It is of Lee Ranaldo and Raül Refree's first official release together titled, Names of North End Women.
The album is experimental in the vein of My Life In the Bush of Ghostsas it uses samples, found sounds and random instrumentation as the basis of the songs here.
Bass playing oddball Thundercat just released his newest jam, "Dragonball Durag" which pretty much sums up the artist. Deep gooey bass and drums, smooth yacht rock saxophone, and falsetto crooning silly lyrics.
The Atlanta, GA based trio The Coathangers sixth studio album is an excellent collection of their strengths; the yin and yang, sweet and sour of pop appeal and punk rawness. The Devil You Know contains twelve tracks of engaging thought provoking, challenging and ear wormy pop punk injected rock and roll.
From the opening song "Bimbo" the group (guitarist/vocalist Julia Kugel, drummer/vocalist Stephanie Luke and bassist/vocalist Meredith Franco) develop the audio version of a Sour Patch Kid candy as Kugel sings with a sweet innocence while Luke gets aggressive on the skins and the chorus. "Crimson Telephone" uses an ominous bass and drum riff before ethereal vocals as Kugel sings about hiding the scars.
The band is fiercely arraigned against certain foes. The blatant and direct "F the NRA" uses a motoring tune to deliver their message of resistance while "Hey Buddy" uses a dance laden groovy bass line delivering the title lyric while raging against hate, bigotry and those fearful souls who deliver it. Both tracks are highlights showing the band can be firm and direct and also shake a tail feather while delivering their message.
The juxtaposition of pretty and dirty is the core of the band and they do it well on the junkie ode "Stranger Danger" but they can also spread their wings encompassing new styles as "Memories" is expansive, closer "Lithium" is a spaced out drug trip and "Last Call" uses dreamy reggae before a huge arena ready chorus.
The Coathangers display a lot of range on The Devil You Know and continue to make music to protest along side of and sing along to at a happening party.
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Support the band, buy the album, stream it on bandcamp or below and peep some video:
With Mardi Gras one week away, New Orleans stalwarts Galactic have released a new single to celebrate parade season.
"Float Up" is a funky new tune which showcases the vocal styling of Anjelika Jelly Joseph as the track bounces along with a light pop appeal. It would have been right at home on their recent release, Already Ready Already.
Support the band, see them live and get ready for Mardi Gras with this new jam:
The newest full length release from Philadelphia artist lojii starts off with a slow dripping track titled "patience" finding the MC breathing out the word softly and then talking about how he has no special secret to success other than just perseverance and hard work. This is the perfect introduction to lo&behold, a smooth flowing, easy going album that never raises up to heavy or sinks to low, just blissfully bumps along and showcases lojii with his various producers skills.
The title track injects a few skittering trap influenced beats but the foundation sound is soulful R&B through and through. Producer Swarvy arrives often using smooth sounds as Pink Siifu and Akeema Zane help out on vocals for "U callin' Me". "trippin' (i like it)" delivers a loose liquid beat that recalls De La Soul as does the excellent retro looking "brite kid" with tape looping production from Jacob Rochester.
The energy hits it's highest level for "uhoh(whereyoho?)" which finds lojii rhyming his fastest over heavy beats, but producer Swarvy still includes flute breaks and smooth lining making it work in the overall aesthetic of the full length. The retro soul of "each day (i pray for)" just keeps rolling along while Nikko Gray helps out on the sweet singing retro shout out jam.
The strong efforts keep coming with the slightly disjointed sounds from Alexander Spit supporting "longwayhome" which literally delivers the artist back with an uber ride recording before the vibes, smooth guitar, and chimes deliver late night soul for the excellent "over&over/round&round" via production from Absent Avery.
In a genre where the current style is brevity and ten cent production seems the norm, this full length album is a call back to more extended and groove filled times. lo&behold runs on like a babbling brook as lojii steers the ship down river, smoothly taking his time on the bliss filled journey.
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Support the artist, buy the album, listen on bandcamp or below and peep some video:
In this ongoing Monday Series we will be exploring various artists versions of Bob Dylan song's. Today's tune is live a cover by John Cruz playing "Jokerman"
Thoughts on Original:
From the first time we tackled a cover of this tune:
The kick-start to his "back to rock and roll" album Infidels, "Jokerman" is a monster. A torrent of images, symbols, thoughts, proclamations, fears and fables; it feels like a dam was broken in Dylan's brain and all of these things just poured out. Musically it moves along but doesn't add much to the towering wordplay as the tune is dominated by the lyrics which seem almost never ending; Dylan has penned wordier tunes, but few feel as heavy as this. Flawed, but reaching for something, it is a not an all-time great Dylan song, but it is one that lets us peak into his brain a bit. For more on this tune, check out this post. Cover:
Thoughts on Cover Artist: RtBE have not heard of John Cruz before. He is a singer-songwriter from Hawaii and more info can be found on his Facebook page.
Thoughts on Cover:
A tough tune to cover and John does a great straight ahead job with some fine upbeat strumming to propel the elongated track forward.
We search the murky back waters of youtube to find full concerts and post them to the site weekly, come back every seven days to help us celebrate Full Show Friday's. These shows are of varying quality and may not be here for long so enjoy them while you can...As always, please support the artist every which way, but especially by seeing them live (if they are still playing)...This week...Selena Gomez!
Each January RtBE does a Jazz showcase and judging by the clicks, people just aren't as into it as we are. To make up for that, in February we go pop during our Full Show Friday series to blatantly attract page views.
The album was originally released digitally last year, but now it gets the full treatment with a vinyl release from Royal Potato Family and great album art.
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit has announced a new album, Reunions, which will be out May 15th.
The group released the first song from the album titled "Be Afraid" and it is an upbeat piece of modern rock and roll. Lyrically it seems to be addressing writing protest songs, and does a neat trick/cop-out of not actually writing one while singing about writing one...
A good start to a record and RtBE certainly loves Isbell, having rated two of his albums among last decades best. Tour dates are below, and tickets go on sale today as the band are playing with some pretty cool opening acts (Billy Strings, Lucinda Williams etc) as well.
Jason Isbell — 2020 Tour Dates
February 29 — Tempe, AZ @ Innings Festival
March 26 — Savannah, GA @ Savannah Music Festival
March 27 — St. Augustine, FL @ St. Augustine Amphitheatre
March 28 — Mobile, AL @ Saenger Theatre
March 29 — Montgomery, AL @ Montgomery Performing Arts Center
May 22 — Boston, MA @ Boston Calling
May 29 — Bethel, NY @ Mountain Jam
June 3 — Philadelphia, PA @ Met Opera House*
June 4 — Vienna, VA @ Wolf Trap†
June 5 — New York, NY@ Rooftop at Pier 17†
June 6 — New York, NY @ Rooftop at Pier 17†
June 8 — Durham, NC @ Durham Performing Arts Center‡
June 9 — Durham, NC @ Durham Performing Arts Center‡
June 11 — Atlanta, GA @ The Coca-Cola Roxy*
June 12 — Atlanta, GA @ The Coca-Cola Roxy*
June 13 — Manchester, TN @ Bonnaroo
June 18 — Milwaukee, WI @Riverside Theater*
June 19 — Minneapolis, MN @ The Armory*
June 20 — East Moline, IL @ Rust Belt*
June 21 — St. Louis, MO @ The Stifel Theatre*
June 23 — Grand Rapids, MI @ DeVos Performance Hall*
June 25 — Toronto, ON @ Meridian Hall*
June 26 — Moon Township, PA @ UPMC Events Center*
June 27 — Williamsburg, VA @ Williamsburg Live at DeWitt Museum Lawn
June 28 — Boone, NC @ Schafer Center for the Performing Arts (on-sale TBA)
July 18-19 — Whitefish, MT @ Under The Big Sky Festival
July 20 — Vancouver, BC @ The Orpheum#
July 21 — Seattle, WA @ Paramount Theatre#
July 22 — Portland, OR @ Theater of the Clouds#
July 24 — San Francisco, CA @ The Warfield Theatre#
July 25 — San Francisco, CA @ The Warfield Theatre#
July 26 — Santa Barbara, CA @ Santa Barbara Bowl#
July 28 — San Diego, CA @ Humphreys Concerts By The Bay#
July 29 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Greek Theatre#
July 31 — Reno, NV @ Grand Theatre at Grand Sierra Resort#
August 1 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Eccles Theater#
August 2 — Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks+
August 4 — Bonner Springs, KS @ Providence Medical Center Amphitheater#
August 5 — Little Rock, AR @ First Security Amphitheater#
August 7 — Austin, TX @ ACL Live at the Moody Theater#
August 8 — Austin TX @ ACL Live at the Moody Theater#
August 9 — Dallas, TX @ Bomb Factory#
August 29 — Chicago, IL @ Wrigley Field^
September 11-13 — Bristol, TN @ Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion
November 6 — Oslo, Norway @ Spektrum
November 7 — Stockholm, Sweden @ Stockholm Waterfront
November 8 — Copenhagen, Denmark @ Vega
November 10 — Berlin, Germany @ Festsaal Kreuzberg
November 11 — Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Paradiso
November 14 — Antwerp, Belgium @ De Roma
November 15 — Koln, Germany @ Gloria
November 17 — London, UK @ Eventim Apollo
November 18 — Manchester, UK @ Albert Hall
November 19 — Dublin, Ireland @ Olympia Theatre
*with Strand of Oaks
†with David Crosby & Friends
‡with The War & Treaty
#with Billy Strings
+with Lucinda Williams
^with Chris Stapleton
The legends Rage Against The Machine will be reuniting and conducting a "Public Service Announcement", touring the country this summer with hip hop act Run The Jewels opening.
Having seen the band back in their hey day, RtBE can confirm that Rage are a beast live and worth seeing.
We will hopefully be catching them at MSG where s few years back we were lucky to catch Run The Jewelsopen for Jack White. Zack de la Rocha came out with RTJ during what was our favorite show of 2015 and now he will return to the arena with his band headlining. Exciting.
Tickets go on sale tomorrow, to get in the mood some live RATM videos below:
In pleasantly surprising news a new band fronted by Ian MacKaye is coming. Coriky is a trio of MacKaye, Joe Lally on bass and Amy Farina on drums.
The band released the first single "Clean Kill" from their upcoming self-titled album and it is a cool mix of tension and release in a very Fugazi vein.
You can stream it below, pre order the record on Dischord.
The cleverly named Jodie Faster has a tag line on their Facebook page: "Playing short songs fast since 2016" and they ain't lying. With the release of their newest full length Blame Yourself they can confidently add "damn good" in front of "songs" on that tag line.
The whole record is seventeen tracks and the album run time is just about seventeen minutes as the group explodes through each number with steamrolling energy and dynamic aggression. The hardcore punk four piece from Lille, France burn with intensity as they slam home sing along parts, blistering drums, parapet scaling guitars and a thundering bass foundation.
A track like the shotgun discharge "We All Bleed Red" is an excellent standout, kicking off at furious speed before a slower break down and a bass run to jump back up the supersonic finale while vocally lashing out at the institutional power structure...all in a dense minute twenty seven. While the vocals are screamed and a bit low in the mix at times, the attachment of the written lyrics allow for the message to come through; the bands passion needs no translation.
Each song pumps and the group never lets the tempo lack for a second. Opener "Still Not Loving the Police" is self explanatory, "JDS" is furious while "Did Not Vote" and "Push the Button" call for revolution and complete annihilation respectfully around pounding drums, tempo changes and punk guitars. The blast beats of "Be Nice Or Go To Hell" are ear drum bursting while "Gloucester's Finest" is a personal shout out to hosts/friends/supporters on the punk scene that ends with some excellent distorted bass.
The outfit can at times shift gears by successfully splashing on more poppy punk tendencies such as on "Grab & Go" or the melodic strums of their Youth Avoiders cover "Grit Your Teeth" but the core of Blame Yourself is the blasting ahead fury of the rumbling "Don't Take It Bad" and the title track which manages to deliver dynamic shifts at just under a minute.
The album closer "Tempus Fugit" hints at more to be offered by the band as they stretch out (for them, two and a half minutes) with a melodic guitar solo and drawn out pacing, successfully proving the band can do more than just slam ragingly.
Hardcore punk works best in smaller bursts as the primal energy becomes whirling, like a hyper kinetic ball of energy which can only be contained for so long. Blame Yourself pushes those forces violently through the speakers as Jodie Faster delivers a dynamite dose of pit filling tunes.
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Reason #1,298 RtBE loves bandcamp. We randomly found this one afternoon and love it. Support the band, buy the record, stream the album on bandcamp or below and peep some video:
In this ongoing Monday Series we will be exploring various artists versions of Bob Dylan song's. Today's artists, Fauk doing a live cover of "Absolutely Sweet Marie"
Thoughts on Original:
The first time we tackled a cover of this tune (one of the most popular in this series):
Color me shocked that we are 36 covers into this series and just now we are getting to someone covering "Absolutely Sweet Marie". The original was one of the most complete songs Dylan has written even if you are never quite sure what he is addressing. He likes the song but surprisingly never played it live until 1988, I find that kinda odd. He dove into this songs' lyrics specifically during a 1991 interview published in Paul Zollo's book Songwriters on Songwriting, Dylan gives an idea of how he sees the song in his explanation of a line about a "yellow railroad":
That's about as complete as you can be. Every single letter in that line. It's all true. On a literal and on an escapist level.... Getting back to the yellow railroad, that could be from looking someplace. Being a performer, you travel the world. You're not just looking out of the same window everyday. You're not just walking down the same old street. So you must make yourself observe whatever. But most of the time it hits you. You don't have to observe. It hits you. Like, "yellow railroad" could have been a blinding day when the sun was so bright on a railroad someplace and it stayed on my mind.... These aren't contrived images. These are images which are just in there and have got to come out.
Tight taught and still somehow allusive, pretty cool and totally Dylan at his finest and a real Blonde on Blonde jam.
The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.
Cover:
Thoughts on Cover Artist:
This is the first time RtBE has heard Fauk and not much can be found online about them, feel free to post any info on the comments and we will update this section. Thoughts on Cover:
This is a really great arrangement of this classic Dylan tune. Fauk punches up the energy and gives their own unique spin on the original. This is what RtBE loves about the series, we keep finding new and cool interpretations of Dylan tunes.
We search the murky back waters of youtube to find full concerts and post them to the site weekly, come back every seven days to help us celebrate Full Show Friday's. These shows are of varying quality and may not be here for long so enjoy them while you can...As always, please support the artist every which way, but especially by seeing them live (if they are still playing)...This week...Post Malone!
Each January RtBE does a Jazz showcase and judging by the clicks, people just aren't as into it as we are. To make up for that, in February we go pop during our Full Show Friday series to blatantly attract page views.
Here is Post Malone's set from Bud Light Dive Bar series in 2018:
When Daniel Johnstonpassed away last year, RtBE mentioned that our gateway into Johnston's music was a Built To Spill cover.
The band was huge fans, backing him on his final tour in 2017, and now comes an album full of covers they recorded prepping for that tour. To be released on May 1st, the directly titled Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston will be released.
You can pre-order the album now on the groups Bandcamp page. Here is the first song from the album, "Bloody Rainbow" and a few other old Built to Spill Daniel Johnston Covers and a tune from their tour together:
On the Drive-By Truckers previous studio release, 2016's American Band, the group tapped into the cultural zeitgeist in a dark year, crafting an album directly of it's time, but informed by years of pain, gun violence, red/blue hate and mental illness. It was an important album, but by design or not, it wasn't an album that inspired lots of repeat listens as the topics were weighty and the music just served the purpose of moving the vital stories along.
That topic of the bands musicality seems to be something they worked on as The Unraveling, keeps the focus directly on modern day USA, but the band has expanded their sonic palate to include fresh sounds engaging the listener with their modern day problems in yet another election year that deals with the exact same topics; pain, gun violence, red/blue hate and mental illness.
The album starts with a piano ballad accented by violins and light beats for "Rosemary with a Bible and a Gun" a classic Patterson Hood penned effort (by way of Bruce Springsteen) about escaping from one bad situation to another, only it excludes the bands patented three guitar attack. Fellow songwriter Mike Cooley's "Slow Ride Argument" puts his fury into a motoring road song which picks up the tempo.
Unlike recent albums which have seen more of a fifty/fifty split between main songwriters Hood and Cooley, this record is dominated by Hood's tales. "Heroin Again" and "Babies in Cages" switch up the bands musical sound while keeping current events front and center. "Heroin Again" pushes up the bass bumping and organ swells while "Babies in Cages" goes full on "Eminence Front" style with more of a dispassionate sense of futility in the vocals concerning the horrors at the border.
Two more classic Hood numbers focus on current struggles. "Thoughts and Prayers" is a powerful straight ahead folk song which not only takes on the asshole politicians and their fear of the NRA, it also makes time for a bridge to tackle flat-earther's, while vilifying the uselessness of the title tandem before a perfect summation of the modern day malaise "21st Century USA", wishing for Amazon to deliver salivation after it's ordered on a mobile phone.
Cooley's "Grievance Merchants" spins a less successful look at Incels and internet trolls, combined with the dour nine minutes of "Awaiting a Resurrection" the album ends on an incredibly bleak note, but such are the times we live in.
All of this and we haven't even mentioned the brightest offering from the band this go around. The first single titled "Armageddon's Back In Town" which infuses the Truckers ominous bad decisions, and no win situations with an upbeat Tom Petty like rocker in stunning fashion. The Truckers haven't had a single like this in quite some years and make the most of it.
While the band mentioned the long and drawn out writing process of the album they recorded with energy throughout. Even at four years removed, The Unraveling is a clear companion piece to American Band, as Hood mentioned:
"More heart and less cerebral perhaps…If the last one was a warning shot hinting at a coming storm, this one was written in the wreckage and aftermath."
That cultural fallout (or The Unraveling) will reverberate for years and thankfully the Drive-By Truckers will continue to be on of the best rock bands going, capturing, fears, dreams and dying hopes of a flawed nation and spinning them into sonic gold.
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Support the band, buy the album and peep some video below:
This one from the Brooklyn based singer is a bit outside of RtBE's wheelhouse but we are thankful to the Glide team for sending it over. Will have a few reviews this month up on the site so stay tuned. Until then...
In this ongoing Monday Series we will be exploring various artists versions of Bob Dylan song's. Today's tune is a cover by Ron Talley of the Dylan tune "What Was It You Wanted?"
Thoughts On Original:
From the first time we tackled a cover of this song: Oh Mercy brought Dylan back in from the creative wasteland that was his 1980's. It had an eerie sense of foreboding, helped by producer Daniel Lanois and the ghosts of New Orleans. The irritable old man in Dylan came out a bit here as well, and "What Was It You Wanted" is a good example of that, a confused searching colors the lyrics as the protagonist just can't seem to get it right.
Cover:
Thoughts on Cover Artist:
Have not heard of Ron Talley before this cover version, but he is a singer songwriter from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Thoughts on Cover:
A pretty solid rendition of the tune with spooky guitar lines and a mix of sounding like Dylan in singing style and moving in his own direction.
