US indie
PREMIERE: Fixtures – ‘Five Ft One, Six Ft Ten’: proper scruffy, shredding alt.guitar pop like they used to make
BROOKLYN five-piece Fixtures know how to do a ridiculously fun guitar pop rush. Really, they do. They’ve just signed on the dotted with Spain’s Bobo Integral, and will be releasing their debut EP, Weak Automatic, for their new home in December. We’ve had a little listen, and another one, and another; and it really is …
SEE: Tune-Yards’ ‘nowhere, man’: brilliantly freakish stop-motion and a rousing groove
MERRILL GARBUS and Nate Brenner’s excellent, genre-busting, rousing Tune-Yards have released a brilliantly freakish stop-motion animation for their new track, “nowhere, man”. It’s bright, groovy, offbeat, spacious, eccentrically paced, passionately sung: in short, everything you need a Tune-Yards’ tune to be. And that accompanying video … Merrill and Nate are caught giving it the Chaplin …
ALBUM REVIEW: Bill Callahan – ‘Gold Record’: Bill pans for nuggets and strikes again
BILL CALLAHAN. Question: can you imagine a world where we don’t have his grace, his eye for the humanity of the everyday, his profound bass-voiced grace, those songwriting abilities. Scary thought, huh? There’s been enough to scare us in this ill-starred year of our lord, 2020. So we can be grateful that he’s kinda sprung …
TRACK: Bill Callahan – ‘Ry Cooder’: a track for a legend, the penultimate ‘gold’
WE REALLY are that far down the line toward the end of the summer. Bill Callahan has released a track for Monday for nine consecutive weeks now ahead of Gold Record on September 4th, and we really are that close to autumn. His penultimate single drop comes in the shape of “Ry Cooder”: a meandering …
SEE: Eels drop surprise new cut, ‘Baby Let’s Make It Real’
FULL of surprises, Mark Everitt’s Eels have just dropped an unexpected new single entitled “Baby Let’s Make It Real”, the result of recent sessions at the band’s studio in Los Feliz, California. It’s the first new music to emerge by the band since the release of their most recent album, The Deconstruction, two years ago. …
SEE: Icarus Pheonix – ‘Zero One, For Will Sartain’: gloriously warm-hearted confessional indie teases cassette-only album
COMING at you out of Missoula, Montana, after a long period creating in Utah, Drew Danburry – who debuted in the world of music with 2005’s brilliantly, almost David Foster Wallace-entitled album, Besides: Are We Just Playing Around Out Here, Or Do We Mean What We Say? has emerged from a retreat, dealing with his …
NEWS: Live-stream shows from And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead: UK ‘date’ this Friday
FACED by the reality that any chance of getting some gigs under their belt for 2020 was vanishing like a mirage, Austin, TX guitar deities …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead have gone some way to assuaging our collective need by announcing a trio of live-stream shows, with a date especially …
ALBUM REVIEW: Box of Chocolates – ‘Fearful Symmetry’: early Brooklyn stirrings from Will Oldham, et al
EVERY era of music has those great, lost nuggets which slip out, are adored by the knowing few, lost to the many; are whispered about and traded for ever-inflating sums until they break cover once more. It’s a cycle that can sometimes take a generation, as the actual chaff falls away to leave little beauties …
SEE: Slow Pulp – ‘Idaho’: graceful and languid guitar pop
I MEAN, as if the depredations of the coronavirus weren’t enough; try having the year that Emily Massey, singer-guitarist of Wisconsin-formed, Chicago-based, languid guitar venturers Slow Pulp has just lived through. Off the back of their Big Day EP – their fifth release, but their first venture into the physical format, they began work on …
TRACK: Bill Callahan makes it a Monday quartet with ‘Protest Song’
BILL CALLAHAN’S ongoing Monday afternoon pledge to gift us a song from his September Gold Record reached its fourth instalment today, with the downhome and evocative porchside “Protest Song”. Today’s is a bluesy, spontaneous and raggy fragment, with the meta-theme of being a protest song about a protest song on the television. “Somebody must stop …