Told Slant is Felix Walworth’s dark and evil band, Told Slant, the solo project of Brooklyn songwriter Felix Walworth, has announced a new album “Point the Flashlight and Walk”, out on November 13th via Double Double Whammy. It’s the follow-up to 2016’s Going By. Told Slant also unveiled two singles from the new album— “Family Still” and “No Backpack”—which come with lyric videos shot by Emily Sprague (Florist).
“Family Still” is a poetic exploration of interpersonal dynamics. “Power isn’t taking / It’s making you give in freely / And I hope you don’t come home / and think it’s enough to be near me,” Walworth sings in a gentle tone. This layered acoustic track excels in its dissection of the complicated shades of intimacy: “What can be said of desire / when every longing instilled in my heart was instilled in such a violent world?”
“No Backpack” also delves into closeness, mixing in both cynicism and romanticism. There’s cherished imagery of angled zippers on a leather jacket and a life packed inside a Honda, which plays into the song’s core conflict—its competing views of love: cautious and self-protective or idealized and reckless. “I don’t want to run with you / when there’s someone you’re devoted to / You’re always living with a trapdoor under you,” Walworth sings.
Walworth said of the new songs:
“Family Still” and “No Backpack” are meant to be listened to in succession. They explore the concepts of devotion and togetherness as both liberatory and self-negating, and mount these explorations from a place of sober reflection and indulgent fantasy.
Based out of Brooklyn, Caitlin Pasko is a songwriter, pianist and, “weaver of dreamy, elegiac meditations”. Caitlin first emerged back in 2017 with the beautiful Glass Period, “a small chapel to personal grief”. After three years, this week Caitlin has released the much anticipated follow-up, “Greenhouse”, named in tribute to the, “structures that protect plant life from unfavorable external conditions, and from environments in which flora adapt in order to survive and sustain other life forms”.
Caitlin Pasko’s songs are rooms where silence and language are granted equal weight. Her singing is precise, but soft andreserved, and her piano-playing drifts and floats. Caitlin talks openly of how the album emerged from an emotionally abusive partnership, and the record chronicles the wider themes of relationships failing, be they romantic, familial or otherwise. Working with producer Henry Terepka, Caitlin sets these ideas into a stunning musical landscape; a world of spacious, elegant piano lines, intricate, deliberate vocals and swirling electronics. It’s a sound entirely Caitlin’s own, equally nodding to classical composers as it does to Caitlin’s contemporaries from Cross Record to Tenci. Particularly jarring and wonderful is the album’s centrepiece Horrible Person, a fusion of gorgeous vocal melodies with unnerving electronics and a lyric that seeks to flip the tables on an abuser who has always dragged you down; “you know you are a horrible person, and I could never really be fully at ease around you, like a cat on a hot tin roof wondering when it should move”. While this is undeniably a record that walks the darker streets, at its close it does offer a certain resolution, in the shape of final track, Intimate Distance. The track finds Caitlin at her piano, picking out bold piano chords and singing to herself of fresh growth and progress, “it took a fallen snow to feel that growth and letting go are so complexly intertwined”. Few albums live up to their title like Greenhouse does, it is a record that exists like a bubble, a place where emotions are laid raw and protected from the toxicity and harshness of the world at large, a place where against the odds, new shoots of life, love and hope will find a way.
Piano, Vocals, & Synths (Dave Smith Tetra, Moog Minitaur)
by Caitlin Pasko
Guitar, Percussion, & Synths (Dave Smith Tetra, Moog Sub 37, Yamaha TX7)
& Additional Piano on “Horrible Person” & “Mother” by Henry Terepka
“Interzone” is the third full-length album by New York’s electro post-punk duo The Vacant Lots, to be released on Fuzz Club, Friday, June 26th, 2020. A genre-blending synthesis of dance and psych, Interzone is made for secluded listeners and all night partygoers, meant for headphones and the club.
Uninhibited by the limitations of two people and continuing their mission of “minimal means maximum effect,” The Vacant Lots’ Jared Artaud and Brian MacFadyen create an industrial amalgam of icy electronics and cold beats with detached vocals and hard hitting guitars. Interzone’s trance-like opener ‘Endless Rain’ and the kinetic krautrock stomper ‘Into The Depths’ are followed by scintillating dark disco anthems ‘Rescue’ and ‘Exit’. Side 2 kicks off with 80’s synth-pop track ‘Fracture’ and haunting after-hours minimal wave ‘Payoff,’ while ‘Station’ and album closer ‘Party’s Over’ deal with disillusionment and conquering one’s indifference to make real change.
The album creates order from chaos and delves into escapism, isolation, relationship conflicts, and decay. With nods to William S. Burroughs and Joy Division’s song of the same name, “Interzone is like existing between two zones,” Jared says. “Interzone doesn’t mean one thing. It can mean different things to different people depending on their interpretation. Working on this album was a constant struggle reconciling internal conflicts with all that’s going on externally in the world. Interzone in one word is duality.”
“Jared and I bounced ideas back and forth while working in seclusion on opposite coasts. We would just send files to each other until the songs were arranged. Then we met up at the studio in Brooklyn where we were fortunate enough to borrow Alan Vega’s Arp synth and finished recording with engineer Ted Young. We then worked with Maurizio Baggio to mix it,” recalls Brian. After the band finished producing Interzone, long term visual collaborator Ivan Liechti designed the album artwork.
The Vacant Lots have released singles with Mexican Summer and Reverberation Appreciation Society, collaborated on their debut album Departure with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, their second album Endless Night with Alan Vega, and most recently on their two EPs, Berlin and Exit, with Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe at his studio in Berlin. The group has toured with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Suicide, Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Growlers, Dean Wareham, The Dandy Warhols, and Spectrum.
Reflecting on the new album, Jared says, “We don’t want to waste people’s time and we want people to play it over and over. Our mantra is ‘is it bulletproof? 8 songs. 30 minutes. It’s about intention and vision.”
Released June 26th, 2020
All Songs & Music Produced by the Vacant Lots, Are Jared Artaud & Brian Macfayden
Brooklyn’s Jeanines specialize in ultra-short bursts of energetic but melancholy minor-key pop. With influences that run deep into the most crucial tributaries of DIY pop — Messthethics, the Television Personalities, Marine Girls, early Pastels, Dolly Mixture — they’ve crafted a style that is as individual as it is just plain pleasurable. Alicia Jeanine’s pure, unaffected voice muses wistfully on the illusions of time, while My Teenage Stride/Mick Trouble mastermind Jed Smith’s frantic Motown-esque drumming and inventive bass playing provide a thrilling rhythmic foundation.
“Winter In The Dark” and a lovely, jaunty cover of The Siddeleys’ “Falling Off Of My Feet Again” provide great insight into what Jeanines are about. 60s-meet-80s melodies combine with timeless guitar jangle in a way that recalls everything from The Aislers Set and Saturday Looks Good To Me to more recent DIY pop groups like Parsnip and Chook Race. Album opener “Either Way,” “Hits The Bone” and “Where We Go” hearken back to some of the most intriguing bands of the C86/C88 era, when bands like Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes crafted perfect pop gems enlivened by the inspiration of punk.
Gorgeous songs like “Where I Stand,” “Too Late” and “In This House” are windows into Alicia’s lyrical style and inspiration. She expands: “I’m kind of obsessed with mortality and how weird the passage of time is so I think my lyrics reflect that. I definitely lean into that kind of melancholy state of mind when trying to think of lyrics, while trying to avoid cliches!” The marriage of the minor-key melodies and melancholic lyrics is powerful and make Alicia’s songs all the more memorable, especially so on songs like “No Home,” with its echoes of girl harmony post-punk groups like Grass Widow and Household.
Clearly, with 16 great songs included, there is a lot at work here on this standout debut album. Jeanines have been compared to such cult pop icons as Dear Nora, Black Tambourine, and more recent acts like Veronica Falls and Girl Ray, but their dark, modal melodies and pensive, philosophical lyrics, along with Smith’s versatile but ever-economical musicality, ensure them a place of their own in today’s crowded but boisterously healthy DIY pop scene.
Oceanator aka Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter/guitarist Elise Okusami, is releasing her debut album, “Things I Never Said”, on August 28th via her own Plastic Miracles label. She has shared a new song from it, “Heartbeat,” which is about the anxiety that comes from having a crush on someone.
Okusami had this to say about “Heartbeat” in a press release: “This song is loosely about having a crush, and both the grounding feeling and the anxiety that feeling brings. We recorded it all together like a live performance, and then I went back and added the lead guitars and the vocals. Guitar and vocals by me, bass Eva Lawitts (they), drums Aaron Silberstein (he).
Things I Never Said includes“A Crack in the World,”. Then we loved the album’s next single, the more synth-poppy “I Would Find You,”. Things I Never Said was originally due to come out on Tiny Engines, but then that label pretty much imploded after it was revealed that it was having difficulty making royalty payments to its artists, so Okusami is putting out the album on her own label instead. Although the British label Big Scary Monsters has just announced that they have signed Oceanator and will be releasing the album in the UK.
To fully understand the energy of frontwoman Eva Hendricks and Charly Bliss, you gotta see them live. I learned that when the Brooklyn four-piece totally smashed the stage the first time I saw them. Not sure why I was surprised, but any doubts I might’ve had about Charly Bliss were effectively squashed. Hendricks is a dynamic instrumentalist and her distinctive high-pitched voice stands delightfully front and centre on a range of harmonies. This is a killer indie power-pop band.
Indie rock quartet Charly Bliss have an otherworldly knack at rendering certain playful images just as sinister: “cardboard cereal,” a bleeding snow cone, a mouth red with Gatorade. 2017’s Guppy established the band as masters of this subversion. Their crunching guitars and Eva Hendricks’ sweet, pointed vocals sliding through increasingly pop arrangements are the vehicle for a creeping dark that filters through each track’s observations of the mundane humour and horror of human affection. 2019’s stellar Young Enough polished its predecessor’s frayed, glittering edges for a slow burn of synthesizers and sharpened focal points; that cleaner sound also made room for a deeper emotional reservoir. Both are examples of kinetic and potential energy refined to an art.
“We’re young enough / To believe it should hurt this much.” They’re old enough to recognize it.
Girl Skin are a Brooklyn-based indie-rock band, led by singer/songwriter Sid Simons. They combine aspects of fragile folk and delicate art rock to create ethereal chamber-pop songs that are unafraid to wear their vulnerable hearts on their sleeve.
This six-piece based in Brooklyn known as GIRL SKIN has a much softer approach to music-making. Their latest single, “Forever & Always,” comes to us from the band’s debut album, Shade is On the Other Side, which will be available on April 17th through Jullian Records. At the helm of this endeavor sits singer-songwriter Sid Simons who wrote and recorded the album at his Brooklyn home with the help of his musical entourage. “Forever & Always” starts and ends with a simple indie-folk sound, but between those two points, the song swells and assumes different forms, sometimes achieving orchestral proportions. The love song sentiment is strong in “Forever & Always” and it definitely pulls on the heartstrings… even on a grumpy old writer like myself. This song has the power to lift spirits to the lofty heights of new love. Check out Girl Skin below
Brooklyn-based indie-folk band Girl Skin have just released the latest single from their debut album, ‘Shade is on the Other side’. Front-man, Sid Simons says of new song ‘Soft Gun’: “I was in my living room one day working on a song that wasn’t really going anywhere and my brother and his soon to be ex-girlfriend were upstairs arguing. They were arguing loud enough that I could hear almost every word, so I started writing down some of the things they were saying to each other and then began singing the lines I wrote down. By the time the argument was over and my brother had come downstairs, I had a song.” Well, that’s how to write a song. It’s warmly textured, summery fuzzy-folk, complete with dreamy, drifting vocals.
Band Members:
Sid Simons,
Sophie Cozine,
Stan Simons,
Ruby Wang,
Noah Boling,
Wyatt Mones,
Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn has been creating incorruptible independent pop music since the late 90’s. Mirah recently announcedthe reissue of her debut LP, You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This, accompanied with a full tribute LP with contributions from over 20 artists. The reissue is out July 31st, 2020 on Double Double Whammy.
Mirah has shared the full album streams for the double LP 20th anniversary reissue of You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This. The reissue includes a remastered version of the record as well as a tribute to the album that features covers by Mount Eerie, Half Waif, Hand Habits, Palehound, Shamir, Sad13,Allison Crutchfield and more. The LP established Mirah as one of the smartest and most exciting young artists in America. It also went on to inspire a new generation of indie musicians, drawn in by Mirah’s deft and introspective songwriting.”
“To get to hear my songs performed by all of these amazing folks was like having a weird cool dream about my life 20 years ago,” Mirah said of the tribute album. “You know that way that dreams can feel both real and surreal at the same time? I love getting to float above myself and listen in on all of the brilliance that the musicians on the covers album gave to this project.”
Additionally, to celebrate the reissue, Mirah has announced a series of live streams featuring performances of songs from her first three records that kicks off on 8/11 with You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This.
20 Year Anniversary Reissue of Mirah’s first album You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like. This was originally released on K Records in 2000 and has been out of print on vinyl since 2014.
Double album with the first disc a straight repress, but the second has a long list of notable artists covering the record including Phil Everum, Hand Habits, Jenn Wasner, Half Waif and many others.
Earlier this month, the members of the dearly beloved and dearly departed band Krill announced they were reforming, with an additional guitarist, as Knot. Their self-titled debut is going to be out at the end of August, and they’ve already shared a promising first glimpse called “Foam,”
Today, they’re back with another one. Knot’s latest is called “The World.” Here’s what Jonah Furman had to say about it: “The World” is supposed to be about the experience of wanting to change the world — or maybe the experience of insisting on wanting to change the world. I guess in some basic way it’s just about anti-escapism — what it means to accept the world, your life, the political situation, as real, as something one cannot retreat from, and as something one should try to not want to retreat from, but to push through, look in the face, and demand some kind of transformation. In my head there was the phrase “another world is possible,” which is heard in movements and protests, and seems to be consciously or unconsciously associated with the idea that we can build something parallel or separate from the corrupted and horrific institutions and instantiations of actually-existing society. I want on some level to reject that; not that change can’t happen, but I want to insist that it happens through, not around, the sick and failed parts of human political experience.
The Band:
Jonah Furman: Vocals, Guitar
Joe Demanuelle-Hall: Guitar
Aaron Ratoff: Bass, Guitar (4, 9)
Ian Becker: Drums
Knot from the upcoming LP, “Knot” out August 28th, 2020 on Exploding in Sound Records.
Max Clarke, aka Cutworms returns with “Castle in the Clouds,” and an accompanying video. Clarke wrote “Castle in the Clouds” in April 2019, after tours supporting his 2017 EP Alien Sunset and 2018’s Hollow Ground. The songs came quick, then, too many to count. Eschewing demos for in-studio spontaneity, he finished “Castle in the Clouds” on a flight to Memphis, TN, and then recorded it the next day at Sam Phillips Studio with Matt Ross-Spang (John Prine, Jason Isbell, Margo Price). The resulting track is somewhere between a lonesome cowboy lullaby for the restless, and a doo-wop sci-fi elegy for the daydreaming teenagers of Mars. Its video, homemade by Clarke, pulls together luminous animations and mid-20th century stock footage.
Cut Worms, moniker of Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter and multi-disciplined visual artist Max Clarke, announces his new double album, “Nobody Lives Here Anymore”, outOctober 9th on Jagjaguwar Recordings. Today, he presents two new singles – “Sold My Soul” with an accompanying video and “God Bless The Day.” Nobody Lives Here Anymore is the haunted reverie of an American landscape in-and-out of Max’s mind. Recorded between May and November 2019 in Memphis, Tennessee, the album is a snow globe of the mid-twentieth-century’s popular music filled with jangling guitars, honkey tonk pianos, and Telstar organs.
“‘Castle in the Clouds’ was the first one we did,” says Clarke. “I remember being in the studio, thinking the control room looked like the bridge on a spaceship. It reminded me of the old Carl Sagan Cosmos, where he’s kind of hovering above, transporting you across the universe. I always really liked the theme song. I think that spirit found its way onto the recording.”
Max immediately started writing material for his sophomore LP after an extensive eighteen-months of touring in support of 2017’s Alien Sunset and 2018’s Hollow Ground. Mining his life-long devotion to the lost American songbook for inspiration, he stockpiled nearly thirty new songs Unlike earlier works that were meticulously demoed, Max opted for rough drafts to capture something more immediate and honest. Most of the initial takes were tracked live with Noah Bond on drums, while Max sang and played rhythm guitar. Max then built lush arrangements around these intimate performances. A skeleton crew of friends and Memphis all-stars were called in to lay down pedal steel, sax, and strings. When all was said and done, they had recorded 17 new cosmic Americana gems.
“Sold My Soul” and “God Bless The Day” follow previously released singles “Unnatural Disaster,” “Baby Come On,” and “Castle in the Clouds.” “Sold My Soul” takes a look back and ahead at the choices we make, with a thinly veiled punchline to soften the blow. Over jaunty guitar, Max’s voice is expressive as he sings “I sold my soul somewhere so long ago // Oh I didn’t think too much at the time I was young and I didn’t know // oh till I saw it late one night on the antique road show // expert collectors to appraise.” The accompanying video, directed and shot by Caroline Gohlke on Route 66 from Chicago to Oklahoma, captures the aura of stumbling through a deserted time.
Max sees this record as a figurative shot across the bow to the modern attention span. He says Nobody Lives Here Anymore is about “throwaway consumer culture and how the postwar commercial wet dreams never came true, how nothing is made to last.” He considers the golden years of a society on its last leg with poignant curiosity, suggesting not only that nobody lives the American dream, but that nobody lives here, in this moment, anymore. “It’s about homesickness for childhood, for a place that never really existed,” says Max.
A loss of innocence lingers through this 80-minute opus as Max attempts to harbour love and meaning inside a world that sold itself out. While his grand anthems overflow with timeless pop charm, his ability to dig deeper than lollipops and holding hands sets his work apart from the days of 45s and Top of the Pops.
“Nobody Lives Here Anymore” the new album by Cut Worms out now on Jagjaguwar Recordings.
The Fat Angel Sings 