Rock & Indie 351 Items

Gentle Ben and His Sensitive Side is now Gentle Ben and His Shimmering Hands: a new line-up means a new album! Here's the new line-up: Ben Corbett (aka Gentle Ben, vox in SixFtHick), Tony Giacca (bass in SixFtHick, guitars in GB&HSS), Dan Baebbler (guitars in SixFHick, bass in GB&HSS) and Jhindu-Pedro Lawrie (drums)."Brut" is how the album is titled and brut it is! The band creates create music of a rare and savage beauty. Soaring highs, crunching lows and in between only the sound of grown men crying into their beers and young lesbians gasping for air.

As she's gotten older, Ella Smoker has found that her subconscious has been trying to tell her "some pretty wacky stuff". Thoughts will come to the 21-year-old singer-songwriter in dreams, or as she writes lyrics in studio sessions, words floating onto the page before she's really had a moment to realise what they are. "As soon as we start making the music, my brain sort of turns off," she explains. "I'll be sitting there, writing all this stuff that feels like a load of nonsense, and a month later, I'll look back and be like `oh'. It all comes from a place I didn't even realise was there." In learning how to open up to herself, gglum ended up finding a kindred spirit in producer Karma Kid (Maisie Peters, Shygirl, Connie Constance), pushing past her natural bedroom-pop introversion to find joy in the process of collaboration. Whether it's the ragged radio-rock of `SPLAT!' ("basically about realising that somebody you held up very highly is actually just a massive shambles of a person") or the riotous, industrial energy of `Easy Fun', Smoker is able to reshape her vocal around the mood, creating a record which expertly balances light and shade. "I've never really done anything in like that vocal style before," she says of `Easy Fun's near-spoken delivery. "I love that song because it's not something I would have come up with on my own, but Karma Kid was great at pushing me out of my comfort zone. I just thought like, look: I can be a little silly with this." The release of `The Garden Dream' will offer gglum plenty more opportunity to get both silly and serious, to be bold in her exploration of new ideas and sounds But it will also offer the opportunity to further accept herself as the dreamlike artist she always wanted to be; confidently embellishing acoustic worlds that her listeners can burrow safely within. "I feel like I naturally gravitate towards wanting to make musical spaces that you can feel like you're living in, rather than trying to make songs", she says. "That's something I really wanted to solidify with this album: I basically want to make music that feels like when you're looking out the window and it's the end of the film and you're imagining what comes next. That's the sound of what I want to be doing."

“In November of 1982, I went into the studio with Government Issue to record what was to be their first full-length album. Up until that time, they had only released the Legless Bull 7-inch EP, and the tape they recorded early 1982 would take over a year and a half to be released as the Make An Effort 7-inch EP. The members of G.I. excelled at driving each other crazy and there was a lot of arguing, but still we had a great session at Inner Ear and we managed to track 20 songs in one day. From the beginning the band had been divided on what to record, and it was only after much debate that they decided to leave off the material they had recorded with the earlier line-ups and only put out 10 new songs. In early 1983 Dischord was strapped for cash, meaning that we could only work on one release at a time. Since all of our money was tied up with the manufacturing of Minor Threat’s Out of Step 12-inch EP, the G.I. record would have to wait. A new DC label, Fountain of Youth expressed an interest in releasing Boycott Stabb, so it was decided to do a ‘split-label’ record. In this case, Fountain of Youth put up the money and we let them use the Dischord Records name to help with context and distribution. It has since been reissued on a number of different labels and formats, but after coming across the master tapes and hearing the songs that had been left off, we thought it would be cool to release the complete session, and to fi nally release the record on Dischord proper. In going through the tapes, I discovered that most of the outtake songs were never mixed, so earlier this year I took the recordings back into the studio. Hearing the separated tracks amazed me. Such great playing and songs! With the technological advances in the recording world making multi-tracking and overdubbing so common, it’s easy to forget that studios could also be used as something more akin to a photo-booth, capturing what was happening at that very moment. Most of the early Dischord sessions were essentially ‘live’ recordings, so the bands had to be able to play, and because the budgets were minuscule, they had to get the songs down in short order. G.I. stepped up on both counts.”—Ian MacKaye, August 2010.

Gwendoline is an ex-underdog duo on the indie scene in France. Micka and Pierre, sensitive losers and big blowhards of the start-up generation, create their very special brand of electro wave with haunting and poetic spoken word, their main source of inspiration being the conversations at the bar and the people they observe aro...

Hannah Mohan’s new album is a first in more ways than one. Time Is a Walnut is the first solo release from the Western Massachusetts singer and songwriter, after nearly a decade fronting indie-pop band And the Kids. The album also comes amid the longest stretch Mohan has spent in one place since she left home at 16 to hop freight trains and hitchhike across North America.

Making music has been at the center of Mohan’s life ever since, even as other circumstances have changed—sometimes radically. A long-term relationship crumbled in 2019. Then the pandemic arrived, bringing an end to her band. After writing a batch of new songs taking stock of her situation, Mohan asked Alex Toth of Rubblebucket and Tōth to produce them, the latest installment of a longtime friendship and occasional creative collaboration.

Although Time Is a Walnut is a breakup album, don’t go in expecting tearjerkers. Mohan draws from a richer palette here, with themes of messy eroticism on the sultry “Soaked,” altered consciousness on the buzzy rocker “Heaven and Drugs," and navigating personal hells with Lady Lamb on “Hell.” Throughout, the songs showcase Mohan’s powerful voice, prismatic melodicism and distinctive lyrical sensibility as she processes major events in her life.

Expanded version of the 2020 release that features Ambient mixes, Demo versions and an Alternate mix of "The Tree Of Life"

A sweet golden wind blows, a wonky guitar plays tricks on your mind, an eerie voice slides through the dampness makin your hair stand on end and suddenly you are right in the middle of the sound of Highway Patrol. Whether it's a lonely motel, an overgrown swamp or a strip bar, those songs do indeed take you on a wild and sensual ride. Seems like those instrument swapping freaks have been diving deep into the waters that have been fueling blues and rock'n'roll since the 70ies. Producing a mysterious mixture between country, soul, rhythm'n'roll. (Have dark forces been dippingtheir finger in the pie?) You'll get your heart broken and fixed in no time!, while those putrid drums will make you dizzy with their wild rhythm. Either way they play a barn in front of 30 people or a venue packed to the top, nobody could ever escape their ease 'n' tension. So lets hear what some other guys have to say after listening to this little beast:

In his 15+ years recording as How To Dress Well, LA-based musician Tom Krell has played with the concept of what we hear and how we communicate in order to create music that exists somewhere between celestial transcendence and an outsider approach to what pop music can be. I Am Toward You is the first new How To Dress Well album in six years, with some of h...

Ltd col. indies.only vinyl!In his 15+ years recording as How To Dress Well, LA-based musician Tom Krell has played with the concept of what we hear and how we communicate in order to create music that exists somewhere between celestial transcendence and an outsider approach to what pop music can be...

In the early 1980s, Britain had a vibrant cassette culture that now gets spotlighted through a limited edition 12" featuring multi-instrumentalist Kez Stone's project, Imago. He was a notable name in Cornwall and the West Country's music scenes with previous projects, Artistic Control and Aaah! which have come back via reissues many times in the last ten years. Imago was a new one-ff project that first emerged with one track on the Perfect Motion compilation curated by NTS Radio's Bruno and Flo Dill and now the full LP, originally released in 1985 on the local label A Real Kavoom, has been remastered and added to with three additional gems. Stone's teenage punk influences sit next to Imago's eclectic approach to sound that blends new wave and psychedelic elements into something irresistible.

The recording is plush on noise and tape saturation, staying fervently true to their sound from their self released tape “Love Or Perish”. Thudding high gain rhythm machines, crackling guitars and looping hypnotic bass lines around it all. Blending mid tempo industrial post-punk and dream pop, Hard Gloss doesn’t leave behind the 80s influences for Emily’s new visions. The album is bookended & intermitted by industrial synth-scapes driving home the band’s disposition.