“The Fountain” was supposed to be a full length album but as the songs took shape, I realized that there was something cohesive going on with a smaller batch. They all focused on the theme of platonic love with a sense of gratitude. I think that traditionally, I had mostly written yearning, romantic odes and it was nice to focus on what was right in front of me and have a record be about that for a change. A big part of this project for me is about trying to reflect on the years I’ve spent touring and playing in different bands, mostly punk bands who played in warehouses and never released records. I want this project to be a part of that legacy.
So much of those old scenes were about celebrating the time we were living and the friendships we were forming and so this is sort of my older take on those excited sentiments. Basically, what does a punk song about friendships look like 20 years later? Probably a little slower, a little softer and a little more melancholy.
The Night Shop is the Song writing project of Justin Sullivan (Kevin Morby, The Babies, Flat Worms). Songs from the cafe of eternal youth.
Justin Sullivan: vocals, guitar Tiffanie Lanmon: drums Jarvis Taveniere: bass, guitar, piano Anna St. Louis: vocals
I kinda feel you’re either all in on Woods or you just don’t get it. I obviously fall in the first camp, and have loved everything they’re put out for many years at this point. This release sounds like it will be more great psych tinged garage folk which honestly there’s just not enough of. Take a listen to the first single down below, neat video as well.
“Dreaming doesn’t come easy these shadowed days, which is why Strange To Explain by Woods is such a welcome turning of new colors.
It presents an extended moment of sweet reflection for the 15-year-old band, bouncing back to earth as something hopeful and weird and resolute. Like everything else they’ve recorded, it sounds exactly like themselves, but with subtly different shades and breaths and rhythmic feels and everything else that changes, the natural march of time and the intentional decisions of the musicians moving in what feels like an uncommonly organic alignment.
Strange To Explain trades in a different kind of dependability, maintaining a steady connection to the voice on the other side of the record needle. After quickly recording and releasing 2017’s Love Is Love in response to the tumultuous events of their (and our) 2016, Jeremy Earl and company took their time with what came next. Parenthood arrived, as did a short songwriting pause. The band went bicoastal when Jarvis Taveniere headed west. And when they returned to their posts, there on the other side of this particular mirror, they made this, an album that not only catches and holds and shares the light in yet another new way, but recognizes that there’s still light to be caught, which is also no small thing.
A bend beyond the last bend beyond, Woods keep on changing, thoughtfully and beautifully. The colors were always there, like trees blossoming just slightly differently each season, a synesthetic message coded in slow-motion. Recorded in Stinson Beach, the kind of place that seems like an AI simulation of an idyllic northern California coastal escape, the familiar jangling guitars recede to the background. John Andrews’s warm keyboards and twining Mellotron rise around Earl’s songs and dance across the chord changes like warm sunlight off the Pacific. The music feels a karmic landmass away from the creepiness of the uncanny valley.
Just dig into “Can’t Get Out” or “Fell So Hard” and it’s easy to spot the affable hooks and fuzzed-out bass and third-eye winks and fun harmonies that Woods have produced reliably since way back ‘round 2004 (which, in the buzz-buzz world of psych-pop really is a grand achievement, too). But listen carefully, also, to the sound of our (and their) world in transition, the ambient humming of spring peepers behind “Where Do You Go When You Dream.” Especially sink into the intention-setting opening trio of songs, emerging from (and shimmering inside) an atmosphere that could only be made by musicians who’ve been working together for nearly 20 years, as Earl and Taveniere have. It’s hardly a secret language, but you try verbalizing it, let alone communicating in it.
“Where Do You Go When You Dream?” Woods singer Jermey Earl asks on the lead single of the Brooklyn folk band’s 11th LP. It’s a question we all seem to be asking ourselves a lot more these days, as our dreams have had to suffice as our only true journeys out of the house in the desperate times we’re living in. To record Strange To Explain, Woods headed to Marin County’s bucolic Panoramic House Studio. Depending on where in the time-track one stands, it’s their 11th full length (not counting collaborations, split LPs, EPs, and singles), and the 99th release on Earl’s Woodsist label. By any standards, Strange To Explain is the work of a mature band, capable of both heavy atmospheric declarations like “Just To Fall Asleep” and extended-form pieces like the album-closing “Weekend Wind,” unfolding in layers of trumpet and vibraphone and ambient guitars and stereoscopic percussion. There are backwards messages and forward ones, lyrical and otherwise. There are melodies that (at least to me) come back nonlinearly but happily throughout the day when I’m not listening to the music itself, finding some hidden perch and maybe soon transforming into the folk songs of the mind. Woods shared another song from it, “Can’t Get Out.” A press release says it’s “a track about fighting to move past the low points of depression.” The propulsive song is backed by synths and might be the yummiest taste we’ve gotten of Strange to Explain thus far.
For contemporary heads, it can be nearly a full-time job to filter out all the bad energy being blasted through nearly all media channels from every conceivable direction. But not all media channels. These benevolent, Mellotron-dabbed dream-sounds constitute some of the more welcome transmissions on these shores in a Venusian minute, just what my kosmik transom was designed to accept. They’re sure to brighten any desert solarium, LED-lit pod, portable Bucky-dome, eco-fit Airstream, or whatever other cozy dwelling your time-mind is currently occupying.
Hello! My album is out today. Thank you to Meg Duffy, Will Ivy, Greta Morgan and Anna St. Louis for playing on it and making it what it is, Jarvis Taveniere for engineering and playing on it, Drew Fischer for mixing it, Abby Banks for taking the photos and to Kevin and Jeremy for putting it out into the world. And thank you to my friends new and old who have been so kind about it. I believe in music and community now more than ever. Grateful to still be a part of it all.
Night Shop is the new project from Justin Sullivan, drummer for Kevin Morby, The Babies and Flat Worms. and The Ringers, Worriers Like most of Sullivan’s projects, the album is a family affair. His former touring and recording partner in the Kevin Morby band, Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) plays bass on several of the songs and sings backup vocals on a few as well. Flat Worms cohort Will Ivy plays lead guitar on some, while Mare labelmate and soon-to-be touring partner Anna St. Louis sings backup on two songs. The album was engineered by Jarvis Taveniere of Woods and mixed by Drew Fischer who previously worked with Sullivan on Morby’s first two records and The Babies second album Our House On The Hill. “When I think about this record, a lyric from A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, comes to mind. It’s the line where Dylan sings, ‘I’ll know my song, well before I starting singing.’ In The Break is the product of someone who has had a lot to say and has waited for the perfect moment to say it.” —Kevin Morby
In The Break is a follow-up to his self-titled EP from 2017. An uncomplicated traipse into folk rock, In the Break isn’t an album meant for picking apart; rather, it’s already cozily knit together, ready for the listener to climb inside and stay awhile. In the Break may be uncomplicated, but it’s not slack. Sullivan balances warm palpability with tight songwriting, resulting in an easy-going batch of brainy rock songs. The album’s lead-off track and first single, “The One I Love,” is a great introduction to Sullivan’s dry wit and spirited folk leanings.
New York’s Webster Hall hosted an event celebrating booking agency Ground Control Touring’s 15th anniversary. The showcase took place across the venue’s three stages and featured a bunch of collaborations and covers. Kurt Vile, Kim Gordon, Steve Gunn, and Woods’ Jarvis Taveniere covered the Velvet Underground’s“Sister Ray”, while Vile also joined Woods for a take on Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”
Other collaborations included Parquet Courts with Lee Ranaldo (who played Sonic Youth’s “Mote” and “Eric’s Trip”), Woods with Parquet Courts’ Andrew Savage, Waxahatchee with Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan, and Perfect Pussy’s Meredith Graves with Rainer Maria.
Kurt Vile with Kim Gordon, Steve Gunn, and Woods’ Jarvis Taveniere: “Sister Ray” (The Velvet Underground cover)
Widowspeak is back at it with their third studio LP, “All Yours”. The first eponymous single is refreshing to hear given we haven’t heard the soothing vocals of Molly Hamilton since 2013’s The Swamp EP. As with everything Widowspeak has done, there’s nothing lesser to expect than yet another beautifully interweaving dream-pop/slowcore album. based on the description listed below, we’re going to get even new layers to the already honed skills of this duo. The release date for All Yours is September 4th. Widowspeak . This is the band’s third album, titled All Yours, is one that could only come from Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas: a honed and elegant interweaving of dream-pop and slowcore rock and roll, easygoing melodies and dusty, snaking guitars. It’s also possibily their best release to date: ten beautiful songs that are refreshingly straightforward yet built from the same well-chosen and deftly-used tools the band has always worked with. It is an ambitious without feeling labored-over, anchored in the strengths of Widowspeak’s consistent influences. guitar passages, moody and american-country-tinged instrumentation, watery tremolo, velvety stacked vocals and brilliantly economical guitar playing. the duo, have remained constant since 2012.
After releasing the second LP, Almanac, and then The Swamps EP (both in 2013), Molly and Rob left Brooklyn for the greener pastures of the Catskills/Hudson Valley region. They found a house they could play music in. They got a dog.And they took their damn time making All Yours. For one, the conceptual process of writing Almanac and The Swamps had been creatively draining. They focused on other things: Molly went back to school; Rob took a job at a Catskills hotel. They wrote leisurely, from shared voice memos and late night jams in the living room. As a result of writing down what came naturally, without any overarching vision, the lyrics on All Yours are largely unadorned, the songs connected only by the forgivingly vague theme of “moving on.”Appropriately, the band chose to work again with Jarvis Taveniere, who produced their self-titled debut in 2011. They also enlisted him and drummer Aaron Neveu (both of whom play in Woods) as the studio rhythm section. We finally get to hear Rob sing in the earnestly laid-back “Borrowed World.” Members of psych outfit Quilt contribute harmonies and keys throughout the record, most notably in “My Baby’s Gonna Carry On,” and “Cosmically Aligned.”
WOODS have been together for almost a decade and winning fans for their lo-fi indie rock sound, The bands core of songwriters Jeremy Earl with his striking falsetto vocal and multi-instrumentalist Jarvis Taveniere alongside drummer Aaron Neveu .
The Fat Angel Sings 