Wirral alt. rock champions Hooton Tennis Club, Firm favourites of BBC 6 Music, the melodic slacker rock group have become a fêted live attraction, with a lengthy European tour behind them. On the road throughout the last quarter of 2016, with their brand new and critically acclaimed second LP Big Box of Chocolates, which has just been released. The follow up to rapturously received gloruis debut album Highest Point in Cliff Town, the new disc was produced by revered singer songwriter Edwyn Collins at his studio in Helmsdale, Scotland.
Signed to the wonderful storied indie label Heavenly Recordings, Hooton Tennis Club inked a deal with the set-up at Glastonbury Festival following a 2014 performance that won over label founder Jeff Barrett.
The latest excellent songwriter to come out of Texas, Jess Williamson is set to release her debut album, “HeartSong”, at the start of November. This week, fresh from touring Europe with Kevin Morby, Jess has shared the latest cut from it, the sublime single, “See You In A Dream”.
See You In A Dream is a attempt to write something simultaneously sad, without slipping into the cliched realm of minor chords. The track is built around the gentle tick of drums, Jess’ pained Caitilin Rose meets early Angel Olsen vocal, and the sort of beautifully twangy guitar line Roy Orbison would be proud of; and if you don’t think that sounds fabulous you’re probably reading the wrong site. Lyrically it’s a classic country ballad, a tale of someone long gone from your life who still weaves their way into your dreams. This single serves as timely reminder of just how good Jess’ upcoming album could be.
They are here and will be out on September 9th, our new record “PEARLS TO SWINE” will be available in stores worldwide. LP and CD formats will also include a poster insert with handwritten lyrics on the reverse side. This is the new EP from singer Adam Torres for the first time in nearly a decade, The Austin folk singer’s 2006 album Nostra Nova got a second chance thanks to a reissue, and Torres toured the country, breathing new life into the songs. The album was a quiet revelation, homespun but with a symphonic sound just a step removed from Neutral Milk Hotel’s fervent experiments
Check out “Outlands” is a deep and beautiful track, with profoundly moving lyrics that features percussionist Thor Harris on drums and Aisha Burns on violin. After putting out his cult classic debut album 10 years ago, Torres dropped out of the music industry.
From the album Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003) by Explosions in the Sky an American post rock band from Austin Texas The quartet originally played under the name Breaker Morant, then changed to the current name in 1999. The band has garnered popularity beyond the post-rock scene for their elaborately developed guitar work, narratively styled instrumentals , what they refer to as “cathartic mini-symphonies,” and their enthusiastic and emotional live shows. They primarily play with three electric guitars and a drum kit, although band member Michael James will at times exchange his electric guitar for a bass guitar. Recently the band has added a fifth member to their live performances. The band’s music is almost purely instrumental.
A Giant Dog’s frontwoman Sabrina Ellis is fearless. She leads the band’s riotous performances—so enthralling it’s hard to look away—and often does so in various arrangements of Spandex and neon. The Austin-based band might look at SXSW as a hometown showcase, but they recently signed with the North Carolina’s Merge Records to release their forthcoming third album “Pile” May 6th. Our music encompasses the passion, the modern survival of winged tipped shoes, seahorse androgyny, moon-rivers and bingo, and is heavily influenced by beer, The Coasters, The Stooges and Velvet Underground.
White Denim are gearing up to drop their seventh studio effort,Stiff, later this month. For the follow-up to 2013’s impressive Corsicana Lemonade, the Austin natives called on Ethan Johns (Paul McCartney, Laura Marling), marking the first time they’d ever leaned on an outside producer.
Since announcing the new album in January, we’ve heard a selection of promising singles in “Ha Ha Ha Ha(Yeah)” and “Holda You (I’m Psycho)”. Now, the garage rockers have unboxed another preview with “Had 2 Know (Personal)”, a slice of progressive rock complete with blitzing riffs.
Few bands cover as much emotional ground as the quartet of Texans formerly known as Pure Ecstasy have over the course of their three full-length records. They can evoke the anthemic highs their name suggests on drugged up Bee Gees ballads like “Heaven,” but they can also do pure agony just as compellingly.
Why are they’re bigger for all their blunted disaffection, they’ve still yet to put out a record that clearly depicts and integrates both impulses. their finest momentBut both sides are at least evident in the wonderfully disorienting bildungsroman Crawling Up the Stairs.
“What stands out about Holy Wave is the sonic textures they apply to make their sound pierce through the smoke-filled haze that engulfs most psych bands.
El Paso, Texas five-piece Holy Wave makes no bones about its love affair with reverb. The group’s second full-length, Relax, is awash in bouncy, hazy songs played at various paces with foggy vocals bleeding in, out and over cheeky melodies. It’s a garage-rock lover’s garage-rock album, unabashedly embracing of Zombies-like slacker psalms and clunky guitar manipulations.
Droning surf progressions and organ come together in “Night Tripper,” the album’s first inkling of any real dynamic outside of their loyalty toward seminal psychedelic forefathers. Relax as a title for this collection is almost too-fitting, with heavy-lidded tunes like “Sol Love” expounding such rudimentary lyrical fodder as “Look at the sun/look at the people” before all sense of cadence or phrasing is lost in a garbled wave of groovy UV white noise.
The album’s first single, “Star Stamp,” singes in an Iron Butterfly bass-and-organ style progression, and guitars are finally freed up for some sorely needed snaky leads. A Ronettes-like fade-in to the enchanting “Shamania” marks a smart, sharp turn for the LP, and it drives home the notion that above all, Holy Wave is a band at total war with contemporary ideas of audio fidelity. That these allegiances are steeped in such stupefying repetition and in such drowse-inducing lengths is regrettable for wide swaths of Relax until some writhing guitar squall comes out of nowhere to bring you back in. 00:00 – Do You Feel It 3:34 – Psychological Thriller 6:13 – Night Tripper 11:15 – Sol Love 13:45 – Star Stamp 17:18 – Son of Sound 21:59 – Shamania 26:52 – Change your Head/Ecstatic Moment 31:55 – Surfin Mta 35:54 – Mouth Mountain 40:13 – Wet & Wild
For any young artist, an important leap happens when influences are absorbed and the act of mining the past transforms into something personal. That’s what happens on All These Dreams, the second album from the singer-songwriter Andrew Combs, Combs is an impeccable craftsman indebted to not only the troubadour lineageof his native Texas, but to that magical moment at the turn of the 1960s into the 1970s when country, soul, rock and pop balladry all mingled on sophisticated albums by artists as varied as Kris Kristofferson or James Taylor “All These Dreams” flows the way albums did then, with AndrewCombs’s vulnerable voice lifted up within lush arrangements in songs that balance pensiveness with yearning.
“Nothing To Lose,” based around Spencer Cullum, Jr.’s steel-guitar pirouettes, is one of the album’s signature songs. For its video, director Tim Duggan mirrors what Combs and his tight group of collaborators (including Cullum’s duo Steelism and the producers Jordan Lehning and Skylar Wilson) accomplish musically, creating a vintage feel that also registers up close. In elegant monotone, rumpled suit jacket and loosened bolo tie, Combs sings into a vintage microphone. He needs a shave. “Pride got the best of me; she took the rest of me,” he murmurs as the music swirls around him. The camera pans to reveal Combs’s band; at one point, backup singers Erin Rae Mckaskle and Juliana Daily appear superimposed at the front of the frame, a couple of Mod angels. The video keeps Combs’ music at the center while opening up a flood of associations. It’s a classic performance perfect for right now.
The Fat Angel Sings 