Well, fast-forward two years and Color Tongue are back and ready to rock once more with a brand new EP, Bealing Bells. True to form, the band have woven a psych-pop tapestry, drawing upon the likes of Animal Collective and Yeasayer to produce something that positions itself on the right side of weird. You’ll have to wait until later this summer to hear the whole thing, but we’re very happy to present the first single, ‘Adult Lessons’, to whet your appetites.

The song begins bright and shiny, glittering with an early morning sparkle before kicking into an assertive rhythm, and this style marks the track as a whole. Because, while the song becomes more energetic and lively, the dreamy aesthetic is never punctured, forming something of a wild carnival ride through a series of equally colourful landscapes. That said, there is also a slighter darker and more fierce side to this track too, an unsettling dimension that lurks within the lulls and eventually builds into the final crescendo.

Bealing Bells will be released this summer, so be sure to keep an eye on the Color Tongue Bandcamp and Facebook pages for more information. the band are also heading out on tour, so check the dates below and be sure to show your face if they are calling anywhere near you.

6/21 Port Chester – Garcia’s
7/8 Brooklyn Tape Release show at Elsewhere
7/13 Brooklyn Brooklyn Bazaar
7/17 LA – Offbeat Bar
7/18 Fullerton – The Continental Room
7/19 Santa Cruz – The Crepe Place
7/20 San Francisco – Hemlock
7/21 Oakland – Octopus Literary Salon
7/22 Fairfax – Peri’s

Artwork by Daniel Schmatz

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Luckily, 2016 has changed all that with the announcement of their debut full-length album, Kinda Like Electricity. So far we only have one song to go by, but it’s enough to suggest that the brooding blend of dream pop and indie rock remains. ‘E.V.I.L.’ emerges with a dark energy, like some bluesy shoegaze track played on half-speed, the lyrics emerging like words from a forbidden love letter or the images of a late night fever dream (e.g. “I shaped the weather for my love / ’cause I know she likes to dance out in the thunder / I shaped the weather for my love / Well I guess that she was stuck in under cover”). It seems apt then that they posted a quote from Milan Kundera alongside the song on Facebook.

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love”

The song comes complete with a video. Directed by Mark Leonard, we find a suitably atmospheric dive-bar scene, complete with low lighting, smoky ambience, etc. Without wishing to spoil anything, the film develops to include a mysterious priest, a lot of hard staring, snake-handling, and an epiphanic/death-cultish conclusion. Check it out below:

Kinda Like Electricity is due out on the 15th August, but in the meantime you can grab ‘E.V.I.L.’ from the Medicine Boy Bandcamp page.

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The band have recently completed their second EP, Daytime TV 2, recorded with Connor Jones at Malthouse Studios in Bristol. The new release will continue with the band’s signature sound of “poppy melodies and harmonies, balanced with a subtle lo-fi and psychedelic aesthetic”. But it’s not all bright and sunny. As they describe, “Lyrically the EP is personal, telling of the frustration of our current situation, and the realities we never expect but have to deal with”.

This lyrical darkness is apparent on ‘Cigarettes’, the first single from Daytime TV 2 which we are proud to present today. Like all the best pop songs, it’s laidback sense of cool has undercurrents of something more sombre which lays meat on the bones of the track’s catchy immediacy.

“I wonder why you never put up a fight,
favour solitude and cigarettes in the night,
I wonder why you sit and stare at the walls,
waiting for nothing to happen at all”

The EP will be released track-by-track via the Daytime TV Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages, and will eventually be available in its entirety as a free download.

Photo by André Baumecker

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The release opens with ‘Waitress’, a surf punk track raucous in its twin aims of cynicism and defiance, lead Megan Liscomb delivering her lines with sardonic glee:

“You’ll always be a waitress,
born to serve in a short dress
You’ll always be a waitress
and the bad man never dies”

‘THNX 4 The Sanctuary’ is more moody, the garage rock shifting towards 60s psychedelica, while the title track is similarly shadowy, rumbling and angsty rock-and-roll smothered in a shroud of dry ice. The final track ‘Phantom’ is a definite change of pace, a song about healed wounds and how all bad things do eventually end, providing a tender and reflective finale to a great little EP.

You can buy Spellbreaker now from Velvet Blue Music, including nice CD and vinyl editions. The band hope to release a full length album this year, so we’ll keep you updated.

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“This past year was pretty nightmarish for me – a grandmother whom I was very close to passed away after quick mental decay and hallucinatory visions, a dear friend attempted suicide by pill overdose, I left a long term relationship, and our original guitar player quit to form a new band.  My whole world flipped in a matter of months and all of the songs I began to write were dark, brooding, wallowing meditations in sadness – and quite frankly, I didn’t like it. So I hired a new guitar player (who became our producer/engineer, too – Dave Cerminara) and asked the band to help me write a record where I could be honest and scared and confused, but that remained upbeat with bright, happy melodies. I didn’t want to sing sad songs with sad music because depression sucks.”

This is a perfect summation of the record, fast-paced, energetic and strangely celebratory in terms of sound, yet lyrically honest and quite often dark to the point of bleak. From the laid back psychedelica of ‘Close Call (Adderall Anxiety)’ and ‘Sneakin’ Out’, to the heavy riffs of ‘Liar’ and ‘Yr House Isn’t Haunted’, the songs are shot through with a detached sense of doom, an understanding of personal weakness that obliterates any chance of sentimental hope or self-absorbed melodrama. The feeling is captured perfectly on the punky ‘Tomato Tomato’:

“Id rather suffer than recover from my daily addictions
because at least I know exactly what it is I am getting
its nice to feel like I am in control in control of something”

But that does not mean personality and humour are absent, far from it. ‘It Was Mine (the Whole Time)’ is a cheeky tale of teenage audacity (although is kind of sad if you think about it too much), ‘Sun Spits’ utilises some impressively weird descriptives (“the car crawls like a saturated centipede”) and the blackly triumphant sing-a-long refrain of ‘Thru The Night’ is hard not to love. All together now… “I made it through the night! I made it through the night!”

To put it simply, Shaky At Best is an album about people addicted to trouble, folks gripped by a love-hate relationship with chemicals and loud noises, stuck within the paradox of crippling anxiety coupled with a good-time death wish. It’s about living too hard as a way to escape thinking too hard. Sometimes ideals and bleeding hearts can’t save us, and it’s up to people like Shaky Shrines to make us feel less alone.

You can stream Shaky At Best in it’s entirety below, and buy it from Bandcamp right now.

If you like what you hear, be sure to check out Shaky Shrines’ previous releases, including a 7″ out on Velocity of Sound.

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In a recent interview, we asked North Carolinan folk musician Sarah Louise to name five acts that ours readers should hear. One of her suggestions was Wes Tirey, a familiar name around here – we have already reviewed his albums, collaborations and indeed even chatted with him too. Wes has since put out the tape Louise mentioned on Columbus label Cabin Floor Esoterica.

‘Old Ohio Blues’ starts the release as it means to go on, a slow, sad folk song surrounded by atmospheric drone which creeps and clings like an oneiric fog. A similar technique is employed across the remaining songs, the combination of traditional folk and electronic effects producing a sound that is disconcerting and alluring, Tirey’s vocals cutting through the mist like an unknown narrator, doomed to repeat his regrets. ‘Ballad of the Black Hills Woman’ plays like the late night echoes of a man who has outlived his company, while ‘The Body’s Better’ tells of someone so indebted to their vices that they have given up pretending otherwise. ‘Akhnilo Blues’ reduces the ambient levels in favour of stark guitar and ‘Mexican Blanket’ offers an evocative instrumental interlude, the ever-present reverb creating a strange sense that the song is a recording of the song, a memory that has not lost its lustre. Closer ‘Buffalo Bones’ is a current favourite, combining macabre dream imagery with a tender beauty, creating a song that’s unsettling and striking and would please any of the past masters.

“And I dream the trees were singing
and I dream the river was on fire
and I dream rattlesnakes were upon me,
and my name was cursed for all time.
And I dream the sky had teeth
and I dream of buffalo bones
and I dream the moon was bleeding
and I dream my body was stone.
And I dream of your lily white hands
and I dream of the flowers on your dress
and I dream wild horses surround you
and I dream your stomach grew.”

The tape is packed with so many vivid images that the bigger picture becomes indistinct, like the recollections of a man so old and tired that the border between reality and fantasy has become porous. Gripped by a fever dream, he is desperate and delirious but determined to say what needs to be said before time runs out on him.

All this is a way of saying that Journeyer/Forward, Melancholy Dream is one of Tirey’s best yet. The release is available as a great little cassette via Cabin Floor Esoterica (see below). While you are there, why not dig into the Cabin Floor back catalogue? But consider yourself warned: it can eat up your day pretty quick.

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We featured Sarah Louise late last year, a brief paragraph that described her American primitive album Field Guide as “a lost disc from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music” and promised a new year release on Scissor Tail Records. Well I’m pleased to say that the release is upon us. Part of the Scissor Tail Editions series (which includes the Tirey/Weathers split we also covered), Field Guide has been packaged as a quite beautiful cassette with artwork by Dylan Aycock.

As you can guess from the title and artwork, Field Guide is inspired by the natural world, especially the Black Mountains of North Carolina where Louise resides. While every song is instrumental, the title provides clues as to the context of the pieces, framing each track within a specific time or place or situation. The title track is vivid and rich, swirling around the listener and blossoming with tiny details so that there is something wherever which way you turn. ‘Dog Improv’ casts the listener as a canine explorer rooting through the undergrowth, the tempo changing on a whim to follow scent trails or other curiosities, while ‘Waterways’ adopts a steady background rhythm upon which playful picking becomes the rippling surface. ‘Late Summer Seed Collection’ is radiant and breezy and conjures the smell of an earth warmed by the sun, the small intricacies hidden within the flow mimicking the morphological complexity of the seeds themselves.

Musical comparisons will undoubtedly see you looking backwards, but to use the term ‘old’ in describing this album would not quite grasp the sensation experienced while listening. Instead it seems more apt to say Field Guide exists outside of time as we generally consider it. Listen to John Fahey or Matokie Slaughter or Blind Willie McTell and there is a commonality running through the music that seems to withstand the changeable patterns and trends that are adopted and cast aside across the years. There seems to be an unchanging element at its core, a force defeated by stylistic fads in genres such as pop and rock. Both in sound and theme, Louise manages to circumvent the skin-deep and decidedly human introspection that occupies most genres in favour of something larger and wider, resonating on a deeper level. The songs speak of an association with nature that makes everything else appear incidental, a connection that humanity has attempted to sever for millennia without ever quite succeeding. In this way the album is both sad and joyous, a reminder of all we have missed and all there is left to experience, the terrifying, heartbreaking and glorious comfort that we, as humans, are an oh-so-small part of an oh-so-wonderful world.

We are delighted to have an exclusive stream of the album that will be available up until the release date. Grab a tape or digital download from Scissor Tail Records.

So make sure you pick up a tape or download the album!

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Slows Down is the recording name of Alexander Hawthorne, a self-taught multi-instrumentalist from London who has just released his self-titled debut EP. He describes his music as, “between minimalist, melancholy chamber pop and dense, menacing psychedelic noise rock”. The record was written during Hawthorne’s travels in India and the USA and, quite incredibly considering the lush and layered sound, is an entirely solo effort. Taking inspiration from a wide range of luminaries including Swans, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Radiohead, he uses a diversity of techniques, from humming, moaning drones to spiky, cathartic crescendos and a dash of psychedelic hypnotism. But despite the expansive instrumentation,things never stray too far from the refined, minimalist values, the glowing core at the centre of all the tumult and noise.

Opener ‘The Blues Easing’ kicks things off to a slightly ominous start, with stark guitars and a steady thudding drum beat and a haunting atmosphere snaking around everything. The music is backed by Alexander’s intimately mumbled vocals, sounding at once both sad and slightly dangerous. Next is ‘On The Street’, a meandering slow build of a track which eventually explodes into bright shining life in the last minute. ‘In My Room’ has an almost spaghetti western feel, with a militaristic drum beat and dramatic swells of instrumentation. Hawthorne cites Middle Eastern classical music as an influence and perhaps that is what comes to the fore here? On this track especially it is amazing to think that this is the effort of just one man, and I am interested to hear how these songs sound when Alexander puts together a full band to play live later this year. The EP closes with ‘The Way Down Leering’, over seven minutes of menacing post-rock-meets-lo-fi rock, something along lines of The Twilight Sad meets Liars, complete with subdued deadpan vocals and an airy, hushed lull of near-silence except the twinkling of a xylophone.

You can buy Slows Down EP on 12″ vinyl or as a pay-what-you-want download via the Slows Down Bandcamp page.

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So when David Roderick Cameron, AKA Chips Calipso, emailed us to tell us about his new album, it was pretty strange to tell him (a man from Melbourne, Australia, who currently has 78 ‘likes’ on Facebook) that we were already listening to the album.

I Walked Outside and Felt the Sun is a lovely slice of psychedelic dream pop, complete with a superbly lo-fi veneer. Imagine what MGMT would sound like if they wanted to be garage rock band rather than The Beatles. ‘Tibetan Clouds’ brings to mind the hallucinogenic strangeness of Evangelicals, ‘I Get Back’ is a punkier affair that channels the attitude of Wavves, whereas ‘Pines 2009’ is more laid back, that laconic sort of rock music that sounds good on holidays. Overall, it’s a perfect antidote to these last few summer evenings where the night draws in a little too early.

You can get the album on a pay-what-you-can basis from Bandcamp.

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Edinburgh’s Now Wakes The Sea seem to exist at numerous points on this spectrum, with nods to pop music, lo-fi indie rock and downright weird psychedelica and drone. Originally the solo project of Alan McCormack, Bildungsroman sees NWTS become a band, a band which utilizes a whole manner of weird and wonderful sounds to create their schizoid songs. Imagine locking The Antlers, You Won’t, The Microphones, Owen Ashworth and goodness knows who else in a haunted junk shop and demanding they record an album with makeshift instruments crafted from whatever they could find. The result is every bit as good as it sounds.

A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, and this album sees NWTS evolve not just in terms of numbers but in sound and maturity. Listening to their previous releases, you get a sense of the arc that their music is taking, and appreciate their efforts to explore new territory. The promo information from label Mini50 Records quotes John F. Kennedy: “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

Mini50 Records are one of the very best labels in their willingness to release albums that push boundaries and challenge expectations. We have covered this before with Old Earth, discussing how his music stands up as pieces of art, refusing to bow down to conventions and compromise ideals for accessibility. With NWTS this is thrown into sharp relief as they prove in parts of the album that they are more than capable of doing the popular bouncy indie rock thing. They could easily have put together a solid, entertaining collection of songs which would have been well received. No listeners would have questioned their choices. No-one would be thinking ‘why didn’t they try to explore some weird stuff here? Why did they settle for this great little lo-fi pop album?’

The conclusion is that their forays into the bizarre and challenging were not a choice but a need. This is not a band peddaling imitation in an attmept to get ahead in the Big Blogosphere Popularity Contest, nor is it an act that was not thinking of the listener when writing and recording. This is an attempt to communicate a specific interpretation of what it means to be human, and it is up to us listeners if we want to put in the effort to understand and appreciate it.

This album opens up an interesting debate on the value of effort (on the part of the consumer) in relation to art, and how this should be balanced with accessiblity. How effort and reward should be related, and how instant gratification could ultimately limit the effectiveness (intensity?) of said gratification. There are probably far more knowledgable people than myself discussing this very topic, so I won’t go any deeper than that, but I feel it should be known that art which requires some effort on the part of the reader/viewer/listener is always taking a chance, as a big investment requires a big payoff. While this album does require an investment (even the title demands further reading), rest assured that it is an investment worth your while.

You can buy Bildungsroman from Bandcamp or via Mini50 Records.

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