Cate Le Bon has announced her next record and shared its first single. Her sixth album is titled “Pompeii” and it’s out on February 4th via Mexican SummerRecords. The single is “Running Away,” and it comes with a music video directed by Casey Raymond and recorded in the Factory in Porth, Wales. Check out the visual, as well as Le Bon’s upcoming U.K tour dates, below.
“Pompeii” was written and recorded in a quagmire of unease. Solo. In a time warp. In a house I had a life in 15 years ago,” Cate Le Bon said in a statement. “I grappled with existence, resignation and faith. I felt culpable for the mess but it smacked hard of the collective guilt imposed by religion and original sin.”
The subtitle is: You will be forever connected to everything. Which, depending on the time of day, is as comforting as it is terrifying. The sense of finality has always been here. It seems strangely hopeful. Someone is playing with the focus lens. The world is on fire but the bins must go out on a Tuesday night. Political dissonance meets beauty regimes. I put a groove behind it for something to hold on to. The grief is in the saxophones.
Cate Le Bon has announced a US/UK/EU tour for 2022. Tickets are on sale this Friday at 10 AM localtime.Ticket + LP bundles are available for UK customers. All dates will be with Mega Bog.
03-14 Southampton, England – Engine Rooms 03-15 London, England – Hackney Empire 03-16 Manchester, England – Albert Hall 03-17 Glasgow, Scotland – SWG3 TV Studio 03-18 Belfast, Ireland – Empire Music Hall 03-19 Dublin, Ireland – The National Concert Hall 03-21 Liverpool, England – Arts Club 03-22 Leeds, England – Irish Centre 03-23 Birmingham, England – The Mill
Cate Le Bon released her fifth solo full-length Reward in 2019.
Iceage return today with “Shelter Song,” the latest single from their forthcoming album “Seek Shelter”. Following “Vendetta” and “The Holding Hand,” “Shelter Song” sounds fuller and brighter than anything Iceage have committed to tape yet. Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s instantly recognizable voice is joined by the Lisboa Gospel Collective, who add an anthemic swell: “Come lay here right beside me // They kick you when you’re up, they knock you when you’re down.”
The video, directed by long time friend and collaborator Catherine Pattinama Coleman, offers a rare, intimate look into the band’s life in Copenhagen amongst family and friends.
“Iceage asked me if I wanted to direct the video for ‘Shelter Song.’ As a childhood friend of theirs, it was important for me to showcase our friendship and the people we share everyday life with. So instead of making a video full of symbolism or a staged performance, I wanted to make a private and personal video close to our hearts. After a crazy year of COVID-19, the world in flames and structural racism peaking at such an extent, I wanted to create a meaningful piece, especially being a woman of colour and fully in my third trimester. In the midst of a pandemic it’s important to remember that those of us who are privileged enough to have a roof over our heads, food, security, love and care, is something of great value. Love is not something one should not take for granted.” – Catherine Pattinama Coleman
The Latest Single from the Band’s Forthcoming Record “Seek Shelter” Out May 7th Iceage -on Mexican Summer and Escho
Copenhagen’s Iceage will make their Mexican Summer Records debut on May 7th with “Seek Shelter”, their fifth album and first since 2018’s Beyondless. The Danish rockers shared another preview of the album in the form of new single/video “Vendetta” a menacing, yet danceable blues-rock track that moves in a fashion somewhere between swaggering and stumbling. “This ain’t no place for a sightseer,” Rønnenfelt warns, his impressionistic lyrics conjuring hazy images of transaction, exploitation and retribution. He swears vengeance over swaying shakers and drums, rowdy guitars and a monolithic synth hum that swells as “Vendetta” crescendoes, with discordant horns only sending it deeper into its dark downward spiral.
Of the album as a whole, Rønnenfelt had this to say: “When we started, I think we were just lashing out, completely blindfolded with no idea as to why and how we were doing anything. For Seek Shelter, we had a definite vision of how we wanted the album to be carved out, yet still the end result came as a surprise in terms of where we sonically were able to push our boundaries.”
A decade on from New Brigade, an instant punk record made by four Danish teenagers that came out of nowhere and inspired total devotion around the world, Iceage’s fifth album and label debut is a thrilling new chapter for the band. Produced by Sonic Boom (Pete Kember of Spacemen3) and mixed by Shawn Everett (Haim, The War on Drugs), Iceage come with a new emotional palette ripe with psychedelic flourishes, romantic piano balladry, invocations of patron saints and even a gospel choir for a song or two. Seek Shelter is a striking new direction for a band at their most expressive and expansive, recorded in a dilapidated wood-paneled Lisbon radio studio with a steady rain dripping through the ceiling. Equipment was arranged around puddles and slowly-filling buckets, garden lamps lit up the high-ceilings and a special record was made.
Sonic Boom (aka Pete Kember) produced the album. It includes “The Holding Hand,” a new song the band shared at the start of the February. The band’s line up features Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, Jakob Tvilling Pless, Johan Surrballe Wieth, and Dan Kjær Nielsen. An additional guitarist, Casper Morilla Fernandez, also joined them to record Seek Shelter, which was mixed by Shawn Everett.
Of the new single, Rønnenfelt had this to say in a press release: “Crime is the undercurrent that runs through everything. If you don’t see it, you’re not looking. In its invincible politics, it is the glue that binds it all together. ‘Vendetta’ is an impartial dance along the illicit lines of infraction.”
Director Jonas Bang directed the “Vendetta” video, which features actor Zlatko Burić alongside the band. Bang had this to say: “We wanted it to be less 1:1 story and more short format collage-ish like if you flick through a chapter in a book reading a bit here and there.”
The band’s previous album, Beyondless, came out in 2018 on Matador Records.
Iceage – “Vendetta” from the album ‘Seek Shelter’ out May 7th on Mexican Summer Records,their first for the label.
Ten years on from their debut New Brigade, the Copenhagen band is sharing new song “The Holding Hand” today. Lead singer and lyricist Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s voice crawls over slow-marching percussion, and as scorching guitar and Nils Gröndahl’s piercing violin layer in, the song rises to a noisy peak.
Danish punk outfit Iceage have signed to Mexican Summer and shared their first single for the label, “The Holding Hand.” It comes with a Anders Malmberg-directed video, and it follows their 2020 single “Lockdown Blues.” Iceage’s languorous, beatific rock frequently embodies the pain that arises when things are just out of reach, and “The Holding Hand” is filled with a similar anguish. Throughout the song, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt sings in a near-stupor, as if his emotions are overwhelming to the point of incapacitation, about feeling powerless in a harsh scene of mythological proportions. The over-five-minute track is cloaked in a shadowy echo, slightly unsettling wind chimes and, for added drama, slowly pounding guitars and strings that match the gravitas of this tale.
“The song lives in a slurred world, movements are elastically stretched out and strength is found in weakness while you find it hard to tell the difference between fume and matter,” Rønnenfelt says. “Gently the swaying intensifies, feel it escalate. Reach out for the holding hand, it seems almost within scope now.”
Having first made his mark as a songwriter and guitarist for Los Angeles’ Allah-Las, Pedrum Siadatian has etched out a place of his own with his solo work as Paint. What started as modest 4-track experiments quickly took on a life of their own as Pedrum began distilling his musical and lyrical inspirations into something both timeless and new. His miniature menagerie of light-psych and proto-punk gems had outgrown their cassette cage and were now ready to be heard.
Paint’s eponymous debut (Mexican Summer, 2018) appeared out of the ether, fully formed. It was praised for its originality and drew favourable comparisons to the likes of Kevin Ayers, Lou Reed and Julian Cope. The mess was the message and the decidedly mid-fi production found Siadatian both honouring and eschewing tradition. The track – “Ta Fardah (تا فردا)” from the new album ‘Spiritual Vegas’ out July 10th, 2020 on Mexican Summer.
This year sees Paint returning with the release of the ambitious “Spiritual Vegas”. While Ray Davies-smirks and Kevin Ayers-wit abound, Siadatian’s singular touch is unmistakable. Joined once again by producer / engineer Frank Maston at the helm, “Spiritual Vegas” features a rogue’s gallery of players with performances by Jackson Macintosh (TOPS, Sheer Agony) on bass and guitar, Nick Murray (White Fence, Oh Sees) on drums, and brothers-in- Las Spencer Dunham and Matt Correia on bass and percussion respectively.
The production is a clear departure from Paint’s debut- with an increased clarity and tonal variety, drawing inspiration from 80’s/90’s art-rock like The Meat Puppets and The Magnetic Fields.
Azniv Korkejian, the Los Angeles -based artist who records as Bedouine, makes soft, delicate, beautiful folk music. There’s a long, rich tradition of musicians using soft, delicate, beautiful folk-music as a forum for the left-wing rallying cry, and it seems like Korkejian is getting in touch with that tradition right now. Last month, Bedouine released her version of the Vietnam-era protest song “The Hum.” Today, she’s dropped a gorgeous take on the old folk traditional “All My Trials.”
“All My Trials” is an old song of unknown origins. It’s a stark piece of writing about how those without money are destined for harder, shorter lives than those with it: “If living were a thing that money could buy/ The rich would live, and the poor would die.” Over the years, a number of artists (Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez) have recorded their own versions of the song. A Paul McCartney recording of it was a minor UK hit in 1990. Today, we get to hear Bedouine’s.
Azniv Korkejian recorded her take on “All My Trials” at her home. She’s done it as a hushed lullaby, with softly fingerpicked guitars and glowing Fender Rhodes tones. I don’t know who sings harmonies on her version of the song — maybe it’s just Korkejian’s voice multi-tracked — but those harmonies are a killer.
Bedouine – “All My Trials” from Mexican Summer’s Looking Glass series.
Released May 19th, 2020
Written by unknown / traditional
Recorded and produced by Bedouine
Recorded at home April, 2020
The Texas-born, L.A.-based singer and songwriter Jess Williamson makes deeply felt songs that orbit around her powerful voice, a voice that’s strong and vulnerable, big room flawless, quietly ecstatic, and next-to-you intimate. In her most recent work, “Sorceress”, that voice is surrounded by a deep-hued kaleidoscope of dusty ‘70s cinema, ‘90s country music, and breezy West Coast psychedelia.
While attending the University of Texas, Williamson began to find her footing as an artist in the DIY and student-run art and music spaces of Austin. A photojournalism major, she interviewed and photographed bands for the school newspaper and hosted a radio show on KVRX, the student-run radio station. But quietly, she had an insistent pull to pursue music herself. In her last year of school, following an impulse after seeing Austin’s Ralph White play the banjo at a house show in her friends’ basement, Williamson took up banjo lessons at South Austin Music, and soon after was writing songs and making home recordings. After graduating, she moved to NYC to attend an MFA Photography program at Parsons. But after a couple semesters, she realized the call to pursue a career in music was too big to ignore, and she dropped out. She started a band in NYC called Rattlesnake with another friend from Texas: Williamson played banjo, her friend played electric guitar, and they both sang. They played their first show at the now defunct venue, Death by Audio, in March of 2010. A few months later, drawn to her larger hometown community, she moved back to Austin to focus on her solo project.
Her fourth album, “Sorceress”, also with Mexican Summer, arrives 2020. It was written in Los Angeles, recorded at Gary’s Electric in Brooklyn, and finished at Dandy Sounds in Dripping Springs, where she recorded Cosmic Wink. While she’s stayed true to her deep country roots, the music has grown in its ambitions. It’s her biggest, most assured collection to date, and a true document of the hard work paying off. About two-thirds of the way through the title track on her new album, Jess Williamson sings, “Yes, there’s a little magic in my hat / But I’m no sorceress.” Agree to disagree. Williamson is, at the very least, bewitching on Sorceress, her fourth album. It’s a blend of folk and country, with a dash of psychedelic rock, that brings together the strongest elements of her previous work—all the hints and glimpses of something deeper musically, and vocally, that never felt completely explored—into a fully realized collection of 11 songs that are at once polished, precise and visceral.
Jess Williamson – from the album ‘Sorceress’ out May 15th on Mexican Summer.
Ariel Rosenberg—a.k.a. the trailblazing lo-fi pop eccentric, Ariel Pink—has released more albums over the past twenty years than many bands do in their entire careers. Some of his most beloved releases, recorded under his Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti moniker, came from the artist’s days on Animal Collective’s now-defunct Paw Tracks label. However, these versions weren’t mixed properly, resulting in a subpar, mono audio transfer.
Now, Pink and the folks at Mexican Summer are making things right with the Ariel Archive Series, an ambitious project of remasters and reissues of the artist’s vast back catalog. The amount of time covered is staggering—starting from Pink’s scrappy debut, 1999’s Underground tape, all the way to a fresh odds-and-ends collection, Oddities Sodomies Vol. 2, which even has new songs from the Dedicated to Bobby Jameson sessions.
This week, the next wave of remasters is here, with some fan-favorite deep cuts—2000’s The Doldrums, 2002’s House Arrest, and 2003’s Worn Copy. There’s even a new experimental film on the way as a part of the series, entitled Dedicated to Boris Karloff, directed by Argentinian artist Salvador Cresta.
With Pink, hunkered down in his Los Angeles home, He talks about the archive series. He reflected on his legacy, praised his collaborators, and scoffed at the notion of giving his younger self advice.
When I originally recorded these things, I built up several generations’ worth of mistakes. There was so much slippage and waste. Remastering the albums was a matter of finding the original mixes I made on those master cassette tapes and using those to remaster to the proper stereo mix. We managed to find a bunch of them. Some of them were lost, but in the case of House Arrest, The Doldrums, and Loverboy, we managed to salvage true stereo mixes. In certain cases we weren’t able to find the originals. In those instances we had to make a mix that was comparable to the original from just straight off the eight-track.
House Arrest
Our favourite omnivorous media junkie from LA still has a few tricks left up his sleeve like the left-of-center House Arrest. Sure The Doldrums and Worn Copy had some hits and humdingers on them, but House Arrest never lets up.
It’s hit after hit after hit. Sorta like if you listened to your friend’s boom box mix tape from top 40 radio around 1985.
The Doldrums
After years of recording in relative seclusion in the hills of Los Angeles, Ariel Pink (the first non-Animal Collective member on the Paw Tracks roster) made his official Paw Tracks debut with The Doldrums. Originally a handmade CD-R release a couple years back,
The Doldrums by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Grafitti was discovered by the Animal Collective during one of their west coast tours and became an immediate favourite.
Recording at home with only a guitar, keyboard, and 8-track (the drum sounds are all unbelievably created with his vocals), Ariel Pink blends Lite FM and warped lo-fi pop into something beautiful and confusing, yet highly addictive.
Loverboy
More than just fetish material for Pink completists, the reissues are most notable because Pink’s equally demonized, glorified, and debated lo-fidelity has been officially tampered with. The original master tapes were made available to credible engineers with good intentions. Unlike the flawed Paw Tracks reissues, the squashed mono mixes of both Loverboy and Underground have been cracked open into a wide stereo field. While a thin layer of tape hiss still hangs above each record like freeway smog, the depths unlocked by the remaster clear space for us to participate in Pink’s original fantasy more than ever. The tumbling AM-radio confections “My Molly” and “Doggone (Shegone)” can be imagined, faintly at least, as actual AM-radio hits, lost soft-rock artifacts recovered on a Saturday morning drive pouring out from a busted rear speaker.
Loverboy is a futurist pop cycle. From the spectral, pulsing organs on “Ghosts” and “Don’t Talk to Strangers” to the shuffling mouth drums on “She’s My Girl,” Pink’s bedroom feels palatial, some hyper-baroque synth chamber hovering between this dimension and the next. It’s all very “time out of joint” as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described his original concept of “hauntology.”
Loverboy and Underground’s newfound fidelity muddies the bigger picture of Pink’s legacy. Specifically, the idea that his work as Haunted Graffiti was a mere prelude to studio budgets, the dismal sonics of these albums an arbitrary choice, a condition of some broke musician recording in a squat. Instead, the precision remastering bolsters the minority opinion of what Fisher described as “anamorphic sonic objects.” The anamorphic being the idea of sounds working on the periphery of comprehension, combining into something radically different.
Ariel Archives revisits Ariel Pink’s historic run of albums as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti with a series of definitive reissues and new collections. The first installment begins with Underground, the inaugural album in the series, Odditties Sodomies Vol. 2, a long-awaited second volume of outtakes and non-album tracks, and finally Loverboy, an exemplary disc recorded between October 2001 and July 2002, at which time Ariel also recorded House Arrest.
It was fun to do because I had [recording engineer] Paul Millar with me. He’s an amazing, thorough audiophile. He just really knows the technical stuff and fixates on things I didn’t even pay attention to. He’s very, very well-versed in the material. He came with his own notes and questions and curiosities. His energy really kind of carried the process, to tell you the truth. It was a pleasure to have him in my house.
I don’t know if it’s the right time. It’s the easiest time for me because all the rights reverted back to me after the licensing with Paw Tracks. Those were five- seven-year relationships that came and went. Paw Tracks folded, so those records were unavailable for a long time, unless I went on tour and they allowed me the albums for the tour merchandise.
But really, this is almost a perfect twenty-year anniversary. I’m forty-one now and I was twenty years old when I made a lot of these, roughly. It’s half of my life ago. It’s a nice twenty year retrospective. I probably won’t have to do it again for another twenty years, hopefully.
Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or critically acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum as well as 2016’s Crab Day, Cate Le Bon’s solo work – and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2019) – has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster. The multifaceted nature of Le Bon’s art – its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious – is evident right down to the album’s very name, Reward. “Cate Le Bon writes songs in the absurdist tradition, as both as an escape and a mirror to the world. Her music is elliptical and sparse, using familiar sounds—chiming electric guitar, saxophone—to create her own alien landscape. ‘Daylight Matters’, the swooning first single from her new album Reward, isn’t so much a reinvention as it is a grand unveiling.”
The Welsh singer/songwriter/guitarist Cate Le Bon released a new album, Reward, this year via Mexican Summer. It was among our essential new releases . Now that the album is out, one of its best album tracks that wasn’t already released as a pre-release single, album opener “Miami.” Le Bon’s music is hard to define, she’s truly her own artist, and “Miami” is fantastic introduction to Reward.
Previously Le Bon shared Reward’s first single, “Daylight Matters,” as well as a video for “Daylight Matters.” Then she shared another new song from the album, “Home to You,” via a video for the track. Le Bon doesn’t feature in the video directed by Phil Collins (no, not that Phil Collins). It was filmed in Lunik IX neighborhood of Košice (Eastern Slovakia), which houses a Roma community who, as a press release states, “due to successive governmental and municipal policies, often live in slums and on isolated, dilapidated estates. Then she shared another song from the album, “The Light” .
In terms of her solo work, Reward is the follow-up to 2016’s Crab Day, although last year she also released Hippo Lite, her second album with DRINKS, a collaboration with Tim Presley of White Fence.
Le Bon has spent a year living in isolation in the Lake District in the UK, by day making wood furniture and by night playing piano and writing songs. “There’s a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night,” Le Bon said in a previous press release.
Of the album title, Le Bon said: “People hear the word ‘reward’ and they think that it’s a positive word, and to me it’s quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it’s really indicative of the times we’re living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning.”
The album features Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint, H. Hawkline, and Samur Khouja. The latter co-produced Reward with Le Bon.
Los Angeles four-piece Allah Las are releasing a new album, LAHS, on October 11th via Mexican Summer. This week they shared another song from the album, “Prazer Em Te Conhecer,” via a video for the track. Drummer Matt Correia sings the song in Portuguese and the title translates to “Nice to Meet You.” A press release says the song “evokes George Harrison while also sounding like a rare 45 from a Brazilian flea market.” Correia also directed the video, which seems to have been filmed on Super-8 and perhaps shot in various cities on tour.
Previously Allah Las shared the album’s first single, “In the Air,” via a Weekend at Bernie’s-inspired video for the track that featured a cameo from Kirin J Callinan. Then they shared another song from the album, “Polar Onion,” via an animated video for the track.
The band features drummer Matt Correia, bassist Spencer Dunham, and guitarists Miles Michaud and Pedrum Siadatian. They started the album in their own studio in Los Angeles before producer/engineer Jarvis Taveniere (Woods) was “brought in to help polish it off.” The album’s title is “a reference to a common misspelling of the band’s name.” The band’s last album was 2016’s Calico Review.
This release on Mexican Summer finds the band turning in their most cohesive and ambitious work yet – a record inspired less by time, but by place.
The Allah Las seem to be transmitting from a place not found on any map. Those familiar with the band’s work will recognize their skillful melding of melodies and moods, but through that lens we see them venturing into new, exciting territories. Indeed, their growth not just as songwriters, but as performers, arrangers, and producers – is clearly audible. With LAHS we not only discover what souvenirs they’ve brought back for us; they’re inviting us aboard and taking us along for the ride.
Correia had this to say about the album in a previous press release: “We’ve been traveling a lot the past couple years and I think that played a role in influencing the broader variety of songs on this record…. LAHS to me feels like a soundtrack to the past five years or so. A sort of audio postcard to anyone who wants to listen.”
Allah Las – from the new album LAHS, out October 11th on Mexican Summer.
The Fat Angel Sings 