This is fine.
Both RayRay and myself were out on the road with our families last week, so we weren’t able to make it out to catch Death from Above 1979 when they hit up Empire Control Room last Friday with Archer Oh. Luckily our friend and photographer Casey Chumbley was able to shoot some photos on our behalf. You can see his shots of both bands below, and if you love his work (we do!) then check out more stuff from Casey HERE.
With a little bit of a sleepy start to the morning, I felt like we should ramp it up a little bit, thus here we are with a fresh tune from Melbourne’s Dragnet. They waste no time wiggling in with jagged punk stabs cutting right through the speakers, little key notes adding in some flare throughout for just the faintest sprinkle of hooks. There’s an undeniable tenacity in what they’re creating, and when the line of “I see red, red, red” reminds me of the Hives in its bravado and simultaneous bite. Spoilsport Records will drop Dragnet Reigns on August 15th, so be ready for your ears to bleed.
Robert Sawrey’s songwriting project Hadnot Creek caught our ear last year when Birds was released in late Summer. Less than a year later, and there’s another installment titled Leaving, which we’d like to point you towards this Friday morning. You’ll get a little bit of traditional alt-country sounds on the LP, though if you listen to the opener below you’ll hear a bit of an edge coming through. Songs like “Witness” give you a slightly different take, diving more into a kind of renegade country edge that would make someone such as Kris Kristoferson proud. It’s a little country, rock n’ roll splashed all over, giving you enough variance to make the whole of the listen exciting.
Something special is in the waters of the Hague today, as Swimming Pool share this stark expanse of quieted pop. It’s perhaps one of the more careful pieces you’ll hear today, using a slight strum to invoke these deep tones whilst building brush strokes of strings to layer faintly atop. Each vocal note seems carefully placed, wary of stepping on the toes of the musical arrangement. The artists occasionally let their voices overlap one another, continuing their textural build that will have you thirsting for more. Look for their Line Cuts EP to make it your way real soon.
If you missed listening to Excess, the 2022 LP from Automatic, you should go give it a few spins, as it’ll get you prepared for the exciting news that the LA outfit has a new record on its way. The title track from their forthcoming Is It Now LP just recently dropped, and already there’s tons of attention growing around the trio. This single emphasizes the band’s focus on the rhythm section, which clearly drives the hook on this song; the punctuation mark comes from the ways the vocals get delivered in and out of the locked hooks in the bass line, begging you to bob and weave around your own room. It doesn’t hurt that there’s a nice wash of synthetic atmospherics sliding across the tune either. Is It Now will drop this Fall via Stones Throw.
The rules of this site are that you cannot run consecutive posts from great labels like Slumberland/Skep Wax, who also released the Lighthearted tune we ran twenty minutes ago. So, now that I slid in that Glassio track, here’s a jam from the new Jeanines…a band that should really be the biggest in the world, just on songwriting alone. In this track, the bass line does the dirty work, giving the track this steady groove so that the guitars can jangle and cut up behind. Alicia Jeanine’s vocal performance, as expected, is sparkling, stretching itself to higher notes when called upon, delivering the signature supply of the group’s sound. How Long Can It Last is part of the double punch from the aforementioned labels, dropping next Friday!
Feeling very light at the moment, so totally indulging in the pop side of things as I crank up this Glassio track. There’s this surfy wash on the track that opens from the beginning, but it gets quickly pulled back to turn on a funky bounce that’s built for loud volumes and long drives. Sam’s vocals have this dreamy tone that fits perfectly into the nuanced touches that work behind the scenes of the single. You’ll also get this brilliant little fade out moment around the 2:35 mark, as the backing female vocalist gets to go front and center and close out the track in style.
If you didn’t order a copy of the new Lightheaded LP that drops next Friday, you might want to get on that right now. The group are very much a modern pop act, but if you listen to their latest single, “The Garden,” you get the feeling that their sound is rooted in the history of the underground. There are some girl-group style harmonies, but also this sort of underlying psychedelia that offers up enough edge to make their sound more than mere homage. Listen to the way they set you up in the first 20 seconds before switching into a bit of swing; you’ll want to grab Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming from Slumberland/Skep Wax now!
There is something refreshing in the approach that Wombo take to songwriting, at least if we’re to believe the narrative. Their current single, for instance, came about as a recording error, leaving the group with this haunting little march that they fine tuned into this structural masterpiece. Rather than have one focal point, the song seems intertwined with both its mood, themes and title…with Sydney commenting on how things can get murky in relationships, so you find yourself slogging through, weighed down by history, much like one would do if they were stuck in a bog. It’s refined and orchestrated perfectly, tethered to the band’s trademark craft; this continues to weave mystery and promise into Danger in Fives, out August 8th via Fire Talk.
I cannot think of a single release in the Felte Records catalog that I dislike, and now they’ve added Pot Pot to the mix, signing on the band to put out their Warsaw 480km LP. This is a song where patience is absolutely key, though you’ll find it easy with the motorik drum work entrancing you from the start, soon joined by a ringing guitar that does the same. The vocals are emphatically delivered in a spoken manner, each line delivered with power to set the lyrical meaning in stone. Mark Waldron-Hyden remarked that the song was a reflection on finding solace after a long road of darkness, reflected in the line of “how/can we get there/canwe get there.” If you dig it, it drops on September 19th!
