Posts Tagged ‘Paradise of Bachelors’

MEGA BOG – ” Dolphine “

Posted: February 22, 2020 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Mega Bog is the fluid musical moniker of songwriter Erin Elizabeth Birgy, who has spent the last ten years channeling, capturing, and releasing her unique bouquet of fragrant, sci-fi pop experiments with a handful of bicoastal collaborators. She is joined on her fifth and finest album (and first for PoB) by members of Big Thief, Hand Habits, and iji, who help her spin a manic web of emotions into beautiful, abstract future poems and thrilling genre perversions.

With echoes of Laurie Anderson, Slapp Happy, Kevin Ayers, Bridget St John, Beefheart, Bowie, Cate Le Bon, Ursula K. Le Guin Prismatic. It’s avant-pop that balances warbling melodies with unexpected bursts of frenetic energy. ‘Diary of a Rose’ is a lush representation of Birgy’s ability to evoke warmth and nostalgia while keeping her gaze to the future. 

It joins Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising and Big Thief’s UFOF as one of 2019’s left field pop gems, a record created with no detectable consciousness of a wider scene but with a bedroom-wide sense of possibility. Birgy’s songs are tangles, unconcerned with hooks, verses, choruses, while floating melodic ideas are addictive precisely because they don’t repeat but play themselves out then disappear. Part prog, part easy listening, warm and engulfing… a shimmering chiaroscuro [of] fully fledged delicious pop. “Dolphine” pulls off the trick of making the small scale feel all-encompassing. 

Sonic fantasia from a poetic mind… a whimsical and devastating cosmic journey through loss and healing. It’s part folk-rock fantasy, part avant-pop mind trip, and all gorgeous. With lush sonic layers that are alternately raw and delicate, Dolphine translates as a series of dream worlds where the confessional meets the fantastical, and lost ones live forever.

The weirding way got weirder,” Erin Birgy sings, sounding like Nico at her spookiest, a lovely summation of her beguilingly crooked guitar playing. Fans of Cate Le Bon, look sharp. Somewhere between the mystical landscapes of prog rock and the familiar breeze of easy-listening radio… It sounds something like the ‘energize’ effect on Star Trek as transposed for a jazz band … the music is vast and refined, hinting at chaos but never quite losing control. The band is equally adept at sweeping you away and pulling you in. A lounge track for the lobby of a passenger ship floating through space, Mega Bog’s ‘Truth in the Wild’ toys with the earthly and the cosmic.

Frontwoman and multi-instrumentalist Erin Birgy guides listeners on a mystical adventure. It’s Absurdly good.

She blurs the lines between the surreal and the profound in a way that she seems able to do like none other… “Diary of a Rose” is a stunning introduction to the new record, a jazzy/breezy gem with vaguely sinister undertones, teeming with Birgy’s unforgettably peculiar and vivid lyrical phrasing and the kind of deceptively labyrinthine melodies and slithering guitar lines that made the band’s last LP Happy Together such a compelling, unsung masterpiece and one of the best records of the last half-decade.It’s spectral, at times suave and smooth, and baroque. She’s not quite like anybody else.

Mega Bog’s “Dolphine” was released June 28th, 2019 on Paradise of Bachelors.

ITASCA – ” Lily “

Posted: September 19, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Itasca

Los Angeles psych-folk singer Itasaca is releasing her new album “Spring” on November 1st via Paradise of Bachelors, and following lead single “Bess’s Dance,” she has just released second single “Lily” with a video. It’s yet another gorgeous song and you can check it out below.

Itasca, the California folk musician Kayla Cohen, shares “Lily,” the opening track to her forthcoming new album Spring, alongside a music video shot on Super 8.  In an essay for The Talkhouse, Cohen writes about the song’s origins, inspired by the ghostly hallucinations of a water lily she experienced on the long drive from Los Angeles to New Mexico, where she composed the songs on Spring: “There’s a trope that a songwriter loves a long drive… but there was the lily image, as a wish for psychosis or an invitation to it.” The video depicts an impressionistic dance of domesticity between mythological figures Ceres (played by Cohen), Pan, and Bes.

Itasca’s “Spring” is out November 1st, 2019 on Paradise of Bachelors.

NAP EYES – ” I’m Bad Now “

Posted: April 3, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Nap Eyes are a remarkably consistent band. Their 2015 debut, Whine of the Mystic, contains nine tracks of breezy, itinerant indie rock that only occasionally rambles on too long. The follow-up, 2016’s Thought Rock Fish Scale, does more or less the same thing. So the question for these Canadian crypto-jammers is: mix it up on LP3 or nah? I’m Bad Now is another reliable work of songs from Nap Eyes, with stronger melodies and more consistency across the board.

Nap Eyes are a remarkably consistent band. Their 2015 debut, Whine of the Mystic, contains nine tracks of breezy, itinerant indie rock that only occasionally rambles on too long. The follow-up, 2016’s Thought Rock Fish Scale, does more or less the same thing. So the question for these Canadian crypto-jammers is: mix it up on LP3 or nah? I’m Bad Now is another reliable slab from Nap Eyes, with stronger melodies and more consistency across the board.

Band Members
Nigel Chapman, Seamus Dalton, Josh Salter, Brad “Bronson” Loughead,

Nap Eyes – ‘I’m Bad Now’, out March 9th, 2018 on Paradise of Bachelors / You’ve Changed / Jagjaguwar’

The WEATHER STATION – ” Kept It All to Myself “

Posted: October 6, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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On her fourth (and tellingly self-titled) album as The Weather Station, Tamara Lindeman reinvents, and more deeply roots, her extraordinary, acclaimed songcraft, framing her precisely detailed, exquisitely wrought prose-poem narratives in bolder and more cinematic musical settings. The result is her most sonically direct and emotionally candid statement to date, a work of profound urgency and artistic generosity. “Timeless… Measured, perceptive storytelling. A singer with an unmistakable & communicative voice, able to convey hope & hurt with equal clarity.” – Pitchfork

“She writes literate songs with unusual precision & sings them in an understated, open-hearted way that lends good poetry the directness of conversation.” – Uncut

“Bob Dylan aside, the singer-songwriter I’ve listened to most over the past year, & to whom I expect to be paying attention for many more to come, is Tamara Lindeman, who, under the name the Weather Station, performs songs notable for a conversational fluency, a diarist’s powers of observation, & a quiet refusal of emotional simplicities.” – Richard Williams, The Guardian

The Weather Station’s S/T album is out October 6th, 2017 on Paradise of Bachelors (worldwide), Outside Music (Canada), & Spunk Records (AU/NZ).

GUN OUTFIT – ” Gotta Wanna/Legends Of My Own “

Posted: November 24, 2015 in MUSIC
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The Olympia punks in Gun Outfit have stretched out and let their hair down, the band’s vibe has followed suit, getting looser with each record. Recorded just before the duo’s move to L.A.,Dream All Over is a dusty piece of good-time rock ‘n’ roll that just wants to hit the open road. That’s what appears to be the abstract narrative behind the video for “Legends Of My Own.”

While Dylan Sharp normally shares vocal and guitar duties with Carrie Keith, Keith takes the vocal lead here on a melody that recalls Kim Wilde’s “Kids In America.” As a figure in a black hat gets busted on a deal, she sings, “I looked familiar in a foreign land / I couldn’t speak, but I could understand / From another life I rode / Into a desert of my own,” like a drifter out to make the best of a bad situation.

Carrie Keith shot the L.A. scene on a “Super 8 under the influence of the black sun,” but from there, the story gets a little muddy:

Dececco came down with some silent concepts, and I had managed to acquire expired 16, so we shot with Mike Stoltz, and Nastassia plays the French shadow. I know Agnes Varda had been around, and she’s often on my mind anyway. Late fall I was in Washington and went for a ride out to the coast with David Harris and Alex in her Cadillac, where we shot the color Super 8; some details I took from Melville, like the hat and overcoat against a cold background. The Camaro came back from Wyoming — my brother had souped it up — and my dad was running it around town, so we shot the two cars on a bridge over where the deal goes down.

Dream All Over comes out October. 16th on Paradise Of Bachelors.

The WEATHER STATION – ” Shy Women “

Posted: April 8, 2015 in MUSIC
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Paradise of Bachelors is a Record Label, Plus Archive located in the North Carolina Piedmont and in the subluminal aether of Chapel Hill, they has spent the past few years building its reputation as one of the finest labels around for traditionally minded North American music. If they’re putting it out, its worth listening. On May 12th, They will release The Weather Station new Album “Loyalty“,  The Weather Station is Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman  This her third album titled “Loyalty”  recorded in a 19th century mansion outside Paris. Like that studio, or memorable art, the record seems to exist outside time. “I saw recently the works of Mary Pratt, a Newfoundland artist who spent most of her life as a housewife—her husband was a successful painter,” Lindeman said “Her paintings depict domestic scenes—jelly in jars, cod fillets in aluminum foils, a salmon head in a sink, but in such rich, elaborate detail, it’s painful somehow. I guess when I see her paintings, I realize that I’m trying to do the same thing, with my music.

“Shy Women,” a perfect example of her attentiveness to minute, universalizing details. “It started the same as most my songs do—a small, commonplace moment that I couldn’t get out of my head,” There was something about it, so ordinary that it begged to be described, and describing it felt powerful somehow—simply to say that it was important, this common place thing—worth singing about. And as I did, the moment revealed itself as a kind of elevator shaft, going pretty much straight down, through all the ‘shyness’ of myself and many of the women I grew up with, and all the moments when we had kept silence, and how that silence has underpinned so much that is deeply wrong.”

One of the great lines in “Shy Women” is: You were staring out, your eyes real straight, like nothing touches you these days/ It seemed to me that luxury would be to be not so ashamed. She explained a bit: “When I say it would be a ‘luxury to be not so ashamed,’ I mean that completely. Shame is, for most women, a constant companion, and is I think the last greatest gender divide, that will be with us for as long as women feel their experience is not worth speaking of, and blame themselves for the actions and feelings of others.” Below, it adds up to a remarkable song.

The WEATHER STATION – ” Way It Is, Way It Could Be “

Posted: February 19, 2015 in MUSIC
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weather station

The Weather Station is the project of Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman, a musician I was first heard of when she collaborated with Will Stratton. She compelled me immediately. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way considering Lindeman just signed with label Paradise Of Bachelors, the storied,this singer songwriter and folklore-focused and a label that plucked artists like Hiss Golden Messenger, Steve Gunn, from relative obscurity and gave them a national stage.

Now, they’ve invested in the Weather Station, and a few listens of her third full-length record “Loyalty” indicate that their impeccable taste is intact. Recorded just outside Paris at La Frette Studios last winter, Loyalty is imbued with the crisp intimacy of the coldest season, the allure of the city of lights. Tamara Lindeman’s voice floats by in the highest of registers of her voice, never breathy but, instead, misty and amorphous.
On the record she plays guitar, banjo, keys, and vibraphone, but like most artists who take the folk music tack with any success, it’s Lindeman’s songwriting that catches your attention and holds it. She’s clever without any smugness, rendering every day events into existential pictures of uncertainty, poking and prodding at subconscious desires without ever fully exposing them.

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Take album opener “Way It Is, Way It Could Be,” for example. Lilting along the twin lines of quickly picked acoustic guitar and a linear, electric guitar backbone, it’s one of the more upbeat tracks on the record. Ostensibly a journey through winter, the song investigates the ambiguity that lives with us as long as we’re here on earth: “The way it is and the way it could be both are.” In Lindeman’s capable hands, this is neither a blessing or a curse. It’s the mark of a good songwriter to force us to keep two futures in mind at once, never letting on if either of them exist at all.