Kieran Hebden returns with his first album in 4 years. There Is Love In You will be released on January 25th and is preceded by a single Love Cry.
Love Cry, backed with the track Our Bells, is available in the shops now on 12” vinyl . A 12” with Love Cry remixes from Joy Orbison and Roska will be available from November 23rd.
Head over to the Domino site for a listen…
There is Love In You
1 – Angel Echoes
2 – Love Cry
3 – Circling
4 – Pablo’s Heart
5 – Sing
6 – This Unfolds
7 – Reversing
8 – Plastic People
9 – She Just Likes To Fight
The new video for the track Comfortable from this year’s brilliant Degrees Of Existence album.
Dimmer are playing two Australian dates this week:
- Wednesday 11th Nov, Annandale Hotel, Sydney
- Thursday 12th Nov, Northcote Social Club, Melbourne
As reported in this week’s The Brag, V Festival owner Virgin Management is still talking to other promoters about staging the festival in 2010. Michael Coppel Presents decided not to remain a 50% partner but main sponsors Virgin Mobile, Toohey’s Extra Dry and Visa are keen for the event to take place.
A decision is expected in the next few weeks.
Dreamin` Man Live `92 revisits Harvest Moon 17 years after its release by pulling together a series of intimate solo acoustic performances Young did at the time. The album was produced by Young and John Hanlon and recorded and mixed by Tim Mulligan.
The track-listing for Dreamin` Man Live `92 is as follows:
- Dreamin` Man
- Such A Woman
- One Of These Days
- Harvest Moon
- You And Me
- Hank To Hendrix
- Unknown Legend
- Old King
- Natural Beauty
- War Of Man
In other Neil news…
As part of its ongoing Archives reissue campaign with legendary singer-songwriter Neil Young, Reprise Records will release re-mastered versions of the first four of Young’s classic solo albums, 1969’s Neil Young and Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, 1970’s After the Gold Rush, and 1972’s Harvest.
These very special reissues, which will be available on November 23rd, have each been re-mastered from the original analog master tapes by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering Studios in Hollywood, CA.
The albums are being reissued on both vinyl and compact disc. The individual albums are being issued on 140 gram vinyl to retail.
There is also a box set of the four albums pressed on audiophile 180 gram vinyl. Vinyl will be pressed at Pallas MFG/Germany—the world’s premiere record-pressing plant.
The box sets will be individually numbered in gold foil stamp and strictly limited to 3,000 units worldwide. They will only be available through www.becausesoundmatters.com and www.neilyoung.com.
Tom Biery, General Manager of Warner Bros. Records and vinyl enthusiast commented: “In all my years of working vinyl releases, I was shocked at just how incredible these Neil Young re-masters sound. There is no doubt in my mind that when listening to these recordings on the new, upgraded vinyl format, it will be as close as anyone will audibly come to actually being in the studio listening to the original master tapes. It now sounds as if you are in the room with Neil during the session.”
The four albums will also be released on 24 karat gold CDs, packaged in Gary Burden designed cardboard wallet packs. The four gold CD albums are housed in a numbered slip case, limited to 2,500 worldwide, and available only through www.becausesoundmatters.com and www.neilyoung.com.
All four titles have already been released to retail on standard CDs, housed in jewel boxes.
[as reported by Business Wire 2009]
New Zealand’s Chris Knox had a stroke earlier this year and as a result his friends and other musicians rallied around him to provide assistance, companionship and now financial help.
The double CD Stroke – Songs For Chris Knox is being released in New Zealand on Monday November 16.
The album will be released on Chris’ own label – A Major Label & distributed by Rhythm Method. The stunning cover was 
designed by Chris’ fellow Tall Dwarf, Alec Bathgate and uses Chris’ favourite colour combination of yellow & black.
Songs are covered from all of Chris’ musical career – The Enemy, Toy Love, Tall Dwarfs, solo, & his most recent band The Nothing.
The album features tracks by such artists as Jay Reatard, Shayne Carter, The Mountain Goats, The Verlaines, Boh Runga, David Kilgour, Don McGlashan, Will Oldham and many more – 32 tracks in all.
There is a party & benefit gig for Chris to celebrate the release of this album Friday November 20 at The Kings Arms.
The line-up is Dimmer (featuring Shayne Carter’s back catalogue), Don McGlashan, David Kilgour, The Bellbirds, & The Pyjama Party (featuring Neil Finn). Entry is $30 which includes a copy of the double CD ‘STROKE – Songs For Chris Knox’. Doors open at 8.30pm. No pre-sales.
All proceeds will go to assisting Chris with his recovery.
STROKE – Songs For Chris Knox Record Release Party and Benefit Gig
November 20, 8.30pm
Kings Arms, Auckland
$30, including a copy of the double CD
1 2 3 4 5 reviewed for FasterLouder
Reunions, reunions… They are a dime a dozen these days, ranging from the heavyweights like Pixies, Led Zeppelin, Blur and Pavement to those that don’t garner the same column inches but are just as important like Magazine and Gang Of Four. Alice In Chains are in a slightly different boat in that they lost their singer Layne Staley to an early heroin grave and were faced with the conundrum of replacing their iconic frontman. Other bands have attempted the same thing (Blind Melon, Queen, INXS) with little success so Alice In Chains took their time and waited until William Duvall appeared on their radar and then tentatively began to write songs and tour their back catalog as a way of blooding the new singer.
Their show in Sydney at the start of 09 was simply astounding and showed that Duvall was a deserved replacement for Staley. He possessed a similar enough voice to do justice to the old songs and enough of his own style to make the role his own.
That brings us to Black Gives Way To Blue, the new album 14 years after their last self titled one. The death of Staley is all over the album but wisely it isn’t overly sentimental. The title alone references the transition of the band from mourning to a brighter future.
The title and closing track is the rawest moment on the album that is directed at Staley as Jerry Cantrell takes the lead vocal over Elton John’s piano and sings a heartfelt paean to a lost brother. There is no judgement or anger, just a fading memory as he sings ‘Fading out by design / consciously avoiding changes / curtain’s drawn now its done / silencing all tomorrows’. Cantrell seems to be accepting that Staley’s death was a suicide as a result of his lifestyle choices (or lack of).
Elsewhere Staley’s ghost looms large over the songs When The Sun Rose Again and Your Decision. All Secrets Known is also about their past but it puts it into the context of their future with its opening lines ‘Hope / a new beginning / time / time to start living’.
The great thing about Alice in Chains is they remain true to their essence. Black Gives Way To Blue retains the signature sound of Cantrell’s chugging, snaking and wah-driven insidious solos. They play metal that is slowed and intensified without becoming cartoonish and they have the ability (as on Your Decision) to strip away the bombast and reveal their softer side like they did on the Jar Of Flies EP back in 1993.
First single Check My Brain is a bit of a no brainer musically and was probably chosen as the most accessible track to re-introduce the band. It has a massive chorus that should make it an anthem of sorts but listen closer and it is a nice critique of the excesses of LA and sun, guns and bongs.
Duvall often has an uncanny likeness to Staley, especially on A Looking In View with his strangled howls and threatening tone. Once he hits the chorus though, there is a a stronger melodic thread that he promotes and it balances the song brilliantly as if he is channeling multiple voices.
Black Gives Way To Blue is a bold and confident return for Alice In Chains. In light of the recent work of their 90’s contemporaries like Pearl Jam (fairly uninspired), Soundgarden (Cornell, please wake up!) they stick to their strengths without just recycling past glories. With their new album Alice In Chains confirms that like Dinosaur Jr they are most deserved of a second run and they can still threaten and serenade with a bruised beauty that will engage both old and new listeners.
Golden Plains have announced the first batch of acts to appear at the Meredith Supernatural Amphitheatre on March 6-8 2010.
Pavement
Dinosaur Jr
Calexico
Dirty Projectors
The Big Pink
Tame Impala
Midnight Juggernauts
Super Wild Horses
Monotonix
Gaslamp Killer
Nashville Pussy
Jeffry Lewis and The Junkyard
The Cruel Sea
The Crayon Fields
Ransom
Andee Frost
Wooden Shjips
Royal Headache
http://2010.goldenplains.com.au/
interviewed for The Dwarf...
For a band that has played shows with The Who, Rolling Stones, Muse, Queens Of The Stone Age and Red Hot Chili Peppers and recently had two singles reach the UK top ten, Biffy Clyro isn’t a name that finds much recognition in this part of the world. The are one of those bands that has somehow gone under the radar in Australia and yet, by rights they should be extremely popular with their mix of classic, stoner and indie rock sensibilities.
On the eve of the release of their fifth album Only Revolutions, bassist James Johnston chats with The Dwarf about touring, their steady rise to fame and getting Josh Homme to play on their new album.
Biffy Clyro are about to head off on a tour that will bring them to Australia (for the third time) this New Years Eve. They’ve built their reputation on the back of constant gigging though it isn’t something the band are getting sick of. “There are aspects to it that are difficult like saying goodbye to loved ones, spending all the time in the bus. The three of us are really close and that extends to the rest of the crew guys, we’ve been a real team for the last few years so we’ve got each others back looking after each other. Its like a family on the road,” says Johnston.
“We’re sad to be leaving home but really excited to be going out and getting the chance to tour the album. We’ll probably have a week or so off after we come down to Oz but we’ll more or less just keep going, playing as many shows as we can. We built our foundations as a band playing live and its something I think is really important. You find out what a band is really like if you go and see them live so its really important for us to keep touring,” Johnston explains.
Only Revolutions sees the band upping the ante with a stronger sound and some musical surprises. “We’ve tried to make an ambitious rock record. Musically we’ll always be a hard rock band, a guitar band. Thats where our history lies but its important to be ambitious as well and try to surprise people a little bit. We started the album with a big brass section which I guess is something people didn’t expect. Compared to the last record its a much more hopeful and optimistic sounding record. Its looking to the future compared to looking back on the past,” Johnston says.
Though there is the cliche of bands always saying that their new album is their best one, Johnston believes they have produced their best work on Only Revolutions. “I think it is our best so far. For any band thats the ambition, you don’t want to release an album and say ‘yeah its great but not quite as good as our last one’. That would be a hard thing to go through I imagine. We always want to make music we are proud of and I guess in doing so we try and make music we like. Hopefully it passes the litmus test and other people will like it as well. You’ve go to listen to yourself and what sounds honest and feels good to you. Along the way we’ve worked hard to make sure that was true on this album.”
Making friends with other bands on tour can be a useful thing, especially when that can lead to someone like Josh Homme contributing to your album. “We hooked up with Josh on some tours in Europe and the US and got on really well and he taught us a lot about the relationships you have with different people in the industry and your record label,” explains Johnston. “Queens don’t seem to be reading off anyone else’s hymn sheet, they’re just doing their own thing and I think we’ve learnt a lot from that band.”
The slow and steady rise of Biffy Clyro has meant they have avoided the explosion of hype that can be detrimental to a long term career so the band is naturally pleased with the way things have rolled out. “You try and have an element of control over these things but a lot of the time it is out of your control and back in the day we never felt like we were struggling. We were definitely on the toilet circuit but it was great fun, we’ve loved every second of what we’ve always done and were never in too much in a hurry to get away from that. Some bands are very careerist and want to get to a certain point by next month and thats the way its gonna be. We definitely are an ambitious band but we’ve enjoyed every step of the way,” says Johnston.
Keep an eye out for Biffy Clyro playing around Australia at the end of the year. The Scottish trio are renowned for playing hugely energetic shows that harness both the nuances of indie rock and the bombastic riffage of hard rock. They are sure to be a festival favourite and a name that will become more popular with local rock fans as a result.
interviewed for FasterLouder...
When The Fiery Furnaces first arrived with 2003’s Gallowsbird’s Bark they seemed determined from the outset to shake up indie pop with their interesting and quirky indie tales about fantastical lands, leaky tunnels and asthma attacks. Many may have dismissed them as eccentric oddballs but six albums later they are still exploring the possibilities of pop on I’m Going Away, their most conventional and catchy collection of songs.
The writing of the new record was much more collaborative than previous efforts where Matt Friedberger played a much stronger role than his sister Eleanor. Relaxing after a brief south east US tour she explains the songwriting process for the new album.
“I wrote nine of the twelve songs. A few were old songs that Matt helped me flesh out and others were ones we worked on in the room at the same time. We definitely talked about what kind of record we were going to make and how we were going to do it.”
Bouncing ideas off each other even led to the duo using the same lyrics in two songs with very different sounding results. “I mostly have lyrics and Matt places them to music if we are doing something together. There was an instance on Cups & Punches where he had a backing track and I put the words over it and then he thought ‘oh these words should be for a different sort of song’ so then he wrote the music to the song Charmaine Champagne and we ended up with two songs with essentially the same lyrics,” Eleanor explains. “We’ve done that live a lot but not on record before.”
The ending of a relationship is one of the main themes on I’m Going Away. Eleanor agrees it is a common topic across most of the twelve songs but not one that is tied to a specific person, time or place. “A lot of the songs we wrote, like Drive To Dallas, we wrote in the same room, I had the words and we purposely wanted to have something that sounded universal and although it’s all true stuff that happened to me it happened a long time ago so i don’t want to make it sound like its all up to date,” she stresses. “Breaking up is something that everyone can relate to and there is a lot of that subject matter on the album because we wanted to do something that was more universal and not so specific like so many of our other albums.”
Continuing the spirit of adventure that always drives their music, the Friedbergers have both recorded solo cover versions of I’m Going Away for release in the coming months. “We hope to have them done and out by the end of September as a digital release. It will be 6 songs of mine and 6 of his and then hopefully we will release the rest later. They are totally different, the same words but different arrangements,” explains Eleanor. “Mine are just guitar, a little bit of bass playing and some percussion, they are very stripped down. I’m not a terrific musician, Matt has the advantage because he is singing so they sound quite different. His have more instrumentation I guess. He went to a real studio and I did mine at home. I’m curious to see which ones people like more,” she ponders.
Dipping her toes into her own recordings has also raised the prospect of a solo album from Eleanor. “Yeah, doing this little project covering the songs on I’m Going Away made me want to do more. I don’t have any definite plans but I think before I die I will make a solo record it is safe to say.”
Historically, bands that feature siblings are often prone to conflict. A case in point being Oasis, The Kinks, Happy Mondays. Eleanor agrees but is quick to stress that the negative aspects are balanced with many positive ones. “We’re not relaxed, we are both uptight in our own ways and argue all the time. Matt is 4 years older than me and we grew up with rooms next to each other and he was very overbearing in many ways. He played his music as loud as he wanted to and kept it on as long as he wanted to and that was both good and bad for me. He kind of brainwashed me in a good way because I ended up liking everything he liked,” she says. “I think a lot of siblings usually reject what their older brother or sister likes but I totally accepted everything. I like other things that he didn’t introduce me to but for the most part I liked everything he liked so we have the exact same musical references and that makes being in a band so much easier.”
“Because we grew up fighting constantly we are used to it and know how to deal with it. We get into fights very quickly but we also forgive each other very quickly and I think people in other bands leave it for a long time to get into a fight and then when they do it just explodes and it destroys the relationship. We have resentments toward each other but they are very transparent so it makes thing easier,” explains Eleanor.
“The downside is that you are in a rock band and its supposed to be cool and crazy but you are with your older brother so all of those cool and fun and crazy things just don’t seem to happen. When you have to spend every night sharing a hotel room with him it can be a bit of a drag,” she laughs.
In concert The Fiery Furnaces are renowned for changing the arrangements of their songs and the format of their shows. At one point a few years ago they eliminated all breaks between songs in an effort to shake up the traditional gig experience. “For this record we’ve been playing it pretty straight. For the last record we were playing maybe a couple of song back to back but for the most part we play it the old fashioned way, one song at a time. I do miss the athleticism that went along with doing a 40 minute set without stopping. It takes the performance to a whole other level. It feels like more of a performance than a bunch of dudes and a chick standing there singing a song. It feels more dramatic,”explains Eleanor.
Whatever format their show takes, the good news for Australian fans is that the band expect to return to Australia in 2010, possibly around February/March, and on the strength of I’m Going Away they are likely to attract larger audiences keen to experience the wonderful world of The Fiery Furnaces.
Bluesfest have announced the first list of bands that are coming to Byron Bay in 2010 for the Easter long weekend.There are a couple of goodies in there, read on…
Crowded House
Buddy Guy
Roger Hodgson From Supertramp
The Gipsy Kings
Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club
Jeff Beck
Lyle Lovett
Rockwiz
Jimmy Barnes plays the Rhythm and the Blues
Jessica Mauboy
The Swell Season
Newton Faulkner
Dr John and the Lower 911
Bela Fleck’s African Project, featuring Oumou Sangare and band
Blue King Brown
Al Di Leola World Sinfonia
Gogol Bordello
Fat Freddy’s Drop
Joe Bonamassa
Peter Green and Friends
The Flatlanders
Avett Brothers
Justin Townes Earle
Renee Geyer
Colin Hay Band
Old Crow Medicine Show
Lil Band O’Gold
Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express
Robert Gordon & The Gang They Couldn’t Hang
