The Jesus And Mary Chain are set to release their long-awaited new album ‘Damage and Joy’ on March 24th, their first since ‘Munki’, back in the summer of 1998. The Reid brothers have enlisted the help of super (as in cool, not megabucks!) producer Youth and he has coaxed and cajoled these perma-scrapping siblings (still, even now!!) into producing a magnificent distillation of everything we’ve come to love about their sound.
Fuzzed up trashy or broken and blue, Jim’s honeyed voice takes us over familiar territory while William scuzzes things up in the wings. The songs are all classic Mary Chain.
With the help of Isobel Campbell, Sky Ferreira and the Reids’ own sister Linda on vocals, there’s also a freshness to their palette, bringing their much imitated sound back up to date, here in the now. It’s great to have them back!
500 limited edition 12” on Cadillac pink vinyl. Manchester all-female five-piece Pins release a new EP Bad Thing, through Haus Of Pins and features Aggrophobe, their single with the legendary Iggy Pop. Following the release of their acclaimed second album Wild Nights last year, Pins went back into the studio to work on new tracks. Recorded in a studio on the Scottish Borders last October and produced by Mark Vernon and the band themselves, the EP features 5 new tracks, which includes a cover of Joy Division’s Dead Souls. The EP opens with the teasing Bad Thing before moving into the addictive Aggrophobe, featuring Iggy Pop’s iconic vocal, leading onto the chant-like pop of All Hail and the dreamy and synth-laden In Nightmares, before ending with Pins own take on Dead Souls. The four new tracks are synonymous with Pins’ sound but also showcase a vigorous, more mature side to the band, making up a solid and impressive musical body of work.
Desperate Journalist release their second album, Grow Up, ostensibly eleven tracks of rocketing leftfield delights propelled forth with thundering rhythms, thunderously spectacular guitar and Jo Bevan’s thunderstruck vocals. Such is intense life with Desperate Journalist, one of the most potent, important DIY bands lurking on the underground scene right now.
They began as a fictional band from a fictional town featured on the Eccentronic Research Council’s 2015 concept album Johnny Rocket, Narcissist And Music Machine… I’m Your Biggest Fan. Now The Moonlandingz have lurched, sticky and bleeding, into the real world and are releasing the first great album of 2017. Interplanetary Class Classics, released on Transgressive Records, is a feast of swirling juddering synths, wailing guitars, motorik stomp and extraordinary songwriting. The Moonlandingz have proven themselves to be one of the best live bands in the UK (“Magnificent, cosmic and batshit!” said The Quietus. “Feral antics and louche anarchy!” said The Guardian) and now they’ve produced an album of proper weird catchy glorious filthy pop.
The Moonlandingz is Eccentronic Research Council’s Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer in cahoots with Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi (aka frontman Johnny Rocket) and Saul Adamczewski. They recorded the album with Sean Lennon at his studio in upstate New York. Also on the record: Randy Jones the Cowboy from The Village People, Rebecca Taylor from Slow Club, drummer Ross Orton, bassist Mairead O’Connor, Phil Oakey and YOKO fucking ONO, who sings and yowls on epic closer This Cities Undone.
Sonic Jesus is an Italian musical project lead by multi-instrumentalist Tiziano Veronese. Since signing to Fuzz Club, the project has released a split single with The Black Angels and been remixed by Sonic Boom aka Pete Kember. Their internationally acclaimed debut ‘Neither Virtue Nor Anger’; an industrial barrage of hypnotic, dark psychedelia. Sonic Jesus’ new album ‘Grace’ goes beyond the past boundaries, pushing towards enthralling melodic horizons and modern pounding beats, delivered by a new-found pop sensibility. There’s still a darkness brooding beneath the noise but these new tracks see the project take on a magnificent and insatiable new form.
Limited to 1000 Copies. Long Time is the second single off Blondie’s new album Pollinator and comes backed with exclusive B-Side Breaks.
On her first proper album as Jay Som, Melina Duterte, 22, solidifies her rep as a self-made force of sonic splendor and emotional might. If last year’s aptly named Turn Into compilation showcased a fuzz-loving artist in flux – chronicling her mission to master bedroom recording – then the rising Oakland star’s latest, Everybody Works, is the LP equivalent of mission accomplished. Duterte is as DIY as ever – writing, recording, playing, and producing every sound beyond a few backing vocals – but she takes us places we never could have imagined, wedding lo-fi rock to hi-fi home orchestration, and weaving evocative autobiographical poetry into energetic punk, electrified folk, and dreamy alt-funk. Everybody Works was made in three furious, caffeinated weeks. She came home from the road, moved into a new apartment, set up her bedroom studio and dove in. Duterte even ditched most of her demos, writing half the LP on the spot and making lushly composed pieces like Lipstick Stains all the more impressive. While the guitar-grinding Jay Som we first fell in love with still reigns on shoegazey shredders like 1 Billion Dogs and in the melodic distortions of Take It, we also get the sublimely spacious synth-pop beauty of Remain, and the luxe, proggy funk of One More Time, Please.
Fifth album (third for Full Time Hobby) from Samantha Crain, following 2015’s “Under Branch & Thorn & Tree” and the 2014 album “Kid Face.”
Written over 4 months at the back end of winter whilst at home in Norman, Oklahoma, You Had Me At Goodbye was penned whilst Samantha was working shifts at a pizza place to save up money for touring, recording, paying bills, and as a self-confessed ‘film nerd,’ binge watching movies. “Oklahoma is beautiful but my relationship with it is complicated. There are mountains, plains, prairies, rolling hills, high deserts and plateaus, with an amazing creative community of people making beautiful visual art, interesting films and loud music. But it’s extremely Christian, conservative, and whilst people say it’s ‘friendly,’ really, people are only friendly if you’re white and aren’t dressed unconventionally. I feel welcome and alienated all at once.”
Bolstered by the visionary production of John Vanderslice (Spoon, the Mountain Goats, Strand of Oaks), mixed and engineered by Jacob Winik (The Magnetic Fields, Hot Buttered Rum), Samantha returned to the Bay Area in California to, once again, record the album in analog at Tiny Telephone Studio.
Iggy Pop had hit bottom after the messy breakup of the Stooges and he needed help, and when friend and fan David Bowie offered to lend him a hand, he was smart and grateful enough to accept. Bowie produced Iggy’s first solo album, The Idiot, and after Iggy set up a tour to promote the record, Bowie put together the band and tagged along as their keyboard player. Bowie’s presence insured a larger audience than Iggy had attracted during the grim final days of his band, and he was determined to prove he could deliver the goods without making a spectacle of himself or collapsing into a drug-sodden heap on-stage. Unfortunately, anyone familiar with Iggy’s body of work knows the last thing you want from one of his live shows is a professional-sounding performance without a sense of danger, and unfortunately, that’s what the audience got during this March 21st, 1977 show in Cleveland, OH, part of a three-night stand Iggy and the band would perform at the Agora Ballroom. Iggy & Ziggy: Cleveland ’77 finds Iggy in fine voice, and at a time when he had a lot to prove, he leaves no doubt he was a solid musician and showman, singing with a sense of control and dynamics he couldn’t approach with the Raw Power-era Stooges. However, Iggy also seems clearly afraid to push this material too far, and the caution robs the songs (nine of which are drawn from the Stooges‘ songbook) of much of their life force. Even worse, guitarist Ricky Gardiner doesn’t seem to know what to do with the Stooges material — he’s at least as skillful as Ron Asheton or James Williamson, but his attack is so toothless and polite that he reduces some of the greatest rock songs ever to mush. (Bowie’s keyboards are not nearly as ill-advised but they don’t fit the old material very well, though Hunt Sales and Tony Sales are a great rhythm section who do what they can to give Iggy the energy he needs.) Some of the material from this show also appeared on Iggy’s lamentable live album TV Eye Live.
The Fat Angel Sings 