Monthly Archives: March 2017

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Xtra Mile/Interscope Records recording artist Frank Turner screens the documentary film Get Better–A Film About Frank Turner—an exhilarating and candid film about a year in his life—for U.S. audiences this spring. Turner will join filmmaker Ben Morse for a Q&A at screenings in Chicago, Pomona, Boston, and New York. A DVD of the documentary will be available at a later date. Advance tickets for the screenings are available here.

Filmmaker Ben Morse spent a year trailing one of the most hard-working musicians currently operating and what emerges is a raw, insightful portrayal of an underground hero. A close friend of Turner, Morse originally intended to capture Turner and his band, The Sleeping Souls, in constant motion only to discover a man facing up to his demons, forced to pause touring for the first time in his career.

Get Better–A Film About Frank Turner includes never-before-seen footage from friends, family and fans across the world as well as extensive interviews with Turner and his band as they contemplate what drives a man to stay on the road and the effect that has on his life and those around him.

Turner has been one of the breakthrough artists of the millennium, emerging from his punk-rock roots to become a rock icon to diehard fans all over the world. In 2015, everything came to a head as Turner slipped off the wagon and confronted the commercial pressures of mainstream success.

“DJing was my thing; I was the only one I knew at my high school with a heavy obsession for vinyl. I graduated in 2007 when iPods were still new and expensive, streaming hadn’t happened yet, and burning CDs was weirdly a little bit controversial.”

“For my 14th birthday my parents were awesome and bought me a DJ-in-a-box set of belt drive Stanton turntables and DJ mixer. I had no idea how they worked, how to DJ, or which speakers I needed to make them work. My amazing parents brought me to the local record store every few weeks, the owner would spin whatever new records he was feelin and I learned to DJ by watching him. I bought my first drum and bass records there, like Shy Fx, LTJ Bukem, and Dieselboy.

Eventually I moved on to ordering most of my records from the UK. I would literally plan an entire DJ mix ahead of time while I waited for the records to be delivered. I grew up playing instruments in school, but I wasn’t really into music until I found electronic music. Every weekend I brought my crate of records with me where I went. I was living on the tail-end of the ’90s rave scene. I even think my senior quote in the yearbook is ‘the party ain’t over til’ the last record spins.’

I still own all of those records, they sit in hard cases in my old bedroom with fliers from mid 2000s raves. Now I buy albums of my favorite current music. I think my most recent purchases were the new Tribe record, Solange, Deerhoof’s La Isla Bonita, Arca’s Xen, and Tim Hecker’s Piano Drop. We’re pressing our EP to vinyl too. There’s something about owning a physical copy of music that you can’t get with streaming.
—Elliot Glasser

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Former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker is the most accomplished dramatic actor in rock’n’roll. He has an unforgettable voice for starters, and possesses an uncanny knack for inhabiting the bodies of the various louts, philanderers, and other shallow and morally repulsive men he likes to write about. Cocker is a moralist at heart. Sometimes he’s funny about it; at other times the tone is much, much darker. But jesting or not, he’s always serious.

In his time he’s painted dark portraits of rave culture (“Sorted for E’s and Whizz”), of a man of small soul warning his son not to follow his shallow and destructive path through life (“A Little Soul”), of a rich girl gone slumming (“Common People”), and “the sound of loneliness turned up to ten” (“The Fear”). But the acme of his horrifying peek into male sexuality remains “This Is Hardcore,” in which the song’s speaker spells out his vision of lovemaking in clinical detail: “I’ve seen the storyline played out so many times before/Oh, that goes in there/Then that goes in there/Then that goes in there/Then that goes in there/And then it’s over/Oh, what a hell of a show/But what I want to know/What exactly do you do for an encore?”

Cocker’s plummy actor’s voice and darkly satiric vision made Pulp the most intellectually and spiritually probing band to emerge from Britpop, and Pulp’s dissolution left me inconsolable. Fortunately Cocker continues to record, and 2009’s Further Complications measures up to the best of his former band. The sound is much harder, thanks largely to an unlikely alliance between Cocker and Steve Albini as producer, and has a wonderful glam rock feel to it.

Never before has Cocker committed to recording a song as hard-hitting as “Pilchard.” The punchy and fast-paced “Homewrecker!” boasts a great Roxy Music-school saxophone and could pass for an Aladdin Sane-era Bowie tune, while the title track (and album topper) boasts a big beat, some Eno-school backing vocals, and opens with the wonderful lines, “In the beginning there was nothing/To be honest that just suited me fine/I was three weeks late coming out of the womb/In no great rush to join the rest of mankind.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Max’s Kansas City is the legendary New York City nightclub that became the focal point for the city’s hip artistic community from the late ’60s until the early ’80s. In its initial period, it was famously often populated by Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd, and played host to new artists such as the Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, the Stooges, Bruce Springsteen, and countless others. It became a base for jet-setters, glam rockers, and celebs until the scene faded and it shut its doors at the end of 1974.

Reopened in 1975 under new management, Peter Crowley was hired as music director. The new young bands he booked helped spawn, in tandem with CBGBs, the New York City punk scene. In 1976 Peter compiled a studio album of acts associated with the club, Max’s Kansas City 1976, to help promote the club. It featured the first released recordings of Suicide, The Fast, and Warhol-era veteran Wayne County, whose title-track gave a roll-call of many of the famous acts who’d regularly performed there.

Now the original album is reissued as Max’s Kansas City 1976 & Beyond, greatly extended to 40 tracks on a double-CD and a selection of 25 tracks on a double-LP. As well as the aforementioned Suicide, Fast, and Wayne County, the new extended album features the New York Dolls, the Stillettos, the Offs, the Senders, Philip Rambow, VON LMO, Iggy Pop, Knots, Roland Alphonso, Cherry Vanilla, Nico, Joy Ryder, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, and Sid Vicious amongst many others. It includes many previously unreleased tracks and rarities. Compiled by Peter Crowley, who also contributes notes detailing the history of the album. Writer, musician, and Max’s scenester Jimi LaLumia provides historical overview sleeve-notes along with biographies of the artists in a 20-page booklet.

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Alt-folk quartet Evening Darling crank out the kind of tunes that force you out on the highway.

The NYC-based bands newest single, “Another Long Drive” finds lead singer Erica Lane sparring with singer/guitarist Nick Lerangis over a perfected blend of top down, Tom Petty-ish Americana. Evening Darling has played up and down the Eastern seaboard and their music is seasoned with the kind of heartland rock vibes that area made famous in decade’s past.

There is a mutual longing in both Lane and Lerangis’ approach to their respective versus that is accentuated when they combine their yearning in a sensual harmony. The desperate search to find stability somewhere outside themselves is hard to shake and it’s even harder to decipher if they are addressing each other, a former lover, or the open road itself.

Evening Darling’s self-titled album is in stores on April 14.

“I wrote this song in a van with one of my touring partners, Todd Lombardo, on a long drive from New York to Nashville. We would switch off driving and sitting shotgun playing the guitar. We had the bulk of it by the time we crossed into Virginia. The lyrics are a conversation between two people. It may not always be clear who’s talking, but that’s kind of the point.”

“The first record I remember playing was The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I was five and discovered it in my dad’s old vinyl collection. I would play it on my aqua-green plastic Playshool suitcase record player over and over. I was completely astonished by it. Everything about it—the songs, the sound of it—and slowly I would unearth other Beatles records and wear them out one by one. I convinced my friends across the street to start a Beatles lip-sync band and we gave basement concerts to our parents. I was beyond obsessed.

A few years later, I branched out of the Beatles and started walking to the local record store, Charlemagne Record Exchange (Birmingham, AL). The place became a sanctuary for me. I’d spend hours poring over their used collection, agonizing which one to buy, and then finally bringing one home in a brown paper bag with a big gold sticker on it.

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Crowned as an avant-garde diva way back in the mid-1980s, Diamanda Galás has spent the ensuing decades embodying and eclipsing the designation. Her oeuvre evinces pure operatic skill, elements of cinematic and literary horror, consistent activism on the behalf of the victimized, potent threads of blues and jazz, and boldness of personality likely to make many popstars jealous. After a nine-year recording absence, she’s back with a double whammy; All the Way (vinyl, compact disc, and digital) and At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem (CD and digital only) reinforce that Galás’ abilities and creative passion are undiminished. Both are out now on her Intravenal Sound Operations label.

An avant-garde diva indeed, but for many budding music enthusiasts of the 1980s, Diamanda Galás’ music was a primary escape from the predictability and smallness of scale that occasionally afflicted the rock output of the time (yes Virginia, even the underground variety). In this, she can be placed in the company of Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, and John Zorn, but with the distinction that Galás, at least at this point in her development, was untethered to “rock” in any form.

She did find herself attached to the industrial fringe in part due to a large lump of her work carrying the logo of the Mute label. This relationship made it easy for curious suburbanites to special order LPs from their local wax shack, but to this day some erroneously assume that it was Mute’s Daniel Miller who discovered her.

Nope. Her debut on record came on Jim French’s 1979 effort If Looks Could Kill; she intermittently appears on side two alongside the multi-horn specialist and guitarist Henry Kaiser, who issued the disc on his Metalanguage label. An interesting artifact, it establishes Galás as part of the late ’70s West Coast avant-garde (she was born in San Diego and moved to San Francisco in the ’80s), but it’s ’82’s The Litanies of Satan, first released on Y Records and reissued in ’89 on Mute, that effectively commences the lengthy first phase of her discography.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Intervention Records is thrilled to announce Judee Sill’s classic 1971 debut, Judee Sill (Cat# IR-016), and her stellar followup Heart Food (Cat# IR-017). Each album is cut as a double-45RPM LP set and pressed on dead-quiet 180-gram vinyl. Both LPs are anticipated to street in June 2017 and are available for pre-order now.

The astonishing Judee Sill was the first artist signed to David Geffen’s Asylum Records, and Judee Sill the first album released on the label. Sill’s music is intensely spiritual, redolent of mystical and divine imagery, yet grounded by great songwriting and a pure but powerful singing talent. Her songs impart incredible intimacy that is enhanced by her sometimes complex string arrangements (remarkably Sill arranged and conducted the strings/orchestra on these albums!).

Sill’s life was tragic personally and professionally. Her father and brother were killed when Sill was young, and her tempestuous relationship with her alcoholic (and remarried) mother resulted in her leaving home at 15. She committed robberies and began a battle she was destined to lose against drug addiction. When stardom didn’t follow the critical acclaim of these two albums her career never recovered. Sill was dead from a drug overdose in 1979 at just 35. The brevity of Judee’s musical legacy is outweighed by the emotional power and weight of these two extraordinary albums.

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