The familiar scent of pressed vinyl and warm woods fills the air, accented by notes of sweet blossoms, hints of amber and soft fruit is now available from DW Home. I wonder if Pitchfork will review it?
Tom Morello, Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder Covers AC/DC’s “Highway To Hell”
From Tom Morello’s upcoming album ‘The Atlas Underground Fire’, out Oct 15, 2021
Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James Official Trailer from SHOWTIME
Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James is an intimate yet propulsive look at Rick James, one of rock, funk and R&B’s most legendary and often under-appreciated figures. Remember, kids, he once played in a band with Neil Young. Watch the premiere on September 3 on SHOWTIME.
Steely Dan’s ‘Northeast Corridor’ And Donald Fagen’s ‘The Nightfly Live’ Both Available September 24
teely Dan’s Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live! and a live version of the acclaimed solo album by Donald Fagen – THE NIGHTFLY LIVE – will both be released on September 24, 2021. Both albums will be available on 180g-vinyl on October 1, 2021. The first live Steely Dan album in more than 25 years, Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live!, was recorded across tour dates at New York City’s Beacon Theatre, The Met Philadelphia, & more, and showcases selections from Steely Dan’s extraordinary catalog of slinky grooves, sleek subversive lyrics, and infectious hits. Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly Live was performed live by The Steely Dan Band. A full track listing can be found below.
Both albums by the legendary jazz-rock icons are available for pre-order today. Fans who pre-order Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live! will instantly receive a digital download of “Reeling In The Years” and those who pre-order The Nightfly Live will instantly receive a digital download of “I.G.Y.”
STEELY DAN helped define the soundtrack of the ’70s with hits such as “Reeling in the Years”, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Peg,” “Deacon Blues,” “Babylon Sisters,” and “Hey Nineteen,” culled from their seven platinum albums issued between 1972 and 1980 (including 1977’s groundbreaking Aja). Both their sound and their notoriety survived the ’80s despite Becker and Fagen’s only occasional surfacing for a solo project. They reunited as Steely Dan in the early ’90s, touring successfully throughout the decade and releasing a live album in 1995 (Alive In America). In 2000 they released their multi-GRAMMY winner, Two Against Nature, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
Steely Dan – Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live!
CD/Digital:
Black Cow
Kid Charlemagne
Rikki Don’t Lose That Number
Hey Nineteen
Any Major Dude Will Tell You
Glamour Profession
Things I Miss the Most
Aja
Peg
Bodhisattva
Reelin’ in the Years
A Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry
2LP:
LP 1, Side A:
Black Cow
Kid Charlemagne
Rikki Don’t Lose That Number
LP 1, Side B:
Hey Nineteen
Any Major Dude Will Tell You
Glamour Profession
LP 2, Side A:
Things I Miss the Most
Aja
Peg
LP 2, Side B:
Bodhisattva
Reelin’ in the Years
A Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry
Donald Fagen – The Nightfly Live
CD/Digital:
G.Y
Green Flower Street
Ruby Baby
Maxine
New Frontier
The Nightfly
The Goodbye Look
Walk Between the Raindrops
1LP
Side A:
G.Y
Green Flower Street
Ruby Baby
Maxine
Side B:
New Frontier
The Nightfly
The Goodbye Look
Walk Between the Raindrops
John Mellencamp Announces The Pre-Order Of ‘The Good Samaritan Tour 2000’ Live Album
John Mellencamp launches the pre-order for the live album to accompany the upcoming documentary The Good Samaritan Tour 2000 out on August 27th. Pre-order The Good Samaritan Tour 2000 live album HERE.
The Good Samaritan Tour 2000 will also be streamed on Turner Classic Movie’s (TCM) YouTube channel August 27th with Mellencamp appearing as a guest programmer on the network in September. The documentary, which is narrated by Academy® Award winner Matthew McConaughey, chronicles Mellencamp’s historic tour in 2000 when he performed for free in public parks and common spaces across the country. The film was executive produced by Federal Films, produced by John Mellencamp and Randy Hoffman, directed by Shan Dan Horan, mixed by Andy York and has special contributions by Nora Guthrie.
Holly Humberstone Announces “The Walls Are Way Too Thin” EP Set For Release On November 5
Today, breakthrough artist of 2021 and the Ivor Novello Rising Star nominee Holly Humberstone announces her highly anticipated second EP The Walls Are Way Too Thin, set to be released on 5 November on Polydor/Darkroom/Interscope/Universal Music Canada, the country’s leading music company. Featuring the landmark A-List title track and the immaculately beautiful ‘Haunted House’, the six-track EP includes brand new song ‘Please Don’t Leave Just Yet’, a collaboration with Matty Healy, frontman of one of Holly’s favourite bands The 1975. When Holly Humberstone entered the studio with Matty, it was mid-pandemic and the 21-year-old felt a yearning for human connection. She pictured drifting out to sea with the city lights behind her, feeling lost and rudderless. Matty, Holly and longtime collaborator Rob Milton, put these universal feelings into the song, another example of Holly’s exquisite ability to connect with our deepest, darkest emotions.
In Holly’s own words: “The song is about wanting someone to stay so badly, even if only for five more minutes, because you know how much it’ll hurt when they leave. I think the desperation in the words really sums up how I was feeling at the time and how so many people must’ve been feeling last year when we were all completely starved of human connection! I often write songs with a bit of a visual in my head, and I kept picturing solitary places, like drifting far out to sea, so far that you can’t find a way back, or old deserted cargo shipping yards with all the lights at the edge of the city.
Holly’s second EP The Walls Are Way Too Thin follows her critically acclaimed debut Falling Asleep At The Wheel, which marked the first chapter in the story of a new global talent. Having just been announced as the Ivor Novello Rising Star Nominee, to being named the BBC Sound of 2021, Apple’s Up Next Artist, VEVO DSCVR’s Artists To Watch 2021, and internationally heralded by the likes of Jimmy Kimmel, James Corden, Triple J, The Sunday Times, NME (5*), The Guardian, i-D, ELLE, and Billboard, it is Holly’s remarkable storytelling that has captured the hearts and minds of fans globally. Holly wants her lyrics to be the ones people could tattoo on themselves and her songs embrace and translate some of life’s most intense feelings in a way that typical conversations all too often fail to capture, from mental health struggles to the dizzying feelings of displacement as you grow out of adolescence.
“This EP represents a feeling of being lost. It’s the kind of lost that makes you question who you are and where you belong. So lost that someone might need to find you again because you can’t find yourself. That’s how it felt to move to Liverpool, then London, and be in transit between cities and never settling” – says Holly.
The news comes after the long awaited return of live music, with Holly playing to her fans for the first time ever, stating “I’ve never seen physical proof my fans actually exist” (Metro). The 21-year old became the breakthrough artist of an unprecedented year – whilst her streaming numbers rocketed to over 150M global streams and her story grew from her crumbling house in Grantham – Holly was unable to play for her growing fanbase. Now, having set festival stages alight at Latitude, Standon Calling and Tramlines, Holly prepares for her first sold out London headlines, with four shows at Omeara next week.
Creating a visionary world within her music, Holly has also set up the Fifth Sister Swap initiative, as a way for her and her fans to swap clothes without relying on fast fashion. It’s an idea that stemmed from her three sisters constantly borrowing from and swapping their own wardrobes, and growing up in a house of women has made Holly passionate about issues affecting women. The artist recently filmed a session for Splendour In The Grass Festival in the Mind Charity shop in Camden, with the focus being on the incredible work Mind do in the UK for mental health, an issue close to her heart. Wanting to bring her initiatives directly to her fans, Holly will be launching the first IRL Fifth Sister Swap at her sold-out Omeara headlines.
The Walls Are Way Too Thin Tracklist
Haunted House
The Walls Are Way Too Thin
Please Don’t Leave Just Yet
Thursday
Scarlett
Friendly Fire
TOUR AND FESTIVAL DATES
06 Aug Wilderness (Chipping Norton)
13 Aug Boardmasters (Festival Newquay)
15 Aug Omeara (London) SOLD OUT
16 Aug Omeara (London) SOLD OUT
17 Aug Omeara (London) SOLD OUT
18 Aug Omeara (London) SOLD OUT
27 Aug Reading & Leeds
29 Aug Reading & Leeds
30 Aug All Points East (London)
10 Sept TRNSMT Festival (Glasgow)
17 Sep This Is Tomorrow Festival (Newcastle)
07 Oct The Troubadour (Los Angeles, USA)
09 Oct Austin City Limits (Austin, USA)
12 Oct Bowery Ballroom (New York)
26 Oct The Cluny (Newcastle Upon Tyne)
27 Oct Brudenell Social Club (Leeds) SOLD OUT
28 Oct Yes (The Pink Room) (Manchester) SOLD OUT
30 Oct Whelan’s (Dublin)
31 Oct Oh Yeah Music Centre (Belfast)
02 Nov King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut (Glasgow) SOLD OUT
03 Nov O2 Institute 3 Birmingham SOLD OUT
04 Nov Clwb Ifor Bach Cardiff SOLD OUT
08 Nov O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire (London)
10 Nov Rescue Rooms Nottingham SOLD OUT
02 June Primavera Sound (Barcelona)
18 June Hurricane Festival (Germany)
19 June Southside Festival (Germany)
Adia Victoria Announces New Album ‘A Southern Gothic’ Out September 17
Adia Victoria has announced the forthcoming release of her new album, A Southern Gothic. The LP is out September 17 via Canvasback Records. The record was executive produced by T Bone Burnett, and features guest contributions from Jason Isbell, Margo Price, and Matt Berninger. Today Adia reveals the first single off A Southern Gothic, “Magnolia Blues.” She notes:
“In an unpublished manuscript in 1933, William Faulkner spoke on the Southerner’s ‘need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage.’
After a year spent in my room in Nashville, I wondered what stories I had to tell. Often the only view of the South beyond my window was the magnolia tree in my backyard. It blocked the rest of the world from my sight. I limited my gaze to its limbs, its leaves and the obscene bloom of its iconic white flower.
The magnolia has stood as an integral symbol of Southern myth making, romanticism, the Lost Cause of the Confederates and the white washing of Southern memory. ‘Magnolia Blues’ is a reclaiming of the magnolia – an unburdening if its limbs of the lies it has stood for. This song centers the narrative of a Black Southern woman’s furious quest to find her way back home to the South under the shade of her Magnolia.
‘Magnolia Blues’ is an ode to Southern Black folk—too often hemmed out of what we mean when we say ‘Southerner’ – and it is also an ode to the South itself. To rescue it from – in the words of William Faulkner – ‘a make believe region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds which perhaps never existed.’
With A Southern Gothic Adia continues her journey through the conflicts of the American South and the troubling resonance of its past. Sonically, the album is full of frequent juxtaposition. It is equal parts historical montage and modern prophesy, dark and light, love and loathing. The 14 tracks are the musical embodiment of the relationship that so many people, especially Black women, have with the South.
During the writing process, Adia listened to Alan Lomax’s old field recordings and the sounds became the heartbeat of her new music, upon which she and creative partner Mason Hickman later layered other parts. And in many ways, the story of working with Hickman to write and produce A Southern Gothic is as critical to the project as the stories Victoria tells across the album. Recording for A Southern Gothic began in Paris in 2019/early 2020, and it was while in France that Victoria discovered a sense of clarity about her home that she didn’t always have when she was writing from her home. “I would say that the philosophy behind this record is, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention,’” Victoria says. “It’s also, ‘When you don’t have excess, when that’s all stripped away, what you gon’ do with that?’ What art can you make from walking through your mother’s garden?”
Without excess or access—to musicians, producers, studio—Victoria and Hickman became a two-man band of sorts, connecting over Victoria’s collection of Southern tales as they tried to keep the pandemic from killing them. Hickman taught himself mandolin and banjo while Victoria cut drum and piano parts. And later, even when the world began to re-open, vaccines became available, and Victoria was able to get in the studio with T-Bone Burnett, the recordings that Victoria and Hickman had done on their own remained.
“I wanted the album to be a time stamp of where I was in 2020,” Victoria says. “I wanted to pay homage and be honest to what I had to work with. I didn’t feel the need to go back and change it and pretty it up. It was honest and it was true.”
The result is a project that fits perfectly into Victoria’s catalogue and the rich legacy of Black Southern storytelling, even as it stands alone as a freshly innovative work. T Bone Burnett says, “Adia Victoria sings on an arc between Memphis Minnie and Sojourner Truth.”
Adds Victoria: “With this project, I was so anchored in the past and the Black brilliance that came before me that it was kind of a road map. They said, ‘Sweetie, we’re gonna locate you, and we’re gonna allow you to move it forward.’”
A Southern Gothic is Adia’s 3rd album and marks the follow up to 2019’s critically acclaimed Silences, produced by Aaron Dessner. Around its release, The Songwriters Hall of Fame presented Adia with the Holly Prize which recognizes and supports a new “all-in songwriter.” She toured the U.S. and Europe on the “Dope Queen Tour” which included a performance on Live From Here with Chris Thile and at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the Newport Folk Festival, and a performance at Mass MOCA and Boston Calling. She has also appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Last year saw Adia participate in a panel discussion, “Black Equity in Americana: A Conversation, hosted by the Americana Music Association and moderated by Marcus K. Downling.
A Southern Gothic tracklisting
- Magnolia Blues
- Mean-Hearted Woman
- You Was Born To Die (ft. Kyshona Armstrong, Margo Price & Jason Isbell)
- Whole World Knows
- Troubled Mind
- Far From Dixie
- Please Come Down
- My oh My (ft. Stone Jack Jones)
- Deep Water Blues
- Carolina Bound
- South For The Winter (ft. Matt Berninger)
Sonic Reducers: Rihanna Is A BILLIONAIRE
Sonic Reducers. One topic. Two music nerds. Five minutes.
Join us as we celebrate Rihanna’s newfound status as a billionaire, debate whether that’s despite or due to the fact that she hasn’t made music for years, and ponder where the hell we went wrong.
Sonic Reducers: The Official Led Zeppelin Doc Is Coming
Sonic Reducers. One topic. Two music nerds. Five minutes.
Join us as we discuss the upcoming Led Zeppelin documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin, ponder the pros and cons of authorized documentaries, and wonder whether the mudshark story will make the cut.
70s-esque Indie-Pop Easy-Rock Duo RED DIRT SKINNERS Look to “Brighter Days Ahead”
Belleville, ON-based, award-winning Red Dirt Skinners’ latest single release “Brighter Days Ahead” signifies the duo’s foray into 70s-esque indie-pop easy-rock loud and clear.
Available now, the new song lands ahead of the Belleville-based band’s forthcoming album release, Bear With Us — coming this Fall.
Rooted in a time when the Skinners — Rob and Sarah — were on tour in Scotland and noticed, amongst the rain clouds, the shadows always pointed towards a rainbow. It seemed to be an observation that could be applied to life in general too, and from that idea, “Brighter Days Ahead” was born.
“We are living in strange and confusing times,” Sarah says. “‘Brighter Days Ahead’ is intended to give the listener hope.
“It’s a positive summer anthem for 2021!”
With previous releases — including Under Utopian Skies (2018), Behind the Wheel (2016), Live at the Blue Lamp (2014), Sinking the Mary Rose (2013), and Home Sweet Home (2012) — garnering the pair poll-topping and award-winning nods such as Alternative Album of the Year, Folk/Roots Album of the Year, Instrumentalist of the Year, and more, the band’s upcoming full-length, Bear With Us, is set to arrive October 22, 2021.
A collection of ten original songs, the new albums draws on hard hitting subject matters, such as dementia, homelessness and narcissistic abuse — all whilst still managing to produce soaring choruses, catchy lyrics, and the ever present award-winning sound of Sarah’s saxophone solos.
Bear With Us is an extremely full sounding album from two highly skilled multi-instrumentalists, and straddles multiple genres. The album is a triumph to positive thinking, and a further development of the band’s signature sound.
Red Dirt Skinners have won countless awards in the UK, and spanned several genres before capturing the attention of the Canadian music press in 2015. Within just two years of their first-ever tour of Canada, the Skinners were invited by Canadian Immigration to become permanent residents under the “Performers of a World Class Level” category. Rob and Sarah Skinner were thrilled and honoured, and accepted the offer immediately — turning their world upside down in what has turned out to be an extremely positive decision both personally and professionally.
With male and female harmonies blending together as one voice, and Sarah’s trademark soprano saxophone solos, you will be swept along by the refreshingly different sound of the Red Dirt Skinners. If you like songs influenced by Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Queen, and David Bowie — all coupled with some epic storytelling, humour, and heartfelt emotions — you’ll love the Red Dirt Skinners and “Brighter Days Ahead.”
“Brighter Days Ahead” is available now. Bear With Us is available October 2021.