Lindsey Jordan has a lot of firepower for an 18-year-old. The Maryland-based Matador Records signee was stylishly clad with a red guitar in tow and sleek shades. Throughout the set, the band gave way to the commanding Jordan for a powerful 40 minutes in front of what felt like the largest crowd of the day. Something big is brewing here, take note…For Indie rock wunderkind Lindsey Jordan and her band, Snail Mail, have announced the release of their debut album. Lush, which follows 2017’s Habit EP, is out June 8th via Matador Records.
“Pristine” continues the personal, intimate feel of Habit, which was written in Jordan’s suburban bedroom. But “Pristine” aims a bit higher, with soaring choruses and crisp guitars crafting a shimmering backdrop for Jordan’s musings on young love. “Don’t you like me for me?” she sings. “I know myself, I’ll never love anyone else.”
Ah, to be young. And yet, “Pristine” is a grand step forward for a promising songwriter who — despite the hype — is really just getting started.
Watch Lucy Dacus perform a few new songs from her new album ‘Historian’ at the PledgeHouse day stage. The extraordinary singer songwriter Lucy Dacus, is one of the most heavily-buzzed acts playing Austin this week. Some artists just have a presence, captivating listeners from the first note, and LucyDacus is very much among them. Whether her songs come in a quiet wash or a rocking churn, her powerful and expressive voice cuts like an airplane wing through atmosphere, pulling the music up and up and up. Songs like “Night Shift” — the title track to her new album Historian reward the attention with uneasy, engaging lyrics.
You might not have caught the buzz for Lucy Dacus’s superb released 2016 album ‘No Burden,’ but you’d have to have your head in the sand to miss the wild anticipation for her sophomore LP ‘Historian.’ Her lilting and confessional brand of indie-rock will make for a riveting live set.
Historianis a record that’s great for introspection and Thinking About Your Life™, but it’s also the perfect kind of music for a late afternoon outdoor set in Texas, Lucy Dacus’s music can feel like a bit of a slow burn, but the layered, aching guitars sound like they’re a lost recording session from every influential guitarist from the 90s. It’s great.
Songs performed: 0:57Historians4:22Nonbeliever12:55Body to Flame16:32I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore
Debuting songs from their new album “There’s a Riot Going On”, On February 27th, Yo La Tengo performed an intimate show at the Brooklyn National Sawdust, happy to share footage of their full performance from that night. There’s a Riot Going On is due out March 16th via Matador Records. Check out Yo La Tengo’s tour date
A lot is made of Yo La Tengo’s love of the cover version. Sir Douglas Quintet. Sun Ra. The Rutles. The Parliaments. From 1990’s impeccable Fakebookthrough to 2015’s Stuff Like That There their knowledge and love the Hoboken indie-rock trio have for rock canon is as genuine as it is impeccably observed.
We know Yo La Tengo can sound like The Flamin’ Groovies, but, well, what do Yo La Tengo sound like? Only four non-covers albums since 2003 and their sound is as timeless/predictable (delete as applicable) as it was in their 90s heyday. With a knowing album title and a sound that is exactly as warm, textured, soothing, dreamy and downright Velvety as you’d expect, There’s A Riot Going On initially appears to be very much Yo La by numbers. Shades of Blue’s Velvets/Beach Boys paean to introspection, She May, She Might’s gauzy psych-lite, Polynesia #1’s twilight exotica that would fit snugly on 1997’s I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One; gorgeous, woozy numbers all but no surprises all the same. A whole album might not have been quite there – the band have happily described it as an “accident” – but when these jams were manipulated and added to drones, snippets, loops and pieces from unused film scores and sessions dating back as far as 2007, what would emerge was familiar yet wonderfully not.
Given the source material, There’s A Riot Going Onwas never going to be the sonic revolution that Sly & The Family Stone-referencing title might suggest, but it is an invitingly disparate sound collage that will seduce fanboys and newbies alike.
Yo La Tengo are still the critic’s favourite band with maybe too much of a thing .
Yo La Tengo play songs from There’s a Riot Going On Check out more shows from National Sawdust:
Setlist:
00:00 You Are Here 10:25 Forever 16:20 for you too 23:14 Shades of Blue 27:40 Let’s Do It Wrong 32:00 She May, She Might 39:30 Out of Pool 44:40 Ashes 51:00 Here You Are
Copenhagen’s IceageElias Bender Rønnenfelt (vocals, lyrics), Jakob Tvilling Pless (bass), Dan Kjær Nielsen (drums), and Johan Wieth (guitar) — will release their fourth album, ‘Beyondless’, on May 4th. After returning last month with ‘Catch It’, their first new material since 2013’s ‘Plowing Into The Field of Love’, Iceage now share Beyondless’s “Pain Killer”, featuring Sky Ferreira (the first guest vocalist to ever be featured on an Iceage song). Additionally, the band is announcing March residencies in New York and Los Angeles and dates in Japan in April, with their previously announced European and North American tours to follow in May and June. It was produced by the band and Nis Bysted, recorded by Mattias Glavå at Kungsten Studios Göteberg, and mixed by Randall Dunn at Avast Studios Seattle. The album was played entirely by the band with additional performances by Nils Gröndhal (violin), horns by Kasper Tranberg (trumpet), Lars Greve (saxophones) and Morten Jessen (trombone),
From the new album ‘Beyondless’ out May 4th on Matador Records.
Iceage are a four-piece band from Copenhagen, Denmark signed to Matador Records that make punk-rock of a darker tone than most. ‘Catch It’ is the band’s first release in four years which features a poetic lyrical delivery from lead singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt in his typical dingy fashion, chopped up with a contrasting guitar solo for added reflection.
On “Catch It,” he delivers one of his most emotive vocal performances yet. Over a simple, lurching chord progression, he groans and seethes into the mic, telling his story as with the wrinkles in his voice as with his words. Because there are only a few notes in the new single’s vocal melody, Rønnenfelt has more of a chance to modulate the texture of his voice. Rønnenfelt has the power to imbue even the simplest words with a distinctly dangerous aura: “You want it, you want it, you want it again/Why don’t you come and ask me?/I adore you, my friend,” he sings with what could be hint of malice. When “Catch It” slows to a false ending and then spins back up into a raucous, unhinged instrumental climax, it only makes his come-on sound like it could double as a threat.
Band Members
Dan Kjær Nielsen
Elias Bender Rønnenfelt
Johan Wieth
Jakob Tvilling Pless
Will Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.
Even so, even awkward and amateurish, Twin Fantasy is deeply, truly adored. Legions of reverent listeners carve rituals out of it: sobbing over Famous Prophets, making out to Cute Thing, dancing their asses off as Bodysclimbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feeleverything: his hope, his despair, his wild overjoy. He’s trusting you – plural you, thousands of you – with the things he can’t say out loud. I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends, he sings – and then, caught between truths, backtracks: I never came out to my friends. We were all on Skype, and I laughed and changed the subject.
You might be imagining an extended diary entry, an angsty transmission from a bygone LiveJournal set to power chords and cranked to eleven. You would be wrong. Twin Fantasy is not a monologue. Twin Fantasyis a conversation. You know, he sings, that I’m mostly singing about you. This is Will’s greatest strength as a songwriter: he spins his own story, but he’s always telling yours, too. Between nods to local details – Harper’s Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat – he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.
Early next year, Car Seat Headrest will release a new version of Twin Fantasy. “It was never a finished work,” Will says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.
It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Will, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those apologies to future me’s and you’s, there is more forgiveness than fury.
This, Will says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy. From the new ‘Twin Fantasy’ available February 16th on Matador Records
Yo La Tengoare back with four songs from There’s A Riot Going On, their first new studio album since 2013.
Hoboken’s Yo La Tengo, are one of the longest-running and most rewarding indie-rock bands since the genre had a name, are up there with Tom Waits in the pantheon of artists who’ve never done anything except what they want. And like Tom Waits, fans are often rewarded regardless. They’ve got great records everyone agrees on (I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, …And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out) and great records even their fans can’t agree on (Summer Sun, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass). None of them could have been made by any another band.
The trio have also shared tracks “You Are Here”, “Shades Of Blue”, “She May, She Might”, and “Out Of The Pool” from their newly recorded new album a 15-track collection, showing off the gamut of their new record’s sound and style. As well as all the new noises, writer Luc Santé has penned a bio which sheds a bit more light on what to expect:
There’s a Riot Going On. You don’t need me, or Yo La Tengo, to tell you that. These are dark times, in our heads as much as in the streets. It’s easy to lose contact with the ground, flying through endless banks of storm clouds day after day. Confusion and anxiety intrude into daily life and cause you to lose your compass. There are times that call for anthems, something to lift you out of your slump and put fire in your feet. And then there are times when what is indicated is a balm, a sound that will wrap around you and work out the knots in your neck.
While there’s a riot going on, Yo La Tengo will remind you what it’s like to dream. The sound burbles and washes and flows and billows. If records were dedicated to the cardinal elements, this one would be water. There are shimmery hazes, spectral rumbles, a flash of backward masking, ghostly flamingos calling ‘shoo-bop shoo-bop’. You are there. And even if your mind is not unclouded – shaken, misdirected, out of words and out of time – you can still float, ride the waves of an ocean deeper than your worries, above the sound and above the Sound.
For Yo La Tengo this is a slow-motion action painting, and Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan, and James McNew did it all themselves, in their rehearsal studio, with no outside engineer (John McEntire later did the mix). They did not rehearse or jam together beforehand; they turned on the recorder and let things coalesce. Songs came together over long stretches, sometimes as much as a year going by between parts. You’d never guess this, since the layers are finessed with such a liquid brush. You’d imagine most of the songs had sprung forth whole, since they will enter your head that way. Within two listens you will be powerless to resist the magnetic draw of “Shades of Blue,” will involuntarily hear “She May, She Might” on your internal jukebox first thing in the morning and “Let’s Do It Wrong” late at night. While there’s a riot going on you will feel capable of bobbing through like a cork.
In 1971, when the nation appeared to be on the brink of violently coming apart, Sly and the Family Stone released There’s A Riot Goin’ On, an album of dark, brooding energy. Now, under similar circumstances, Yo La Tengo have issued a record with the same name but with a different force, an album that proposes an alternative to anger and despair. Their first proper full-length since 2013’s Fade, There’s A Riot Going On is an expression of freedom and sanity and emotional expansion, a declaration of common humanity as liberating as it is soft-spoken.
Yo La Tengo have a busy year ahead of them, with a huge run of North American and European live dates booked for spring/summer.
Tracklist:
You Are Here
Shades of Blue
She May, She Might
For You Too
Ashes
Polynesia #1
Dream Dream Away
Shortwave
Above the Sound
Let’s Do It Wrong
What Chance Have I Got
Esportes Casual
Forever
Out of the Pool
Here You Are
There’s A Riot Going On is out 16th March via Matador Records.
Historian, will be the sophomore album from Richmond, Va. native Lucy Dacus, counting down the days until its March release. Our anticipation has only intensified with the release of “Addictions,” the second single from Dacus’ impending record.
The second track on Historian, “Addictions” is an honest, horn-assisted anthem, accompanied by a video directed by the singer-songwriter herself. Dacus, a former film student, was able to put her cinematic skills to use in the making of the video, in part a love letter to her native Richmond. A nameless protagonist explores the city, viewing it through a magical, black-and-white frame while reflecting upon her past. This visual device separates the reality of the present (the world of color) from the fantasies of the past (the black-and-white world), reinforcing the central idea of “Addictions”—how we come to rely upon substances, activities, places or people, and how hard it can be to leave them in the past. “You’ve got addictions too, it’s true,” Dacus insists as the song crescendos, forcing each one of us to look inward and take stock of all we’re holding on to.
Historian is out on March 2nd via Matador Records. You can revisit the album’s initial announcement—and its superlative first single, “Night Shift”
At age 18, Brooklyn-based Baltimore kid Lindsey Jordan has already been through a whirlwind word-of-mouth rise through the underground, a round of breathless media exaltation, a SXSW star tour, and a label bidding war that landed her band Snail Mail on historical indie-rock pillar Matador Records. So what does everybody see in her? Debut EP Habit is pretty much all we have to go on so far, but it presents Jordan as a natural, a songwriter capable of spinning magic from a few guitar chords and howled phrases. Her lo-fi guitar ballads glimmer in their grime, wringing uncommon beauty from indie rock’s basic toolkit. Imagine Waxahatchee under the influence of both Sonic Youth and actual youth, and you’ll begin to understand what all the fuss is about.
Car Seat Headrest, aka Will Toledo, has re-imagined and re-recorded his excellent 2011 Bandcamp masterpiece, Twin Fantasy, and it will come out on 16th February via Matador Records. It was a record Toldeo always knew he would return to (in fact it was part of his original deal with Matador), so far from a conventional re-recording, the follow up to 2016’s seismically brilliant Teens of Denial is a wholly revelatory, epic and visionary new work. With a seven-piece band in tow (including members of Naked Giants), Car Seat Headrest will bring its explosive and revelatory live show to Australia, Europe, and select West Coast cities through the first half of 2018.
The album announcement comes with the release of Nervous Young Inhumans and its accompanying video, which can be seen below. It is a frenetic, anthemic, split-screen choreographed crescendo that perfectly mirrors the album’s theme of duality.
Toledo always knew he would return to ‘Twin Fantasy’. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.
Even so, even awkward and amateurish, ‘Twin Fantasy’ is deeply, truly adored. Legions of reverent listeners carve rituals out of it: sobbing over “Famous Prophets,” making out to “Cute Thing,” dancing their asses off as “Bodys” climbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feel everything: his hope, his despair, his wild overjoy. He’s trusting you – plural you, thousands of you – with the things he can’t say out loud. “I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends,” he sings – and then, caught between truths, backtracks: “I never came out to my friends. We were all on Skype, and I laughed and changed the subject.”
You might be imagining an extended diary entry, an angsty transmission from a bygone LiveJournal set to power chords and cranked to eleven. You would be wrong. ‘Twin Fantasy’is not a monologue. ‘Twin Fantasy’ is a conversation. “You know,” he sings, “that I’m mostly singing about you.” This is Will’s greatest strength as a songwriter ; he spins his own story, but he’s always telling yours, too. Between nods to local details – Harper’s Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat – he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.
“It was never a finished work,” Toledo says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.
It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Toledo, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those “apologies to future me’s and you’s,” there is more forgiveness than fury.
This, Toledo says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.
The Fat Angel Sings 