Sparks serve up a latte, The Dirty Nil make a passion play, Arlo Parks fires up her machine, Joe Perry returns to Sweetzerland, Live Skull start the party and more — these are your plays of the week:
The Barnestormers
The Barnestormers
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “What you have right here is rockabilly royalty. They’re global all-stars who swing like a gate. They make the finest finger-poppin’ grooves to shake your local juke joint since the glory days of fenders and fins. Hold tight, kiddo. Flip your lid for each of them now …. pounding the ivories is UK music legend Jools Holland. In the red corner, on sticks, skins and steel, from the City of Angels via Brooklyn, it’s the signature Stray Cats backbeat of Slim Jim Phantom. In the blue corner, from Melbourne, slinging his hollow-body Gretsch low and drawing quickly — Chris Cheney from the Living End. Who’s the ringmaster for all this? Studio daddy-o Kevin “Caveman” Shirley on the flying faders. And last but definitely not least, wearing the championship belt of 20 number one albums, on vocals, the storming heart and soul of Australian rock ’n’ roll: Jimmy Barnes. It’s time for The Barnestormers.”
The Bevis Frond
Long Stuff
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Long Stuff was originally issued in 2002 as a CD-only limited edition of 110 copies for members of The Bevis Frond Online Community. It comprised a select batch of lengthy, previously unissued tracks. Some of these were home demos featuring just Frond frontman Nick Saloman on all instruments and vocals. There was also an unused track recorded for the 1995 album Superseeder featuring Ade Shaw on bass and Andy Ward on drums. Since then, The Long Stuff has never been re-issued in any format. Due to certain circumstances, one of the original tracks could not be used, so that has been replaced by a different unheard demo called Here’s A Little Love Song. Also, we have added three further unissued tracks, another home demo called Skyline Commander, plus a leftover song from the sessions for the recently released Little Eden album called Yet Anothe’. Finally, we felt compelled to add a storming 24-minute live version of the classic track Superseded recorded at Cardigan’s Doctor Sardonicus festival in 2019.”
The Dirty Nil
Free Rein To Passions
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “If there’s one rule people should follow when approaching The Dirty Nil, it’s this: Never tell them how to rock ’n’ roll. Ontario’s Juno-winning trio is a finely tuned rock machine that is at its best when the members are pursuing their penchant for thrashy riffs, bashed out drums, and levels-to-the-max volume. And on their fourth album, Free Rein To Passions, the band followed their instincts down to the note to produce their most authentic work to date. The Nil’s back-to-basics approach was a direct reaction to their previous record, 2021’s Fuck Art, a creative process that brought too many industry people whispering in the band’s ears, telling them how to polish and tweak their songs to fit on the radio or streaming playlists or whatever other arbitrary whims the modern music machine demands. “There were all these expectations and pressures, people telling us to try this or that,” says frontman Luke Bentham. “We’re by no means the biggest band in the world, but in our ecosystem it became hard to try to make all these people happy. We were given challenges, and I think we met them, but getting to that place, it made me realize: ‘If we go any further in this direction, then I don’t know what we’re doing anymore.’ It had gotten to a point where the creation wasn’t very fun.”
Live Skull
Party Zero
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Insurrections. Global pandemics. The return of fascism. Climate crises. These are some serious times. But if you’ve got angst in your pants and you need to dance, or scream, or play guitar too loud too close to your amplifier, turn your ear to what Live Skull are doing. The New York noisers, who went on indefinite hiatus just before their kind of smart, gnarly, inventive din became lucrative, rose again in 2016. Their new album Party Zero, a thrilling work redefining what Live Skull means and what they stand for: no longer a group with a past, but one with a future. Party Zero marks the arrival of guitarist Dave Hollinghurst, an electrifying presence pushing the band in a fresh, new direction. It’s a fiercely political album, in keeping with this politically fierce age. “Desperation inspires us to make art and music,” he says. “There’s a lot of birth and rebirth, looking for pathways of resistance and promoting the good and trying to fight against evil. I once said we had to start Live Skull because Reagan became president. And we had to restart Live Skull because Trump became president.”
Kevin Morby
More Photographs (A Continuum)
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Kevin Morby writes (and records, and imagines) at an almost incomparable clip, and his most recent album, This Is A Photograph, studies life, time and mortality through myriad lenses. It’s a dynamic, buoyant record on big, heavy themes, so it only makes sense that Morby found he wasn’t quite done with it on its completion. More Photographs (A Continuum) finds new nooks, corners and vantage points. “If This Is A Photograph is a house that you have been living inside of,” says Morby, “then More Photographs is, perhaps, the same home just experienced differently. As if you, its inhabitant, have taken a tab of something psychedelic and now, suddenly, you’ve replaced your eyeglasses with kaleidoscopes.” With a luxurious nine tracks – three re-imaginings and six brand new songs — More Photographs (A Continuum) is prequel, sequel and primer to an already rich and generous record from one of our most luminous modern songwriters.”
Arlo Parks
My Soft Machine
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Grammy-nominated, Mercury Prize and BRIT Award-winning artist Arlo Parks is returning with her second album My Soft Machine, a deeply personal body of work; a narration of Parks’ experiences as she navigates her 20’s and the growth intertwined. Explained ever-articulately in her own words below: “The world/our view of it is peppered by the biggest things we experience – our traumas, upbringing, vulnerabilities almost like visual snow. This record is life through my lens, through my body — the mid-20s anxiety, the substance abuse of friends around me, the viscera of being in love for the first time, navigating PTSD and grief and self sabotage and joy, moving through worlds with wonder and sensitivity — what it’s like to be trapped in this particular body. There is a quote from a Joanna Hogg film called the Souvenir, it’s an A24 semi-autobiographical film with Tilda Swinton – it recounts a young film student falling in love with an older, charismatic man as a young film student then being drawn into his addiction — in an early scene he’s explaining why people watch films — “We don’t want to see life as it is played out we want to see life as it is experienced in this soft machine.” So there we have it, the record is called My Soft Machine.”
Joe Perry
Sweetzerland Manifesto MKII
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The co-founding member, principal songwriter, and co-producer of Aerosmith and Hollywood Vampires, as well as one of the most sought-after guitarists of all time, Joe Perry is about to release his new album Sweetzerland Manifesto MKII. The new LP includes six new tracks and alternate vocal appearances and mixes from the original 2018 version. “We had so many songs and with everything going on with the Vampires, Aerosmith, COVID, not touring, and touring, this music kept riding along for me,” Joe notes. “It was like the engine of a train that wasn’t going to stop. I’d wanted to put these songs out, and the idea of adding them to a vinyl release or Deluxe Version turned into doing MKII. I tend to think in terms of albums. The first one had a vibe, and MKII is a little more rocked out. I almost prefer it. It’s one of those records I can play from front-to-back live.“
Sparks
The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte marks Sparks’ first release on the venerable Island Records label in close to five decades, following such classics as 1974’s landmark Kimono My House, highlighted of course by the indelible hit single This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us. The new album is described by Ron and Russell Mael as a record that is “as bold and uncompromising as anything we did back then or, for that matter, anytime throughout our career.” The album includes such instantly intriguing new musical vignettes as Mona Lisa’s Packing, Leaving Late Tonight and Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is, songs which once again display Sparks’ seemingly ceaseless ability to craft complete, intricately detailed stories within perfect three-and-a-half minute pop masterpieces. Both characteristically timeless and unequivocally modern, The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte once again affirms that, after more than a half century making such masterpieces, Sparks remain inimitable, ingenious and, as ever, utterly one of a kind.”
Sweat
Who Do They Think They Are?
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Who Do They Think They Are? is the debut album from Pittsburgh-based Swiss-American quartet Sweat. After leaving her home in Basel with a hungry heart for authentic vintage rock, it didn’t take long for vocalist/organist Sue Pedrazzi to settle into her new home alongside Steel City gemstones: Richard Stanley (Rich the Band), Dan Hernandez (Limousine Beach, Cruces) and Kayla Schureman (Century III). Together, the foursome formed Sweat; a traditional band with fresh and energetic new ideas that set out an attractive stall for fans of British prog rock sensibilities, fragile American folk and heaps of ’70s schmaltz. They draw influence from the likes of Deep Purple and The Moody Blues, the strutting beat of The Who, and the wailing highs and broken lows of Heart. “Who Do They Think They Are? provides us with a source of self-actualization; both as individuals and as a band,” says Pedrazzi. “It is an intimate, retrospective lament and it exposes us in such a way that words never will.”
Wolf Eyes
Dreams In Splattered Lines
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Dreams In Splattered Lines fuses together Wolf Eyes’ 25 years of DIY electronics with the avant-garde sensibilities of Fluxus and the granite of dreary Midwestern life. Continuing some of the ideas explored on the Difficult Messages record of collaborations, the result is a surreal dreamscape of disorienting sound collages, where hit songs are transformed into terrariums of sonic flora and decimated fauna. As if pulled from a fever dream, the surrealists of the 1960s converge with alien electronic blues musicians in an underworld of mystery. The air is thick with car wash radio white noise, crackling and fizzing like a toxic elixir, spoken word poetry transmissions as absurd and cryptic phrases. Each corroded aural environment is a microcosm of chaos, honed to razor-sharp precision. Swept away in a whirlwind of thirteen perplexing narratives, each one an unpredictable journey through subterranean worlds, a sonic trip of reality folded into itself.”
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