Houston, TX lo-fi quartet Low Horizon got a good thing going on their new Four Songs too Long, a blend of noise, garage and grunge rock. Imagine Weezer having a party with the Pixies, Yo La Tengo and Prints Jackson.
The lyrics are pretty dark, but even songs 40//Death and Funeral (with Fleetwood inspired vocal harmonies) can't hide the fact that is a bunch of uplifting songs, thanks to the catchy backbeat and jangling guitars.
Belgian power trio Triggerfinger have signed a record deal with Dutch label Mascot Records. Their new album will be released in the Fall. They have additional festival dates. More to come.
Live dates:Watch Dopapod tackle the Pink Floyd classic Pigs (Three Different Ones). With Caton Sollenberger (The Jauntee) on guitar. Recorded live @ Paradise Rock Club in Boston, MA - 2017/04/07.
Liverpool poppy rock band Little Triggers have been listening closely to that other Merseyside quartet and topped it off with some Britpop for their new single Silly Cigarettes. Ennui, girl trouble, and a short guitar solo before they hit the brakes to bring the song to a premature ending. What the fuck just happened? Better listen to it again.
French folk act Queen Of The Meadow will play four shows in The Netherlands to promote their Aligned With Juniper album. Recommended if you like UK Seventies folk with hints of psychedelic, pastoral pop.
Live dates:
Johnny Dowd and his guitar slinger Michael Edmondson will support country duo My Darling Clementine @ The Dock in his hometown Ithaca, NY on April 20th.
He has finished an album with public domain tunes:
Oakland based husband and wife folk duo The Saxophones have made a video for "If You're on the Water, the title track from their debut EP. Alexi Erenkov explains:
Our song, “If You’re on the Water,” is largely about a week spent on Shasta Lake in which I began a long distance relationship with my then girlfriend, Alison, broke my femur in a boating accident, and a close family friend in San Francisco committed suicide. (...)
Synths and poetry are the cornerstone of Electropoëzie (electro poetry), the brainchild of Hans Hoeverloo & De Ridderbaas. Their new album Voor de Moord is a pairing of (supposedly) high and low art. Nursery rhymes, Herman Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick, shopping lists, elephants all join in for a parade of adventurous and eclectic spoken word pieces.
Voor De Moord is a radio play backed by the sounds inspired by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, VPRO's Vrije Geluiden, Eighties New Wave, and Dance. It's a maze, a puzzle and a rollercoaster ride. Open mind required and brace yourself for unexpected left turns and smart metaphores. Recommended if you like Fabrieke and high school teachers who want to show their students that poetry and music can join forces and create something special.
The Fierce & The Dead have put up a stream of Verbose from their new album Field Recordings (live). Bass player Kev Feazy is the guide during another new one, Verbose, sounding like John Entwistle letting rip during a prog metal workout.
Dark country folk duo The Handsome Family will be hitting the road again for a European Spring tour, playing shows in Ireland, the UK, Spain, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmrak and Norway.
Live dates:
Dutch swamp blues grunge band Martha Jane & the Talisman have a couple of gigs lined up tor promote their Hello Demon album. Prepare for a set of steamy, voodoo goodness.
Live dates:Watch the new Bella Loka video for GO Down, a track from the London based electropop forthcoming album The Light, The Mud & The Dark (April 28th on DEFDISCO). Dark and sinister, the song tells the story of a meeting in the woods with blond lady promising lead singer Tea Boothby the world. David Boothby weighs in with blink-and-you'll miss 'em guitar fills.
Amsterdam quintet Eskorakas are serving a sexy, spicy variety of blues grunge, seasoned with electronics, on their self-titled debut EP. They explore the back alleys, run into zombies, and try to get away from unnamed horrors.
This is what a collaboration of Johnny Dowd and Nick Cave for a slasher movie soundtrack would sound like. Tomas Gons plays his guitar like he is strangling it and vocalist Eva Bijnen jazzes things up like Etta James is possessed by PJ Harvey. Gons takes the mike for lead single On The Run, a prowling track without a Hollywood ending. The two unplugged songs sound even scarier, thanks to guest musician Milan Mes' trumpet. Late night stuff to be played while riding high on a stimulant of choice.
Kristina Cottone goes solo with Bow, a soulful EP. The lead singer of Chicago band Honey & the 45s has a voice that was made for lounge-y tunes. The jazz-tinged Boston Boy and the more upbeat BFF are like two sides of the coin. She can be coy, but she can get angry as well. The standout tracks is the slow come hither song Ukulele Summer Love Song, an ode to an overlooked instrument and a reluctant lover.
Going solo is not without risks, but Bow has freed from the inherent genre limitations that come with playing a band. Now she can do what she does best: singing her ass off, albeit in soft-spoken way.
we do as songwriters is rewrite the songs that have impressed us till we find our own voice. It's part of learning the craft.
Steve Earle
Amsterdam indie guitar band Maggie Brown have unveiled Hail to the Rain, the first single from their second album Another Place. It's a slice of gentle, tender pop, with a lead guitar line that gets stuck inside your head and exquisite multilayered vocals. This what The Byrds would have sounded like if they had been around in the Nineties.
Canadian psychedelic doo-wop rock trio The Velveteins have made a video for Midnight Surf, the second single from their forthcoming debut full-length Slow Wave. The clip was directed by Nicholas Posthumus, who captured the band messing around at home, on the road driving a - cliché alert - Volkswagen Transporter, and staring a the sea.
This year The Fierce And The Dead will perform their first ever show outside the UK, when they hit the stage RoSFest in Gettysburg, USA, on May 7th. The instrumental experimentalists have been making waves in prog circles as the cult band that could make it big. Those who were lucky enough to catch them in concert rave about their heavy metal avant-garde post-rock compositions. Tracks from their studio output sound more aggressive and they like to road test new songs as well. You had to be there. For the rest of the world the new album Field Recordings (live) offers the power of the band while sitting in the comfort of their own home. Huge speakers might help, as well as accommodating neighbours.
The Fierce and The Dead always like to explore different moods within a composition, shaking things up and slowing down. After opening with two oldies, In Your Face and Ark, they cover new ground with Dancing Robots, a hybrid of guitarist Matt Stevens's solo output and "Red" era King Crimson, with drummer Stuart Marshall making good use of his cymbals. Bass player Kev Feazy is the guide during another new one, Verbose, sounding like John Entwistle letting rip during a prog metal workout. They bring the set to a close with the pastoral Palm Trees and guitarists Steve Cleaton and Stevens setting up a conversation during 666...6.
Watch Dutch musician Fred Händl playing a "rather loose interpretation" of the Zappa classic Stink-foot on piano. He is working on a follow-up for his Fred Händl plays the music of Frank Zappa – featuring The Giacomo di Lindini Trio album.
» drfreddies.com
» jazzappa.com
HCTF review of Fred Händl plays the music of Frank Zappa – featuring The Giacomo di Lindini Trio.
Revolution Come…Revolution Go, the new Gov't Mule album, will be released on June 9th. Two tracks, Stone Cold Rage and Sarah, Surrender, can be streamed from the band's Soundcloud. They entered the studio to begin recording the album the day after The Donald was elected. Guitarist Warren Haynes on Jambands.com:
The first thing we did, once we found out that he had won, was we went in and played a blues tune to get it out of our systems. No thoughts of putting it on the record; we just thought, let’s go play some blues. We were just joking around – ‘Wow, this is going to be a really dark record’ – but somewhere along the line we decided, let’s tackle these political songs, but let’s also do all the positive stuff about making the world better and reflection and one-on-one relationships.
Watch French darkwave band Deleyaman perform La Mer et L'Amour @ Thiemeloods in Nijmegen, The Netherlands - 2017/04/07. It's a track from their latest album The lover, The stars & The citadel.
HCTF review of The lover, The stars & The citadel.
Denver band DeVotchKa will perform a live score to Dziga Vertov's silent classic "The Man with a Movie Camera" at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on April 13th, as part of the SFFILM Festival:
A landmark for its playful experimentation with the depiction of reality, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is charged with the excitement of cinema’s possibilities. “The film drama is the opium of the people,” Vertov wrote, “Long live life as it is!”
Can you be an opera singer or a rock singer? Anna Coogan is both, putting her classical training and vocal range to good use on her new album The Lonely Cry of Space and Time. She sings about science and outerspace, environmental issues, family and love. While most artists would fall flat on their face when they tried to cover that much ground Coogan never looses focus. She is a poet, a singer and an ace guitarist, alternating between Chris Isaac and Ry Cooder, rowdy garage rock, mainstream pop, vocal pyrotechnics, and intricate soundscapes. With fellow Ithaca, NY citizen Willie B on drums and bass moog, she put together an album that- for lack of a better description - could be labeled as cinematic pop.
She reaches for the sky in the title track, inspired by the recent discovery of gravitational waves, and Meteor, and comes down to earth for Burn for You, Collateral and Wedding Vow. Anna Coogan is a singer's singer, making it seem so easy and effortless. Whether you like Kate Bush or Margo Timmins (or both), they are no competition for this woman who earns a living working as a vocal coach and limnologist.
Dutch folk noir band The Bullfight have been a hidden treasure for longer than they care to remember. Their brand of orchestral pop somehow failed to reach a Nick Cave or Decemberists-sized audience. Their new double album is two-fists knock on the door marked "recognition". The first CD contains the brand new Shame, Guilt, Deception – individuals chapter I album and the other is a reissue of heir long out of print album One Was A Snake.
The Bullfight are the musical equivalent of a night out at the circus, with an afterparty at a jazz/vaudeville dive. They are melancholic (The Weeping Willow), defiant (That Man, My Life Is Better Than Yours), and can throw down a jig that could have been written by Leonard Cohen (My Comeback). The album as a whole is an old school ballroom dance on the volcano - naming a song Waltz for L.E. is dead giveaway.
Blues rock quartet Gov't Mule have announced a nine-show European tour to promote their new studio album, playing gigs in Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Austria.
Dutch happy hardrockers The Dirty Denims keep it simple on their new no-frills EP Back With A Bang - part 1. The quartet likes to boogie like AC/DC did when Bon Scott was still alive. Keywords: fun, energy and having a good time. Lead singer Mirjam Sieben has enough power to reach the back rows of a festival crowd (or rattle the windows of a bar treating their clientele to a set of rawk).
Pop this in the player when you need some lowdown and dirty rock 'n'roll: plenty of catchy riffs, ooh-ooh's and yeah-yeah's. Back With A Bang - part 1 is a less is more EP that is catchy as Hell. Recommended if you like ZZ Top and Joan Jett.
Matt Hannah showed a lot of promise on his debut album Let the Lonely Fade. His new one, Dreamland, is the work of a musician who is comfortable with being a country-esque Americana singer. He got a new band and enlisted two guys who can play bass, ensuring that the songs have a solid backbone - he needed that to ground all those guitars.
Hannah's gravely voice serves as a nice contrast for the sweet sound of Aaron Fabbrini's pedal steel. The songs have a lazy swing quality - drummer JT Bates playing with brushes certainly helps. Dreamland is an optimistic alum. His lyrics are straightforward and devoid of metaphors or hyperboles. Hannah knows where he is going: to an even better future, with his significant other by his side. That may sound superficial or even cheesy, but it's honest.
Engineer Justin Cortelyou has been working with legendary producer Bob Ezrin for many years. He talks about this (and more) in an interview with Tape Op Magazine:
He's seen enough, and he will put the fear of god in you. If you can make it through the boot camp stage with him, it prepares you for so much. You can take anything. But it's great, because it saves time. You know exactly where he stands, and you know if he's not happy. When the red light goes off, he's the best guy ever. He's not mean, necessarily; just intense.
On recording Phish:
We're used to cartage guys with little box trucks coming in with gear, but Phish bring in an 18-wheeler, and it's a huge set up. They have two instrument techs with their own benches. Phish also has their own engineer, Ben Collette. He knows their sound, and knows what they like. He's awesome to have – he has everything organized. He took out all these mic pres from their console, so we had a ton of great gear to use.
Dutch country singer Amber Kamminga is halfway through a her Song Stories series, four videos in which she gives a little background information about all four tracks from her debut EP Star-Crossed Lovers. Watch her explain of Back To Barcelona and Liar (in which she mentions HCTF's review).
Does it matter that Frisco based singer and guitarist Shawna Virago is a transgender? No, it doesn't when appraising the music as such, but since pretty all of the lyrics on her Heaven Sent Delinquent deal with being accepted as such it becomes clear that she has run into her fair share of misunderstandings, discrimination, and all out harassment. No wonder she picked elements of punk, folk and good ol' outlaw country as the main genres for her music.
Virago means female warrior with masculine strength, a fitting stage name for a woman who fights the good fight through her music. It's just her and her acoustic guitar, the classic set up for a protest singer. Her vocals contains a twangy snarl, while she sings about relationships (Gender Armageddon, Heaven Sent Delinquent), sexual innuendo (Last Night’s Sugar, The Pleasure Car), and politics (Lands of Guns and Honey).
When a band is named after a bleak Philip. K. Dick novel changes are that they will paint a dysptopian world - the don't trust anybody kind. Progressive pop/rock quartet The Cosmic Puppets are not that dark, but there is plenty of stuff that they can worry about on their Beauty In The Strangest album.
Founded in 2004, when the band members were all graduates of the Perth Music College in Scotland, they kept in touch after they moved to different parts of the country. It wasn't easy to get together to work on their music. All in all it took them nine years to finish the album. What kept them going was a shared love for melodic progressive music. Singer and keyboardist Tony Halsall wrote all the lyrics, but all music is a collaborative effort. They can rock (The Whole-Half Truth), channel Lamb-era Genesis (Inside She's Dying), and even indulge in funky mainstream pop (The Reject).
British shoegaze pioneers Ride have added more dates to their American tour. They hit the West Coast in September before going South for a show in Mexico City.
Their new album Weather Diaries will be released on June 16th.
Watch Massimo Bucci perform the Genesis classic Firth Of Fifth on piano. He wrote the arrangement. Lots more (Yes, ELP, Mozart, Bach, Scott Joplin etc.) on his YouTube channel.
German-Dutch duo The Day are back with a new single. Grow is another fine example of their mix of melancholy and electro indie pop that made their debut EP Strangers With Familiar Faces so special.
Laura Loeters' vocals and Gregor Sonnenberg's keyboards are carefully balanced. Every note counts in their genre and they graduated with honours.
John Cale will perform at l’Alhambra in Genève , Switzerland on September 1.,, as part of the Festival de Genève.
Tickets go on sale June 20th.
All my lyrics are open to interpretation by the individual and imply many different meanings, therefore their relevance is purely subjective.
Ian Curtis
Live at the Machpelah 30th March 2017 is the third album that Colin Robinson released under his one-man project Jumble Hole Clough banner this year. With that kind of productivity some wear and tear might be expected, or even rehashing some old ideas. And while hit signature tone is in place, plus his uncanny command of using loops, Robinson shows no signs of painting himself into a corner. Give this a man a guitar, a bunch of effect pedals and well-used amps and he will get to work improvising a set of gnarly tunes, sitting on the cusp of avant-garde and funky progressive rock weirdness.
Recorded during the Inkfolk event at Machpelah Works in Hebden Bridge, his set featured a couple of tunes that adventurous (or mildly inebriated) attendees might have tried to dance to, succumbing to the lure of the low notes in Malachite Clan Hop. A Champion Hellcat has all the swagger of a feline walking down the street like he owns he it. Napalm-Hot Chalice has a jazzy vibe that come close to fusion (thankfully without all the self-consciousness that tend to come with it).
NYC singer and guitar ace Andee Blacksugar has released Vol 7 of his Black Sugar Transmission re-recordings for his monthly EP series The Aughts. Vol 7: We Blacked Out On The Train To The Future contains six songs crossing the border between glam and hard rock, It can be bought from his webshop.
The Aughts is a new monthly series of 6-song EP releases. These are brand new re-recordings of songs I originally wrote/recorded on my trusty 4-track machine roughly between 2000 and 2006 (also known as the P*S*K era).
Memphis based screaming blues act Low Society will release their third album Sanctified on May 1st. Husband Sturgis Nikides (guitar) and wife Mandy Lemons (vocals) laid the groundwork for the tracks during their tour in Belgium and Holland last year:
This is our 3rd album, and a trans-Atlantic production with native Belgians Jacky Verstraeten on bass and Bart De Bruecker on drums, as well as Memphis legend Rick Steff back on the keys, also, our good friend Brian Hawkins on the jaw harp. The rhythm tracks were recorded at Closed Session Recording Studio in Roeselare, Belgium, by Kristof Maes. All additional recording and tracks were done back home - at American Recording Studio in Memphis, TN, with engineer Will Danger.
Canadian psychedelic doo-wop rock trio The Velveteins have released video for Midnight Surf, another single from their forthcoming debut full-length Slow Wave. It's an ode to sleep, dreams and letting go. Nice touch to have crashing cymbals emulating the waves of the ocean.
The new The Fierce & The Dead album Field Recordings (live) will be released on April 28. The tracks were recorded live at the Ramblin' Man Fair in Maidstone, 24th July 2016. The artwork was created by Mark Buckingham, the comic book artist who also designed the packaging for their Magnet EP.
Field Recordings (live) is released thru Bad Elephant Music (CD, digital, and - very limited - cassette). Preorder from their website. The artwork was created by Mark Buckingham, the comic book artist who also designed the packaging for their Magnet EP.
Irish singer Billy Keane come into his own on his new EP The Nearness of You, with four melancholic folk-tinged tunes. He is an above average guitar player, but it's his voice and his words that make him stand out in the huge crowd of hopeful singer-songwriters looking for a break. That one year songwriting course he took at London’s BIMM paid off handsomely. Damien Rice and Ray LaMontagne are among his heroes, but he is no copycat of their styles. Keane's songs are driven by smart key changes that are both pleasing to the eye and interesting enough to satisfy hardcore music geeks and students.
He looks inward and outward in his lyrics, telling tales of travel, stolen moments, and the inevitable heartbreak. Keane sings like is sitting right in front of the listener, creating a true intimacy that is the mark of a great folk vocalist. He is a breath of fresh air in a world where artists like Ed Sheeran are polluting the airwaves with boring, predictable crap.
All three Trey Anastasio acoustic shows are now available on Livephish.com:
His Summer tour with the Trey Anastasio Band kicks off on April 14 in Port Chester, NY.
» trey.com
Amsterdam indie guitar band Maggie Brown will celebrate the release of their second album Another Place (CD, vinyl, digital) with a hometown show @ De Nieuwe Anita on July 1st. The artwork, Monogorod III, was created by Aldo van den Broek.
Maggie Brown:
Marcel Hulst: vocals, guitar
Friso Schmid: keyboards
Thomas Dow: bass
Pascal van Baren: drums
HCTF review of Maggie Brown.
Instrumental experimentalists The Fierce & The Dead are on the bill of three leading prog festivals: RoSFest in the USA, and in the New Day Festival and HRH Prog 6 in the UK.
They will release a live album later this year. The artwork was created by Mark Buckingham, the comic book artist who also designed the packaging for their Magnet EP.
Johnny Dowd, one of a kind leftfield trashcan Americana artist, has a show at The Silver Line in Trumansburg, NY on April 7th. He will introduce his new band The Love Munchkins. Show starts at 8pm. Donations much appreciated.
HCTF review of Execute American Folklore.
