Good news alert! Oxford (via Berlin, nowadays) sweethearts BE GOOD are
back with an absolute banger. In the kinda, indie bedroom-pop sense of the
word, of course. I've loved these guys an obscene amount since I lived in
Oxford and Donuts is their first new track since last April. No
pressure then... Luckily, it's a beaut. Obviously. It's late, and I'm struggling to formulate words to just tell you how much I love this band: I'll let the music speak for itself.
The good news keeps coming: if you like what you're hearing here (and why wouldn't you?!) you're in luck, as BE GOOD headline The Lexington in a few weeks, on 16th November. See you at the front? Tickets available here.
"I'm grasping the neck of all of my friends singing I deserve the same as you do."
Chartreuse never disappoint, and I'm a little in love with this one. I should probably be heading to sleep, but I feel compelled to write as I've just listened to their new single a few times in a row and then fallen into a little Chartreuse shaped rabbit hole. Love them and love this one a lot! They recently announced their debut album Morning Ritual, which is due for release via Communion Music on 10th November - Whippet is the latest single to be taken from it.
With Hattie on lead vocals on this one, she describes how the track was inspired by a conversation she had with a friend at the pub about life plans and 'settling down.' "She was asking me what my plans were, and I said I didn't know. A lot of our friends have serious careers, and we're in a band. I felt bitter about having to have the conversation, so the line "left like a whippet" is me wanting to leave and stop talking about it."
If you like what you hear - they're heading on tour across November: dates and tickets here. They've also just announced a few instore shows, tickets here.
For a bunch of reasons, I've been pretty bad at blogging lately. My head is in
a bit of a weird place at the moment and being back to full time at work is
exhausting - it's hard to find the time around everything, to be honest. I
think that I've also perhaps felt a little distant from music/the blog in
general lately... I haven't been to many gigs since lockdown, and writing
about artists I'd seen live when I was living in Oxford was how the blog
really started to take off in the first place.
Recently, however, I've had a whirlwind couple of weeks of gigs in London:
first up, three Stornoway album release shows for their record
Dig The Mountain! which came out last week, and just hit #7 in the
album sales chart. Incredible! They played beautiful sets at
Banquet Recordsand
Rough Trade Eastand the
launch event at WWT London Wetland Centrewas such a special afternoon. Next, my forever favourites
The Hoosiers playing one of the best shows I've seen them play
at London's KOKO (enough said). And earlier this week,
Christof van der Ven headlining in London for the first time in a few
years and me getting to rub shoulders with blog favourites Bear's Den and The Staves. I'm eyeing up some more gigs soon... music is
pretty great, huh?
I'm feeling a teeny bit inspired by it all, so I'm making a tentative return
to trying to ramble about music - and where better to start than the return
of one of my absolute favourite musical pairings, Johnny Flynn and
Robert Macfarlane. Separately, they're one of my favourite musicians and one of my
favourite writers, and together they make art that I adore.
Lost In The Cedar Wood is a favourite album and the accompanying
performance was stunning, and I loved getting the chance to chat to Rob about
it earlier this year at Cambridge Folk Festival,where
he told me exactly what I wanted to hear, that they'd been working on more
music, and it was imminent...
A few weeks ago, the pair officially announced that they'd made a new record.
Hallelujah! The Moon Also Rises is releasing via the beautiful label
Transgressive on 10th November, and it features the first single
Uncanny Valley:
In his announcement of the record, Rob wrote:
It’s about darkness and light, winter & spring, burial and revelation, stories, weather and seasons, ghosts and paths and love and rivers, and other bits and bobs and pots and pans.
We sort of just kept on writing songs after finishing Lost In The Cedar Wood; some of them we found by walking tracks & rainy woods & streams together, & some by noodling in notebooks, & some in poems & stories, & almost all by laughing a lot.
Working & making with Johnny is just one of the great joys of my life. He’s a quiet, gentle, generous genius with a huge gift for making collaborative, creative connections between people. He’s also very funny.
Charlie Andrew is on producing duties, and the album features much of Johnny's Sussex Wit band as well as the Sheldrakes, Cosmo and Merlin. You basically couldn't imagine a lovelier and more wholesome bunch of creatives to make music together, and the results are unsurprisingly gorgeous. Second single No Matter The Weight is out now. Almost frustratingly brilliant.
You heard it here first: I'm well and truly back in my The Staves era. So many of my favourite artists are coming back with new songs and albums at the moment and I have fallen pretty hard for this one. The duo are back with You Held It All, their first release via Communion Records (a match made in heaven, I think?) and their first new music since the 2021 album Good Woman(my album of the year.) It is almost TOO good?! I haven't much to say, apart from that I love these sisters so much. Crossing my fingers that there's an album on the way, but for now, I'll happily listen to this one on repeat...
On the track, the band share: "You Held It All is a song about understanding, and the knots we tie ourselves in when we don't express our truth; and how much power and freedom there can be when we do."
Months on, it still doesn't seem quite real that Stornoway are back but they really are - they're several festivals down, have an instore tour and a regular tour on the way, and their new album Dig The Mountain! arrives on October 6th. What a time to be alive! The new music keeps arriving and I think that you could hardly wish for a more dreamy coming together of voices than Brian Briggs and Sam Lee. I'm certain that the band's new track The Navigator is something I dreamt up. I think I must like it a fair bit - a couple of weeks after release it is already in my top three most streamed songs of the year. That good!
On the track, Brian shares: “this song was inspired by [a] sailing adventure with friends. For me there is no more powerful way to get perspective than to go in a small boat out of sight of land. There is surely no wilder place, no situation where you feel smaller or more vulnerable. We had no choice but to tune deeply into the shifting wind and waves that governed our days. Worries and problems shrank and were blown away. And a shared sense of isolation brought us together as a motley crew, whilst also making us question where we were going in our own lives.
It was a pleasure to record Sam Lee’s rich, woody baritone on a warm, May day in a Gloucestershire woodland. He made a wonderful addition to the crew!"
Sam adds: “The wait is over and Stornoway have returned with a bounty of utterly stunning songs. It seems their time away from playing has only made them a better band!”
Dig the Mountain! arrives 6th October - pre-order/pre-save here. Also very much worthy of note is the exciting news that the band are re-issuing their debut album Beachcomber's Windowsill on vinyl via the lovely Dinked (details here) on 8th December. You can pre-order that from a selected bunch of independent record stores (I'd recommend Resident Records in Brighton for a brilliant postal service if like me you don't have one particularly local to you!)
Welcome to the latest in a long line of: songs I'm obsessed with. Bombay Bicycle Club are just the absolute best, aren't they? I am living for the promo they're doing for their upcoming record. Digging up MSN conversations from the early days of the band? Too pure. A karaoke instore tour where fans got up on stage and performed as part of the band? Incredible. They're clearly having a great time promoting the album, performing and making music at the moment and I'm very much here for it!
I Want To Be Your Only Pet is the latest in a run of superb singles from the album - with a properly classic Bombay riff that just seems to get better on each listen. The idea of this one rushing over me at a gig some time soon... yes please?! P.S - I managed to sneak an early listen and the entire album is brill, obviously.
On the new track, Jack shares: "I was just playing around with guitar sounds at soundcheck, and started playing this riff. Jamie must have heard something in it because he got out his phone and started recording. For the next few months he would constantly text me to ask "have you written a song around that riff yet?" So finally I did to stop him harassing me. To me it sounds like if Abbey Road era Beatles had a love child with Rated R era Queens of the Stone Age."
Hello again! Two posts in two days? Who is she?? Short answer: I'm SO obsessed with this beautiful new video from Francis of Delirium that I instantly needed to share it. I've loved the project for years, and loved this track when it came out back in July. The new video, co-written and co-directed by Jana herself along with Rares Matei, is a gorgeous representation of a young blossoming relationship. Too pure.
Talking about the track, Jana shares: "'Real Love' at its heart is a simple song about being in love with your best friend. For years, timing got in the way. I got in my own way, and then finally, it worked out. Coming out of a two-month-long tour in the US and heading into summer back at home, it felt like my world was opening up. I wanted to write a song that reflected the feeling of leaning into vulnerability, a song that embraces telling the people you love what they mean to you and truly meaning it. Spending every night watching The Districts on tour really impacted me. There was this hopefulness I heard in their music that I really connected to. After writing our last EP ‘The Funhouse’ which was all about darkness and the feeling of being engulfed by the chaos of the world, I just couldn’t write anything super dark and heavy at the time, it just wouldn’t come out. My body and brain were just guiding me to writing lighter, more open music."
(Hi!) I feel like I'm always writing something, apologising for barely writing anything, and then disappearing again before repeating the cycle. Back again! A lot is happening in my brain at the moment but as always music is a comfort, and while I don't have as much time to share it here as I'd like, I'm still listening! Adoring the new Willie J Healey album Bunny at the moment and v v much looking forward to the release of this one. SUPERMAN is the latest track from VC Pines, who shares his debut album MRI on 8th September. I think it must have been four years since I started listening to Jack's music - following various singles and EPs, and I'm excited to see this album find its way into the world. He's a special artist!
On the new track, VC Pines shares: "'SUPERMAN' is about biting off more than you can chew and self sabotage. There are people in your life who mean more to you than life itself, but you let things get in the way, and you lose sight of what's important, until it's too late... It's also very easy to promise more to those you love, than you can deliver. So you live in this constant state of feeling like you've let everyone down, which is a dark dark place.
"I wrote this song with two mates who I've known for years. They recently started renting a studio in Dalston, but only have it at night times, so this was written and produced at around 3am under Stoke Newington high street.
"I've recently started working on my FOMO - Since writing this, I realised that I was saying yes to EVERYTHING and then being exhausted for, or missing the things that really mattered. I think that's what happens when I write, a lot of it is my subconscious, and I only realise how I've been feeling until the song is finished."
Oh hi! We're back to writing blog posts too late, when I should be getting to sleep... but I haven't posted in a while and the press release for this one was sitting in my inbox whispering sweet nothings to me. I've just had a week off work and headed down to the South coast, to East Sussex. A trip to Brighton gave me aaaaaall of the The Great Escape memories from my couple of years there. A walk along the cliffs at Beachy Head provided the unexpected acrobatic trio you didn't know you needed - airplanes practicing overhead for this week's airshow, swallows dancing through the skies before their migration back to Southern Africa, and smaller still, some fancy blue butterflies. Back at the hotel, I had a look through my guidebook and lo and behold - we'd been admiring the Adonis Blue! Ooft. A real stunner!
Skip forward to staring at my inbox this evening, looking at the various tracks and announcements I'd like to try and write about and.... this one jumped out to me. Sussex resident and all round good egg/performer in many brilliant bands Emma Gatrill has just shared her new single Adonis Blue (you guessed it) and it is just as beautiful as its namesake. The track also features Conor O'Brien of Villagers - big yes to that!
The track arrives with news of Emma's new album Come Swim, arriving 24th November on Wilkommen Records, and featuring contributions from Emma's partner Marcus Hamblett (who also oversees production) as well as Helen Whitaker (flute) and Andrew Stuart Buttle (violin). More on the record over the next few months!
On the track, Emma shares: “Adonis Blue is a rare butterfly, the males have brilliant sky blue wings
with a fine black line around the edge. I spent the summer on a quest
wandering the South Downs in the hope of spotting this butterfly. The track
is about searching for things that are hard to find but accepting that the
quest itself can fulfil desires. It’s about the adventure and all that we
find along the way. Conor is such an inspirational musician and it was an
absolute honour to work with him on this song. The beat he crafted really
weaved itself into the orchestration and his trumpet really makes the song
for me!”
Can somebody explain to me how it is August already? I've been neglecting the
blog lately - it's so hard to find time to write around work and other
commitments, but I promise I'm trying to get things back to some sort of
normality/a higher frequency of posts. Rest assured if I'm not writing as
much, I'm still obsessing over new music in the background - and I'm very much
in that place with Stornoway at the moment. If you know me or the
blog, you probably know how much I love the band, and I'm all sorts of excited
to share the latest track from their upcoming album
Dig The Mountain! (due 8th September). It's Not Up To You is a
Björk cover, featuring Yijia, and I'm a little bit in love with
it.
The accompanying video, directed by the band's live violinist
Susie Peters, sees the trio performing in Wytham Woods, just outside of
Oxford, where Brian had his first conservation job (monitoring blue tit and
great tit nest sites) after university. Watching them play in amongst the
trees with the dappled light coming through the beech leaves... agh. The video
is as beautiful as the track itself - a rare achievement.
Talking about the release, the band share:
"we've always been hugely inspired by Bjork's fearless spirit and we
particularly love this song from her 'Vespertine' album. We replaced
electronics with acoustic instruments and vocal effects and changed the time
signature, but it was once Jon and Oli got their hands on it and added
piano, organ and bass that it started to soar."
You may have seen me gushing about this online already but... I saw
Stornoway on Friday!!!! Friend of the blog, and my old boss, Oli got us
into Cambridge Folk Festival to see the band headlining the second
stage (competing with The Proclaimers, and so nearly giving us that
I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) cover... you tease, Brian.) The band and
their music mean so much to me - Oli and Tom gave me my first paid work in
music and I've got so many lovely memories of seeing them perform. I can't
quite believe they're really back.
I didn't manage to get to any of their festival slots last Summer, and the
EartH gig earlier this year sold out far too fast for me (boo!) so my
last show was the 2017 farewell show at Oxford's New Theatre (live album here) - I was working on the show so was there right from soundcheck through to
the afterparty, it was an incredible day. Bittersweet, though, as I couldn't
quite believe I wouldn't see them performing again. Fast forward six years and
they're back, as brilliant as ever, and they've got new music to share.
I'd say that I couldn't be happier, and that I couldn't love the band more if
I tried... but then, well,
this happened. Oli had organised for author, Johnny Flynn collaborator (!) and
professor Rob Macfarlane (!!)to interview the band after
the online premiere of their new video, live at the festival. I saw this was
happening online and took my opportunity to try and meet Rob - he's one of my
favourite authors to read and recommend, somebody whose opinion I trust deeply
(if a book has a review from Rob on it, I'll probably buy it) and I adore his
work with Johnny. Thankfully, Rob wasn't put off by my lingering outside of
backstage to say hello, and was more than generous with his time - our
conversation meandered through Stornoway, bookselling, writing, working with
Johnny, my review of their show at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Johnny making me weep
in The Motive and the Cue (so GOOD), wildlife and Rob's current
projects. All of this happening under an oak tree, too. Poetic.
