Fred Thomas and Betty Marie Barnes first started collaborating as part of Michigan-based indie pop outfit Saturday Looks Good To Me. The pair sharing vocal duties on 2004 Polyvinyl release Every Night, and Barnes joined the outfit on subsequent albums and tours. During a break in SLGTM project in 2010, the pair took to the stage in Ypsilanti to play their first show as a new duo which came to be known as Mighty Clouds. A self-titled album followed, honing a lo-fi indie pop aesthetic and showing another dimension to what was now clearly a fruitful collaboration. Tours followed, then SLGTM returned and the pair’s journey continued, and those releases which featured Barnes’s vocals became some of the most treasured by fans.
So treasured, in fact, that Antiquated Future decided the collaboration between Thomas and Barnes would be the perfect focus for the latest in their Selected Songs series. In recent years, these releases have preserved, celebrated and reintroduced some of the finest indie releases, offering compilations of singles, rarities and demos and live takes to give the fullest picture of the acts on show. You Can Tell Everyone Under the Sun (Selected Songs, 2004-2013) collects the very best tracks from across the Mighty Clouds discography, as well as those Saturday Looks Good To Me songs to which Barnes lent her vocals. “The concept for this volume arrived several years ago, making iPod playlists of all the SLGTM songs she sang on,” the label explain:
Live recordings where Betty is singing some classic songs she hadn’t originally recorded with the group, lost Mighty Clouds tracks—the material was all so strong, yet difficult to arrange cohesively. But it had to be done! This sort of compiling—bringing together tracks from all over to tell a story that is important to us is what the Selected Songs series is all about.
But as if that wasn’t enough, Antiquated Future are also releasing a two brand new songs recorded by Mighty Clouds as a standalone 7″ single. Excitingly described as the “beginning of a new chapter,” A-side ‘Anagram’ signals an evolution of the Mighty Clouds style, maintaining some of the sincerity and retro wistfulness for which the project is known but adding new layers of atmosphere. The track’s gauzy depth nods towards noise or almost shoegaze sensibilities, while the ambiguity of the lyrics only plays into the complicated mood—where a bright energy is stalked by an unshakeably foreboding shadow.