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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“This quartet has been burning up stages all around their hometown, fueled by their abrasive blend of doom metal, psych rock, goth and a tangy soupçon of pop music… They landed a spot on the 2018 Best New Band poll in alt-weekly Willamette Week, but could quickly take over the world.” — Paste Magazine “They mesh elements of doom, Krautrock and atmospheric indie into one bewitching rock whole.” –Classic Rock Magazine “A greasy, sun-baked rock jam calling back to the genre’s classic days while showcasing a heavy doom edge that gives it a modern spin.” 6 Best New Songs Right Now — Revolver Magazine
Portland, OR quintet Blackwater Holylight announce March 2020 headlining tour dates today, while also releasing a new video. The clip is a dramatic art short film set to the song “Jizz Witch” from the band’s 2018 self-titled debut album. Watch/share the video via YouTube HERE. Please see current tour dates below. Blackwater Holylight released their acclaimed sophomore albumVeils of Winter (RidingEasy Records) in October 2019. Hear/share Veils of Winter: YouTube, Bandcamp, Spotify.
Thanks to all who listened to what might have been my final set of the winter. I’m not sure I’ll be on again until May, but I’ll keep you posted. Here’s the set list:
Deep Dive of the Clash
The Clash – Rock the Casbah
The 101’ers – Keys to Your Heart
The London SS – Sell Out
Sex Pistols – Holiday in the Sun
999 – Emergency
The Ramones – Sheena Is a Punk Rocker
Buzzcocks – What Do I Get?
Public Image Ltd. – Death Disco
Subway Sect – Ambition
The Clash – White Riot
Junior Murvin – Police and Thieves
The Clash – Janie Jones
The Clash – I’m So Bored with the USA
The Clash – What’s My Name
The Clash – London’s Burning
Lee Perry – The Upsetter
The Clash – Complete Control
Blue Oyster Cult – Godzilla
The Clash – Tommy Gun
The Clash – Julie’s in the Drug Squad
Traffic – Dear Mr. Fantasy
The Clash – London Calling
The Clash – The Guns of Brixton
The Clash – Police on My Back
The Clash – Washington Bullets
The Clash – Should I Stay or Should I Go
The Clash – This Is England
Big Audio Dynamite – E = MC2
Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros – Johnny Appleseed
Covering the earliest years of Screaming Females‘ career of singles recorded in ramshackle studios in New Jersey to remixes of hit singles made in high-end studios in Los Angeles, Singles Too is a great collection of rare cuts, B-sides, digital releases, remixes, and cover tunes from the punk power trio.
The first two tracks, “Arm Over Arm” and “Zoo of Death” (and why isn’t that the title of a Poverty Row thriller from the 1930’s starring George Zucco?), are some of the earliest ones ever made by Screaming Females. You can hear the early evidence of future epic shredding from singer / guitarist Marissa Paternoster, just nineteen-years-old at the time, getting all she can out of the studio time. “No Being Disgusting” is saw raw that it’s almost like wrecking on your skateboard and into a pile of gravel (and I mean that in the best possible way).
“Pretty Okay” brings Mike Abbate‘s bass to the forefront as he pummels you with sheer power. “I dig on calculus,” Paternoster sings at the beginning of “I Do” – a song about doing out of the ordinary stuff to get the attention of a crush. The song is more power-grunge than math rock, however, as evidenced by Paternoster’s Bob Mould-influenced solo. The song devolves into sludgy, warped that wouldn’t be out of place on a doom metal album. “Ancient Civilization” is where the album starts to turn toward higher production and sharper sound, but no less fuzz and power. Abbate’s thick bass grooves return on “Let Me In,” and drummer Jarrett Dougherty sounds like he’s somehow juggling toms and playing them at the same time.
Paternoster’s screaming vocals on the chorus of “Skeleton” are, as I read on a YouTube comment about one of Screaming Females’ live shows, “punk as fuck.” The acoustic demo of “Hopeless” (one of their most popular tracks) is lovely. I can’t describe it better than that. “Take It Back” is more solid punk and the remix of “End of My Bloodline” brings in some of Dougherty’s beloved hip-hop beats and some slick rapping in place of Paternoster’s vocals. Dougherty lays down a wicked beat on “Cortez the Killer” – the band’s sizzling cover of the Neil Young classic.
Their cover of Sheryl Crow‘s “If It Makes You Happy” is a welcome addition to the album, as it’s been a popular tune at their live shows for years (plus, it rocks hard). There’s a quick cover of Guided By Voices‘ “A Good Flying Bird,” and then a fun, bass-heavy cover of Taylor Swift‘s “Shake It Off.” The album closes with a lovely cover of Eurythmics‘ “No More I Love You’s.”
This is an great collection and essential if you’re a Screaming Females fan.
Detroit’s Rogue Satellites (Lisa Poszywak and Jaye Thomas) have been making fuzzy psych / shoegaze since 2012 and their newest EP, Baby I’m Jeff, takes on a 1990’s grunge edge to their sound normally steeped in stuff from the 1960’s through the 1980’s.
The EP starts with the heavy, chugging “Mercury in Retrograde.” In case you weren’t aware, a lot of astrologers and people who take astrology at least semi-seriously believe that the recent retrograde passing of Mercury in our solar system is responsible for a lot of bad vibes, anger, and suffering that occurred in 2019. Poszywak’s vocals and lyrics express how ready she, and all of us, are ready to be over 2019 and all the negative energy it carried with it.
“I can see the future, you’re still acting like you care,” Thomas sings on “I Can See the Future” – a track about a doomed relationship that sounds like an early Failuretrack with it’s screeching guitars, echoing vocals, and synth stabs. “Son of an Atom Bomb” reminds us that they haven’t kept all their psychedelic influences off the EP. The raw bass, guitar distortion, and simple yet hard beats are bliss for neo-psychedelia fans like yours truly.
“Autopilot Says Yes” slows things down (but doesn’t skip on the sludge) with a song about going along for the ride with someone who might not be the best person to hang out with, but you’re willing to take the risk for some fun. The closing title track is an acoustic cut of what sounds like a love song, but is actually a plea to a woman from the point of view of an abusive dickweed.
It’s a fun EP that makes you want to hear more of their work, as any good EP should do.
