English musicians and music geeks extraordinaire Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness have posted a new episode of their podcast The Album Years. They talk about 1977, discussing albums by Fleetwood Mac, John Martyn, Billy Joel, and a whole lot more. This is part #3B of what will be 8 episodes about this year.
The New Brutarians destroy the Fleetwood Mac classic Go Your Own Way, but in a good way. The duo consists of Adam Turkel on guitar and fashion model Christina Wright on drums and they obviously had a lot of fun turning this classic rock staple into ramshackle lo-fi garage rocker from Hell. If anything it will scare the shit out of the retirees in their hometown St. Petersburg, Florida.
The cat is out of the bag. Over the last few months a couple of "fake bands" released tracks as part of the Digital Singles Series by the folks at Californian power pop label Big Stir Records. It turns that one band was hiding behind all this: The Armoires, the power pop quintet fronted by label owners Christina Bulbenko and Rex Broome. They had also reached to the other artists on their roster to join in as guest musicians to create what would become Incognito, an album with covers of their musical heroes and a bunch of originals filled with references and lyrical snippets - "Listen to the wind blow / Watch the sun rise" from Fleetwood Mac's The Chain pops up at the end of I Say We Take Off And Nuke The Site From Orbit. The oddest track is the half a minute of audio collage The Armoires Are The Amine Beta Ring Sunshine Harmony Consortium, which does not sound like anything from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music or The Kinks magnum opus The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.
It takes some nerve besides the required skills to kick off an album with the John Cale classic Paris 1919. Slightly more rough around the edges than the original, it features the superb harmonic skills of Karla Kane & Khoi Huynh (The Corner Laughers). As a rule of thumb the covers tend to stick close to the originals - why fix a perfect albeit overplayed pop song like Yellow River by one-hit wonder soft rockers Christie. However, they decided to deconstruct and rebuild Senses Working Overtime with ace results. They slowed it down a bit, with call-and-response vocals by Blake Jones, Dolph Chaney and Peter Watts (Spygenius).
Late Aster was founded by four students while studying music at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Half of the band, Aaron Messing and Anni Hochhalter, mix classical piano and jazz vocals on their cover of the Fleetwood Mac classic Dreams. The sadness of the lyrics really comes to fore in this stripped down arrangement. It will be released as a bonus track on the limited vinyl version (50 copies) of their debut EP True and Toxic, due for release on May 21 via Bright Shiny Things.
Watch Belgian jazz guitarist Bert Dockx (Flying Horseman, Dans Dans, Ottla) tackle the Fleetwood Mac classic Albatross, a track from his solo album Transit.
Live dates: