The Amazing, a Swedish group featuring Dungen guitarist/all-around prog guy Reine Fiske, specializes in a sort of long-winded, gorgeous psychedelia that is so unfashionable it almost becomes fashionable again. The band’s considerable melodic talents produced one of last year’s strongest rock albums, Picture You. Now, barely a year later, comes a more hushed, ambling set called “Ambulance” , which despite its title plays more like a leisurely night drive through some surreal, half-lit city. Ambulance was apparently recorded live in a one-room studio in Stockholm, and the songs, which anchor themselves around Christoffer Gunrup’s ocean-smooth murmur of a voice, are rich in improvisation. All that Ambulance is missing, if anything, are the fiery instrumental passages and taut drama that gave Picture You its edge. Sleepy and settled, these songs are more likely to blend into one another, which is not such a bad thing when the arrangements are so strong
Posts Tagged ‘The Amazing’
THIS WEEKS ESSENTIAL RELEASES 22nd July 2016
Posted: July 28, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC, THIS WEEKS ESSENTIAL PURCHASESTags: Beach Slang, Bears Den, Belly, Ben Walker, Faun Fables, Josieanne Clarke, The Amazing, The Cult Of Dom Keller, The Fireworks, This weeks Essential Releases
CAR SEAT HEADREST – TEENS OF DENIAL
‘Teens of Denial’ is the thirteenth album in Car Seat Headrest’s (aka 23-year-old Will Toledo) oeuvre, second on Matador, and first to be recorded in a proper studio with a full band and producer (Steve Fisk). On Denial, Toledo moves from bedroom pop to something approaching classic-rock grandeur and huge (if detailed and personal) narrative ambitions, with nods to the Cars, Pavement, Jonathan Richman, Wire, and William Onyeabor. By turns tender and caustic, empathetic and solipsistic, literary and vernacular, profound and profane, self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, he conjures a specifically 21st century mindset, a product of information overload, the loneliness it can foster, and the escape music can provide. At the heart of the album sits the 11:32 ‘Ballad of the Costa Concordia,’ which has more musical ideas than most whole albums (and at that length, it uses them all). Horns, keyboards, and elegant instrumental interludes set off art-garage moments; vivid vocal harmonies follow punk frenzy. The selfish captain of the capsized cruise liner in the Mediterranean in 2013 becomes a metaphor for struggles of the individual in society, as experienced by one hungover young man on the verge of adulthood.
2LP – Double Vinyl with Download.
ARIEL PINK / R STEVIE MOORE – KU KLUX GLAM
Psych-pop masterpiece from two of the best to ever do it. Los Angeles native and weirdo-pop enthusiast Ariel Pink joins forces with lo-fi pop pioneer R. Stevie Moore in a crazy freak-out extravaganza. Back in 2012, two leaders of the modern psych scene colluded together in making a 60+ track album. Here, we have the definitive collection of songs from ‘Ku Klux Glam’. Re-mastered and compiled by R. Stevie Moore, this is a presentation of this record in it’s clearest form.
BELLY – STAR
BEAR’S DEN – RED EARTH AND POURING RAIN
CD – Digi sleeve on reverse board.
LP – Reverse board standard sleeve with printed inner.
THE CULT OF DOM KELLER – GOODBYE TO THE LIGHT
LP – Limited Coloured vinyl album.
JOSIENNE CLARKE AND BEN WALKER – THROUGH THE CLOUDS
AGNES OBEL – CITIZEN OF GLASS
CD – With lyric booklet
LP – 180 Gram black vinyl LP with download code and housed in a Gatefold sleeve.
THE AMAZING – AMBULANCE
LP – With Download.
THE FIREWORKS – BLACK AND BLUE EP
Faun Fables are back with ‘Born Of The Sun’. Since 1998, Faun Fables has been the musical world of Dawn McCarthy, visited in collaboration with her partner Nils Frykdhal. In early times, their wild spirit roamed the streets and hills of the SF / Oakland community while, pilgrim-like, wandering the world and issuing two albums of deeply-rooted, swirlingly other folk music in 1999 and 2001. With the release of ‘Family Album’ in 2004, Drag City got involved and ‘The Transit Rider’ (2006), ‘A Table Forgotten’ (2008) and ‘Light Of A Vaster Dark’ (2010) followed. Now, suddenly, it’s 2016. Six years have passed since ‘Light Of A Vaster Dark’ appeared. Life has happened, in the form of three children born to Dawn and Nils.
Anyone who has spent time in the thrall of Faun Fables’ bewitching sound knows that this was the dream; beyond Dawn’s passion for song, dance, theatre and all manner of folklore (plus a regular regimen of yodelling), the mythic shadows of home and hearth, friends and family, have infused all of their expressions. Now, raising the family that was once only dreamed about makes for an earthier and more expansive Faun Fables album, informed by the slow and sudden progress of time that occurs when we are with the very young.
‘Born Of The Sun’ is in itself another birthing, the songs gestating over several years, then recorded mostly in concentrated periods over the past two winters. On previous albums, the passions of Faun Fables seemed to be laid firmly on the stones of the Old World. The minstrels who cavorted across the cover of ‘Mother Twilight’ seemed out of another, hard-to-place time. ‘Born Of The Sun’ continues on in this exalted tradition but also reflects the rhythms of family living, where each day is a new and irreversible step forward through the necessarily scorched earth of raising children.
Where ‘Family Album’ and ‘A Table Forgotten’ looked yearningly through time at the spiritual natures of communal living, ‘Born Of The Sun’ is forged in the crucible of now and, as such, has a feeling apart from the previous days of Faun Fables.
Dawn and Nils and the kids (whose vocals on ‘Wild Kids Rant’ suggest they are following their parents’ path into the forest) are embracing the phenomena of creation as they move inexorably forward. ‘Born Of The Sun’ is the bountiful and exuberant album of this place and time – an old, candlelit world of arcane beliefs in our brightly-lit world, growing ever more profound in the light of perpetual discovery that bathes all of Faun Fables’ songs.
An enchanting and often beguiling mix of traditional medieval folk and swirling Californian psychedelic sounds. Progressive but coherent chord changes and textures develop as time goes on, building and morphing into a cacophony of instrumental depth and vocal intensity. Fascinating and thoroughly skilled instrumentation and (in places) frightening heart-wrenchingly poignant lyricism. A Journey not to be missed.
BEACH SLANG – A LOUD BASH OF TEENAGE FEELINGS
Beach Slang’s second full-length is a crash-and-thunder collection of songs about what it takes to keep yourself going, to make it through the rest of the night – hell, through the rest of your youth – and beyond. Frontman James Alex wrote much of ‘A Loud Bash Of Teenage Feelings’ on their first album’s support tour, during which he spent a lot of time with the kids who’d picked up the record. “A lot of the songs [on Loud Bash] are the stories of the kids who got turned on to Beach Slang by the first album,” says Alex. “They’re autobiographical, too, but kind of at a remove – I’m not that young kid anymore, but I used to be. You know how it is; rock and roll is a new crop of 15-year-olds picking up guitars every year and having at it. There was something really cool about documenting someone elses life, but seeing myself in it. I suppose that’s why we connect. We’re all kind of one big gang.” LP – Black Vinyl. LP+ – Limited Clear with Blue Splatter Vinyl.
BEACH HOUSE – ZEBRA
“Zebra” was Beach House’s follow up EP to the highly acclaimed breakthrough album “Teen Dream” which was centered around that album’s lead-off cut.
The AMAZING – ” Ambulance “
Posted: July 16, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSICTags: Ambulance, Sweden, The Amazing
On its fourth album, Ambulance, The Amazing has a way of unspooling melodies that don’t grab you so much as slowly burrow under your skin. Playing with an unhurried improvisational spirit, the Swedish band lets ideas amble along and develop naturally; it takes time to explore the nooks of its songs in search of deeper resolution. That lovely, resonant quality conjures a meditative mindset suitable for solitary walks or the melancholic stillness of an early morning. Yet all the haze shrouds everything in mystery, and it appears that Christoffer Gunrup wants it that way.
As The Amazing’s enigmatic singer and songwriter (as well as one of its three guitarists), Gunrup submerges his muted croon just below the surface of the mix, singing so that his phrasing is practically imperceptible and his themes are equally tricky to parse. Gunrup makes a point to refrain from discussing his songs much or making lyrics available in liner notes online — the quirk of a guarded artist who insists the art speak for itself.
Like its previous works, and especially 2015’s Picture You, Ambulance uses mood to tell its stories. Recording live with only a few takes to rehearse the new material, each member — Gunrup, guitarists Reine Fiske (best known for his work with Dungen) and Fredrik Swahn, bassist Alexis Benson and drummer Moussa Fadera — is given space to freely embellish the songs while they’re still fresh. The result emphasizes sinuous melodies, lavish textures and spidery arrangements that forgo verse-chorus pop-song structures. Likewise, The Amazing deploys familiar genre touchstones (lushly orchestrated pop, British folk, pastoral psychedelia, cosmic mid-tempo rockers) as atmosphere-altering shorthand to transport listeners into its contemplative world.
From its first moments, the album-opening title track establishes an instrumental template that carries through nearly every song: Fadera’s militaristic drum roll accompanies stark piano stabs, intertwining guitar arpeggios from Fiske and Swahn, and keyboards that swirl atop glacial orchestration — all while Gunrup sings elusive lines like, “You know sometimes you have to change.” Later, in “Moments Like These” and “Perfect Day For Shrimp,” The Amazing blends fingerpicked acoustic guitar and shimmering synths with a breathy whisper that evokes the crestfallen hymns of Nick Drake or Jose Gonzalez. In “Floating,” twangy pedal steel and warbling synths give the song an almost country-rock flavor.
In “Through City Lights,” Ambulance’s longest and most stirring track, The Amazing conjures the winding story songs of Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek by unfurling every stanza with dramatic pacing, leaving plenty of room to let the words that stick out hang in the air. In those moments, he’s able to project desperation as gentle strumming and a simple, ghostly guitar motif glide underneath.
While mostly striking a somber tone, “Blair Drager” does provide a change of pace in the form of smoky lounge-jazz and cosmopolitan trip-hop. Built around in-the-pocket break beats, slinky guitar upstrokes and sinister speak-singing, it’s yet another satisfying color in the band’s palette. The Amazing implies its heartbreak and haunted regret without explicitly defining it, and Ambulance succeeds by inviting listeners to interpret the meaning for themselves.
The AMAZING – ” Headless Boy ” and ” Picture You “
Posted: January 9, 2015 in MUSICTags: Sweden, The Amazing
The superlatively-named The Amazing introduced their third album with the nine-minute-long title track “Picture You,” a song that wasn’t as epic as its runtime may suggest. Instead, it’s a shimmering and plaintive piece that unfurls much like a long drive on a country road, and their followup is much of the same. “The Headless Boy” is a sweet, charming, and understated take from the Swedish band,
The Fat Angel Sings 