Month: July 2014

David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights to release new album!

The latest album from David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights was recorded in his native New Zealand between 2012 and 2014. That span covering three years suggests this might be one of those albums that was slaved over, with weeks-upon-months spent recording and then mixing until every minor detail was perfected.  The opposite is true.  End Times Undone took so long to finish because Kilgour assembled his bandmates every four or five months, and then only for a couple days at a time.

“We’ve become so obsessed with capturing the creative moment as early as possible when we get together,” Kilgour says of making music with guitarist Tony de Raad, bassist Tom Bell, and drummer Taane Tokona.

It’s the perfect way for Kilgour to operate these days, more than 30 years into a career that is equally compelling, consistent, and influential.  From his first recordings with The Clean, the iconic band who remain active and whose legend deservedly grows mightier every year, Kilgour has had a distinct sound that has inhabited all of his albums and sounds fresh with every new release.

If it sounds a little fresher on End Times Undone – Kilgour’s eighth solo album and second straight with this Heavy Eights line-up – that’s because of the method.  Not many bands can make musical discovery sound so leisurely and urgent, so crisp and casual.  But that’s what transpires over these ten tracks. Building on the chemistry showcased on 2011’s Left By Soft, Kilgour and the Heavy Eights were able to quickly coalesce around this batch of songs.

Over just ten songs, End Times Undone offers a robust sampling of all the various styles Kilgour has mastered over the last three decades.  For an album that comes so late in one’s career, it’s a surprisingly convenient entry point into Kilgour’s body of work.  After a psychedelic intro, opener “Like Rain” immediately identifies itself as vintage Kilgour, with shimmering guitars that gracefully swell and secede.  “Lose Myself in Sound” will appeal to fans of The Clean who favour songs where the band chugs along on a blissful straight-line path.  While the album has its share of abstract lyrics, this title is one to take seriously.  And like many songs here, it draws to a close with an extended instrumental passage, the sound of four people finding their own rhythm together.

End Times Undone will be released shortly after a reissue of The Clean’s Anthology, a 46-track set that serves as the band’s defining document that can attest to their pantheon status.  End Times Undone is a perfect companion piece to that collection that left off in 1996, and in many ways feels like it could have simply been the next album helmed by Kilgour instead of one that comes nearly 20 years later.

End Times Undone will be released on Merge in the UK on 1st September 2014.

Goat announce new album, Stereogum premiere first single

Swedish rock collective GOAT will release their highly-anticipated second album,Commune on CD/LP/DL on 22nd September 2014 via Rocket Recordings (Stranded Rekords in Scandinavia and Sub Pop Records in North America).

You can now listen to the lead single, ‘Hide From the Sun’, which Stereogum calls, “beautifully psychedelic…[their music] crosses borders at will and speaks its own language.”    

Commune is the follow-up to GOAT‘s hypnotic 2012 debut, World Music, which received widespread acclaim and placed in many top-ten lists. The mysterious, masked group continued to awe the world with their intense live shows which was captured on their Live Ballroom Ritual double-album.

GOAT will be presenting new songs from Commune on festival stages throughout the summer before embarking on their first full European tour which finishes with a massive show at London’s Roundhouse.

There is no direct association between mysterious Swedish psychedelicists GOAT and revered Argentinian master of magical realism, Jorge Luis Borges. Yet their mission appears to be the same. Borges generated his ideas from historical curiosities across the globe—gaucho knife duels on the South American plains, Middle Eastern heresiarchs plotting treacheries in secret libraries, Chinese pirates waging wars against the Emperor—and twisted them into fictions that blurred the lines between fortified footnotes and outright fantasy.  GOAT’s sound is the sonic manifestation of this principle, as evidenced in their aptly-named debut album, World Music, which incorporated elements of Nigerian afrobeat, German krautrock, Anatolian funk, and a host of other global micro-niches into a hallucinatory cultish celebration of rock’s diverse manifestations. Deprived of the requisite band biography, early experiencers World Music’s electrified tribalism and lysergic compositions had the inevitable questions regarding the origin and timeframe of the recordings. The truth only became knottier every time the elusive GOAT collective provided their cryptic answers.

Ultimately, it is GOAT’s music that speaks the most about them, and, on their sophomore album, Commune, GOAT deliver a heavy dose of acidic grooves, hypnotic incantations, and serpentine guitar lines.