Oh my, yes! It leaked a couple of weeks ago, and I jumped on it with both feet.
And naturally, I’m really digging it. This is Cornelius’ Songs From Northern Britain for me. If he’s maybe not quite as sonically ambitious in his 40s as he was in his 20s and 30s, he’s absolutely at the top of his abilites in songwriting and musicality. This is an album to drop the needle, stretch out on the couch and relax into.
I like the sound of that! Looks like the album is due out stateside on July 21st.
Meanwhile, there’s a new B-sides and rarities collection from Beach House out now called B-Sides and Rarities. Yes, please!
New Gary Numan, full album in September. Maybe turning the industrial down a little and going back to where the sound was around Sacrifice.
I haven’t really liked a lot of Numan’s industrial-rock albums of recent vintage, but this is good. I usually end up listening to Numan’s new album at some point, but I think I’ll move it up in the schedule.
Similarly, it’s been awhile since I’ve really loved new material by The Church but this song may qualify.
There have been few rock heroes quite as damaged and destroyed by drugs as badly as Johnny Thunders. And so this is crazy: at one point in the 1980s, Thunders, a legendary junkie himself, pleaded with Only Ones frontman/guitarist Peter Perrett to please get himself cleaned up. Thunders simply couldn’t believe that Perrett was so completely throwing away his considerable talent.
I mean…you know you’re a total, absolute mess when Johnny Thunders tells you “Get it together, dude.”
The sad thing about the continued discovery of the Only Ones, and in particular “Another Girl/Another Planet” is that royalties from that song essentially kept Peter Perrett in heroin and crack cocaine through the early part of the 2000s. A MOJO profile from shortly after a pretty good solo album in 2005 described Perrett as barely able to get through a song without needing an oxygen hit from a tank, so ravaged were his lungs from smoking crack.
Well.
Apparently Peter’s been clean and sober for 5 or 6 years now. And all that thrown-away talent didn’t go anywhere…or at least enough stayed around. He shopped some demos of some new songs around, and prestigious indie/major label Domino snapped him up. And his new record is kind of amazing. It’s a straight up great rock and roll record, that could’ve come from any point in time during the last 40 years.
What’s really cool is that what he sings about here mostly is a pretty dark journey and somehow getting through it all. There’s redemption all over this…but also regret, and not a little “what-if” longing. Also cool: both of Peter’s adult sons play on the record. In fact, Jamie Perrett’s guitar work here is absolutely brilliant.
Improbably, somehow Peter remains married to his companion of 47 years Zena, who’s been there to pick up the pieces for all that time. And so dig this song:
Fuck yeah.
I heartily endorse the following two excellent songs which were posted recently right here in this thread:
The Church - Another Century
Peter Perrett - An Epic Story
Furthermore, I’d like to thank the following two forum members who did the posting:
charmtrap
triggercut
Wolf Alice will release their sophomore album in September, and they’re currently touring the US. Will see them later this month, but the first two tracks that have been released once again show that this is a band that isn’t confined to a single genre. My Love is Cool was part grunge, part pop, and part folk.
Here’s the first released track for Visions of a Life, Yuk Foo. (Do not watch if epileptic). I’d hate to be the guy Elie was angry with when she wrote it.
And here’s the newest track, which is completely different, and amazingly beautiful. I’m totally in love with it.
You listen to that, and it’s hard to believe that this is the same band, let alone the same album.
This track needs about a 20 second runway to rev up, and then it gets pretty good…
…and then the chorus comes in and HOLY SHITBALLS.
I love it.
That’s pretty damned okay! I really should have spent more time exploring “proper” shoegaze before diving into blackgaze like Alcest, but, to steal an expression Neige probably uses, c’est la vie.
Ohhhh Alcest. . .
<3
It’s electronica-triphoppy-dreamy-popstuff from a metal guitarist I kinda know.
It’s also rull super good.
That Fever Dream track is killing me. It’s the Ride reunion I wanted but didn’t quite get.
Alcest is good, but I’m trying to hear the black metal elements there. Sounds like typical shoegaze to me. I’ll admit “blackgaze” is a new term for me (though I know black metal people cross over to ambient and psych music pretty regularly). I guess I’m going to have to explore a bit more.
…and then I’m pretty sure I’ve bad dreams like the new Telescopes video.
Wait. The Telescopes are still around?
Also, can we get an Armando ruling on Boris?
Yeah…they’ve been keeping that secret pretty good, even though at this point I think they’ve put out more records since 2000 than they ever did back in the day. It’s all fairly deep psychedelia and buzzy guitar noise these days, though. You’re not gonna find many tracks like “High On Fire”.
Not that they ever ever exactly Tops of the Pops material, really. Just for reference, my two fave Telescopes singles from 80s/90s period, and maybe two of the finest tracks of the shoegaze-era:
Have you listened to Kestrels?
Here I made us a playlist to drop newer shoegaze artists into (not new songs from old 90s artists, so no new Slowdive and stuff like that, I think mid 2000s works?)
Some albums lean more heavily on harsh vocals than others, and Neige’s musical background’s in black metal. He was (as far as I’m aware) one of the first to take the “wall of nigh-discordant buzzing distorted noise” element of black metal so far as to wrap around into shoegaze with Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde, which is still one of my favorite albums to this very day.
But, for harsh-vocal-tinged modern Alcest, look no further than “Oiseaux de Proie”:
On a similar tack, but moving further into black metal territory, you’ve got last year’s seminal Yugen by Ashbringer, who I think most would categorize as “atmospheric black metal.” It’s all a continuum, man.
(wait, what’s that, did Armando take another opportunity to share something from his album of the year last year? Why, he did! That tricky bastard)
The last man who gave serious effort to categorizing Boris had a seizure and sank into a coma from which he will only emerge when you play just the right volume of atonal staticky noise directly into his right eardrum and wailing vocals into the left.
That’s definitely an endorsement.
You’re not wrong.
That said, my gf’s always been the bigger Boris fan; I think their wildly all-over-the-map musical stylings don’t fry her brain quite as bad moving from album to album. I don’t dislike 'em by any means, but I am woefully underprepared to introduce someone into their ludicrously enormous discography :(
NBD. Just Joe Walsh and Bjork hanging out at Dodger Stadium, as so often happens.
I like the way Icelanders all know Bjork and always say “yeah, her mother and her were always crazy”