Monthly Archives: April 2020

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Responding to the worldwide Covid-19 emergency, Songs For The National Health Service is a one-off compilation album of exclusive, unreleased tracks by some of the biggest names in indie, with all proceeds funding specialist PPE for hospitals and NHS key workers.

Foals, Wolf Alice, Baxter Dury, The Vaccines, The Big Moon, The Wombats, Sports Team, The Magic Gang, Spector, Swim Deep, The Orielles, Nilüfer Yanya, Alfie Templeman, Oscar Lang, Pixx and Jessica Winter have all come together exclusively for the album, with a mix of special covers, remixes, live tracks and demos not available anywhere else, the majority being made available for the very first time. Songs For The National Health Service is working in partnership with Dr. Natalie Watson at University Hospital Lewisham, as she launches the Hoods for Heroes campaign.

Our initial target of £30,000 will provide enough ‘PAPR’ (powered air purifying respirators) to help fully stock Lewisham Greenwich NHS Trust (site of the UK’s first confirmed Covid-19 patient), Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust and University Hospital Crosshouse, Scotland. All money raised beyond that will provide equipment for further hospitals and regions based on need, not only helping safely treat victims of Covid-19, but enabling NHS teams to restart time-critical head and neck cancer surgery.

The artists hope this album will not only raise funds, but also serve as a keepsake of our indebtedness to the NHS and its staff working tirelessly and courageously through this difficult time. In the future we must do much more to ensure they are funded and paid properly, and forever treated with the respect they deserve.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | My Morning Jacket will offer a free webcast of their full set from the 2016 Shaky Knees Festival in Atlanta, GA this Friday night at 8 pm ET on the band’s YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Nugs.TV. The webcast kicks off “Shaky Knees TV,” a virtual weekend of live sets from the festival playing through the weekend. The band and Shaky Knees are including a charity component, encouraging viewers to make a donation to Crew Nation, a global relief fund supporting live music crews who have lost work during COVID-19.

The webcast is broadcast in conjunction with the re-launch of the My Morning Jacket live archive audio program via nugs.net, the leading live music platform for concert recordings and live streams. Starting today, 27 MMJ shows, previously only available for purchase as a-la-carte downloads, can be found on nugs.net’s live music streaming service, most of which are also offered in MQA 24-bit hi-res audio. In addition, two new shows are being added to the service and as downloads — their 2016 show from the Tivoli Theater in Chattanooga, TN (available now) as well as the 2016 Shaky Knees show being webcasted on Friday (this will be available on the nugs.service after the webcast concludes on Friday night). New shows from the band’s extensive touring history will be added to the service each month.

Subscribers to nugs.net can listen to over 15,000 live concerts and view over 100 HD videos of full shows, ad-free, exclusively on the nugs.net streaming app, on desktop, and through Sonos. New and legendary shows from iconic artists are added daily and downloadable for offline playback.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Stevie Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation and its national K-12 curriculum initiative, TeachRock.org, along with the student-run organization YOUnison as well as 50 supporting organizations will be honoring first responders and healthcare workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic today, April 30, as part of the “Worldwide Day of Gratitude” initiative. “Worldwide Day of Gratitude” will be a global coming together through the arts and to mark the occasion, the late Bill Withers’ classic “Lean On Me” will be played on SiriusXM stations tomorrow at 7:00 pm EDT in a nationwide sing-a-long.

Teachers, students, and members of the general public, are all invited to learn and share the iconic song via sheet music authorized by Hal Leonard Corporation, as well as special lesson plans developed by TeachRock.org, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and others. Participants are encouraged to download the materials and then share their unique versions on YouTube and social media channels using the hashtags #LeanOnUs and #DayOfGratitude. “We are all finding ways to say thank you to our essential worker heroes who have worked right through this very scary time,” says Van Zandt. “We applaud them every night at 7:00. Now we’ll add a great song to say thank you.”

“The effort put forth by the first responders and healthcare workers has been incredibly inspiring to so many around the world,” said Andrew E. Morrison, co-founder of YOUnison, a student-centered community empowering YOU to achieve musical excellence based around self-directed learning, creativity, and collaboration. “To show our gratitude, teachers, students, and people of all ages can use the power of music and the arts to unite to honor these amazing heroes.”

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | New Zealand’s legendary group The Clean have dusted off several releases from their catalog and made them available on all digital platforms! Today marks the digital debut of the band’s 1996 studio album Unknown Country and that of “Live Dead Clean,” a six-song EP of early live tracks recorded in 1981 and 1982. Pop some “Champagne & Misery” to celebrate.

The Clean’s David Kilgour and Robert Scott on Unknown Country: David Kilgour: The Clean always wanna try something different, but on this LP, we were obsessed with the idea. Tracks like “Wipe Me, I’m Lucky” and “Franz Kafka at the Zoo” are fine examples of the approach, I reckon. Quite a long way from “Tally Ho!” and “Beatnik”! I remember we generally left vocal ideas to last, after the tracks were recorded, so we never really knew where we were headed. Might also explain all the instrumentals! Made during the Balkan War, hence the reference. And for the freaks, I think “Balkans” is the only Clean track ever to not actually feature the Clean playing. It’s all Alan Starrett, as we removed the backing track.

Robert Scott: This album is very different from our other albums. We didn’t go into the studio with many “song” ideas—a lot of it was written on the spot. I really enjoyed recording this as it was free of expectation. We weren’t playing much live at the time. It does contain some of my favourite Clean songs such as “Twist Top,” “Wipe Me, I’m Lucky,” and “Valley Cab.” Certainly our most experimental album.”

In addition to the releases mentioned above, Compilation, Vehicle, Modern Rock, and In-A-Live are available for your listening pleasure on your favorite digital service today.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | There are bands, there are fans, and then there’s Dennis and Lois. It’s official, April 28, 2020 is the release date for the long-awaited, award-winning documentary called Dennis And Lois. A story about a New York couple that transcended beyond just being “music fans,” to become the legends behind the legends.

In the Rock ‘n’ Roll world, the word “legends” is normally reserved for the performers and the stars, but every now and then, certain people rise up between the cracks of celebrity and fame to cement their own legacy. Dennis and Lois are such people. It all began in the mid-70s at a gritty little club in New York City called CBGB’s where Dennis and Lois befriended an up-and-coming band, The Ramones. They quickly became part of The Ramones inner circle, selling merchandise and assisting the future punk legends on tours around the world. This experience changed their lives.

Through the years, Dennis and Lois continue to build friendships and sell merchandise for the bands they admire. Happy Mondays immortalized them in song and Spin magazine published a comic strip celebrating their “War Stories from the Road.” Dennis and Lois are considered by many to be rock ‘n’ roll icons, but as age and illness start to threaten their lifelong tour, they need to rely on the friends they’ve collected along the way and the music that energizes them to keep it going.

Dennis and Lois is a documentary about love, passion, and the power of music. It’s about a couple who’ve always lived life on their own terms, and who have dedicated their lives to the spirit of Rock ‘n’ Roll with a self-imposed moral obligation to give back to those who create the music that moves them. It’s a film about the long list of artists that they’ve come to call friends, who consider Dennis and Lois an integral part of their own success and purpose.

Although he has a sizable discography to his credit, Stuart Hyatt isn’t accurately labeled as a musician, but rather as a field recorder, and through extensive collaboration, a sonic architect (he indeed studied architecture, an endeavor that led him to his current pursuit). Released as Field Works, his productivity was collected in a large-scale limited edition vinyl box set in 2018, and now there’s Ultrasonic, a 2LP, CD, and digital release of Hyatt’s compositional sources enhanced by, amongst others, Eluvium, Sarah Davachi, Mary Lattimore, Noveller, and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Cohering into a rewarding “storytelling project” concerning the endangered Indiana bat, it’s out May 1 via Temporary Residence.

Although electronic music has its share of multi-member groups, and most-often duos (e.g. Boards of Canada, Matmos, Autechre, The Knife), it is still dominated by solo operators (and doesn’t my promo inbox know it). Indeed, electronic music is largely an auteur-driven zone where collaboration is regularly utilized as a way to extend or just spice-up an approach that has already proven effective on its own.

But wait. To describe Field Works as electronic is reductive, even as the list of those who’ve built upon Hyatt’s foundations include many who fit into that category (the aforementioned Matmos, Visible Cloaks, Ben Lukas Boysen, The Field, Dntel, B. Fleischmann, Gazelle Twin, Prototokyo, Pantha du Prince, and more), along with others, with the expected descriptive overlap, who are frequently tagged as ambient (Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Lusine, Chihei Hatakeyama).

But there are also names standing a little further apart (The Album Leaf, Juana Molina, Lullatone, Dan Deacon), or a lot (William Tyler) as Field Works becomes distinguished for the bedrock necessity of collaboration. To offer some background, the numerous prior recordings in the Field Works catalog, currently available separately digitally but released in 2018 on vinyl in the 7LP set Metaphonics: The Complete Field Works Recordings, evolved from a site analysis Hyatt conducted of the Washington Street neighborhoods in his hometown of Indianapolis as part of his M.Arch. thesis project.

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Although long defunct, throughout the 1990s the UK label Too Pure promulgated a sweet heaping mess of worthwhile musical activity; most illustrious in the outpouring were PJ Harvey and Stereolab, but numerous additional acts fortified the scenario, and amongst the finest was Pram. Formed in Birmingham, England in 1990, the experimental pop outfit released three full-lengths on Too Pure, and the first two, ’93’s The Stars Are So Big, the Earth Is So Small…Stay as You Are and the following year’s Helium are available via Medical Records of Seattle, WA.

Pram initially came together in the late ‘80s under the name Hole. Eventually their founding members, namely Rosie Cuckston on vocals and keyboards, Matt Eaton on guitar, Samantha “Sam” Owen on bass, and Andy Weir on drums, changed the moniker to Pram, and their first recordings wielded an abrasive, nervous quality derived from indie rock and traceable back to their home country’s post-punk innovators, in particular The Slits and The Raincoats.

As part of the upside-down musical landscape of the early ’90s, Pram has surely been categorized as one component in the truly seismic indie explosion. But instead of being tidily indicative of the ’80s underground’s absorption into the mainstream of the ensuing decade, the group can be accurately tagged as prescient; circa ’88 as Hole their sound reportedly sprang entirely from vocals and a homemade Theremin.

Pram has been described as everything from experimental pop/rock to neo-psychedelia to dream pop, but they seem best pegged as an early example of post-rock (though at least one member of the band disagrees) as they adopted a wide range of atypical instrumentation, borrowed ideas from a Krautrock and post-punk antecedents, honed their skills as multi-instrumentalists and then strove to not sound like anyone else.

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“My dad thinks listening to music on vinyl in the 21st century is hilarious. It’s a conversation we’ve had every Christmas since I was a teenager and my sister and I started getting records in flat Amazon-mailer packages under the tree.”

“He laughs at the absurdity of packing up a box of records that would take up less than 1% of the available space on his iPod. And sure, the fact that my dad still listens to music on an iPod in 2020 is much funnier than anything he could ever say about record collecting, but he does have a point. Vinyl is heavy. It breaks and warps. It’s peddled and collected by an often obnoxious and snobby corner of the music-loving world. It also must be enjoyed at home, which to be honest isn’t really where I most enjoy listening to music. A record, while it might look and sound great, can’t be enjoyed on a walk through the park or on a long drive through the middle of nowhere. So what is so great about it?

The first turntable I ever bought was some Sony USB-powered thing that I got at Best Buy in ninth or tenth grade, and my only impetus for buying it was that my girlfriend gave me The Beatles’ blue album on vinyl and I had no way to listen to it. I brought home the record player and looked for a headphone jack. Couldn’t find one. I tried Googling “how to use turntable” and was immediately overwhelmed with talk of preamps, speakers, cables, needles, and no one even once mentioned just plugging in your headphones. I’d just spent like a hundred bucks on this complicated looking machine that was going to play this record, and now everyone on the internet was telling me I needed to spend more money? No thank you. The turntable, and the record, sat on the back burner up until the summer before I left for college.

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Based in Portland, OR but with time spent in England, Olivia Awbrey writes the songs and sings them on her debut full-length. Just as importantly, she invigorates her tunes with tough guitar playing and enlists a tight crew (including Jen Macro of My Bloody Valentine) to infuse the whole with heft and depth, so that instead of just another indie strum scenario, a tangle of influences productively shine through. Dishonorable Harvest is out May 1 on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through the Quick Pickle label.

Checking out Olivia Aubrey’s first release, the 7-song “Fight or Fight” EP from 2017 (still available on CD), does present something of a strum scenario in its opening title track, though it’s more classically folk-poppy than indie and likeable at that. Following it is a tight dose of up-tempo melodic-rock, with the rest of the set highlighting Awbrey’s budding strengths as a singer-songwriter.

Extending from its first cut, the EP’s an enjoyable listen, but “Geolocation at P.A.M.,” the opening song on her follow-up Dishonorable Harvest, delivers a power move of considerable proportions and sets into motion a long-player that, while solid, still registers as an effort of promise rather than a document of fulfilled potential. Furthermore, the track’s title refers to the Portland Art Museum, the connection revealed in lyrics that dive into (seemingly) autobiographical realms infused with rocking loudness situating Awbrey as a descendant of Patti Smith.

She’s not swiping Smith’s moves though. In her website bio, Awbrey describes her songs as offering a “self-interrogation of her place in the world as a queer woman,” and it’s a self-assessment that shines through in the hearing. Additionally, on an instrumental level, the song’s heaviness feels connected to more recent Alt-indie developments, the bio further detailing how Awbrey met and spent time with one of her inspirations, the English songwriter CJ Thorpe-Tracey, who along with Jen Marco, contributes to Dishonorable Harvest.

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