Dinosaur Jr. offered another preview of the band’s upcoming album “Sweep It Into Space” with the new single, “Take It Back”. “Sweep It Into Space” is out on Friday via Jagjaguwar Records.
Following the release of the Lou Barlow-penned “Garden“, this latest single finds singer/guitarist J Mascis back at the helm. While the song opens with bright sonic tones compared to “Keith Richards’ Jamaican explorations” in a press release, these quickly give way to a more conventional Dinosaur Jr. tone. What could be construed as a catchy, radio-friendly hook gets ruffed up just the right amount by J’s raspy delivery to give “I Ran Away” a comfortable edge of grit. Meanwhile, the stop-motion animated video by director Callum Scott-Dyson makes some of the lyrics’ straightforward messaging a bit more ambiguous and abstract.
“[I] really wanted to use the creature on the front of the album sleeve for Sweep It Into Space as an inspiration and springboard for its own little adventure, exploring some simple notions of creation, dependence, coming of age and searching for another like yourself,” Scott-Dyson said in a press release. “I wanted to mix those themes with my style of stop motion animation, everything being very DIY and handmade, using any materials I could get my hands on to bring the idea to life and give it a surreal and otherworldly feel. I’ve always been a really big fan of Dinosaur Jr, so I was working extra hard to do something that could add to such an awesome track and sit alongside it.”
New Album “Sweep It Into Space” will be out April 23rd! Check out the first song, “I Ran Away,”
“Take It Back” the new song by Dinosaur Jr. from the album ‘Sweep It Into Space’, out April 23rd on Jagjaguwar Records.
Sophie Payten – the folk-pop singer and producer known as Gordi shares her latest single, a soaring, post-new wave anthem, ahead of her second album “Our Two Skins” . Since her last album “Reservoir”, Gordi has collaborated with Troye Sivan, toured with Sam Smith, Julien Baker and more, performed at Eaux Claires alongside The National, Bon Iver and Big Red Machine, and finished her medical degree to become a qualified doctor. The dark horse of ‘Our Two Skins’ – ‘Extraordinary Life’ – has just ticked over 1 million streams. It’s the most played song from the record. You guys totally should’ve told me that you want me to write non-moody songs.
To celebrate, I asked a couple of friends to reimagine the song. I first met Alex Somers when we worked together on my first album ‘Reservoir’ in his studio in Iceland. I saw Alex + Jonsi play their collaborative record ‘Riceboy Sleeps’ at the Sydney Opera House last year and Alex has brought that beautiful atmosphere he always finds to his rework of ‘Extraordinary Life’. Georgia Maq (lead singer of Camp Cope) released some of her solo work earlier this year, which I totally fell in love with. She seemed to really dig ‘Extraordinary Life’ so she produced and engineered her own cover of it.
Gordi is proud to share the “Extraordinary Life” EP featuring compelling remixes from Alex Somers (Sigur Ros, Black Mirror) and Camp Cope’s Georgia Maq. The EP also includes a live version recorded at the Sydney Opera House in July this year, and a lo-fi bedroom demo from 2018. “Extraordinary Life” is the most streamed song from the 27 year old Canowindra artist-producer’s second album Our Two Skins, notching over 1 million plays on Spotify last week.
Gordi’s “Extraordinary Life” reworked. Original song taken from Gordi’s album “Our Two Skins” out now via Jagjaguwar Records.
Angel Olsen has announced a new album called “Whole New Mess”, the first material she’s recorded and released without any bandmates since 2012’s Half Way Home. It’s out August 28th via Jagjaguwar Records. Watch a video for “Whole New Mess” below. The time had come, Angel Olsen realized in the fading summer of 2018, to take her new songs out of the house. Olsen’s 2016 marvel, My Woman, had been a career breakthrough, but it catalyzed a period of personal tumult, too: a painful breakup, an uneasy recovery, an inadequate reckoning. At home in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Olsen penned songs that finally grappled with these troubles, particularly love—how forever is too much to promise, how relationships can lock us into static versions of ourselves, how you can go through hell just to make someone else happy.
Find physical editions of Angel Olsen’s Whole New Mess at Rough Trade. Olsen recorded Whole New Mess in October 2018 at The Unknown, the church-turned-studio run by Phil Elverum and Nicholas Wilbur in Anacortes, Washington. The album features more intimate versions of several songs that appeared on last year’s All Mirrors. Olsen explained her approach in a brief statement:
I had gone through this breakup, but it was so much bigger than that—I’d lost friendships, too. When you get out of a relationship, you have to examine who you are or were in all the relationships. I wanted to record when I was still processing these feelings. These are the personal takes, encapsulated in a moment.
At least nine of the eleven songs on Whole New Mess should sound familiar to anyone who has heard All Mirrors, Olsen’s grand 2019 masterpiece that earned high honours on prestigious year-end lists and glossy spreads in stylish magazines. “Lark,” “Summer,” “Chance”—they are all here, at least in some skeletal form and with slightly different titles. But these are not the demos for All Mirrors. Instead, Whole New Mess is its own record with its own immovable mood, with Olsen working through her open wounds and raw nerves with just a few guitars and some microphones, isolated in a century-old church in the Pacific Northwest. If the lavish orchestral arrangements and cinematic scope of All Mirrors are the sound of Olsen preparing her scars for the wider world to see, Whole New Mess is the sound of her first figuring out their shape, making sense for herself of these injuries.
Losing someone close to you creates an almost phantom limb-like effect. Often, it feels like they’re a phone call away. But that instant between when you reach for the phone and when your brain delivers the new reality to you is a strange, momentary eternity. It’s both an uncompromising void and maybe as close as you’ll ever come to communing with that loved one again.
Gordi wrote Sandwiches as a tribute to the matriarch of her family. Her late grandmother was, in Gordi’s words, “a great feeder of people.” So when she fell ill, Gordi and her mother took it upon themselves to nourish the visitors gathered around her hospital bed. As they passed around sandwiches, “someone called out that she was gone.”
Sydney-based singer-songwriter Gordi announced her sophomore album with a brand-new single, ‘Aeroplane Bathroom’, which has arrived with a music video.
Gordi – real name Sophie Payten – told NME Australia that the music video is “the visual centrepiece” of her upcoming album, ‘Our Two Skins’, due for release on June 19th on Liberation Records.
“Aeroplane Bathroom” by Gordi, the new song off ‘Our Two Skins,’ out June 26 on Jagjaguwar Records.
Brooklyn act Cut Worms (aka Max Clarke) released a new double album Nobody Lives Here Anymore via Jagjaguwar. Clarke says the album grapples with “throwaway consumer culture and how the postwar commercial wet dreams never came true, how nothing is made to last.” There is a powerful old-timey atmosphere in these songs, and they reverberate with the feeling of road tripping in the South.
Ahead of his forthcoming album Nobody Lives Here Anymore, Cut Worms (aka Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Max Clarke) has shared two new tunes: single “Every Once In A While” and b-side “The Golden Sky.” Clarke also released two lyric videos, with the words appearing on a retro label of a vinyl record. “Every Once In A While” features subtle thumping drums and calming vocals, making for stunning country-tinged single. “I’m just watching all the clouds go by / Just like clock hands, on the face of the sky” is just one of the imaginative scenes Clarke paints in the song.
A new single of mine is out today. Available on all of the streaming platforms or to purchase downloads. Hope you will enjoy.
“Every Once In A While” from ‘Nobody Lives Here Anymore’ by Cut Worms, out on Jagjaguwar October 9th, 2020
Australian musician Gordi (real name: Sophie Payten) has just shared this shimmering new single which he says is a tribute to her late Grandmother. The song was produced by Bon Iver collaborators Chris Messina and Zach Hanson at Gordi’s family home in Canowindra, Australia. “Her whole life was in Canowindra,” say Gordi of her grandmother. “We made it in a house that’s a hundred meters from her house.” She’ll be on tour with Of Monsters & Men this spring.
The Australian musician Gordi, moniker of Sophie Payten, shares the new single, “Sandwiches,” and its accompanying Justin Ridler-directed video. “Sandwiches” It is a soaring, post-new wave anthem, and a tribute to her late grandmother. One of the first true Gordi “guitar songs,” it shimmers with the lush-yet-fragile momentum of The Cranberries’ classic “Dreams.” “Sandwiches” follows “The Cost,” a track released last month in support of the Australian Bushfire Relief efforts, and is Gordi’s first new recording since her 2017 debut album, “Reservoir”. Gordi has also recently collaborated with Troye Sivan, toured with Sam Smith, Julien Baker and Fleet Foxes, performed at Eaux Claires alongside The National, Bon Iver and Big Red Machine, and finished her medical degree to become a qualified doctor.
Her late grandmother was, in Gordi’s words, “a great feeder of people.” So when she fell ill, Gordi and her mother took it upon themselves to nourish the visitors gathered around her hospital bed. As they passed around sandwiches, “someone called out that she was gone.”
The gravity of the moment was poignant for its softness and mundanity. Gordi approaches the totality of a loved one’s life as measured in the small memories that stay with us. She sings, “When I think of you a movie-reel of moments plays / We’ll be in the car or after mass on Saturdays / You’ll be walking down the driveway, you’ll be in your chair / You’ll say ‘See you round’ or ‘Say your “Three”’ / And now you’re everywhere.”
Gordi called on long-time collaborators and Bon Iver production duo Chris Messina and Zach Hanson to make “Sandwiches” at her family home in Canowindra, Australia — an old cottage littered with some of Sophie’s favourite pieces of musical arsenal combined with some flown in from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The tiny farm town where her family has lived for over a century, Canowindra, and the heart of the matriarch, is embedded in this song, and where the video was filmed. “Her whole life was in Canowindra…we made it in a house that’s a hundred meters from her house.”
“Sandwiches” by Gordi, out now on Jagjaguwar Records..
In early 2003 a young Steve McBean was living in Vancouver and in the midst of a transition from his sorely overlooked rock band Jerk With A Bomb into an auspicious new chapter. JWAB was his umpteenth band in as many years woodshedding as both a frontman and a supporting musician in countless punk & hard core bands in the Canadian wilds starting in his teens and going through his twenties. JWAB was arguably the band in which he’d finally found his signature singing voice and started collaborating with drummer Joshua Wells and vocalist Amber Webber.
Around this time his friend Dan Bejar (Destroyer, New Pornographers) sent to Jagjaguwar Records a demo tape of new songs that Steve had been writing. He wasn’t sure if it they were JWAB songs or something new entirely. The songs were randy & ribald, with a primitive drum machine beat and a Bo Diddley guitar swagger. They were scintillating and taught us things that our parents were too scared to teach.
These were the demos for the songs that would be re-recorded as the debut album by Pink Mountaintops, a sister project to the other McBean-fronted rock band that was being born at the same time — Black Mountain. This was an exciting time not only for McBean — who was bubbling with songs & ideas — but a turning point for Jagjaguwar, thrilled to sign two of its most significant projects simultaneously. We’re very pleased to be able to share these first demos which bred so much inspiration and provided a horny clarion call for things to come.
We’ve already shared the excellent “Mark Zuckerberg” single from Nap Eyes, and now we have the latest track from their upcoming album “Snapshot of a Beginner”, which is out on the 27th March via Jagjaguwar Records.
“So Tired” is a change of pace from the irrepressible catchiness of the last single, a more mournful, resigned slice of slacker rock that just begs for a hot water bottle and a blanket.
The process of arranging this with Nap Eyes and ultimately recording it at Long Pond Studio with producers James Elkington and Jon Low was also a great experience. James added his characteristic insight as well as some beautiful lap steel playing to the arrangement, and Jon captured and chiselled out a performance from the band that still reflects our straightforward roots, while giving the recording a depth and shimmer that constitute new territory for us. It was pretty unreal working with those two in that studio, which is a beautiful, high-ceiling’d, converted barn that feels and sounds very good to be in. I’ll conclude by saying, I feel very grateful we got to journey with this simple song from its rough inception all the way through to the version you can hear on Snapshot of a Beginner today.”
“This song was written, I’m estimating here, sometime in the winter or spring of 2017 in my home city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It came about as part of a song writing club comprised of myself and my friends Caleb Glasser (Fake Buildings) and Danika Vandersteen (Old & Weird). Incidentally, Caleb also wrote the lyrics for the Nap Eyes song “Mark Zuckerberg” as part of this club, which I subsequently put to music. Anyway, this particular song came about in a typical way on a sunny afternoon, as I was strumming a few chords in my bedroom, trying out lyrical ideas. Generally speaking, I do not know what I’m going to sing or write about when I sit down and start to say or sing phrases, and this song was no exception. I remember liking the sound of the verse chord progression— E, B, F#min, A, which suggested a basic melody. Four-chord progressions like this often remind me of Green Day, who have remained one of my favourite bands since I first heard them as a 10 or 11 year old kid. And I think there is usually some of that old mood-energy influence that comes through in my song writing at times like this.
With all this being said, the lyrics of ‘Even Though I Can’t Read Your Mind’ address some of the social and psychological challenges that tend to come up when human beings interact. As a fairly shy and introverted person myself, a lot of what I think and feel in any given social situation tends to remain unsaid. At the same time, when it comes to the minds of other people, it’s often necessary for me to remind myself that I have no clear view of what they are thinking and feeling, to say nothing of any judgments they might be forming about me. In this sense, singing the song acts as a kind of balancing or calibrating device for my social brain: on the one hand I’m reminded that, even when I think I know what others are thinking, I really don’t. And on the other, I’m able to affirm the social signs I do see, even discordant ones, and this helps me to adapt to challenging situations while protecting the integrity of my self-concept—what in psychoanalysis is called ego strength.
Nap Eyes are releasing a new album, Snapshot of a Beginner, on Jagjaguwar/Royal Mountain in partnership with Paradise of Bachelors. On Tuesday they shared another song from the album, “So Tired,” via a lyric video. It features a sublime guitar solo towards the end.
In a press release frontman Nigel Chapman had this to say about “So Tired”: “The ‘So Tired’ refrain marks a slight shift in perspective and its meaning is twofold. For one, I get frustrated sometimes by what the world seems to require for success at a given task (for example, polished songwriting, coherent and understandable communication), so part of this is just me venting on this subject. Sometimes I would rather flow with free writing than try to box songs into rehearsed, many-times-repeated containers.
“Second, at times I find myself wishing people would not hold so many preconceptions about the things in this world a given person might try to communicate. Most of us, myself included, usually assume we already know a lot – even about things we’ve spent very little time thinking about – and because of this attitude, people are often predisposed to misunderstand new ideas, even when they’re communicated in straightforward and coherent ways. But there’s no doubt, an idea won’t ever get through until there’s someone around to listen to it.”
Previously Nap Eyes shared Snapshot of a Beginner’s first single, “Mark Zuckerberg,” via a video for the song (which of course tackles the founder of Facebook).
Nap Eyes features frontman Nigel Chapman, drummer Seamus Dalton, bassist Josh Salter, and guitarist Brad Loughead. Jonathan Low (Big Red Machine, The National) and James Elkington (Steve Gunn, Joan Shelley) produced Snapshot of a Beginner, which was recorded at The National’s Upstate New York Long Pond Studio.
Sharon Van Etten moved away from New York, what, a couple of months ago? And she’s already making artfully expressionistic black-and-white videos where she wears floppy hats and stares and desert horizons. Nicky and Juliana Giraffe at Giraffe Studios directed the black and white video, which features Van Etten and the dancing duo of Allison and Veronica Huber in the California desert. John Congleton produced the song, which simply has a very cool vibe.
Van Etten had this to say about the video in a press release: “‘Beaten Down’ is about love, patience and empathy. It’s about making life-changing choices and remaining strong enough to see them through.”
Just a year ago, Van Etten shook off all vestiges of stereotypical singer-songwriter fare to release Remind Me Tomorrow, a dank and scuzzy electronic rock record. What’s so marvelous about her new single “Beaten Down” is how she’s managed to keep those sharp, hard textures while turning them toward something more languid and expansive. “Beaten Down” is a song of support and encouragement, and Van Etten delivers it over a miles-deep bass groove, layering her own voice up symphonically and soaring high on the chorus. It sounds like space opening up. It’s the sound of somebody who can breathe.
“Beaten Down”, the new track from Sharon Van Etten, available now on Jagjaguwar Records
Psych Ward is an irresistible slice of slacker-indie that is notable for it’s resigned, literal lyrics, and was inspired by Kaya Wilkins’ own experience in a mental health institution. Kaya’s Jagjaguwar debut, “Watch This Liquid Pour Itself”, due on 24th January 2020, is filled with images of pools of sweat, oceans, and other forms of wetness. On her first single, Kaya has been playing music since she was a tween, learning songs on her acoustic guitar and listening to Cody Chesnutt. And, being from originally from Norway, she also played in a black metal project. Although she remains at the center of her artistic process,
The Fat Angel Sings 