The debut full-length by Allison Crutchfield (P.S. Eliot, Swearin’) has announced her debut solo album. It’s called Tourist in ThisTown, and it sonically pulls back the curtain on her life and places with Crutchfield center stage, fully revealing her power, conviction, and grace. The Alabama native has immersed herself in music since her teenage years, forming notable bands such as P.S. Eliot and Bad Banana (both with her twin sister Katie of Waxahatchee ) and it’s out January 27th via Merge Records. She has also shared a music video for the album’s first track, “Dean’s Room.” Directed by Lara Jean Gallagher, the video shows scenes of Crutchfield dancing around a home alongside the dancer Marlee Grace. In the video Gallagher “wanted to counter the upbeat tempo of the song with moments that felt like taffy,” she said in a statement. Below, watch the “Dean’s Room” music video, and see Tourist in This Town’s full tracklist and cover artwork, as well as Allison Crutchfield’s upcoming tour dates.
Crutchfield’s last album with Swearin’ was 2013’s Surfing Strange. In 2014, she self-released the Lean in to It EP. Earlier this year, P.S. Eliot got back together for a reunion tour in support of an excellent compilation of their complete recorded works, 2007-2011.
If you’re looking for the perfect soundtrack to the changing seasons and the darker nights coming in, look no further than Hiss Golden Messenger’s new album “Heart Like A Levee” , the band’s first new LP since 2014’s superb Lateness of Dancers. The album, out October 7th, features frontman M.C. Taylor waxing poetic about life, change, and the American landscape. His songs, created with help from members of Bon Iver and Megafaun, are filled with longing and drive. The title track, which we are premiering today, is all promise wrapped up in guitar strings—perfect for making lonesome autumn nights seem a little less lonely.
From the album Heart Like a Levee, out October 7th, 2016 on Merge Records.
Originally released in August of 2001, the double-LP reissue will mark Getaway’s first appearance on vinyl and it includes an 18-song bonus CD that compiles the hard-to-find, tour-only releases of Syd’s Pink Wiring System and Slush Fund. A double-CD version includes the full album plus the bonus disc.
There is a live version of the pulsing, soaring “Stars” along with a couple of other Getaway songs and The Clean classics like “Fish,” “Side On,” “Quickstep,” and “Point That Thing Somewhere Else” appears on the rare 2003 album Syd’s Pink Wiring System. That record will be included with the Getaway reissue, along with the more experimental, piano-driven EP Slush Fund from the same era.
These bonus tracks reinforce the idea of the Getaway-era Clean as especially plugged in, generating inspired and beautiful music almost on instinct.
Indeed, they’ve done justice to Getaway, It was a key album in The Clean discography ,a record that honors the band’s origins as garage-rock-loving New Zealand kids, excited just by the hum of a good, cheap amplifier. Songs like the twangy, easygoing “Crazy,” the jaunty acoustic snippet “Cell Block No. 5,” and the trance-inducing “Circle Canyon” are more fine examples of Robert Scott and the Kilgour brothers’ interest in immediacy and a strong vibe, applied to catchy melodies.
Due On December 2nd, the deluxe version of 2001’s Getaway in honor of the album’s 15th anniversary.
Ahead of the release of their upcoming album Heart Like A Levee, out October 7 via Merge Records, Hiss GoldenMessenger has released a new video for single “Tell Her I’m Just Dancing”. The video features a rollicking performance of the track by the band, which includes Matt McCaughan (of Bon Iver) on drums.
“Lateness Of Dancers”, is the fifth studio album by Hiss Golden Messenger, was one of 2014’s finest records. The first record MC Taylor and his collective of collaborators has released for Merge Records, it delved into Southern states musical traditions, but injected them with enough fresh impetus to make it more than just another Americana record.
Not wanting to hang around MC Taylor began writing the follow up at the start of 2015 in a hotel room in Washington. Looking out the window at powerful storm, he admits he’d never felt more disillusioned and divided by the twin interests in his life his music and his family. The tracks from that writing session would go onto make most of his upcoming record, Heart Like A Levee which will be out on Merge Records in October and was produced alongside Megafaun’s Bradley Cook. This week as well detailing the release, Hiss Golden Messenger have also shared a new track, Biloxi. The track has something of Gold-era Ryan Adams about it, all bright acoustic guitars, gentle fluttering beats and warm twanging slides; and it might just be the most accessible single he’s written to date. MC Taylor has suggested since those recordings he’s realised both his music and his family lives can’t exist without the other, which for music fans everywhere might just be the best realisation he could possibly have come to, there’s plenty more songs to come from this increasingly vital songwriter.
Heart Like A Levee is out October 5th via Merge Records.
From the album Cult Following, which came out May 6th, 2016 on Merge Records. If it is the only new track you’ve listened to from Little Scream, a.k.a. Laurel Sprengelmeyer, is the ultra danceable “Love as a Weapon,” you’d be forgiven — it is a definite summer jam. But you’d also be missing out on the beautiful, twisted collection that is Cult Following, the Iowa-born, Montreal-based songwriter’s sophomore release. “Every disaster has a beautiful start,” sings Sprengelmeyer on “The Kissing,” a track that features the vocals of TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, and a layered standout among songs that feature Sufjan Stevens and Sharon Van Etten. Mary Margaret O’Hara’s vocals make an appearance on the haunting “Wishing Well,” and the full project was produced by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry. No one’s calling it a concept album, but Cult Following contains 12 seamless tracks that have collected some dedicated followers.
This month, Wye Oak surprise-released a new sorta-album called Tween. It’s been two years since their last LP — the underrated and beautiful Shriek, but this isn’t the official next record from Wye Oak, exactly. It isn’t billed as Album #5. It is eight previously unreleased songs, revisited from the transitional and searching time that elapsed between Civilian and Shriek, while also being inextricably linked to both. It’s an album that steps sideways and backward and maybe forward, making it the latest weird entry into what has become Wye Oak’s weird trajectory.
As a successor to Civilian, Shriek was lost somewhere in-between all of this. It was in the mold of the stylistic leap and it was the much-anticipated album that seemingly should’ve ignited more fervor around the group, yet didn’t. The thing that doesn’t make sense here is that Shriek was so well-received; it wasn’t a botched attempt at the stylistic left-turn breakthrough-followup. It just wound up being, well, a quieter release than the one for which the duo seemed primed. A not-insignificant part of this is that Wye Oak’s decision to aggressively ditch their guitar-oriented sound for a synth-y, groove-focused album left some fans and critics scratching their heads. Strange as it seems in the ’10s to be hung up on a rock-oriented band experimenting with a more electronic sound, there was some degree of validity to it. In the perennial conversation about “guitar music being over” or whatever, Wye Oak were a beacon of hope, a band that were wresting raw and vital emotions out of an instrument and form that many would write off as being tapped-out. Even so, Shriek wasn’t some gimmick or willful negation of what the duo had achieved on their first few albums. It was a necessary overhaul in which Wasner and Stack reworked their approach from the ground up,
So, in several ways, that’s where Tween comes in. It’s the type of counter-narrative whisper of a release that you can get away with more easily when you aren’t saddled with the pressure of having ascended to the peak of the indie world, the point at which each of your records has the weight of being the Next Big Statement from your band. And it’s a release that elucidates what went on behind the scenes of the seemingly abrupt, sharp left-turn that occurred between Civilian and Shriek, while also suggesting what Wye Oak could be now that Shriek has rearranged the borders.
It all culminates with the stunning closer “Watching The Waiting” — Tween’s surefire, immediate entry if you were to make a list of Wye Oak’s finest songs. “Watching The Waiting” doesn’t sound quite like anything else in Wye Oak’s catalog. It has a breakneck momentum not unlike past songs, but a less burdened one; it’s brighter and sprightlier than the heavy churn of The Knot and Civilian. Some of the dreaminess of “Shriek” and “Schools Of Eyes” is in there, but it lifts off in a different way. The song’s more organic than Shriek, but its drama is primarily driven by the interplay of Wasner’s vocals and a lead synth line that waits to peel open into a wailing solo just short of the two minute mark. Much of Wye Oak’s pre-Shriek work felt like something mysterious and foreboding and brooding lurking in darkened forest corners. This returns to a more pastoral quality, but instead sounds like mystic visions at daybreak. If Tween is a document of an era of transition that also hints at what the new Wye Oak could explore, then “Watching The Waiting” is hopefully the promising preview of what’s to come.
From the album Tween, out now digitally on Merge Records. Vinyl / CD out August 5th.
Bob Mould’s new album hits record stores this week, and its great to see him releaseing new album, the music from PATCH THE SKY here in an exclusive stream. Bob and record stores have a strong mutual admiration society going and we’re excited about Patch The Sky, his upcoming tour (dates below) and about a special zine, coming on Record Store Day. It’s the first ever Merge zine, and it celebrates the career of Bob Mould with an introductory essay from Michael Azerrad plus personal stories, artwork and photos from fans around the world. The zine also includes music–a CD of Bob’s 2014 full-band live session for Chicago radio station WXRT.
A very limited number of these available at participating record stores on Record Store Day.
So plan to get the new album from Bob Mould, Patch The Sky, on Friday at your local record store. And tide yourself over with our exclusive stream and the video for “Voices In My Head” with “the sort of soaring hooky, straight ahead rock rager that Mould has been doing so well for so long.”
A Giant Dog’s frontwoman Sabrina Ellis is fearless. She leads the band’s riotous performances—so enthralling it’s hard to look away—and often does so in various arrangements of Spandex and neon. The Austin-based band might look at SXSW as a hometown showcase, but they recently signed with the North Carolina’s Merge Records to release their forthcoming third album “Pile” May 6th. Our music encompasses the passion, the modern survival of winged tipped shoes, seahorse androgyny, moon-rivers and bingo, and is heavily influenced by beer, The Coasters, The Stooges and Velvet Underground.
The video for new How To Dance single “Baby Blue” ruptures the fourth wall in the same way Mount Moriah’s music ruptures the traditional themes of Southern roots rock. The intimacy of each moment captured on camera mimics the slow and heartfelt vocals and dusty instrumentation, the clip’s surreal nature accenting the slow-burning single’s dreamy qualities all the while. Seeking to highlight the fact that each seemingly candid moment captured is indeed a construct, director Jordan Michael Blake sought to use the film’s voyeuristic qualities in order to “prompt some thought about the way to frame our own personal memories/perceptions of others.” Watch the music video for “Baby Blue” below.
From the album How to Dance, out February 26th on Merge Records.
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The Fat Angel Sings 