The Faint return with new album Doom Abuse
The Faint will return this spring with their sixth album, Doom Abuse via SQE Music. The birth of Doom Abuse, in many ways, is in parallel with a rebirth of the band itself. The Faint, started in Omaha in the mid-’90s, have always created against the grain, disinterested in making anything except what their own inspiration drives them to make. Each album since their 1998 debut Media has shifted and evolved that desire. Some albums, like 1999′s Blank-Wave Arcade, came from urgent, short recording processes while others, like 2004′s Wet From Birth, were more carefully constructed. The musicians themselves are the constant, together embracing a style that is truly unlike every other band out there. While Doom Abuse harkens back to Blank-Wave Arcade‘s immediacy in some ways, it opens a new door. Inside is exactly where The Faint want to be now.
Posted on: February 25th, 2014
bis to release new album data Panik etcetera 5th May 2014!
The influential and ever underrated Glasgow, Scotland trio, bis, return with data Panik etcetera - a release that brings us up to date with recordings from the year spent re-branded as Data Panik, alongside other attempts to record a fourth, and definitive, bis album. Hardcore fans have been desperate to get their hands on these recordings, and the band have carefully selected and remastered the pick of the bunch. The band have been playing storming live sets over the last few years, surprising punters at places such as Primavera and 2013′s Indietracks Festival as headliner, while new material has crept into the set-list.
Manda Rin, Sci-Fi Steven and John Disco, to give them their professional monikers, were known in the late 1990′s for such highlights as being the first unsigned band on Top Of The Pops (allegedly), creating the theme tune to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon “The Powerpuff Girls”, having their own Casio G-Shock watch released in Japan and moving from their punk-rock roots to having an underground European dance hit with “Eurodisco”. Taking influences from Devo, XTC, Huggy Bear, Bikini Kill and The Plastics, bis have also inspired others for 20 years now – being a reference point for a host of artists such as CSS, Los Campesinos!, Joanna Gruesome and Chvrches. The band also featured in NME’s list of Top 20 Cult Heroes and featured in their Top 50 Britpop anthems. Albums, The New Transistor Heroes (under-fi pop/punk songs with twitches into disco, hip-hop and synth-pop), Social Dancing (Glossy electro-pop) and Return To Central (an expansive rebirth, taking in Eno, Moroder and Can) showcased the over-development of their creators, always keen to move onto the next project.
With data Panik etcetera the inspirations had moved onto strict, skinny-tie, new-wave pop songs (‘Control The Radical’, ‘Minimum Wage’, ‘Retail of the Details’), awkward XTC play Chic disco (‘Cubis (I Love You)’, ‘Music Lovers’, ‘Too Much Not Enough)’ and disconcerting goth-techno (‘Sense Not Sense’, ‘Flesh Remover’). ‘Rulers and the States’, meanwhile, has already featured heavily on a Scottish Television advert with its nagging Sparksy riff
Posted on: February 25th, 2014
BIRD to release debut album My Fear and Me in May 2014
BIRD is the creation of Adele Emmas, Sian Williams, Alexis Samata and Christian Sandford. Hailing from Liverpool, they create dark, haunting yet enrapturing music which will entice you into their otherworldly universe.
With a dynamic mixture of power and fragility, BIRD combine hypnotic, tribal drum beats, atmospheric guitars and dreamlike synthscapes to create the foundation for Adele’s beautiful, siren-esque vocals and lyrical poetry.
After releasing two EPs (one of which was produced by composer and ex-The Coral guitarist, Bill Ryder-Jones) and continually touring the UK, BIRD have gained a large following and garnered praise from the likes of BBC Radio 1, 2,3, 6music, and have been invited to play sessions for Simon Raymonde (The Cocteau Twins/Bella Union). The Guardian, Metro, NYLON, NME and Channel 4 have also featured the band.
Support slots with Wild Beasts, Soley, King Charles, PINS, Poltergeist (Echo and The Bunnymen) and Stealing Sheep have cemented BIRD as a formidable live presence. They were invited in 2013 to play at Festival Number 6, The Great Escape and Liverpool Sound City.
Now with new Liverpool label, Baltic Records, launched in 2013 under ADA and working closely with Seymour Stein (Warner), BIRD have been working with producer Darren Jones to create their debut album entitled, My Fear and Me which will be released in May 2014.
Retaining the atmosphere and dark heart of their early EPs, and combining this with melodic hooks, stark lyrical imagery and intensely-layered soundscapes – the band utilise instruments such as harp and theremin to add to their unique sound. With vocals recorded in darkness and instruments recorded in a church, BIRD have carefully honed this collection of songs to tell stories of the soul through the sounds within.
Posted on: February 25th, 2014
Dirty Projectors’ Nat Baldwin to release solo album!
Despite his busy schedule recording and touring as the bass player for Dirty Projectors, Nat Baldwin found time to write and record his most soulful and ambitious collection of songs to date.
In the Hollows will be released on 5th May via Western Vinyl.
After recording the initial tracks at Machines With Magnets in Pawtucket, RI, Nat recruited Otto Hauser (Vetiver, Lia Ices, Espers) for drums and percussion and Rob Moose (The National, Antony and the Johnsons, Bon Iver) and Clarice Jensen for string arrangements. Discussing the album’s production, Nat says “I wanted to achieve a consistency throughout that my past albums have lacked. I wanted the strings to add to the mournful quality of the songs, weaving their way through the sonic terrain, providing emotional emphasis, but also leaving necessary amounts of space. Albums by Nick Drake, Judee Sill, Joanna Newsom, Antony & the Johnsons, and Bill Callahan, to name a few, provided inspiration in balancing that intimacy with minimal, but powerful, adornments.”
Immersive, athletic, and often profound, In the Hollows represents his clearest and most consistent album-length statement, melodically, structurally, and lyrically. Nat explains that “I hope it is as unsettling as it is beautiful. I want it to make people feel things they can’t describe.”
Posted on: February 25th, 2014
Silo to release new album after 13 years!
Work is the first release for 13 years from Denmark’s best kept secret: digital power rock trio Silo. Back in the 1990s the group – Frederik Ammitzbøll (guitars), Mikkel Bender (bass) and Søren Dahlgaard (drums) – were the most abrasive act signed up by Swim Records, the independent label founded by Wire frontman Colin Newman and his wife Malka Spigel. After releasing two albums – Instar (1998) and Alloy (2001) – and appearing live with the likes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sigur Rós, Trans Am and Pole, the group, who came together as students, drifted off into family life and gainful employment. But now Silo have reloaded, and their distinctive twisted-metal sound, built on crunchy digitized guitars, beats that crack like a bolt cutter, and a sturdy industrial rhythm matrix, sounds bang on trend.
Work will be released on 14th April via Novennial Paralysis
Posted on: February 25th, 2014
Stone Jack Jones to release new album
“apocalyptic mountain music…curiously unsettling…Jones lets a little light in, if only to show how dark the world can be.” Pitchfork
Self-described “ambient folk musician” Stone Jack Jones’ third album Ancestor is coming out 31st March on Western Vinyl. Based in Nashville, but raised in a coal miner’s company house on the banks of Buffalo Creek, WV, Stone Jack Jones is the descendant of four generations of coal miners. After being rejected from military service in Vietnam due to epilepsy, and discouraged from pursuing the coal mining business, Jack decided to start wandering. By the time he landed in Nashville, where he met Roger Moutenot, Patty Griffin, and Kurt Wagner, Jack had worked as a carny, an escape artist, a ballet dancer, a professional lute player, and even owned a late night performance art club in Atlanta.
Ancestor was produced with Roger Moutenot (known for his work with Yo La Tengo, Sleater Kinney, They Might Be Giants) and features collaborations with Patty Griffin and notable Nashvillians including Lambchop’s Ryan Norris, Scott Martin and Kurt Wagner as well as Lylas’ Kyle Hamlett. The tales on Ancestor distill Jack’s lifetime of experience into songs that use the esoteric narratives of an American rambler to elucidate the celestial worlds within each of us. Intensely meditative, the album patiently explores the hardness of the coal mines, the mystery of suicide, the comfort of a dog’s acceptance, the idea that forgetting all you know can be the first step towards hearing and reconnecting with your muse, and one man’s gratitude for the love he’s been given and the life he’s had the chance to live.
As Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner describes it, Ancestor is “long and languid, moving none too fast, there’s alcohol and rope in the air. There ought to be a place, a bar, or barn, where this music plays from p.a. suspended in the middle of the room like those ones they used in the civil defense strapped to polls in the neighborhoods of the 60s, 50s.. Fan shaped horns arranged in a center cluster…there’s nostalgic allusion and ghostly nods to a world only Jack knows, and perhaps his god knows.”
Posted on: January 21st, 2014
Merge to release debut album, Daughter of Everything from Vertical Scratchers
Vertical Scratchers is a new duo comprising of John Schmersal (ex-Brainiac/Enon, live Caribou, Crooks on Tape) and Christian Beaulieu (ex-Triclops!/Anywhere) formed in Los Angeles in 2012. John and Christian met at a Thanksgiving party, began hanging out, and decided to form Vertical Scratchers. John says, “I love Christian’s drumming because he approaches it like a songwriter, as he is one in his own right. There aren’t really drum fills—more like rhythmic accents that punctuate what is happening at that point in the song itself.”
Most Vertical Scratchers songs clock in under the two-minute mark but often go in twice as many directions as your average-length song. Pop deception. Think the Kinks with a Buzzcocks brevity.
Daughter of Everything was recorded live in Los Angeles at The Smell in September of 2012. The special guest appearance lead vocal from Robert Pollard (GBV) was recorded at Waterloo Sound in Ohio by Todd Tobias. It will be released in the UK via Merge on 3rd March 2014.
Posted on: January 21st, 2014
Helms Alee to release new album on Sargent House
Helms Alee‘s music is exactly the sort of mutant, fantastic hybrid that used to only occasionally erupt out of small, isolated scenes, uninformed by trends of the day – instead inspired by the band’s own collective contributions. The Seattle trio’s unique amalgam of metal, art rock, pop and punk is charmingly reminiscent of the fertile creativity that groups once had before the Internet seemed to instruct bands to only copy one another. Helms Alee’s third album, Sleepwalking Sailors sounds like many styles combined into one, and none of it concerned with any notion other than creating vital, urgent and uniquely characteristic music.
Bassist/vocalist Dana James, drummer/vocalist Hozoji Matheson-Margullis and guitarist/vocalist Ben Verellen combine a vast array of ideas within a single song, while still sounding entirely cohesive. Their songs are undeniably heavy, but also freely roaming through icy post-punk and warm melodic haze at any given moment. Any given song can be pummeling one moment and then subtly shift into triply harmonies without the listener even realizing what has happened.
Sleepwalking Sailors was recorded with engineer Chris Common (These Arms Are Snakes, Pelican, Chelsea Wolfe) in Seattle, with intentionally built-in limitations. Helms Alee’s previous album Weatherhead was released in 2011 by their longtime label HydraHead just before it went under. Undaunted, and as a testament to the band’s strong fan base, Helms Alee originally crowdfunded Sleepwalking Sailors, eventually raising an impressive recording budget.
Sleepwalking Sailors will be released on 10th February 2014 via Sargent House.
Posted on: January 21st, 2014
