For their sophomore LP as Drinks,Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley (a.k.a. White Fence) absconded to the South of France, holed up in an old stone house, and spent their days sleeping through the heat and recording come nightfall. Without distractions like Wi-Fi and civilization, the pair lived in their own little Shangri-La, and Hippo Lite, the album born of it, conveys the intimacy of two artists free to make whatever sounds they please. The insular nature of the recording process lends an honesty to the album, like children playing away from the watchful eyes of adults. And Hippo Lite is playful; “Real Outside” pairs household object percussion with tangy blurts of guitar, and “Greasing Up” sounds like a campfire lullaby. More than anything, Hippo Lite is a document of intimate creativity, of what happens when you can build a fort with someone you trust and live in shared merriment.
In a hotel room near midnight, PhoebeBridgers shares a lullaby for the lost. You can’t help but hang on for dear life. Phoebe Bridgers was one of our top discoveries going into Austin’sSXSW, a quiet and powerful voice in the loud din of the festival. After she performed at Central Presbyterian Church, a favorite venue, Bridgers and percussionist Marshall Vore came to NPR host Bob Boilen’s hotel room just before midnight to play the striking song “Smoke Signals.” Stripped of the strings on the studio version, there is still a sweeping quality to this acoustic performance, something like Low’s elegiac waltzes blurred into open chords, suitcase percussion, children’s toy bells and vocal harmony. You can’t help but hang on for dear life.
With soft gorgeous pop sensibilities that know how to turn up the overdrive. these tracks are meticulous–the textures, the way the songs build, just gorgeous. fourth track had me impulse buying, second to last track had my jaw physically dropping
You might expect something akin to goofy surf rock from an LA-based project called Illuminati Hotties. And while Sarah Tudzin can certainly play to that note, it’s far from the only one she’s well-versed in. On her debut LP Kiss Yr Frenemies, Tudzin draws from a wide ranging palette — encompassing acoustic balladry, bouncy surf rock, and simmering noise pop — from which she doodles detailed scenes and stories of young adulthood. Also in her toolbox: keen self-awareness, vulnerability, poignant wit, nuanced social observations, and a sense of optimism that recognizes the beauty that can grow out of growing pains. Tudzin is both personal and personable; her anecdotes are relatable without sufficing the intimate specificity of her experience. Lighthearted odes to past flings with lame dudes carry the same weight as heart-wrenching letters that begin with sleeping in her car on her 24th birthday. Kiss Yr Frenemies is the fruitful aftermath of emotional labor and hindsight.
I don’t know for sure if this Los Angeles DIY four-piece purposefully chose to release Gentle Leader on the weekend that is traditionally considered the gateway to summer. But either way, it is a match made in heaven, as Peach KelliPop’s vibrant tracks are perfect for warm weather and bright days. It’s the first record that the band has released as a collaborative effort, which only benefits the music’s urgency.
This LA band has quietly amassed one of the more consistent catalogs in all of ’10s left-coast Americana, steadily putting out one very good album every year or two for the past decade. The forthcoming release Passwords (due out June 22nd) starts off on a ham-fisted note with the political number “Living In The Future,” but the rest of the album thankfully is in the vein of “Crack The Case,” a spare, synth-accented folk-pop number that ruminates on fake news and the value of forgiveness. Presented as a retro-future lyric video with its storyline scrolling across a space-race era computer console, the track appears to be asking one very big and very current question: “How can we all get along?” With delicate piano and acoustic guitar strains, ethereal steel-guitar runs and light synth accents – plus front man Taylor Goldsmith’s typically-poetic vocal delivery – the band comes to a compassionate conclusion.
Fans of Springsteen’s Tunnel Of Love period will want to pay special attention.
Interdependence Day comes late this year – it won’t be until July 20th that it comes down, and we’re celebrating with a new Ty Segall & White Fence album! Ever since 2012, we’ve been asked when there might be another one from this duo – that was how compelling their Hair album was (and is). If you loved Hair, you’ll definitely be jumping for Joy in late July. Given that Tim Presley aka Mr. White Fence‘s – collaboration with Cate Le Bon, Drinks’
Hippo Lite, is still cooling on the sill, this is pure bonus, and we dig it for that, just as we feel great for scoring bonus Ty too – but when we do this, we’re really missing the point. Having made one record together already, Ty and Tim know what it’s like to bring themselves into a project like this. In fact, they’re transcended it. This time, they came to collaboration expecting to find themselves there. And darn if they didn’t – in shared space, as one entity. It’s interesting to see them mingled amoebically, and as a result, Joy has a whole new thing about it that takes it far beyond any “Hair 2”. Come July, you’ll know what we mean by this. For now, just get “Good Boy” on repeat – before you know it, Joy will have arrived!
Valley Queen! The LA-based band, fronted by Natalie Carol, released their 2017 Destroyer EP to widespread critical acclaim, with the track “Stars Align” even named one of Top 50 songs of the year on NPR’s All Songs Considered.
When asked what this album is about, I’ve gone mute. The bulk of the songs on this record were written over the past two years in my bedroom, backyard, or plucking away in the back of the van on Neil’s old Japanese guitar and headphones. I realize now a lot of the songs were written in fever dreams, fits of aggression, hot anger, ecstasy, longing, quietude.
In the experience of falling in love, going on tour in very seedy situations, being broke and in debt, self doubting, the band Valley Queen breaking up, the band Valley Queen getting back together, the guitar has always been sitting there for me to pick up and hammer out the inner reality of the external situation. We’re still here, and Supergiant tells you why.
I’m still as lost as ever, no conclusions have been made, no greater wisdom to impart – but for now, this is all I have.
What ecstasy. What a ride. “Supergiant” is now live
The Lord Huron song “The Night We Met” found its way into the massively popular, albeit oft-maudlin, series, 13 Reasons Why with a new take on their hit song featuring the noir-ish indie songstress Phoebe Bridgers.
“The Night We Met” is a track from Lord Huron’s 2015 release, the spacey indie-folk travel log “Strange Trails”. Bridgers’ vocal contribution expands the song’s already-haunting melody to encompass a deeper sense of melancholia, something she also comfortably emits on her critically adored 2017 LP Stranger in the Alps. Lord Huron’s Ben Schneider and Bridgers are likely collaborators, too: Each have traversed the spectrum of indie-folk sounds, though Bridgers says she isn’t yet committed to a confined style.
Lyrically, her gorgeous 2017 debut album Stranger in the Alps – which she recorded independently before being signed to the Dead Oceans label – grapples a lot with death. The late Lemmy from Motörhead and David Bowie are both referred to, while the song Funeral was inspired by a boy Bridgers knew who died of a heroin overdose. “Jesus Christ, I’m so blue all the time and that’s just how I feel, always have and always will,” she sings, the mournful mood recalling the late American miserabilist Elliott Smith. Yet, in person, Bridgers could hardly be sunnier. “I didn’t realise there was such a heavy theme on the record until I started recording the album.
The standout single from Stranger in the Alps, was “Motion Sickness” it has amassed more than half-a-million views on YouTube and is an exquisite evisceration of a former lover. “I faked it every time,” she sings, before landing another blow to the solar plexus: “And why do you sing with an English accent?/ I guess it’s too late to change it now.”
The song, she tells me, is about the Grammy-nominated singer- songwriter Ryan Adams, whom she met in 2015. “A mutual friend in LA was like, ‘Ryan would like you’. He really was just trying to get me recording and trying to get Ryan to hear me, but Ryan was like, ‘Let me see a picture of her’.” Bridgers says that she and Adams “ended up hanging out all night and recording a song together called Killer. Then, a couple of weeks later, he was suddenly trying to hook up with me. I was super-down and had just broken up with my high-school boyfriend. We slept together on his 40th birthday and I’d just turned 20.”
She wrote Motion Sickness after they broke up. What did he think of it? “We were back on good terms by then but after I sent him the song he didn’t talk to me for 24 hours. Then he sent me a sweet text saying ‘it’s a great song’,” she says. “Yes, interesting character…”
Bridgers wrote “Smoke Signals” in a cabin outside Ketchum, Idaho, last spring. It finds her somberly emoting against a backdrop of guitar chords and orchestral swells. Sometimes her words are poetic: “I wanna live at a Holiday Inn where somebody else makes the bed/ We’ll watch TV while the lights on the street put all the stars to death.” Other times she’s more straightforward but just as powerful: “All of our problems, I’m gonna solve them/ With you riding shotgun, speeding ’cause fuck the cops.” References to Bowie, the Smiths, and Motörhead might capture your attention, but the recurring image of trash burning on the beach is what will linger with you.
L.A. musician Sarah Tudzin makes fizzy, self-deprecating power pop under the moniker Illuminati Hotties. “Paying Off The Happiness,” like a few other unlikely rallying cries before it, plays off the very real, very troubling issue of financial insolvency among the millennial set with with a joyful sigh and shrug, The hook, sung breezily over some chintzy dissonance, might be the catchiest outpouring of debt-fueled anxiety since Alvvays sang about student loans in 2014. Illuminati Hotties were The Best Band That Almost No One Saw at SXSW: Sarah Tudzin is the project’s mastermind…She has a malleable writing style that feels ripe with potential, and she seems comfortable doing just about anything. The album’s lead single, “(You’re Better) Than Ever,” is a surf-pop shredder by way of Courtney Barnett, but its follow-up “Cuff” is a masterful blend of heavy-soft dynamics that shows off the many sides to this project. Tudzin’s songs vacillate between humorous and cutting with ferocity.
Despite the pluralized nom de guerre, illuminati hotties is the creative outlet of Sarah Tudzin – a producer and engineer hailing from the sprawl of Los Angeles. illuminati hotties has been lighting up stages across SoCal since Fall 2016 with playfully interweaving guitar lines, relentless rhythmic momentum, and strikingly self-aware vocals.
With its chorus that swells before spilling over, “Patience” is a plea and an appreciation that demonstrates the dichotomy of virtue. It also highlights the duality of Illuminati Hotties, a playful project that balances heart-on-sleeve sentiments
At first listen, illuminati hotties is a sun-drenched, irreverent volley with the onset of adulthood, but as the listener dives deeper, they will find an earnest consideration of musical phrasing and deliberately crafted wordplay regarding the complexity of love, loss, and skateboarding. Lauded as local “tenderpunk pioneers,” illuminati hotties has perfected the blend of sweetness and ferocity, of celebration and despondency, in their debut album, Kiss Yr Frenemies.
Taken from their debut album, which will be released later Tiny Engines, new track “Cuff” is indicative of that warped journeying, the track slowly introducing itself with a hazy, foggy opening minute or so, the subtle production and half-buried vocals conjuring a sense of embedded melancholy, a drifting sadness that is soon wiped out, to some degree, as the whole thing bursts in to a bristling, raucous life you never saw coming.
“Cuff” is a musical reminder that we can truly never have a band figured out. Last summer we were introduced to illuminati hotties and their sunny single “You’re Better Than Ever.” Since then the band has signed to Tiny Engines and will release Kiss Yr Frenemies on 5/11. While their first single offering was bright and a total blast, “Cuff” is more subdued; a quiet single of introspection and stunning beauty.
On her third album, singer-songwriter Jess Williamson is a giant, throbbing valentine, so taken by her new romance that she has become tenderness itself. “Love is my name now / Love, darling” she coos at the top of “Love On The Piano.” It’s a far cry from where she left us with 2016’s Heart Song, a stormy, brutally beautiful collection of prose about gnarled matters of the heart. Cosmic Wink a journey, a reckoning, choosing a path, dealing with it, learning, growing, disappointing, finding, evolving, being cruel, being crueled, wildness, loving, turning toward, turning away, fool energy, finding, pleasing, past lives, future lives, soul mate, twin flame, Home, new Home, old Home, fate, luck, chance, new love, old love, Ancient love, being in love, being Love, being loved, Dream wisdom, death, rebirth, sacred everyday, sacred every damn DAY. Y’all…. this is my baby. Her name is Cosmic Wink. All my life she’s been waiting to be born and now she is finally here. Worldwide. Thank you
Jess Williamson – I See the White From the upcoming album Cosmic Wink Available May 11th via Mexican Summer Records
The Fat Angel Sings 