Hypnos 69 - An Aerial Architect

How could I have missed out on a band from my own country that lists Anekdoten and Motorpsycho amongst their favorite current bands? With a sound that brings the spirit of early Floyd, Sabbath and Crimson back to life, this album has simply been written just for me. I don't know if there's a recipe to make the glory of the early 70s come alive again, but getting the sound right is sure one of the main ingredients. And that is exactly what Hypnos 69 achieved here. Just like Diagonal and Astra, the band combines psych-progressive songwriting with a vintage 70s sound that is natural, dynamic, rocking and that respects the true sound of all instruments. No studio tricks, no proTools cut-and paste, no synthetics, no plastic, no fake. The list of instruments is impressive: an array of drum and percussion, bass, guitars, effects, organs, mellotron, saxophone, Hammond,... Luckily not all at once but spread nicely over the plus 72 minute album length.
Another secret to make 'retro' work is to avoid being the umpteenth Genesis or Yes clone. A better approach is to combine different styles into a new mix that - even if derivative - still has a personality of its own. Some of the influences on Legacy are 1970-era Crimson, early 70s hard rock, jazz-rock, Ozzy-vocals, some Floyd, Yes and even some BJH alike vocal harmonies. Hypnos 69 have a history as a stoner band and there are still traces of that in the sound, but the songwriting has become fully Prog, offering long composed suites with spacey instrumental breaks and concise improvisations. It is fun spotting the occasional musical quotes from other bands, from King Crimson for instance (there's an echo of Indoor Games on An Aerial Architect) and from Yes (melodies from The Fish at 3.18 into The Empty Hourglass). My symphonic knowledge is limited to the mainstream bands so there may be more.  From: https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=29944

K.D. Lang - So It Shall Be

Back in 1992, singer k.d. lang released a record unlike any other. Ingénue slithered against the popular music grain with songs that drew slow, deep breaths and sighed seductively. It had an alluringly divergent sound that landed somewhere in a blurry nexus of pop, country and global folk, with accordions, clarinets and Eastern European flourishes. And lang's monumental voice, both powerful and restrained, was simply unforgettable as she sang languorous songs of love and desire.
Ingénue became a monstrous, multi-platinum hit for lang, but it was also a milestone in the '90s LGBT rights movement. Against her label's wishes, lang came out in a cover story for The Advocate three months after the album was released. Her decision helped spark a shift in the national conversation about what it meant to be gay and made Ingénue one of the first in a series of important cultural moments that pushed LGBT issues into the mainstream conversation. (Others from that period included the film Philadelphia and the Broadway play Angels In America and, later in the same decade, the television sitcom Will And Grace).
To celebrate Ingénue's 25th anniversary, Nonesuch Records is releasing a remastered version of the album on July 14, along with some previously unreleased live recordings. Last year lang recorded an album with Neko Case and Laura Veirs called case/lang/veirs. They toured together and became friends. So we asked Laura Veirs to talk with k.d. lang about Ingénue and how the album still resonates today.

k.d. lang on writing and recording an album with a sound that wasn't particularly popular at the time:

"When Ben Mink and I made Ingénue, we were consciously aware of the fact that no one was making this kind of Eastern-European dirge. ... The tempo of the record was nerve-wracking. I thought that I would just get killed for being so slow. And I did. There was a lot of criticism on the record when it first came out. But I purposely wanted to sing unornamented because ornamentation was really starting to take off in pop music. I feel like truth is centered ... it's still and it's very plain. So I really consciously went against the grain with this record. And [playing it live] we have to sit down and go, 'OK, this has to be played with absolute restraint and precision,' almost like classical music because so much about Ingénue I think is this space."

On the challenges of writing intimate and personal lyrics:

"When I worked with Ben Mink or when I work with most collaborators, we come up with the music first, which is very easy. But then that puts me as a lyricist in a very difficult spot because then I had to write lyrics that conveyed my emotion but also fit into the music and sang well, which is a lot of parameters for writing lyrics. And the lyrics were a struggle. It took me six or seven months to get the lyrics for this."

On not liking or understanding "Constant Craving," the album's final track and biggest hit, until just recently:

"I felt like it was incongruent to the rest of the record. And it's funny because yesterday in rehearsals of Ingénue, for the first time, I felt what the song's purpose was and why we put it on as the last song on the record. It's an acquiescence. It's a summation of human desire. It's like yes, OK, we all are heartbroken. We're all nervous. We're all vulnerable. We're all hopeful, but at the end of the day, constant craving has always been. And it really, emotionally, just surfaced for me, the purpose of that song. But we're doing the record in sequence on tour in Australia next week, so to have 'Constant Craving' come to the end of this very insular, quiet performance is fascinating."

From: https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2017/07/13/536522399/k-d-lang-reflects-on-25-years-of-ing-nue

Capillary Action - Gambit

Capillary Action's debut album, Fragments, was an instrumental guitar showcase brimming with virtuosity and violent rhythmic shifts. I think I could be forgiven for expecting more of the same from So Embarrassing, but holy confounded expectations, is this ever a different album from its predecessor. Are there still wicked rhythmic turns, hints of jazz, and mind-bending guitar runs? Sure, but this time they're all subordinated to songs-- the first thing you hear on this album is guitarist Jonathan Pfeffer's voice, singing over a breakneck but fairly straightforward rock beat.
Pfeffer is now clearly playing with the tension between straight-ahead indie rock and spastic, mathy composition. Opener "Gambit" has those basic verses, but breaks them up with ragged odd-metered riffs, alternating in a way that makes each new 4/4 verse sound even more propulsive. A similar approach guides the album's best song, "Elevator Fuck". The band uses a string synth and what I think is a real trombone to inject sweetly melodic but rhythmically strange phrases between verse lines that seem as though they should disrupt the flow of the song but don't.
Whereas the band's first album reserved the middle for its most introspective moments, this one gives us the aggressive experiment "Badlands", which features the sounds of Pfeffer's breathing cut up and made into a brutal rhythm. It's one of several tracks to use extreme dynamic range to great effect. "Pocket Protection Is Essential", for instance, sets quietly melodic sections against the heaviest, loudest bits on the album-- it's genuinely startling the first time the shouted vocals and pounding drums crash in, and not much less startling each time after that. Closer "Self-Released" uses all these techniques to create a collage of a song that has the pacing of a brawl, with quiet moments to catch your breath followed by furious passages of pounding rhythm and dissonant swells.
The album as a whole extends the collage feel, with each track flowing easily into the next to make a kind of suite. The songs aren't inseparable from each other, though; quite a few of them work well on their own, and this owes much to the band's overall stylistic re-orientation. Pfeffer's even, baritone vocals add a strong melodic center for the listener and put the instrumental freakouts in context. So Embarrassing is a bold change in direction for Capillary Action, but one that pays off as well as one could hope.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11266-so-embarrassing/

The Bombay Royale - Live Music at RN 2014 / Millennium Stage 2014

 The Bombay Royale - Live Music at RN 2014

 

 The Bombay Royale - Millennium Stage 2014 - Part 1

 

 The Bombay Royale - Millennium Stage 2014 - Part 2

 

The Bombay Royale has been impressing festival goers in Europe over the summer with their extravagant show. After a triumphant set at Glastonbury last month, Stage 2 at the 49th Cambridge Folk Festival became home for the Spaghetti-Bollywood disco dancers. I sat down with three members of the Australian 11-piece to find out their past, present, and future. So, without further ado: Under the costumes with Parvyn Kaur Singh, Andy Williamson, and Shourov Bhattacharya.

Music Review Database: So first I want to know who came up with the name The Bombay Royale?

Andy: I did.

MRD: What does it represent?

Andy: I was playing around with names and initially I was going to call it The Mumbai Royale or something, but pretty quickly actually found out half of India still calls it Bombay. But more than that, it was actually that music we were kind of inspired by and the music we were playing was all definitely from Bombay. It was from the 70s and 60s and that period. The royale part, perhaps it was from Casino Royale, well every second street in India has a royale, between all of that it just seemed like a, you know.

MRD: We think you sound like Kill Bill meets The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, is that a good representation of your music?

Andy: Tarantino is awesome, but he's fairly derivative I guess, he's taking those styles and all those old films and kind of having a play with them, which is sort of what we're doing as well. If you listen to the old Bollywood films, watch and listen to old stuff from India in the 60s and 70s, there’s that sound that he really loved, Ennio Morricone, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and they dug all that kind of stuff but then they also fused it with their own folk music and classical music and came out with something different, so it’s definitely not a style we've made up, dreamt up all by ourselves.

MRD: Is Ennio Morricone one of your musical influences?

Andy: Yes, definitely yeah, but it was also the influence that he had on Indian cinema too. Like the Indian film writers in the 60s and 70s. They loved surf guitar and they loved those kind of Sergio Leone type westerns. You watch half the movies, those films, half of them have cowboy type characters, gunfights on trains and galloping horses all that kind of stuff.

Shourov: Gunfights on trains are very common, it's a real staple. There’s a bunch of influences we have, that’s one of them. The directors themselves in India that time are household names. People like R.D. Burman, everyone in India knows those musical directors because they created so much great music, and so the songs and the sounds we started with was from those guys, that was a starting point, so there an inspiration too.

MRD: Has blending rock and Bollywood been hard? You have an 11-piece band, has it been hard merging it all together as one sound?

Andy: The hard thing was to make it that small. Taking something like a film score, it was not typically music that was ever performed live. It was done by studio orchestras, so they have string sections and brass sections. The hardest job for me originally when I put the band together was trying to figure out how I could even do half the justice to that sound.

MRD: Do you get a better reception in Australia or in Europe? Is this your first European tour?

Shourov: Yeah it is.

Andy: We've had a really good reception here; we've had a really good reception in Australia too. I think we’ve got novelty value on our side here a bit more. The same as you would if the same came back in the other direction, that thing where it's not from home.

Andy: It's probably been quicker [in Europe] because we’ve came straight into good festivals and all that kind of thing, whereas at  home we've had to work from the ground up doing clubs and building up an audience, so it's a different relationship you have. We have a lot more loyal fans [in Australia] that come to lots of gigs that are really solid, whereas here you just suddenly get the festival line-up and the day before you’ve played half the people here wouldn’t have known who you were and then hopefully you’ve hit them and you win people over. They might not get to see us play for another year or two, whereas our fans back home would come and see us a few times a year in Melbourne.

MRD: So what was it like playing Glastonbury?

Shourov: It was pretty epic yeah, it was huge. It was one of the biggest crowds we’ve played.

MRD: What's your biggest crowd?

Parvyn: We played at a show called White Night Melbourne, and I think there was about 30, 40 thousand people that time.

Shourov: It was a big stage in the middle of the city.

Parvyn: Yeah, on the streets of the steps of Flinders Street Station, which is the main train station in Melbourne. And then we have Federation Square and the Yarra river, so that whole area.

Shourov: So there was just a river of people up all the streets. If you look on our Facebook page about three months ago, you’ll find this pretty amazing photograph of the stage and the crowd; that was a buzz.

MRD: What are your plans for the future?

Shourov: World domination?

Andy: Private island.

Shourov: Private island yeah, or at least a private jet.

Parvyn: Yeah, the skipper wants a yacht.

MRD: Private island and a yacht would go well together yeah.

Shourov: We've got another album in the works, we're always writing and yeah, excited about that.

From: https://www.discoveryrecords.co.uk/2013/07/interview-bombay-royale.html

 

 

Galley Beggar - Moon & Tide

“We’ve always been compared to folk rock bands, but we haven’t always fitted into the genre exactly,” says Galley Beggar vocalist Maria O’Donnell. “We’ve gone to folk festivals, but because we’re electric we don’t fit in there. People like to put us in boxes, and I suppose folk rock is the closest thing. We’re quite happy being different!”
To reduce Galley Beggar’s allure down to a simple matter of folk rock revivalism would be foolish. With a sound that incorporates all manner of unexpected elements while always celebrating the mischievous spirit of folk music across the centuries, these Kentish chameleons have been steadily earning a formidable reputation since forming back in 2009. Over the course of three acclaimed albums – Reformation House (2010), Galley Beggar (2012) and Silence & Tears (2014), the band’s first for Rise Above Records – Galley Beggar have pulled off the neat trick of simultaneously honouring and upgrading the psychedelic folk rock template, both reveling in the simple magic of acoustic instrumentation and joyfully harnessing the lysergic power of the electric too. And now they are poised to release their fourth and finest album, Heathen Hymns. A dizzying blend of the traditional and the untried, it’s a record full of absorbing musical stories that showcase a newfound lust for experimentation.
“Silence & Tears was quite a laid back and chilled out album for the most part, and although it wasn’t deliberate, this album just feels a little bit heavier and more proggy,” Maria explains. “It’s still got some acoustic tracks on there, of course. There’s at least one song with just a guitar, a sitar and a cello! But overall it just feels a lot darker than the previous album and more adventurous, too. When we wrote Silence & Tears, and it was the first album we’d done with a label, and we worked with [producer] Liam Watson and he taught us a new way of thinking about and looking at things, about giving things space and trying different ideas. When we were writing Heathen Hymns, we just naturally wanted to try new things.”
For all its many detours down psychedelic rabbit warrens and shadowy, fog-shrouded footpaths, Heathen Hymns is still an album with melody and humanity at its core. Fresh originals like the hypnotic Four Birds and the woozy raga rock of Moon & Tide wield an insidious charisma, but it’s the way Galley Beggar’s collective ingenuity collides with the sacrosanct likes of traditional standards Let No Man Steal Your Thyme [here featuring a guest vocal from Celia Drummond of UK acid folk legends Trees] and The Girl I Left Behind Me that confirms this album as both an unequivocal triumph for creativity and a platinum-plated treasure trove for aficionados everywhere.  From: https://riseaboverecords.com/artists/riseaboveartists/galley-beggar/

 

Tyrannosaurus Rex - Elemental Child

Tyrannosaurus Rex's fourth album, A Beard of Stars, was the turning point where Marc Bolan began evolving from an unrepentant hippie into the full-on swaggering rock star he would be within a couple of years, though for those not familiar with his previous work, it still sounds like the work of a man with his mind plugged into the age of lysergic enchantment. "A Daye Laye," "Pavilions of Sun," and the title tune sure sound like the writings of an agreeably addled flower child, and Bolan's vocals are playfully mannered in a manner that suits his loopy poetry. However, after shunning the corrupting influences of electric guitars on Tyrannosaurus Rex's early recordings, A Beard of Stars finds Bolan plugging in as he turns on, and he sounds like he's clearly enjoying it; the wah-wah solo that closes "Pavilions of Sun" demonstrates how just a little electricity gave this music a new lease on life, as do the guitar and bass overdubs on "Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart," and the lo-fi raunch that dominates "Elemental Child" was the first manifestation of the amped-up proto-boogie that defined Electric Warrior and The Slider. A Beard of Stars was also the first Tyrannosaurus Rex album after Mickey Finn took over as percussionist from Steve Peregrine-Took, and his more straightforward approach (as well as his occasional basslines) gave this music a far more solid foundation than Peregrine-Took's expressive but frequently unpredictable rhythms, further setting the stage for the group's Grand Transformation. A Beard of Stars holds on to the charm of Tyrannosaurus Rex's early work while letting Bolan's natural charisma and rock moves finally take hold, and it's a unique and very pleasing entry in their catalog.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/a-beard-of-stars-mw0000471037#review 

Dust Moth - Lift

It wouldn’t feel quite right to call Dust Moth’s new full length, Scale, heavy. Heaviness often implies weight, or a sense of the music bearing down on its listener. There’s an emphasis on the music being tactile, physical and molded into a solid object. You can even see it in the names of genres: rock, metal, sludge, etc. Scale, as loud and aggressive as it occasionally is, doesn’t really fit that description. Instead, it feels like an incredibly dense gas, impossible to hold, but heavy enough to crush their air out of your lungs nonetheless.
Much like guitarist Ryan Frederiksen’s previous band, These Arms Are Snakes, listening to Dust Moth can evoke the sight of a never-ending guitar pedalboard. Frederiksen, bassist Steve Becker, and keyboardist Irene Barber all disguise their instruments behind a fog of delay, reverb, and phasers. Instead of muddling up their sound, this approach only gives them more flexibility. Melodies can come from anywhere at anytime in any form. The quivering synth that leads the outro of “A Veil In Between” feels just as natural for the band as the mournful clean guitars at the start of “Night Wave.”
Of course, Dust Moth can get right and heavy when they want to (“Lift” is the banger of the bunch) but their real strength is how even those more physical moments still work in service to Barber’s vocals. Imagine a less phoned-in Chino Moreno on the last few Deftones records and you’ll have a rough idea of how Barber interacts with the rest of the band. Barber feels simultaneously part of the smoke and mirrors surrounding her and like a lantern guiding the listener through to the other side.  From: https://www.invisibleoranges.com/dust-moth-scale-album-premier/