Saturday, April 22nd marks the tenth annual Record Store Day 2017. If you’ll be getting up early and hitting up your local record shop, keep your eyes peeled for Suuns‘ Hold/Still Remixes. Almost a year to the day from the release of the Montreal band’s third album, Hold/Still, the LPs of remixes twist and turn the original tracks into something else entirely. The source material lends itself perfectly to a remix project given its layers of experimental complexity, and the remixes on the forthcoming LP vary from dance floor fillers to ambient.
Suuns’s deliver an Record Store Day 2017 exclusive album of remixes of thier most-far reaching and creative record to date, features 9 tracks across 2LP’s and comes with an MP3 download card.
Hold/Still Remixes is a limited-edition pressing exclusively for Record Store Day 2017 and pressed on red vinyl.
Several months into 2017 and the Whitney train is still chuggin’ along. In addition to touring virtually non-stop for all of 2016, the Chicago-based band has a slew of dates ahead for this year, and just released a new 12″.
Recorded in the fleeting calm between all of that touring, the record is available now digitally and physically on June 2nd. The 12″ includes two covers – Dutch duo Lion‘s 1975 psych-pop “You’ve Got a Woman” and Dolly Parton‘s “Gonna Hurry (As Slow As I Can).” Drummer Julien Ehrlich notes “You’ve Got a Woman” is an evil-sounding cut for Whitney, a band who established a sonic aesthetic of sweet, sun-dappled longing and nostalgia on last year’s “Light Upon the Lake”, instead playing around with the darker elements and strings on Lion’s track. On the other hand, “Gonna Hurry (As Slow As I Can)” will be familiar to those who’ve caught one of Whitney’s shows – they’ve been working it into their live sets, Ehrlich crooning the song, accompanied by guitarist Max Kakacek.
And yes, for the record, Ehrlich wants to assure everyone that they’re eager to jump into a second album – “We’re about three songs in, we’re too emotionally unstable to write on the road – songs pop out if we have chill time to process what we’ve been putting ourselves through.”
“Gonna Hurry (As Slow As I Can) (Dolly Parton Cover)” from the upcoming 12” out June 2nd, 2017 on Secretly Canadian Records
Roxanne Benjamin has been busy in the horror world of late, having made her directorial debut with a segment of this year’s anthology film “Southbound” after serving as a producer on all three “V/H/S” movies. Now she’s back with a throwback music video for Cherry Glazerr “Nurse Ratched,” The title of the song is, of course, a reference to the domineering nurse from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,”
In it, a girl wearing a red hoodie hitchhikes her way into a ride and goes on to confirm all your worst fears about people on the side of the road with their thumbs up; this leads to one of the bloodiest sequences you’re ever likely to see in a music video, especially for such a low-key song. From there, she takes the car for herself — and picks up an unsuspecting hitchhiker of her own.
Last month, LA rock group Cherry Glazerr announced that they were signing to Secretly Canadian to release their new full-length, Apocalipstick, early next year, The song originally appeared as the B-side to their 2014 single “Had Ten Dollaz,” but it’s been re-recorded for the new album. Cherry Glazerr announces their new album Apocalipstick. The band’s first album was recorded at Hollywood’s iconic Sunset Sound studio with acclaimed producers Joe Chicarrelli (The Strokes, My Morning Jacket, The White Stripes) and Carlos De La Garza (Bleached, M83, Paramore).
Cherry Glazerr – “Nurse Ratched” from ‘Apocalipstick’ out on January 20, 2017 on Secretly Canadian
Light Upon The Lake has slowly become one of my favorites in 2016.
The falsetto that Julian Ehrlich sings in. Normally, that’s a deal breaker for me as well but after a few listens of No Woman, I started to feel the interesting beauty that came with Erlich’s falsetto and the wonderful guitar playing of Max Kakacek (he of Smith Westerns fame). Then they released Golden Days when announcing the album and I was hooked. A few weeks later I received the full album and I haven’t been able to stop praising it since.
Ehrlich and Kakacek wrote this album after they each went though breakups. But labeling this as a breakup album would be wrong in my opinion. To me, it is more about two buddies helping each other during a tough time. They holed up in a Chicago apartment, writing the songs together; Whitney becoming their shared identity. Says Kakacek, “We were both writing as this one character, and whenever we were stuck, we’d ask, ‘What would Whitney do in this situation?’”
The next step up in their evolution was making the trek out to record with Jonathan Rado, sleeping in him backyard for weeks. Together with the help of some other talented musicians, they crafted a wonderful album of lo-fi country soul. It captures a period in their life in a way that combines the wistfulness of youth with the burdens of becoming an adult.
Formed out of the dissolution of personal and professional bonds, Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich’s new project is a transmission of inner rapids—and their first full-length, Light Upon the Lake, is a postcard from the calm on the other side.
The primary contradiction of Light Upon the Lake, the debut LP from Whitney, is this: how can music so strongly rooted in melancholy make you feel so glad to be alive? It’s a strange platter—and to be sure, Whitney’s kind of a strange band (just take a look at their introductory portraits on Instagram if you really want to, uh, get to know them). But in talking to Max Kakacek and Julien Ehrlich, the songwriting duo at the forefront of the group, it becomes clear that there’s an explanation for every contradiction—a key to every song.
The Fat Angel Sings 