British post-bunkers Dry Cleaning have a way of combining angular, jagged, rollicking chords, riffs, and drum fills with spoken word vocals that is difficult to describe and even more difficult for anyone to attempt to emulate. Front woman Florence Shaw is one of the wittiest and most enigmatic lyricists out there right now, and her bandmates (Nick Buxton – drums, Tom Dowse – guitar, and Lewis Maynard – bass) are wild craftsmen in their own right. Their first full-length album, New Long Leg, is a cool record that’s a little tighter than their previous EPs, made so by having plenty of time to tweak tracks and explore new sounds thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic cancelling their 2020 tour, but no less intriguing.
Maynard’s bass is something the Delta 5 would love on the opening track, “Scratchcard Lanyard,” while Shaw tells us, “It’s okay, I just need to be weird and hide for a bit and eat an old sandwich from my bag.” Haven’t we all felt like that at some point since March 2020? “Unsmart Lady” starts with a wild cacophony and then settles into a solid rock groove from Dowse that reminds me of good Foreigner tracks. Shaw also lets you know how to find a girlfriend: “If you like a girl, be nice. It’s not rocket science.”
My favorite lyric of Shaw’s on “Strong Feelings” is “That seems like a lot of garlic.” It comes out of nowhere among Buxton’s tight, yet slippery beats. “Leafy” seems to be about a break-up with Shaw singing about cleaning out a house (“What about all the uneaten sausages?”) while her bandmates seem to be playing a different song in another room. This is the kind of song Dry Cleaning does so well. Shaw seems to be doing her own thing while Buxton, Dowse, and Maynard are jamming on their own, but both elements somehow perfectly combine.
It will be a crime if Dry Cleaning doesn’t produce merchandise that reads “More espresso, less depresso.” – a great lyric from the jangly, yet smooth “Her Hippo.” The title track, with its stabbing guitar riffs, has Shaw musing over the idea of going on a cruise while she’s stuck at home due to every travel plan getting cancelled last year. “If you’re an Aries, then I’m an Aries,” Shaw says, perhaps flirtatiously, on “John Wick” – which has nothing to do with an Uber-assassin and more to do with old men griping about things that don’t matter. Dowse’s guitar on it is almost the sound of these men bitching about Antiques Roadshow and the trash truck running late.
Shaw’s vocals sound slightly electronic / robotic on “More Big Birds,” almost turning her into a computer voice. It’s a slight touch, but instantly intriguing. I’d love to know the story behind “ALC” because it starts with Shaw telling someone, “You can’t just come into my garden in your football kit and start asking questions about who lives here. Who’s asking?”
The closer, “Every Day Carry,” is a wild, psychedelic trip that has Dowse, Maynard, and Buxton playing a cool psych-jazz / post-punk blend in a dark club in the back of a former clock factory while Shaw sings / speaks about topics ranging from chocolate chips cookies and imminent domain construction to cab drivers and geese. There’s a great breakdown about halfway through when the band dissolves into a noise rock jam and then kicks back into gear with swirling sounds and Shaw’s voice and lyrics being the eye of their hurricane. It ends like a power outage.
New Long Leg is setting the bar high for other post-punk bands (or any other genre, really) to follow in 2021. Dry Cleaning’s forced vacation did wonders for their creative energy and focus, and for our ears.
Keep your mind open.
[Stretch your legs over to the subscription box while you’re here.]
Ten years in the making, Open Hand‘s newest album, Weirdo, has plenty of appropriately weird stuff, psychedelic fuzz, vintage synths, and seriously cool chops. The album opens with someone saying, “I’ve got a message for you, and you’re not going to like it.” Okay, Open Hand. You have my attention.
“The People’s Temple” has guitarist / vocalists Justin Isham encouraging us to leave because he’s feeling much better. It’s an interesting suggestion after a decade, and even more so as Isham sings that he’s considering running away from something (Stardom? A relationship? People in general?). It’s difficult to take him too seriously, however, because the opening track bumps and jams with funky keys by Kyle Hammond and damn funky drumming by Gil Sharone.
Mike Longworth‘s rapid bass chords open the danceable “It Takes Me,” which reminds me of the dance-funk stylings of !!!. Isham and Ryan Castanga‘s guitars shimmer on the fuzz-heavy “Again?”, showing off the band’s deftness at switching from dance-funk to shoegaze and doing both genres well. They go back to dance-funk on “Like I Do,” and Hammond gets another chance to strut his stuff with formidable synth bleeps, bloops, and beats.
“Return” (with guest drums from Mike Levine and guest vocals from Lisa Loeb) is a neat, spacey track, and “In My Way” gets us firmly back into shoegaze territory, reminding one of Humand Failurecuts. Sharone puts down some of his fiercest beats on the track. Seriously, some of his fills will knock you back in your chair. Isham, Longworth, and Castanga crank up the fuzz on “I Think So,” and it mixes well with Sharone’s rocket fuel drums and Hammond’s sunshine synths.
“Loved,” with guest co-vocals from Brittany Snow, has a bit of a prog-rock feel to it that changes things up a bit. Bill Gaal takes over on bass on “Chances,” and proceeds to get his money’s worth by thudding us with glorious fuzz and low end as the rest of Open Hand unleash a track that Josh Homme would envy. “Draw the Line” ends the album with some space rock and, I think, samples from the weird John Carpenter horror film, The Prince of Darkness.
I don’t know why Open Hand took a decade off from releasing new material, but I’m glad they’re back in 2021. Everyone needs good music nowadays, and stuff as good as Weirdo is more than welcome.
Today, Los Angeles-based musician Jess Cornelius presents a cover of the Eagles’ “I Can’t Tell You Why.” Rather than remaining faithful to the original, Cornelius transforms the song with a grittier sound featuring a drum machine and live drums, and fuzzy guitars which unwind under her muscular croon. It was recorded by Aaron Stern in Los Angeles earlier this year.
Cornelius elaborates: “I can’t remember when this song first came under my radar — I imagine that, like for many people, it was sort of playing in the background on one of those classic hits stations. One day a friend put the song on (because we were talking about late 70s yacht rock, I guess) and it got a bit stuck in my head so I learnt the chords. It wasn’t ever going to be something that I covered faithfully, and I didn’t see the point anyway.
So I was messing around with the arrangement, making it less bouncy and darker. I have always loved the melody, and the tension of the chorus, but to me it was a sad song and I wanted to bring out the frustration of the lyrics. Also, years ago I heard Lou Reed cover Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill,’ which is one of my favorite covers of all time, and that became a bit of a template for this version. It’s almost an homage to that cover, really.
I wanted to learn the guitar solo, because I never do, so it was fun to practice all that cheesy string bending. Of course, my version is a little trashier. And I started with drum machine drums but added some live drums at the end. I kinda wanted it to sound like it was disintegrating — luckily Jarvis Taveniere was mixing so he made the drums sound cohesive and not as chaotic.”
The Go! Team’s debut LP, 2004’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike, is an album that had a transformative effect on independent music, a release Pitchfork describes as “an ear-ringing sugar buzz that energized a generation of previously fun-averse indie fans.” In the years since The Go! Team have never let up, releasing 4 more albums of innovative, danceable, sample-based music while steadily evolving a sound that has an omnivorous appetite for tones, textures, styles and genres, combining and re-combining disparate building blocks into a sound that is always, undeniably The Go! Team. Today, the band are announcing their 6th LP. Get Up Sequences Part One, set to be released via Memphis Industrieson July 2nd, and sharing the album’s first single “World Remember Me Now,” a song that provides a tantalizing hint of an album that it sure to be a bright light of this summer and of the band’s catalog.
WATCH: to The Go! Team’s “World Remember Me Now” on YouTube
Performed by long time Go! Team lead vocalist Ninja and members of the Kansas City Girls Choir, “World Remember Me Now” is about feeling forgotten in the modern world. From the opening alarm clock, the lyrics take the structure of a day in the life of a woman in a big city: “Pour the Orange Juice and Check the Post, Flip the Calendar and Pop the Toast”. “I’ve always been interested in people’s daily routines – what people do all day” says Go! Team songwriter Ian Parton. “It was written ages ago but has become strangely relevant to the world now. It’s easy to feel forgotten at the moment”.
While the album is a burst of positivity from the band, the recording of the album was a tough process for Go! Team leader Ian Parton, who began losing his hearing while working on the album.
“I lost hearing in my right ear halfway during the making of this record” Parton explains. “I woke up one Thursday in October 2019 and my hearing was different in some way – it fluctuated over a few weeks and at one point everything sounded like a Dalek. I seem to remember listening to music was bordering on unbearable. Over time it settled into just a tiny bit of hi end being audible on my right side. I thought the hearing loss was from playing music too loud over the years but it turns out I was just unlucky and it was a rare condition called Menieres. It was traumatic to keep listening to songs I knew well but which suddenly sounded different and it was an odd juxtaposition to listen to upbeat music when I was on such a downer. The trauma of losing my hearing gave the music a different dimension for me and it transformed the album into more of a life raft.”
Read more on the background of the album and the band from DJ, film maker, The Clash cinematographer and Big Audio Dynamite member Don Letts below:
Twenty one seconds, that’s all it took – actually rewind that ‘cause I was hooked by the first 15 such was the impact of ‘Let The Seasons Work’ the veritable statement of intent that is the opening track of The Go! Teams latest album ‘Get Up Sequences Part One’ and once I’d stepped through that door I definitely wanted more….
With echoes of the past, their avalanche of sound first caught my ear with ‘Power is On’ from 2004’s ’Thunder, Lightning, Strike’ which sampled a clip from my Clash film ‘Westway to The World’. I was struck by their use of the obscure – something that didn’t go unnoticed by this ex-member of Mick Jones second band Big Audio Dynamite. But here’s the thing – on further investigation it was clear to hear there was more going on than a clever use of samples n’ loops – ‘cause if you took ‘em away you still had kickass songs and that was always the B.A.D acid test. The album was a great introduction to an outfit I’ve been a fan of from that time till this. Further exploration led to the revelation it was primarily the vision of one man, musical ringmaster Ian Parton – accompanied by a co-ed team of players to push that vision further.I also came to recognise Ian’s ability to see the beauty and the possibilities of the amateur and the naive. Armed with these attributes they delivered Proof of Youth The Go! Team’s second album in 2007 n’ that took things to another level with guest vocals from the likes of the Double Dutch Divas and Public Enemy‘s Chuck D. For 2011’s ‘Rolling Blackouts’ the band’s cut n’ paste approach was supplemented by a cast of thousands, some regular some not to deliver a bunch of satisfying songs that sampled the likes of Harry Nilsson, Lata Mangeshkar n’ Joe Tex along way. By way of contrast and in the wake of a band break up 2015’s ‘The Scene Between’ would see a return to the stripped back beginnings of the debut album. But at the heart of what was an undoubtedly more sampled driven outing were those, by now familiar, melody driven hooks. In 2018 ‘Semicircle’ knocked it out of the park, teaming up with a community choir in Detroit, Michigan.
And now on ‘Get Up Sequences Part One’ Ian, Ninja, Nia, Simone, Sam and Adam have created a musical world distinctly of their own making. A place where routine is outlawed and perfection is the enemy. Where Ennio Morricone meets the Monkees armed with flutes, glockenspiels, steel drums and a badass analogue attitude. We’re talking widescreen, four-track, channel hopping sounds that are instantly recognisable.
In The Go! Team’s world old’s cool, the future’s bright and melody is the star….
Just check the second cut COOKIE SCENE – with a bouncing flute and junk shop percussion it introduces guest rapper Indigo Yaj who delivers an old school vocal that continues this sonic trip. Next stop the harmonica driven northern soul groove that is A MEMO FOR MACEO, an instrumental for your thoughts to become lyrics and turn your life into a movie. In WE DO IT BUT NEVER KNOW WHY matters of the heart get a look in albeit with a Go! Team twist that sees trumpets ask the questions and steel drums give the answer. Just as FREEDOM NOW comes bursting through the gates with an OMG instrumental jam that’ll blow out your speakers. Now if you wanna loose your shit this next cuts it – with a chorus channeling Curtis Mayfield, enter the inimitable Ninja with POW and you don’t stop, you wont stop to this flute driven free for all. By way of demonstrating the ringmaster’s passion for those old’s cool vocals combined with his ‘needle-in-the-red’ recording technique comes I LOVED YOU BETTER a defiant message to an ex love, spelling out exactly how he’s fucked up – and then there’s those steel drums. Following that some soda fountain soulcourtesy of A BEE WITHOUT ITS STING, a groovy protest song that makes its point with a tambourine – hey only The Go! Team. The musical wagon train then takes you into the wide screen, wind swept western that is TAME THE GREAT PLAINS heading off into a polyrhythmic panorama that’s full of hope. Slappin’ you back to reality comes WORLD REMEMBER ME NOW a timely reminder that when you’re lost in the routine of life,you can always count on The Go! Team.
The sum total of my listening experience was that the band came through on their opening musical promise to deliver that most rare of works – a complete one. Using ingredients available to everyone they manage to sound like no one – they are The Go! Team and if ‘Get Up Sequences Part One’ doesn’t hit you like it hit me, check yr pulse – you might be dead.
– Don Letts
“World Remember Me Now” is out now on Memphis Industries. Get Up Sequences Part One is out on July 2nd on Memphis Industries. Pre-order from their store here.
Museum Of Love – the New York-based duo of Pat Mahoney and Dennis McNany – returns with new single “Cluttered World” on Skint Records. Produced by the duo and mixed by James Murphy (DFA / LCD Soundsystem), “Cluttered World” is a super-futuristic torch song — it takes you by the hand and leads you down, down into a subterranean basement, all thick air and close heat. It pulls up a stool somewhere between the grand piano and the quaking bass bins and sets you right in the heart of the action. It’s a wild and disorientating place, yet it’s one you’ll want to return to again and again each time the drum track stops. “The song is about labor in the 21st century, and drifting and sifting through the hyper-abundance of our so called civilization,” explains Museum Of Love.
Mahoney, founder and drummer of LCD Soundsystem, and McNany, known for his production work as Jee Day, formed Museum Of Love in 2013 and released their lauded self-titled debut the following year. “Cluttered World” is their first taste of new music to come later this year.
Kindred spirits from far across the globe, Brooklyn, NY quintet Clone and Aukland, NZ trio Swallow The Rat announce their forthcoming split LP today, sharing one track from each band via New Noise.
New Zealand’s Swallow the Rat (featuring ex-My Education guitarist Brian Purington) and New York’s Clone (ex-Dead Leaf Echo, Squad Car) shared a stage in Queens, NYC on perhaps the last day before the city shut down in 2020. A mutual appreciation society was formed over drinks later that night. Swallow the Rat were in town to play the New Colossus Festival, while Clone were playing what was to be the first date of their debut tour of the East Coast. There were plans to share the stage again in New Orleans and in Austin at SXSW.
A global pandemic put an end to this, but the bands kept talking. Both had recently recorded EPs, and so a plan was hatched: a split 12″ with songs from both bands. Four tunes apiece, about the irony of memory recall, the loss of friends by their own hand, frustrations of gender role psyche and the fear of looking back. Dissonant delayed guitars and martial drums abound, despite the oceans and continents separating the groups.
Swallow The Rat / Clone split LP will be available on LP and download on May 21st via Headbump Records. Pre-orders are available via Rough Trade in the US HERE and Golden Antenna in the EU HERE.
Earlier this year, Squid announced the release of their much-anticipated debut album, Bright Green Field, out May 7th via Warp Records. Today, they present a new single, “Paddling,” which follows the release of “Narrator” (feat. Martha Skye Murphy), and announce an onlineperformance as part of the official British Music Embassy SXSW showcase, airing Friday, March 19th at 6pm CDT.
“Paddling” has long been a staple of Squid’s incendiary live show. This psych-motorik stomper is a reaction to being thrust into an adult world as friends suddenly turn their focus to careers. Built around a drum machine loop and pulsing synth line, sonic details pepper the track as it lurches between dynamic movements. All the while, the band members share vocal duties with an infectious ease and confidence. Squid elaborates: “Written from two different perspectives, ‘Paddling’ is a song about the dichotomy between simple pleasures and decadent consumerism. Recounting a familiar scene from The Wind in the Willows, the song reminds us that although we are humans, we are ultimately animals that are driven by both modern and primal instincts, leading to vanity and machismo around us in the everyday.”
Bright Green Field is an album of towering scope and ambition that endlessly twists down unpredictable avenues. Each member – Louis Borlase (guitars/vocals), Oliver Judge(drums/vocals), Arthur Leadbetter (keyboards/strings/ percussion), Laurie Nankivell(bass/brass) and Anton Pearson (guitars/vocals) – played an equal, vital role in the album’s creation. Written in Judge’s old local pub and recorded in producer Dan Carey’s London basement studio, it includes field recordings of ringing church bells, tooting bees, microphones swinging from the ceiling orbiting a room of guitar amps, a distorted choir of 30 voices as well as a horn and string ensemble featuring Emma-Jean Thackray and Lewis Evans from Black Country, New Road.
Squid’s music – be it agitated and discordant or groove-locked and flowing – has often been a reflection of the tumultuous world we live in. As an album title, Bright Green Field conjures an almost tangible imagery of pastoral England. However, it’s something of a decoy that captures the band’s fondness for paradox and juxtaposition. Although the geography of Bright Green Fieldis an imaginary cityscape built from monolithic concrete buildings and dystopian visions, it’s also a joyous and emphatic record that marries the uncertainties of the world with a curious sense of exploration.
Swedish rock band Alastor share the first single from their forthcoming album Onwards and Downwards today via Metal Injection. Hear and share “Death Cult” HERE. (Direct YouTube and Bandcamp.)
Excelsior! It’s the hail of yore that one should go ever onward and upward. And so, fittingly Onwards and Downwards is the occultist Swedish band Alastor’s clever call to arms… and also a reflection of our collective dark state of mind these days.
“If our last album Slave to the Grave were about death, this record is more about madness,” says guitaristHampus Sandell. “You can look at the whole record as one person’s gradual slip into insanity. An ongoing nightmare without end. It also sums up the state of the world around us as this year has clearly shown.”
Alastor is heavy doom rock for the wicked and depraved. Drenched in heavy, distorted darkness and steeped in occult horror that will make your skin crawl and ears cry sweet tears of blood, the band is revitalized in 2021 with meticulously crafted songs and new drummerJim Nordström bringing a hard-hitting and precise energy.
“It’s a more focused record but at the same time it’s more personal and naked. More raw emotion and pain,” Hampus says. The band recorded the album with the help of Joona Hassinen of Studio Underjord, who has helped with mixing since their Blood on Satan’s Claw EP in 2017. Christoffer Karlsson of The Dahmers also assisted with overdubs and encouraged the band to demo the material early on, aiding in the album’s more deliberate and tighter feel.
From the first note of opener “The Killer In My Skull” the guitars are far thicker and out front than ever, and Nordström pummels the snare and kick like a young Dave Grohl. Bassist / vocalistRobin Arnryd’s chorus-drenched voice soars above it all like a one-man choir, at times harmonizing beautifully with shimmering Hammond organ notes. Nary a moment is wasted on the droning navel-gazing of lesser bands. Particularly, the driving anthem “Death Cult” which sounds like it would fit comfortably on QOTSA’s Songs For The Deaf, though there’s considerably more heft here. The title track pays its due to the Devil’s tritone in a marvelously woven framework of intertwining melodies befitting the album’s theme of descent into madness.
The quartet released its epic 3-song debut album Black Magic in early 2017 via Twin Earth Records, followed by the 2-track Blood on Satan’s Claw EP on Halloween the same year. Joining forces with RidingEasy Records in 2018, Alastor summoned the 7-track hateful gospel Slave to the Grave, which was packed with dynamic twists and turns, and funereal girth. It was met with considerable praise, setting the stage for the band’s greatest step onward (and upward… or downward, depending on your preferences.)
Onwards and Downwards will be available on LP, CD and download on May 28th, 2021 via RidingEasy Records.
Keep your mind open.
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Hailing from Athens, Greece, Holy Monitor (Alex Bolpasis – bass, Dimitris Doumouliakas – drums, Stefanos Mitsis – guitar, Vangelis Mitsis – keyboards, and George Nikas – vocals and guitar) combines psych-rock, kraut rock, stoner rock, space rock, and even ambient music on their new album Southern Lights.
Opening track “River” has fuzzy guitars, psychedelic organ chords, and heavy drums telling a lovely tale of the night sky reflected in moving waters. “Naked in the Rain” has a great 1960s garage-psych groove to it as Holy Monitor calls for us to “shine on” through tough times.
“Blue Whale” is a tale of a mystical creature or woman (perhaps one and the same) that exists in the mind of Nikas. The title track lays on the reverb, both on the guitars and the vocals, creating a hypnotizing brew. “The Sky Is Falling Down” seems to be a reaction to a large portion of the world going for each other’s throats in the middle of a pandemic (“It sounds like madness, but I know you’re feeling lonely. It sounds like madness, but we’re falling in a state of slumber.”). The song starts chaotic, then drifts into a neat dream-space before it fades out…and then rockets forth again with some of Doumouliakas’ biggest cymbal crashes and Vangelis Mitsis’ heaviest synth-stabs.
“Hourglass” is a nice, synth-based, instrumental palate cleanser before the heavy psych of “Ocean Trail” (with Stefanos Mitsis and Nikas upping the fuzz on their guitars even more). The album ends with another water-themed track, “Under the Sea.” It’s a nice slice of cosmic rock that, like “The Sky Is Falling Down,” talks about the COVID-19 pandemic, but with hope instead of concern. “One summer night, a stranger approached me, like people did before they got sick. He touched my hand and told me his story. I always had a curiosity,” Nikas sings. We all dream of returning to times when we could at least have the chance to engage in a meaningful conversation with a stranger.
We all dream of drifting away and leaving COVID-19 behind us, and albums like Southern Lights make the waiting easier.
Keep your mind open.
[Drift over to the subscription box while you’re here.]
Kalbells—the collaborative synth/art-pop project of Kalmia Traver, Angelica Bess, Sarah Pedinotti, and Zoë Brecher—today shared their dreamy new single, “Diagram of Me Sleeping”, from the upcoming full-length, Max Heart, releasing March 26 via NNA Tapes.
Each track from Max Heart excavates love and creativity from a new and surprising ventricle of life—and “Diagram” fits right in as a lofty ode to sleep, brought to reality with jazzy bedroom-pop melodies, swoony sax, and playfully surreal lyricism. Traver explains how the song came to fruition: “I woke up one morning and my legs felt relaxed and pillowy like two lovers tangled together in mindless warmth and it was pleasant beyond the sensical and I wrote this song. I’ve come to crave sleep almost like love itself. Sleep is where so much of our creativity happens, in dreams & in the spaces between them. I love thinking of my body as a landscape, and sleep is the time I get to roam it freely.”
Traver adds about the recording/mixing process: “I especially loved tracking drums & bass on this recording. We were recording straight to tape at Outlier Inn in the Catskills and the sounds we were getting for Zoë & Sarah were sending shivers up our spines, we were prancing around all giddy. I mixed Max Heart (my first time mixing an album! – I taught myself the skill of mixing during the initial covid quarantine, alone for 4 months in my apartment NYC) and mixing this song was so easy because the sounds we got were so good and the song was simple. It was very satisfying and created a blueprint for mixing the rest of the record.”
The sophomore album from Kalbells, illustrates the formidable love Kalmia Traver (Rubblebucket) discovered with her touring band turned bandmates. Together, Angelica Bess (Giraffage, Body Language), Zoë Becher (Hushpuppy, Sad13), Sarah Pedinotti (Okkervil River, LipTalk) and Traver, practice both listening and accountability, rejoicing in their queerness, and promoting each other to be their most genuine selves. The result is Max Heart—ten vibrant and subtly layered tracks of mesmerizing psychedelic synth-pop. Common groove language is a rare medicine to happen across, which is why, as a group, playing together has been not only exciting, but healing. Max Heart harnesses this magnetic power for a collection of songs that are packed with inspired tension and daring surreality. Read the full bio here.
Max Heart is available to pre-order on standard black & “Salty Pickle” green vinyl, as well as on compact disc and digital formats here. The album will be available on “Red Marker” red vinyl exclusively from local indie record stores.
