JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Gang Starr.
Throwback: Black History Month: Thelonious Monk
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Thelonious Monk.
Throwback: Black History Month: MC Lyte
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to MC Lyte.
Since their formation in Cincinnati back in 1986, The Afghan Whigs — currently Greg Dulli (vocals, guitar), John Curley (bass), Patrick Keeler (drums), multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson and newest member, Blind Melon’s Christopher Thorn (guitar) — have a long-held reputation for never playing by convention: During the plaid and grunge era of the early 90s, the members of The Afghan Whigs stood apart from their contemporaries by wearing suits and for being more likely to slide into a soulful groove than a power chord driven riff.
Reuniting after an 11 year hiatus in 2012, the JOVM mainstays released two critically applauded albums, 2014’s Do to the Beast and 2017’s In Spades, that found the band writing and recording music that furthered their story together, while pushing their sound in new directions.
“I’ll Make You See God,” is the first bit of new material from the JOVM mainstays since 2017’s In Spades, and the single is a roaring headbanger centered around fiery power chord driven riffage, thunderous drumming Greg Dulli’s imitable crooning and an arena rock friendly hook. It’s arguably one of the hardest and aggressive songs they’ve written and recorded in close to 30 years.
“That’s one of the hardest rock songs we’ve ever done,” the band’s Greg Dulli says in press notes. “It was written and performed on sheer adrenalin.”
Along with the new single, the JOVM mainstays announced a short run of US tour dates. which will see them playing small venues across the East Coast, Midwest and Southeast. The tour closes out with a May 25, 2022 stop at Music Hall of Williamsburg. As always, tour dates are below.
2022 TOUR DATES
05/11 Fort Lauderdale, FL Culture Room
05/12 Tampa, FL The Orpheum
05/13 Orlando, FL The Social
05/14 Atlanta, GA Terminal West
05/15 Carrboro, NC Cat’s Cradle
05/17 Nashville, TN The Basement East
05/18 Louisville, KY Headliners Music Hall
05/20 St. Louis, MO Delmar Hall
05/21 Milwaukee, WI Turner Hall Ballroom
05/22 Indianapolis, IN The Vogue
05/24 Pittsburgh, PA Mr Smalls Theatre
05/25 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg
New Audio: Babeheaven Shares a Slow-Burning and Atmospheric Meditation on Loss
London-based indie pop quintet Babeheaven — led by Nancy Anderson (vocals) and Jamie Travis (instrumentation and co-production along with Simon Byrt) can trace their origins back to when Anderson and Travis struck up a friendship while working in shops located on the same street.
With their critically applauded, full-length debut Home For Now, the British pop outfit established a sound and approach guided more by mood than message, while thematically reflecting the disengagement that comes from years of uncertainty, fits and stops and crushing disappointment.
Babeheaven’s highly-anticipated sophomore album Sink Into Me is slated for a March 18, 2022 release through Believe. And while the album continues the British pop outfit’s long-held reputation for crating music that is imbued with feelings of loneliness and disconnection, the album’s material is rooted in a central tension: there’s disillusionment; but there’s also a yearning for growth and evolution.
Informed by the death of two close family friends of Anderson’s within a year of each other, the album explores love and loss — and the very human desire for comfort and connection. Unlike its predecessor, the members of Babeheave were able to write songs together in the studio, along with Luca Mantero, Milo McGuire and Ned Smith. “It was more organic,” Babeheaven’s Jamie Travis says of Sink Into Me‘s songwriting process, which happened over the course of six months over the course of 2020. “It sounds ridiculous but we hadn’t been able to do that before.”
Reportedly Sink Into Me sees the members of Babehaven making a huge step forward: Sonically, the band sees the band distilling their influences and coming into their own distinct style. “It was a conscious decision to move away from being a trip-hop bedroom-pop band,” says the band’s Travis. “We did that on the last album; now it was time to try something different.” The trip-hop references are still there — but they no longer dominate; rather, the album reportedly finds the band crafting a decidedly widescreen sound that seamlessly meshes elements of pop, R&B, indie rock and electronica.
The end result is an album that sees the London-based act encapsulating the past few years while attempting to make something universal. “We’re not trying to write hits,” says Jamie. “We’re trying to write good songs that people can connect with.”
Earlier this year, I wrote about Sink Into Me‘s third single, “Make Me Wanna” expresses an aching and maddening yearning for connection in a sweet, somewhat old-fashion love song, featuring Brooklyn-based emcee Navy Blue about missing that special someone who may be an ocean away.
“Heartbeat,” Sink Into Me‘s fourth and latest single is a slow-burning and atmospheric song centered around Anderson’s gorgeous and achingly plaintive vocals, shimmering acoustic guitar, glistening synths, chugging beats which propel the song forward and a sinuous bass line. While sonically the lush arrangement seems to mesh elements of trip hop, Dido-like pop and Quiet Storm-like soul, “Heartbeat” is inspired by a profound experience of loss:
“the lyrics to ‘Heartbeat’ were written on my way back from Luca’s house. We drove past a car crash, which had a blue tarpaulin over it,” Babeheaven’s Nancy Anderson recalls. “It means a fatal incident has happened, but I didn’t know that until the driver told me. I wrote a poem about the moment — because really hit me, deeply.
Later, we started a song and we were caught in a cycle of chords. It was a good opportunity to use that poem.
Inspired by Arthur Russell, the beat underneath it is pushing the words around. Like a chugging cello. But In this songs the drums go around and round until it breaks.”
Throwback: Black History Month: Bo Diddley
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tributes to Bo Diddley.
Throwback: Black History Month: Fela Kuti
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to the godfather of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti.
DYD is a French production trio, who individually and as a unit have had lengthy careers producing a number of successful French artists — and for remixing the work of internationally acclaimed artists like Dua Lipa, Lauv, Billie Eilish and others.
The trio step into the spotlight as artists and producers with their debut single “Colorblind.” Centered around layers of glistening synth arpeggios, tweeter and woofer rattling, skittering beats and achingly plaintive vocals, “Colorblind” reveals the French production’s ability to craft radio friendly bangers with infectious hooks.
After remixing several big mainstream hits, we thought we had to release our single. And it’s there. Hot. Colorblind will be the title of this first track, pending the EP in the coming months!
DYD also remixes great mainstream artists of the international POP.
Just for their personal pleasure. Whether Dua Lipa or Lauv to Billie Eilish.
Her remixes are validated by the artists’ labe
Currently split between Florida and Berlin, emerging psych pop duo Dream Powder — Argentinian-born multi-instrumentalists and producers Karl Wunsche and Nico Leivo — was conceived as a virtual project as a result of the pandemic.
The Transatlantic psych pop act’s latest single, the Tame Impala-like “Theories” is centered around wobbling and glistening synth arpeggios, a sinuous bass line, stuttering and blown out boom bap-like beats, fuzzy guitars, Leivo’s achingly plaintive vocals paired with an enormous and infectious hook.
As the duo explain, the song reflects on two very disparate events that Dream Powder’s Nico Leivo experienced: A summer weekend in which he was forced to cope with and then deal with the relationship fears and insecurities expressed by a partner. And a contemplative stroll in his neighborhood under the influence of LSD. The song’s narrator nostalgically fantasizes about the two as though they were merged into one moment — a walk that finds the narrator reflecting on the new stresses of a romantic relationship and the desire to escape it through a pleasurable, mesmerizing and buzzy trip.
Throwback: Black History Month: Muddy Waters
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Muddy Waters.
New Audio: Cy Dune Shares a Frenetic and Ecstatic Ripper
Seth Olinsky is a singer/songwriter, guitarist, composer, producer and studio owner best known as the co-founder and lead vocalist of acclaimed, underground, experimental noise folk outfit Akron/Family. He’s also known as the creative mastermind behind the equally acclaimed project Cy Dune, a project that has found Olinsky exploring the blues, 50s rock and 60s/70s photo-punk through his unique lens.
Olinsky’s various projects have displayed a post-genre approach in which he collages several different genres simultaneously to create multiple meanings while purposely juxtaposing authentic and pure songwriting sincerity with self aware meta-meaning and pranksterism.
His latest Cy Dune effort Against Face is slated for a March 3, 2022 release through Lightning Studios. Clocking in at a breakneck 18 minutes, the album is a meta-punk blast through 20th Century art school punk forms mashed together.
In the lead up to the album’s release next month, I’ve managed to write about two of Against Face‘s previously related singles:
- Title track “Against Face” a buzzing and mischievous, mosh pit friendly mash-up of Bob Dylan and The Stooges self-titled album — in particular “No Fun.”
- “Disorientation (Cut Up),” a dazzling and mind-bending synthesis of angular Wire-like post punk, house music, and New Order/Manchester sound centered around enormous, rousingly anthemic hooks paired with Olinsky delivering dance floor friendly cliches in a series of non-sequiturs before the song breaks sown and remixes itself.
Clocking in at about 85 seconds, Against Face‘s latest single “Any More” is a frenetic, polyrhythmic and breakneck freakout featuring buzzing power chords paired with Olinsky’s crooning verses and howled choruses and an ecstatic, free jazz-inspired guitar solo. The song veers out of control like a runaway train — and it’s just a lot of fucking fun.
“My favorite part of this song is how out of control the drums feel – the way that these fast, derailed drums cycle against the slower, almost crooner-like drag of the verse vocals,” Olinsky says in press notes. “The guitar solo is just a sheer jump off a cliff, and I love how it cuts off so sharply into nothingness. There’s an electricity in the song that evokes a wildness and spirit that has an ecstatic, visceral excitement to me.”
London-based dream pop act and JOVM mainstays Still Corners — vocalist and keyboardist Tessa Murray and multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter Greg Hughes — have managed to bounce between chilly and atmospheric pop and shimmering guitar-driven, desert noir through the release of five albums: 2012’s Creatures of an Hour, 2013’s Strange Pleasures, 2016’s Dead Blue, 2018’s Slow Air and 2020’s The Last Exit.
The critically applauded The Last Exit continued where its immediate predecessor left off with 11 songs centered around shimmering and carefully crafted arrangements featuring organic instrumentation paired with Tessa Murray’s smoky crooning. Thematically, the album took the listener through a hypnotic and mesmerizing journey filled with dilapidated and long-abandoned towns, mysterious shapes appearing on the horizon and long trips that blur the lines between what’s there and not there.
The album’s material was brought into further focus as a result of pandemic-related lockdowns and quarantines. “There’s always something at the end of the road and for us it was this album. Our plans were put on hold – an album set for release, tours, video shoots, travel,” Tessa Murray explained in press notes for the album. “We’d been touring nonstop for years, but we were forced to pause everything. We thought the album was finished but with the crisis found new inspiration and started writing again.” Three of the album’s songs — “Crying,” “Static,” and “‘Till We Meet Again” were written during this period and they reflect upon the profound impact of isolation and the human need for social contact and intimacy.
Late last year, the JOVM mainstays released “Heavy Days,” a propulsive and uptempo bop featuring twinkling synth arpeggios, a chugging motorik groove, shimmering and reverb drenched guitars and a soaring hook paired with Murray’s smoky vocals. The end result twas a song that saw the duo retaining the beloved elements of their overall sound — but while seemingly drawing from 80s pop.
Despite the literal weight of it’s title “Heavy Days” may be the most optimistic and sunny song of the JOVM mainstays’ growing catalog. “Sometimes it all feels like too much, there’s a lot to take in reading the news all the time,” Still Corners’ Tessa Murray says in press notes. “We wanted to write a reminder to put the phone down now and again and get out there and live life to the fullest while you can.”
The JOVM mainstays start off the year with the expansive “Far Rider,” a track that sounds as though it could have been on both or either Slow Air or The Last Exit as its centered around shimmering, reverb-drenched guitars and a steady rhythm paired with Murray’s smoky crooning, which at one point are chopped up and distorted.
“This song is about leaving, lost love and finding yourself somewhere on the journey, really it’s about redemption,” Still Corners Tessa Murray explains. I recently drove 6000 miles across the southwest to feel the sun on my face and think. We used the dreamlike nature of the song to capture the landscape and a hypnotic feel to conjure up the long and lonely travel days.”
Still Corners will be embarking on a lengthy tour throughout 2022 that includes a June 16, 2022 stop at Le Poisson Rouge. Check out the rest of the tour dates below.
European Tour Dates
2nd April – Athens, Greece @ Gagarin 205 Tickets
4th April – Lille, France @ L’Aeronef Tickets
5th April – Paris, France @ La Maroquinerie Tickets
6th April – Sint-Niklaas, Belgium @ De Casino Tickets
7th April – Amsterdam, Netherlands @ Q-Factory Tickets
8th April – Groningen, Netherlands @ Vera Tickets
10th April – Copenhagen, Denmark @ Hotel Cecil Tickets
11th April – Hamburg, Germany @ Grünspan Tickets
12th April – Köln, Germany @ Gebäude9 Tickets
13th April – Berlin, Germany @ Heimathafen Tickets
14th April – Leipzig, Germany @ UT Connwitz Tickets
15th April – Prague, Czech Republic @ Meetfactory Tickets
16th April – Vienna, Austria @ Flex Café Tickets
18th April – Zagreb, Croatia @ Boogaloo Tickets
19th April – Ljubljana, Slovenia @ Kino Šiška Tickets
20th April – Milan, Italy @ Magnolia Tickets
21st April – Bern, Switzerland @ Dachstock/Reitschule Tickets
22nd April – Metz, France @ La Chapelle des Trinitaires Tickets
25th April – Dublin, Ireland @ Pepper Canister Church Tickets
26th April – Glasgow, United Kingdom @ Stereo Tickets
27th April – Leeds, United Kingdom @ The Brudenell Social Club Tickets
28th April –Manchester, United Kingdom @ YES Tickets
29th April – London, United Kingdom @ EartH Theatre Tickets
US Tour Dates
18th May – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania @ Underground Arts Tickets
19th May – Vienna, Virginia @ Jammin Java Tickets
20th May – Durham, North Carolina @ Motorco Tickets
21st May – Atlanta, Georgia @ Aisle 5 Tickets
22nd May – Tampa, Florida @ Crowbar Tickets
26th May – Dallas, Texas @ Deep Ellum Arts Co Tickets
27th May – Austin, Texas @ The Parish Tickets
30th May – Phoenix, Arizona @ Rebel Lounge Tickets
31st May – San Diego, California @ Soda Bar Tickets
1st June – Santa Ana, California @ The Observatory Tickets
2nd June – Los Angeles, California @ Echoplex Tickets
3rd June – San Francisco, California @ Great Northern Tickets
5th June – Portland, Oregon @ Mississippi Studios Tickets
6th June – Seattle, Washington @ The Crocodile Tickets
8th June – Boise, Idaho @ Neurolux Tickets
9th June – Salt Lake City, Utah @ Urban Lounge Tickets
10th June – Fort Collins, Colorado @ The Coast Tickets
11th June – Denver, Colorado @ Globe Hall Tickets
14th June – Chicago, Illinois @ Lincoln Hall Tickets
16th June – New York, New York @ LPR Tickets
17th June – Hamden, Connecticut @ Space Ballroom Tickets
18th June – Allston, Massachusetts @ Brighton Music Hall Tickets
18th June – Allston, Massachusetts @ Brighton Music Hall Tickets
Throwback: Black History Month: Howlin’ Wolf
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Howlin’ Wolf.
Throwback: R.I.P. Mark Lanegan
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms pays tribute to Mark Lanegan.
New Video: Sunglaciers Share Uneasy Ripper “Out of My Skull”
Calgary-based post-punk outfit Sunglaciers can trace its origins back to 2017 as a collaboration between its founding — and core — members: multi-instrumentalist Matthieu Blanchard and lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Evan Resnik. When they started the project, Blanchard had completed his studies in medicine, working in family medicine and addiction and Resnik had returned from a trip hitchhiking through France.
Since the project’s formation, the Calgary-based act has released a couple of EPs and their full-length debut, 2019’s Foreign Bodies, which saw them crafting a sound that blurred the lines between dazzling indie rock melodicism and icy, post-punk experimentation, centered around a maximalist approach.
During that same five year period, the members of the Canadian post-punk outfit have seen a steadily rising profile, as they’ve shared stages with the likes of JOVM mainstays Preoccupations, Omni and Daniel Romano while topping the charts of college radio stations across Western Canada. Understandably, when the pandemic put their touring plans on a then-indefinite pause, the band quickly shifted their focus to writing material, dedicating 40-plus hour weeks to music during the early months of 2020.
Those writing sessions wound up becoming the Calgary-based outfit’s sophomore album Subterranea, slated for a March 25, 2022 release through Montreal-based purveyors of all things psych and trippy, Mothland. Continuing an ongoing collaboration with Chad VanGaalen, who co-produced the album, Subterranea reportedly sees the band eschewing the maximalist approach of their previous releases and crafting material with a decided laser focus. The end result is a frenetic, breakneck album of material with songs that never overstay their welcome. “We tried to write vertically instead of horizontally,” Sunglaciers’ Matthieu Blanchard explains. “Our last album Foreign Bodiesand the EPs that came before it had lots of long songs with different parts drifting back and forth. For this album, we decided to strip our songs down to two or three minutes with only a few ideas in each of them.”
“The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik says. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music everyday. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and put them together. We were listening to a lot of McCartney II at the time and loved how eclectic it was, which led to us mirroring that vibe.”
With an extended timeframe to write and record, the album, which was recorded at Bruce Crews’ voiceover studio On Air Studios allowed the members the opportunity to learn skills in engineering and for the opportunity to swap the instruments that each member typically played, a strategy that was employed during the writing and recording of Portishead‘s Third and David Bowie‘s “Boys Keep Swinging.” The album also features contributions from the aforementioned Chad VanGaalen, Hermitess‘ Jennifer Crighton and Roman66′s Louis Cza The Black Greek God. The end result may arguably be Sunglaciers most urgent and cohesive batch of material, an effort that draws from the likes of Deerhunter, Total Control, and BEAK> among others.
Earlier this year, I wrote about “Avoidance,” a woozy and uneasy ripper full of guilt and recriminations delivered with a breakneck freneticism centered around a persistent synth-driven groove. And while sounding a bit like Plague Vendor and Atsuko Chiba, “Avoidance” lyrically touches upon themes of alienation, abandonment and guilt in a way that should feel familiar to most of us during this unusual moment of our lives.
Clocking in at just about two minutes, “Out of My Skull” is full of foreboding, uneasy menace centered around hypnotic, glistening synth arpeggios, a sinuous bass line and propulsive drumming paired with Resnik’s anxious delivery. And as a result, the song evokes a frustrated, restless boredom — and it should feel familiar for most of us, stuck at home with nothing to do, nowhere to really go and no one to see.
Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik, the accompanying video is shot in a brooding and cinematic black and white, and interestingly, it conveys both menace and playfulness simultaneously.
“’Out of my Skull’ is dark but it’s lively. I shot in black and white to lend a bit of a classic, noir vibe to the video, which also helped bring out some of my innate 90s influence,” the band’s Evan Resnik says in press notes.
“The lyrics loosely reference Miles Davis and a few moments from his life: his hiatus from 1975-80, a shooting in 1969, being assaulted by a cop outside Birdland in 1959. I watched a lot of music documentaries in early 2020 when we began writing this record. Miles was a mysterious and brooding artist, and that initial inspiration helped me get into that mindset during songwriting and throughout the video production. The video is intimate but detached, with close-up faces in contrasting, unreal environments. We’re in your face, but we’re not really there.
“We had a lot of fun shooting, and I think that comes through in the video and adds a bit of levity.”