Month: April 2022

Happy Release Day To Spiritualized

Posted on by danielle

It is with much pleasure that we present to you today, the new album “Everything Was Beautiful” by Spiritualized.

While some people imploded in the lockdowns and isolation of the epidemic, others were thriving. “I felt like I’d been in training for this my whole life” says J Spaceman. He was referring to his fondness for isolation and when you reframe loneliness as “beautiful solitude” then it isn’t so bad. He would walk through an empty “Roman London” where “even the sirens had stopped singing” and where the world was “full of birdsong and strangeness and no contrails.” He used the birdsong walks to listen and try and make sense of all the music playing in his head. The mixes of his new record, a ninth studio album, weren’t working out yet. 

Spaceman plays 16 different instruments on Everything Was Beautiful which was put down at 11 different studios, as well as at his home. He also employed more than 30 musicians and singers including his daughter Poppy, long-time collaborator and friend John Coxon, string and brass sections, choirs and finger bells and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. So there’s a lot going on. 

“There was so much information on it that the slightest move would unbalance it, but going around in circles is important to me. Not like you’re spiraling out of control but you’re going around and around and on each revolution you hold onto the good each time. Sure, you get mistakes as well, but you hold on to some of those too and that’s how you kind of… achieve. Well, you get there.” 

Eventually the mixes got there and Everything Was Beautiful was achieved. The result is some of the most “live” sounding recordings that Spiritualized have released since the Live At The Albert Hall record of 1998, around the time of Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space. 

The opening track “Always Together With You” is a reworking / supercharging of a track originally released in demo quality in 2014. This new version is a perfect Spiritualized song; a breathtaking, hard-edged, psychedelic pop tune where themes of high romance and space travel collide.

The artwork is designed once again with Mark Farrow. If you buy the vinyl you can pop a pill box out of the sleeve, revealing gold foil underneath, and assemble the Braille-embossed little thing and put it somewhere in the house. The box set has 8 of them. Literally a boxset. It looks more beautiful in the flesh. “Farrow and I were talking about what we should do and we just said, ‘It’s called Everything Is Beautiful, how could you not have a pill?’” 

All these layers, all these details, the year-long mixes, the making sense of it all and the lives lived within these lyrics; for somebody so famously unconfident of his own abilities, isn’t this a punishing thing to keep doing? “Yeah, but I like what I do. There’s a line from Jonathan Meades that’s about having all the attributes to being an artist. ‘Paranoia, vanity, selfishness, egotism, sycophancy, resentment, moral nullity and more idiot than idiot savant.’ “And that’s what it feels like, this kind of thing. You’re your own worst enemy and biggest supporter. “There’s a ‘Of course this is worth it. It’s me’ and then this kind of deep doubt of ‘What the fuck is this all about?’ “And then ‘Why is it important?’ and then knowing there’s no easy answer. But it’s there. I know it’s there.”

Laura Veirs Announces “Found Light”

Posted on by danielle

Laura Veirs today announces her new album, Found Light, out 8th July via Bella Union and available to preorder here. While it’s technically the 12th studio LP from the esteemed Portland, OR-based artist, it also, in many ways, feels like her debut: Found Light is her very first record with co-production credits (alongside Shahzad Ismaily),and finds Veirs embracing a self-sovereignty and artistic independence she’d never known previously. Lead single “Winter Windows”, replete with energetic, fuzzed-out guitars and driving percussion, is a showcase of this feminist liberation, and its playful video sees Veirs dancing to the beat of her own drum in her basement—a perfect mirroring of the cathartic experience found within the album. “I love how this video captures feelings of freedom and strength and weirdness, despite the lyrics in this song being quite heavy in places,” explains Veirs. “I hope this video conveys the confidence and sense of aliveness that I feel now as a solo woman in the world after a tough two and a half years of going through my divorce and the pandemic.” 

The song, she says, is “very much about the strength of mothers and the power that women in cooperation have to shape their own lives and the lives of children. It’s about us taking the reins of life and sharing our internal light and power. I believe these rays of strength echo outward and foster love that is passed through the generations. It was fun to stretch my vocals on the high chorus near the end. This song gets at my punk roots but feels confident and current to my life right now.”

If 2020’s My Echo—written and mixed just prior to her 2019 split from her long-time husband, her long-time producer, and the father of her two sons—was Veirs’ divorce album, Found Light is about what comes after. The separation left her questioning her identity as an artist: had that part of her, which seemed intractably intertwined with her partner for so long, been swallowed in the split? Would she ever make music again? Historically, Veirs handled her song’s most fundamental elements — the writing and the singing — but she always left arrangement and production decisions to her partner, even down to the final tracklist. Though she co-owned a studio with him, she never led the charge in it, and she had never played guitar while singing on tape at the same time. Despite having put out a dozen albums, she wondered if she actually had the know-how to make one without him. 

Absolutely and emphatically: Yes. Following a string of brief sessions (some with Death Cab for Cutie multi-instrumentalist Dave Depper, and some alone in her own home), she booked time at Portland’s Jackpot Studios, then called her old friend Ismaily and asked him to join. They clicked and opted to co-produce the album. Ismaily offered guidance and insight, but gave her space to make her own choices and invite her own guests, like Sam Amidon and Karl Blau. She finally sang while she played guitar, realizing perhaps for the first time she was actually great at something she’d done most of her life.

Veirs spent months doubting herself, doubting her ability to make an album without the aegis of her ex-partner. But after her divorce, she started writing, exercising, painting, playing, and seeing other people, both romantically and artistically. She was discovering new sides of herself, or even rediscovering ones she’d lost — in both cases, finding new light. Found Light is a provocative document of it all, from her paintings that adorn it to her tales of lovers and woes and realizations therein. Despite the sadness and suffering that prompted these 14 graceful wonders, they are ultimately a testament to the inspiration of independence, to shaping new possibilities for yourself even after great loss. Found Light is a reminder that we are always capable of something more.

Laura Veirs June UK tour:

Thursday 9th June – Norwich – Norwich Arts Centre

Friday 10th June – Nottingham – The Bodega Social Club

Saturday 11th June – Cambridge – Storey’s Field Centre

Sunday 12th June – Birmingham – Hare & Hounds

Tuesday 14th June – Gosforth – Civic Theatre

Wednesday 15th June – Edinburgh – Summerhall Arts Venue

Thursday 16th June – Glasgow – Stereo

Saturday 18th June – Leeds – Belgrave Music Hall

Sunday 19th June – Manchester – The Deaf Institute

Tuesday 21st June – Pentrych – Acapela Studios

Wednesday 22nd June – Bristol – Thekla

Thursday 23rd June – Exeter – Phoenix

Saturday 25th June – Glastonbury – Glastonbury Festival

Monday 27th June – Portsmouth – Wedgewood Rooms

Tuesday 28th June – Guildford – The Boileroom

Wednesday 29th June – Brighton – Komedia

Thursday 30th June – London – Union Chapel

Ural Thomas & The Pain Share “Gimme Some Ice Cream”

Posted on by danielle

With their new album Dancing Dimensions due out 3rd June via Bella Union, Ural Thomas And The Pain today share a summery and irresistible new single, “Gimme Some Ice Cream”, from this much-anticipated LP. The track comes accompanied with an entertaining part-animated video.

Of the track Ural says: “Who doesn’t want Ice Cream and lemonade every day in the summer? We love both so we wrote a song about it!”.

Additionally, Ural Thomas And The Pain have announced a bunch of new live dates either side of their London Jazz Cafe show in June.

Walking through the residential heart of Portland’s Mississippi district you’ll find a charming wooden house under the overcast Oregon sky. This local landmark is the home of soul legend Ural Thomas, built by hand with found materials decades ago. The basement is overflowing with musical equipment. When you walk down into the room you may see Portland’s Soul Brother Number One at the table chuckling, telling stories and jokes, and espousing his personal humanist philosophy obtained from 83years of unfathomable experiences. He’s often joined by either his generations of biological posterity or the adopted family that is his band, The Pain. You may also find this infinitely magnetic personality ripping through a cover song at full volume or working out a new original with his loved ones.

Though Ural Thomas is widely recognized as one of the most exciting singers remaining from the original soul era, and an active musical institution for over 60 years, his band, all decades younger, are treated as equals. The Pain are no backing band, but rather a well-oiled tightly-knit musical aggregation that’s spent the last eight years with Thomas developing a unique sound of its own.

Born in Meraux, Louisiana, in 1939, and moving with his family to Portland, Oregon during World War II, Ural Thomas grew up to become Rose City’s Soul Brother Number One. Already an established singer in his teens, he became the leader of the wild twistin’ rhythm and blues vocal group The Monterays –who achieved regional fame and recorded the canonical single “Push-Em Up” for the local Sure Star Records. His success brought him to Los Angeles where he caught the ear of industry bigwig Jerry Goldstein of The Strangeloves, best remembered for managing Sly and The Family Stone and producing dozens of iconic records by the likes of War, The McCoys, and The Angels. Goldstein saw star quality in the young singer and brought him into the studio with arranger Gene Page (known for thousands of recordings with everyone from Aretha Franklin to Elton John to a veritable who’s who of Motown stars) to record two landmark 1967 singles “Pain Is The Name of Your Game” and “Can You Dig It” for the MCA pop subsidiary UNI. Around this point Ural also recorded a 1968 live LP for MCA’s soul imprint Revue and the 1967 James Brown-informed proto-funk dancefloor dynamite that is “Deep Soul” for Seattle’s Camelot label. All are widely admired and continue to be heard at DJ sets and dance parties worldwide.

Ural Thomas next left Los Angeles to record in Cincinnati at King Records with James Brown’s production manager Bud Hobgood. After the two had a falling out, Portland’s soul man took a bus to New York City where he was featured more than forty nights at the Apollo. Eventually disillusioned with the industry and missing the communal aspect of making music, by the end of the 1960s he returned to Portland where he established a Sunday night jam session that continued for decades. In 2014 Portland DJ and drummer Scott McGee sat in. They became friends and within months Magee had assembled a full show band that they christened Ural Thomas and The Pain. The new group wasted no time performing and recording, touring the world and releasing two LPs between 2015 and 2018.

So few of soul music’s original practitioners of are still among us. Even fewer are still active. And of those, even fewer can still deliver the goods on the same level that made your hair stand on end the first time you dropped the needle on their record. Rumor had it that the complete package of undiminished passion, sweat, wailing, dancing, and banter, the elusive soul man we always seek out, could be found tearing it up in the Pacific Northwest. When Ural Thomas finally made it out east to play at Jonathan Toubin’s soul revue billed alongside Irma Thomas, Archie Bell, Joe Bataan, and other legends, it was his first New York City gig since his Apollo reign four decades prior. Having previously shared the stage with James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, Etta James, and nearly any star from the hyper-competitive world of classic soul performance, Ural Thomas was not intimidated. He rose to the occasion, bringing down the house both nights and drenching an entire new generation of New Yorkers in his soul sweat!

And the band played on… Despite the usual COVID-19 obstacles, Ural Thomas and The Pain finally completed their much-anticipated third album, Dancing Dimensions.  While exploring everything from sweet Chicago soul to airy West Coast psychedelia to Sly funk, their latest collection retains the distinctive sound the band organically developed organically over years of relentless work. Classic yet unmistakably contemporary at the same time, “Dancing Dimensions” is the most accurate representation of The Pain’s unique flavor, power, and musical breadth committed to vinyl thus far.

Tim Burgess Shares “Here Comes The Weekend”

Posted on by danielle

Following a busy couple of years hosting his hugely successful Twitter listening parties, amongst many other activities, Tim Burgess returns with an addictive new single, “Here Comes The Weekend”, the first taste of music from a new album due for release later this year via Bella Union. “Here Comes The Weekend” is a buoyant, bouncy, beaty beauty about a modern day romance both helped and hindered by technology. It’s the perfect curtain-raiser, an anthemic hymn to transcending geographical distance with emotional connection. The track comes accompanied by a colourful video directed by the legendary Kevin Godley.

“The idea was very much about two people who were distanced and wanted to connect but were finding it really difficult because of mobile phone signals and rain and time differences and jet lag,” says Burgess. “And I always knew the album should start with Here Comes The Weekend. It’s a simple song, and it’s a feeling more than anything.”

Commenting on the video Kevin Godley says: “This idea, about physical separation versus virtual connection, had Tim, Rose and Dan delivering impeccable performances throughout a pretty physical day, spent bending real people + live projections into a film that seems to blur the lines between joy and anxiety. Not that we set out to achieve anything that specific, but the improvisational nature of the shoot allowed it to emerge. Nor did it do any harm having an artist and song this bloody good to apply the idea to. Big thanks to Tim and everyone for the opportunity.”

Has there been a busier musician over the last two years? A more prolific artist? More creative? More heroic?

Tim Burgess – as self-effacing a band leader, solo star, label runner, repeat memoirist and all-round caffeinated can-do kid as you’ll find – would certainly shrink from the latter accolade. “A hero??” he’d likely mutter with a shake of his boyish mop. “For playing some records?”

Yes, Tim, we would say that. And not just because with the May 2020, mid-lockdown appearance of I Love The New Sky, his fifth solo album, he undauntedly pushed on with releasing an album that brought much-needed sunshine to a world enveloped in gloom.

Over the course of the first year of the pandemic, Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties were a lifeline to many. At a time when the world shut down, we all retreated indoors, alone, and cancelled gigs were the least of our worries, the North Country Boy’s idea of utilising social media to unite us round a digital turntable was inspired.

An innovation he’d imagineered a few years previously to peer under the bonnet of The Charlatans’ back catalogue albums now became a meeting place for fans of artists of all sizes, stripes, vintages. Yearning members of the Oasis faithful could lean into Bonehead’s reminiscences of making Be Here Now. Agog Beatles heads could cosy up to Paul McCartney’s tweeted tales from the studio floor, or marvel at Yoko Ono and Klaus Voormann’s 50-year-old memories of recording Plastic Ono Band.

The guests were as eclectic as they were electrifying as they were enthusiastic, with the eager participants including everyone from Run the Jewels to Roisin Murphy, Kylie Minogue to Iron Maiden – with the heavy metal heroes the all-time champs on the TTLP replay chart (yep, if you missed them in real time, you can go back and play any of the Listening Parties from the last two years #tech).

At a time when we couldn’t go anywhere, Tim Burgess helped us go everywhere. “Everybody all over the world starts listening to an album at the same time,” he said in spring 2021, as the number of parties he’d hosted ticked past the 743 mark and his Twitter followers hovered around the quarter-of-a-million tally, a 250 per cent increase on the previous year. “There’s a global call to arms, so you feel part of something. Then you hear one of your favourite records, or something new to you which is equally exciting. And you get to listen to it with a community. And this past year, who hasn’t missed all that?”

Meanwhile, Burgess was writing. And writing. And writing. For sure, some of that was for his first Tim’s Twitter Listening Party book. It was a handsome tome published last year (a second follows this autumn), the profits from which went to support various live music charities – a bit of front-footed, philanthropic proactivity also reflected in Burgess handing over monies from various other TTLP-related (ad)ventures. That Tim-shaped badge you bought might just have helped save a locked-down independent venue.

There were, too, some notes (and tweets) written to support the release of “A Head Full of Ideas”, The Charlatans’ 2021 career-spanning 30th anniversary boxset that was also accompanied by some triumphant band shows.

But mainly that writing comprised songs. Twenty-two of them in total. From September 2020 to summer 2021, ideas poured out of Burgess. He’d been encouraged by Simon Raymonde, boss of his record label Bella Union ­– and, of course, a former Cocteau Twin. He applied a musician’s logic: if you can’t tour your last album, write a new one. Then, when you can tour again, you’ll have two albums’ worth of songs to play.

But more on that later… For now, enjoy “Here Comes The Weekend” and stay tuned for more Tim Burgess info coming soon!

Tallies Announce Patina

Posted on by danielle

Toronto’s Tallies today announce their new album, Patina, alongside sharing a new single: “Hearts Underground”. The new album, out through Bella Union (UK/EU) / Kanine Records (US) / Hand Drawn Dracula (Can)on 29th July follows their self-titled debut which scored support at MOJO, CRACK, DIY, NYLON, 6Music and many more upon release in 2019.

Speaking about the new single, singer Sarah Cogan says: “This song is that little voice that kicks yourself. The voice that says, “why’d you do that?” In this case, it was about how it holds me back, sometimes for the better. It’s about self-sabotage. Sometimes you wish this little voice would speak up sooner and not just after the fact. I wrote a song about that little voice that I’ve heard my whole life; it’s a reflection on times when I’ve held back too much or when I wish I’d held back more.”

Coming produced by Graham Walsh (of Holy Fuck, whopreviously helmed records by METZ and Alvvays) alongside Dylan Frankland of the band at Palace Sound, Baskitball 4 Life and Candle Recording in Toronto, the new record arrives as a true labour of love, one that was delayed due to the pandemic but ultimately is a truly rewarding collection for the band. It pricked the ears Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde – a hero of the band – who signed Tallies to his Bella Union label, providing “a light at the end of a dark tunnel” according to Sarah Cogan of the band.

The juxtaposition of light and dark is a strong theme in the music of Tallies. While many of their tunes are upbeat, with Frankland’s breezy guitar lines drenched in reverb, soaring over Cian O’Neill’s propulsive drumbeats, Sarah’s lyrics can add a hint of shadow to even their most jangly tunes. This idea is also apparent in “Hearts Underground”, a track that describes the slippier side of personal relationships over effervescent indie-pop – undercut, of course, by a deliciously discordant guitar solo.

Tallies, who have previously opened for the likes of The Ocean Blue, Sloan, Mudhoney, Tim Burgess and Hatchie, is made up of founding members, guitarist, Dylan Frankland and singer/guitarist, Sarah Cogan who are joined by drummer, Cian O’Neill. The band recently announced a number of UK live shows. See here for more details: https://www.talliesband.com/tour

Happy Release Day To Father John Misty

Posted on by danielle

Father John Misty returns with Chloë and The Next 20th Century, his fifth album and first new material since the release of God’s Favorite Customer in 2018.

Chloë and the Next 20th Century was written and recorded August through December 2020 and features arrangements by Drew Erickson. The album sees Tillman and producer/multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson resume their longtime collaboration, as well as Dave Cerminara, returning as engineer and mixer. Basic tracks were recorded at Wilson’s Five Star Studios with strings, brass, and woodwinds recorded at United Recordings in a session featuring Dan Higgins and Wayne Bergeron, among others.