ALTER.NATION #37
The Raconteurs, Mavis Staples, Flying Lotus feat. Anderson .Paak, Cate Le Bon, Earth, Black Mountain, Amyl and the Sniffers, Sebadoh, L'Eclair, The Intelligence, Empath, The Raconteurs
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The Raconteurs - Help Me Stranger
The sorta-title track from their first album in 11 years
The Raconteurs—the band featuring Jack White, Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence, and Patrick Keeler—have shared the new song “Help Me Stranger.” It appears on Help Us Stranger, their first album in over a decade, due out June 21 via Third Man.
The Raconteurs have previously shared the Help Us Stranger tracks “Sunday Driver,” “Now That You’re Gone,”
Grammy-winning national treasure who has masterfully balanced gospel and secular music since her early years with the Staple Singers.
Mavis Staples has announced a new album titled We Get By... “These songs are delivering such a strong message,” Staples said in a statement. “We truly need to make a change if we want this world to be better.” ... We Get By’s album art features the photograph “Outside Looking In” by Gordon Parks from his 1956 photo essay The Restraints: Open and Hidden. Parks co-founded Essence magazine and was the first African American staff photographer and writer for Life magazine. In 2017, Mavis received the Gordon Parks Foundation Award.
Flying Lotus feat. Anderson .Paak - More
Flying Lotus has a gargantuan 27-track album coming out soon called Flamagra, his first full-length since 2014’s You’re Dead! So far, we’ve heard two proper singles, the Little Dragon collab “Spontaneous” and “Takashi,” plus our eerie introduction to the album “Fire Is Coming” with David Lynch. Today, FlyLo has shared a new song, “More,” which features fellow LA luminary Anderson .Paak, arguably one of the most anticipated guests on the album.
“More” blends .Paak’s singular vocals with FlyLo’s crisp percussion and swirling synths. Listed as a co-writer, Thundercat’s masterful bass input is heard all over the track. It’s one of the more concrete-sounding bangers from Flamagra so far, complementing David Lynch’s forboding monologue and Little Dragon’s airy verses.
Cate Le Bon - Miami from Reward
Welsh artist Cate Le Bon's fifth album, Reward, was created in a vacuum of solitude. While Le Bon was in an intensive furniture-making course by day, she spent her nights alone at the piano writing the skeletons that would be fleshed out as songs here... Where that album and much of Le Bon's work were centered around nervous, angular guitar rock, Reward exposes new dimensions of her songwriting. A controlled, confident vocalist and inventive guitarist, Le Bon has built many of her best songs around fluid riffs and unexpected vocal turns. Reward is comparatively restrained, composed on piano and focusing largely on synthesizers, saxophones, and metallic percussion sounds in open-ended arrangements. The album opens with "Miami," a song that eases the album into being with synthetic bell tones and a patient sequence of slow arpeggios. The song oozes slowly, unfolding until Le Bon's rich, layered vocals trade off with saxophone harmonies. The song is distant and playful at once and sets the tone for an album that communicates joy as much as it does crushing loneliness...
Earth - The Colour of Poison
“The Colour Of Poison” is exactly the type of track you think of when you think of Earth — a vast, heavy, elementally satisfying slow-trudge riff-monster. Part of the appeal with Earth is that you never know when they’re going to launch into free-jazz freakouts or Ennio Morricone soundscapes. But there’s still something satisfying about them doing basic stick-to-your-ribs doom metal with this kind of majestic mastery.
Earth is a full band, but these days, it’s largely a collaboration between Carlson and longtime percussionist Adrienne Davies. Carlson has said that the new album took shape as the two of them worked on writing and recording it, not imposing any kind of concept on what they were doing. “The Colour Of Poison” is proof of that — a band intuitively doing what it does best.
Black Mountain - Boogie Lover
Vancouver psych-metal warriors Black Mountain are returning this spring with Destroyer, their first album in three years... Destroyer’s second single is out. It’s called “Boogie Lover.” Unlike their colleagues in the prolific Australian outfit King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Black Mountain’s song about boogie does not actually boogie. It’s a spacey, doomy slow creep on which the band sounds as towering and geological as their band name suggests.
Amyl and the Sniffers - Starfire 500 from Amyl and the Sniffers
With an energy befitting a tiny tornado, Australian punk crew Amyl and the Sniffers deliver a series of punches to the jaw with their rollicking self-titled debut. Clocking in at less than 30 minutes, Amyl and the Sniffers is an absolute thrill, the ideal soundtrack to a sweat-and-beer-covered bar brawl. Here, black eyes and bruises are a welcome trade for the fun and complete abandon within, which owes much to the band's electrifying vocalist, Amy Taylor... While Taylor is undeniably the star of the show, the group -- guitarist Dec Martens, drummer Bryce Wilson, and bassist Gus Romer -- shine when they are given space to breathe. From the instrumental prelude to "Starfire 500" to the steadily building "Control," Amyl and the Sniffers prove there's more beneath the surface than their scuzzy, mosh-friendly, three-pronged attack.
Sebadoh - phantom from Act Surprised
It's fairly remarkable that Sebadoh still has a trademark sound, given how much they've changed over the years. Lou Barlow's days as a nerdy, introspective guy playing with a four-track cassette machine are ancient history in 2019, the year they released Act Surprised, but to this day that's what many folks think of first when they hear the group's name... But the performances are significantly brawnier in 2019; D'Amico hits a lot harder than Eric Gaffney or Bob Fay did in Sebadoh's earlier incarnations, and that has encouraged Barlow and Loewenstein to turn it up and rock out a bit. Justin Pizzoferrato's engineering sounds a bit buzzy in the low end, but the highs are clear, bright, and punchy, adding considerably to the impact of the performances, and though this is a long, long way from the resin-infused thunder of Dinosaur Jr.
L'Eclair - Endless Dave from Sauropoda
Going strictly by the sound of their records, one might assume that Swiss sextet L'Eclair spend virtually all of their time either listening to records or making music. It's hard to pin down exactly what type of music they produce, but whatever it is, it's clearly the result of people who have impeccable taste, and have spent a considerable amount of time developing their chemistry as musicians. The group seem to have an ear for anything with a spacy, expansive groove, and their music equally recalls everything from Can to William Onyeabor to various library music composers. More so than their first two albums, Sauropoda has more of a cosmic disco tinge to it, mixing proto-house and space vibes into the group's funk-blasted sound... "Endless Dave" is a much more laid-back Afrobeat-dub chiller, and it really does seem to go on forever, but it doesn't get tiring.
The Intelligence - L’appel du Vide
The Intelligence will release new album, Un-Psychedelic In Peavy City, on May 24. It’s their 10th album, first in four years and, after years on In the Red, the first for main brain Lars Finberg’s new label, Vapid Moonlighting Inc... “I developed these bad existential psychedelic hangovers that were giving me panic or anxiety attacks, especially while driving, that were really awful, trying to analyze what exactly keeps me from crashing this van or unbuckling my seatbelt and voluntarily rolling out the door onto the speeding highway,” Lars tells us of the song. “I quit drinking and they seem to have gone away, touch wood. I was thrilled when I found there is a French term for this: ‘L’appel du Vide’ or ‘Call of the Void.’ I decided to try to take a month off alcohol and I liked it so I just kept going. In a lot of ways life got much sunnier and much easier, and I am much happier, but it’s not perfect so I’m bitching/joking about the extremely minimal things I don’t like about it. But it’s supposed to be fun and funny and a celebration and I hope the animals party to it.”
Empath - Roses That Cry
After a brief, delicate synth intro, “Roses That Cry” launches into a kaleidoscopic squall. Catherine Elicson’s guitar sounds as if it is breaking into pieces, Garrett Koloski’s drums whip up a ferocious gale, and Em Shanahan and Randal Coon’s synths swirl and squawk in the undertow, bringing a generous levity. Elicson’s words echo the jumbled progression of this turmoil as she conjures fading memories. “Are you coming around/You’d like to, but you don’t know how,” Elicson nudges, her voice gently bending with compassion. “Remember when that tree fell on your car/Glass spilled all over the yard.” When the dust finally settles on “Roses That Cry,” Empath emerge unscathed.
The Raconteurs - Hey Gyp (Dig The Slowness)
Jack White’s rock quartet shares their cover of Donovan’s “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)”
The Raconteurs, Mavis Staples, Flying Lotus feat. Anderson .Paak, Cate Le Bon, Earth, Black Mountain, Amyl and the Sniffers, Sebadoh, L'Eclair, The Intelligence, Empath, The Raconteurs
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