Zola Jesus - Exhumed

 #Zola Jesus #darkwave #electronic #industrial #experimental #art pop #electropop #gothic rock #music video

Nika Roza Danilova has been recording and performing as Zola Jesus for more than a decade. As a classically trained opera singer with a penchant for noisy, avant-garde sounds, she launched her career with a series of lo-fi releases that pitted her soaring vocals against harsh industrial clatter and jittery synths. Her work became more hi-fi as she began to explore her own skewed vision of pop music on releases like Stridulum, Valusia, and Conatus. That era culminated in the release of Versions, a collection of string quartet interpretations of her most beloved work, conducted by J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus). That album and subsequent tour were followed by her most hi-fi outing to date, Taiga. In 2017 she returned to both the Wisconsin woods in which she was raised and her longtime label, Sacred Bones Records, to release Okovi, her darkest album yet. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, and Patreon.

Zola Jesus on making a living as a musician:

What’s the best way to make a living as a musician?

Be really good at budgeting money. Don’t live in an expensive city. Don’t get too comfortable.

What’s the hardest part about making a living as a musician, as you’ve experienced it? How can you avoid that trouble?

The instability. It’s feast or famine. It’s important to understand that every good year comes with three bad ones, financially speaking. Don’t take anything for granted. Plan accordingly. Work smart. Work hard.

Do you think using social media — Instagram, Twitter — helps with sustainability?

Yes. Social media is the watering hole of our culture. For better or worse, it’s where we congregate. Also, having access to the public directly gives us autonomy and control over our art. No longer do we need to rely on some Big Joseph from Shareholders Inc to get our message out and speak up.

Where are there opportunities for making money in the music industry currently?

On a practical level, hope that your music gets played in a movie or TV show. It will help to pay the bills, especially at times when you have no active income. I’m starting to learn something else though. I think when we talk about “making money,” our ideas have to come from something capitalistic, like a sponsorship, or a record deal, or whatever fantasy of being a rich rock star yields. But really, instead of focusing on making money by selling what you do, we should focus on making connections. Fostering the relationship between you, your music, and the people who like your music. Find a community. Respect it. Once you have that, turn to it. The community can sustain you, if you let it. Forget the Apple advertisement or sponsorship or whatever else you think you might need to be a working musician in late-stage capitalism. Turn to people. Mutual fucking aid.

How important has Patreon been for your sustainability? Why do you think it’s been so successful?

Here I will repeat myself from what I said above. But, Patreon allows me to sleep at night. It has been amazing to experience the generosity of a community. I never thought about being able to be supported in this way. Before I started my Patreon, it always felt like I was forced to figure out how to package what I did as a thing to sell, and I hated it. I can’t think about my music in that way. But instead I realized, I could figure out how to change how I made money from my music. This way, I don’t need to change what I do. I just go directly to the people who my music is for, and they can all come together and support it, if they can.

How important is it to develop a digital audience for you work?

Well, I live in northern Wisconsin, so my regional audience is pretty sparse. “Digital audience” really just means audience. When you make a thing, especially a weird thing, you’re only going to find so many “matches.” That is to say, “people who get what you’re doing and like it.” These days, it’s pretty convenient to be able to have access to nearly an entire world of potential “matches.” So, while I tour as much as I can, there are only so many places I can go in order to evangelize my work. For everywhere else, I am grateful for the possibility that I could find a match of someone in some far-flung place that could never stumble upon my show. Having that channel open for us to find each other is vital.

How important is merch to making a living?

I’m horrible at merch, so hopefully it’s not super important and I’m not missing the point on all of it. For some people it’s huge I think, or so says the legend.

Is it possible to make money as a musician through streaming? How much is reasonable to expect?

Ha. Some say yes, some say no. It’s possible to make money, but not enough to live on. I would never count on it. You’re basically being paid micro amounts for each listen that could one day add up to the actual amount of the purchase of one record.

How should someone just getting started wade into the streaming waters?

I’d like to know as well. I guess getting on playlists is important? But I’m cynical about it. About all of it. Sorry, that’s not helpful! The one thing I can recommend is to use sites like Bandcamp, which puts musicians in the front seat with their music.

From: https://thecreativeindependent.com/wisdom/zola-jesus-on-making-a-living-as-a-musician/

Puscifer - The Mission (M is for Milla Mix)

 #Puscifer #Maynard James Keenan #art rock #experimental rock #electronic #industrial #progressive rock #eclectic #music video

When you think of prog metal giants Tool, the word ‘comedy’ probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But the way frontman Maynard James Keenan sees it, it’s essential not only to that band, but to just about every band he’s ever had a hand in – most notably his solo-project-turned- full-band, Puscifer. “It’s always been the case,” he contests. “It just so happens that Puscifer embodies more of that up-front than the other projects – though, [1996 Tool single] Stinkfist... come on!” Puscifer started life as a gag, a punch-line to a joke that only Maynard fully appreciated. The band’s first public ‘appearance’ was on November 3, 1995, when they popped up on the first episode of the Bob Odenkirk and David Cross comedy sketch show, Mr. Show. In a rockumentary-style skit, a wig-and-trucker-hat-sporting Maynard appears as ‘Ronnie Dobbs’, frontman of the hardcore punk group Puscifer (which also featured Tool guitarist Adam Jones). At that point, ‘Puscifer’ existed only as the vehicle for comedy sketches and was more a workshop of ideas than an actual musical project.
“The name ‘Puscifer’ came up even before we did Mr. Show, when I was working with [comedian] Laura Milligan in a comedy club in Los Angeles,” Maynard explains. “Puscifer was one of the fake bands we’d get to play at shows. There were lots of little things happening behind the scenes long before the first full-length – we even printed t-shirts and stuff. Puscifer didn’t really fully realise itself as a project until I started working on the Underworld soundtrack with Danny Lohner.”
A sometime live member of Nine Inch Nails, Danny had collaborated with Maynard on A Perfect Circle’s debut album, Mer De Noms, as well as the ultimately unrealised supergroup Tapeworm. The pair had become a closely knit creative force, Maynard even inviting Danny to help develop ideas for the long-mooted Puscifer project. In turn, when Danny was appointed as the musical supervisor on the 2003 vampire/werewolf action film Underworld, he suggested the pair finally release a fully fledged Puscifer song. The finished product, Rev 22:20, was Puscifer’s first ‘official’ release, but it still took another four years for the band to release a debut album. “Part of the reason it took so long to record a debut album was logistics,” Maynard admits. “These days, you can go onto a bunch of AI programmes, give them a bunch of lyrical and visual prompts, and within five minutes you’ve got the whole thing done while sitting in your underwear drinking coffee. When I was trying to do Puscifer as an independent band, you didn’t really have things like Pro Tools, Final Cut Pro or even iMovie, so everything took budget and I didn’t have a budget.”
Puscifer’s development reached a major turning point when Maynard began working with engineer Mat Mitchell on A Perfect Circle’s 2004 release, eMOTIVe. Recognising that he had again found a kindred creative spirit, Maynard enlisted Mat to help him realise his vision for Puscifer. One of the first songs they worked on became Vagina Mine, based around a riff Maynard had been tinkering with for “a fuck of a long time”. “We worked really well together, complementing each other in strange ways,” Maynard says. “I came up with the riff to Vagina Mine back when I was living in Grand Rapids, pre-Tool. It was an acoustic riff, but when I tried to explain it, [the people I showed it to] couldn’t wrap their heads around it. I just kept shelving it, but I showed it to Mat and he was like, ‘Let’s record it!’ It all spiralled out from there.” With Mat’s help, Puscifer’s sound truly began to take shape. While A Perfect Circle had largely inhabited the same alt metal/prog crossover sphere that he had become famous for with Tool, Maynard knew this new project was going to be something entirely different.
“Trying to reinvent yourself is not an easy task when you have a lot of pressure from an existing, successful thing,” he admits. “With Puscifer, it was hard to find a way to still be ourselves and bring something unique to the table while trying to also force yourself into another box. We really turned on our creative juices to find our way through that minefield and, for the end product, I’d point to the likes of Tom Waits and Kraftwerk. If they had a baby, that bastard child would be Puscifer. There are weird analogue, acoustic instruments mixed with synths and drums.” Over the next three years, Maynard and Mat worked together on Puscifer’s debut album, recording bits in the brief windows of downtime the pair had while Maynard juggled the massive success of both Tool and A Perfect Circle. Maynard freely admits he has no idea how many different sessions and recordings it took to finally pull together Puscifer’s debut album, “V” Is For Vagina.
“It’s hard to track when you’re almost 60 and used a lot of aluminium deodorant back in the day!” he offers with a chuckle. “It literally ended up being a Frankenstein creation, because we were forced to record it in hotel rooms and various studios on our days off, in boiler rooms and dressing rooms. On the original Vagina Mine track there were some tom hits and snare hits that were recorded in a big arena somewhere, alongside acoustic guitar we’d recorded in a closet, and keyboard stuff Mat brought from I don’t even know where. He could have done it at Starbucks for all I know!”
As the songs came together, humour remained a key element, Maynard creating a cast of colourful characters who would crop up in Puscifer song lyrics, music videos and recorded skits online. “Some successful bands get caught in that trap of being afraid to go off brand”, says Maynard. “AC/DC is one of my favourite bands, but you will never catch them dead going off brand. With Puscifer, there’s no such thing – just go.” The approach was undoubtedly bizarre, but became more prevalent in subsequent years as emerging bands constructed their own fictional narratives to great success. Which raises the question: did Puscifer pave the way for Ghost?
“Somebody always has to be first, but I don’t think there’s one person that specifically invented it and then everyone else followed,” Maynard says dismissively. “The ideas of having characters associated with your music was where music was always heading. Our exposure to Canadian sketch comedy show Kids In The Hall, Second City and other things like Monty Python while we were kids all seeped into our subconscious, and shows like Saturday Night Live helped cement this connection between music and comedy. We connected those dots and those characters just started coming out. I’d love to take credit for that... So in fact, starting over, yeah, we did that!”
Released on October 30, 2007, “V” Is For Vagina marked the moment Puscifer officially graduated from Maynard’s gag group into a fully realised creative enterprise. Along the way they had been a comedy country-punk group, subjects of short films and even a clothing line (consisting mostly of novelty t-shirts). The next logical step was to play shows. In February 2009, they hosted a multi-night residency at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, mixing comedy skits and live performances of their songs.
“We were scratching our heads and going, ‘How the fuck do we do this?’ because we had all this movement onstage and all these modified sets,” Maynard recalls. “I still remember the butterflies, because I was so used to just going out and singing my songs, but there was all this improv dialogue and that was nerve-racking. Some of it fell 100% flat, but other bits were fucking awesome.”
Puscifer’s debut album peaked at No.25 on the Billboard 200 in the US and, by autumn 2009, Maynard was ready to take the project properly on the road. There, they picked up the final ingredient to turn Puscifer into a fully-fledged band, British singer-songwriter Carina Round. Carina initially joined as a live member, but soon became a key creative force at the heart of Puscifer – and remains so today. Much like Mat Mitchell before her, Carina’s first contribution was helping them re-interpret Vagina Mine for live performances.
“We didn’t want to be one of those bands that wrote a great song that would sound awful live and be too afraid to actually change it,” Maynard explains. “If you have all three of myself, Mat and Carina working on a song, even if we go off in wildly different directions, you have a frame of reference for what those three people can do. Nine times out of 10 Carina’s decisions are going to be smarter than mine, and the same goes for Mat. Combine that with the insanity that my brain goes through with those two people, and those three creative forces are more than the sum of their parts.”
But with Maynard having so much experience playing characters, who would he like to play in a film of his life? “I keep getting calls from Brad Pitt, but I keep muting him. Ha!”  From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/puscifer-story-behind-the-first-album

 

 

Haight-Ashbury - She's So Groovy '86

 #Haight-Ashbury #psychedelic rock #psychedelic folk #folk rock #acid folk #neo-psychedelia #flower power #retro-San Francisco sound #sunshine pop #Scottish #music video

Choosing such a loaded name is willful. Scottish trio Haight-Ashbury are going to be identified with psychedelic-era San Francisco whatever they do. Should they wish to extend their musical wings, diversions into drum and bass or metal aren’t going to be easily accommodated. It's just as well then that Haight-Ashbury are top-drawer practitioners of a terrifically attractive dark psychedelia. Their second album (released under the name Haight-Ashbury 2, but they still trade as Haight-Ashbury too) opens with hand percussion, a jangling sitar and a keening, modal vocal line. Rhythm is Mo Tucker simple and repetition hypnotises. The raw production emphasises Haight-Ashbury’s edginess. As does a leaning towards the moodiness of Mazzy Star and their obvious familiarity with The Jesus & Mary Chain and The Incredible String Band. This version of the psychedelic dream will make flowers wilt. Second track “Sophomore” describes giving the kiss of life. Haight-Ashbury are singing of those around them being close to death. Quoting Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the jangling and tuneful “Everything is Possible” brings some levity. There’s some hope for peace and love. This extraordinary album hasn't quite come from the blue. Theartsdesk saw Haight-Ashbury at the end of last year at France’s Trans Musicales festival and summed them up as “folk harmonies with a raga guitar and shoegazing dissonance”. The Ashburys does nothing to alter that, but it does confirm that Haight-Ashbury are very special.  From: https://theartsdesk.com/node/35096/view

Of course Haight-Ashbury aren’t actually from San Francisco, but it’d be more than reasonable to assume that their second album opener, ‘Maastricht - A Treaty’, was recorded live amongst the longhairs in Golden Gate Park. Lifting the patchouli oil-drenched essence of far-out musical Hair, the song unfolds as a somewhat directionless exposition of tremulous sitar while, just in the corner of your vision, a kaftan-clad Dennis Hopper does the Watusi with George Harrison. If this whole album were similarly stoned and meandering, we might take umbrage; but mercifully it’s a one-off. In fact, as a lesson in vivid scene setting, it works a treat.
Coming from Scotland rather than California, Haight-Ashbury are Kirsty Reid, Jennifer Thompson and Kirsty’s brother Scott on drums. Haight-Ashbury 2: The Ashburys follows the trio’s 2010 debut, and though it might be heavily indebted to counter-cultural, tie-dyed grooves, this isn’t just a spun-out, swinging 60s tribute from some half-baked merry pranksters. ‘Sophomore’ brings to mind those other harmonising hippies of the moment, Haim; but like those So-Cal sisters, it adds a healthy, brusque dose of a gutsy power-pop into the bargain. Tough like Pat Benatar but heartfelt and absorbed with female experience like Stevie Nicks, its heavy guitars and heavenly vocals also recall graceful grunge virtuosos The Breeders and Veruca Salt. It is, quite frankly, a blinder of a song. These Glaswegians don’t spend the whole record stateside stargazing though. They skip the same, lavender-studded path as Smoke Fairies on the eerie 2nd Hand Rose, looking to British folk of the 1970s, of Fairport Convention, with ring-a-roses, Wicker Man vocals and a stomping glam-goth breakdown.  From: https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/25pn/

Blue Rodeo - Hasn't Hit Me Yet

 #Blue Rodeo #country rock #alt-country #roots rock #Americana #folk rock #Canadian

Canada's most popular roots rock band, Blue Rodeo grew into a veritable institution in their home country, debuting in the mid-'80s and still recording and touring in the 2020s. Their sound is a flavorful blend of country, folk, and rock, informed by Americana touchstones like Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, and the Band as well as the sterling pop songcraft of the Beatles (the latter a crucial influence for guitarist and co-founder Jim Cuddy, which shone through on their 1990 breakthrough album Casino). As the alt-country and No Depression scenes began to take hold, they won a new audience who took to the scrappy yet artful sound of 1994's Five Days in July and 1997's Tremolo, though the group's fundamental sound changed very little. Under the guidance of Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor, Blue Rodeo earned a reputation for consistent quality on-stage and in the studio, and if the tone of 2021's Many a Mile showed maturity was buffing off some of their edges, their strength as songwriters remained a constant.
Blue Rodeo was founded in Toronto by its two lead singers, guitarists, and songwriters, Cuddy and Keelor. The two met in high school and had been playing together since 1977, when they started a punk-influenced band called the Hi-Fi's. In 1981, they moved to New York in search of a record deal, and reorganized the band under a new name, Fly to France. Three years of hunting proved fruitless, and the group switched styles several times before Cuddy and Keelor returned to Toronto in 1984. The following year, they assembled a new band with the idea of returning to organic, guitar-based music in an era dominated by synth pop. Christened Blue Rodeo, the initial lineup also featured drummer Cleave Anderson, bassist Bazil Donovan, and keyboardist Bob Wiseman.
Blue Rodeo quickly became a popular live act on the Toronto scene, which was already geared toward the kind of music the band was playing. They caught the attention of John Caton's Risque Disque label, which signed them and worked out a distribution deal with Warner's Canadian division. Their 1987 debut album, Outskirts, was a smash hit in Canada, selling over 200,000 copies (the Canadian equivalent of double platinum) and landing them a slot on tour opening for k.d. lang. The more introspective, socially aware Diamond Mine followed in 1989, and it sold even better, not to mention winning the band its first of many Juno Awards.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/blue-rodeo-mn0000062860/biography

St. Vincent - Your Lips Are Red

 #St. Vincent #art rock #alternative/indie rock #electronic #singer-songwriter #avant-rock #pop rock #ex-Polyphonic Spree

St. Vincent was born Annie Erin Clark on September 28, 1982 in Tulsa, Oklahoma and spent most of her childhood in Dallas, Texas. She began playing guitar at the age of 12, and picked up some valuable lessons on the life of a touring musician as a teenager when she joined her uncle Tuck Andress on the road with his popular jazz duo Tuck & Patti. After graduating from high school in 2001, she studied at the prestigious Berklee School of Music, and recorded a self-released, three-song EP with fellow students in 2003, Ratsliveonnoevilstar. In 2004, Clark left Berklee and joined the extra-large Baroque pop group the Polyphonic Spree as a guitarist and a singer; she toured with the band, and appeared on the sessions for their 2007 album The Fragile Army. Also in 2004, Clark performed with Glenn Branca's 100 Guitar Orchestra for a recording of one of his avant-garde symphonies. In 2006, she left the Polyphonic Spree and joined the backing band of like-minded pop composer Sufjan Stevens. She recorded a three-song EP to sell at her shows with Stevens, on which she adopted the name St. Vincent (inspired by the New York hospital where poet Dylan Thomas died as well as her great-grandmother's middle name). During this time, she also recorded her debut album with musicians including Polyphonic Spree members Louis Schwadron and Brian Teasley and keyboardist Mike Carson, a frequent collaborator with David Bowie. Arriving in July 2007 on Beggars Banquet, Marry Me won critical acclaim, and in 2008 Clark won the PLUG Independent Music Award for Female Artist of the Year.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/st-vincent-mn0000574035/biography

One of the first things you wanted to learn to play on the guitar was Jethro Tull’s Aqualung – where did that come from?

I think that was my dad’s CD. I saw Jethro Tull three times. Tull – three times! My first concert was Steely Dan. I was never cool. But a lot of that – Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young, Neil Young, The Doors, Zeppelin, Steely Dan, The Crusaders, Herbie Hancock, Traffic – all that stuff would have been my dad’s influence, I guess. How many times have you seen Tull, hmm?

Were they not a bit alarming for a child?

If I’m honest, I don’t love the flute – it ranks as one of my least favourite instruments. I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t understand the novelty of just how brave he [Ian Anderson] was to bring the flute into prog rock. When you’re going back and raiding the boomer record collection you don’t have the same concepts as they do. “Oh, so-and-so was just a so-and-so rip off, these people are corny” – it’s all just exploration for you. It’s nice with virgin ears.

You’ve said there’s a Stevie Wonder influence on Daddy’s Home – was that from your father too?

I knew the sort of young Stevie Wonder era but actually it was right after 9/11 – which was my first or second day at college – and my friend was like, “Just go deep on Innervisions.” And I was like, “Woah, OK.” So it was music that helped me deal with the depth of what was going on. That was when I really got into Innervisions, Talking Book, Songs In The Key Of Life, that particular era of Stevie Wonder that was super-heavy.

How about Sly Stone?

I knew the hits growing up and then dug in around the same time and went back and revisited it recently. Checked out the Long Beach sound and bands like War. Super groove-based but with other influences whether Latin or, like, wiggly stuff. No straight lines. No right angles at all. Groove and feel are like a house of cards. It’s like this elusive magic trick.

You were into theatre at high school – is that where you learned to become a performer?

It was something that really scared me but I got such a thrill out of it. Let me make a distinction: I wasn’t into musical theatre. I was, like, reading Ibsen. I wasn’t trying to be the lead in Hello, Dolly! Musical theatre, I didn’t understand – I was like, “Why would you break into song right now?” I loved David Mamet.

What were your signature roles?

I had a progressive theatre teacher who changed one of the roles in Our Town to a female role so I could have a part. I think I had about four lines and most of it was to look forlorn, which wasn’t that hard as a teen. And then I was Helen Keller’s mother in The Miracle Worker.

You went on to study at Berklee College Of Music but did you ever play in a guitar-bass-drums school band?

I did a bit. I played in bands in high school and we’d do Jewel covers and such. Then I begrudgingly played in a jam band in high school. And then in college I played in a noise band that was very Polvo, all those Sonic Youth kind of noise bands with detuned guitars. It was really fun. I was doing my own solo stuff in the midst of all this. Writing at least.

Can you remember the first songs you wrote?

One of the first things I wrote I ended up using on the song Saviour [on Masseduction] – I’m picturing pressing play and record at the same time on the Tascam 4-track. I don’t remember exactly the first thing I wrote, but I do remember that I would learn other people’s songs and then about three-quarters of the way through I would immediately start trying to write my own things. I’ve never been that great a student, I guess. I think instinct can take you a lot of great places but at a certain point, if you want to keep trying to get better, you do just have to go back and figure out: “OK, this song is great. Why is it great?” Take it apart like a frog in biology. It’s not the sexiest part, but I just find it crazy, endlessly fascinating.

Do you think you’ve written a standard?

A song like What Me Worry? [on Marry Me] was literally inspired by the Great American Songbook. Maybe my song New York [on Masseduction] can go into the canon of songs about New York. It’s a little bit of a hard sell with the word “motherfucker” in it, but who knows? Maybe that would play in 2040, 2050. The obscenity won’t matter. Nobody will care.

There’s a song on the new album named after Warhol Superstar Candy Darling. When you moved to New York after college, were you in thrall to that Warhol idea of the city?

Yeah, I think New York is full of people who have escaped from wherever they’ve come from, unless they were born there. It’s still my favourite city and I still have so much more of a romantic relationship with New York than any other place. I moved there just after college. When I was in college, I would escape Boston and go on the Chinatown bus for $15 and go to the city for the weekend. Hoped I’d find a place to stay and run around and be drunk and see shows. Every single block of downtown has memories – good, bad, ugly, fuzzy – and you’re alive in that place more than other places. That’s my experience and I know I’m not alone. Candy Darling was just so beautiful and singular and funny and I feel kind of a perfect heroine.

On returning to Texas, you were invited to join The Polyphonic Spree – how was that as a learning experience?

I always wanted to be essentially doing what I am doing now but it was so exciting to go from playing little clubs to – I think my first gig with them was at a Spanish festival called Benicàssim. It was like, the elevator doors opened and there were like 40,000 people. The chaos, it’s hot and sweaty, and there’s just that unpredictable ‘What’s going to happen next? Am I going to hop on top of a road case and be wheeled all over the stage?’ We were mostly on the bill with Sonic Youth and the stuff that was big in those days. Franz Ferdinand was really big, Kaiser Chiefs, The Bravery – are all these things ringing bells? Jet was one of the big headliners.

Beyond music, what did you learn from watching other bands on the festival circuit? Any cautionary tales?

One thing that I think of is when I see people with really massive entourages. I know it maybe seems sexy from the outside but you’re paying for all that. I mean, don’t go bankrupt ’cos you’re bringing your entourage around.

From: https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/i-could-be-anybody-today-st-vincent-interviewed/

UrIah Heep - I Wanna Be Free

 #Uriah Heep #hard rock #heavy metal #progressive rock #British prog metal #heavy prog #heavy blues rock #1970s

Uriah Heep. A misunderstood band in this country, a band who have found such success in the States and in Europe that they haven`t really had the time to correct their British image. They arrived in the 1969 to 1970 period which was remarkable for the rise of the “heavies” such as Purple and Sabbath and to many people`s minds they play loud, heavy music and that`s that. But the band today is far, far more musical than the band which recorded “Very `Eavy, Very `Umble”, back in 1969. Perhaps the man who governs the direction most is guitarist and singer Mick Box and the opportunity of a Talk In with him gave me the opportunity to discover exactly the genealogy behind both the band and the super-fast guitar style of the man.

Can you remember what was the very first music you ever heard?

Oh dear, hang on. Yes, the first thing that actually stuck in my brain was the Buddy Holly era. I don`t even remember a particular tune, just that whole thing. I was knocked out with the sound. I liked the way he sung and it was different to anything else. That was a stage I was going through when I used to stand in the front room miming with a tennis racket.

So you knew that it was a guitar that you wanted to learn to play?

Yes, most definitely, there was nothing else.

How long after that did you actually get your first guitar?

It must have been about a year after that I got this little ukelele `cos I thought it was a cheap guitar. I was a bit dumb. I knocked out a few little tunes on that which was fun and then I wanted to get the proper thing so I got a £12 10s guitar called a Telston, or something like that, and that was from the pawnbrokers.

So when you switched from Uke to proper guitar you had to learn some new chords?

Ukelele chords are like shortened guitar chords, you know chords with just two fingers and I got a few little books that showed me the chords and I picked up a few things from there. I thought well I`ve got to go further than this so I tried to learn songs from records. That didn`t work at all. I couldn`t get it to sound like the music at all so I started going to a guitar teacher. I went to him for about a couple of months and he was a bit of a con merchant. He used to give me things to play and I had to go away and learn to play the thing in a week. But within half an hour I could play it to him, it did help in as much as he showed me the basic formation of chords with tonic thirds and fifths and I suppose he was really helpful in just being someone to report to. After I got fed up with him I didn`t know who to turn to so I just used to plonk away at home and with my knowledge of chord formation I was able to build my own chords.

So you still couldn`t get anything from records?

No, but the first thing I eventually got from records actually shaped my whole technique. I tried to copy a record by Les Paul and Mary Ford. I didn`t know anything about recording at all, nothing. His whole sound is a speeded up guitar sound and he`d play, in rough terms, something at 16 r.p.m. and speed it up to 45 and then put it out as a record. I used to try and copy him at that speed and in actual fact I kept on plugging away at that record. I think it was “Nola,” and eventually, I got it at the right speed and so I got on into a fast technique thing. After that I started getting into jazz players like Tal Farlow and Barney Kessel. Well soon after this period I formed my own band. That was just a local band that I formed with guys I`d heard of from the same area. We played the local youth clubs for six bottles of coke and that sort of fee. I remember our first paid gig. I think we got ten bob. That was very much the front room rehearsal scene and it was really a good era.

The band was playing what sort of music?

I think it was just before the Stones happened and we were into Buddy Holly music and Elvis` stuff. Our lead singer could only sing rock so we bashed that out all night. I think I must have been about 13 at this time so we were pretty young. All the music like “Jailhouse Rock” and “Blue Suede Shoes” is based on the 12-bar format and that also gave us a chance to do a few lead breaks because you don`t have to think too heavily.

What did you call the band you had at that time?

We were called the Stalkers, and that was for both reasons because we wanted the women as well, you see.

How long did the Stalkers last?

It lasted a good few years because we started to get £15 gigs, and all that and we thought “amazing” and we were really pleased. We started playing the Marquee and that was really the big time for us and just before we made the Marquee we realised we needed a new vocalist because the other guy just wasn`t up to it and our drummer`s cousin was David Byron who`s our singer now and he suggested that this guy David might be suitable and that was the start of a partnership that has taken us right through `till now. The auditions we had at that time were so silly, we just said: “What do you know” and if he knew “Blue Suede Shoes”, we said: “OK sing it.” So we settled on David.

Where did the band go to from the Marquee?

From there we thought we wanted a change and David and myself wanted a change, we wanted to go professional. I was working as a clerk in an export office. I was determined to be professional.

It must have been a big decision.

David was a bit unsure because packing up and going pro meant that we were going to lose two members because they wanted to go through with their apprenticeships. We struggled a long while when we first went pro and we spent a year just writing songs together. It proved a lot harder than we thought to get the right musicians and we finally got Paul Newton who was in this band and we got in a drummer and we called ourselves Spice.

So this was in fact the beginning of the band that`s now Uriah Heep?

Yeah, we started doing all the clubs after a period of a year with no work.

How did you live through that year?

For the first six months I did things like potato picking, get up at six in the morning and worked all through the day and get about £2 a week for it. I washed down shop windows and signs, cut someone`s lawn, anything to get money going and get through a week. It was just a struggle for ourselves and in the end we ended up going on the dole for six months. They kept sending us for jobs and they`d tell us to go on the ninth for an interview and we`d turn up on the 19th and swear that we`d seen a one in front of the nine on the piece of paper with the instructions on it and of course they would immediately consider us unsuitable. I also used to go down the dole in bizarre clothes like pyjamas and jumpers with huge holes in the sleeves and I`d do anything not to get a job. I did that for six months and in the end I couldn`t keep a straight face. We eventually got a drummer called Alex Napier in on drums and we started doing some clubs and being picked up by a few agents. A guy who helped us out a lot was Neil Warnock. He worked for an agency called Southbank and he managed us for a while.

What sort of material was Spice doing?

Well to get work in those days you couldn`t do what you wanted to. You had to remember that people wanted to hear certain things and you just had to play them. We tried to get away from playing all the run of the mill stuff and we used to dig out old Joe Tex things and numbers like that which went down very well. We never did the top twenty stuff, we used to spend hours in record shops digging out obscure numbers to play. I remember finding Donnie Elbert`s “Little Bit Of Leather” and songs like that.

Did you put any soul in the act at that time?

Well soul was the thing at that time and we used to do some as a kind of a mickey take thing with dance routines. Then we started to get into an improvisation kick and we started to play our own numbers on stage.

I remember that it was difficult for a band to play their own numbers on stage at that time?

Yeah it was murder. We got to a point where we were digging up all these old numbers and we thought we could write numbers just as good. At that time we couldn`t actually, but at least we were attempting it. So we started sticking in a few originals and they seemed to be getting the same reaction so we gained a little confidence.

About what year would this have been?

I think it was about 1967. It was during that year that we started doing our own numbers on stage and we did more and more of them until the whole set was just our own numbers.

What sort of clubs were you doing then?

We were doing the Marquee, college dates, the Red Lions, the Wake Arms, Epping, this sort of thing.

This was about the time of the start of the underground movement?

Yes very much so, I think we were one of the first bands to get a little bit indulgent in as much as I used to go and do a guitar solo for 15 minutes on stage with the rest of the band going off and at that stage nobody around was doing that. I think we were carving our own little niche then but we kept to the format that we used with this band that you can afford to be really heavy and exciting but still retain lot of harmony and melody with it and that`s what we were trying to do then. We`re still doing that. On stage five of us sing and normally with all that power going on you get just one guy out front who`s singing.

How long did Spice last under that name?

It ended at the end of 1969. Gerry Bron came to see us working at the Blues Loft, High Wycombe, and we`d heard that Gerry was a good straight manager so we`d invited him to come down. He thought we had it all there potentially, musically and so on but he knew there was something missing. So did we but we didn`t know what, we didn`t know where to turn. So he took us under his wing, he didn`t sign us or anything and he gave us a few pilot gigs to see if we were good enough, whether we`d turn up on time, if we were reliable or if we were temperamental. So he tried us out for a long while and then he slung us in the studio with a couple of our own numbers, just to try and find out our direction. We`d never been in the studio before except for a few demo sessions and we went in and what we came out with wasn`t very impressive at all – in fact, we still listen to the tape we made on that session now, just for a laugh. Gerry was knocked out with the enthusiasm and the will to get on and he stuck with us. Then we started to record our first album.

Was this the album that eventually came out as “Very `Eavy.”?

Yeah and it was during that we discovered what the missing link was we needed a keyboard player, and another voice. Our bass player used to play with a band called the Gods and another ex-God was Ken Hensley who was playing at that time with a band called Toe Fat. We approached Kenny and he agreed to come down to Hanwell Community centre and have a blow. We just played for a while and we realised it was going to work. In addition to playing keyboards he could also play guitar, write songs and sing and this was just what we needed. So we started recording that band.

The album came out a long while after you recorded it didn`t it?

Yeah, that was the drag, because when that album came out it was obsolete for the band because we`d moved so fast we were already into other material.

It did a lot of good for you that album, though, didn`t it?

It did more good for us on the Continent actually, it was OK here, but they really picked up on it.

When was the period that the band actually started to break?

We got the Uriah Heep name from Gerry. The band came to him in the centenary year of Dicken`s death or something and we picked up on a bit of publicity. We`d been thinking of all different names for the band like your Corrugated Dandruff and Clockwork Doughnut and it was nice to find a name that had a bit of a story behind it. We got all that dealt with and we were doing some pilot gigs in England getting new gear worked in and then we were slung over to be on a festival in Hamburg in Germany and we were first on the bill. We steamed in there and they gave us an ovation and they wanted an encore which wasn`t bad for a band there for the first time. There were a lot of influential promoters backstage who all saw it and they started booking us on German tours and things, which was beautiful and the Germans really started plugging for us. In six months we were over there six times on various tours. The album started going in the charts; it snowballed for us there.

How did the band come to go to the States?

Well we were very successful in Germany and it was slowly happening here, it was very slow but it was still going. We were having a lot of bad press which may have been right or may have been wrong. I don`t know, but it never concerned us that much because we were still going along to gigs and each time we went we got bigger crowds and we always got encores. We just hoped that the press thing would swing round which luckily it has done. We thought, States, OK. Let`s go there. We went over there as a support band playing 30 or 45 minutes just to get experience and it`s the first time we`d ever played before 20,000 people. It was like the Blues Loft, High Wycombe to the Los Angeles Forum, it was ridiculous.

What was the States audience reaction like?

It was interesting, it wasn`t brilliant but it was interesting. Three Dog Night wasn`t exactly our crowd. At the end of the tour we found there was enough reaction to go back and do another tour and then we toured with Deep Purple and Buddy Miles which really broke us out there.

Do you enjoy playing the States more than anywhere else?

I enjoy playing there but there`s no where like home, is there? Up the M1, play the gigs and then you can go home to your own bed.

From: https://geirmykl.wordpress.com/2018/06/02/article-about-mick-box-uriah-heep-from-sounds-november-25-1972/

Wolf Alice - Moaning Lisa Smile

 #Wolf Alice #alternative/indie rock #shoegaze #folk rock #dream pop #folk punk

Wolf Alice didn’t exactly dream big at the start of their careers. They’re one of the biggest bands in the UK at the moment but despite reaching the heady heights of music stardom, they say they never really indulged many wild aspirations when they were young. “Ellie says she just wanted enough money to buy hot lunches every day,” guitarist Joff Oddie jokes, reminiscing about the 2010s, when Wolf Alice were a folk duo starting out in London.
“I don’t think I let myself visualise those, what’s called landmark moments, because you don’t want to disappoint yourself,” says the Ellie in question, surname Rowsell, the band’s singer. She jokes that her only ambition was to play the cult east London pub The Old Blue Last, which was once owned by Vice magazine and was at the centre of the noughties Shoreditch music scene where acts with names like Shitdisco regularly played and misbehaved. It’s hardly the main stage at Glastonbury. “I didn’t mind if people came,” Rowsell adds, “it was just so I could tell people I played.”
Despite this apparent humility, Wolf Alice have managed to reach heights that feel like a rarity for a British rock group these days. Their Nineties shoegaze pop, grunge-indebted riffs and musings on the idiosyncrasies of millennial life stood them apart from the usual four lads and guitar fare that had previously bloated the 2000s indie scene. Since they expanded with bassist Theo Ellis and drummer Joel Amey and released their debut EP in 2014, their albums have topped the charts, they won a Mercury Music Prize for their second record, 2017’s Visions of a Life, and they’ve just received a nomination for their third, the recently released Blue Weekend.
They’ve had to get used to the new level of fame since their last album. With Visions of a Life came the harsh, instructive spotlight of the tabloid and broadsheet media into their lives – The Sun ran a story alleging Rowsell was engaged to the frontman of punk duo Slaves and that they had bought a house in Margate, which Rowsell has denied. Winning that initial Mercury is a moment the four-piece are still yet to process, especially Ellis, who semi-jokes he still has PTSD from the fallout of unexpectedly winning. “It’s so unbelievably amazing but I just so never thought that was going to happen ever,” he confesses, “and then obviously we had to go on the news and we were really drunk.”
Wolf Alice are so down-to-earth, you imagine they don’t bow easily to pressure. Indeed, the burden of following up two well-received albums could have broken most bands but they have not only risen to the occasion, they’ve released one that many see as the truest distillation of their sound and ethos to date. Blue Weekend is a collage of familiar themes – failed relationships, honest self-reflection, anxiety – but even more widescreen, veering from guttural punk riffs to cinematic strings. Wolf Alice have often been accused of relying too heavily on their influences rather than having a definitive sound, but here they’ve leaned into the genre-hopping. “Having one sound and writing 11 variations of the same song feels lazy,” says Oddie. “Different types of music better represent different kinds of emotional content. Angry, loud, noisy things feel appropriate sometimes, but that’s not appropriate for all aspects of the spectrum of human emotions.”  From: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/wolf-alice-interview-mercury-prize-b1888079.html

Psychotica - Valentino

 #Psychotica #alternative rock #industrial rock #alternative metal #gothic rock #glam metal #1990s

The industrial goth band Psychotica was founded in 1994 by singer Pat Briggs, an alumnus of the glam rock outfit R.U.Ready who was at the time managing the small New York City nightclub Don Hill's. Encouraged to form a new band to boost club attendance, Briggs teamed with bassist and Don Hill bartender Tommy Salmorin to found Psychotica, soon bringing aboard onetime White Zombie guitarist Ena Kostabi, Nine Ways to Sunday cellist Enrique Tiru Velez, backing vocalist Reeka, and drummer Buz. After their first live performance, the group signed to the American label, releasing their 1996 debut LP a few weeks after beginning a stint as the opening act on that summer's Lollapalooza tour. By 1997, both Salmorin and Buz had exited to form a new group, Numb, and Reeka was also out of the band; the remaining trio of Briggs, Kostabi, and Velez welcomed synth player Doug DeAngelis, pianist Bette Sussman, bagpipe player Richard Markoff, and koto player Mark Stanley in time to record the second Psychotica LP, 1998's Espina. Singer and group leader Pat Briggs died on December 27, 2022.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/psychotica-mn0000377456/biography

It is an absolute shame that Psychotica no longer exists, and that vocalist Patrick Briggs has eased back into Nightclub ownership. What an amazing vocal talent! Wild and weird, with a Marilyn Manson like gothic undertone and David Bowie glam, I just don't understand why Psychotica never went further. They performed at Lollapalooza in '97, and that was pretty much the end. Patrick had a tendency to perform almost naked, though at Lollapalooza he wore a silver jumpsuit a la Devo. He was on the edge of acceptable behavior, but so very talented, bringing in pianists and bagpipes and symphonies behind his unique music. After Espina, they recorded one more album, Pandemic, that never got released. There are MP3's out on the internet from Pandemic, and I strongly urge you to find them and get them before they disappear. Pandemic has a Georgio Morodor (Cat People Soundtrack) remix of MacArthur Park, along with three not-to-be-missed ballads that Patrick's vocals just make you want to cry on: Valentino, Euthanasia, and Monsoon. Find Pandemic! You won't be sorry.  From: http://saltyka.blogspot.com/2007/06/psychotica.html

The Tea Party - Live Intimate & Interactive 1998

 Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

 #The Tea Party #hard rock #progressive rock #experimental rock #middle eastern music #blues rock #psychedelic rock #1990s #Canadian

Hugely successful in their native Canada, The Tea Party is a rock band with a truly eclectic sound, fusing elements of blues, progressive rock, Indian, and Middle Eastern into what has jokingly been dubbed 'Moroccan roll'. ‘Live Intimate and Interactive’ includes two live performances at MuchMusic--Canada's answer to MTV. The first was recorded in 1998, when the band performed 'Army Ants', 'Fire In The Head', 'Release', 'Transmission', 'Save Me', 'Sister Awake', 'Temptation', and 'Psychopomp'. Then in 2000, the band returned to MuchMusic studios to perform 'Temptation', 'The Messenger', and 'Sister Awake'.  From: https://imusic.dk/movies/0803057901029/the-tea-party-1998-live-intimate-and-interactive-dvd

It was the end of November 1995. The Tea Party had just completed a U.S. tour and were excited about the next album. The Edges of Twilight was closing in on double-platinum sales domestically, wrapping up a year that earned the band three Juno nominations and a MuchMusic People’s Choice Favorite Music Video award. All seemed to be well, but the success of The Edges Of Twilight couldn’t hide the fact that Jeff Martin was in a personal crisis at the time and that the band was in troubled waters – a change of management at that time being just one sign. In retrospect, Jeff Burrows was reminded of that time: “The songs of Transmission were all written at a time when we were going through - not only Jeff going through personal hardship - but the band was going through bad managerial things and a bad American record company. At that point, we didn't know whether the band would even continue at some points. It was a bad vibe, but it was healthy for writing.”
The mid ‘90s were also the time when bands like Massive Attack, Aphex Twin and The Prodigy celebrated great success with their mix of rock and industrial, electronic soundscapes. But the most important soundtrack for Martin’s dark mood was provided by a band whose album Martin got handed over by a friend and was supposed to build the foundation for Transmission: it was a copy of Nine Inch Nails’ album “The Downward Spiral”. Martin was so fascinated by what he heard there that the vision of enriching his own music with electronic elements and mixing it with oriental timbres also grew in him. The idea of combining rock music with electronic sounds was not new, but for The Tea Party this sound cosmos was untouched, new territory – something that was about to change abruptly with Transmission.
Transmission began as an experiment of sorts in Martin’s loft studio in old Montreal, where he had previously “demoed” The Edges of Twilight. The difference, this time, was that Transmission was pieced together entirely and comfortably at Martin’s home. “There was no clock,” explains Martin, who produced the whole album and mixed it at Morin Heights, Quebec, with the exception of three tracks which were co-mixed with Adam Kasper (Soundgarden) at NRG Studios in Los Angeles. The organic and mechanic foils on Transmission began when Martin’s friend, English folk musician Roy Harper, gave him an old ‘80s Emulator II and Martin began messing around with it, starting with a loop sampled from a piece of Lebanese funeral music.
Over the next month, he assembled another five songs at his house and emerged with the skeletons (loops, electronic treatments and guitars) of “Psychopomp”, “Army Ants”, “Gyroscope”, “Pulse” and “Temptation”. Sound landscapes were created, and while they were at first only meant to be fiddling around, it forged a new direction for the sound of the band. After Martin had created the framework for the songs, Burrows and Stuart Chatwood travelled to Montreal and added their instruments parts to the to the musical skeletons Martin sketched out. Both expanded their instrument repertoire once again — Chatwood learned keyboards, which play an important role on Transmission, while Burrows experimented with an electronic drum kit. The band dared to enter new territory and take the risk of alienating old fans with the new direction. Embracing synthesizers, sampling and digital-recording techniques the trio was abandoning its previous musical prejudices, and revitalizing its evocative and intensely emotional sound with a modern approach.
It was February 1996 when Burrows recorded his drum parts in the loft below Martin’s house in Montreal – a space filled with discarded restaurant equipment. Burrows knocked off his bed tracks in two days, giving the band a power on which to build further (later he would add darabouka, dumbek, pod shakers and the lead pipe to select tracks). “Lucky enough, my landlord agreed to clear out the second floor beneath my loft, and there became the drum room and the drum sound that we all know as the backbone of Transmission,” recalls Martin. Chatwood, who plays keyboards more than bass on Transmission, had owned a sampler for four years and began adding his own “shadings” to the songs.
Martin remembers those days: “We’re just working with sounds, making our own sounds, experimenting with rhythms as well, breaks and things like that, to see how we play. We thought that these were going to be demos, when in fact, they turned out to be the record.” By the end of April 1996, after his bandmates left Montreal, half of the new album was completed without any vocals. Martin, still in his dark mood, had been documenting his existence in a “diary of madness” and set about turning it into lyrics.
On no album before and after have the lyrics been as dark as on Transmission. It began with the poem “Transmission”, which pits the glories of modern progress against the depravity parading within, not just poverty, Martin explained, but the “condition of the soul”. Musically, Transmission melds the rock, middle eastern and electronic elements. It made for the perfect album title. The album title was also a reference to Joy Division’s song of the same name. The idea of dropping the band name The Tea Party and renaming themselves Transmission was even briefly considered, in order to gain a better foothold on the American market, but in the end, they decided to keep their original name.
In addition to his personal crisis, Martin also dealt with social questions on the album, which were influenced by the writings of Christopher Dewdney, Canadian poet, essayist and futurist, and also a friend of Martin´s. One of his works, “The Secular Grail” inspired the song “Gyroscope” and his ideas on the nature of consciousness and psychic equilibrium infuse many of the songs on this album. “It’s basically a collection of aphorisms on the human condition and having to deal with the juxtaposition of the new deity being technology and the old ones, the organic ones. And, also in this book, he equates a human being’s psychic equilibrium to something like a gyroscope and how the rate of spin in each particular individual is equal to their psychic energy. And like a spinning top, if outside forces affect it, it will incur a wobble and go off course. With human beings, forces like flattery or conversely, criticism, affect you in such a degree that you start to go off course and you start to shift,” says Martin.
Meanwhile, other songs on the album are also based on books Martin read at the time. For example, “Army Ants” or “Psychopomp”, which goes back to a term used by psychologist C.G. Jung. With so many literary models, a German music magazine titled an article about Transmission with the headline “Books Instead of Drugs”. Martin admits however, that alcohol and drugs played an important role in his life before and after Transmission. After the first songs were completed, the other five songs took shape, including two songs which took the band in a different direction. “Release” and “Aftermath” both had a beauty and ambience to them which belied their ominous lyrics. The final track of the album, “Babylon”, was recorded in in one day during the mixing phase at Morin Heights. The Tea Party’s exciting evolution from blues-rock to eastern-rock to its current hybrid of industrial-acoustic-soul was sealed.
At the end of 1996, the whole album was written and it was time to complete the final recording of the songs. These recording sessions started in January 1997 and were finished in February 1997 with the recording of the vocals. With the recordings in their luggage, the band travelled to Los Angeles for three weeks in March 1997, where a large part of the album was mixed at NRG Studios. The mix was completed at Morin Heights, north of Montreal. The mastering was done by Bob Ludwig, who put the finishing touches to the album in April 1997. With this album the band created a dark colossus, a mixture of rock and electronics, of dark and apocalyptic structures and lyrics, always standing before the abyss and seldom seeing a glimmer of hope. In short, The Tea Party had created a monster with Transmission, which was now ready to present to the public. The first single “Temptation”, which swore the fans to what was to come with the dark video, was the precursor.
The album was first released in Canada on June 17, 1997, followed by releases in Australia, Germany and the USA. The latter was released for the first time on the Atlantic Records label, with the goal of starting fresh and the potential for wider recognition in the USA. The release was accompanied by concerts that could be followed live on the Internet. In 1997 this was still quite uncharted territory! The bands also played at major Canadian festivals such as Edgefest. The Tea Party was also asked to open for two shows of the “Bridges To Babylon” tour of the Rolling Stones, but unfortunately this didn’t happen because Mick Jagger fell ill and the shows in Toronto and Montreal were cancelled.
The band themselves described a performance at Intimate and Interactive at the Canadian music channel MuchMusic as one of their highlights at that time. In this show the official band video for “Psychopomp” was created. The band also recorded two concerts in Sydney, Australia, to release them on a live CD, but that content has not been released to date. And even though The Edges of Twilight is right on par with Transmission, and Heaving Coming Down was their first No. 1 hit, the album is seen by many as the creative highlight of the band.  From: https://transmission.teaparty-online.com/inside/#

The Vespers - Lawdy

 #The Vespers #folk #Americana #roots music #contemporary folk #bluegrass #music video

Here’s another great song from Nashville’s own The Vespers, a remarkable group we’ve been celebrating for years here. Written by Phoebe Cryar, this is “Lawdy.” The Vespers are two sisters (Callie and Phoebe Cryar), and two brothers (Bruno and Taylor Jones). All four are multi-instrumentalists, covering upright and electric bass, guitar, banjo, drums, mandolin, ukulele, accordion and more. The Vespers was the sister’s duo at first; they named their group The Vespers after Phoebe found this word for evening prayer and Callie liked it, because she felt it easy to remember. They sing, as the saying goes, as only siblings can sing. Siblings who are great harmony singers, that is. Their two voices in perfect visceral harmony is the engine of this group. But it needed more, and when they met the musical Jones brothers at a campfire jam, they found the missing parts of their band, and they expanded to be four. “Lawdy” has recently had a new surge of new attention after being featured in the TV show “Longmire.” It is from their second album The Fourth Wall, released in 2012. The title of the album, they said, refers to the invisible fourth wall which separates the performers and the audience; it’s a wall they aim to tear down.  From: https://americansongwriter.com/todays-favorite-newly-discovered-song-lawdy-by-the-vespers/

Like their alt-folk and bluegrass brethren, Crooked Still, Red Molly, Blame Sally and the late, lamented Nickel Creek, The Vespers are adept at conveying back porch harmony with deep-rooted humility and soaring spirituality. They may be young - the two brothers and two sisters who make up the quartet are barely out of their teens (and one is only 19!) - but the reverence for tradition and home-grown sensibilities echoes consistently through every one of these rootsy homilies. Indeed, the melodies come across like Sunday morning hymns, songs that combine gospel fervor with a supple delivery.
Given the fact that "The Fourth Wall" is only the quartet's second album and, like their first release, 2010's "Tell Your Mama," also an independent effort, their competence - and confidence - is all the more impressive. The title is taken from theatrical jargon that delineates the unseen divide through which an audience observes the performers on stage, an appropriate handle that also connects to the album's easy embrace. Songs such as Better Now, Got No Friends and Will You Love Me convey wistful folk finesse...all plucking banjo, willowy harmonies, breezy tempos and down-home designs. But it's their deeper reverence that envelopes these tracks, particularly their mournful cover of Son House's Grinnin’ in Your Face (the sole cover), Lawdy and the album's lovely hymn-like closer Winter.
Youth and contemplation oftentimes make odd bedfellows, but these earnest shuffles and hushed laments manage to infuse celebration with solemnity and make that mix sound effortlessly enticing in the process. Two albums on, the Vespers have demonstrated their ability to tap into a timeless thread and garner contemporary appeal. In so doing, they emulate a neo-gothic imprint that might have been etched in Appalachia. "The Fourth Wall" is something truly special.  From: https://www.countrystandardtime.com/d/cdreview.asp?xid=4868

White Denim - Pretty Green

 #White Denim #garage rock #indie rock #psychedelic rock #progressive punk #blues rock #experimental #music video 

The Austin, Texas, rock band White Denim flavors its basic rock 'n' roll with a potpourri of other styles, but that's kind of logical, since their origins came out of a virtual collision of bands. White Denim, whose sound has included tinges of punk-funk, psychedelic, country, heavy metal, and Latin jazz, became a band in a sort of ad hoc, almost accidental, manner back in 2005. The band Parque Torch, with singer/guitarist James Petralli and drummer Josh Block, was playing on a bill with another band, Peach Train, which included bassist Steve Terebecki. By the end of that night, Terebecki had joined Block and Petralli and the threesome evolved into another band. White Denim was releasing its own EPs by 2007, and combined a couple of those EPs for "Workout Holiday," their debut album, which, oddly enough, was only released in the United Kingdom. It was late 2008 before the band re-worked some of those tunes and added some more for "Exposion," which became their U.S. album debut. Their latest record is the group's seventh, and their music has always been noted for the different directions it takes, often record-by-record, or even cut-by-cut.
"Well, Parque Torch was James' original trio, which was cool and had no bass," explained Terebecki, from his Austin home, when we caught up with him last week, before the current tour started. "That band was a real in-you-face, riffy punk rock band, sort of like early Replacements. But of course Josh was a drummer with a real jazz background, so they played some really interesting music. Peach Train was the band I was in, sort of the band Makeup, a power trio with a lot of wah-wah used on the guitar, but basically noisy rock 'n' roll." "I was really excited to get a chance to play with Josh," Terebecki added. "I come from Virginia originally, and I had moved to Austin fairly recently then. I had played with some really accomplished drummers in Virginia, but Josh was the first really good drummer I had heard here in Texas. We began trying to build a sound of our own, and all this time later, we're still refining it."
No matter what stylistic permutations White Denim might take over the years, it seems that a basic rock 'n' roll feel, a 1950-60s garage band sound, ends up being their foundation. "I think basic rock 'n' roll is definitely at the root of it all, because it's all born from what we like to play onstage," said Terebecki. "Our live shows tend to be louder and more upbeat than our records anyway. We've all never been fans of performers who get up there and play all laid-back on stage. We have done a lot of experimenting with different things with our recordings, but live, in concert, we are always louder and nastier. We like to do what feels good in the moment."  From: https://www.patriotledger.com/story/entertainment/local/2018/10/04/expect-mix-musical-styles-from/9706010007/

Stonefield - In The Eve

 #Stonefield #psychedelic rock #stoner rock #hard rock #heavy psych #melodic metal #Australian #music video

The Findlay sisters Amy, Hannah, Sarah and Holly are the quadruple dose of stoner rock we’ve come to know as Stonefield. Laced with mind-bending, psychedelic riffs, the Aussie band’s tunes will fling you back in time – not surprising, considering they grew up on the likes of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. The siblings have come a long way since commandeering their parents’ farm shed in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges for rehearsals. As teenagers, they won a contest held by radio station Triple J for unsigned artists, shining a national spotlight on their music. Then, after a gig in Perth, Stonefield were approached by a scout for Glastonbury Festival, leading to their sensational performance at the 2011 show which culminated in an incendiary cover of Led Zep’s Whole Lotta Love. Between then and now, the band have released an EP, three studio albums, and are on the cusp of another full-length. Titled Bent, the upcoming project will be released via King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s independent label, Flightless, just like 2018’s Far From Earth. If the new album’s lead single Sleep is any indication, it looks like we’re in for another glorious sludgefest.

What was your musical upbringing like?

We all have quite similar tastes in music and grew up listening to the music that our parents had brought us up on, which was a lot of Frank Zappa, Zeppelin and Hendrix. During our high school years, we all got into slightly different stuff but we’ve always had a common love of rock music.

You all grew up in a small town. Did that make music an escape for you?

I don’t think it was necessarily an escape but it definitely gave us something to do, which I guess is probably part of the reason we stuck with it. There were fewer distractions and not much else to do.

What’s the songwriting process like for Stonefield? You seem to put out albums at a fast pace – As Above, So Below in 2017 and Far From Earth in 2018.

We have a habit of writing a whole heap of songs and ditching them before getting to a point where we’re happy to put them on an album. We generally jam on a little riff or idea that someone has and the song is created from there. Once we’ve written and ditched a few songs, we all eventually get an idea of the album we want to create and it becomes a lot easier from there.

Bent was recorded by Joey Walker and Stu Mackenzie of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. What was it like for you to work with two guitarists on the album?

Recording with Stu and Joe was a completely different experience to anything we’d done before. They stood back completely and let us make the decisions without influencing us too much. It was refreshing working with people who had faith in what we do and enabled us to achieve exactly what we wanted to without second-guessing ourselves.

We read that the album was recorded in between tours over five days. How did that affect the process and the atmosphere of the sessions?

It helped us to achieve a much more “live-sounding” album that wasn’t over-produced or overly thought about. All the songs still felt fresh and exciting to play which made it a very enjoyable process.

Amy has said that Sleep is about the experience of floating in the “in between”, but many fans see that song title and think of the band, Sleep. Is it an homage, and was it intentional?

It wasn’t intentional at all, however, we are fans of Sleep so we don’t mind the association! It came purely from the storyline of the song.

This is going to be Stonefield’s fourth album. Has what you wanted out of a music career changed since you embarked on this about a decade ago?

I don’t think what we wanted out of a career has changed but I think the way we wanted to achieve it and how we go about it has changed. We have learnt so much and have so much more belief in our knowledge and decisions that we are able to navigate things much better these days.

In terms of guitar tone, did you know what you wanted for this album?

Nope! Generally when recording an album, whoever we’re working with tends to get deep into experimenting with different amps and sounds, but a lot of the time we end up going with something very similar to my live setup. For Bent, I went in knowing what works and how we wanted the album to represent our live sound, so I didn’t spend too much time messing around.

Last April you guys were in Los Angeles for what you called a “residency”. How long were you there for, and what was it like?

We were there for a month. It was quite a different experience being in the one spot for so long as we’re generally in a different city every night, but it was a lot of fun. We had amazing bands play with us each week so it was cool discovering so much new music.

From: https://guitar.com/features/interviews/stonefield-from-farm-shed-to-glastonbury/

Virgin Black - Lamenting Kiss

 #Virgin Black #gothic metal #doom metal #avant-garde metal #symphonic metal #Australian #music video

When I first heard the band name 'Virgin Black' come up in conversation I thought this had to be some sort of gothic metal band with all band members wearing long dresses and corpse paint on their face. An average metal band that 16-year old high school 'metal experts' listen to nowadays (no offense meant to anyone). And in a way these preconceptions were actually right!Virgin Black is indeed a band that could partially be categorized as a gothic metal outfit. Yet that banner would not do enough justification to this bunch of talented musicians, for they go beyond the boundaries of conventional gothic metal.
There's this new wave of progressive artists who seem to incorporate classical music into their compositions; think of the likes of Epica, Nightwish and most noticeably Swedish prog metal outfit Therion, but Virgin Black surpasses each and every one of them. Yes, all of them share that longing for operatic vocals, yet Virgin Black's music is not about the bombastic nature of songs. These five Australians make music without reaching out to conventional metal. It's not all about heavy metal riffs or pompous drumming. No, Virgin Black seem to enjoy minimalist moments as well; some segments are pure classical or operatic pieces of music, whereas other moments are pure acoustic brilliance!
Come to think of it, perhaps 'doom metal' would be a more appropriate tag for this branch of music. The dramatic vocals, either operatic or normal singing in low key, don't make the happiest of conditions to listen to music, but they do somehow manage to charm the listener. To give you an idea of what to expect: lead vocalist Rowan London's voice is a sort of compromise of those trademark high-pitched prog metal vocalists and low-key opera vocalists, whereas bass player Ian Miller's additional vocals are pure black metal in origin, i.e. he growls. Yet, his growling is not at all bothersome, mainly because most of the time when he sings, you hear London backing him up with his low and dynamic voice or visa versa.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=14692

The Buns - Stockholm

 #The Buns #garage rock #noise pop #glam rock #punk rock #indie rock #French

The Buns began life playing 'garage secretarial rock' in the basement clubs of home-town Paris, armoured from the norm by pencil skirts, rouge paint and with hair tightly knotted in bouffant buns; they attracted a lot of attention, especially with fans of vintage styles and sounds. The duo quickly progressed from sweat-heavy dives to guest appearances in French stadiums, and a coveted slot on the seminal garage rock compilation, Dirty Mod; the track in question was 'Thrill Me Up', a lyric from which inspired the title of The Buns' U.K debut album, a frantic roller coaster ride of glam punk, and earthy garage rock, Dangerous. The L.P includes the best of the groups earlier 'Mad Men glamour' period, plus the current rock-chic snarl captured to tape by Liam Watson at Toerag Studio.  From: https://wellsuspectrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-buns-dangerous

The Buns' "Stockholm" is 2 minutes 52 seconds of brazen garage rock featuring searing guitar riffs, sultry vocals and heavy drums with the aim to seduce it’s listener into submission.

Where was the video for Stockholm filmed?

The video was filmed in a cellar, a friend's music studio under construction. We needed a dark place because the idea was to film in the darkness with a flashlight.

How does the video compliment the song?

The song is about the Stockholm syndrome so we wanted to connect fear and desire. Being locked and scared, in a dark place, but at the same time loving that feeling of danger. It's a paradox we often find in romantic relationships. An addiction to someone hurtful who keeps us from being free, in a certain way. Being unchained to someone.

Any behind the scenes stories?

We didn't have money to pay a director, nor proper video cameras to film, so we decided to do it ourselves with the video cameras of our phones, it’s flashlights and a vintage video app! Being our own director was fun and easy, because we know each over very well; we knew what we wanted to do and we didn't have to wait for the technical team to be ready. The fact that we were limited with the filming equipment forced us to find simple ideas, with the constraints of that one and only place, as if we were actually stuck in that cellar. One of us also filmed afterwards the mysterious tattooed man in a prestigious hotel in Monaco, but it's top secret. When we got all the pictures, we sent it to a friend of ours who is a professional film editor. We're very proud of this video. It's a rewarding experience to have directed it on our own!

Could you tell us about the ideas/themes/imagery used?

The principal idea was the confinement, the captivity. We wanted to have strong visual elements like the chains and the stone of the cellar from one part, and the mysterious man from the other part, to evoke the prisoners and the sexy hangman. We wanted to mix the dark side and the erotic potential of being trapped. But without falling too deeply into the cliches of sado-masochism.

What is the message the video is trying to convey?

There is a double meaning. First meaning: the clinical Stockholm's syndrome; you can imagine a girl locked in a cellar by a man, discovering she's actually falling in love with him. Second meaning: it's a story about a toxic relationship, a sexual addiction, an emotional dependence, a mental obsession, a fight between reason and desire, love and hate. The girl knows she has to escape from him but she feels too confused and too weak to be able to do it. But people can also just take the song for what it is: a loud rock song with a big guitar riff and a heavy drum!

From: https://whenthehornblows.com/content//2017/10/the-band-explains-the-buns-stockholm.html

Electric Würms - Heart of the Sunrise

 #Electric Würms #Flaming Lips #psychedelic rock #progressive rock #neo-psychedelia #experimental #Yes cover

Flaming Lips fandom in the 21st-century requires agreeing to the terms of this transaction: in exchange for receiving a non-stop stream of new, consistently adventurous music from your favorite band, you have to put up with Wayne Coyne’s Instagram skeeziness, and all the #freaks hashtags, exclamation-point abuse, and Miley Cyrus tongue-wagging selfies that go with it. Seems like a fair enough trade-off, but even those fans who are most tolerant of Wayne’s social-media madcappery had to be thinking “really, dude?” last spring when some especially ill-advised photos led to accusations of racism, and the extremely acrimonious ousting of long-time Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock (the fallout from which continues to spread).
In light of this, the debut of the Lips’ prog-inspired alter-ego act the Electric Würms couldn’t have come at a better time. By promoting redoubtable multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd to bandleader and reducing Coyne to background noisemaker (with Nashville psych-rock outfit Linear Downfall playing the role of an absent Michael Ivins), the new project effectively doubles as a form of damage control, redirecting our attention back to the ongoing evolution of what has been a remarkably productive and intriguingly unpredictable phase for the band. Even that Teutonic album title—which apparently translates as “music that’s hard to twerk to”—offers the guarantee of a Miley-free zone. Given that Drozd has long been the de facto musical director of the Flaming Lips, the Würms unsurprisingly stick to the post-Embryonic playbook, to the point where the new band name is practically immaterial, and Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk could just as easily be the (slightly) sunnier follow-up to the blood-red-skied electro-psych of 2013’s The Terror. And when you consider how much Coyne’s voice was fused into the textural mist on that album, Drozd’s soft, childlike coo doesn’t have much opportunity to distinguish itself amid the shock-treatment synths, radio-static guitar fuzz, and stellar-drift drums. Oddly, for an album that cheekily presents itself as a long-lost ’70s prog cut-out bin artifact, Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk’s most notable characteristic may be its 29-minute brevity, offering a tasting-menu sampler of the various modes the Lips have been exploring for the past five years. It’s almost as if the Lips have formed a cover-band-medley version of themselves.
So in lieu of prog’s multi-sectional intricacy, each of the six tracks here lock into discrete themes, from the mirage-like space-age bachelor-pad smear of “Futuristic Hallucination” to the Live-Evil-era Miles (by way of Yoko Ono’s Fly) psych-funk shriek of “Transform!!!” However, these four-minute spurts are too free-ranging to establish a melodic logic, yet too steady in execution to achieve maximal freak-out potential; with its creeping rhythm, quavering vocal, and steampiped-synth exhaust, “The Bat” is very much sonically of a piece with The Terror, but feels insubstantial outside a similarly elaborate context. Ironically, focus arrives in the form of a cover of Yes’ hyrda-headed dinosaur-rock colossus “Heart of the Sunrise,” which simply lops off Vincent Gallo’s favorite build-up and the arpeggiated closing act and condenses it into a pure and simple four-minute star-gazing ballad, with Drozd doing an eerily spot-on Jon Anderson. (That said, the attempt at writing a modern-day Yes song—“I Could Only See Clouds”—is less satisfying, with a placid central melody that never fully adheres to the intrusive Howe/Squire-worthy contorto-riff.) But it’s not surprising that the Würms find their greatest success the further they venture from the Lips mothership and the longer they stay the course. With the Neu! hypno-rock pulse of “Living,” the band turn in both their headiest jam and most dramatic song, with Drozd’s ghostly voice sounding like a final transmission to mission control before he and Coyne thrust themselves into the coldest, darkest reaches of outer space—or, at the very least, somewhere with no smartphone reception.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19598-electric-wurms-musik-die-schwer-zu-twerk/