Composer and former Oingo Boingo frontman Danny Elfman has shared a new song, “Sorry,” which is another of the songs, like “Happy,” that he’d written especially for his 2020 Coachella performance that ended up not happening due to the pandemic. “‘Sorry’ was the first song I’ve written for myself in a long time,” Elfman says. “It began as an obsessive choral-chant instrumental work, which at the time I called ‘alien orchestral chamber punk’ and evolved slowly into a song. I was surprised by the amount of rage I’d been storing inside myself which came bursting out as soon as I applied my voice.”
The creepy, animated video for the song was made by Jesse Kanda, who has worked with Arca, FKA Twigs, and Bjork, and like the song, it was created for the Coachella performance.
Los Angeles-based quartet SLUGS first appeared back in 2018 with their EP, “Cool World“, a record that caught the attention of many blogs, and saw the band share stages with the likes of Jessica Lea Mayfield, The Districts and Let’s Eat Grandma. Since then things have gone a little quiet, which all changed last month, when they returned with a brand-new single, “Super Sane“.
Citing influences from Linda Perhacs to The Oh Sees, Slugs are not a band easily pigeon-holed, with a sound that flutters from the sweetly melodic to the riotously energetic. Super Sane is probably the band at their most restrained, as washes of burbling electronics and gently meandering guitars create a gorgeous backing for vocalist Marissa Longstreet’s impassioned vocal delivery.
This is a song of sweet juxtapositions, at times it feels intimate and insular, the next fierce and strong-willed, as it seems to muse on ideas of healing and finding a path to acceptance of your lot. While plans for the year ahead remain as yet unconfirmed, there’s enough here to hint that the return of Slugs is a reason to be very excited about whatever is coming next.
Reciting mantras is a form of teaching — leaning into the repetition, retraining your brain, learning new realities. For Jilian Medford, it was a way to fight through her anxieties. And here, on “Show Me How You Disappear”, through a haze of tangled, inverted pop, her new truths push their way to the surface.
Mesmeric and kaleidoscopic, shimmering with electrified unease, Show Me How You Disappear is both an exercise in self-forgiveness and an eventual understanding of unresolved trauma. Medford’s third record as IAN SWEET unfolds at an acute juncture in her life, charting from a mental health crisis to an intensive healing process and what comes after. How do you control the thoughts that control you? What does it mean to get better? What does it mean to have a relationship with yourself?
The inklings for the record began slowly. In 2018, Medford wrote “Dumb Driver” on an acoustic guitar while living in a “hobbit hole” back house in Los Angeles. Skeletal, stripped-back versions of the undulating, amorphous “My Favorite Cloud” and “Power” emerged next. Mentally she was in a dark place. By January 2020, following increasingly severe panic attacks, Medford began a two-month intensive outpatient program, including six-hour days of therapy. It yielded an unprecedented level of self-reflection for Medford, who already plumbs the depths of her emotions for her song writing. She took a step back from music to completely immerse herself in the program, and once she felt ready to move on at the end of February, the rest of the songs poured out of her.
Recorded with Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Empress Of), Andy Seltzer (Maggie Rogers), and Daniel Fox, among others, Medford approached this album as a curator. She handpicked the producers that fit each song, which explains the range and experimentation showcased. Medford then recruited Chris Coady to mix and tie everything together into one cohesive piece.
The resulting record envelops both Medford and the listener like water: its ebb and flow, the ease with which it can switch from nourishing to endangering you. Fully immersive, with guitar lines as quick to sound grungy as they are to ascend to astral distortion, it’s a lush cacophony of experimentation. While writing the record, Medford revisited the discography of her forever favourite band, Coldplay and noted inspiration from Young Thug’s bizarre and magical vocal delivery. With these influences and many more, Medford’s pop melodies are inverted by the freak world she builds around them.
The cyclical nature of obsessive thought patterns shapes Show Me How You Disappear. It’s self-referential, each song in conversation with one another, tracing the same relationship and the desire to be an escape artist from your own life. But there’s also the repetition Medford learned to help herself via Emotional Freedom Technique tapping, which involves tapping pressure points on the body and repeating mantras to curb anxiety.
“Since I learned that method in therapy, it has saved my life and seeped into my music,” she says. “Song writing has always been a tool for me to process my emotions. But this technique has allowed me to apply more intention to that practice.”
For her, the refrain of “Get Better” hits that hardest, a sort of emotional thesis of the album. She explains, “This song came from being stuck in an infinite loop of destructive thoughts and the only way to get out of my head was to repeat my goal over and over. By saying ‘I want to get better, better, better’ out loud, I started to feel something.”
Show Me How You Disappear also offered a certain liberation to Medford. As personal as it is — like preceding albums Shapeshifter and Crush Crusher — here, post-therapy, Medford was able to approach her song writing in a new way. She learned how to distance herself from the immediacy of her work, to put space between her personal identity and her art. There was less concern about fitting every piece of her story into the lyrics. Instead, this time, she held back. “I think there’s something to be said for leaving things out,” Medford says. “This is the first record that I leave that space for myself. I feel a freedom on this one that I haven’t felt with the others. People always say ‘I put all of me into this’, but I actually didn’t this time — I left space.”
Dizzying and enthralling, Show Me How You Disappear is the sound of someone coming apart and putting themselves back together the moment an old mantra, repeated into the mirror time and time again, finally clicks. To look at your reflection, and finally feel seen.
Punk legend Alice Bag has announced a new album and shared the lead single, which features Allison Wolfe (of Bratmobile and much more). Alicia Armendariz (aka Alice Bag) is a Los Angeles punk legend, not just for her ground breaking first band the Bags (featured in Penelope Spheeris’s Decline of Western Civilization), but for her outspokenness, activism, writings, and embodying the D.I.Y. ethic instilled in her by her mother.
When L.A. punk legend Alice Bag and I recently talked on the phone, she began the conversation by telling me her dog, Cinnamon, had died three weeks earlier. She said thinking about the Rainbow Bridge—a poem that has been adopted by the pet-loss grief community—has really helped her. Her voice is light and calm, and sounds like many flowers opening, undulating. It is melodic and sweet, like an extract of something very powerful, and philosophical. But when she sings, that extract explodes.
Since the mid-1970s, her voice has exploded on stage and on record with the Bags, which she co-founded as part of the first wave of L.A.’s punk bands. She described her tough childhood in East Los Angeles and her coming of age into the punk music scene in her powerful 2011 memoir .
Alice told me that “Punk rock is my therapy,” and singing has always just come naturally to her. The first money she ever earned was from singing. Miss Yonkers, her fifth-grade teacher in Los Angeles, asked her to sing on an educational bilingual cartoon, and Bag earned $100—more than the monthly rent her parents paid. Said Bag, “I thought, ‘maybe I could be a singer when I grow up’”. She is still singing at 62, having released a solo album, Alice Bag in 2016, Blueprint in 2018, and Sister Dynamite in 2020.
But she didn’t tell her dad about her dream of becoming a singer because he would tell her she should strive to own the record company instead. “I think he treated me the way some men of his generation would’ve treated their firstborn son,” she said. “That’s why he filled my head with dreams.”
In The Red, Bob Baker Marionette Theater and Pancake Mountain present: Breadcrumbs! The first single from the forthcoming record SISTER DYNAMITE out April 24th 2020 on In The Red Records.
Musicians: Alice Bag, David Jones, Rikki Watson, Sharif Dumani Special guest vocalists: Allison Wolfe and Lysa Flores
Glass Beach have covered “Beach Life In Death’ by Car Seat Headrest. All 14 minutes of it. The track is part of their Patreon where fans can vote on which songs the band covers, along with a bunch of other perks including exclusive access to new music and video content.
Genreless and just as disjointed as it is cohesive, the first Glass Beach album was initially self-released by the band in the spring of 2019, but it’s roots actually date back to as early as 2015 when songwriter and band leader “Classic” J McClendon (they/them) started demoing tracks for the album when they first moved to Los Angeles from their hometown of Burleson, Texas.
Bassist Jonas Newhouse and drummer William White heard J’s solo project, casio dad on their college radio station at the University of Minnesota Morris in 2016 and liked it so much they decided to move into an apartment with J (who had spent the last year living on a friend’s couch) in Los Angeles, start a band together, and spend the next three years refining J’s demos into an album. Shortly after the album was finished, Layne Smith joined on lead guitar, playing parts originally performed on the album by J to help flesh out the band’s live sound, and quickly becoming a key piece to the band’s cohesion.
“Beach Life In Death” by Car Seat Headrest covered by Glass Beach out now via Run For Cover Records
“We start with these honest, bedroom-folksy songs. Then we just start adding like 808s and weird found sounds and pretty soon it’s something totally new and exciting. The Los Angeles based singer/songwriter Noah Weinman leads Runnner, often recruiting close friends including Skullcrusher’s Helen Ballentine and A.O. Gerber to help with vocals. His poetic, melancholic lyrics shine through on his 2020 second EP One of One, which meanders through contemplative, folk-tinged ballads to an almost unrecognisable, anthemic rework of Thundercat’s “Captain Stupido”.
Writing about their debut EP, “Fan On”, we described the music of Los Angeles-based band runnner as “somehow at once low key and blazingly expressive, distinctive and relatable.” If modesty and ambition seem like strange bedfellows then runnner disprove the thought, their “smooth and emotive bedroom pop combined with DIY folk leanings” working to create a sound that’s intimate yet thematically far-reaching, “explor[ing] the bittersweet nostalgia imbued in the minutiae of the day-to-day” to poke at existential questions and fears.
Though formed around Noah Weinman and Nate Lichtenberger,runnner performs live as a seven-piece yet the band are intelligent in their use of their numbers. Rather than throwing everything into the songs in some maximalist frenzy, runnner are frugal even in this sprawling form, maintaining a simple intimacy and fleshing out where necessary—with vocal harmonies, saxophone and trumpet—to further support and underline the emotion of the songs. Hectic crescendos are objectively great, but clever is the artist who can earn them with a careful balance of quiet.
The fact is pertinent because runnner are quickly establishing themselves as experts in balance, finding the sweet spot between loud and quiet, earnest and wry, and forming tracks of genuine emotional resonance. This year sees the band return with a brand new EP, “One of One”, and lead single ‘Heliotrope’ suggests that the development is continuing. Making the release one of our most anticipated of the year to come.
Having come out with an EP earlier this year, which is also fantastic, Kathleen comes back with another four-song EP. There is a lot of dread as the EP was mostly written during quarantine, but then again who wasn’t filled with dread. “August” kicks us off with a song revolving around how love sometimes doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would. Kathleen’s voice roars with emotion that she couldn’t hold back while thinking of her past love. “Dark Side of the Moon” was written at the beginning of the quarantine as Kathleen packed her car and drove through four states, with many of her belongings to her family’s home. There is some hope in the beautiful folk song with learning to take what you can, including watching the birds sing and the grass grow. The song ends as nature takes over the track, giving us all hope.
“Can’t Sleep” is that feeling that everyone has: that everything currently happening is a dream, but if we can wake up it will all be over. There’s so much uncertainty and while it would be nice to just snap awake, we need to figure out how to come together to defeat everything that is happening. It’s the song off the EP that would find the dancehalls, if we could get there right now. “Glass Piano” closes us out with a song that seems like it could have come from Fiona Apple, with some great piano work and layers of vocals on top of each other. It’s a beautiful track showing what Kathleen is capable of and what could be coming next.
Kathleen is one of Warner Records newest signees. Raised in Steamboat Springs, Colorado but now based in Los Angeles, she draws from her poetry and environmentalist background in her conscious spin on the singer/songwriter formula. On her debut EP, Kathleen I, listeners can hear traces of Joni Mitchell’s down-to-earth folk, Fiona Apple’s idiosyncratic art pop, and touches of contemporary pop production, an engaging combination that showcases the depth of Kathleen’s vocals and her song writing potential.
Make sure to listen to both EP’s if you haven’t yet. Released by Warner Records
Cartalk, the project of Los Angeles songwriter and musician Chuck Moore, have been teasing out their debut album, the immaculate “Pass Like Pollen”, for the better part of a year. These singles got some light coverage but steadily built on each other. Every song added another view into their captivating sound. The nine tracks that form Pollen are each vulnerable, exuberant, and gripping in a way that makes their power known mere seconds after pressing play.
One song dropped far in advance, the closing cut, “Sleep,” exemplifies this. Even before Moore’s voice comes in, the tendrils of guitar reaching out foreshadow the crash we all can feel is coming. The song has urgent, anxious energy, and Moore laments “I can’t write songs about you before I sleep / I won’t be so meticulous.” Its pace shakes you, and you feel the emotional resonance of every word viscerally, perhaps as strongly as Moore themselves. Songs like “Car Window” and “Noonday Devil” tap into relatable ideas like the comfort of sitting on floors, and sticking one’s head out of the car window. Neither act is subversive, but go against what’s expected nonetheless.
Pass Like Pollen in a lot of ways feels like the natural successor of Great Grandpa’s Four of Arrows. That is to say that above all else released this year in rock music, it’s the album that most confidently embraces country music’s influence and proudly wraps each note in that flag. Additionally, Moore’s vocals share a certain tone with Great Grandpa’s own Al Menne. The album’s opener, “Arroyo Tunnels” is reposed and eerie. The vast, developed lyricism on display here is a recurring theme throughout. It depicts a long drive and expresses a love for the world it travels and takes comfort in the long drive. This deep attention to and appreciation of detail is tangible in every note.
“Wrestling” has some great riffs and a chorus that will surely get a crowd dancing once we can come back to live events again. “Driveway” is a heavy song about being in a relationship but feeling like it’s over already, basically a shell of what it once was, and it feels like you can see through the other person as if they were a ghost. “A Lesson” is a quick beautiful slow song about learning from every relationship and taking that forward as you move on in life. “Sleep” ends the record on a high note both lyrically and musically. While it might be over, the memories are there forever. I’m so excited for what the future holds for Cartalk as this is quite the debut.
“Pollen” shines as an airing of grievances and self-affirming mantras. Moore isn’t just writing songs with big choruses, though there are plenty of those, they’re building out an expanse for their guitar and band to fill. You can hear the space between each riff, and on a song like “Las Manos,” when the vocals and guitar act as a part of each other, the atmosphere they share becomes overwhelming. That song could be considered the highlight, though, with as many excellent songs as there are here, that title can be argued over. Feeling the guitar swing down as Moore sings “did my honesty scare you?” is exhilarating.
It’s not like Exene Cervenka, and her bandmates in the Los Angeles proto-punk quartet X are just sitting around their respective houses, idly twiddling their thumbs this enforced-lockdown December. But they are coming to surreal grips with the fact that for this Yuletide season, at least, they will not be the hardest-working band on the road. Since, of course, no bands are on the road at all and may not be for quite some time. So their annual “X-mas Tour” has been summarily canceled, the singer says, just when they and fans needed it most.
In April, X released its first new studio album in 27 years, the guns-blazing, Rob Schnapf-produced “Alphabetland”, one of its strongest yet. And its eerily-prescient material, like the current raucous single “Goodbye Year, Goodbye” (complemented by a spartan animated stick-figure video conceived by Tiny Concert’s Keith Ross) was all written and recorded pre-COVID-19 — five songs in 2018 and another seven in a session that wrapped on March 10th, just before the quarantine. Otherwise, this would have been a banner year for the group, which also signed a special merchandising deal with designer John Varvatos. “But it’s very hectic playing shows during the holidays because, for everyone else, it’s just part of the seasonal fun,” she admits. “But we’re trying to have holiday fun with our friends while we’re working, and sometimes it isn’t easy. And then you come home in December and think, ‘You know, I really should have gotten a Christmas tree. Oh, well…’ But I do love playing those Christmas shows, and I’m really going to miss it this year. So it’s, er, a little odd.”
As Live albums go Forget “The Song Remains The Same” the 1970 bootleg “Live On Blueberry Hill” captures Zeppelin at the peak of their powers better than anything else, Sure, Led ZeppelinIV and Physical Grafitti are generally accepted as Led Zeppelin’s twin peaks, though you could find someone to make a case for each of their albums (even In Through The Out Door). But it’s the 1970 bootleg Led Zeppelin Live On Blueberry Hill that is the true connoisseur’s choice when it comes to Zeppelin albums.
Bootlegs and Zeppelin have been synonymous for over decades. Despite manager Peter Grant’s heavy-handedness when dealing with anyone he caught taping their shows, Zep became the most bootlegged act of all time.
The band’s impact on their initial American tours made them a prime target for the then emerging bootleg recording business. From their inception, it was more than evident that Zeppelin’s studio output was just the starting point. On stage was where the real action occurred, as they constantly improvised and expanded their material. Peter Grant summed it up when he stated: “Led Zeppelin was primarily an in-person band… that’s what it was really about.”
On the night of September 4th, 1970, during their sixth American tour, two separate teams of fans were intent on taping the Led Zeppelin gig at the Inglewood Forum in Los Angeles. Both parties came away with lengthy representations of the band’s then current state of play, recorded on reel-to-reel machines close to the stage.
Regardless of which version you hear, the sheer authenticity of the performance shines through. The dynamic thrust of Bonham’s drums, the sinewy grind of Page’s guitar, Jonesy’s resonant bass lines and melodic keyboards, plus the outstanding clarity of Plant’s vocal shrieks (enhanced by the echo unit used at the time), all merge into a ferocious mix that magically recreates the electricity of the occasion. The sleeve notes describe it as “One hundred and six minutes and fifty three seconds of pure alive rock.
The recording that would become known as the album Led Zeppelin Live On Blueberry Hill was captured by a pair of West Coast bootleggers whose previous credits included Dylan’s Great White Wonder set and the Stones’ Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be. Another bootlegger known as Rubber Dubber also recorded the show and quickly issued it as a double album stamped Led Zeppelin Live Los Angeles Forum 9-4-70. The more commonLive On Blueberry Hill on the Blimp label version with a distinctive surreal cover insert, also came out within weeks of the show.
Moments to relish include the unpredictable Communication Breakdown medley that included Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth and The Beatles’ I Saw Her Standing There, plus the Zep I opener Good Times Bad Times. Not forgetting freshly minted nuggets from the soon to be released Zep III album such as Since I’ve Been Loving You and the rarely played live Out On The Tiles. A lengthy Whole Lotta Love turned into a rock’n’roll juke box as they randomly threw in covers of Buddy Holly’s Think It Over and Leiber, Stoller & Barrett’s Some Other Guy – a formula they repeated with a breathless encore rendition of Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill.
Back in their heyday, bootleg recordings of Led Zeppelin offered a whole new perspective on the band. This remains as essential a part of their discography as any of their official albums. To paraphrase the great Fats himself, Led Zeppelin Live On Blueberry Hill is still an absolute thrill. From the 1980s the bootleg became available on CD as a 2-disc set, often under the titles Blueberry Hill and The Final Statements. An historic show immortalized on the first-ever LP bootleg, Blueberry Hill. After the concert, JP, RP and JB jam at the Troubadour with Fairport Convention. “It was mainly Plant and Page who got up onstage and joined Fairport. They did things like “Hey Joe,” “That’s Alright Mama,” “Mystery Train,” and other stuff. This was after Sandy Denny had left Fairport, so it was the all-male Fairport lineup. Joe Boyd
Setlist:
Immigrant Song, Heartbreaker, Dazed and Confused, Bring It On Home, That’s Way, Bron-Yr-Aur, Since I’ve Been Loving You, Organ solo / Thank You, What Is and What Should Never Be, Moby Dick, Whole Lotta Love (medley incl.: Let That Boy Boogie, Who’s Loving You Tonight?, I’m Movin’ On, Red House, Some Other Guy, Think it Over), Communication Breakdown (medley: incl. Good Times Bad Times, For What It’s Worth, I Saw Her Standing There), Out On The Tiles, Blueberry Hill.
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The Fat Angel Sings 