Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Illuminati Hotties and Fontaines D.C. Steve Cropper and Colin James. The Alarm, Uniform, Secret Beach, Melt-Banana and more. Not bad for the middle of August, huh? Here are your plays of the week:
The Alarm
Music Television
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Originally inspired by Pin Ups, David Bowie’s 1973 album of glam and proto-punk covers, Music Television by The Alarm will step back into the future by reinterpreting songs from some of rock’s most influential and defining moments in visual music. “The Alarm came of age in the MTV era” states frontman Mike Peters, “So many of our longstanding fans grew up on MTV and saw The Alarm for the first time on MTV’s The Cutting Edge or via the historic Spirit Of ‘’86 Live Global Broadcast concert, and have stayed with us ever since.” Featuring 12 tracks celebrating both influential and underrated artists, Music Television features covers of Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World, Dire Straits anthem Money For Nothing (the first song to be played on MTV Europe in 1987), The Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star, INXS’s Don’t Change, The Blow Monkeys’ Live Today Love Tomorrow, Michael Jackson’s Beat It, Modern English’s I Melt With You, and Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight.”
Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour
Friendlytown
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Not many people start new bands in their ”80s. But legendary guitarist, producer, and songwriter Steve Cropper isn’t just anybody. In fact, the triple-threat musician was recently nominated for his first solo Grammy for the debut from his tight and tuneful rock ’n’ soul quintet The Midnight Hour. Cropper has wasted no time in following up this success with the sophomore album Friendlytown. Always pushing ahead and never repeating himself, Cropper has brought in the talents of Billy F Gibbons from ZZ Top to play on the record. Also stopping by Friendlytown is Queen guitarist extraordinaire Brian May, and country-rock singer-songwriter and guitarist Tim Montana, who has balanced a successful solo career with high-profile collaborations. “If your booty is not shaking in the first two bars of this album, you’re already dead in a chair,” laughs Cropper. “I feel so good about this batch of songs. They’re packed with radio hooks, and we have Billy Gibbons, Brian May and Tim Montana playing on the album — it’s like guitar heaven.”
Fontaines D.C.
Romance
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Romance is Fontaines D.C.’s most ambitious record yet, its 11 tracks constellating ideas that have been percolating among Grian Chatten (vocals), Carlos O’Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan (bass) and Tom Coll (drums) since they released Skinty Fia in 2022. The sonic evolution of the band, who bared their teeth in early records with antagonistic punk sensibilities, is an ascent into grungier breaks, dystopian electronica, hip-hop percussion, and dreamy Slowdive-style textures that may surprise fans. The shoegaze touchpoints first pressed on Skinty Fia unfold here like a purpling bruise. Working with Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Blur), the band left behind any “retro aesthetic”, as Chatten says “we say things on this record we’ve wanted to say for a long time. I never feel like it’s over, but it’s nice to feel lighter.”
Sonny Gullage
Go Be Free
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Kevin ‘Sonny’ Gullage was born with what you might call “blues wisdom,” a mixture of empathy, sensitivity, and keen observational skills. The first song the New Orleans, Louisiana-based artist wrote as a 12-year-old was about the BP oil spill, and its devastating environmental and economic effects. Put simply, Sonny has always been an old soul. Now, Sonny is 25 years old and the blues singer-songwriter and keyboardist is releasing his debut album Go Be Free. The uplifting and purposeful 12-song collection is produced by four-time Grammy winner and nine-time nominee Tom Hambridge (Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Susan Tedeschi, Delbert McClinton), and it features an incendiary cameo by guitarist Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. “It was almost a revelation when I discovered I could sing the blues — it just flowed out of me — and I realized that’s how I wanted to connect with people,” Sonny shares. “When I sing, I don’t sing for people to understand me, I sing for people to understand themselves.” Go Be Free is both a culmination of a life in music, and the start of a promising career as a gifted singer- songwriter and instrumentalist.”
The Harlem Gospel Travelers
Rhapsody
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “When I grew up, on the way to church, you’d listen to gospel music,” says Ifedayo Gatling of The Harlem Gospel Travelers. “Then on the way back from church, it was Back That Azz Up. Music is music, as long as it makes you feel something. I always tell people, no matter what you believe in, it’s about how does this make you feel? Does it make you feel like you want to be a better person? Does it make you feel like you want to love somebody that you didn’t want to love before?” With their new album Rhapsody, the extraordinary vocalists of HGT — Gatling, Dennis Bailey and George Marage — are able to fully explore the entire range of music that influenced them. The followup to their acclaimed 2021 release Look Up!, the record is a dive into lesser-known but hugely important releases in the evolution of gospel music. HGT’s longtime friend and mentor Eli Paperboy Reed approached the group with the idea of digging through the Numero catalog and recording some of the gospel funk material, reinterpreted in their own way. “It allowed us to take these songs that a lot of people might not know and put our own spin on a genre that we built our livelihood in,” says Gatling, “and also expand people’s mindset about how they view gospel music and how they view us.”
Illuminati Hotties
Power
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Illuminati Hotties is the musical project founded by singer-guitarist, songwriter and producer Sarah Tudzin. Power was co-produced by by Tudzin and John Congleton (St. Vincent, Death Cab For Cutie). It features the Hotties’ trademark wit and vibrancy, and is undeniably fun. Tuzdin says about lead single Let Me In, “I find that something I have in common with most people that I talk to lately is the immense fear of and inability to be alone with ourselves. Constant motion, avoidance, restlessness — anything to keep myself from stagnating have always been my coping mechanisms when my inner monologue starts to get loud.” Meanwhile, the title track “Power is a reckoning with mortality. It was the song I avoided writing every time I sat down with a guitar until it finally fell out of me. In it I’m asking over and over, how am I supposed to participate in earthly existence after the passing of my mom, who so selflessly gave me her confidence, who instilled my power? There is no answer, and there is no sign.”
Colin James
Chasing The Sun
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “For his electrifying 21st album Chasing The Sun, acclaimed singer-songwriter and master guitarist Colin James assembled a towering roster of musical guests — Americana icon Lucinda Williams, harmonica ace Charlie Musselwhite, and legendary producer-guitarist Colin Linden, to name just three — to amplify seven scorching blues-rock originals and four dazzling covers. Co-written with longtime pal Tom Wilson (Blackie and the Rodeo Kings) and The Trews‘ MacDonald brothers, the album finds James powerfully building on a repertoire that has earned him eight Juno Awards, 31 Maple Blues Awards, and induction in the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame. Colin has set the bar for consistency and talent in Canadian music and remains at the top of his game, always challenging himself musically. A consummate professional and a superb guitarist, Colin is a musician’s musician. The confidence that comes with maturity can be heard in his voice and seen in his electrifying stage performance. He does what comes naturally — and always has — as he knows no other way and no other life.”
Melt-Banana
3 + 5
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “3+5 is the long-awaited eighth album from Tokyo noise-rockers Melt-Banana. It showcases the duo’s visionary musical approach and extraordinary abilities as performers: Yasuko Onuki’s giddy, hyperactive vocalizing and Ichiro Agata’s glitchy, cyberpunk guitar, delivered at dizzying speed, bathed in aggressive electronic sounds. Their aesthetic approach is exultantly experimental, fusing diverse genres imbued with chaotic energy. As on their previous works, the music on 3+5 is unpredictable, always filled with surprises and excitement. 3+5 synthesizes elements of a variety of extreme music, hyper-pop, classic punk, vintage metal, and noise. It partakes of Japanese culture overall, especially the subcultures of gaming, anime and underground music. Melt-Banana seek to offer possibilities to musicians who won’t start a band if they can’t find a drummer, young women afraid to express themselves in their own unfiltered and unique voices, bedroom musicians and egg punks seeking to blend electronic noise with live instrumentation. 3+5 provides a fresh experience and inspiration for all.”
Motorpsycho
Neigh!!
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “There are songs that makes friends with anyone and do great at parties, doling out compliments left, right and center. And then there are those songs that just don’t seem to fit in, songs that knock over glasses and makes awkward comments to the host as they stubbornly refuse to adapt and adjust to whatever larger setting you needed them to work in; these are songs that seemingly insist on remaining outside your control no matter how many stylistic or production tricks you try to pull. Usually, for a band such songs eventually fall by the wayside, are left behind or butchered for parts a few years later. But sometimes quite a few of them show up at the door, at the same time, unruly and ready to shake things up a bit. Sometimes there is trouble. These are the songs that makes up Neigh!! Not merely a companion piece to last year’s Yay!, not a collection of B-sides or simply leftovers from that same period, but a reaction, a party for those not invited to parties, consisting of troubled, sometimes weirdly clothed outcasts that refused to go away and instead languidly found their place in the post-plague world while the tunes from Yay! were being pampered and sing-along’ed by band and fans alike.”
The Secret Beach
We Were Born Here, What’s Your Excuse?
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The Secret Beach are an ever-shifting group of musicians and co-conspirators orbiting around the songs and voice of Prairie songwriter Micah Erenberg. Unquestionably a musical delight, The Secret Beach’s new 15-song recording We Were Born Here, What’s Your Excuse? is a subtle nod to the oft-overlooked Canadian province of Manitoba, lazily known to many as either a landlocked frozen tundra or the butt of a joke on The Simpsons (season 16, episode 6), which gave the LP its self-deprecating title. This is an album teeming with warmth; its tracks casually unfurl spools of intimate texture, hushed melodies, and a wholly inviting atmosphere that puts the listener virtually in the same room as these timeless tracks. The songs — many barely cracking the two-minute mark — fly effortlessly by, nodding to many major players in the pop music canon. The spectre of Elliott Smith hovers over many corners of the record, and indeed, whiffs of Bob Dylan and The Band appear throughout, with the latter uniquely evoked in the album’s organic, live-band feel, and the former’s lyrical mastery mirrored throughout. More contemporary touchstones like Brooklyn indie-folk auteurs Woods and M. Ward are also apparent, and early ’00s heroes Grandaddy are called to mind as well.”
Spirit Of The Beehive
You’ll Have To Lose Something
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “For the past decade, Spirit Of The Beehive have honed an aesthetic like no other. They’ve chopped up samples, chewed them up, spit them back out again, baby birded it. Across four albums and a smattering of EPs, Zack Schwartz, Corey Wichlin and Rivka Ravede have fully solidified their stance as some of rock’s weirdest and best deconstructionists. This latest offering is the most crystallized version of the band’s aesthetic, a continued meditation on the end of relationships and the unsteadiness that follows. It is a meticulous, beautiful, and quietly heartbreaking collection of songs. More often than not, it sounds like listening to a walkman from inside of a hurricane, like the YouTube videos you’d watch in bed for 18 hours straight after you break your wrist from a skateboarding accident. The goal in making You’ll Have To Lose Something was to soften out some of the edges. “Less hard left turns,” says Wichlin. “We wanted to make something intentionally less antagonistic.”
Uniform
American Standard
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “American Standard begins with a shock: Vocalist Michael Berdan stands alone, screaming, “A part of me, but it can’t be me. Oh God, it can’t.” It all starts with an admission. Beneath the harrowing screams, there’s the pain of bulimia nervosa.There’s the pain of a sickness that is as physical as it is psychological. This is a kind of emergence. With every movement of American Standard, Uniform peel off a new layer and tell the story inside of the one that came before it. The lyrics sink down into the core of the innermost self, the small human being crushed in the grip of sickness. To help deliver this narrative of eating disorders, self-hatred, delusion, mania, and ultimate discovery, Berdan sought assistance from a towering pair of outsider literary figures. Alongside B.R. Yeager (author of the modern cult-classic Negative Space) and Maggie Siebert (the mind behind the contemporary body horror masterpiece Bonding), the three writers eviscerate the personal material to present a portrait of mental and physical illness as vividly terrifying as anything in the present-day canon. The result is an acute articulation of a state beyond simple agony, capturing the thrilling transcendence and deliverance that sickness can bring in the process.”
Albums Of The Week
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings | Woodland
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Critically acclaimed Americana songbirds Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings have announced details of their 10th studio album, Woodland — their first since 2020’s Grammy-winning covers set All the Good Times (Are Past & Gone). Named for and recorded at Welch and Rawlings’ own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, the 10-song set features both full-band sessions and intimate duet performances, all tied together by the duo’s signature old-time sound and evocative lyricism. Speaking about album and studio, the pair say: “Woodland is at the heart of everything we do, and has been for the last 20 some years. The past four years were spent almost entirely within its walls, bringing it back to life after the 2020 tornado and making this record. The music is (songs are) a swirl of contradictions, emptiness, fullness, grief, destruction, permanence. Now.”
