Horsegirl is on a race against the clock. The aim to release the trio’s debut album. For one, there’s a pandemic raging all around them. For a relatively new band (they only began playing their first shows in mid 2019), that means their in-person performance and rehearsal time has been drastically altered.
But looming largest of all is the reality of their ages. Band members Gigi Reece, Nora Cheng, and Penelope Lowenstein are all still in high school. And as graduating seniors, Cheng and Reece will likely be someplace else (New York City, if they have their way) come fall 2021. None of this has escaped the band members’ minds these last few months.
Horsegirl’s this Chicago trio sounds like they’ve been plotting their rise forever. The band released a collection of their first three singles on Bandcamp, in which they dive headfirst into heartfelt indie and eccentric noise rock. Their songs may evade big hooks, but they’re so magnetizing that you’ll hardly notice. With immense depth and a palpable sense of cool, Horsegirl share raw scribblings over clamorous guitars, and the result is exhilarating friction
Horsegirl are a Chicago band, through and through. All three members were raised in the city and cut their teeth in the city’s abundant youth performance programs. “I’ve gone through all of the Chicago institutions, I feel — Old Town, the Wiggleworms classes, Girls Rock Chicago,” said Lowenstein. “After taking guitar lessons for a long time, I was like, ‘In high school, I have to be in a band.’ It’s what I wanted to do.”
Lowenstein comes from a “total music nerd family,” she said, with a “crazy good” brother who plays the drums and a father who plays guitar and introduced her to Sonic Youth. Cheng began playing music from a young age and said she grew up on classic rock ’n’ roll. But after ditching music for a bit, it wasn’t until the summer before 8th grade, in 2016, that she joined School of Rock and began playing again.
“Sea Life Sandwich Boy” on Dropkick Records Released on: 2020-01-31
Melkbelly sculpts their signature balance between subtle melody and frantic noise on new album “Pith”, their second for Carpark Records/Wax Nine. The Chicago-based foursome has made spatial dynamics central to its arrangements, reaching for weirder highs and more startling atmospherics, negative space giving way to enveloping walls of chaos. This sense of form is reflected not only in the purposeful production, but in the ceramic cover art created by Chicago artist Deborah Handler. Since their 2017 debut Nothing Valley, the members of Melkbelly have an even better understanding of their sonic motivations. “We’re always going to sort through the past to make better sense of the present,” Miranda says, and in doing so Melkbelly continually finds ways to mutate its sound. On Pith, Melkbelly sought space, and succeeded in crafting it. What a pleasure to be let in.
Recording in two short sessions six months apart, the band worked with long time collaborator Dave Vettraino, this time at Bloomington, Indiana’s Russian Recording. Alongside an arsenal of rock gear and airy synth layers coaxed from a Moog Prodigy, “Pith’s multidimensionality was refined by the studio’s collection of rare Russian tube mics, which were placed in every corner to capture Melkbelly’s unabashed loudness. Frontperson Miranda Winters’ charmingly bright vocals are newly effected, delayed to a menacing, mysterious thickness. Guitars, handled by Miranda and Bart Winters, interlock and separate with dizzying ease, riffs dissolving into floating trails and reappearing with metallic edges. Bassist Liam Winters’ low grooves bounce and kick along with drummer James Wetzel’s rhythmically unsettling performance, which stretches time yet never falters.
On “Pith”, Melkbelly’s second full-length, the Chicago foursome refine their knotty but melodic noise rock. Singer-guitarist Miranda Winters calls out from murky depths, conjuring memories of loss, anxiety, frustration, and occasional bliss. On standout track “THC,” the band slowly cranks up the tension until it erupts into an onslaught of guitar fuzz. Melkbelly rarely stays in one place for long, whiplashing from one fractured groove to the next, always finding new ways to shift from quiet to explosive.
Recorded at Russian Recording in Bloomington, Indiana, Released April 3rd, 2020
Miranda Winters – Guitar, Vocals James Wetzel – Drums, Moog, STS Bart Winters – Guitar Liam Winters – Bass Guitar All songs written by Melkbelly Lyrics by Miranda Winters
There’s a palpable sense of dread throughout Just Look At That Sky, the breathtaking LP from Chicago post-punks Ganser. Bassist Alicia Gaines and keyboardist Nadia Garofalo swap lead vocal duties and anchor these abrasive and stunning songs with divergent approaches between Garofalo’s biting punk delivery and Gaines’ ethereal alto. Tracks like “Shadowcasting” boast brooding atmospherics and foreboding lyrics from Gaines, where she sings, “The more I look at it / the worse it gets.” Elsewhere, the vibe gets more aggressive on the jagged single “Lucky,” where Garofalo shrieks, “You thought you’d be more than this / Thought you’d be OK” over screeching riffs. It’s everything you’d want in a post-punk LP.
Ganser understand tension better than most. The eight post-punk anthems that comprise their new album Just Look at That Sky (and one jazz/spoken word interlude) eschew the easy formula of build-and-release in favour of settling into moments of discomfort that mirror the uneasy narrators of their songs, drinking away their anxious existence and prepping for air disasters. Their rhythms are so taut they’re ready to snap, their guitar riffs caustic and unpredictable, so that when there is a moment of climax—like the surprising burst of horns on closer “Bags of Life”—it’s more than earned. I probably don’t have to explain why an album of aestheticized discomfort resonated as much as it did this year—anxiety loves company—but it’s more than a healthy outlet for nervous energy. It’s pure headphone catharsis.
Our new album ‘Just Look at That Sky’ is out now on Felte! Check out the videos from the album on their channel and stream the record on all platforms. Vinyl, CDs and merch available at Bandcamp.
During the enforced idleness of the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people hatched ambitious plans: reading unreadable books, mastering a language, baking virtuous sourdough. For Jeff Tweedy, the global crisis truncated a Wilco tour, and he found himself at home with his family. His son Spencer lives at home anyway, and his other son, Sammy, returned from New York to do remote schooling.
Tweedy had tuned in to the discussion about creativity during times of quarantine, and had learned (the arguable fact) that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while sheltering from the plague. What to do? Well, in times of stress, as in all times, Tweedy’s habit is to visit his Chicago studio, The Loft. There, he planned to write a country album named after Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, producing a song a day.
“Love Is The King” is not that record. Tantalisingly, Tweedy suggests that a number of straightforward country-style songs were recorded before his own instincts started to kick in. True, if Shakespeare had gone countrypolitan, he might have taken his sense of jeopardy, his troubled masculinity, his interest in tempests as an emotional metaphor and created something similar. “Ripeness is all,” says Edgar in King Lear. “Oh, tomatoes right off the vine,” croons Tweedy in “Guess Again”, “we used to eat them like that all the time.”
This album marries Tweedy’s mature emotional outlook (love is all, and is a dream worth dreaming) to the workaday manners of Uncle Tupelo or the Woody Guthrie project, Mermaid Avenue. There’s a home video lurking on YouTube of Tweedy sitting on his sofa, strumming his way through Talking Heads’ “Heaven”. The sound of Love Is The King is what you’d expect from the bar band in that song: briskly functional, with an enduring tension between Tweedy’s balmy vocals and the electric guitar, which arrives in these songs like a deluge.
“I always think that the electric guitar player, who’s me, is the guy who’s having the toughest time dealing with everything,” Tweedy tells says. “He’s a little bit frayed. He showed up for a different type of session, his nerves are getting the better of him.”
Occasionally, broader influences seep through. The playful “Gwendolyn” has the wayward electricity of the Faces, and a heroine who sounds the sort of paramour the young Rod Stewart might have conquered and regretted. For Tweedy it acknowledges his habit of finding himself several steps behind a woman, emotionally. The title track has a languid rhythm that is almost obliterated by the guitar, and a lyric that marries the Lear-like outlook of the narrator (“At the edge/Of as bad as it gets”), to flashes of current affairs; tanks in the streets and violence.
That mood spills into “Opaline”, a honky-tonk lament that playfully blurs images of death, paranoia and dread. The inspiration for the song is more prosaic. The lyric is addressed to a golden orb-weaver spider that lived in Tweedy’s backyard through spring and summer before abruptly disappearing, presumed dead. The song’s most troubling image, of a hearse stuck at a toll gate, actually happened. Tweedy saw the funeral car, parked in its own metaphor, when escaping Chicago via the skyway to Michigan. “I kept looking in my rear-view mirror, thinking, ‘Holy shit, that’s one of the worst things I can think of,’” he says with a laugh. “A guy driving a hearse with no change for a toll.”
On paper, it sounds tormented. In reality, it doesn’t. As a singer, Tweedy patrols the trunk road between regret and resilience. Straight-legged sincerity, when he chooses to use it, is a good look: see the thankful love song “Even I Can See”. Tweedy is probably more instinctively comfortable undermining himself, as on the countrified “Natural Disaster”. That song’s image of “a lightning bolt punch a bird right out of the sky” may be a nod to the sudden death of a flamingo in Charles Portis’s book The Dog Of The South. On a further literary note, Tweedy’s pal, author George Saunders, provides a couple of lines to the sprightly “A Robin Or A Wren”, a song that manages to roll together romantic devotion, love of life, fear of death, and a playful suggestion of reincarnation. Saunders’ lines are about “the end of the end of this beautiful dream”.
Tweedy, with his unerring ability to find himself while getting lost, ushers in a conclusion that is happy and sad, with hope kept aflame by his faith in the power of song. No matter what he does with Wilco or solo, simply one of the best songwriters alive. His lyrics are poetry. His vocal delivery invites you in and is so vulnerable. I like this a bit better than Warm, which was also brilliant. This is just another in a string of albums from artists over the pandemic that have blown me away this year.
Released October 23rd, 2020
All songs written by Jeff Tweedy except “A Robin Or A Wren” written by Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders Performed by Jeff Tweedy, Spencer Tweedy, and Sammy Tweedy,
Slow Pulp’s remarkable full-length debut Moveys is a testament to hard-fought personal growth. In the process of making their new record, the Chicago-based indie rock band powered through health challenges, personal upheaval, and a pandemic, all while learning how to be better songwriters and friends. Full of blistering energy and emotional catharsis, this compelling 10-track collection highlights the band’s resourcefulness and resilience to come together even when they were states away.
Slow Pulp’s journey towards their debut album has been an unexpected one for the Chicago band. Through personal tragedies and health issues, “Moveys” became something entirely different from what the band had initially planned. The initial blow being singer Emily Massey receiving a diagnosis of Lyme disease and chronic mono. To add further insult, one week before the pandemic loomed, Massey’s parents were involved in a serious car crash.
But out of this personal upheaval, their debut album was formed through the most difficult of circumstances and as a result is a telling testament towards the collectivism within Slow Pulp. Through these experiences and writing simultaneously Massey was able to find space to process her thoughts and undergo a healing process. That process is transcendent throughout the record and a key crux as to how their music can have such profound effect. With some of the album’s material being recorded and written after lockdown, you would think that there would be a bit of a logistical headache when trying to piece an album together. Although an isolated experience wasn’t too different to their usual process as Emily explains. “We write separately from each other and usually send ideas through a Google Drive link. So, it wasn’t too crazy different, I did end up recording my vocals with my dad, which was really fun, he engineered my vocals”.
Writing with her dad Michael provided a mutual sense of healing between the pair. This is cemented on Whispers (In The Outfield), a wonderful instrumental track that merges piano and synth to create something which sounds texturally ethereal yet manages to maintain a very human level of wonderment and warmth. “That was the first piece of music that he played since the accident. Just the fact that he was able to work on the album with me was pretty special after an event where he almost lost his life” Emily said.
Shoegaze was one particular tag that the band were given after their earlier work, yet Moveys is much more dynamic in the genres it pays homage to. Their evolution was not planned as guitarist/producer Henry explained, “It was kind of an accident. We all kind of projected that it was going to be pretty heavy and blown out and it just didn’t happen like that. It wasn’t a conscious decision; I think we were following our gut”. One of their biggest achievements as a result of following this instinct is that Moveys has a consistent tone throughout yet each track still maintains a sense of individualism.
Absolutely delicious indie-rock that hits the perfect balance of complexity and straightforward song writing excellence.
Burr Oak is the new project of Chicago based singer-songwriter Savanna Dickhut who merges together brutally honest, story– driven lyrics with raw, dreamy vocals. With just two singles out this past year, the Chicago Tribune wrote her songs “show the promise of a songwriter sure of her voice and sound, one that is piercing and deeply relatable and authentic.”
Discussing the track, Savannah has suggested “Flower Garden” is a reflection on, “a past relationship, one from a few years ago that only lasted a couple of months but had a lasting effect on me”. Here the former lover is cast as a flower garden, “so beautiful and lush at first sight”, yet as the seasons turn and the days draw in, what once seemed so positive loses its sheen, yet leaves you still questioning, “why did you have to go away?” The shifting of seasons are reflected perfectly in the tracks musical threads, what starts off as an almost genteel dreamscape gradually swells and towards the end builds to a wailing crescendo of guitar-soloing, reminiscent of Squirrel Flower or Big Thief.
Flower Garden is lifted from Burr Oak’s upcoming debut album, Late Bloomer. released November 18th, 2020.
Endless thanks to my band that is, Anthony Mest [drums], Jeffrey Sullivan [guitar], and Jacob Gordon [bass]. Thanks to Nicholas Papaleo for playing synth & keys on Flower Garden and Luke Otwell for playing lap steel.
Chicago duo Ohmme was started by Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham in the summer of 2014, combining their love for lushvocals and song writing with their love of experimentation and sound.
Surprise! We’re very excited to announce a special split 7” with our friends The Aubreys out TODAY exclusively on Bandcamp. Our side has 2 new songs: “Eagle Eye” and “We Human”. Yuuuge thanks to the Aubreys for asking us to make this sweet thing with them!
Drums by the man, the myth, the legend Eric Slick. Recorded by Dorian Gehring. Limited number of vinyl available now.
Chicago duo Ohmme was started by Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham in the summer of 2014, combining their love for lush vocals and song writing with their love of experimentation and sound. Ohmme founders Sima and Macie and their drummer, Matt Carroll, were supposed to hit the road in April opening for Waxahatchee, ahead of the June 5 release of “Fantasize Your Ghost” on Joyful Noise Recordings. Cunningham, 30, and Stewart, 27, are nimble multi-instrumentalists and arresting singers, and they’ve collaborated widely throughout Chicago’s sprawling music communities, playing with artists working in rock, hip-hop, classical, folk, country, jazz, noise, and more. Between them they’ve worked with the likes of Chance the Rapper, Tortoise, Jeff Tweedy, and Twin Peaks.
In the months since COVID-19 shut down the live-music ecosystem, Ohmme have played several online sets, sometimes sharing a room and sometimes remotely, including as part of Goose Island’s 312unes series and the Dr. Martens Presents: Stay In series
There’s obvious chemistry emanating throughout Ohmme’s music that’s so tangible it can only come from a decades-spanning friendship. Songwriters Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart formed their unbreakable bond performing throughout the fringes of Chicago’s many interlocking communities, collaborating with titans from the city’s indie rock, hip-hop, and improvised worlds. The two formed Ohmme in 2014 as an outlet to explore an unconventional approach to their instruments. “That’s the whole genesis of the band: us walking up to our guitars and saying, ‘how can we make this noisemaker do something different?’” says Cunningham. Their 2016 self-titled debut EP took these experiments live and showcased the band’s vocal interplay that is another key to their songs. The full-length follow up, Parts, found the duo adding a drummer, Matt Carroll, and expanding their sound; Spin wrote: “Ohmme’s aesthetic universe has the cramped intimacy of a small rehearsal space, and they are its masters. Anything they can squeeze inside—swirling baroque vocal melodies, punchy punk power chords, three-minute rockers and dreamlike chamber-pop suites—ends up sounding like Ohmme.” Their latest album, Fantasize Your Ghost, was released in June of 2020 and found the band featured in outlets such as Premier Guitar and Uncut with songs that capture more closely the band’s live show
Laura Jane Grace wasn’t planning on making a solo record this year. In fact, she was planning on making a record with Against Me!, the band she’s fronted for the past 23 years. But clearly, nothing went according to plan this year. “We came home from the Against Me! tour we were on in March, and right before we left, we had been in the studio working on songs, and I had been working on them for months prior,” says Grace. As she sat at home, all of her tours cancelled, and the members of Against Me!—as well as her other band Laura Jane Grace & The Devouring Mothers—spread across the country, she was left with a batch of songs and no band to record them with.
“I sat around for a month-and-a-half at a home just being shellshocked being like, ‘What the fuck happened and what the fuck is happening with the world?’ As I started to get my bearings, I just came to the realization that waiting was going to kill the record and kill the songs. I spent two years working on all these songs, and the idea of throwing them away didn’t sit well with me,” says Grace. “But then I was like, ‘What am I waiting for?’ All I have to do is adjust my scope. I can sit here on my fucking ass and do nothing, or I can work.”
So, Grace got to work. She picked up the phone and called Electrical Audio, the iconic studio in her adopted hometown of Chicago, Illinois, to ask if she could make a record with famed engineer Steve Albini. The goal was to go in and document these songs exactly as she’d been playing them in her home, straight to analogue tape. When she hung up the phone, she had four days booked.
The result of the session at Electrical Audio is “Stay Alive”, a record that doesn’t just embody that title, it serves as the guiding principle behind its creations. But it also put life back into an industry that’s been ravaged by venue closures, cancelled tours, and delayed records. “By putting the songs out, that puts the label in work, that puts a photographer in work, that puts a graphic designer in work, that puts a merch company in work, that keeps it alive,” says Grace. “You hear on the news every day about people losing their jobs and everything collapsing, and I want to fight against that. The only way I can think to fight against that is to work.”
Across the 14 songs that comprise Stay Alive, Grace takes all her pent-up fears, anger, and anxiety and releases it, like an olive branch to the weary listeners who are feeling those exact same ways. As she says in “Blood & Thunder,” a love song to Chicago—or perhaps a mea culpa for “I Hate Chicago” on The Devouring Mothers album Bought to Rot—the album’s thematic premise is all but spelled out: “When you give in and quit / There’s a power to be found in it.” It’s an idea that may sound odd on its face, but it displays Grace’s commitment to no longer resisting the changes in front of her. On a record that sees her traversing the globe—from Marbella, Spain to Glasgow, Scotland to London, England to the Land of Oz—”Blood & Thunder” is a begrudging embrace of what can’t be changed; Instead of resisting the city she once loathed, she finds the beauty in the little things, like the moon rising over Indian Boundary Park, or the wind rolling up Western Avenue.
The album’s title is one that surfaces in the record itself, and serves as a subtle rejoinder to her Polyvinyl labelmate Chris Farren, who gifted Grace a hat that said “Can’t Die,” and she’s spent the last two years running in it every single day. By flipping the phrase on its head, Grace built her own message; one based around work, struggle, and reaffirmed commitments. In certain cases, songs like “Hanging Tree,” which has a chorus that builds to the phrase, “A burning crucifix and a hanging tree,” have been kicking around since 2017, but finally found a moment that made sense for it on Stay Alive. And in the case of “Shelter In Place,” a song about her own isolation and introspection, the pandemic finally gave words to a feeling she’d long had but was never able to accurately describe.
The songs that make up Stay Alive are documents of a time and a songwriter who experienced enough to find levity in the simple act of doing the work. Recorded with nothing more than an acoustic guitar, an occasional drum machine, and her own powerful voice, Grace’s distinct song writing signature is front and center. What’s more, she made it purely for herself. “I just want to put this out because it makes me feel alive and it’s giving me something better than sitting here losing my mind while the world falls apart,” says Grace. “It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about what you do. Just stay alive.”
The one and only Laura Jane Grace (Against Me! Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers) has signed with us and announced her incredible new solo record “Stay Alive” streaming everywhere right now!
There’s so much we want to tell you about the record, but listen now and read what Laura herself has to say…
A short note from Laura Jane…“Hi, my name is Laura Jane Grace. This is my album. This album is about staying alive. Stay alive. Don’t die. Work hard. Fight back.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Laura Jane Grace had a panic attack, quit smoking weed, and decided to put out a record. Thursday, she dropped Stay Alive with little warning or preamble — a raw, unedited missive from lockdown.
“I just wanted to make a record and I wanted to make a record that was the antithesis of a Zoom call,” she says. “I wanted to record all analogue. I didn’t want to make any edits. I wanted to make something that matters from this period of time because all that shit like livestreams … I don’t mean to bash them, but they don’t create anything lasting, you know?”
This album is an entirely analogue recording. No computers were involved in the making of this album. These recordings were not edited together, these songs are documented performances. This album was written and recorded in Chicago, Illinois. I recorded this album with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio on the two days after the full moon of July 5th, 2020. The album was mixed in another two days time. Steve and I were the only two people in the studio. We both wore face masks and stayed 6 feet apart at all times. I only took my face mask off while singing. Please wear a face mask.
There are songs on this album about haunted swimming pools and burning churches. There are songs about mountains. There are songs about astral seas and dry lakes. There are songs about drinking espressos and eating croissants at the Bora Bora beach club in Marbella, Spain. There are songs about dirty rivers that smell like pee in Glasgow, Scotland. There are songs about Nelson Algren’s Neon Jungle and Simone de Beauvoir’s Mandarines. There are songs about petrified polymorphs and blood and thunder and LSD and laying on the grave of the Marchesa Luisa Casati while day dreaming of fabulous parties thrown 100 years ago and how the world has fallen apart before and how it is falling apart now and how if we’re lucky it will fall apart again someday long from now too. There are songs about all of that and more but really this record is about staying alive. Stay alive. Don’t die. Thank you for listening to my record. –LJG
Grace worked feverishly with Albini on the record; mostly masked, the two never saw each other’s faces. The producer’s reluctance to try too many takes suited Grace fine since she didn’t want anything to sound too over-cooked. The result is a fast-paced 14-song record with the fist-pumping old-school bravado of Against Me! (“So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Fuck Off”) mixed with almost painfully beautiful imagery (“The Swimming Pool Song,” in which Grace describes herself as a haunted pool).
Laura Jane Grace knocks it out of the park with this unexpected solo effort, in a time which we need artists like her. Even though I’ve been listening to her music for years I still find something refreshing in it, such as the track “Ice Cream Song” which has a twing of modern broadway, as well as the demo aesthetic of midi drums and intriguing vocal mastering on “So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, fuck off”. A definitive quarantine classic!
PS: this may technically be my first proper solo record but I can’t even tell anymore PSS: if at any point you refer to this album as an “acoustic album” my 6 string strumming ghost will haunt 10 generations of your family every night of their lives with bedroom busking from 11PM to 6AM 🙂 ”
As you’re frantically hitting that link, be sure to pre-order your physical copy on a limited UK/EU Starburst (Black/Blue/Purple) vinyl variant as well as black LP/CD and an exclusive t-shirt too.
Laura Jane Grace’s new album, Stay Alive, is available December 11th, 2020.
The Fat Angel Sings 