just for a moment, the pins and needles leave you frozen. It’s murmurations of doves scattering to the four corners, bright white wings flapping gracefully against an ominous sky. It’s some kind of wonderful.
Listen, if you haven’t depression-fucked the love of your life to “Describe,” I’m extremely sorry. This album lights up every individual nerve ending, sometimes all at once.
From Perfume Genius’ new album ‘Set My Heart On Fire Immediately” released on May 15th, 2020 on Matador Records.
I know I’m not the only one for whom ‘Bad Feeling’ by Muzz has been one hell of a soothing balm through this tumultuous year. And so this summer we learnt how to play it with our pals Roamin Vasset and Lucien Chatin. It was recorded and filmed by our friends Matteo Fabbri, Anne-Laure Etienne and Pierre Paturel, and edited by our very own Jesse D Vernon. And seeing as Muzz have released their covers EP, it seems like a suitable time to share with you our own Muzz cover.
The Band: Guitar: Jesse D. Vernon Bass: Romain Vasset Drums: Lucien Chatin
So far, Austin five-piece Sun June has done an excellent job of selling their forthcoming record Somewhereto its intended nostalgic audience, in turn referring to it as their “prom record” and describing their sound as “regret pop.” To add to that, vocalist Laura Colwell describes it as being “bigger, fatter, sadder” than its predecessor when introducing its latest single, the dusty-trail dream-pop (and prom-ready) “Bad Girl,” which longingly looks back on the freedom of Colwell’s teenage years.
To introduce the new single, the band is unveiling a vibrant, sun-soaked visual for the track, setting its moody tones to an ecstatic dance routine. While the influence of Terrence Malick—whose set for Song to Song is where Colwell and bandmate Stephen Salisbury met—is evident in the contemplative cinematography, the band claims to have taken inspiration from “films like Blood Simple and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which were also shot in rural towns just outside of Austin.”
“Bad Girl” is about a younger version of myself I like to obsessively despise while desperately trying to emulate. It’s about a self-destructive past and how my fear of death and FOMO (for lack of a better term) affected my decision making. I really wanted to make a dance video because the song has so much attitude. The dancer/choreographer Sarah Navarrete really captured the push and pull of the lyrics. The video is like a noir narrative,
“Bad Girl” by Sun June from the upcoming album ‘Somewhere’ out February 5th, 2021 via Run For Cover Records
While punk music was our first love, pop music has become our fixation. Throughout the making of ‘Palberta5000,’ we were focused on making music that people could not only sing along to but get stuck in their heads… that and attempting to make songs longer than 50 seconds…While our melodies have gotten more melodic and our singing less harsh, we haven’t strayed too far from who Palberta is, defiantly Palberta. And no one will shape us to be otherwise.” – Palberta
Two years removed from their triumphant 2018 LP Roach Going Down, described as “a leap to another level” from the beloved NYC trio, Palberta are returning to deliver their clear-eyed fifth album, ‘Palberta5000,’ a collection of adventurous, hyper-melodic songs that will excite their devoted following while welcoming new fans along for the ride. While long heralded as one of the most original and idiosyncratic bands in the East Coast DIY scene, earning regular comparisons to ESG, Captain Beefheart (Pitchfork) and CAN (FADER), on ‘Palberta5000,’Ani Ivry-Block, Lily Konigsberg, and Nina Ryser max out traditional pop forms—creating hits that catch in listeners’ brains while blowing the genre out into lush, kinetic extensions that morph into absurdist outros and haptic breakdowns—to create their own hardcore style of popular music. In doing so, they have made their most accessible album by a far measure—one that is bursting at the seams with vocal hooks and exuberant playing.
‘Palberta5000’ was recorded with Matt Labozza (PALM, Shimmer), whose Peekskill, New York, studio is located in the original home and family lamp-store of Paul Reuben (Pee Wee Herman). Fuelled by carrots, celery, radishes, and peanut-butter-and-jelly bagels, they diligently tracked ‘Palberta5000’s well-rehearsed songs in four days, never putting down more than three takes. Labozza’s recording and mix capture the band’s rollicking instrumentation and vocal precision.
The first single, “Before I Got Here,” features a charging and emotionally chaotic intro verse—building to the frantic ear-worm lyrics “if you want to talk about it / then we can talk about it / I’m just so sick about it / don’t blame me”—that stops on a dime for a three-part vocal harmony breakdown, then seamlessly rushes off again. The song conveys the raw emotions that can accompany letting someone into your life before pumping the brakes and settling into a hypnotic krout-surf outro, garnished with horns from Matt Norman that reinforce and swell the melody.
“High speed, fast track, slow prose.” ‘Palberta5000’ punctuates its jagged edges with ebullient cries of “Hey!” and rounds its corners with angelic harmonies, while marching-band snares propel the album forward with a metronomic intensity that belies the sixteen tracks’ diverse time signatures and fevered pacing. Hardcore fans will recognize the band’s live staple “Corner Store,” whose heart-melting harmonies layer over irresistible croons of “I meet you anywhere you are”—a promise kept by an album that meets listeners where they are. “Big Bad Want,” another notable piece from the band’s pre-COVID sets, is Palberta’s version of fast punk, with a zig-zag bassline and a call-and-response nursery-rhyme chorus that returns for the song’s outro, stretching defiantly past the three-minute mark with the repeated mantra “Yeah (yeah) I can’t pretend what I want.”
Although Palberta have toyed with repetition and longer song structures on past recordings, ‘Palberta5000’ masterfully digs into a groove and transforms repeated phrases with a cult-like frenzy to hypnotic effect. On their slow waltz, “The Way That You Do,” and the enchanting “Red Antz,” Palberta bring the tempo down for lavish slow jams only hinted at on past efforts like Bye Bye Berta’s “Why Didn’t I.” Such tracks add a variation to ‘Palberta5000’s well thought-out song cycle and contribute to a full album experience that will leave listeners breathless. In the fitful sleeper “Cow,” Palberta sing, “I will be there with my hand on your chest / I feel your rumbling internal mess.” In a time of exhausting disappointment, ‘Palberta5000’ is an album that sees our internal and external messes, openly displays its fragile places, and acts as an energetic complement to the movement for positive change.
Last week Cherry Glazerr (the Los Angeles-based band led by Clementine Creevy) shared a new song, “Rabbit Hole.” It’s their first new song of 2020 and is out now via Secretly Canadian.
Creevy worked with Jenn Decliveo (Hinds, Beth Ditto, Porridge Radio) on the song. It follows the band’s 2019 album,Stuffed & Ready. “Rabbit Hole’ is about clawing back my identity,” Creevy says in a press release. “I often find myself acting a certain way to get someone else’s approval. Then it’s hard for me to find myself again. That’s what I was meditating on with this song.”
A press release says that the rootlessness Creevy experienced as a young kid, before her family settled in Los Angeles when she was in middle school, also influenced the song. “Change and discomfort are something I thrive in but I’ve come to realize that there’s a futility of doing things just to please other people,” she says. “You can’t sacrifice your true self, it’s just unsustainable. Realizing this has been a big pill to swallow for me but it has given me a wealth of perspective.”
Summing up the experience of recording “Rabbit Hole,” Creevy concludes: “I feel like I’m growing into the artist that I’ve always wanted to be, it feels better than anything to do what you want with your own art.”
The Hold Steady have announced a 10th Anniversary Reissue of their 2010 album “Heaven Is Whenever”, and with it comes the usual assortment of bonus material. Yes, that means there’s previously unreleased material. “Separate Vacations,” out along with the news of the reissue, has been performed live before but never released in its pristine studio form. It’s a cascading midtempo rock track that moves with the beaten-down grace that defined that era of the band.
In addition to nine rare or unreleased songs, the reissue includes liner notes by Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers. The Hold Steady shared this message about it all: Everyone seems to have an opinion about our fifth album, “Heaven is Whenever”. Ten years later, going over these songs for this reissue, we’ve taken on a great new appreciation for this collection. With some distance, it seems we were trying to get somewhere else, and this was a necessary transition record. The songs are weary, but with a dark humour. It might even be the funniest Hold Steady LP, although it’s sometimes hard to tell because it doesn’t convey the same ecstatic joy as some of the earlier records.
For the 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, “Heaven is Whenever” includes nine bonus tracks that tell the story of the time it was made. We were chasing something that was mostly undefined, and we kept making more and more music. We recorded stuff we forgot about like “Wonderful Struggle”, stuff we’ve played live but never released, like “Separate Vacations”, and even an alternate version of “We Can Get Together”. The album wasn’t a lot of fun to make. It was recorded in fits and starts. At one point, we left Dreamland Studios early due to a medical issue. The label folks flew in and visited to see what the hell was going on. Franz had left the band, Steve had yet to join, and we were coming off several years of non-stop touring.
We’d become a bit more self-aware than in our early days. Many of our favourite bands didn’t make it to their 5th LP, and it’s hard to keep a band evolving for that long. One huge bright spot about this period is that Steve Selvidge came in for the touring on this album cycle. He became and remains a huge part of the heart and soul of The Hold Steady. In fact, our biggest regret about Heaven now is that we didn’t record this album with Franz and Steve. There’s even more to the story — the Super Deluxe version of the album available on streaming platforms will include tracks from the 2009 Avatar Sessions in New York City, versions of “Heaven is Whenever” songs that Franz was working on with the band prior to his departure. Here in 2020, we’re very proud of Heaven is Whenever. It’s the sound of a band pushing through difficult times by making music about that very struggle. It acknowledges suffering as part of human life. And with all the extra songs that we recorded beyond the album tracks, it’s a testament to the band’s willingness to show up and try to work through uncertainty. Our amazing friend Patterson Hood from the Drive-By Truckers has a lot more to say about that in the LP liner notes.
Released November 27th, 2020
THE HOLD STEADY (2009) was: Bobby Drake, Craig Finn, Tad Kubler, Galen Polivka,
THE HOLD STEADY (2020) is: Bobby Drake, Craig Finn, Tad Kubler, Franz Nicolay, Galen Polivka, Steve Selvidge,
Buildings burning in every direction; macabre unknowns in your friendly neighbour’s basement; undecided voters sharpening their pencils: under pressure we could call Kiwi Jr’s Cooler Returns “timely.” But what year is it, again? On their sophomoric smash-up released world-wide by Sub Pop Records, Kiwi Jr cycle through the recent zigs & looming zags of the new decade, squinting anew at New Year’s parties forgotten and under-investigated small town diner fires, piecing together low-stakes conspiracy theories on what’s coming down the pike in 2021. Put together like a thousand-piece puzzle, assembled in flow state through the first dull stretch of quarantine, sanitized singer shuffling to sanitized studio by streetcar, masked like it’s the kind of work where getting recognized means getting killed, Cooler Returns materializes as a sprawling survey from the first few bites of the terrible twenties, an investigative exposé of recent history buried under the headlines & ancient kings buried under parking lots.
Not so long since their debut Football Money in archaeological time, unending grey eons later in the dog years of quaran-time, spiritually antipodean Canadians Kiwi Jr return to disseminate this year’s annual report to the shareholders, burying the incriminating numbers in the endless appendices of a longform narrative record, a 3,000 word tract for stakeholders to pore over.
Opener “Tyler” builds a Frankenstein of all your musician exes; don’t you remember “falling apart in the green room while they drank half the headliner’s rider?” In “Waiting In Line” we’re still slumbering at the bar, agitation skyrocketing contemplating “what breed of beast protects the back door.” We hear “it isn’t past until it burns,” in “Maid Marian’s Toast” but what explains the accompanying & extensive itinerary of incinerated Eastern Canadian eateries? Investigated off the clock by Kiwi’jrs amateur arson division, suspicion is cast on all: The Cook, The Regular : Ms. Scarlett, Colonel Mustard. Throughout these crises, histories, and head games Kiwi Jr. don’t expect you to be taking notes or checking dates – and on the back nine, when “Omaha” demands proof that “Woodstock ever happened in the first place,” perhaps the freewheeling guitar groove underfoot tells us all we need to know about who’s been flipping through the festival files, air-drumming along to the complete 10-CD set.
Opening with a sweet melody on 12-string guitar, the band offer up even more evidence that ‘Cooler Returns’ is set to be one of the best releases of 2021. Reminiscent of a forgotten 70s classic, its fairground piano and bouncing rhythms are prefect for blowing away the January blues.
These stories – memories of Augusts past, unrepressed & transcribed fast – go down easier thanks to meaningful changes enacted in 2019’s KiwiCares Pledge: delivering on a promise to transition from Crunchy to Smooth by 2021, the caveman chug of Football Money has been steamed & pressed with the purifying air of a saloon piano – operated with bow-tie untied – and a spring green side-salad of tentatively up-tempo organ taps & freshly fluted harmonica.
A chronically detuned spin of the dial through swivel-chair distractions & WFH daydreams, an immersive ctrl-tab deluge cycling through popular listicle distractions like the unentombing of Richard III, or the deja vu destruction of the Glasgow School of Art, Kiwi Jr sing this song to an indoor audience, crisscrossing cancelled, every other prestige distraction source wrung dry, only song writing remaining to deliver engrossing tales to the populace, just how I imagine it worked in the old days.
Fixing loose ingredients into a sturdy whip, Kiwi Jr beam in live from the 9-5, striding into 2021 with a mastered brainwave that comes equally from the back room of the record store as the penalty box. And how do we, left holding this box of deliberate entanglements, sign off to those as yet uninitiated, undecided, uncertain, unseen, absent return coordinates
Kiwi Jr.’s “Cooler Returns”, featuring the title track, “Undecided Voters,” “Maid Marion’s Toast,” and “Waiting in Line,” will be available January 22nd, 2021 worldwide through Sub Pop with the exception of Canada through the band’s Kiwi Club imprint. The album was produced by Kiwi Jr., mixed and engineered by Graham Walsh (METZ, Bully, Preoccupations) in Toronto, and mastered by Phillip Shaw Bova at Bova Labs in Ottawa, Ontario.
Kiwi Jr. is Jeremy Gaudet (mic, guitar), Brohan Moore (drums), Mike Walker (bass), and Brian Murphy (guitar).
Lancaster, PA’s Innocence Mission have been making delicate dreampop for longer than that descriptor has existed, with Karin Peris’ heartbreaking voice forever the star of the show. Draped in aching melancholy, “See You Tomorrow” is among the group’s finest in a span over a 30 year plus career. Alternative folk act The Innocence Mission first gained recognition in 1989, when they found chart success with their self-titled debut album. By the time the band released their third album, Glow, in 1995, they had earned a zealous cult following that remains loyal to them to this day. Their songs tend to be exquisitely crafted, featuring ethereally beautiful acoustic-based music and hauntingly introspective and thoughtful lyrics, all combining into a sound that is at once delicate yet intense. The band, led by married couple Karen Peris (vocals, guitar, piano, organ) and Don Peris (guitars, drums vocals), originated when they first met in high school. Now, more than thirty years later, they (along with bassist Mike Bitts) are preparing to release their twelfth studio album,
Love. Connection. Community. Understanding. Most of us experience these aspects through the prism of family and friends. But not everybody can turn those feelings into song, especially not with the beauty and sensitivity of Pennsylvania trio the innocence mission, fronted by Karen Peris and husband Don. Following their Bella Union album debut “Sun On The Square”, which won the band some of their best-ever reviews, they have made another exquisite and touching album, “See You Tomorrow“.
This is a record steeped in awe and wonder, intense longing, sadness and joy; a rich sequence of songs that attempt to describe the essence of what makes us human. Sufjan Stevens, who has covered the innocence mission’s classic Lakes Of Canada, once called their music “moving and profound. What is so remarkable about Karen Peris’ lyrics is the economy of words, concrete nouns which come to life with melodies that dance around the scale like sea creatures.” The band recorded See You Tomorrow in the Peris’ basement (and the dining room where the piano sits). Karen wrote and sang ten of the album’s eleven songs, and plays guitars, piano, pump organ, accordion, electric bass, melodica, mellotron, and an old prototype strings sampler keyboard. Don contributes guitars, drums, vocal harmonies, and one lead vocal on his song Mary Margaret In Mid-Air. Fellow founder member Mike Bitts adds upright bass to four songs including On Your Side, the album’s first single.
With wistful strings and distant acoustic guitar, “On Your Side” sounds like the first chill of autumn.
