News

Stereogum premieres video from Jerry David DeCicca's forthcoming solo album

Understanding Land is the debut album from Jerry David DeCicca and will be released on 2nd June 2014.   After five critically-acclaimed albums with Columbus, Ohio’s The Black Swans, the last of which, Occasion For Song, served as a eulogy to the late Noel Sayre – the friend and violinist who DeCicca formed the band with –  it felt like a good time to begin a new journey. The 10 songs which make up Understanding Land, were written in London after 5 months of touring and traveling the US, Spain, Portugal, and the UK.  What began as demos, turned into an album when they were shared with double bassist Andy Hamill(Mark Murphy, Natacha Atlas, Tracey Thorn).   Andy added bass and some gypsy slides.  DeCicca sent tracks to pals Will Oldham (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) and Kelley Deal(The Breeders) and they both came back with sweet harmonies.  The legendarySpooner Oldham (Muscle Shoals, Dylan, Neil Young) played Wurlitzer on 3 songs in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.The first single, ‘First And Last’ features the two Oldhams (unrelated) together on a track for the first time.  “It’s a gentle acoustic ballad that matches the easygoing imagery in Matt Bauer’s video, which finds DeCicca peacefully drifting around his new hometown of New Braunfels, Texas by land and sea.” Stereogum.
Everyone you hear on the album (except Spooner who cheated and used a real studio, The NuttHouse in Muscle Shoals, Alabama) recorded the tracks in their home, themselves.  Once the digital world allowed everyone to be gathered together, it was mixed in Austin, Texas by Grammy winner, Stuart Sikes (Cat Power, Phosphorescent, Loretta Lynn, White Stripes).

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.

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.

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.”

Helms Alee to release new album on Sargent House

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.