The Kissaway Trail arrives on American shores with a renewed sense of purpose and a new album entitled Sleep Mountain due for release on April 20, via Bella Union. Sleep Mountain adds in dabs of electronica to the breadth of guitars for a contemporary, timeless, vulnerable rock classic.
Joanna Newsom / Peach, Plum, Pear
A really good song from a great debut album, made by one of the best female artists ever.
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Toronto’s Jack Breakfast has recently released The Escapers, a 35-minute song cycle about familial disappointment, love, and ghosts. This is Breakfast’s fourth album, and his first release since 2003. Breakfast fancies himself an amateur naturalist, and enjoys taking photographs of waterbirds in all seasons.
Big Star / Kangaroo
The sounds, the scratches, the ghostly strings, the hammering percussion, the purposeful errors in production and performance, the lyrics (silly and heartbreaking all at once, somehow) and on top of it all, riding above, Alex Chilton’s shimmering haunter of a voice. This song has been breaking my heart since I was a boy and has taught me so much about accidentally-on-purpose musical arrangement.
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Andy Cato and Tom Findlay, better known as Groove Armada, have announced a spring US. tour in support of Black Light, their sixth studio album through Om Records. The tour will find them dropping multiple dates in New York, California, and Florida, including appearances on Morning Becomes Electric and at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami.
Roxy Music / Re-Make Re-Model
A band that have had a great influence on us, particularly in the making of Black Light. Loads of Roxy tracks have been on loop on the tour bus, but this one stands out for me from their first ever eponymous album. It shows just how out there they really were.
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Sisterworld is the follow up to Liars‘ self-titled (2007) and was written and recorded in Los Angeles by Liars and Tom Biller (Kanye West, Beck). It’s the first Liars album to be recorded entirely in the US since 2004’s They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and sees Angus Andrew, Aaron Hemphill and Julian Gross taking inspiration from fringe characters lured to Los Angeles and the resulting subcultures and alternate spaces that they generate.
Clarence Carter / Patches
The more song-oriented Liars’ albums become, the more a song that tells a literal story like this seems the ultimate challenge to produce. For me, writing lyrics that are bare and clear with their meaning is such a scary thing. I have to try and overcome this fear anew with every song.
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Lyon-based Babylon Circus is music laced with ska, gypsy, rock, vaudevillian antics, dancehall and reggae. Their first Australian East Coast tour in 2008 saw the nine piece band sell every show out. They feature on the So Frenchy So Chic compilation and are touring Australia this March.
Django Reinhardt / Minor Swing
Backstage, home, in the bus, cooking or having breakfast, is there a time you wouldn’t love to hear this one? We love it anytime, any style, too, as it’s been remixed and rearranged so many different ways. Still, we love the original best.
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Stalwarts of the Chicago music scene, The J. Davis Trio’s latest album, These Things Happen, features their ever evolving blend of hip hop and garage-jazz with big beats. The band is known for their crisp performances and has shared stages with The Roots, M’shelle N’degleocello, Ozomatli, Reuben Wilson, De La Soul, Maceo Parker, Norah Jones, and many others.
Marlena Shaw / California Soul
Just a great example of a beautifully crafted classic soul song. A masterful balance of big band and intimate soulful expression.
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The power of Afrobeat, sizzling funk, righteous hip hop, rootsy grooves and 20 of the hottest musicians from Melbourne’s booming music scene, all come together on the sublime debut by The Public Opinion Afro Orchestra. Hot on the heels of their impeccable vinyl-only release Two Sides of the Truth/Do Anything Go Anywhere, The Public Opinion Afro Orchestra have made an album to command the attention of world music fans, hip hop aficionados, jazz cats, funk and soul freaks and indie hipsters alike.
Fela Kuti / Shakara
For a band playing Afro-beat, it’s impossible to not cite Fela as a chief inspiration. A giant in both the musical and political arenas, Fela IS afro-beat. Taking musical cues from American funk, jazz and traditional African rhythms, he created his own style, his own way and created music that was felt across the world. It’s a big call, but I think this is my favourite Fela track: a bit dark, but it’s still a mover.
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There’s something about the kind of potent rock and roll fury that Airbourne cranks out, all cylinders firing, that makes you want to chug a beer straight down your throat and punch the air as though it’d touched your wife inappropriately. It sounds crude, we admit. But that’s the thing about these Aussie pub rock rebels. Their music, like new album No Guts. No Glory., are perfect soundtracks for drunken debauchery, and “that’s what we’re here for, mate,” says rowdy lead guitarist and vocalist Joel O’Keeffe.
Charlie Daniels Band / The Devil Went Down To Georgia
It has an awesome story and even more amazing fiddle playing. For a country song, it ROCKS!
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Gardening From The Ground Up Part 1 is Houston native Sarah Elizabeth Foster’s first collection of deeply charged tunes. Filled with raw emotion and wistful reflection, her songs are the product of a vision almost stalled when she was challenged to persevere through the intensive vocal therapy necessary to arrive at what her doctors called a “miraculous recovery” when she was diagnosed with a benign, vocal chord polyp. The record is an unusual acoustic blend of 60s inspired pop, fresh folk and classical motifs wrapped around Sarah’s deep vocals and emotionally rich lyrics.
Joni Mitchell / Both Sides Now
The orchestral arrangement of Both Sides Now is so moving, paired with Joni Mitchell’s voice. The intro starts so perfectly and quietly then you immediately grasp her life experience the second you hear her voice. At the 2:40, mark when the horns come in, I always feel my heart swell.
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Magichour, the self-titled debut release from acclaimed songwriting duo Ian Housten Shadwell and Gemma Deacon is an intricate tapestry of sounds wrapped into dreamy pop songs. Gemma and Ian are best known as the songwriting team behind iconic Sydney acoustic pop classicists, Cactus Child.
Magnet / Where happiness Lives
I have always had a deeply sentimental side, the kind of cloying cry in the movies kind of girliness that has marked me as a soft cock lover of the acoustic ballad, and they don’t come anywhere softer or more ballad like than this fingerpicked folk paen to a lost love. It became the soundtrack for a particularly difficult break up in which I would press replay with a Pavlovian frequency, each time feeling the tears well in my eyes with a delicious sadness. My own instincts aside and I can recommend it you as a very pretty song indeed by someone who I think is more or less unknown outside of his native Denmark.
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