Florist – Emily Sprague’s appropriately-bucolic quartet florist popped up on our radar earlier this fall with “Holdly”, a compact ep crammed with sharp songwriting and memorable melodies that thankfully serves as a placeholder for the birds outside sang, a full-length coming January 29th via double double whammy.
“The Birds Outside Sang” is an album about the speed at which rain falls, life goes on, and people grow. It’s one part a personal, autobiographical, and almost completely chronological telling of a time in my life full of confusion, physical + emotional pain, loneliness, and hope. It is another part a rebirth of a musical friendship between my best friends in the whole world, and an attempt to highlight the importance of love and the things in life that give you something special to hold on to, to find a calm that can carry you through being alive and being scared.
Thank you for listening. My one and only goal is that someone can listen to this album and feel/see something, and take it with them as a thought. Emily of Florist
released January 29, 2016 Florist is Emily Sprague, Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker, and Felix Walworth
MOTHXR, are a four-piece from Brooklyn, have revealed their latest single ‘She Can’t Tell’.
The dark, r&b influenced track has been lifted from their upcoming debut album “Centerfold”, due for release on 26th February. From the album Centerfold via Washington Square / Kitsune.
Mothxr is Penn Badgley, Jimmy Giannopoulos, Simon Oscroft and Darren Will,
Mothxr formed last summer over, literally, eight days. Badgley, best known for his television and film work, always considered himself a musician at heart, if not in practice. A music project was in the ether but he, Giannopoulos, and the band needed a catalyst to kickstart the process. “Jimmy and I talked about getting out, like, ‘Fuck this winter, maybe let’s get three months out in Los Angeles,’” Badgley says. “Then it was like, ‘Maybe we’ll go out there for a month and a half,’ then it was four weeks. I remember a few days later I was like, ‘So, yo, we’ve got eight days. Write a song a day? Ok cool.’ Over half the record came out of those eight days.”
“Including ‘Easy,’ which was the first song we released,” Oscroft adds. “‘Easy’ was written and recorded on the third day. We never thought about the order. We just were like, ‘Ok cool, song’s done.
One of the best indie bands to recently emerge from Brooklyn in Diiv’s wake are this trio. Equal parts Blondie, The Cure and Tame Impala, their brand of blissed out indie sounds exhilarating, while debut album “Human Ceremony” has barely left the stereo since advance copies came in last month. New single ‘Easily Said’, meanwhile, is jangle pop perfection at its best.
Florist is a friendship project that was born in the Catskill Mountains. Recorded by Florist at 603 Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, NY.
When Emily Sprague moved to Brooklyn from Albany late in 2013, she was already honing her songwriting style: aching, blunt, quiet, but not sheepish. Then, in February 2014, she was in a severe bicycle accident and broke her neck and one of her arms. As she recovered, she began writing new songs, even more spare thanks both to her economical lyrical aesthetic and how circumstance had limited what her body could do.
Some of that music has made it to “The Birds Outside Sang,” the first full-length from the band Florist, an album that bubbles with Ms. Sprague’s anxiety about mortality. Often she finds herself at war with her body, like on “Rings Grow”: “I used to think I was leaves but I’m bark/and I’m peeling away/and my bones are the branches that regrow in the springtime.”
Her singing is frail but determined on this album, which hits like an intense whisper. She finds strength in her weaknesses and ruminates about a personal identity that’s ever changing: “I was born a boy with many opinions/and now I’m a girl who doesn’t really care about anything.”
Skeletal arrangements suit Ms. Sprague best, both because of how she’s singing and what she’s singing about. So the band, which also includes Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker and Felix Walworth, generally gives her room to breathe.
But one of the most striking moments comes on the beginning of “1914,” when she sings, “Grab me by my shoulder blades and hang me out to dry/I’m a mess and I need someone/to help me out with that.” All of her bandmates are singing, too, in a sort of shambolic chorus. The mood is lonely but soothing — an acceptance that even though no one knows where we’re going, at least we’re not alone.
Columbia Records is proud to announceDon’t You, the long-anticipated album from the trio of friends known as Wet. An astonishingly lucid and heart-wrenching collection of 11 tracks, the album is slated for a Fall release. The lead single, “Deadwater,” debuted on Annie Mac’s influential BBC Radio 1 show
“Deadwater” is the first musical offering from the forthcoming project and the follow up to their auspicious debut, the Wet EP. Wet, comprised of singer-songwriter Kelly Zutrau, and multi-instrumentalists Joe Valle and Marty Sulkow, make songs that resist easy categorization and invite every listener to bask in its intimate glow.
But despite their wide-ranging sensibilities, Wet never compromises its core: sturdy pop songwriting and piercing lyrics.
The album, almost entirely self-produced, was written during a period of solitude in a rented house in Western Massachusetts last year. Wet works together as a trio on every aspect of the album; Joe and Marty work on all aspects of the album’s instrumentation; they take Kelly’s demos and arrange them to perfection.
The trio met through mutual friends as college students in New York City in 2007. After a few years of informal dabbling, they began officially making music as Wet during the summer of 2012, an especially aimless and emotionally turbulent period.. After releasing a few songs on SoundCloud — like “Don’t Wanna Be Your Girl,” a weak-kneed but strong-headed breakup ballad — they quickly began attracting attention, sometimes from unexpected places before releasing their critically acclaimed debut EP Wet in May 2014.
The B-side from Sunflower Bean’s Fat Possum debut 7″, This Brooklyn trio has garnered plenty of buzz since their heavier-than-heavy 2015 EP, “Show Me Your Seven Secrets”, and are getting ready to release their official debut. Judging by the leadoff single “Wall Watcher” – about “existing in a lonely world,” bassist Julia Cumming the band has dialed down the fuzzy psychedelia and dialed up the tempos. Their new album titled “Human Ceremony”, recorded in just seven days, is propelled by Cumming’s ethereal voice and a rhythm section that has only gotten tighter and faster after dozens of live shows last year, opening for the likes of Wolf Alice and Best Coast.
Lou Reed’s controversial concept album Berlin – his third solo outing after the break up of The VelvetUnderground – first saw the light of day in 1973 and was almost universally denounced. Rock bible Rolling Stone declared it a career-finishing ”disaster” that was so bad it merited perpetrating ”physical vengeance” on its creator before signing off with ”Goodbye, Lou”. Hardly surprising, then, that Lou Reed should have stepped away from the work and ignored for so long, only returning to it in 2006 to resurrect it in a 30-date tour that has already spawned a DVD (directed by Julian Schnabel) and now this live recording, taken from two nights in mid-December that year at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York.
Critical appreciation of Berlin has been building since its damned and doomed debut, and in this super-charged performance, complete with 30-piece band and 12-strong choir, it’s easy to hear and appreciate why. As a concept, the piece still suffers from its own flawed ambition. Whatever else it is, Berlin is not a rock opera, or any sort of opera, for that matter. Yes, there’s a narrative – two drug-addled lovers take a lethal walk on the German capital’s wild side – but the structure supporting it is so loose and the songs so arbitrarily connected that calling it an opera is nothing more than a fanciful affectation.
But there are magnificent moments contained within that bare comparison with the best of Reed’s solo work. Equally, there are some excruciating moments, too, not least an horrendously awful take on The Bed.
While it lacks the clinical studio intensity of the original, this live performance carves its own muscular drama and dark poetry out of Reed’s dystopian lyrics and coruscating music, the latter helped by the return of original collaborator Steve Hunter on electric guitar. Reed himself remains his timeless self: dour, po-faced, emotionally underplayed and vocally colourless but acutely acerbic and astringent.
Three other songs – Candy Says, in a duet with Antony ‘And The Johnsons’ Hegarty; Rock Minuet from Reed’s 2000 long-player Ecstasy; and Sweet Jane from the Velvet’s fourth album, Loaded – are offered as encores, cleverly if a little too subtly attempting to re-thread Berlin back into a wider context.
Why We’re Excited Wet have been waiting nearly three years for the trio to drop a full-length LP. Finally, followers will get what they’ve been wishing for with the impending release of the band’s major label debut.
With just one EP in 2013, the previously Brooklyn-based Western Massachusetts outfit endeared listeners with their R&B-tinged synthpop on tracks like “You’re the Best” and “Don’t Wanna Be Your Girl”. That latter track resurfaces on “Don’t You”, but has been reworked to reflect the band’s lusher atmospheres. Minimalism still plays a role in Wet’s sound, but so does intricate layering.
The undeniably lovely “Dead Water” was the first track to introduce their expanding sound, followed by the achingly beautiful “Weak”. Loss is still as much of a theme as ever, as evident on “Its All In Vain”. It turns out all that time between the EP and LP has given the band time to let their music become fully formed so that, as frontwoman Kelly Zutrau put it, they could “feel good about these songs and not finish until they were perfect.” We’ll see how perfect they can make it when Don’t You is a constant on your turntable. For all the wintry and sultry tones here, the cooling, smeared R&B that Kelly Zutrau, Marty Sulkow, and Joe Valle make as Wet is ideal for humid months. As the summer stretched on, Don’t You became one of my favorite things to listen to in the, a mirage of stillness in a frantic midday moment.
PWR BTTM smoothed the rough edges of their debut EP and turned out a polished and powerful debut album, Ugly Cherries, that’s as heavy on the riffs as it is on the message. Ben Hopkins and Liv Bruce switch off instruments and vocals on practically every song, and the whole project has a similarly communal, anything-goes feel.
PWR BTTM is a queer punk band consisting of Ben Hopkins and Liv Bruce. The band was formed at Bard College where Bruce and Hopkins bonded over a mutual interest in bringing elements of performance and drag artistry into DIY culture. While at Bard the duo recorded a demo, Cinderella Beauty Shop, and the Republican National Convention split EP with Jawbreaker Reunion. On these releases, Hopkins plays guitar and sings, and Bruce plays drums. Since then, the two have begun to share vocal/songwriting duties and have also started to trade off instruments.
This development is very much apparent on their forthcoming LP, Ugly Cherries, an album documenting the duo’s experiences with queerness, gender, and adulthood over the course of a year of living in upstate New York. UglyCherries was recorded by Christopher Daly at Salvation Recording Company in New Paltz, NY and mastered by Jamal Ruhe at West West Side Music. The full-length record is slated for a dual release on Miscreant Records and Father/Daughter Records released September 18, 2015.
Torres, the stage name of Maicon born song-writer Mackenzie Scott, first came to the world’s attention back in 2012 when, whilst still a student, she wrote and independently released her self-titled debut album. As impressive as that record was, surely even Partisan Records, who snapped her up on the back of it, must have been quietly delighted with their decision when they first heard her latest record, Sprinter.
It wasn’t so much a step up in Mackenzie’s song-craft, as a giant leap. A stunningly produced record, it was made in Portishead’s Adrian Utley’s studio in Bristol and featured PJ Harvey collaborators Robert Ellis and Ian Oliver, but there was no doubt who the star was, this record was all about Mackenzie. The voice: capable of producing the raw power of Anna Calvi, or the emotive depth of Sharon Van Etten. The songs; from the experimental pop of Cowboy Guilt, to the squalling dark-electronics of Son You Are No Island, and the blast of noise that was Strange Hellos. This was a spectacularly good record, that questioned topics from religion, to unrequited love, and adoption, all delivered with an ambitious musical pallet and a lyrical light-touch. Put simply, it was just a fantastic record.
Not that she is striving for it, but Torres (aka Mackenzie Scott) could be the female incarnation of Kurt Cobain. Sure, she has the lanky physique of the grunge god and her stringy blond hair doesn’t hurt either. And don’t forget about her love for Fender’s other guitars. But the real similarities lie in the Brooklyn-based singer-guitarist’s ability to create the most dramatic and polar-opposite of dynamics. One second she’s whispering into the mic and the next she’s yowling loud enough to carry across county lines. In her dynamically rich second album Torres, you can hear influences ranging from Funkadelic to the aforementioned Nirvana, and you can even hear the Queen of Pop in Scott’s more subdued, airy singing. I usually play with a more elaborate rig, but for SXSW I only brought a few pedals and carried them around in my backpack all week. I wanted to keep setup time to a minimum and reduce the weight of my gear as much as possible, as I’m usually carrying it all on my back from venue to venue during SXSW.”
The Fat Angel Sings 