Posts Tagged ‘Bella Union Records’

HOLLY MACVE – ” Heartbreak Blues “

Posted: January 27, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Holly Macve

Holly Macve was born in Ireland and raised in Yorkshire, but the sound of her music is rooted strongly in America. She credits her mother’s collection of old blues and Bob Dylan records as a crucial influence, and she’s adopted a singing style that bounces between a country-western twang and a high-and-lonesome yodel. Her debut album, “Golden Eagle”, comes out March 3rd via the wonderful quality label Bella Union . Here is a song taken from that album, “Heartbreak Blues.” If you’re into the same kinds of old records that Holly grew up on, or newer stuff like Angel Olsen and Margo Price, you should definitely give this a listen. Holly doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but she’s got a songwriting style that’s very accomplished for a young artist’s debut album (she’s 21). Listen to “Heartbreak Blues” . She played SXSW last year and she’ll play again this year. All Most other dates are in the UK and Ireland..

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HORSE THIEF – ” Little One “

Posted: January 10, 2017 in MUSIC
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Throughout the course of their musical union, the members of Horse Thief have won over the hearts of music lovers from all walks of life the band are very happy that the media is reacting to the new Horse Thief album. It’s long been my belief that this band have it in them to be one of the best American bands we’ve ever worked with at Bella Union and with each show and each new recording that feels 100% justified.

It’s out in a couple of weeks and already you can feel the growing appreciation for the band. They’ll be here with the Felice Brothers this month in Europe and I urge you to get down to see them and see your favourite new band.

A triumph… Frontman Cameron Neal filters anglophile influences (The Smiths’ melodic grace and New Order’s tender resolve) through Horse Thief’s graceful widescreen Americana”.
“Well-crafted second album release… The Oklahoma-based quintet trade in a roots-influenced American rock on a mid-point between Midlake and the Kings of Leon.”

“Anthemic and uplifting Americana… In its tales of life in mountain towns, of love declared and not returned, of hard decisions made, it has an honesty and a sense of wildness and isolation. Its all quite beautiful.”

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HORSE THIEF – ” Another Youth “

Posted: December 1, 2016 in MUSIC
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The new Horse Thief album and their brand of psych-folk / indie rock. I first caught them as End Of The Road Festival a few years back , They are a great Oklahoma band and i have been smitten ever since and their great front man Cameron Beckham Neal.

So here they are with their sophomore effort and Bella Union debut, “Trials and Truths”. Here’s a little more on the album. influenced by their life on the road, love, relationships and home, Neal says, “The title Trials And Truths is about us: we’re still a young band, figuring out how to make things work and to have a purpose, so we can get through any hard times. But the band is very much together—it feels like a brotherhood, we’re all in it for the same reason.”

MARISSA NADLER – ” Dissolve “

Posted: November 20, 2016 in MUSIC
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With her much-lauded LP Strangers released last May on Bella Union, Marissa Nadler has unveiled a typically striking video for the track “Dissolve” one of the album’s many highlights.

For more than 12 years Marissa Nadler has perfected her own take on the exquisitely sculpted gothic American songform. On her seventh full-length, Strangers, she has shed any self-imposed restrictions her earlier albums adhered to, stepped through a looking glass, and created a truly monumental work.

In the two years since 2014’s elegiac, autobiographical “July”, Nadler has reconciled the heartbreak so often a catalyst for her songwriting. Turning her writing to more universal themes, Nadler dives deep into a surreal, apocalyptic dreamscape. Her lyrics touch upon the loneliness and despair of the characters that inhabit them. These muses are primal, fractured, disillusioned, delicate, and alone.  In places her voice and guitar play off subsonic synths, while elsewhere, a pulsing drumbeat launches the songs off into an intense, confrontational place.

Marissa Nadler performs a chilling rendition of “Dissolve” in a session for Pitchfork.tv

INDIAN QUEENS – ” Us Against The World “

Posted: November 3, 2016 in MUSIC
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Indian Queens

Consisting of sisters Jennifer (guitar/vocals) and Katherine (bass) O’Neil, along with lifelong friend Mat on Drums, the trio, who were born and raised in Hackney Wick, have been making music together since their school days. Under the moniker Indian Queens, they take their influence from the ever-changing environment of the city with and musically mine a similar field to bands such as Warpaint, Radiohead and Massive Attack. Their sound is an atmospheric blend of soaring guitars and solid drum beats that evoke and uplift.

The band describe the project as… “a way to escape. We didn’t know how to record an album but we begged, stole and borrowed, got evening jobs so we could record all day. We worked every hour given to us because we knew we had something special at our fingertips. Growing up under the shadows of concrete giants, the songs are a reflection of our city’s energy.”

Bella Union Records are pleased to introduce to you Indian Queens, who premiered the video for their debut single ‘Us Against The World’ will be available digitally on 18th November.

HORSE THIEF – ” Another Youth “

Posted: October 28, 2016 in MUSIC
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We might still be two months away , but music in 2017 is already shaping up nicely. This week saw the confirmation we’ve been waiting for that Bella Union are releasing the new Horse Thief album, entitled Trials & Truth, in January, and celebrating the announcement the band shared the first taste of it, new single, Another Youth.

Discussing the new record, frontman Cameron Beckham Neal noted that this record was less rushed than its predecessor, and suggested it sounds more like how the band wanted it to. Certainly Another Youth sounds like a confident band, at the very top of their game. Building from a jarring opening guitar line, into a wave of pounding drums and pulsing keys, as Cameron’s voice enters, every bit as fragile and melodic as we remember, it’s in many ways the classic Horse Thief sound. What makes Another Youth stand out from their previous output is just how streamlined it seems, they were always prone to letting tracks drift on a sea of melody, but this sound focused and driven. A welcome return for one of our favourite bands on the planet, without wanting to wish our lives away, 2017 can’t come quickly enough.

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Taken from the upcoming 2017 album ‘Trials & Truths’,

TROUBLE WITH TEMPLETON – ” Bad Mistake “

Posted: October 1, 2016 in MUSIC
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Another excellent release from a band of Australian persuasion, signed to that wonderful label Bella Union.

Trouble With Templeton, are a band that have been nurtued by the label and have come out with a gem of a track. Thankfully their new single, Bad Mistake, serves as a timely reminder of the bands songwriting prowess.

It has been two years since the band released their last album, Rookie, and since then according to frontman Thomas Calder, the band have been busy “breaking down and re-assembling what it means to make music for us”. If Bad Mistake is anything to go by, it’s time well spent, recalling the dreamy-melodies of Grandaddy and the laid-back scuzz of Pavement, it’s not just a triumphant return but the bands best track to date for sure.

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Trouble with Templeton have the upcoming album “Someday Buddy” released on Bella Union Records.

PAVO PAVO – ” Annie Hall / Wiserway “

Posted: September 8, 2016 in MUSIC
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Pavo Pavo

The background: “Pavo” is Latin for peacock, and the group’s name is inspired by a southern constellation of the same name. In Spanish, “Comer pavo” means to be a wallflower, which applies well to this Brooklyn quintet’s retro, modern sci-fi pop: they’re geeky – wilfully so – and these five classically trained musicians have played with the likes of John Zorn. The recording studio is their habitat, where they wallow, pale and withdrawn, submerged up to their moustaches and fringes in vintage gadgetry, making pop music that makes them sound like Brian Wilson running amok in the BBC radiophonic workshop. Hill hails from Pleasantville, a village in Westchester county, New York, that reeks of a Norman Rockwell painting reframed by David Lynch. Bagg’s words and music have an eerie washed-out playfulness, a wistful exuberance, that captures the sadness of a passing moment or era.

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“That’s definitely in there,” agrees Hill, referring to the atmosphere of Pavo Pavo’s excellent debut album, Young Narrator in the Breakers. “It comes from the autumnal nature of our time, leaving college in New Haven and moving to New York City. A big part of that is a mourning or grief, a loss. A lot of the songs started on a piano, played late at night at one of our parents’ houses, so there’s the introspective aspect. Then we turned up the volume and created pop or rock songs. But there’s a wistfulness at the core of the songwriting.”

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The lineup: Eliza Bagg (violin, synthesizers, vocals), Oliver Hill (guitars, synthesizers, vocals), Nolan Green (guitars, vocals), Austin Vaughn (drums), Ian Romer (bass).

EZRA FURMAN – ” Big Fugitive Life ” EP

Posted: August 22, 2016 in MUSIC
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The Big Fugitive Life EP features songs that Ezra Furman describes as orphans, which are songs  that either didn’t make the cut from his last album record,  Perpetual Motion People or 2012’s The Year of No Returning.

Lead track “Teddy I’m Ready” is giddy with excitement. Starting with an impatient guitar riff the song explodes into life as he announces “Teddy, I’m ready to rock and roll.” The euphoria is ramped up with the addition of a delirious saxophone and so wired is his wonderfully wracked voice it sounds like he hasn’t slept in a week.

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The lyrics are endlessly quotable throughout. “Little Piece of Trash” has the brilliant line “I don’t really give a fuck if they put me in a truck and send me off to sea”, during which Furman genuinely sounds like he  means what he is saying, which is one of the reasons he’s so marvellous.

While the first three songs here are all Rock ‘n’ Roll ebullience, on the final three Furman explores a more plaintive side to his writing. “Penetrate” is an acoustic ditty written in the spirit of American songwriters like Hank Williams or Woody Guthrie as he laments “Penetrate my country, penetrate my home.”

The closing song “Refugee”, is about a “Jew who refuses to die”, referencing the horror of World War II endured by his Grandfather. It’s the most nakedly personal song he’s written and shows that regardless of its genre – be it punk, glam-rock or troubadour balladry, it’s not just the way the melody sways back and forth like a drunken waltz, or the meandering pathways Furman’s voice takes through the song’s unbroken verse. “Refugee” is so overstuffed with narrative that it can’t find room for a chorus, which feels appropriate given how it’s about people who wander the earth searching — and often failing to find — a home to call their own.
“‘The Refugee’ [is] my first song entirely concerned with my Jewish background and present, a song dedicated to my grandfather who fled the Nazis as well as to all of the refugees desperate for a home today,” Furman explains. Though the song starts in a “frosty green Poland”, it ends up somewhere universal, the lyrics no longer restrained to just a single person’s story. “We dedicate this record to refugees of all kinds, all over the world,” says Furman. “May all the wanderers find the homes they seek, and and may those with power welcome them as fellow citizens of humanity.”

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The Big Fugitive Life EP is a perfect bookend to the Perpetual Motion People album available through Bella Union Records. 

HOLLY MACVE – ” Corner Of My Mind “

Posted: July 23, 2016 in MUSIC
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Brighton might not be the obvious place to discover a great new alt-country talent, but thankfully it was where Bella Union’s Simon Raymonde went searching. There at an open-mic night he stumbled across a 20 year old Irish-born, Yorkshire bred singer by the name of Holly Macve; Simon recalls how on opening her mouth Holly silenced a crowd of “beery boys.” The rest, as they may well soon say, is history.

Whilst no details have yet been shared of a full length album, Holly has been working with the likes of the Corals Bill Ryder Jones and Lanterns On the Lake’s talented guitarist Paul Gregory. This week, Holly has shared the video for her stunning new single, “Corner Of My Mind”. The track is a thing of haunting beauty; the gentle tick of an acoustic guitar, embellishments of piano and electric guitar, and slap bang in the foreground is Holly’s magical voice. Her tone reminds me somewhat of the songstress Marissa Nadler, her melodies Imogen Heap, her inflections could be from First Aid Kit; it’s a truly special instrument, and one it seems inevitable the world will be hearing a lot more of in the future. In regards to the footage, Holly states “We decided to not plan much before we starting filming, hoping to just stumble across the right imagery and atmosphere needed to accompany the dark nature of the song. All the shots were filmed in Holme Moss near my hometown in West Yorkshire which is where it was written.”

You can catch Holly Macve at a number of festivals

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