We last heard from Boston’s Hallelujah the Hills on 2014’s Have You Ever Done Something Evil? an album a mix of deep hooks, clever lyrical turns, and gut-punch feeling. With their follow-up, A Band Is Something to Figure Out, out April 12 on the band’s Discrete Pageantry label, Hallelujah the Hills’ don’t replicate that success, but rather they open up a new set of challenges.
The darker textures and scuffed-up edges of this record make it seem leaner than its predecessor, but these songs are thick with layers. “What Do the People Want” opens the record on a careful, epic build, only for the record to left turn into the shout- and-rumble of “We Have the Perimeter Surrounded”. “The Mountain That Wanted More” and “Spin Them Atoms” are feel like sweet, familiar power pop…
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Shields are from the north east of England and tend to define their music as “alternative pop.”
It has taken some time for the band to get around to completing their debut album – oddly, their 2012 single, Mezzanine, is included here. The wait, nonetheless, has been worth it, especially when you take into consideration that the likes of Everything Everything and Foals have taken on the indie/electro pop/rock game and beaten it hands down.
Entitled How Can We Fix This?, this 10-track record was produced by Adrian Bushby (known for his work with Muse and the Foo Fighters) and is Shields’ first collection of new material since their second EP, the critically acclaimed Kaleidoscope, in 2012. Interestingly, it was recorded entirely in the band’s home studio.
Promo-only 4CD set covering the years 1961-2000 from Numero Group’s catalog.
“This four-CD set compiles highlights, lowlights, and odd lights from the Numero Group’s sprawling collection of songs spanning four decades and covering the broadest range of popular music, none of which caught the popular attention. From group soul to garage rock, from psych to folk to new age to power pop to yacht rock to indie, noise, slowcore, and art-punk….from songs in celebration of eternal life and aching love to Nicaraguan jazz and odes to death, fate, Eurotrash, and teenagerhood.
This sampler follows a rough chronological format, though certain tracks are grouped together to provide clearer access to their genre and individual history; you will, for instance, find…
Chris McGregor‘s Jazz / The African Sound is a lost global jazz classic, and a true holy grail for collectors of jazz and world-jazz. A cornerstone of South Africa’s illustrious jazz history, it has been out of print since before the end of apartheid.
Never before released outside of the country, this painstakingly restored reissue is the long-delayed first chance to hear Chris McGregor’s debut recording as leader.
Ten years before the Brotherhood of Breath blew the cobwebs out of British jazz, Chris McGregor had already recorded as leader with a big band comprised of South Africa’s leading jazz lights. Put together in 1963, the Castle Lager Big Band was a multi-racial group, a risky endeavour in apartheid South Africa. Modernist in outlook, and dedicated…
“The proper music abounds,” sneer Future of the Left on their fifth album, taking potshots at the tedium of ‘authenticity’ while barrel-rolling between jagged slabs of math-centric post- hardcore and spacious Pixies surf. They’re here for your culture, and their merciless approach is as sharp as frontman Falco’s acid tongue.
“Add another finger to your English breakfast / You army surplus motherfucker,” he spits on “Eating for None” – another takedown in a blur of painfully funny non-sequiturs and prescient satirical portraits. You’d swear the music was a sideshow to the laugh factor if the Shellac-taut likes of “Miner’s Gruel” weren’t so ear-bleedingly addictive.
As ever, the potent gallows humour of The Peace and Truce… derives not from flaneur-ish…
Two years after the first installment comes Buck ‘Em!: The Music of Buck Owens, Vol. 2, a double-disc set chronicling the eight years when Buck Owens was a crossover superstar thanks to his prominent role as a co-host of Hee Haw.
Buck started to slide into a rut toward the end of this run — a process accelerated by the tragic death of his right-hand man Don Rich in 1974, a loss from which Owens never fully recovered — but producer Patrick Milligan slyly disguises this trend by nestling deep cuts, live tracks, and outtakes among the best of his hits, thereby painting a portrait of Buck Owens as a musician nearly as adventurous as he was during the purple patch of the ’50s and early ’60s. Rarities per se aren’t the focus of the collection — most of the rare items were originally…
Pinning down Culture Abuse‘s sound is no simple task — the San Francisco five-piece mash together a plethora of sounds drawn from all corners of the punk spectrum and tie them together into an unrelenting, hook-laden wall of sound. On their full-length Peach, the band have only grown more versatile with their songwriting.
In contrast to previous releases, Peach takes a lighter tone overall, weaving sunny, surf-y riffs into a number of songs, like “Peace On Earth.” That’s not to say that any of the energy or aggression found in their older work has been forgone, though; it’s often strategically juxtaposed within these structures. “Turn It Off” bursts out of the gates with breakneck power chords before dropping into an echoing reggae-esque swing halfway through,…
Bob Schneider’s never been a fan of the tried and true. The Texas songwriter’s music has often defied convention and expanded the parameters as far as what’s expected from the typical singer/songwriter.
Consequently, his latest album isn’t an album in the strictest sense but more a series of EPs released at different intervals over the past year, three works collectively titled The King Kong Suite. Each disc contains five songs that share the same mood and musicality, and even now that they’re packaged together, the individual EPs sound quite distinctive from one another, and yet still make for a fully formed work.
That said, Volume III — the most recent individual effort in the series — is decidedly different from its predecessors. Where Volume I was mellow…
Best known for his work with the seminal outfit Swans, Norman Westberg’s output beyond that group is sprawling and restless. His name recurs and ripples through many interconnected micro-histories surrounding New York City’s music and art scenes. From appearances in film works associated with the Cinema of Transgression, through to his participation in bands such as The Heroine Sheiks and Five Dollar Priest, Westberg’s name is woven deeply into the fabric of New York over the past three decades.
MRI is the result of Westberg’s encounters with the heavy medical scanning technology following his recognising diminished hearing. ”I started to notice a loss of hearing in my right ear,” Westberg explains, “and decided that it was high time that…
After the underground success of their self-titled debut, which went through several pressings on multiple formats, Austin darkwave trio Troller swapped a bandmember and took their sound in a heavier direction on their second album, Graphic.
Their first album’s artwork seemed to suggest that they were some sort of mystical doom metal outfit, and while they haven’t quite become a metal band yet, there’s a significant doom element to this album, especially to the droning bass guitars.
Vocalist Amber Goers’ vocals are much more powerful on this album than on the group’s debut; while they seemed like a shadowy, ethereal blur before, they’re more up front here. Rather than being merely haunting, they’re downright piercing here, often ending up in fits of cathartic…
On November 5, 1969, the very first single by Carpenters was released on A&M Records. “Ticket to Ride” b/w “Your Wonderful Parade” announced the fresh talents of Richard Carpenter, 23, and Karen Carpenter, 19. The dramatically reinterpreted Beatles song introduced radio to Karen’s richly intimate voice, and the bitingly ironic flipside heralded the songwriting team of Richard Carpenter & John Bettis – while both sides revealed Richard’s prodigious gifts for arrangement and orchestration.
On Valentine’s Day, 1970, “Ticket to Ride” entered the Billboard Hot 100 where, five weeks later, it peaked at a more-than-respectable No. 54. With their very next single, “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” the Carpenters would reach No. 1 on the Billboard Pop and Easy Listening charts,…
Parallax (noun) “the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer.” This phenomenon is exactly how the listener new to Phronesis‘ oeuvre would perceive this, their sixth album recorded within the last decade.
“67000 MPH” for example, is a whistle stop tour of musically-defined gravitational resistance. The mad tempo changes and frequent erratic structural modulations characterise this frenetic opening number penned by Anton Eger. But in spite of this wild compositional metamorphosing the music is absolutely gripping. The initial fractured nature of Ivo Neame‘s “OK Chorale” is soon resolved with undulating waves of light and shade from all three musicians playing together almost telepathically.
When Fumaça Preta issued their self-titled debut on Soundway back in 2014, it confused many but attracted more. The crazy trio of Alex Figueira, Stuart Carter, and James Porch laid down a wicked brew of equal parts trashy psychedelia, garage rock, post-tropicalia samba, Latin punk, drunken cumbia, and more. Impuros Fanaticos, the group’s second long-playing exercise, is the trial of music by fire.
The m.o. here was to grow their sound, erasing lines between genres while fracturing them at the same time with flagrant, rampant experimentation. It results in something altogether darker and more sinister, yet its listenability is more contagious and viral. There are so many sounds in this mix (clanging metal work, indefinable percussion, electro synth squiggles, gated reverb, volume and…
What many don’t know about Delta Spirit frontman & Middle Brother amigo Matthew Logan Vasquez is how prolific of a songwriter he is. Despite being a primary writer for both projects, Vasquez still had enough material to release an EP, Austin, in November and now an LP in the span of four months. The title of Vasquez’s full-length debut solo album, Solicitor Returns, pays homage to a record he made years ago but was unable to release. Having wrapped up existing engagements with Delta Spirit for the time being, Vasquez was able to record, release and perform a set of personal songs that are a bit rougher around the edges than his followers may be used to.
The album opener and title track fades in with pulsating synth chords throbbing progressively…
A native of Philadelphia now based in Nashville, Lizanne Knott has built a dedicated following both in the States and in the UK for her sultry brand of Americana; however, for Excellent Day, her fourth album, the recent death of guitarist Jef Lee Johnson prompted her to dig back into her blues and jazz roots, the result is a stew of the Mississippi Delta, New Orleans and vintage Nashville. Indeed, the laid back, brass coated, lazing blues title track is itself a Johnson penned number.
It’s not the only cover here. Sometimes, a melancholic, hushed voice and acoustic guitar ballad about love’s often brief nature, is an unreleased Janis Ian number only available as a download worktape on her site,…
Though he’s best known as a live collaborator of techno wunderkind Nicolas Jaar and one-half of the electronic-rock group Darkside, guitarist Dave Harrington has a deep history with jazz and improvisation. Become Alive, the debut album of the group that bears his name, digs deep into these musical roots. Yet there’s a twist: electronic studio processes are also on-hand to coax new results in the music. Become Alive is based on a producer’s approach to composition, a form that can be traced back to Miles Davis and Teo Macero’s work during the trumpeter’s “electric” years in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
Harrington took to the recording studio with a number of local Brooklyn players, then reworked the material afterwards. That retroactive gesture…
Misty Miller used to be rather mistier than she is now. Some years back she emerged as a ukulele-toting folkie, so wholesome she was charged with tiptoeing through bluebells for the Woodland Trust.
Now, like Grimes, the 21-year-old south Londoner wields her own tattoo gun, often on a whim. You can hear these growing pains played out on Miller’s winning new album. The Whole Family Is Worried takes the vexed business of being young and female to grungily honest but impeccably tuneful places. Miller deals in the kind of melodies that bring to mind the Americans to whom tunes are second nature – Kim Deal, say, or Jenny Lewis.
Miller’s elastic voice has most often been compared to Chrissie Hynde of late, but her songs are more snaggle-toothed propositions, reviving…
Dubblestandart‘s contribution to Echo Beach’s famous King Size Dub series precedes the 2015 release of the band’s 15th album, a work of bassy, full-time flavor that follows Woman in Dub and In Dub. King Size Dub: Special contains a showdown between Dubblestandart classics, tunes from the upcoming album, and previously unreleased mixes.
Features appearances by Oskar Werner, David Lynch, Gu Gabriel, Ari Up, Dillinger, Banth Singh MC Dehli Sultante, Anthony B, Hoda, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Marcia Griffiths; and remixes by DJ Liondub, Adrian Sherwood, Robo Bass HiFi, Fuzzy Logic, Jstar, Umberto Echo, Dub Spencer & Trance Hill, Skip “Little Axe” McDonald, Kid Kenobi,…
Chris Abrahams deploys his nods to past greats with restraint and subtlety, never allowing them to obscure his own presence. Fluid to the Influence is a quiet and contemplative album, but one possessed of strong inner resolve and overflowing with flutters of pure talent.
Abrahams is best known as the stalwart behind the piano with much-acclaimed experimental trio The Necks, and with their star in the ascendant following the success of last year’s Vertigo, putting out a solo album at this stage feels like excellent timing on Abrahams’ part, not for opportunistic or cynical reasons but because it emphasises his work as an individual both in and outside of The Necks. On the evidence of Fluid to the Influence, it also allows him to unwind and give voice to the more…
The fourth CD in a 12-month period by Zorn’s most powerful new ensemble featuring John Medeski on organ, Ches Smith on congas and voudun drums, Kenny Wollesen on vibes, Kenny Grohowski on drums and Matt Hollenberg on guitar presents nine genre-busting compositions mixing jazz, metal, classical, world music and more.
This time their trademark sound is augmented by the ringing tones of Kenny Wollesen’s vibraphone to create their wildest, most insane CD to date.
Juxtaposing complex atonal lines, driving vamps, heavy metal riffs, improvisational madness, shredding solos and moments of profound lyricism, The Painted Bird is a surreal and expressive new world in sound.
Moonchild meets Nova Express!