Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are back with another preview of their upcoming album “Sideways To New Italy”, in the form of new track “Falling Thunder”.
Speaking about the new track, the band writes, “This song is about pushing on through the relentless march of time, against the constant cycle of seasons, and the way people change and relationships change. It’s set in that time when autumn is turning into winter and the trees are getting bare.” “Falling Thunder” is a third taster of the group’s forthcoming second album, arriving after previous singles “She’s There” and “Cars In Space”.
Sideways To New Italy will follow on from their 2018 debut Hope Downs, and is named after a village near New South Wales’ Northern Rivers – the area drummer Marcel Tussie is from.
Vocalist and guitarist Fran Keaney says of their forthcoming record, “I wanted to write songs that I could use as some sort of bedrock of hopefulness to stand on, something to be proud of. A lot of the songs on the new record are reaching forward and trying to imagine an idyll of home and love.”
“Falling Thunder” is out now. Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s Sideways To New Italy album is due to arrive via Sub Pop Records on 5th June
Wolf Parade’s ‘Under Glass” is a standout track from “Thin Mind”, their acclaimed album of 2020.
It’s now the subject of a gory yet humorous, Cronenberg-esque official video, and will see its premiere tonight, Saturday, April 18th via the Episode One Podcast charity stream with ChapoFYM on Twitch. The charity stream event will raise funds for the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation!
The “Under Glass” video is directed by Caleb Bardgett and Johnny Dunn, stars Keegan Kruse, with special effects makeup from Cig Neutron (Face-Off All-Stars winner), filmed by Thaddeus Bridwell, and video effects by Bardgett.
Dan Boecker says of the video, “‘Under Glass’ is inspired by Canada’s greatest cultural export: David Cronenberg. The protagonist sits in isolation, their only joy in life is plugging in a bioport and interfacing with a psychedelic PS1 hellscape where they are loved and adored. Their body decays. They’re smiling.” And co-directors Jonny Dunn and Caleb Bardgett offered this, “We worked with Dan last year on some really cool videos for one of his other projects, and so naturally we jumped at the chance to jam with the Wolf Parade boys on this video for ‘Under Glass.’
“We looked at Brian Yuzna’s SOCIETY and Cronenberg as spiritual references for the visuals, and theme-wise, the band wanted to tap into some end-of-times / isolation / addicted-to-screens stuff… This was mid-2019, preceding our eventual quarantine so it’s all more eerily-relevant now, seeing as how we’re all pretty alone and isolated, becoming very pale and more jacked-in.
“We really wanted to nail the body horror, which meant we needed a practical special FX master…but didn’t know anyone ourselves. We hit up a buddy of ours, Eric Skodis, who knows all about that world, and he referred us to a genius named Cig Neutron, who turned out to be the absolute perfect brain for making the best and grossest oozy stuff we could imagine. We shot the video all in one day at Cig’s studio, with Thaddeus Bridwell as DP.
“Keegan Kruse starred as our logged-on lonely video freak and was such a sport. He had to wear the make up all day, and it took him another half day just to peel all of the latex and make-up off of his face.
“We couldn’t be happier to see the video finally come out in a world where all of us are now trapped inside, living ‘Under Glass.’“ Thin Mind is available worldwide through Sub Pop,“Under Glass” from the Wolf Parade album Thin Mind (Release Date: January 24th, 2020)
“On the Mend” is a new highlight from Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between – A heartbreak-post-breakup pop song with Swordfishtrombones-vibes, that includes backing vocals from Steady Holiday’s Dre Babinski and Rebecca Black.
Honus Honus says of the track, “I wrote this a year or so after a painful break-up and although I was in a better place at the time, I wanted to touch on all of those raw emotions someone has to work through in order to get healthy and able to love themselves again. Musically, the tempo, the push, and pull of the band, the openness of it all just drives this home. So, yes, it’s a bit of a heavy song but I think it’s also one about hope, healing, letting go and moving on. The heart can be cruel but you can’t let it consume you.”
Honus Honus (aka Ryan Kattner) has devoted his career to exploring the uncertainty between life’s extremes: beauty and ugliness, order and chaos. The songs on “Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between”, Man Man’s first album in over six years and his Sub Pop Records debut, are as intimate, soulful, and timeless as they are audaciously inventive and daring.
The 17-track effort, featuring “Cloud Nein,” “Future Peg,” “On the Mend” “Sheela,” and “Animal Attraction,” was produced by Cyrus Ghahremani, it also includes guest vocals from Steady Holiday’s Dre Babinski on “Future Peg” and “If Only,” and Rebecca Black (singer of the viral pop hit, “Friday”) on “On The Mend” and “Lonely Beuys.” The album follows the release of “Beached” and “Witch”, Man Man’s contributions to Vol. 4 of the Sub Pop Singles Club in 2019.
At the end of 2015, Man Man went on an unexpected and unforeseen hiatus, and thus began a period of creative reinvention for Honus. He worked in music supervision and on scores (The Exorcist, Superdeluxe, Do You Want to See a Dead Body?). He acted in the indie film Woe (“I played a park ranger, a nice guy in a sad movie.”), So It Goes, a short musical film with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and starred in the award-winning tour documentary Use Your Delusion. He also developed an animated series, wrote film scripts, a graphic novel, a neo-noir TV pilot, and briefly penned a music column for The Talkhouse all while continuing to work on new music, such as an unreleased kids’ record, another Mister Heavenly album, a self-released Honus Honus record, and a conceptual art/noise project Mega Naturals. He was sleeping just 2.5 hours per day.
In the midst of this Man Man sabbatical, Honus began piecing together what would become Dream Hunting in the Valley of the In-Between. He recruited longtime-creative collaborator Ghahremani to help him produce. Written in a friend’s LA “guesthouse” (more shack than chic) that had “an old upright piano, a thrift store lamp, and nothing else,” it was an arduous, three-and-a-half-year process, “I had chord progression notes that looked like chicken scratch and lyrics on pieces of paper stuck all over the walls. It looked like I was about to break the big case, catch the killer,” he says, laughing. “One of the best things about this time, in these ‘lost in the wilderness/surreal exile from my own band’ years, was that I finally found players who believed in me, trusted my vision, respected my songwriting. It was rejuvenating.”
After enough time away from home, even the familiar starts to feel foreign. For guitar-pop five-piece Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, returning to Melbourne after long stretches looking out at the world through the windows of airplanes and tour vans lead to dislocation, like being the knot in the middle of a game of tug-o-war. Their second record, Sideways to New Italy (Sub Pop Records), sees the band interrogate their individual pasts and the places that inform them. In clicking the scattered pieces back into place, they have crafted for themselves a new totem of home to carry with them no matter where they end up.
Lead by singer-songwriter-guitarists Tom Russo, Joe White and Fran Keaney (and rounded out by bassist Joe Russo and drummer Marcel Tussie), the band began grasping for something reliable after emerging from relentlessly touring their critically regarded debut Hope Downs. “Sideways to New Italy” on June 5th via the fine folks at Sub Pop. Everything they have released has been awesome.
Home, for Russo, manifests in different ways: there’s Melbourne, where he and brother Joe grew up, but also Southern Italy where the forebears of their family originated. The album is inspired by New Italy – a village near New South Wales’s Northern Rivers – the area Tussie is from. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pit-stop of a place with fewer than 200 residents, it was founded by Venetian immigrants in the late-1800s and now serves as something of a living monument to Italians’ contribution to Australia, with replica Roman statues dotted like souvenirs on the otherwise rural landscape. As members of the band individually visited the Mediterranean and returned home to Melbourne’s inner-north, where waves of European migrants forged a sense of home since the 1950s, they realized the emotional distance between the two was minuscule. The prominent and romantic Greco-Roman statues that sit outside tidy brick homes in Brunswick represent, for Russo, an attempt to “build a utopia of where your heart’s from.”
“I wanted to write songs that I could use as some sort of bedrock of hopefulness to stand on, something to be proud of,” says Keaney. “A lot of the songs on the new record are reaching forward and trying to imagine an idyll of home and love.” This is the bulk of Sideways to New Italy, which boasts love songs, and familiar voices and characters, grounding the band’s stories in their personal histories.
The same can be said of this record, where White’s early attempts at writing big, high-concept songs were abandoned in favor of love songs (“She’s There,” “The Only One”), and familiar voices and characters filter in and out, grounding the band’s stories in their personal histories. On “Second of the First” the voice of a close friend joins White’s partner in delivering a spoken word passage; the chorus from “Cool Change” began its life in a song the trio played in an early band, over a decade ago; the chords from “Cameo” were once in an eventually abandoned song called “Hope Downs”; an early version of “Falling Thunder” featured a reference that only their friends would recognize.
“Sideways to New Italy” on June 5th via the fine folks at Sub Pop Records. Everything they have released has been awesome to date.
What happens when an abrasive rock trio trades guitars for synths, cranks up the beats and leans into the everyday anxieties of simply being a functioning human in the 21st century? The answer is Uneasy Laughter, the sensational second Sub Pop Records release from Los Angeles-based Moaning.
Vocalist/guitarist Sean Solomon, bassist/keyboardist Pascal Stevenson and drummer Andrew MacKelvie have been friends and co-conspirators amid the fertile L.A. DIY scene for more than a decade. They are also immersed in other creative pursuits — Solomon is a noted illustrator, art director and animator, while Stevenson and MacKelvie have played or worked behind the boards with acts such as Cherry Glazerr, Sasami and Surf Curse. On Uneasy Laughter, they’ve tackled challenges both personal and universal the only way they know how: by talking about how they’re feeling and channeling those emotions directly into their music.
Kikagaku Moyo started in the summer of 2012 busking on the streets of Tokyo. Though the band started as a free music collective, it quickly evolved into a tight group of multi-instrumentalists. Kikagaku Moyo call their sound psychedelic because it encompasses a broad spectrum of influence. Their music incorporates elements of classical Indian music, Krautrock, Traditional Folk, and 70s Rock. Most importantly their music is about freedom of the mind and body and building a bridge between the supernatural and the present. Improvisation is a key element to their sound.
Go & Tomo run their own record label Guruguru Brain currently based in Amsterdam. Guruguru Brain has released about 10 artists from Asia including Kikagaku Moyo since 2014.
Kikagaku Moyo’s new single “Gypsy Davey” b/w “Mushi Nu Uta” is available now on all streaming services and is a part of the latest edition of the iconic Sub PopSingles Club series.
Here we have a brand new track from the one and only King Tuff! He also has a little something to say about it:
“I’m Free” is a song I wrote a few years back which first appeared on Ty Segall’s album Freedom’s Goblin. Ty had asked me to write a song for him to record and I had this little demo laying around which I gave to him. I never really thought about it much after that but recently I was asked if I would ever release my own version of the song… so here it is! My favorite time to write songs has always been in the middle of the night. The world slows down and the little nocturnal critters start hooting, howling, buzzing, bubbling… there’s just different ideas that float around that you can’t catch during the day. This is a small song about that. The crickets and raindrops you hear towards the end of the song were recorded one night in June in Vermont outside of a witches hut.”
“I Shall Be Free” is the second single in the series of four 7”vinyls leading up to their next full-length LP. Each single being a seasonal release. “I Shall Be Free” is the Spring installment. The song is defiant anti-work protest punk. The slash your face chords and bass less undertow channels an AC/DC-Cramps hybrid that completely misses the mark. Primo Hot Snakes for sure.
Wolf Parade the Montreal band’s 2005 debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, became a ubiquitous indie radio staple. The band Wolf Parade – Dan Boeckner, Spencer Krug and Arlen Thompson – release ‘Thin Mind’, the group’s fifth album for Sub Pop. their heart, panache, and synthesizers on display through their next few albums, 2008’s excellent At Mount Zoomer and 2010’s Expo 86, and after a lengthy hiatus, they showed more growth on 2017′s Cry Cry Cry.
Their new album “Thin Mind” still comes as an unexpected new peak for the band this album scratches a very specific and satisfying itch for indie guitar music in 2020. Now a trio, the group has only deepened its talents and personal musical aesthetic, while their lyrical themes have taken on both a newfound maturity and optimism.
Wolf Parade seem more comfortable commenting on the world around them on Thin Mind, but they sound just as interested in having a good time making music. The songs bounce and zip with the sort of kinetic energy that’s hard to find in blogosphere success stories still making music in 2020. As can be heard on standout tracks such as “Julia Take Your Man Home” and “Forest Green,” everything sounds sharper and more direct, without being aggressive or in-your-face, as any art-pop sprawl has been replaced with glammy arena rock tendencies. The panoply of synthesizers on display across the entire project, especially on “Wandering Son” and “Against the Day,” are also a fine addition. This full turn away from being Wire disciples to New Order and Duran Duran acolytes provides a resplendent edge. for Wolf Parade to kick off 2020 with a ten-song album bursting with mature perspectives and emotional heft, it makes even jaded assholes like me sit up and take notice.
Thin Mind is packed with straight-up fun music that overflows with a danceable sensibility, infectious melodies, and overall good vibes. The songs here find Wolf Parade openly encouraging their listeners to make a difference in the world, to work to make things better. As they put it, during the chorus of album highlight “The Static Age,” “I don’t want to live in the static age staying in a place where nothing changes. We can begin again.”
Frankie Cosmos is the musical pseudonym for Greta Kline, the daughter of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates. Since 2012, Kline has been releasing an impressive catalogue of lo-fi, often endearing indie-rock songs. “Close it Quietly” is her second full-length to be released by celebrated label Sub Pop and it marks a huge step forward. Indeed, these 21 songs in just under 40 minutes make up her most substantial offering to date, without losing the original homespun appeal of her early records. Her quirky, conversational style is fully on display on “Cosmic Shop,” the sunny “Windows,” the tender and intimate “Marbles” and the key-standout closer, “This Swirling.” Kline possesses a quiet, unique cleverness that is worth finding.
Close it Quietly (Release day: September 6th, 2019)
The Fat Angel Sings 