2023’s softscars presented a darker, more cathartic side to yeule’s music, embracing shoegaze, grunge, and other ’90s alternative influences rather than the more atmospheric electropop of their earlier works. Their fourth album, Evangelic Girl Is a Gun, is a continuation of this sound, but also sort of a rebirth or renewed focus. Opener “Tequila Coma” has a trip-hop rhythm which feels gritty rather than easygoing, and it’s accompanied by glitchy, longing vocals and a scratchy guitar solo. Other songs match lyrics of desire and infatuation with the strongest hooks yeule has ever written. “Eko” is upbeat alt-pop with a soaring chorus about being unable to stop thinking about someone. “Dudu” contains an extremely catchy, deceptively cheerful-sounding onomatopoeic refrain…
Category: indie
It’s been ten years since Kathryn Joseph won The Say Award and now We Were Made Prey. is here. Can we still say ‘wow’? The evolution in Joseph’s work is restless and searching. This release is no different as it serves us another intuitive and unexpected turn in her style, instrumentation and vocals. The keyboard sounds like a lost Rhodes piano smothered in gentle distortion; it swirls and silences throughout the album and by the end comes out clean, shed of texture. Working alongside Lomond Campbell, the expansion into electronics and textures is a welcome backdrop to Joseph’s almost fickle voice.
The album’s first single Harbour. shows this new distorted rage, at in-betweens, longings, shortcomings. Bel (II).
Very few music lovers would welcome a drummer-less universe, yet solo ventures by percussionists tend to be an acquired taste. Even if you are drawn to the skins, drums taking centerstage can be strong medicine, so it will probably be a relief to most listeners that Goddess, while devised by a drummer, owes nothing to such purism. Nor is the project a ruse to move a band member traditionally sat at the back to the foreground, in an act of egotistic overcorrection, harking back to the days when Ringo and Keith went solo in search of the acclaim traditionally afforded their frontmen.
Fay Milton, formerly of Savages, is one of the most expressive and exuberant drummers of her generation, a fact not altogether obvious on Goddess, where the drums are mostly…
The National may be on a hiatus at the moment – after releasing not one but two albums in 2023 and embarking on a truly mammoth world tour – but it seems nobody truly rests in the Brooklyn-based band. Aaron and Bryce Dessner are very in-demand songwriters and producers for a whole host of different bands, while Matt Berninger has decided to dip his toe back into the world of solo projects.
Berninger is no stranger to the side-band project of course. Ten years ago, he formed EL VY with Ramona Falls‘ Brent Knopf, releasing the excellent Return to the Moon (which, so far at least, remains the band’s only record). His debut solo record Serpentine Prison followed almost five years ago, with legendary soul musician Booker T Jones at the production controls.
If you were to draw a Venn diagram regarding American bands tagged variously as No Depression, College Rock, Alt-Country, Paisley Underground and power pop, chances are that Scott McCaughey would be at the centre of the intersections. To quote a recent article, “Over the last four decades, McCaughey has been the Mad Hatter at an eternally rocking tea party where pals from Wilco, The Baseball Project, R.E.M., Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3, The Decemberists, The Bangles, NRBQ, The Dream Syndicate, The Posies, and others help bring his slightly skewed visions to life.”
In his own right, McCaughey has helmed two fine bands, Young Fresh Fellows and The Minus 5, the latter quite a moveable feast of a band, the lineup fluctuating with various members…
Asthmatic Kitty Records celebrates the ten-year anniversary of Carrie & Lowell with an expanded double-LP album that includes seven previously unreleased bonus tracks, a 40-page art book, and a new essay by Sufjan Stevens.
The deluxe edition also offers an alternative cover: a full-framed version of the original Polaroid zoomed out to reveal the photo’s caption written in a child’s handwriting—“Carrie & Lowell”—disclosing the source of the album title (it was written by Sufjan’s sister Djamilah). The new edition was designed by Sufjan himself: the 40-page booklet contains various collages of vintage family photos spanning four generations interfused with artwork and drawings (on themes of death, dying, grief and the state of Oregon) as well as landscape…
Director Alex Ross Perry’s film Pavements is currently screening in select theaters – with more to come – and has been met with confusion, confoundment, and ultimately high praise from critics, including features and reviews in the New York Times, New Yorker, and Los Angeles Times.
On May 30th, Matador will release the Pavements soundtrack album digitally with a physical edition to follow at a later date. Compiled by Pavements producer/editor Robert Greene and Pavement, the soundtrack ropes together disparate elements of Perry’s film – dialogue snippets, scenes from the fake Oscar-bait biopic Range Life, and cast recordings from the Slanted! Enchanted! jukebox musical as well as live and rehearsal tapes from the band’s 2022 reunion tour.
One minute and two seconds into The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’, there’s a vocal punctuation that sends music off on a whole new trajectory: the Fabs united, as a collective Little Richard, letting out an ecstatic “woo!” (or perhaps an “ooh!”: what do you hear?). It’s pop’s capacity for joy, energy, spontaneity and boundless possibilities articulated in a split second.
The seventeenth solo album by Ty Segall, prolific and sometimes frustrating Californian garage rocker, may not have quite the same cultural impact. But after three minutes and 13 seconds of Possession’s title track, Segall drops his very own “woo!” – an unconscious signal, perhaps, that this complicated rock classicist has hit on a more direct mode of expression.
Since reforming in 2010, Swans have made a habit of testing the patience of their audience in pursuit of transcendence, often rewarding that perseverance with profound and overpowering listening experiences. Birthing, a two-hour album with an average track length of about 16-and-a-half minutes, continues that tradition but is even slower, heavier, and more ominous. If the band’s previous two albums, 2019’s Leaving Meaning and 2023’s The Beggar, felt introspective and somewhat muted despite their sense of baroque grandeur, Birthing reaches outward, as if toward the stars, aiming for something far more cosmic.
An almost cultic energy pulses through the album, and it’s not just because of Michael Gira’s weathered incantations or prophetic…
“There’s a running joke in our town,” Alan Sparhawk told a German reporter in 2011. “It says you can’t make a record in Duluth without a banjo on it. The banjo is the sound that signals white people to start drinking and dancing.”
For most of the past three decades, however, Sparhawk has presented a quite different sound of Duluth to the rest of the world; one more evocative of “the slate gray skies and the mysterious foghorns” that another famous son, Bob Dylan, mythologised in Chronicles. Between 1993 and 2022, Sparhawk’s musical energies were concentrated on Low alongside his late wife, Mimi Parker, and on an often stark, slow, musically and emotionally unflinching kind of music. When a rare banjo appeared on their…
The Godfathers launch into celebrations of the 40th anniversary since their formation with a compilation of tracks taken from their most recent three studio albums. It’s a collection of songs which proves beyond any doubt that the band have lost none of their incendiary power and belligerent menace that graced our ears and rattled our speakers when they first emerged on the rock’n’roll scene back in the mid-80s.
The longevity of any band will inevitably be judged by both their ability to continue writing songs which complement the legacy that they have built and also by their live performances such that they do not in any way denigrate that legacy. Within this context, and amidst the explosion of new talent that is emerging from within the current…
Morcheeba make a blistering return with a stunning new album, Escape the Chaos, out on 100% Records. Exquisite new single ‘We Live and Die’ showcases a stunning vocal from Skye and cinematic production by Ross Godfrey.
Escape the Chaos is Morcheeba’s 11 th studio album and follows their 2021 release Blackest Blue. This new album effortlessly shows why they are trip-hop royalty. ‘We Live and Die’ will also be released as their first ever 7” on Record Store Day, April 12th , to celebrate their 30 year anniversary. “For me, ‘We Live and Die’ is about my duration in the band and the music world and life in general,” Skye says of the track. “The lines become blurred after all this time. In a way, it’s a homage to the thirty years of being in Morcheeba…
Brandon Welchez spent the late aughts/early teens in the fuzz-rocking Crocodiles, a duo of So Cal buzzsaw romantics that raised the specter of the Jesus & Mary Chain. His latest project, Psychic Pigs, is a good deal rougher, full of the snarl and spit of late-1970s garage punk: the Ramones, the Dead Boys and Johnny Thunders.
This self-titled album rips the band-aid off with opener “The Law Means Nothing to Us.” The cut begins, deceptively, with a snippet of Mozart, but quickly barrels through that façade. Onslaughts of guitar frayed with volume, furious drumming, agitated but anthemic vocals rampage in double time. The track lasts just under two minutes, but leaves you gasping for breath afterward. The eponymous track, hitting just about…
Thor Harris has become a legend for his multi-instrumentalist work with artists like Swans, Shearwater, Bill Callahan, Devendra Banhart, and Shahzad Ismaily. A Renaissance man of sorts, he’s also a master carpenter, plumber, and woodworker, in addition to being a staunch advocate for mental health with a strong and vibrant social media presence.
While adept at string, percussion, and wind instruments, it was a marimba, gifted to him by producer John Congleton, that inspired Harris to move away from the sound of previous projects and create the luminous Thor & Friends, whose fifth album, Heathen Spirituals, continues their fascinating journey through ambient, minimalist, and occasionally atonal sounds.
There’s something fundamentally elusive about Erin Durant. A New Orleans native who found her artistic identity in the Brooklyn indie folk and rock scene in the 2010s, Durant now lives in Topanga Canyon. That sense of movement, wandering and wondering, is at the core of her music as well.
On Islands, her bewitching eight-song set from 2019, her songs felt like they wanted to hide behind the wallpaper, to never quite embrace a particular destiny. Possessing a woodland sprite soprano and an obvious love of saloon piano and honky-tonk songwriting craft, Durant as often as not seemed to be working in opposition to the composite elements of her work. She tends to shy away from choruses or repeated hooks, instead letting her songs unfurl slowly…
When Shamir first broke into music in 2015, the artist made a deal with himself: “Once I feel like I’ve done and said everything that I felt like I wanted to do and say, then I will call it,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to be an artist who was doing this just because it’s their job.”
One decade and 10 studio albums later, Shamir is making good on that promise. Ten, the mercurial multi-hyphenate’s excellent, indie rock-infused new album is his last one, too. Over the course of 10 songs, Shamir tackles big and small questions — the existential struggle with aging on album-closer “29” feels right at home with the simpler understanding of love lost on “I Know We Can’t Be Friends” — before closing out this chapter of his professional life.
For this reissue of 7Seconds 1986 release New Wind, original producer Ian MacKaye and Inner Ear Studios’ Don Zientara ‘reimagined’ the album, delivering Change in My Head. The effort removes some songs, remixes the full record, plays with the track order and unearths a few unreleased gems from the original recording session.
New Wind, the title alone declared a change was coming, and it is the 7Seconds album that most original fans felt started moving the group too far from their punk/hardcore roots. MacKaye and Zientara worked to perk up the sound a touch, yet this restored effort still clearly displays a band in transition. 7Seconds, Kevin (Seconds) and Steve (Youth) Marvelli, along with drummer Troy Mowat, were moving away from their…
Once a band comes out of hibernation, there’s no telling what they’ll do. The Anomalys, a rough-cut garage band out of Amsterdam, re-emerged in 2022 after a 12-year hiatus, older perhaps but not noticeably wiser, cranking ferocious, block-simple punk rock out of the standard rock line-up. The band draws members of King Khan’s European circle of acquaintances — Remi Pablo on furious, rapturous drums and French punk guitarist Looch Vibrato of MAGNETIX and Louder Than Death. The band leader, known as BONE, plays another guitar. There is no bass, though someone’s making heavy use of the fat strings on his guitar.
This is the sort of music best honed live, and the Anomalys have spent the last two years playing a shit-ton of shows. “Anxiety,” an early single,…