NME says: “A career high. While other artists, they came up with, have
called it quits, the British indie band have kept moving forward. Their fifth
album rewards that resilience with some of their most beautiful work yet.”
TUTV: Bittersweet pop melancholia sugar-coats this new opus. It has a similar intimate
and treasuring life-and-love idealisation of Coldplay‘s 1998 debut Parachutes. Three-hanky sweet (a bit too much at times), but genuine and honest-to-goodness. Heart-and-soul stirring stories, familiar to some of us. Swim Deep
Band: WARNING Who: Notorious British
doom metal vets.
Album: RITUALS OF SHAME
Their brand new one
and first in 20 years.
Sputnikmusic says: “It’s absolutely insane how they can come back after 20 years and drop an album of this magnitude. Sit down, lay back and get lost in the darkness my friends.”
Band: POND Who: Popular psych-pop-rock
veterans from down under.
New album: TERRESTRIALS
Their 11th. Out on June 19th.
Pre-order info here.
Press info: “Terrestrials is a cyclone of urgent, scorched earth rock’n’roll, tipping
the hat to the sounds of then while squarely facing up to the here and now.
Conceived from a place of reverence for a particularly potent epoch in Oz rock, Terrestrials mines the sound of open sky melancholia, heat haze sizzling on the plains and jangly pub backrooms that hits an eternally poignant nerve for anyone familiar with the sound, time and place.”
Album artwork
DIY Magazine says: “Pond are devised as a group in which anything goes, something that
has always been both their underlying strength and their weakness. They will always exist in their own weird and wonky world, but it’s a place that everyone should visit every once in a while. The band boil everything down to its very essence.”
TUTV: I’m not a steady Pond follower. Mind you, they accomplished some great things
now and then, but overall, to my ears, they were a band playing always, just under the surface of psych guitar pop splendiness. Not bad, not good (enough), until now.
Terrestrials is packed with a string of vigorous firecrackers with Two Hands, Roebuck
Plains, The Fatal Shore, and Tourmaline as the best of many best. For the very first time, these spunky-funky-punky Aussies will crowd my earphones for a long while. Bulletproof entertainment.
Press info: “The new album finds the band entering a new era in what’s already
been a storied career. Their eighth full-length chronicles moments of significant
change, the personal, the political, and the universal, while returning to the core
creative principles that first put them on the map with listeners the world over.
Twenty years in, The Menzingers have discovered that the wisdom gained with
time’s passing is even stronger than the emotional armor they once wore in their
youth, and Everything I Ever Saw captures the quartet embracing the here and now
while strengthening the bonds that have held them together.”
Greg Barnett (guitar/vocals) about the new record: “I want to be able to appreciate, understand, and love everything that we’ve done, as well as where we’re going. It his has
been a huge portion of my life, and everybody has dedicated so much to this band.
It’s going to define who we are for the rest of our lives.”
Singles.
3 fiery, full-blooded
and fervent energizers.
Last year, the brothers Ron (79) and Russell Mael (76), known to the world as SPARKS,
who started their career 59 years ago, released their 28th LP, titled Mad! (stream below)
and took the road afterward for a tour that’s still going.
Now, the Maels have announced a live album. It’s named SPARKS LIVE ON THE MOON.
It’ll drop on planet Earth on September 14th. Pre-order info here.
The double LP comprises a full live set of 20 songs spanning the band’s 59 year career.
Sparks: “After our 2025 World Tour, we accepted an invitation to do a special one-off concert on the Moon, more precisely at the Taruntius Crater, near Mare Fecunditatis. Honored to be the first band to perform on the moon, let alone at the beautiful Taruntius Crater, we couldn’t have imagined the lunar fan interest, with all tickets being grabbed up within an hour. Sit back, close your eyes and imagine the wondrous setting, and enjoy Sparks’ first full concert album, Live On The Moon.”
You can’t shut up the imperishable Russian collective of political and feminist activists PUSSY RIOT and their global fanbase. This year marks their 15th year of opposition against the Kremlin tyranny.
Last Month, the clamorous PRs showed up at the Venice Biennale, the so-called “Olympics of the art world”, timed deliberately, to coincide with Russia‘s controversial
return to the event. The stunt made headlines globally.
Mastermind and driving force since day one is NADYA TOLOKONNIK, who spent two years, along with fellow pussy riotiours Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina, in a Russian jail for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred after her protest performance
in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour church in 2012.
Thus far, they have expressed their fierce discontent through several mixtapes,
a series of barbed-wire singles, and countless live protests in their home country, Ukraine, and the Western world.
Tolokonnikova about the LP’s reactionary motivation, the ongoing war with Ukraine: “Me and my countrymen could have prevented it, we just had to fight harder for our dream
of a peaceful democratic Russia. I live in exile, like a rat. Everything I loved was taken from me; my entire country was stolen. My mother died of cancer in Moscow, and I couldn’t be there to say goodbye.
The father of my daughter nearly died after being poisoned with a nerve agent by the FSB. My friend Alexey Navalny was murdered in jail. And I no longer know whether I’ll ever be able to let people get close to me again – being torn away from everyone I loved cost too much. Vengeance is what forces my eyes open in the morning, and what keeps me going. “OUTRO” is dedicated to my mother and my love to her.‘
TUTV: Don’t expect a clamourous Bikini Kill noise. Only on smoking punk grenades Faceless Pigs, Disobey, Candy Dopamine and Blizzard) they lash out with rage. Sonically,
CYKA is for the greater part a trip and hop, EBM-orientated record spiked with both, reflective and spiralling synth-orchestrated flare-ups.
Vocally, she alternates bouncy, whispering rap rants with poppy, near-helium-like
echoes. We have a unqiue party album here. One to dance when Putin is going down.
Lyrically Tolokonnikova unravels all her outrage and is on constant attack mode.
She will never quit attacking the Russian dictator (who appears on the title track).
She will never stop exposing his crimes. She’ll never back down. She’s a fearless
warrior. She’s a tenacious bitch. Hail hail.
At 82, American singer-songwriter legend CARLY SIMON, who became worldwide
known You’re So Vain (more than 700 million streams on Spotify) in 1972, returns
after 17 years with a new LP, titled Comes In Waves, her 24th, out on August 14th.
The lead single HOWL shows that Simon‘s voice has aged admirably. Impressively
strong and riveting. The song itself is a tremendously arousing gem. Exquisite performance.
Simon: “‘Howl’ lives in that space between betrayal and forgiveness, where anger has
to be voiced before it can be released. It’s about letting the frustration out so it doesn’t
sit and simmer. The song begins in anger, but it moves toward forgiveness, and speaks
to any situation where trust has been broken.”
Blues rock veteran JON SPENCER has been riffin’ around since 1983. He did so, with…
take a deep breath, his first band Pussy Galore, his gang the Blues Explosion, with his wife Christina Martinez‘s inBoss Hog, with his group the Hitmakers, and now as a trio (under his own name) with Kendall Wind on bass and Spider Bowman on drums.
Press info: “Garage punk for today, hyper-driven soul and powerhouse grooves,
beats hard as diamonds and slick as ice, fuzz bass in your face, and an avalanche
of uncontrollable urges, pushing Jon’s latest outbursts — hollering, drooling, sexified crooning, and vociferously lamenting these difficult times — to new levels of rock’n’roll expressionism.”
Spencer: “I’m in a time of spiritual reckoning. These past few years, there has been a lot of emotional conflict and personal loss, the passing of time takes its toll. Losing friends, losing family, and all of this set against a world gone topsy-turvy, where it feels like we are losing
basic freedoms I’m trying to balance a lot of things, but the answer is always rock ’n’ roll.”
TUTV: Spencer is fed up, as millions of us, with that monkey in the White House. He totally messed up the world’s balance with trade wars, insulting and intimidating other countries and their leaders for not kissing his fat ass, and with his economically disastrous Iran war, and all this in just 18 months. Whatever disturbs Spencer’s mind, he seeks distraction in his music, as we music junkies do in listening to it.
There’s an abundance of anxiety, anger, and fury to ventilate on this new record, instigating a non-stop riff-licks-hooks flood. Old skool blues explosions. A 32-minute
tirade of raging rock ‘n’ rebellious roll excitation. Songs Of Personal Loss And Protest has enough deliberative firepower to reinvigorate us with the confidence to face and fight
the daily turmoil caused by larger-than-life egos in charge, who derail our lives.
Thanks, Jon.
Prolific singer-songwriter luminary KRISTIN HERSH, best known for her illustrious band Throwing Muses and, to a lesser extent, 50 Foot Wave. She’s also pretty productive on
her own.
Along with the news comes 1st single DARK EYED JUNCO.
A romantic, retrospective memory wrapped in a fervid tune.
Hersh: “He was a ‘Dark Eyed Junco’ and I was a light-eyed weirdo. We’d play
basketball until after dark then, when we couldn’t even see the hoop anymore,
so that we didn’t have to go home. After our stepfather moved in,
it wasn’t a home anymore.”
(Me, as an NBA freak, I wonder if Kristin has a fav basket team).
“Dark eyed junco
Light on the wing
Flyin into town, on a cloud
Tryin to make the heart sing”
