This is the first of three (so far) live albums released this month from Australian juggernauts King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. All proceeds from the purchase of Live in Adelaide ’19(and the other live records) go toward wildlife rescue efforts during Australia’s horrible brush fires.
They come out roaring with “Planet B,” “Mars for the Rich,” and “Venusian 1” – any of which can flatten the uninitiated. “Cyboogie” is a switch to synth-blues and the grooves of “Real’s Not Real,” “Hot Water” (with guest flute from Adam Halliwell of Mildlife) and “Open Water.” “Sleep Drifter” is one of those songs that always delights when you hear it live.
“Billabong Valley” is always a crowd favorite because Ambrose Kenny-Smith takes on lead vocals in the song about an Outback outlaw. “The Bird Song” is another great live treat, as the song is so happy and groovy you can’t help but smile when you hear it. Things get weird on “Inner Cell,” a tune that had a menacing buzz throughout it, and “Loyalty,” which has plenty of odd time signatures to amaze you.
The groove on “Plastic Boogie” makes you think the song should’ve been named “Solid Rock Boogie.” The band then heads back into thrash metal with “Organ Farmer” (which is bonkers) and “Self-Immolate” before learning they still have thirty-five minutes of stage time left. What to do? How about playing a nearly half-hour version of “Head On / Pill” which is nothing short of outstanding?
This is a solid live album by one of the best live bands on the planet right now, and you can’t beat the price and you’re contributing to a great cause when you buy it. It’s a win for everyone.
Okay Kaya – the project of Norwegian-born, New York-based Kaya Wilkins – shares the new single/video, “Psych Ward,” from Watch This Liquid Pour Itself, her forthcoming album out January 24th on Jagjaguwar. She also announces initial performances in support of Watch This Liquid Pour Itself. A full list of dates can be found below.
“Psych Ward,” produced by Kaya with co-production from Christoph Andersson (Cautious Clay), follows previously released singles/videos “Asexual Wellbeing,” “Baby Little Tween,” and “Ascend and Try Again.” On “Psych Ward,” Kaya’s scene of nurses making rounds is based on her personal experience of time spent in a hospital. Kaya describes the track and the video in her own words:
“This is basically a Hospital Evaluation Form. The last few days I was in a hospital a nurse unlocked one of the cabinets and let me use the rec room guitar, to play outside of art therapy class. I wrote what I saw to understand how I felt. It turned into this funny bop, I wanted it to feel like a Ramones song or something.
I wrote the lyrics in a very literal way as I often tend to do. When it was time for a music video I took the words ‘do the rounds’ even more literally by making Kaya pole dance in her daydream during her morning fitness routine. The fitness routines were always to an ABBA greatest hits CD, it felt much too ecstatic compared to the heavily drugged hospital bodies, barely out of bed, barely moving. I wanted the video to show that effort, because I am scared to forget. This whole album is filled with moments I am scared to forget, coming right at you projectile style.”
Although Kaya recorded most of Watch This Liquid Pour Itself herself, she also collaborated with producers Jacob Portrait (UMO, Whitney, (Sandy) Alex G) and John Carroll Kirby (Solange, Kali Uchis) to fully realize her ideas for how this record should sound. Each of the music videos for the new record are co-directed by Kaya and Adinah Dancyger, and were shot respectively in Germany, Japan, Norway, and New York.
Additionally, Kaya is pleased to announce that all of her music videos will be screening later this month – January 15th at Film Noir in New York and January 23rd at Now Instant in Los Angeles. She’ll also be performing solo on January 27th at the Van Leeuwen Ice Cream shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as part of her Van Leeuwen collaboration. Kaya’s special “Eat Your Feelings” a vegan black sesame ice cream flavor, will be available for a limited time at their Williamsburg, Lower East Side and Silverlake (Los Angeles) scoop shops. Watch “Psych Ward” Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nedrz5vDug
Okay Kaya Tour Dates: Mon. Jan. 27 – Brooklyn, NY @ Van Leeuwen Ice Cream (RSVP) Tue. Jan. 28 – New York, NY @ Whitney Museum of American Art (DJ Set) Thu. Feb. 13 – Brooklyn, NY @ National Sawdust Fri. Feb. 28 – Oslo, NO @ By:Larm Mon. March 2 – Paris, FR @ Pop Up Wed. March 4 – London, UK @ SET Sun. March 8 – San Diego, CA @ CRSSD Mon. March 9 – San Francisco, CA @ Cafe Du Nord Tue. March 10 – Los Angeles, CA @ Moroccan Lounge Tue. March 17 – Sat. March 21 – Austin, TX @ SXSW Fri. May 8 – Berlin, DE @ Pitchfork Festival
Hailing from Lyon, France, doom metal trio Praÿ (Antonie Berthet-Bondet – drums, Maud Gibbons – guitar, and Jason Rols – bass) let you know right away on their self-titled album that they are not screwing around with you.
Rols’ opening bass on the first track, “First Trip,” sets the creepy tone / begins the ritual and soon Gibbons’ guitar is calling to ancient things beyond the stars and Berthet-Bondet’s drums are heralding their arrival. The song floats into psychedelia close to the nine-minute mark and brings back to Earth, although we return wondering if there are things lurking in the shadows (Spoiler: There are.)
“Heretic Eye” also gets off to a dark, quiet start before unleashing fuzzed fury that might knock you out of your chair. “Sulphur” ups the speed a bit and reveals some of the band’s prog-rock influences (mainly through some of the time signatures and Gibbons’ chords early in the track) before the raw power of all three members hits you in the chest like a sledgehammer…and then quiets down to a low rumble before smashing up the place again. The song goes through at least three changes, and each one is somehow better than the last. The final track, “Bottom of the Universe,” sounds like its emerging from a black hole somewhere beyond Alpha Centauri, so the name is appropriate. It hits you with big cymbal crashes and bass thuds and guitar chords that sound like the devil revving the engine of his hot rod. Then, the bottom drops out and we’re floating in a psychedelic Steve Ditko-drawn universe that leads us to a Jack Kirby-drawn post-apocalyptic planet.
The album is only four instrumental songs, but the shortest one is eleven minutes and twelve seconds in length. They don’t cheat the listener or themselves. They explore the shadows as long as they like. Do you dare join them on the journey?
Keep your mind open.
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“This is as much an atmosphere as a song, warm and leisurely and insinuating.” — The New York Times
“…a meditative, twangy song that blends the band’s Thai-funk proclivities with Bridges’ rootsy vocals.” — RollingStone
“…a sun-baked, languid rock song that coasts on Bridges’ smooth vocals.” — Pitchfork, The Most Anticipated Albums of 2020
Khruangbin & Leon Bridges will release TexasSun, their forthcoming collaborative EP, on February 7th via Dead Oceans, in partnership with Columbia Records and Night Time Stories Ltd. Following the EP’s titletrack, a slow rolling song about the pull of the unique Texas landscape, they today offer its second single, “C-Side,” a shimmering track comprised of wah-wah guitar lines, burbling Latin polyrhythms, and soft vibraphone. Stream “C-Side” below.
Their first time writing with a vocalist, Texas Sun finds Khruangbin—comprised of LauraLee (bass), MarkSpeer (guitar), and Donald “DJ” Johnson (drums)—tailoring their exotic funk to Bridges’ soulful melodies. On the EP, these Texas natives meet up somewhere in the mythical nexus of the state’s past, present, and future—a dreamy badlands where genres blur as seamlessly as the terrain. The state’s music is as varied and wild as its geography, producing Southern rap pioneers GetoBoys and UGK, lysergic trailblazers The 13th Floor Elevators, and genres-unto-themselves like St. Vincent, Gary Clark Jr., and Beyoncé. TexasSun lives here too, a record that calls equally to the chopped-and-screwed hip-hop fans rattling slabs on the southside of Houston, to those who grew up on listening to both mariachi and post-hardcore out on the Mexican borders of El Paso, to the Austin acid-dropping art school kids.
Texas Sun started on the road and wrapped up in the studio. Both Bridges and Khruangbin had been touring nonstop behind their acclaimed sophomore LPs when their paths converged for a joint North American tour in 2018, a run of shows stretching from Los Angeles to New York. Although both of their musical lanes were slightly different, they shared a dusty, laid back vibe. When a Khruangbin session yielded a song that seemed like it might pair well with Bridges’ voice, the band sent it over. Bridges returned the track with his vocals the very next day. They all soon decamped to the studio with engineer SteveChristensen, hoping to make it into a B-side. But everything flowed so naturally, it was obvious this would be something bigger, leading to TexasSun.
Ancient River (J. Barreto – guitars and vocals, Alexis Cordova – percussion and vocals) describe their new album, After the Dawn, on their Bandcamp page as “A dark, moody collection of songs written primarily on the band’s tours.” That’s as accurate a description as any I could write, but I would add one word to it – “heavy.” This is easily the heaviest, fuzziest Ancient River record I’ve heard in a long while.
The opener, “So Long Ago,” almost lulls you into a euphoric daze at first before a wrecking ball of distorted guitar fuzz and massive fills smacks you in the face. “Trust in Me” has a malevolent chug running throughout it, like something moving at the bottom of a witch’s cauldron. Cordova’s drums on “Until the End” bring Black Sabbath to mind, and Barreto’s riffs alternate between psychedelic trips and skull battle ax skull-crushers.
“The Nothing” is a quick instrumental that leads into “King Freak,” which brings in a little shoegaze to the heavy fuzz assault. “With Love” pulls you down into a world of incense smoke and peyote visions. The album ends with “Under the Stone,” which is over eight minutes of heavy jamming that will induce slow, rhythmic nodding and upper torso undulations from the sheer gravitational pull of it.
I don’t know what kind of weird, creepy things Ancient River saw on their recent tours to inspire these songs. Perhaps they ran into the monster depicted on the cover while driving their van down a dark Pacific Northwest road or stopped at a roadside market somewhere in Montana to buy some handcrafted Native American jewelry and met a talking crow. Again, I don’t know. I’m not even sure they could explain it, but that’s okay. The mystery is sometimes better than the answer, and this album is a mystery that can have different solutions depending on the kind of day on which you hear it and / or your state of mind at the time. Open it and let it alter your perception.
Keep your mind open.
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Iggy Pop‘s New Values was his first post-Stooges record that didn’t involve David Bowie in some way, although Bowie would later cover one of the tracks on it, but more on that later.
The album highlights Pop’s blend of performance art, lyricism, punk attitude, and crooning swagger. The opener, “Tell Me a Story,” begins with what sounds like ice being clinked into a cocktail class and Pop singing, “What must I do to take a holiday?” and proclaiming how much he loves performing but hates people who take the fun out of it. The title track has a cool guitar riff from Scott Thurston and Pop practically stomping around the recording studio as he lets us know he has “a hard-ass pair of shoulders. I got a love you can’t imagine.” He’s “looking for one new value, but nothing comes my way.” Who hasn’t been there?
“I love girls. They’re all over this world,” Pop sings on (you guessed it) “Girls.” Jackie Clark‘s fuzzy bass matches Pop’s strut well. Pop professes he wants “to live to be ninety-eight” so he can hopefully make out with more girls. He’s currently seventy-two and shows no signs of stopping, so I think he’s going to get his wish. “I’m Bored” sums up being sick of the rat race and fake friends better than any emo record ever released, and Thurston’s solo is anything but boring.
“Don’t Look Down” is the tune David Bowie found so good that he covered it on his Tonight album. It has this neat electric organ from Thurston throughout it and a sharp saxophone solo from John Harden. “The Endless Sea” gets a little psychedelic with Thurston’s synths and Harden’s horns, but Clark and drummer Klaus Kruger keep the tune grounded by putting down one of their tightest grooves on the album.
“I’m only five-foot-one. I got a pain in my neck,” Pop sings on “Five Foot One” – a song about being overwhelmed by big city life. It has probably my favorite lyric on the record: “I wish life could be Swedish magazines.” “How Do Ya Fix a Broken Part” has a cool jazz-fusion sound to it that’s unexpected and yet perfect. Pop’s vocals on “Angel” becoming wistful as he sings about missing his girl. That being said, Pop does wonder what his girl is up to on “Curiosity,” a song about trying to keep thinking good thoughts about a lover while they are away. “African Man” has Pop getting weird and funky as he sings about eating a monkey for breakfast and how he hates the “dirty white man.” Pop is a known lover of Afrobeat music, so this tune might’ve been an early sign of that. The album ends with the post-punk cut “Billy Is a Runaway,” a sharp track tells the tale of a kid who’s living on the edge of everything, something Pop appreciates to the point of buying him a drink.
New Values is a cool record that covers a neat part of Pop’s career when he was moving away from punk and into post-punk and art rock, but never losing his prowling tiger presence.
Keep your mind open.
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Australian band Tropical Fuck Storm are pleased to announce a North American tour in support of Braindrops, their newest album released last year on Joyful Noise Recordings. The band will bring “their good old-fashioned down-under rock kick to the gut” (Chicago Reader) of a live show across the states, including some cities they have yet to visit. Tickets are on sale now.
Tropical Fuck Storm – comprised of Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin (The Drones), Erica Dunn, and Lauren Hammel – was formed around 2017 in the city of Melbourne, Victoria along Australia’s south-eastern coast. Following their debut album, 2018’s A Laughing Death in Meatspace, Braindrops overflows with compelling sounds and visions that reflect the often dark and fractured reality of life on planet Earth as we hurtle toward environmental and social decay at a frighteningly rapid clip. Listening to the album is a jarring and exhilarating experience, full of pulsating grooves, black humour, dissonant experimentation, and unsettling dystopian plot-lines.
Braindrops is an unrelenting work, from an unrelenting musical ensemble. “Tropical Fuck Storm is a full on thing,” Liddiard offers. “Everything we do, we do it to the death.” Purchase Braindrops – https://bit.ly/2ZPsO2Y
Tropical Fuck Storm Tour Dates: Tue. March 31 – Los Angeles, CA @ Bootleg Theater Thu. April 2 – Iowa City, IA @ Mission Creek Festival Fri. April 3 – Detroit, MI @ Deluxx Fluxx Sat. April 4 – Toronto, ON @ The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern Sun. April 5 – Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz P.D.B. Mon. April 6 – Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair Wed. April 8 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s Thu. April 9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg Sat. April 11 – Baltimore, MD @ Metro Gallery Mon. April 13 – Atlanta, GA @ The Earl Tue. April 14 – Nashville, TN @ The End Wed. April 15 – Bloomington, IN @ The Bishop Thu. April 16 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall
Keep your mind open.
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Too Free – the Washington, D.C. based trio of Awad Bilal (Big Freedia, Vasillus), Carson Cox (Merchandise), and Don Godwin (Callers, Impractical Cockpit) – announce Love in High Demand, their debut album out February 21st on Sister Polygon. In conjunction with today’s announcement, they share a video for lead single “ATM.”
Too Free is born of the most innate curiosity – their only mission is a desire to connect with others in the space that music creates. Drawing from improvisation and experimentation, they deconstruct their songs to their most necessary elements, leaning into their collective punk ethos and DIY backgrounds. Taking energy that projects a reverence for legacy with the opposite of nostalgia, they lead with a principle of imagining a future and being in it – intentionally making music that skews towards the inclusive and accessible instead of making things insular and pretentious.
Relying on the power of movement and improvisation, each track on Love in High Demand provides an empathetic space for the listener. Drawing equally from elements of South Florida freestyle and Jersey electro into DC’s signature polyrhythms, the record is a continuous refinement of the virtue of motion – each composition rooted in propulsive energy that envelops. Aiming to make something with a more utopian outlook that counters the pervasive pessimism, archaic ideologies and dystopian timelines we interact with on a daily basis, they approach this project with an open-endedness that incorporates higher concepts of what pop art can sound like.
“ATM” examines the duality of attention. Too much can go to one’s head, corrupting a sense of common ground and innate empathy of the human experience, but on the flip side, the effects of too little unlock desperate feelings inside of us, rendering our morality obsolete. “ATM” is about that beautiful, healthy middle ground where it’s okay to desire being noticed, and was consciously written for marginalized people who don’t always have the platform of being seen. The track is an homage to the group’s shared love of ballroom music and the everlasting courtship between the dancer and the music.
Says frontperson and lyricist Awad Bilal, “When we see people who look like us, engaged in situations we could see ourselves in, and have our experiences reflected back at us – we feel seen – and that is everything.”
“I realized at some point that I’m not going to fit into any one box, and maybe that’s a good thing. This record is me embracing being an outsider making my own path.” — Caroline Rose
Caroline Rose announces Superstar, out March 6th on New West Records, lead single/video “Feel The Way I Want,” and a North American tour. The follow up to 2018’s acclaimed LONER, Superstar is a bigger, badder, glitter-filled cinematic pop record. It’s an underdog story, and one not far off from Rose’s real life. After years of struggle to release what would ultimately become LONER, Rose found herself in the midst of a new widespread audience, one both intrigued and perplexed about how and where to place her. This feeling of otherness, combined with a developed set of studio skills and a challenge to “make something from nothing,” marked the beginning of Superstar—the story of a shamelessly odd hero, or rather anti-hero, on a quest to become a someone.
Inspired by cult classics such as The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Mulholland Drive and the mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous, Superstar plays out like a film. After the protagonist receives a mistaken phone call from the glamorous Chateau Marmont hotel in album opener “Nothing’s Impossible,” they (gender neutral pronoun) take it as a sign toward a star-studded future and leave behind everything in pursuit of a newly established destiny. What ensues is a cinematic paradox that in one moment finds them strutting down a neon strip in full Saturday Night Fever hip-swing, and the next, sipping a dirty martini at the rundown apartment complex pool dwelling on life’s unfortunate turns. It’s a narrative Rose pulled directly from the somewhat shameless desires of her own growing ambition, as well as the public breakdowns of several notable celebrities. “To me, there’s both humor and horror in hubris and what it takes in order to be successful. I wanted to make a story out of those parts of myself that I find largely undesirable and embarrassing, then inject them with steroids.”
The goal of lead single “Feel The Way I Want” is to “have people, including myself, not know whether to love or hate this person. They’re kind of like a walking eye roll who’s easy to dismiss, but at the same time you admire their determination. It’s the Kanye effect.” The accompanying video, directed by Rose, was made on an iPhone over the course of an 11-day road trip from Hollywood, California to Hollywood, Florida.
Since LONER’s release, Rose began formulating the ideas and songs for Superstar in between the band’s near-incessant touring schedule, from playing sold out headline shows across the country and beyond to becoming fan favorites at some of the world’s biggest festivals. She wrote, recorded and produced Superstar in her home studio, as well as on a portable rig set up in green rooms while on tour.
Superstar will be available across digital retailers, compact disc and vinyl. The album will also be the Vinyl Me, Please”Essential Record of the Month” for March and will be available on colored vinyl exclusively from VMP. Direct-to-Fan and Independent Retail editions will feature an exclusive, fold-out 24×36″ poster autographed by Rose and are available for pre-order now. Watch Caroline Rose’s Video for “Feel The Way I Want” – http://newwst.com/crftwiwPR
Superstar Tracklist: 1. Nothing’s Impossible 2. Got To Go My Own Way 3. Do You Think We’ll Last Forever? 4. Feelings Are A Thing Of The Past 5. Feel The Way I Want 6. Freak Like Me 7. Someone New 8. Pipe Dreams 9. Command Z 10. Back At The Beginning 11. I Took A Ride
Caroline Rose Tour Dates: Fri. March 6 – Albany, NY @ The Hollow Sat. March 7 – Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground Wed. March 11 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Café Thu. March 12 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Café Fri. March 13 – Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Tavern Sat. March 14 – Columbus, OH @ Skully’s Wed. March 25 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg Thu. March 26 – Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair Fri. March 27 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts Sat. March 28 – Washington, DC @ Black Cat Wed. April 1 – Iowa City, IA @ Mission Creek Music Festival Thu. April 2 – Milwaukee, WI @ Turner Hall Ballroom Fri. April 3 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall Sat. April 4 – Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line Music Hall Fri. April 24 – Dallas, TX @ Club Dada Sat. April 25 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall: Upstairs Sun. April 26 – Austin, TX @ Antone’s Tue. April 28 – New Orleans, LA @ Gasa Gasa Wed. April 29 – Oxford, MS @ Proud Larry’s Thu. April 30 – Nashville, TN @ The Basement East Fri. May 1 – Sun. May 3 – Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Festival
Austin shoegaze trio ThunderStars share a new single from their forthcoming album, Number Stations today via Treble Zine. Hear and share “Not That Far” HERE. (Direct Bandcamp.)
ThunderStars is a shoegaze/dreampop band from Austin TX. Formed in the fall of 2018, it marks the return to music of longtime Margot & the Nuclear So and Sos multi-instrumentalist, Erik Kang (guitar, lead vocals). The 3-piece solidified when Sven Bjorkman (drums), posted a random thought about creating a band to use the name ThunderStars, which was coined by his toddler daughter during a stress-fueled trip to the hospital.
This art-out-of-chaos theme has hung over the band since its inception. After their second live show, their bassist, Omar Richardson, was assaulted by a vagrant outside the venue, which resulted in a concussion and subsequent trip to the ER. This incident was covered extensively in Austin news, which raised the band’s profile unexpectedly. ThunderStars demos also were well received publicly, and the band subsequently received considerable radio and podcast plays, as well as show bookings with many touring acts.
Number Stations will be available on January 10th, 2020 on LP and digital on Mariel Recording Company. Pre-orders are available HERE.
Keep your mind open.
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