drag city
NEWS: The Peacers return with March set for Drag City; see ‘Irish Suit’
SIC ALPS were one of those bands which, with the amount of the talent in its ranks, could only burn bright and, like an unstable isotope, emit members to spin off into other musical pursuits, eventually to transform itself in a musical half-life. Tim Hellman went into the ranks of Thee Oh Sees; Mike Donovan …
TRACK: Bill Stone – ‘Purple’: lost psych-folk nugget gets a reissue
YOU MAY think we’ve been there, got the T-shirt, seen it all where it comes to long-lost psych singer-songwriters of the Sixties and Seventies. Yep, we’ve adored and come to revise the place of history for artists like Bill Fay, Vashti, Gary Higgins; Linda Perhacs. They’re embraced, lauded, careers rejuvenated. We’ve mined it dry; we …
SEE: New Bums – ‘Tuned To Graffiti’: insouciant, folksy beauty trails for March album
NEW BUMS is the freewheelin’ two-hander of two very fine songwriters in their own right: Ben Chasny, aka psychotropic voyaging genius Six Organs of Admittance; and Donovan Quinn, formerly of the truly lovely and cultist Jagjaguwar baroque-psych-folk outfit Skygreen Leopards. They’ve got together before, almost seven years back, for the loose ‘n’ lovely Voices In …
SEE: Cory Hanson – ‘Angeles’: mellow LA country-psych with the darkest heart
BY DAY Cory Hanson is singer-guitarist with LA psych quintet Wand, but he also pursues a rather seductive solo vision: a very LA blur of blissful, rootsy psych, part-Laurel Canyon, part-peyote in the deserts out past city limits. He’s got only his second full-length solo outing, Pale Horse Rider, due for release on Drag City …
SEE: The video for Bill Callahan’s ‘Breakfast’: a visual nugget sifted from ‘Gold Record’
OUR DEEPEST Americana poet Bill Callahan put together his latest album, Gold Record, really quickly, and previewed it over those long, lazy lockdown summer days with the neat idea of dropping a track every Monday afternoon leading up to its eventual September release. Loose and freewheeling it may have been, but that doesn’t take anything …
TRACK: New Bums – ‘Billy, God Damn’: a freewheelin’ acoustic slide blues
ONE – and there are many more, but for now, this – one of the many reasons we over at Backseat Mafia love the good folks at Drag City, is that they have a huge roster of brilliant artists who mix and collaborate and create anew; and that DC fosters and releases such new breeds …
NEWS: Cory Hanson announces second solo LP; see the country-psych grace of ‘Paper Fog’
CORY HANSON, singer-guitarist with LA psych seducers Wand, has today unveiled the video for “Paper Fog”, a very first preview of what’s to come from his second extra-curricular outing, Pale Horse Rider, due from the dependably lovely Drag City come spring. Watch the video, below. Drag City say “it’s a record as much about Los Angeles …
SEE: Dope Body – ‘Known Unknown’: gloriously messy highlight from ‘Crack A Light’ gets visuals
NEED a big, dirty, cathartic winter lift? No need to dial. Doctor Dope Body has just the prescription for you. They’ve pulled what’s arguably the standout track from their most recent album, Crack A Light, “Known Unknown” – and given it some righteous visuals. The track? It’s the album closer, a brilliant distorted space-disco-punk-noise rattle: …
SEE: Calexico to release seasonal album; watch the video for ‘Hear The Bells’
ARIZONA’S atmospheric Tex-Mex outfit Calexico have returned after last year’s collaborative album with Iron & Wine, and have announced a new album whose songs are very much concerned with this time of year in the shape of Seasonal Shift. The album is a celebration of the wider winter and festive season and will be released …
TRACK: Edith Frost – ‘Little Sign’: a psych-country call for positive action
NOW THERE’S a singer from Drag City’s diverse and always lovable stable that we haven’t heard nearly enough from in recent years. San Antonio’s self-styled purveyor of “pensive, countrified psychedelia”, who recorded a lovely quartet of albums for the label around and just past the turn of the century, has broken ground in 2020 with …