Teke::Teke spy on you, Deniz Tek is thirsty, Imaginary People strike out on their own, Osees levitate again, Turner Cody will drink to that — and your Wednesday just got a whole lot better, thanks to the latest Midweek Roundup. First round’s on me:
1 | Teke::Teke | Yoru Ni
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Seven-piece Japanese psych-punk band Teke::Teke have returned today with an otherworldly video for newest single Yoru Ni. Surf-punk guitars fuse with traditional Japanese shamisen and shinobue as the video transports you into their version of a psychedelic old-school spy flick. It’s off their debut album Shirushi, (out May 7 named after the Japanese practice of kintsugi — the art of mending broken pottery by fusing the pieces back together with seams of gold, silver or platinum lacquer. The album glues together these pieces of classic Japanese balladry, surf rock, psychedelia, and more into sounds that wouldn’t be out of place in a Tarantino movie. “Yoru Ni (At Night) was literally written in the middle of the night,” guitarist Serge Nakauchi-Pelletier explains. ‘’I woke up suddenly and had this melody in my head, as if it had come to me from another world. It really felt like I was following some kind of spirit or ghost, it was taking my hand and wanted to take me somewhere.”
2 | Deniz Tek | Run Out Of Water
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Garage-rock legend and Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek will reissue his groundbreaking 1992 solo debut Take It To The Vertical on March 19. Recorded at historic SugarHill Studios in Houston, the album features Radio Birdman’s Chris Masuak on guitar and keyboards, and The Stooges’ Scott Asheton on drums. Electrifying opener Run Out of Water is now available for the first time. The track is accompanied by the original 1992 video, taken from the Australian TV show Rage.”
3 | Imaginary People | Renegade
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “After beginning the campaign for their third full-length album in 2020, Imaginary People had to hit the pause button due to the pandemic. Now the band are starting back up with singles from their new album Alibi — and today they share Renegade, the latest lift from the forthcoming release. The video was directed by frontman Dylan Von Wagner, who says, “After spending two nights in jail for trespassing in an empty warehouse we found the ‘right’ one and performed an exorcism! Thank you and please just listen.”
4 | Osees | Snickersnee
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “John Dwyer and Osees’ new live album Levitation Sessions II will be available on April 23. The video of the performance premieres on April 10, but you can get a sneak peek with this performance of Snickersnee.”
5 | Turner Cody & The Soldiers Of Love | Boozing and Losing
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Based in St. Louis, Turner Cody & The Soldiers of Love have a new video for their song Boozing and Losing, from the album Friends in High Places, coming June 4. Friends in High Places is as much a country-folk record as it is an ode to French indie-pop chanson, by way of Serge Gainsbourg. It’s this pull — a friendly tension between seemingly disparate musical traditions across borders — that makes Friends in High Places so alluring, refreshingly modern, and even a touch surprising. It’s “continental country” at its finest, with Cody’s masterful and cinematic songwriting as the backbone.”
6 | Vitriol | The Parting Of A Neck
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Portland death metal band Vitriol are premiering their live video for The Parting of a Neck, from the band’s debut album To Bathe From The Throat of Cowardice. States Vitriol frontman Kyle Rasmussen: “Being this far along in a world without live music, we’re feeling especially grateful that Dylan (producer) did such a beautiful job immortalizing this performance from our last tour. The Parting Of A Neck has always been a special song for us and has since grown only more significant. The song debuted as a couch-bound playthrough and seeing it get the live treatment at this point feels like the perfect way to punctuate a long period of striving.”
7 | Thunder Horse | Chosen One
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “San Antonio doom-laden heavy metal purveyors Thunder Horse are set to release their album Chosen One this Friday, and today they unleash the video for Chosen One. Slow, low and brutally truthful, the sound of Thunder Horse doesn’t quite fit into one box, but it is built thick with classic doom, heavy blues and guitar-driven rock’n’roll, while the well thought-out addition of organs, talk box or acoustic guitars comes to cap off their savory, heavy songwriting. Close your eyes and imagine the brooding sounds of early Sabbath, the massive wall of guitars made famous by bands like Deep Purple and Mountain, on a sonically mesmerizing Pink Floyd trip, and you will have a taste of the experience that Thunder Horse brings.”
8 | Long Range Hustle | Comeback Kid
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Long Range Hustle are not afraid of a long-distance relationship. In the summer of 2020, the Toronto indie-rock quintet were testing bandwidth and upload speed while proclaiming ‘full steam ahead’ on making their followup to 2018’s Town. The band headed to The Bathouse Studio outside Kingston, with veteran Tony Doogan cyber-producing the album from his home base in Scotland. Today, they share the video for Comeback Kid. “This new music video shows us that as long as your motivations are external, as long as you’re fighting for the audience in the shadows and not for yourself, you will always get beat down. It is only when external gaze is finally gone that you have a real shot at winning the fight.”
9 | Xenia Rubinos | Did My Best
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “New York City artist and singer Xenia Rubinos shared the cinematic new track Did My Best today. Directed by filmmaker and photographer Mario Rubén Carrión, the video features Rubinos as a woman at a New Year’s Eve party who clearly doesn’t want to be there and is out of touch with everyone celebrating around her. “I felt that making this video was my own healing ritual,” Rubinos said. “It’s my wish that this song can be a resting place for somebody’s feelings, that they can feel themselves inside of it and wrap themselves up in it when they need to.”
10 | Vision Video | Comfort In The Grave
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Georgia quartet Vision Video released their latest single Comfort in the Grave. Taken from the band’s upcoming debut album Inked In Red (out April 16), the song lays in the dirt somewhere between teenage angst, ‘80s Italian horror films and murderous, gut wrenching loss of love. Keyboardist Emily Fredock — who handles lead vocals on this one — once met a very peculiar guy at a bar… and after some deliberation and drunken antics, she and some friends ended up consensually, temporarily burying him in her backyard. It became a running joke with a couple of her friends, who said she should write a song about it. “Once I started writing about it, it kind of evolved into this concept of me putting the relationship I had just gotten out of, to rest. Losing someone so close to me in that way felt kind of like a death and finding closure through the realization it was what was best for me was the only way to make it feel less tragic.”
11 | Sarah Neufeld | With Love And Blindness
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “With Love And Blindness, the second single off Sarah Neufeld’s upcoming album Detritus, premiered today. The accompanying video was shot by director Jason Last while he and Neufeld attended a residency on Corsica during summer 2019. Neufeld elaborates, “I found that the pulse of the landscape resonated with the essence of the music, especially With Love and Blindness; a sense of rawness, of sensuality, of a strange gravity intensified by the hypnotic summer heat and the general otherworldliness of the place.”
12 | Sara Watkins | Under The Pepper Tree
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Sara Watkins of the Grammy-winning groups Nickel Creek and I’m With Her, as well as The Watkins Family Hour, will release Under the Pepper Tree on March 26. The 15-song set was produced by Tyler Chester and is the followup to her critically acclaimed 2016 solo album Young In All The Wrong Ways. Today she shares the animated video for her original song Night Singing.”
13 | All My Faith Lost | The Inconvenience Of Spirits
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Italian neoclassical darkwave/ethereal neofolk quartet All My Faith Lost just presented their first record in 11 years with the immersive Untitled. The beautiful, sprawling album saw release yesterday, and in conjunction with its unveiling, a video for The Inconvenience Of Spirits is now playing. The 11 songs on Untitled enclose all the distinguishing traits of the band’s previous works, distilled through several important events that occurred in the member’s lives and the additional influences brought in by new guitarist/bassist Angelo Roccagli, who joins Viola Roccagli (vocals, piano, synths, flute), Federico Salvador (vocals, guitars, synths) and Fabio Polo (violins).”
14 | Treephones | A Map
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “A Map is the second single from the upcoming Treephones — the musical moniker of Stephen Trothen — album Pink Objects (out May 7). The song tells the story of a couple taking a road trip with a number of unexpected events interfering — specifically some rain and a fox that appears in the middle of the road during the return drive. In a larger sense, A Map is about the desire to plan and the commonplace nature of the unexpected. “I was thinking of the map as an object that presents and promises a sense of order and organization that is fixed,” says Trothen, “and how un-mappable items almost always introduce slight detours.”
15 | The Silk War | Blue Hour
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Emerging New York City female-fronted rock band The Silk War have released their new single Blue Hour and announced their independent debut album Come Evening will be out May 14. Blue Hour is about staying up all night, often on a bender, and immersing in debauchery, whether alone or around others. “Our new single Blue Hour … refers to the 10-minute moment of twilight between night and day (normally only seen for nefarious reasons), details the burden of waiting. In a time of waiting that is the pandemic, we are all waiting for things to go away, to come back, to find our true selves again.”
