Geez, it’s the end of January already? That was fast. And furious — at least in terms of new music. Thankfully, things seem to be slowing down a tad next week. There’s just one massive release on the way: Shania Twain’s Queen Of Me. That’s the last you’ll hear of that around here. I’ve got other fish to fry — like these upcoming releases:
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Your Future Is Your Past
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Anton Newcombe — frontman, songwriter, composer, studio owner, multi-instrumentalist, producer, engineer, father, force of nature — returns with the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s 20th full-length studio album Your Future Is Your Past. After a hugely prolific 2010s that saw the release of eight long-players and one mini-album, Newcombe had been going through a period of writer’s block when one day he picked up his 12-string guitar and The Real (the opening track on previous album Fire Doesn’t Grow On Trees) came out of him. Like the kraken, it was as if he’d summoned it. “All of a sudden, I just heard something,” he says. “And then it just didn’t stop. We tracked a whole song every single day for 70 days in a row.” By the end of it they had two albums ready to go. Joining Newcombe in the studio for The Future Is Your Past were Hakon Adalsteinsson (guitar) and Uri Rennert (drums). “Nobody can stop me, I’m not asking somebody, I’m not making the rounds at Warners, saying ‘please put out my record!’. It’s just for me,” he says. He hopes he can be an inspiration to others. “I would love to see more groups, people playing music in the UK and everywhere else because I really enjoy it. That’s the only reason I need. It’s the only reason to do stuff.” That hits to the core of what makes Newcombe and Brian Jonestown Massacre tick in 2022. He’ll keep jumping in that fire. That’s how he rolls. Savour it.
John Frusciante
.I: / :II.
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “There are two versions of this album,” says John Frusciante. “The CD version is pronounced Two and called : I I . This is the longer version. The vinyl version is pronounced One, and called . I : This version is shorter, but contains one vinyl-only track. The reason the vinyl is shorter is that some of the tracks have sounds that can not be pressed on vinyl. After a year and a half writing and recording rock music, I needed to clear my head. I listened to and made music where things generally happen gradually rather than suddenly. I would set up patches on a Monomachine or Analog Four and listen to them, hearing one sound morph into others, making changes to a patch only after having listened for quite a while, gradually adding elements, and finally manipulating the sounds on the fly. All tracks were recorded live to CD burner, with no overdubs, and executed on one or two machines. While I was almost exclusively listening to artists such as Chris Watson, Peter Rehberg, Bernard Parmegiani, CM Von Hausswolff, Jana Winderen, Oren Ambarchi, Hazard, Bruce Gilbert, Klara Lewis, Ryoji Ikeda and so on, I was also inspired by my mental image of John Lennon’s tape and Mellotron experiments he made at home during his time in The Beatles, as well as events like the first minute of David Bowie’s Station To Station, …And The Gods Made Love by Jimi Hendrix, the synths in the song Mass Production by Iggy Pop, and the general idea of Eno’s initial concept of ambient music.”
The Go! Team
Get Up Sequences Part Two
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Over their six albums, The Go! Team have taken sonic day trips to other lands, musically dipping into other cultures. But now on this, their seventh. They’ve bought a round-the-world ticket. Benin, Japan, France, India, Texas and Detroit were all stops along the way. Wildly different voices from wildly different cultures side by side but all still sounding unmistakably Go! Team. Setting the course for a kaleidoscopic, cable access, channel hop. Picking up from 2021’s Get Up Sequences Part One, Part Two continues the feeling of Technicolour overload. A feeling that there is so much good shit out there that you are grabbing it all at the same time. The record is saying: Look at this. Look at this. When you listen to it I just want the saturation of the world to be turned up. Simultaneously messy and tight, chaotic and coherent both albums have an obsession with the power of a bassline and a backbeat. “For me each successive Go! Team record just gets fucking groovier and for me grooviness is life”, founder Ian Parton says. It’s a journey spanning Cyclone Tracey wig-outs, chroma key sitar psychedelia, Casiotone anthems, spoken word melodrama and kalimba callouts. Brill building melodies lead into musical handbrake turns, four track into panoramic.”
The Men
New York City
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “When everyone left N.Y.C., the sewer opened and we crawled out.” Prolific Brooklyn institution The Men return with their ninth studio album New York City. Arriving following 2020’s Mercy, the new LP marks a return to the more scuzzy and abrasive rock ploughed over their decade and a half spent coursing through the grimy sewers of N.Y.C. Here, nocturnal proto-punk meets a timeless, all-guns-blazing rock ’n’ roll gusto. That the album leans into a more primitive, back-to-basics sound owes largely to the way in which was forged, an earlier version of the record scrapped in favour of four people playing in a room together. “The New York City album was revised, reorganized and shaped until it became clear that things fall into place like the hammer driving the nail or the scythe’s swipe through the tall grass,” they say. The result is a series of cuts played live and recorded to 2″ tape in Travis Harrison’s (Guided By Voices, Built To Spill) Brooklyn studio.
M(h)aol
Attachment Styles
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Irish intersectional feminist five-piece M(h)aol have announced their debut album Attachment Styles. Following the release of their debut EP Gender Studies, the band hit the ground running in 2022. Gaining a reputation as one of the most sought after live bands of the summer, M(h)aol performed at Primavera, Green Man, Latitude and End Of The Road, toured Europe with Gilla Band and Shellac and more. Based between Dublin, London, and Bristol, M(h)aol (pronounced male) are formed of Róisín Nic Ghearailt (she/her), Constance Keane (she/her), Jamie Hyland (she/her), Zoë Greenway (she/her) and Sean Nolan (he/him). Attachment Styles is a record about social connection, queerness and healing. When Róisín was writing the lyrics, she used the theory of attachment styles as an overarching theme which is a theory that looks at the impact our inter-familial relationships and society have on how we relate to one another.”
Smashing Pumpkins
Atum: Act 2
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Smashing Pumpkins’ 12th studio album is a three-act rock opera album titled Atum (Autumn). It will feature 33 tracks and is the sequel to 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and 2000’s Machina/Machine of God. Atum was written and produced by Billy Corgan over the past four years. The album tells an epic interplanetary story set in the not-too-distant future, though the songs themselves respectively stand on their own in the Pumpkins pantheon. This is the final instalment in a concept album trilogy that began with 1995’s Melllon Collie and then continued with 2000’s Machina. The album features three original members of the band — Corgan, James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin — as well as longtime guitarist Jeff Schroeder. Corgan had been developing the idea for the rock opera for years, and the pandemic gave him the time off the road to meticulously complete it in the grandiose way he had intended.”
