Lake Ruth - Under the Waning Moon

Did you folks really meet on Facebook? Do tell.

Allison Brice: Hewson and I first virtually bumped into each other back in the MySpace days. I'm pretty sure that we were switched on to each other's music via Greg Hughes from Still Corners. Greg and I were fellow south Londoners at the time. Sadly, Hewson and I didn't keep in touch after MySpace folded, but in early 2015 found ourselves reunited via our mutual friend Phil Sutton from Pale Lights. On a silly Facebook thread he started about frozen food of all things…

Hewson Chen: The interwebs brought Matt and I together too. I looked him up to hear what he sounded like and one of the first hits on YouTube was a cat car chase video: Holy Fuck's "Red Lights".  I pretty much knew we would work great from there.  I have cats in common with Matt, and TV dinners in common with Allison.

AB: I'm severely allergic to cats and have never been able to set foot in either Hewson or Matt's apartments!

You all have played or currently play in other bands (New Lines, The Silver Abduction). How do you find the time, and is this on top of regular day jobs?

AB: It's a challenge. We all have day jobs and are raising - or soon to be raising - young children. I think that when free time is in short supply, you just have to grab what you can get - focus, and get down to work.

Matthew Schulz: You have to choose between sleep and art. I still choose art.

HC: Time is a tough factor for sure, but the technology helps - like you can sketch in broad strokes with plug-ins before actually hooking up the Farfisa, or what have you...

How does songwriting usually happen? Are all three of you actively involved in writing your tunes?

AB: Yes, we all are. We ping ideas back and forth and constantly share audio via Dropbox. The tunes start with one of us passing around a fragment, adding parts here or there in my home studio in Miami or Hewson and Matt's in Brooklyn. I moved to Miami a few years ago after a decade in London. It's an easy 'commute' up to NYC to join the rest of the band - Hewson & Matt plus Rene, Sohrab and David from our live group - for shows.

MS: Hewson and I often record random drums at the crack of dawn and then he returns with a pile of tracks he made from them. Then we beat them into submission. It's so backwards to me but works well with our geography and time restraints.

HC: Yeah sometimes the song will start with Allison singing a random melody with no words. Sometimes we'll start with a drum track that Matt belted out after me being like, "What's up with the purdie shuffle?" Other times I'll have some little filigree banging around that needs a story, or something to give it direction and Allison will say, "This one is about the Heaven's Gate cult." Those last two examples ended up being the same song.

What informs your songwriting? You include some rather fantastical themes in your storytelling. It is all fascinating, and not your standard fare.

AB: Songwriting is a mysterious process. I'll begin with a melody, and work with that until the vowels and consonants start falling into place. Eventually, some skeletal words will emerge - and I'll begin to get an idea of who is communicating and what they want to say. Every song has its character, its setting, and its story. The common denominator among the characters seems to be their marginality and their need to be heard. Often their stories are distressing and difficult to voice, but no performance is compelling without genuine emotion driving it. 

HC: She's very earnest. You can joke around like, "How about a song about the rise of modern epidemiology?" and voila, Dr. Snow and the Broad Street Pump.  She used to work in a bookstore, that's got to figure in somehow.

How would you self-describe your music if someone asked what you’re about?

HC: An Italian friend once exclaimed "old time music!" after hearing some tracks. I chose to take it as a compliment.

AB: I once read on a guitar forum that we'd sound right at home soundtracking "The Love Witch 2" - that works for me.

From: https://whenthesunhitsblog.blogspot.com/2018/02/interview-lake-ruth.html

Hidden Masters - Into The Night Sky

With the toybox psychedelia of Tame Impala hitting the mainstream and all things “out there” becoming the sound of summer 2013, Hidden Masters have landed at just the right time with an album which is absolutely smothered with heavy psyche. It is so psychedelic in fact, that you could be forgiven for thinking you had woken up in the late '60s and the acid had never worn off. Prepare for the trip of your life!
Blasting off with ‘She Broke The Clock Of The Long Now’, sub-Sabbath riffs are interspersed with frenetic piano and melodic vocals. On top of this harmonies swoop and swoon and guitars make thrilling runs. Forget all music that has happened in the last fifty years as you are placed right in the heart of Carnaby Street once again.
‘Into The Night Sky’ is held up by the piano as everything else clatters around it, Almost telekinetic, there is understanding of how this music should work and the trap off falling into too much going on is tempered by the space between. Music should be able to breathe and Hidden Masters know how to do this perfectly.
‘Perfume’ could have come straight off Nuggets with its urgent vocals and swirling Hammond. It's the closest you get to a possible single but you doubt this is even considered. No, Hidden Masters are more interested in that old fashioned statement...the album. Every song is a trip in itself which as a whole satisfying whole show a relentless talent at work.
Nothing sounds quite the same and by the time you get to ‘Like Candy’, which is possibly one of the greatest songs ever written with its insane sing along section followed by the funky work out on organ, you have lost all grip on reality. ‘Last Days of The Sun’ does this too only this time it transports you with its Arabian flavour. If only The Kinks were this good!
There is nothing like Hidden Masters at the moment, the closest comparison in contemporary circles is Howl Griff who take a much more elegiac road. Hidden Masters are the sound of the best acid trip ever and then some. Lysergic and blistering, the sun will never be the same again.  From: https://echoesanddust.com/2013/06/hidden-masters-of-this-other-worlds/

Lone Justice - I Found Love / Shelter / Beacon

Lone Justice was supposed to be huge. Admittedly, there’s no shortage of bands that fall into that category from the era of burgeoning college radio influence from the mid-eighties to the early-nineties, but Lone Justice has long struck me as one of the more perplexing near-misses. They surely had the industry support with major figures like Tom Petty and Linda Ronstadt extolling their virtues and a major label plucking them from the L.A. club scene to make the band a showcase act on their roster. The press, too, lined up to celebrate the band, reserving special praise for the rich, throaty vocals of lead singer Maria McKee.
Looking a little like the subject Walker Evans might have selected if he’d indulged in a mid-career shift into fashion photography, McKee came across like a lithe, lovely firebrand. She was perhaps perfectly suited to appeal to moody, earnest boys toiling in student-run radio–I think it was almost a prerequisite to getting that FCC Operator’s License to have a little crush on her, at least for those who were so inclined–but perhaps less so for the wider masses who were settling on Madonna as the standard of pop star sex appeal. Similarly the earthiness of their music, merging a polished rock sound with rootsy songcraft, seemed increasingly out of place on commercial radio, which was becoming more preoccupied with bombast than ever before. Lone Justice was very good and resolutely true at a time when those qualities held little interest for those with the strongest influence on which performers broke through.
Arguably, the closest the band came was in 1986 with the title track from their sophomore album, Shelter. The song received decent airplay on rock radio and climbed up to number 47 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart before it ran out of steam. In reality, though, it wasn’t really the band that was reaching those heights. Most of the founding members departed after the debut didn’t live up to expectations, leaving McKee to recruit new musicians. She had sole or shared songwriting credit on all ten tracks of Shelter after contributing to only about half of the songs on the debut. The primacy of her authorship was fully confirmed when she gave up on the pretense of the band altogether, discarding the Lone Justice name and release her very fine self-titled solo debut in 1989. Again, except for a knowledgeable (and fairly small) crowd of devoted fans, no one paid much attention.
Like many songs that were more welcome on our college radio station airwaves than just about anywhere else, “Shelter” still sounds like a hit to me. It evokes the same sensation of broadly shared fondness that I have for actual smashes of the time frame from the likes of U2. I guess, in a way, I still hear what could have been nestled in those notes.  From: https://coffee-for-two.com/2011/08/12/one-for-friday-lone-justice-shelter/

Emerson, Lake & Palmer - A Time and a Place

“We would have had hell’s own job getting that band off the ground,” asserted Greg Lake in Part 1 of our interview last week, after his revelations that at one point — before Carl Palmer had been brought in — there were embryonic plans for a musical aggregation comprising himself, Keith Emerson, Mitch Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix. The interview continues from there:

GL: We had enough of a job with ELP, with the big names bit. Like Keith’s name was known; I was from a known successful group and Carl was from Atomic Rooster, who were in the up and coming vibe. It’s so hard launching a group like that. You have to be super aware all the time. Nothing you do can be at all flash because any hole you leave anywhere, people will be jumping in to tear the heart out of you. When I think of all the good ideas that got thrown out… we were so afraid of being thought flash about it all. The worst thing was the Festival Hall concert. I mean, it was a great concert man. It was good, we knew it was good and we really enjoyed it. But you read the reviews and wonder if it was really the same gig.

NME: I was just coming round to ask you your opinion of the public and critical response to ELP.

Public response has been incredible. All through the last tour it was like a madhouse, the reception we got. It wasn’t just the applause at the end, they were clapping during numbers. Yet the Press, instead of being fair and saying “Okay now what do people feel about this group?”… the don’t report… they express their own opinion.
It was criticism of a very low level. Okay, there were a couple of good criticisms which were founded.

Can you say what they were?

First thing that comes to mind is “Pictures Of An Exhibition,” which was a classical interpretation, very similar to the kind of thing the Nice used to do. You look to anything Keith used to do and it was somebody else’s work he had interpreted.
That was one mistake. It was not wrong for the band in that I personally enjoyed doing it, but it was wrong because it gave the Press, the critics, a lever. It gave them a way to make comparisons. “Pictures” is being dropped now because we are creating material ourselves and there’s no longer room for it. We are doing two hours now. Add this next album and we will be on for four hours. People like to hear the current album so what we’ll probably do is drop “Pictures,” do the first album in the first half and the next in the second.

What was the other fair criticism?

The second mistake was the Isle of Wight. We put on a bad performance and we were setting ourselves up for judgement. That would have been okay if we had played well but we couldn’t because the festival itself was so badly organised… the PA and everything… and we rely so much on the equipment being just right. The criticism there was just, but it was still poor. If they had written in the papers that the band played a bad set because the conditions were not right… but they didn’t. After that we sort of got scrubbed out and nobody took any notice. The good part about the band was just left unnoticed and it is a source of pride to us that the LP sold an incredible amount of records, and we didn’t push it or hype it in there. It was just bought by people who dug us on the tour.

It could have been a lot worse though, couldn’t it? Other groups…

Oh yeah, Blind Faith. They didn’t even get off the ground.

You must have expected a certain amount of criticism?

Sure I had expected criticism, but it is still a hard pill to swallow. It gets through to you. But I think we have now gone through the stage where people are judging us. And really, I don’t hold it against anybody who scratched us.

Can you talk about the theme of the album track you played. (We’d earlier listened to one side, an extended suite, off the next ELP album).

It’s about the futility of conflict, expressed in this context in terms of soldiers and war — but it’s broader than that. The words are about revolution, the revolution that’s gone, that has happened. Where has it got anybody? Nowhere.
It starts off with frustration, with the 5/4 piece, which in itself is a frustrating metre. The natural beat is four, so the extra beat every time is unnatural. Then it builds up towards the first song which asks the question: Why can’t you see how… stupid it is, conflict? The next song is about the hypocrisy of it all and the last song is the aftermath, the conclusion of it. What have we gained? The very last bit, the march, is a joke. It was written in six days and rehearsed in six. It all came very quickly from one idea.

Whose idea?

Keith started the instrumental piece, the 5/4, and I had my song at the very end. We had a beginning and an end. We figured it out on a piece of paper.

Through the whole piece there seems to be a greater balance between the three of you, whereas the first album seemed to break down into individual contributions. Here it is harder to tell where Keith stops and you take over. You must be very pleased with that.

Yeah, the first album was a balance, but it was a balance of individuals. There was Keith and I… but this time it is together. He has written for me and I have written for him. Breaking it down to basics I suppose you could say that the instrumental parts are Keith’s and the songs are mine. The aim is to achieve a working balance where the output of each person is allowed freedom, yet the total gells as one music. In many bands it happens that one person is musically not satisfied. What we’ve achieved is very pleasing, very pleasing indeed. But we have no clue, none whatsoever, of the second side. We are due in the studio on Tuesday and we have nothing at all.

Will “Picture Of An Exhibition” be included?

Well, we have the tape made by the film people at the Lyceum concert, “Pictures” runs for 40 minutes, and it cost us nothing to make. You see, we don’t want to go back on it and re-record it because that’s a phase that has gone. We played it last night, probably for the last time. But there are people who want it, so what we might do is put that in as a separate LP with the new album, and not make any extra charge for it.

How pleased were you with your contribution to the first ELP album?

I was very pleased actually. I had my song on the second side and on the group things I was a third of the music. I also produced the album, which was a lot of fun. I was pleased in so far as my personal output got laid down as I wanted it. I am not pleased with the album now, in that I don’t think it is complete. As I explained earlier, it was down to individuals. But I shall be happy with the new one. Tell me, why is it that bass players go largely unnoticed? I feel sorry for all bass players; there are some good ones around.

It was always hard to tell from the records what exactly your contribution to King Crimson was.

The trouble is I never got credit for what I did in Crimson. Most of the songs on that King Crimson album (the first) I had a large part in creating “Schizoid Man” – I wrote the riff and song: “Epitaph;” I wrote the melody line for “In The Court Of The Crimson King.” The things I do are like parts that make up something but don’t necessarily form a large part of the end product. It comes back to the unnoticed bass player. Take him away and see how he’s noticed. I feel frustrated that my output has to do with the total thing rather than one specific part. I am not really after that sort of superstar recognition. I don’t want to be a solo superstar. I know that sounds corny but the motive I have for being successful is that I want to move people emotionally and I would dig to have enough money to be secure. Yet it is annoying when you don’t get credit for what you do.

From: https://geirmykl.wordpress.com/2020/10/22/article-about-emerson-lake-and-palmer-elp-from-new-musical-express-february-20-1971/

K.D. Lang - Save Me / Season Of Hollow Soul / Constant Craving

k.d. lang’s career started with a round of open-heart surgery. In 1983, the woman born Kathryn Dawn was involved in a 12-hour performance art piece in which she and her peers in Edmonton, Canada, re-enacted the first artificial heart transplant, using pickled carrots and beets for the organ. There are no surviving reports of the audience’s response, but lang recalled that the players came away dazed.
A year later, she took her career in a more conventional direction, albeit marginally. lang was an androgyne from rural Canada who considered herself to be the reincarnation of Patsy Cline, convinced she was born to be a country star. Even in outlaw terms, she was a long shot in conservative Nashville, a city nonetheless seduced by her punky verve and saucy rambunctiousness, a hay-bale alternative to the genre’s burgeoning cosmopolitanism. She was accepted, to a degree—her vegetarianism and PETA allegiance notwithstanding—but lang knew that acceptance was creative death. By the early ’90s, she felt that she had exploited country’s full creative potential. Now was time to develop her own romantic language.
That’s a challenge for any artist—how to create an original expression of love or heartbreak when those emotions have been so comprehensively codified by decades of pop music? lang’s circumstances were very particular. She was irrevocably in love with a married woman, and there was nothing she could do, no cooling-off period she could wait out, to get what she desired. The crush was a lost cause, and despite heavy rumors about her sexuality and a much-remarked upon lesbian contingent in her fanbase, lang was also not yet officially out. It was the early 1990s: Ellen DeGeneres wouldn’t come out for five years, AIDS-related deaths wouldn’t peak for another four, and President George H. W. Bush was renouncing his earlier support for gay marriage in a shameless attempt to maintain power. And yet, lang wanted to convey the specificity of her pain to as broad an audience as possible.
She was also perturbed by how pop was starting to crowd out the singing parts with the rhythm parts. Seeking a vehicle worthy of her voice, lang decided to hark back to the age of Peggy Lee, Julie London, and Rosemary Clooney, the adult contemporary sound of her parents’ generation. The gulf between her artistic whims and mainstream potential could hardly have seemed wider. But lang, who had sewn plastic farm animals to her gingham skirt in her earliest, kitschiest phase as a country star, was skilled at subverting what seemed anachronistic, even if the growing queercore scenes in Olympia and London wrote her off as a mopey blight on their cause. That is the beauty of 1992’s Ingénue, which looks however you want it to look depending on the light—radical queer ur-text or MOR reverie—and lets lang shapeshift accordingly. It was her first all-original album for a reason, allowing her to create modes of tragedy, defeat, and roleplay as she tried to distill the truest essence of her own heartbreak, a state that makes subjugated clichés of us all.
Ingénue is irresistibly seductive, so much so that it drives home just how unavailable lang’s crush was: How could she resist this? lang described the sound of Ingénue as “post-nuclear cabaret” and “nouveau easy listening”: Opener “Save Me” soothes the room like a bath filling up, making the light swim and the temperature rise. From there, lang and stalwart collaborator Ben Mink conjure a sense of intimacy so acute it feels like a confrontation. Their obsessive “sonic cleanliness” heightens the atmosphere to a peak of sensitivity: The tapering bass of “Wash Me Clean,” a song that is otherwise pure, sustained glow, might as well be a finger running down the inside of your wrist. Long before the term ASMR was coined, lang knew how to simulate the sensations of heartbreak: the obsessively lovelorn can trigger the memory (or fantasy) of connection until it’s wrung dry, the spark drained.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kd-lang-ingenue/

The Yardbirds - I'm Not Talking / Mr. You're a Better Man Than I / Over Under Sideways Down / Shapes of Things

Long before Disraeli Gears, Blind Faith, and Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs convinced people that Eric Clapton was some kind of “God.” Before the pub-inspired proto-metal of Beck-Ola, and the avant jazz of Blow By Blow signaled the true genius of Jeff Beck. And before Led Zeppelin I, II, III or IV were ever a glint in Jimmy Page’s eye, there was a band called The Yardbirds and they ruled.
The Yardbirds never came anywhere close to matching the mind-boggling chart dominance of The Beatles. They never were able to adopt the same effortless, sneering cool of Mick and Keith and the Rolling Stones. And they couldn’t physically dominate the stage with the same kind of explosive energy as The Who. They were simply the most talented, envelope-pushing band to emerge from the swinging London scene of the 1960s.
The Yardbirds were born in the smokey jazz clubs that dotted the London Metropolitan area in 1963. Their career was initially shepherded by a Swiss emigre, born in the Soviet Union named Giorgio Gomelsky. Gomelsky ran the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, where the Rolling Stones first cut their teeth. When Andrew Loog Oldham showed up one day and swiped the Stones from under his nose, Gomelsky vowed never to let that happen again.
Early on, The Yardbirds honed their blues chops while backing local heroes like Cyril Davies and American legends like Sonny Boy Williamson. Williamson swung through the scene in ‘63 looking to make a paycheck blowing his harp for hordes of young, English blues fans eager to hear the real thing for themselves. Eric Clapton entered the lineup around that time, then split just as soon as the band scored their first Top-5 hit, a bongo-fueled rave-up titled “For Your Love.”
No matter. Enter Jeff Beck, one of the most supremely talented musicians to ever pick up a Telecaster. That’s when things got really interesting. With Beck on board, the Blues was sacrificed at the alter of psychedelia as the Yardbirds twisted their sound in new and unique ways on songs like, “Heart Full of Soul,” “Shapes of Things,” “Over Under Sideways Down,” and “Train Kept A Rollin’.” Fuzz pedals, sitar, and enough feedback to pin your eyes to the back of your brain. This became their hallmark.
The group’s bassist, Paul Samwell Smith quit sometime in 1966. Again, no matter. Jeff Beck simply phoned up his old mate, and one of the best session players in London, Jimmy Page, to fill in. It didn’t take long before Page swapped out four strings for six — Chris Dreja took over on bass — and for a supremely brief moment in time, the Yardbirds could rightly boast the greatest two-guitar lineup ever conceived.
This version of the band only recorded a few songs together before Beck himself departed. The best is called “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago.” The unrealized potential that lives in the grooves of that single, galloping 45 remains one of the greatest “What-if’s” of that entire era.
When Beck left in 1967, Page naturally took the reins. Or he tried to anyway. The band’s management called in a ringer, a renowned pop producer named Mickie Most, to help pilot The Yardbirds back to chart dominance. But when the time came to record, Most’s instincts ultimately failed him. Page could see the future and wanted to record heavier, twisted material; songs like “Dazed and Confused.” Most forced them to lay down treacly pop compositions like “Ha Ha! Said The Clown” instead. The results were obvious.
The final epitaph for the Yardbirds was best summarized in a 1970 essay written by one of their most ardent acolytes, rock critic Lester Bangs. “The Yardbirds for all their greatness would finally fizzle out in an eclectic morass of confused experiments and bad judgments,” he wrote. “Because the musicians in the Yardbirds were just too good, too accomplished and cocky to do anything but fuck up in the aftermath of an experiment that none of them seemed to understand anyway.”  From: https://sonicbreadcrumbs.substack.com/p/yardbirds-jim-mccarty-interview

Fern Knight - From Zero To Infinity

Fern Knight is an American psychedelic folk band currently based in Washington, D.C. Formed in 1999 by Margaret Ayre (née Wienk), the group performs music inspired by the spooky, pastoral sounds of classic British acts like Pentangle and Steeleye Span.
The band is the primary vehicle for Margie Wienk's singing and songwriting. Since 1999, Fern Knight has been a part of the burgeoning folk underground from annual tours of North America, mainland Europe and Scandinavia to lending her cello/double bass/vocals to many recordings, shows and tours of Alec K. Redfearn, Espers, Greg Weeks, Birch Book/In Gowan Ring, Damon and Naomi, Ex Reverie, Mountain Home, Orion Rigel Dommisse and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. Her other musical endeavors include co-writing and co-directing the alternate score to Czech new wave film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders with cohorts Greg Weeks and Brooke Sietinsons in The Valerie Project (Drag City, 2007).
With its fourth album Castings (vhf records), Fern Knight weaves an uncommon sound from far-flung musical roots. Under classically trained cellist/guitarist/vocalist Margaret Ayre's unwavering direction, this DC / Philadelphia quartet continues to gracefully color her tightly arranged, smartly produced songs with echos of British folk leanings in the manner of The Strawbs, Sourdeline's ancient trad-folk and old-school riffage in the vein of English progressive cult-rockers Asgard.  From: https://www.last.fm/music/Fern+Knight/+wiki

Bigelf - Gravest Show On Earth

On this third album (from 2008) by the exciting USA progrock formation Bigelf I notice more variety and less emphasis on a bombastic vintage keyboard sound than on their previous two albums. Just take a look at the huge amount of guest musicians, especially the The Gallows Orchestra, The Section Quartet and The Kung-Pao Horns. Due to their contributions Bigelf sounds like The Brian Setzer Orchestra (brass in Blackball) and ELO (omnipresent violin sound in Gravest Show On Earth and The Game). And often Cheat The Gallows sounds like a tribute to many sixties and seventies Classic Rock Bands, I notice hints of Marc Bolan (Superstar), Black Sabbath (Blackball, Race With Time and Hydra), The Beatles (Money, It's Pure Evil), The Doors (Blackball) and Pink Floyd (Race With Time).
But Bigelf succeeds to sound like Bigelf because of the way they blend their distinctive elements like the compelling atmospheres featuring strong vocals (with that cynical undertone), heavy guitarwork (I love those fat Black Sabbath inspired riffs) and a lush Mellotron sound, especially on The Evils of Rock & Roll (fiery guitar solo), The Game, the dynamic and alternating Race With Time (delicate Floydian slide-guitar and sensational interplay between powerful guitar and intense violin-Mellotron) and Hydra (great break with synthesizer flights and heavy guitar riffs). The two dreamy tracks are very tastefully arranged: flute-Mellotron, fiery guitar and an orchestra in Money, It's Pure Evil and acoustic rhythm-guitar with choir-Mellotron a long a wonderful, very moving guitar solo in the emotional No Parachute. The long final composition entitle Counting Sheep is their most ambitious work, it sounds like a mini rock-opera with lots of shifting moods, multiple breaks and captivating musical ideas, Bigelf in its full splendor as a progressive rock band and for sure Bigelf has progressed on Cheat The Gallows.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=849

Jefferson Airplane - Blues From An Airplane / Runnin' 'Round This World / J.P.P. McStep B. Blues / Go To Her

The musical revolution ignited by the Beatles in the '60s exploded in many directions. Coast to coast, bands were forming. From the most earnest teenagers to the more savvy young adults, music was a unifying force. New York City had its own flavor, as did Los Angeles, but the city that would ultimately transform the landscape more than any other was San Francisco, with Jefferson Airplane leading the way.
Formed in 1965 by singer Marty Balin and guitarist Paul Kantner, Jefferson Airplane took the fire of the British Invasion and the Byrds' folk-rock jangle, and created their own style. With the addition of lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, bassist Jack Casady, singer Signe Toly Anderson and drummer Skip Spence, the Airplane were ready to take flight.
After building a rep in San Francisco throughout the year, the band signed with RCA Records in late 1965 and began work on their debut LP. Though RCA had Elvis Presley at the top of their roster, they had yet to sign a full-fledged rock 'n' roll band. Sessions began on Dec. 16 in Los Angeles with the songs "Runnin' Round This World" and "It's No Secret," both of which would comprise the band's debut single.
Released in August 1966, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off traces the line from the Beatles to the Byrds to the new sound the Airplane were making. The album opens with the haunting "Blues From an Airplane," which sets the tone for the trip. The vocal blend of Balin, Anderson and Kanter was strikingly original, as was the instrumental interplay between Kantner and Kaukonen.
The LP didn't arrive without some controversy: Their label decided some of the lyrics were too much for the public to handle and requested changes to three tracks, "Let Me In," "Run Around" and "Runnin' Round This World," which was relegated to a B-side and contained the phrase "fantastic trips."
"They'd find all this meaning and give it a great deal of importance," Balin said in the book Got a Revolution. "Trips was just a slang word to us, part of the language. They'd sit down with their censors and talk to us and we'd say, 'You guys are crazy!'"
The album spanned the sunshine glow of "Come Up the Years" to the grit and dirt of "Tobacco Road," and the haunting waltz of album closer "And I Like It." Their version of folk rock was a lot different than the L.A. or New York acts who walked similar ground. This was the birth of the San Francisco sound that would captivate so many bands over the next couple years.
A January 1967 cover story on the band in Crawdaddy called Jefferson Airplane Takes Off "the most important album of American rock issued this year." The band was gaining momentum, but within its ranks significant changes were on the horizon. Spence quit the band in March 1966 to form Moby Grape, opening the door for Spencer Dryden. And Anderson gave birth to her first child in May, and left the band in October. Her replacement, Grace Slick, joined the group the night after Anderson's final gig, cementing Jefferson Airplane's definitive lineup.  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/jefferson-airplane-takes-off/

The Smithereens - Behind The Wall Of Sleep / Blood And Roses

New Jersey’s The Smithereens had been around since 1980, releasing a couple of independent EP’s, but their first full-length album is where the story officially began for anyone beyond their local scene. When the bass-driven single “Blood And Roses” hit the airwaves, it fit in perfectly with both classic rock & current music. Here was a band steeped in ‘60s British Invasion groups like The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and The Hollies, but in lead vocalist/songwriter Pat DiNizio they had a unique talent who used those artists as inspiration for songs that sounded like no one other than The Smithereens. His bandmates (lead guitarist Jim Babjak, bassist Mike Mesaros and drummer Dennis Diken) were deceptively sophisticated, providing clever arrangements to seemingly straight-ahead songs like “Time And Time Again,” “Strangers When We Meet” and “Behind The Wall Of Sleep.” As good as their rockers are, it’s the subtler tracks that make Especially For You so special. Suzanne Vega adds sweet harmonies to the lovely “In A Lonely Place,” and the acoustic break-up song “Cigarette” is an accordion-accented delight. My college cover band played a few Smithereens songs which were always well-received, and since I went to school in New Jersey I’ve always felt a close connection to their music. They went on to release more great records but Especially For You is probably their most diverse collection of songs and it holds up extremely well nearly 3 decades later.  From: https://kamertunesblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/thirty-year-thursday-the-smithereens-especially-for-you/ 

Castle Rat - Sun Song

When Castle Rat take to the stage, you’re met with a fever dream’s assortment of a D&D party: a plague doctor, a vampiric count and a woodland druid. Up top, singer Riley Pinkerton – in the guise of “The Rat Queen” – leads this merry band into fabled adventure, each show climaxing with her solo sword duel with the rodent-masked, stockings-wearing, scythe-wielding Rat Reaperess. But despite having become a successful global festival act off the back of their 2024 debut album Into The Realm, their odds-and-ends fantasy appearance born in the clubs of Brooklyn came about by accident.
“When I started the band it was just a name and we all wore black, but then we got booked on a Halloween show so I very last minute crudely put together the characters and the costumes out of cardboard boxes and paper mâché,” Riley reveals. “It was so fun we just thought, ‘What if we do this every time?’ Now I needed a reason as to why I am the Rat Queen and there’s a plague doctor and a vampire, so I retroactively wrote the lore and it tumbled into what it is.”
With bluesy yet battle-ready classic doom metal underpinnings like Sabbath riffs plunged deep into the dreams of Robert E. Howard, everything about Castle Rat’s presentation, from their look to the vintage production of their albums, creates the impression of a lost band from 80s fantasy movie Deathstalker. It’s 1985 all day here, their deliberately analogue aesthetic showcasing the handmade costumes over elaborate digital artwork.
“For me it was important for both records to be photographed covers,” says Riley. “A lot of metal bands will get fantasy art of a warrior chick, but that’s not representative of what you get on stage. Doing a high fantasy metal band but rooting it in a homespun DIY foundation is what makes it believable and something that people want to be a part of.
"They can see that I’ve sewn my own costume, and there’s threads hanging off of it because it’s something I just did in the pandemic when I had a lot of time, and I made my own chainmail that’s falling apart tied together with shoelace from the dollar store. Down to the name, a castle is grand and it’s royal, but we’re the rat!"
This bespoke approach to the weird and wonderful conjuring images of teenage tabletop campaigns carries over to Castle Rat’s output. Their second album The Bestiary came hot on the heels of Into The Realm. Where Realm…struck a real balance in tone between scuzzy and heightened, capturing exactly the feel of discovering a secret doom act from the genre’s primordial years in the back of a dusty record bin, The Bestiary sees them set their sights on grander things, incorporating orchestration and more progressive terrain whilst retaining that core swords-and-sorcery sound.
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“I’m still using stuff from my personal life to flesh out the songs,” Riley divulges of the album’s titular theme, a term any fantasy nerd will be familiar with as a catalogue of mythical fuzzy fellas manifesting here in simple punchy titles like Wizard and Unicorn. “Each of the creatures represents either a person in my life or an experience, and that keeps it real.”
As Castle Rat’s central focal point, despite her equally outlandish companions, Riley is also sensitive to the perception that her role in the band is a visual gimmick and not a creative force to be taken seriously. “In my late teens if I was walking through a train station with a guitar bag on my back, a number of men that would come up to me and ask, ‘You actually know how to play that thing?’, which I think is an experience unique to being a younger woman in music,” she says. “Sure, like I just like carrying a guitar-shaped backpack!
"There’s the insecurity, like people will think, ‘Oh she looks the part and she sings, so the guys in the band must write all the music’. But I take a lot of pride in starting this band and creating this universe. At this point, if someone says I can’t play guitar, then why is everything going so well?”
With Castle Rat pretty much not acknowledging any trends or developments in the zeitgeist past the high fantasy metal of yore, they may seem at odds with the genre-mashing and digitalisation that makes up much contemporary metal. Yet their swift burst in popularity suggests a healthy appetite for a band who can tap into worlds of myth and escapism as vividly as they can. “At the end of the day I just wanna play the music that I love,” Riley sums up. “I feel like trying really hard to keep up with the times is a great way to fall into a trap of immediately sounding really dated. Where, if you go far enough back it’ll just be classic.
"Sometimes I look at how I did my eyebrows two years ago and cringe, so trying really hard to stay modern just doesn’t speak to me. I just want to live in this world, where I’m surrounded by Frank Frazetta paintings and the soundtrack is Black Sabbath.”
Beginning contributing to Metal Hammer in 2023, Perran has been a regular writer for Knotfest since 2020 interviewing icons like King Diamond, Winston McCall, and K.K. Downing, but specialising in the dark, doomed, and dingy. After joining the show in 2018, he took over the running of the That’s Not Metal podcast in 2020 bringing open, anti-gatekeeping coverage of the best heavy bands to as many who will listen, and as the natural bedfellow of extreme and dark music devotes most remaining brain-space to gothic and splatter horror and the places where those things entwine.  From: https://www.loudersound.com/bands-artists/i-take-a-lot-of-pride-in-starting-this-band-and-creating-this-universe-black-sabbath-homemade-chainmail-and-frank-frazetta-getting-to-know-castle-rat-the-fantasy-metal-sensations-everyones-talking-about 

Fever Ray - Live In Berlin 2018

As Fever Ray and in The Knife, Karin Dreijer has embodied many characters, but she’s never looked like she’s had this much fun doing it. When Fever Ray’s Plunge crash-landed last year, its gleefully shocking antics left us gasping for air. A world away from the steely presence of her Fever Ray debut, a series of videos saw Dreijer inhabit a wide-eyed, genderless body to flesh out the album’s anarcho-queer vision, and employed a cast of characters to toy with its BDSM basement aesthetics. These characters appeared again in the visuals for the Plunge tour, introduced to us in a series of Top Trump cards, looking like Mortal Kombat fighters from an alien planet ruled by women.
These characters comprise Fever Ray’s band, and they appear tonight at the sold out Berlin show. Seems like someone’s been watching Glow – a purple hue descends on the stage and the band members arrive one by one with all the camp ferocity of a wrestler entering the ring. As they stomp to the front of the stage they each work a kind of Street Fighter goes to Berghain look: sporting whips, lycra, body paint, head-to-toe PVC and – a personal favourite – a body builder muscle suit, bright orange and cinched at the waist by pink glitter pants. Karin Dreijer follows, sporting the demonic baby look from her videos, the light reflecting off her bald head and Vaseline-smeared make-up. Her t-shirt, which says ‘I love Swedish Girls’ (with ‘Swedish’ crossed out in black tape), is a not-so-subtle reminder of the themes fizzing through the album.
Indeed, the whole show drips with lust. While The Knife’s farewell tour had an element of stage school theatrics, tonight is pure joy. The women take their places – two on percussion, one on synths and two singers joining Dreijer at the front – as they rattle into new material, embellishing tracks like An Itch and A Part of Us with earthy live percussion, thick bass and choreographed dance moves. In between bounding round the stage, the three singers move in unison, with armpit whiffs, finger sniffs, and fists up for This Country’s rally cry: “This country makes it hard to fuck”. This biggest reaction of the night is, unsurprisingly, to their quite literal illustration of the album’s lyrical trigger switch: “I want to run my fingers up your pussy”. It’s a punishing -10 degrees outside tonight but it’s pretty steamy in here. One demonstration of Plunge’s carnal pulse sees the three act out a ménage à trois, taking it in turns to sub and dom – hair is pulled, legs are hoisted over bodies, faces pushed toward the floor.
These intoxicating moments are harshly contrasted with material from Fever Ray. Pivoting between extroversion and introversion, the suffocating domesticity of the debut is reflected in stark, low-lit performances. The singers huddle motionless in a corner of the stage, singing about TV and concrete walls. For Red Trails, one singer twirls with silver wings billowing around her, like a phoenix rising from an oil spill, and we are brought back up to the heavens again. The pink and purple haze of the strip lights turns into rainbows for the encore of If I Had a Heart and Mama’s Hand – one song about lovelessness and one about longing – before the band gather at the front, resembling a depraved Spice Girls. In a show packed with joy and strength and pride, their collective presence feels truly nourishing. More than anything, tonight traced the scale of Fever Ray’s journey – stepping out from claustrophobia into the wild unknown; from domesticity to a new kind of family.  From: https://crackmagazine.net/article/live-reviews/fever-rays-lust-fuelled-live-show-brings-plunge-to-shocking-vivid-life/

Galley Beggar - Live at the Moira Furnace Folk Festival 2011

Galley Beggar are part of a new wave of British acid folk bands alongside Trembling Bells etc, and although they have had several releases before their new album, Silence and Tears is their first on Rise Above, hence their inclusion on the bill tonight. I have been looking forward to seeing them play live after playing their album to death over the previous weeks. Their melodies are beautiful and somewhat melancholic (reminding me in mood of the two COB albums), and they set a different tone to the evening.
It’s one where darkened trees hang heavy in autumnal skies, and crows gather on freshly harvested fields. Maria O’Donnell’s vocals are beautiful and have a sense of wild wood magic as she sings songs like “Empty Sky” and “Geordie” in a crisp, clear tone that clings to winter trees. Celine Marshall’s violin adds an extra element of sadness to the some of the songs, while David Ellis and Mat Fowler’s guitars have a touch of Richard Thompson’s psychedelic folk style about them. The worst thing is that their set seems painfully short as it would have been fantastic to bask in their song’s atmospheres for a while longer.  From: https://freq.org.uk/reviews/lucifer-galley-beggar-saturn-live-at-the-borderline/ 

The Moody Blues - Nights in White Satin / Tuesday Afternoon - Bouton Rouge 1968

 The Moody Blues - Nights in White Satin - Bouton Rouge 1968

 

 

The Moody Blues - Tuesday Afternoon - Bouton Rouge 1968

 

The Moody Blues secured their place in prog history as Days of Future Passed shot up the U.K. rock charts. But the project, released on Nov. 10, 1967, was fraught with deep uncertainty, weird happenstance and then – at least in the U.S. – initial lack of interest.
The Moody Blues had started out as a rootsy band, as far removed from symphonic rock as they could be. "We were originally a rhythm-and-blues band, wearing blue suits and singing about people and problems in the Deep South," frontman Justin Hayward told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. "It was okay, but it was incongruous, getting us nowhere, and in the end we had no money, no nothing."
Then came what Hayward says was "a series of wonderful accidents." Their label, Decca Records, was looking to recoup money it had advanced the Moody Blues, while promoting then-new stereo recording equipment that produced the so-called Deramic Sound. Already a hit with classical listeners, Decca was hoping stereo would take off with the rock crowd, as well.
"Up until that time, most albums, of course, were only in glorious mono," bassist John Lodge told the St. Petersburg Times in 2000. "Later, we had to actually go back into the studio and remix it into mono, because so many people wanted it in mono. They didn't have stereo players." Decca suggested blending classical and rock ideas, in the hopes of speaking to both audiences.
"They wanted us, as a way to pay off that debt, to do a demonstration record of a rock version of Dvorak with [conductor] Peter Knight playing the real Dvorak between our pieces and an engineer mixing them together so people would say, 'Oh, that sounds wonderful in stereo,'" Hayward noted on the Moody Blues' official site in 2012. Producer “Michael Barclay, whose project it was to get these demonstration records together, suggested we do it the other way around: We do our songs and then Peter Knight would orchestrate pieces in between our songs, and so that's what we did."
It was a stroke of genius – or, more correctly, a stroke of accidental genius. Through sheer force of will, the Moody Blues created the perfect vehicle for a groundbreaking combination. "We said, yeah, sure we'd do it," Hayward told the Los Angeles Times, "and then, after we said yes, we went down to the pub and decided to do our own songs instead."
The Moody Blues had been developing an album-length theme that used the elements of a passing day as a metaphor for phases of life. They'd build off a track already written by keyboardist John Pinder titled "Dawn of a Feeling," leveraging the entire project – eventually, that is – on "Nights in White Satin."
Hayward used the song to explore the ending of one love affair and the beginning of another, keying on the image of a set of new sheets he'd just been given. "I just sat down at the edge of the bed with my big 12-string and wrote the song in like four minutes," Hayward told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1999. "I think there's a lot of truth in it."
He took the same 12-string into rehearsal the next day to play "Nights in White Satin" for his bandmates. "They sort of went 'Oh, yeah, it's alright,'" Hayward added, laughing. But then Pinder said, "Play it again, Justin," and began to add Mellotron accompaniment. Once he created the now-familiar harmony line on the keyboard, they knew they'd hit upon something magical. "Fairy dust. The invisible, unknowable thing," drummer Graeme Edge told the Naples Daily News in 2012. "It's just one of those songs where everything came together correctly."
That was true for the entire project, as these new tracks alternated with interludes from the London Festival Orchestra. The two groups' peak collaboration arrived during the soaring conclusion of "Nights in White Satin."
"It took us five days to finish, and, after each day we'd send them down to Peter Knight, and he'd write these orchestral arrangements," Hayward told the Los Angeles Times. "We'd edited all the tapes to be the right length, and [the orchestra] just played live in the gaps."
By the end, they'd taken the then-nascent idea of rock concept albums to an entirely new level. "It was revolutionary," Lodge told the St. Petersburg Times. "Usually an album was six hit singles and six B-sides of songs that people didn't particularly want to listen to. We put it together as an album, 40 minutes of real music. That's why there's no stops, no scrolls, in Days of Future Passed. One song goes into the next song. It goes through as a complete work of art."
Thing is, Decca didn't know about any of it. The Moody Blues didn't present Days of Future Passed until the entire recording was complete. "It was a conspiracy among all us musicians who were present," Hayward admitted in his talk with the Los Angeles Times.
The label executives were, by and large, nonplussed. "When we played the finished product to all these old directors at Decca – which is a fine, upstanding old English music firm – they said, 'This isn't Dvorak,'" Hayward added, "and we said, 'No, but this is what it is.'"
In another happy twist, it turned out that the Moody Blues had a lone ally. "Fortunately, a guy from the States was there, called Walt Maguire," flautist Ray Thomas told the Hit Channel in 2016. "He was the head of London Records, which was Decca America, and he said, 'If they don’t want it, I certainly do. This is going to blow up our sales in the States.' So, that’s how it got released."  From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/moody-blues-days-of-future-passed-album/

 

Holly Herndon - Eternal

How you would describe what you do?

I'm a computer musician.

What does that mean?

Well, that's always what comes next. I am a composer, and I'm a performer. My primary instrument is the computer.

What were the formative experiences in becoming the musician you are today?

Well, my introduction to musical performance was through choirs, often in a liturgical setting – in church, in this emotional ecstasy that one has in the religious singing experience. Another introduction would be coming to Berlin as a teenager and hearing Eurodance in the supermarket; also the crazy, synthetic pop music that was popular here. It's like a geographical point. Another one would be moving to Oakland, going to Mills [College], and starting to use a computer in a way that I had more control over. That's the trajectory.

What led you to Mills?

I was already writing music. I went to some master classes here [in Berlin]. I took some free improvisation with [vocalist] Lauren Newton. I was trying to teach my way through some things. I had downloaded SuperCollider [a real-time audio synthesis programming language] and was trying to figure it out without any community. That is hard to do if you are coming at it blind, without any reference point. There was already a deep interest, and I was trying to figure things out myself. I figured that if I wanted to take things to the next level technically, I needed to retool. So, I decided to go to Mills.

SuperCollider was the first music-making software you interfaced with?

It was, and it wasn't what I ended up using. I ended up using Max [Max/MSP/Jitter; a visual programming language for music]. It's random. At Mills, one semester they would teach Max, and one semester they would teach SuperCollider. I happened to start on the semester they were teaching Max. That's the only reason. It's actually probably better that way, because it's visual. Actually, I was in the beta testing of Max for [Ableton] Live at the time, when I was first getting started.

Around what years?

I was at Mills from 2008 to 2010. This always happens to people when they first start to use Max: I was building this complicated, insane, disgusting patch that I'd never use again. But that's part of doing it; to learn how it works. I was building this stupid performance system that was super complicated. I spent forever on it, and then the Max for [Ableton] Live beta came out and answered everything. All of a sudden it was so much easier to do all the things I wanted to do, because I could just put individual Max patches on individual audio tracks - things that were difficult to code if you were just starting with an empty Max patch. That was a massive self-own; but it was also good, because I had to learn how to do all that. Now I have the stability of this DAW [Ableton Live] but with the flexibility of all this weirdness I want to do [Max For Live]. That then became a powerful performance tool.

Do you have separate phases for writing and composing, and then taking those ideas in to record, or is the process fluid?

That would be the smart way to do it. My methodology is not always that perfect. I would write something, like a simple score, and then we would have regular rehearsals once a week, or every other week. The members would perform them, and I would record that. I'd then go back into the studio and work with it. Then I'd iterate on that and change the score; or I'd have them emulate a process that I applied to the score. Once it was at a certain point, I would go into the studio to record them, but I would still end up changing it and remixing it into its final iteration.

For the score, do you use traditional notation for the ensemble to read?

Yeah. Or sometimes I record a process and have them emulate a digital process. Then it, of course, becomes something entirely new when they're interpreting it.

What is the environment or studio that you work in like?

We had a very unusual setup in our old place. We just moved a couple months ago. We used to live in Kreuzberg [in Berlin], and we had a more industrial loft space with a large, open room where we could have rehearsals. I had a little studio room, where I could shut the door that was sound-treated and had a nice speaker setup. I could do single recordings in there. We would also rent a recording studio to do a proper final run of recordings. I would record our rehearsals in the main room and then iterate on them in my studio. Once we got it to a point where we were rehearsed, we would take that to a recording studio. We'd further rehearse there and get real-time feedback and try it with different approaches. "Okay, let's try it this time staccato" or, "legato" or, "add a glissando to these parts." Just workshopping.

When you're recording the vocal ensemble at your house, do you have a particular way that you like to capture that audio? Any certain mic'ing techniques or mics that you like to use?

It depends on what we're recording. Usually I was just recording as a reference, but we ended up using some of that. I probably should have paid a bit more attention. I find the Sony PCM [handheld recorder] to be quite good at recording. The fidelity is good enough. I did a piece called "Body Sound" years ago with a dancer, and that was all recorded with the PCM. I was just holding it to his feet as he was dancing and recording his foot sounds. It's actually really crisp and clear. But there were a couple times that I rented microphones and set them up in our space for a couple of sessions when I knew that I didn't need to rent the studio. It's expensive to do that. There were a couple of background parts I wanted to record where I would set up some microphones. I can't remember the microphones that I ended up using. There's this place here called Echoschall. I would rent a nicer microphone when I would record soloists in my studio.

From: https://tapeop.com/interviews/132/holly-herndon

Haken - Invasion

Haken is a British Progressive Rock/Metal band formed in London in 2007 by To-Mera guitarist and keyboardist Richard Henshall and two of his school friends, Ross Jennings and Matthew Marshall. The band's albums have been met with critical acclaim, and they've achieved a high level of popularity within the Prog community.
A lot of their songs feature an intense level of instrumental and vocal virtuosity, philosophical lyrics, longer song lengths, and a generally quirky attitude. They gathered some attention to themselves with the help of their video for "Cockroach King", which features a muppet-themed parody of Bohemian Rhapsody's famous music video. They've garnered the respect of a few of the larger names in the Prog community, including Jordan Rudess and Mike Portnoy, who have both praised their music. The orchestral tribute group Symphonic Theater of Dreams is also currently making a symphonic tribute album to the band. In 2014, the band released an EP titled Restoration containing updates of a select few songs from their demo, Enter the Fifth Dimension. Their seventh studio album, Fauna, was released on March 3rd, 2023.  From: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/Haken

 

Goat - Hide from the Sun

I couldn’t be happier that Sweden’s Goat got to be such a big deal so quickly, as I just absolutely loved them from the word “go.” Their union of acid-fried psych guitars, surreal Krautrock dreaminess, Afrobeat’s funk rhythms, and the otherworldly unison-chanted vocals of the band’s two female singers goes beyond just organic—this music is practically elemental.
Their debut, titled World Music, and packaged in a stunning die-cut cover, was by a long shot one of the best (and best-reviewed) albums of 2012, a fantastic year for new releases, so their triumph wasn’t merely by default. The LP yielded the heavy single “Goatman,” the catchy as all hell “Run to Your Mama,” which was the subject/object of two amazing remix records, and the big mindscramble of “Goathead,” an acid-prog blowout which seemed to endeavor to strand their fellow heavy-psych Swedes Dungen in Fela Kuti’s compound. Right before the big raid.
Their live shows, too, attracted near-unanimous acclaim. The band takes the stage in identity-obscuring costumes that draw inspiration from the tribal garb of indigenous peoples all across the globe, with specific references to Islam (their bassist has appeared wearing a niqab), Africa, and the pre-Columbian Americas. When combined in concert, the colorful apparel, the dancing of the singers, and the volume and vehemence of the music are all quite intense. 
Late last month, Goat released World Music‘s follow up, Commune. While World Music wanted to dance, chant, and fuck in the primordial ooze from which all life emerged, Commune aims to touch the transcendent. (The obvious question: is “commune” a noun or a verb here? An imperative?) While the winning formula is unchanged—Afropop beats, check; fuzz-blitz guitar solos you want to bring along with you when you die, check; ESL hippie lyrics rendered in soaring, unison wail, check—this record’s sounds are leavened with a cathedral’s worth of reverb, and its grooves are as often meditative as booty-shaking. But the trancey atmospherics here are genuinely absorbing, and while it’s not as immediately gripping as the debut, Commune could prove itself as a more accessible entryway for Goat initiates. It opens with slow-building chimes, like Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath” and AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells,” which build into the plaintive and distant “Talk to God.” Subtle, right? See also “The Light Within,” “To Travel the Path Unknown”—there’s plainly a mystic’s agenda at work here. The band are at their robust best on “Goatslaves,” album closer “Gathering of Ancient Tribes,” (cough cough G.O.A.T.) and the lovely, raga-drenched single “Hide From the Sun.”  From: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/hide_from_the_sun_the_new_video_from_swedens_psychedelic_shamans_goat/ 

Frantic Chant - Fiberglass Spiderlegs

 Where did the name Frantic Chant come from?

Col “Stazy was in a bookshop and saw a board full of magnetic words all jumbled up. In the centre was frantic and chant, he just thought they looked good together and suited the music we were making. I might have got this totally wrong, but that’s how I remember it.”

Your latest album is 21 songs and almost two hours long, what made you decide to put out a double album?

Nick “We had so many songs to get out our system. We had lots of time in the studio to muck about and de-fragment. And also TRUMPETS!”

Stazy “We’re not a band that says ‘Let’s leave that one for the next album’. If a song’s done or nearly done, get it finished and get it on. There’s not one note that’s gone to waste on this album. The running order wasn’t a problem as the songs go as a narrative.

Col “It wasn’t intentional to record so many songs but having an extremely patient producer in Elle Durnan meant we could experiment and record new ideas on the spot. A couple of the songs came while 2 or 3 of us were waiting in the studio for the others to arrive and we’d been playing another wee batch of songs live for a while too.”

What was the inspiration behind the video for ‘Fiberglass Spiderlegs’?

Col “We can’t claim any credit for the video, it was done by Hugo, who is also known as Psyche Coaster. He asked to use the song on a compilation album he was putting together for the Psychedelic Underground Generation blog/label and the next thing we knew he’d posted the amazing video on his YouTube channel.”

Where did the title Glass Factory come from?


Col “There is a sample we used on a song, Mushroom Jim & the Planet of the Funky Apes that was taken from an old UK kids TV program called Jackanory. The sample is from a story called The Glass Factory and the voice is the legendary British actor, Bernard Cribbins. The title just seemed to tie in with the loose concept the album had so we stole it.”

The album covers many musical styles, did you have any ideas on the musical direction if the album as you were writing it?


Stazy “The only style we never mentioned was Psychedelic, but that seems to be what a lot of listeners hear judging by the videos we’ve had made for the tunes and also by the genre of blogs, pages and playlists that support the cause. We’re always trying to move forward with new styles and methods for recording. Luckily we have the luxury of spending time in the studio to play around a lot. We’d get bored if all our songs sounded and felt the same as the next one.”


Darren “Not really, most of the tracks started off from riffs or chord patterns on acoustics, previously it’s all been jams in the practice room. There was an effort to be a bit more musically wanky (you might want to change the adjectives there) – less major chords, avoiding verse, chorus, verse. So we just picked up on things as the songs came together, nothing really thought about in advance. (There was also the mind blowing musical invention from the bass player which transcends all previous bassery, ever)

Col “The only pre planned direction was that we wanted a loose, laid back style on about 4 or 5 songs so the first instrument we recorded for those was an acoustic guitar. Once everything else was added they still seemed to keep the sitting round the campfire vibe we wanted. It was open season on all the other songs and all sorts of things influenced where they ended up. Nick and me travelled to the studio together most days and would listen to different music every time and little things would creep in from that. Stuff like guitar sounds from the likes of Dinosaur Jr and New Order songs that are not too obvious as they’re maybe only one of ten, or more, guitar tracks in the mix.

From: https://tomatrax.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/interview-with-frantic-chant/

Bettie Serveert - Tom Boy

 For over 20 years now, Carol van Dijk and her compatriots in Bettie Serveert have been releasing slightly askew, Velvet Underground (formally) and Neil Young (literally) influenced albums, some of them pretty great, some of them not. My favorite is probably 2003’s Log 22, which features some great psychedelicized jams, but it was their early-to-mid 90s records that made what little splash they ever made. And if that splash hit you, it was probably made by this song, “Tom Boy,” one of the most delightfully low-key anthems of the 1990s. Like most of Bettie Serveert’s songs, “Tom Boy” unfolds at its own pace, pretty much sneaking in and out if its chorus:

You call me a tom boy
And I love it
Because only a tom boy could stand above it
And simply change it.

There is so much going on here that I love, I’m not even sure I can do it justice. What kills me about how the just let the chorus kind of happen is that it allows her to makes “love it” and “above it” seem like an internal rhyme, punctuated by how the “change it” at the end of the chorus then rhymes with the “rearrange it” at the end of the verse which preceeded it. Not to mention what feels like a feminist “fuck you, I will let your insults pass right through me” underdog attitude that goes along perfectly with big guitar chords and quiet interludes that dominate “Tom Boy.”

From: https://medialoper.com/certain-songs-bettie-serveert-tom-boy/

Famous Groupies - One Need Leads

I'm new to this band, which, at least per their webpage, appears to be the work of a Scottish singer/songwriter named Kirkcaldy McKenzie and various friends & family members, performing songs ostensibly written decades ago by McKenzie's grandfather. Hard to say how much of the bio is just tongue-in-cheek, but regardless, the music is pretty damn delightful, and they've instantly become a favorite of mine.
The band name presumably derives from the Paul McCartney & Wings song, and it pretty much gives up the game--their 4 albums, and this one in particular, are pure McCartney homage/pastiche. It's endearing 70s-styled pop, ridiculously tuneful and lighthearted, unpretentious piano and guitar-driven baroque pop, dripping with charm. The songs conjure not just Sir Paul, but other like-minded artists ranging from Emitt Rhodes to Beagle Hat to the Dukes of Stratosphear. Some of the hooks are pulled straight out of the McCartney catalog: opener "One Trick Pony" recalls "Getting Closer," "Bombs Away" cribs from "Mrs. Vanderbilt," "Big Bam Wigwam" borrows the "Helen Wheels" riff, and so on. So, yeah, you can have a lot of fun just playing spot-the-influence; but the album is great fun even if you're less intimately familiar with every Wings deep cut.  From: https://www.jitterywhiteguymusic.com/2022/04/famous-groupies-furry-white-album-2020.html

Belly - Seal My Fate / Super Connected

 Belly - Seal My Fate

 

 Belly - Super Connected

 

Belly’s debut album, Star, released in 1993, was an unqualified crossover success. The Rhode Island-based dream pop band, fronted by Tanya Donelly, who had spent time in both the Breeders and Throwing Muses, broke through in a big way. Belly‘s dreamy alternative rock connected with audiences in the United States and the United Kingdom, driven by the success of the single “Feed the Tree” featured in the coveted MTV Buzz Bin.
Star sold around 800,000 copies in the United States, hitting #2 on the UK albums chart. Belly were nominated for two Grammys–Best New Artist and Best Alternative Music Performance. They were on top of the world, touring with new bassist Gail Greenwood. Expectations were high for the follow-up.
Two years later, Belly released the follow-up, King, and while most critics were kind, it simply didn’t sell as well as Star. By then, alternative radio was dominated by more aggressive guitars, and the singles were largely ignored. In addition, the band had largely dispensed with their debut’s dreamy, gauzy sounds in favor of louder guitars.
However, the more rock-centered King, produced by Glyn Johns, wasn’t heavy enough to get radio play but was probably too electric guitar-centered for many fans drawn in by Star‘s dreamy quality. Reportedly, the group weren’t too surprised that King underperformed. They have shared in interviews since that recording it was not a fun experience.
Thirty years on, King deserves reconsideration. It is an unfairly forgotten, solid follow-up that shouldn’t have been so quickly relegated to the cut-out bin. Its sales of over 350,000 probably don’t sound too much like a disaster for a rising band today. While King is not giving more of the same in terms of songwriting, it is the sound of a road-tested group circumventing expectations a little and still writing several memorable tracks. If listened to without the weight of expectation, this is a solid 1990s alternative rock record with several winning songs. It’s odd to say, but this record might have done better if a different band made it, one not carrying the weight of expectation Belly were laboring under.
Belly moved toward louder guitars when they hit the road to support Star. When original bassist Fred Abong quit just after it was released, Gail Greenwood replaced him just in time for the tour, and her metal past influenced the group to emphasize more electric guitar on stage. That influence certainly carried over into the songs on King.  From: https://www.popmatters.com/belly-king-atr-30 

 

Beausoleil - Austin City Limits 1990

At a time when the word “Cajun” was unknown or disrespected by many Americans, Louisiana native Michael Doucet began to collect and preserve traditional Cajun music. The word “Cajun” (a corruption of “Acadian”) refers to the French settlers of Acadie (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island in Canada) who migrated to southern Louisiana after the Great Expulsion of 1755.
Doucet grew up surrounded by Cajun music. “I don’t think I know a French family that doesn’t have a musician in the family,” he told Sing Out’s Mark Greenberg. His four aunts were singers; one of them was married to a fiddle player who taught the young Doucet traditional songs. He learned French from his grandmother and parents, who still spoke the language.
Music was a part of family life. “Next door to us was accordion player Don Montoucet,” Doucet told Greenberg, “and we’d always go to his garage on Saturdays to hear music.” Radio also influenced Doucet, as did a local television show called Passe Partout that was dedicated to Cajun music. As he grew, Doucet learned to play the trumpet and guitar; years later he rescued his uncle’s fiddle, the instrument he became best known for playing. Doucet’s interest in traditional Cajun music was sparked when he heard “Cajun Woman” by Fairport Convention. He formed a band with few of his friends, and together they played the old songs at local hot spots.
In 1974 a French promoter spotted them during a performance at a local bar/service station and invited them to a folk festival in France. “So we went to France,” Doucet told Greenberg. “Wow! They knew about this music…. It was like speaking to people of our great-grandfathers’ era who were our age. It was the turning point of my life…. I really got to see firsthand the inescapable correlation between old French songs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and our music here.” After a long stay in France, Doucet returned to the United States and, with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, began to collect the traditional music of southern Louisiana.
During this time, Doucet and five others performed as Coteau, a band known as the “Cajun Grateful Dead” for its mix of rock ‘n’ roll and Cajun music. When the group disbanded after about two and a half years, Doucet formed Beausoleil with some of the best Cajun musicians available, including Dewey and Will Balfa, Varise Connor, Canray Fontenot, Bessyl Duhon, and the noted fiddler Dennis McGee. Their name was taken from an Acadian settlement in Nova Scotia whose name meant “good sun.” Their first record was cut and released only in France, but in 1977 their American debut album, The Spirit of Cajun Music, was released by Swallow. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll described the album as “an eclectic mix of blues, ballads, standards, and traditional music.” But “there was no work here at the end of the ‘70s,” Doucet explained to Sing Out’s Greenberg. “There was not one dance hall here in Lafayette.”
Despite the weak demand for Cajun music, Beausoleil continued to play, releasing record after record in the early 1980s, including the albums Parlez Nous a Boire, Louisiana Cajun Music, Zydeco Gris Gris, and Allons a Lafayette. When the Cajun music craze erupted, fueled by soundtracks from The Big Easy and Belizaire the Cajun (both of which included music from Beausoleil), interest in the band’s music increased exponentially.  From: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/beausoleil