TV Priest press their case, The Weather Station sail the high seas, Teenage Fanclub bring it home, Wax Tailor and Mark Lanegan light a candle — and we’re just getting started on your Wednesday Roundup. The only thing that surprises me about today’s events is that anybody is surprised.
ON REPEAT
1 | TV Priest | Press Gang
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “TV Priest will release Uppers, their full-length debut on Feb. 5. Today, they’re sharing the new single and official video for Press Gang, helmed by returning director Joe Wheatley. Press Gang is inspired by Charlie Drinkwater’s grandfather’s life’s work as a photojournalist and war correspondent on Fleet Street from the 1950s to the early 1980s. The song is about the shifting role in the dissemination of information and ideas, and how the prevailing narrative that the “Death of Print Media” has contributed to a “post-truth” world.”
2 | The Weather Station | Atlantic
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Weather Station — the project of Tamara Lindeman — reveals a new single/video for Atlantic, from her forthcoming album, Ignorance, out Feb. 5. Atlantic furthers Ignorance’s sophisticated turn in sound, bursting with urgent percussion, flutters of woodwind and strings, and Lindeman’s cool voice. Says Lindeman: “I feel like I spend half my life working on trying to stay positive. My whole generation does. But if you spend any time at all reading about the climate situation circa now, positivity and lightness are not fully available to you anymore; you have to find new ways to exist and to see, even just to watch the sunset. I tried to make the band just go crazy on this one, and they did. This is one where the music really makes me see the place in my mind; the flute and the guitar chasing each other, wheeling around like birds, the drums cliff like in their straightness; I love the band on this one.”
3 | Teenage Fanclub | Home
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Teenage Fanclub have announced that their tenth studio album Endless Arcade will be released March 5. To mark the occasion the band have shared a video for Home, the album’s 7-minute opening track. Even if we weren’t living through extraordinarily troubling times, there is nothing quite like a Teenage Fanclub album to assuage the mind, body and soul, and to reaffirm that all is not lost in this world. Endless Arcade follows the band’s ninth album Here. The new record is quintessential TFC: melodies are equal parts heartwarming and heart-aching; guitars chime and distort; keyboard lines mesh and spiral; harmony-coated choruses burst out like sun on a stormy day.”
4 | Wax Tailor | Just A Candle (ft. Mark Lanegan)
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Renowned producer Wax Tailor will release his album The Shadow Of Their Suns on Jan. 8. Ahead of the album come the single and music video for Just A Candle (ft. Mark Lanegan). The Shadow Of Their Suns is the producer’s first studio album in five years, treating the fans to an array of darkly elegant “sound features’ accompanied by a new and prestigious cast. Wax Tailor tells us: “The Shadow Of Their Suns is an allegory for the different kind of powers that control our world. I’ve always kept this image in mind of the 99% who live in the shadow of these artificial lights, segregation, politics and mass-media. From a musical point of view, I really wanted to give more space to instrumental arrangements and my own storytelling around this topic. I’m not a lesson-giver but nothing is really neutral, we live in a sick world and music can be food for thought so I’ve tried to work in this direction.”
5 | Valley Maker | No One Is Missing
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Valley Maker (Austin Crane) has announced that his new album When the Day Leaves will be released on Feb. 19. Today he shares a taste of the album by way of single No One Is Missing, which captures personal reflection, and questions one can ask themselves in isolation. Austin says: “I wrote the track as a way of grappling with the partiality and temporality of how we connect with one another, I guess as an attempt to collect and reflect on recent experiences of loss, love, leaving, returning, missing, etc. On that theme, while recent months of social distancing have often felt isolating, I’m continually grateful for how music and the natural world can remind us we’re not alone.”
6 | Maggie Lindemann | Knife Under My Pillow
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “With just over two weeks before the Jan. 22 release of her long-awaited debut EP Paranoia, alt/rock/pop singer Maggie Lindemann has unleashed a video for Knife Under My Pillow. The visuals see Maggie anxiously and carefully searching her house at night, bringing to life the uneasiness described in the song. “I wanted to do some cheesy 2000s scary movie vibe. The walking around the house with the flashlight with a full-on glam look, ugh it’s so good. A mixture between a corny scary movie with a modern twist on a 2000s look. Walking around the house to find nobody in it, but SWEARING you saw shadows. And of course, the performance shot of me just playing in my living room, which is supposed to be more of a dream and not reality. I wanted to do something more simple with just dramatic looks, everyone killed it.”
ALSO ON THE PLAYLIST
7 | Stonegazer | Bring Down The Rain
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Finnish stoner doom unit Stonegazer shared their video for Bring Down The Rain today. The song is taken from their latest album The End Of Our World, issued in the spring of 2020. The band comment: “The song was inspired by the self-destructive and tribal nature of man and contemplates the nihilistic view to accelerate our slow suicide. The footage in the background comes together with the lyrics to portray both the acts of war, the deceit wrought around them and the consequences.” The video was directed, edited and shot by Tuomas Kulju.”
8 | Dreamslain | Shadow Warriors
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Jan. 29 release date for Dreamslain’s Tales Of Knights And Distant Worlds is getting closer, and to raise the anticipation for this mammoth double CD set, the band have unveiled a new video. Shadow Warriors is one of the heaviest, most intensely atmospheric tracks from Tales Of Knights And Distant Worlds, and is sure to be a favourite with headbangers everywhere. This new lyric video features the band in their element; playing together — the sparks flying from each musician as their creativity and passion blends to create their unique sound.”
9 | Beaten To Death | Melankolske Oppstøt
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Norwegian grindcore innovators Beaten to Death have just unleashed a video for a song off their new album Laat Maar, Ik Verhuis Naar Het Bos. Titled Melankolske Oppstøt, this new track is also featured on the EP Laat Maar, Deel Vier: Ik Verhuis Naar Endor, the last of a series of four EPS containing different versions of album’s tracks.”
10 | King Baal | Let’s Murder Together
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Symphonic metal discovery King Baal launch the official video to Let’s Murder Together, from their upcoming album Conjurements, due for release on Jan. 29. “Uniting through blood and complicity symbolizes how deep passion and devotion can be. And this song is all about love. Through the idea of murdering together we want to express love and devotion in its deepest nature.”
11 | The Kompressor Experiment | Club Soda Live Session
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “A few days after the official release of their EP KMPXP, Swiss post-prog rockers The Kompressor Experiment just shared a live session recorded with the Club Soda team. The Kompressor Experiment are a quartet from Sion that offer a blend of instrumental progressive rock, metal, stoner rock and post-rock. To this genre mix, the band add some innovative sounds to push the traditional boundaries of rock music. The musical side of this uncommon project is entwined with a strong visual identity.”
12 | Insect Inside | The First Shining Of New Genus
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Having announced their evil intent with first single Posthumous Grief, Insect Inside now unleash the title track from their forthcoming album The First Shining Of New Genus. This massive slab of venomous, destructive, brutal death metal can be heard now. The album is described by the band as “a symbiosis of several subgenres of brutal death metal! You will hear insane blastbeats, atmosphere, slamming riffs and technical riffs inherent in technical death metal, and of course ultra brutal guttural with old school growling.” It arrives Feb. 19 and is sure to be one of the most brutal albums of 2021.”
13 | The Neverlutionaries | Stumble
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Around the time I created it, I just got out of a really bad relationship, but I missed her terribly. It was one of things where people get used to chaos yet find themselves yearning for it and even worse — getting used to it. Like a bad habit, I wondered if I could ever trust anyone like that again and this song was a testament to that,” explains Christopher Harold Wells, mastermind of Nashville’s Neverlutionaries, who share the track Stumble today. It’s the second single from The Neverlutionaries’ debut self-titled LP, set for release Feb. 12. The layered dreamy track, this time presented with R&B and jazz inflections, starts with solemn piano chords and builds with swirling-delayed guitar effects around Wells’ impassioned vocals.”
14 | Rachika Nayar | The Trembling of Glass
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Brooklynbased ambient-electronic composer Rachika Nayar (formerly Rachika S.) announced her debut album, Our Hands Against The Dusk, and shared the deeply moving single The Trembling of Glass. Nayar explains: “I arranged nearly the entire song from processing one guitar progression into a bunch of different sounds — which then reveals itself in its raw form at the end of the piece from beneath the fog of all those textural mirrors. For myself, listening to it brings to mind: Nostalgia. Memory. Pulling back the veil, and the painful clarity of seeing yourself anew.”
15 | Chris Wenner | We Need So Much Love
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “After the successful release of his debut album, German songwriter Chris Wenner releases the first single in a series of new songs for a second album. We Need So Much Love deals with the basic human need for love and how it so often ends in heartbreak. The song features the young singer-songwriter Greta Lovisa on backing vocals.”
16 | Bill Callahan & Bonnie “Prince” Billy | Miracles (feat. Ty Segall)
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Bill C and B’P’B join hands with Ty Segall and Johnnie Frierson to turn the party up to 11, with a synth and rhythm box rebuild of Frierson’s late-period Memphis outsider-gospel, summoning forth a 7″ single with two views on one sweet soul tune. Frierson’s heavenly original, dating from a DIY cassette release in the early ’90s is warm, emphatic and nakedly effervescent. The flip, torn from today’s internet headlines, features Ty’s low-down nasty funk take, the layers and bobbing beats of which make Bill and Bonny come fervently alive before the mic. Together, they make believers of us all.”
17 | My Funeral | Overkill
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Helsinki crossover thrash band My Funeral released their own version of Motörhead’s iconic song Overkill, dedicated to the memory of Lemmy Kilmister. The track was produced by Ville Holmström at Studio Muuntamo. ”We decided to record our own version with My Funeral’s twist in memory of Lemmy and Motörhead. Most of the song was recorded live in an attempt to achieve a dangerous rock’n’roll overall feel. This is our hommage. We hope that our version will reach the ears of Eddie, Philthy and Lemmy, wherever they may be. LIVE FAST AND DIE OLD!”
