Their album is going to be called “Phantasmagorical Jam” – ooh what a tease
if you took one band you really love, one band you’ve never heard of from the 90’s, and one kind of crappy band that you see all the time that could be better if they got their shit together, and you put all of those bands together, and you shook the sum total of all the members of all of those bands until they became an evenly-dispersed array of musical atoms, and then entangled those atoms betwixt each other and comprised food stuffs from those same atoms and served them at fast food chains across the eastern seaboard – You would have the COLORINES
the second track is “Follow Everyone” – rife with multiple meanings and sclerosis. it is a rare cut brimming with metallic newness and surging with hope and dope.
Florist – Emily Sprague’s appropriately-bucolic quartet florist popped up on our radar earlier this fall with “Holdly”, a compact ep crammed with sharp songwriting and memorable melodies that thankfully serves as a placeholder for the birds outside sang, a full-length coming January 29th via double double whammy.
“The Birds Outside Sang” is an album about the speed at which rain falls, life goes on, and people grow. It’s one part a personal, autobiographical, and almost completely chronological telling of a time in my life full of confusion, physical + emotional pain, loneliness, and hope. It is another part a rebirth of a musical friendship between my best friends in the whole world, and an attempt to highlight the importance of love and the things in life that give you something special to hold on to, to find a calm that can carry you through being alive and being scared.
Thank you for listening. My one and only goal is that someone can listen to this album and feel/see something, and take it with them as a thought. Emily of Florist
released January 29, 2016 Florist is Emily Sprague, Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker, and Felix Walworth
Florist is a friendship project that was born in the Catskill Mountains. Recorded by Florist at 603 Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, NY.
When Emily Sprague moved to Brooklyn from Albany late in 2013, she was already honing her songwriting style: aching, blunt, quiet, but not sheepish. Then, in February 2014, she was in a severe bicycle accident and broke her neck and one of her arms. As she recovered, she began writing new songs, even more spare thanks both to her economical lyrical aesthetic and how circumstance had limited what her body could do.
Some of that music has made it to “The Birds Outside Sang,” the first full-length from the band Florist, an album that bubbles with Ms. Sprague’s anxiety about mortality. Often she finds herself at war with her body, like on “Rings Grow”: “I used to think I was leaves but I’m bark/and I’m peeling away/and my bones are the branches that regrow in the springtime.”
Her singing is frail but determined on this album, which hits like an intense whisper. She finds strength in her weaknesses and ruminates about a personal identity that’s ever changing: “I was born a boy with many opinions/and now I’m a girl who doesn’t really care about anything.”
Skeletal arrangements suit Ms. Sprague best, both because of how she’s singing and what she’s singing about. So the band, which also includes Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker and Felix Walworth, generally gives her room to breathe.
But one of the most striking moments comes on the beginning of “1914,” when she sings, “Grab me by my shoulder blades and hang me out to dry/I’m a mess and I need someone/to help me out with that.” All of her bandmates are singing, too, in a sort of shambolic chorus. The mood is lonely but soothing — an acceptance that even though no one knows where we’re going, at least we’re not alone.
Of all the awesome DIY bands to emerge from that fertile sonic space between pop-punk and indie-rock in recent years, Chumped have been amongst the best. Teenage Retirement’s flurry of power chords and melodic insight portended a long, storied career for the band. Then they broke up, which for Chumped fans was the kind of miniature private trauma that Anika Pyle could write a fantastic Chumped song about. In a sense, she already had: The tremendous Teenage Retirement leftover “Not The One” takes on deeper resonance now that we know the band is over. “I’m not the one,” Pyle emotes. “I can’t give you what you want.” Technically that’s true — what Chumped Nation really wants is for the band to continue indefinitely — but as parting gifts go, they could not have done much better.
Another New York act that I just adore, this lot stepped up their game recently with a brilliant single on TerribleRecords called ‘In Love And Alone’ – culled from their debut album, it was one of the strongest guitar tracks of the past 12 months.
This track ‘On Location’ has an ecstatic, driving melody that pushes and pulls in all the right directions. Like all great garage anthems, from The Troggs to The Buzzcocks to The White Stripes, it serves to annihilate, and is a full-bodied gasp of trailblazing, chugging and relentless guitars.
“I remember writing it in a hotel room in Glasgow in late 2014,” says singer John Eatherly of the track. “I was very frustrated, feeling like different people wanted different things from me. The song is centred on a fictional character, but it’s also a reminder to myself to not give a fuck what others think when I know I’ve got something.”
The best moments come in the three choruses, when the normally placid frontman almost completely loses it. Sounding more seething and exasperated each time, it serves as a lesson in the kind of stuffy punk frustration that made Elvis Costello so compelling back in the day, and not least because the rest of the band behind Eatherly manage to top even his burgeoning, yelping nihilism in the thrilling breakdown and subsequent ‘A Day In The Life’-style build two-thirds of the way through the track.
Strangely, considering everything else that’s going on in it, what ‘On Location’ sounds like is the perfect album opener. But then again, so did Public Access’ TV’s previous track. And perhaps the one before. Maybe they’re on to something? Public Access TV are one of a number of bands including Crystal Castles, Spring King, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Suede, Mystery Jets and Blossoms confirmed to play the NME Awards Shows 2016 with Austin, Texas next month.
They play London’s Birthdays on February 25th, supported by fellow up’n’comers Misty Miller and Strange Bones
The twangy jangle-pop of Blue Plutos was always very enjoyable to me — particularly the track “Shadow Chateau”. With a sound reminiscent of Felt, The Go-Betweens, The Church and other ’80s jangle-pop greats, they really struck a sweet spot. So I was delighted to find out that one of Blue Plutos’ members, Tyler Agnew, started another project in 2015 called Everyday Life alongside lifelong friend Tana Sirois, who provides delicate vocals throughout their album Cycles. While not as jangly or poppy as Blue Plutos, the project shows Agnew’s songwriting with the most affecting emotional resonance and atmospheric power to date. The release centers around the theme of growing older, but not as gracefully as hoped. Recorded in early 2015 in Agnew’s Brooklyn apartment, the release’s sound merges several of Agnew’s inspirations, particularly that of ambient music and samplers, who mesh with his admiration for singer-songwriters in the vein of Elliott Smith and Dan Fogelberg. The result is is a memorable one, with hypnotic vocals, fluttering acoustics, and spacey synths resulting in an atmospheric and convincing sound.
Columbia Records is proud to announceDon’t You, the long-anticipated album from the trio of friends known as Wet. An astonishingly lucid and heart-wrenching collection of 11 tracks, the album is slated for a Fall release. The lead single, “Deadwater,” debuted on Annie Mac’s influential BBC Radio 1 show
“Deadwater” is the first musical offering from the forthcoming project and the follow up to their auspicious debut, the Wet EP. Wet, comprised of singer-songwriter Kelly Zutrau, and multi-instrumentalists Joe Valle and Marty Sulkow, make songs that resist easy categorization and invite every listener to bask in its intimate glow.
But despite their wide-ranging sensibilities, Wet never compromises its core: sturdy pop songwriting and piercing lyrics.
The album, almost entirely self-produced, was written during a period of solitude in a rented house in Western Massachusetts last year. Wet works together as a trio on every aspect of the album; Joe and Marty work on all aspects of the album’s instrumentation; they take Kelly’s demos and arrange them to perfection.
The trio met through mutual friends as college students in New York City in 2007. After a few years of informal dabbling, they began officially making music as Wet during the summer of 2012, an especially aimless and emotionally turbulent period.. After releasing a few songs on SoundCloud — like “Don’t Wanna Be Your Girl,” a weak-kneed but strong-headed breakup ballad — they quickly began attracting attention, sometimes from unexpected places before releasing their critically acclaimed debut EP Wet in May 2014.
New York trio New Myths just released their debut album “Give Me Noise” a collection of dark rock and synth pop with huge sounding guitars the vocals weave their way into with gorgeous harmonies, New Myths creates a sound that catches you and keeps you A NYC-based band that blends electronic elements with a new wave/rock sensibility, this all-female trio is comprised of Rosie Slater (drums and vocals), Marina Ross (bass and vocals) and Brit Boras (guitar and lead vocals). The three ladies knew each other individually but not all together until forming the band in 2012. Marina and Rosie played together in another band throughout high school, Rosie and Brit went to the same jazz conservatory for college, and coincidentally, Brit and Marina were neighbors growing up.
They set out to write music that they loved, and started by combining elements of bands that influenced them such as Blondie, The Cure, Heart, Nirvana, Kate Bush and Joy Division. Since releasing their debut self-titled EP in March 2012, their song “False Gold” was featured in the girls Spring 2013 digital ad campaign for California surf company REEF and was also picked by Lou Reed to be featured on his Sirius XM radio station. Building a following with a powerful live show and a uniquely eerie and danceable sound, NEW MYTHS are set to release their debut full-length album titled “Give Me Noise” via Taming Ghosts .
newmyths.bandcamp.com
The Colorines are a band from New York with music that sounds like a psychedelic pop dream, and the singer has a really pretty voice with a very similar sound to Paul McCartney. This one is “But I’m Too Sad” (or if you’re in the group you just write Im too Sad but that’s not what my cover says does it Robb) and you’ll probably recognize it if you’ve seen us in concert almost ever. it’s the one where we keep repeating “i’m too sad” over and over at the end. you love it. I listen to them when I’m depressed and need to be put in a good mood. You should listen to their track “Weirdo” on the Fossill Fumes EP, a rag-tag team of four small town boys with psychic powers, and a piano made of frozen windex, and a socioeconomic modsynth dream.
new single from upcoming full-length album “Phantasmagorical Jam”
written, recorded, and produced by the Colorines
Lou Reed’s controversial concept album Berlin – his third solo outing after the break up of The VelvetUnderground – first saw the light of day in 1973 and was almost universally denounced. Rock bible Rolling Stone declared it a career-finishing ”disaster” that was so bad it merited perpetrating ”physical vengeance” on its creator before signing off with ”Goodbye, Lou”. Hardly surprising, then, that Lou Reed should have stepped away from the work and ignored for so long, only returning to it in 2006 to resurrect it in a 30-date tour that has already spawned a DVD (directed by Julian Schnabel) and now this live recording, taken from two nights in mid-December that year at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York.
Critical appreciation of Berlin has been building since its damned and doomed debut, and in this super-charged performance, complete with 30-piece band and 12-strong choir, it’s easy to hear and appreciate why. As a concept, the piece still suffers from its own flawed ambition. Whatever else it is, Berlin is not a rock opera, or any sort of opera, for that matter. Yes, there’s a narrative – two drug-addled lovers take a lethal walk on the German capital’s wild side – but the structure supporting it is so loose and the songs so arbitrarily connected that calling it an opera is nothing more than a fanciful affectation.
But there are magnificent moments contained within that bare comparison with the best of Reed’s solo work. Equally, there are some excruciating moments, too, not least an horrendously awful take on The Bed.
While it lacks the clinical studio intensity of the original, this live performance carves its own muscular drama and dark poetry out of Reed’s dystopian lyrics and coruscating music, the latter helped by the return of original collaborator Steve Hunter on electric guitar. Reed himself remains his timeless self: dour, po-faced, emotionally underplayed and vocally colourless but acutely acerbic and astringent.
Three other songs – Candy Says, in a duet with Antony ‘And The Johnsons’ Hegarty; Rock Minuet from Reed’s 2000 long-player Ecstasy; and Sweet Jane from the Velvet’s fourth album, Loaded – are offered as encores, cleverly if a little too subtly attempting to re-thread Berlin back into a wider context.
The Fat Angel Sings 