Laura Jean Announces Amateurs
We’ve gone about five years since hearing from Australia’s Laura Jean, but there’s news of a new LP titled Amateurs, and with it, comes this huge song that I just want on repeat throughout the rest of the day. This new single is just absolutely brilliant, even getting a little help from Aldous Harding and Marlon Williams on backing vocals. For starters, the guitars on this song are so rad; you get a darker guitar dueling with this strummed jangle, fitting them perfectly like a tasty PB&J. Still, the vocal performance throughout is just spot on; there are moments when the vocal texturing is so sublime that you might not spin anything else for the rest of the day. Amateurs will be out via Chapter Music in November!
Austin label 
Year-end lists (or “best-of”s as most people term them) are extremely hard for me to compile. I listen to (and buy) a lot of music from day-to-day & despite my best efforts truly cannot keep up with the sheer magnitude of quality recordings coming out each year – and 2019 was a pretty fucking great year for music. So here’s my best shot at compiling a list of my “10 Most-Listened-To” albums from 2019 (plus five honorable mentions). They’re in alphabetical order to avoid any sort of ranking, because honestly ranking something as “best” or assigning a numerical rating seems antiquated & frankly diminishes great art, IMHO. (Trouble In Mind Records releases are excluded, for conflict of interest, but it’s safe to say that anything we’d be investing thousands of dollars releasing is – in our opinion – worth your time). Hope you enjoy & possibly discover something new. Support independent artists & record labels!
This may be yesterday’s news, but the song is too perfect not to share.