06-12-2021 alter:MiX # 33 alter tracks in PRSNT_PRFCT_MiX (2h 22m) [2019-2021] # G. Love & Special Sauce, Pearl Charles, Still Corners, Little Barrie, Malcolm Catto, Circles Around the Sun, Geese,Radiohead,Son Lux, TOY,Eerie Wanda,Rose City Band,Goat Girl
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G. Love & Special Sauce are a Philadelphia-based trio whose laid-back, sloppy blues sound is quite unique, as it encompasses the sound/production of classic R&B and recent rap artists (the Beastie Boys, in particular). The group -- G. Love (born Garrett Dutton) on guitar/vocals/harmonica, Jeff Clemens on drums, and Jim Prescott on upright bass -- released their self-titled debut in 1994 on OKeh/Epic..
G. Love & Special Sauce
Go Crazy (feat. Keb' Mo') 3:40
Fix Your Face 3:15
from The Juice 2020
Now that they're over a quarter-century into their career, it's time to come to terms with a simple fact: G. Love & Special Sauce are no longer youthful upstarts, they're veterans. Fittingly, their 2020 album The Juice is the kind of record that could only be made by musicians who've been around the block a time or two. It's not that The Juice is the work of untrammeled virtuosos -- it is most decidedly a vibe record -- but rather that it's an album that's casually confident that also happens to have an offhand sense of community. At its core, The Juice derives from a series of Nashville sessions held with Keb' Mo', who is credited as a co-producer and appears on a fair chunk of the album...
Singer/songwriter Pearl Charles has a knack for writing melodic, low-key indie pop with a jangling country tone. After coming up through the Los Angeles lo-fi and garage scenes, she made her full-length debut in 2018 with Sleepless Dreamer, a finely crafted slice of warm country-pop. She followed it up three years later with Magic Mirror...
Imposter 3:25
Magic Mirror 2:58
Sweet Sunshine Wine 4:10
from Magic Mirror 2021
In a pleasing tangle of sun-warmed melodies and 1970s influences, Pearl Charles strikes a confident, if laid-back tone on Magic Mirror, her sophomore album. The Los Angeles native has been bubbling under the radar for nearly a decade, trying her hand in a variety of indie subsets from lo-fi Americana to garage and psychedelia before landing on a more polished amalgam of vintage-flavored country-pop and West Coast soft rock. Her 2018 debut, Sleepless Dreamer, showed plenty of promise and laid the framework for the more fully realized sound she achieves here... The production and arrangements throughout are impeccable, warm, and well-suited to the kind of thoughtful, low-key songwriting at which Charles excels. Neither basking in its vintage flavor nor overplaying its strengths, Magic Mirror is the kind of subtle record that reveals its pleasures through repeated listens. Even Charles' voice is a comfort; after a decade of mainstream mumblers and overwrought affectations, her enunciated vocal style brings a conversational tone to the songs...
United by Tessa Murray's delicate vocals and their love of otherworldly atmospheres, Still Corners' music is otherwise in constant motion. .. Still Corners formed shortly after Hughes, a native of Austin, Texas, met Murray by chance at a London train station. Taking their name from a phrase in Robert Frost's poem "New Hampshire," they soon began making music together...
The Last Exit 4:41
A Kiss Before Dying 2:45
It's Voodoo 4:44
from The Last Exit 2021
More than a decade after they formed, Still Corners and their music remain in constant motion. Over the years, Greg Hughes and Tessa Murray have relocated from London to the English seaside to Texas' Hill Country, and their sound has shifted with every move. On The Last Exit, however, there's a slightly shorter distance between where they've been and where they are. They embellish on the sunbaked dream pop they introduced on Slow Air... Even if The Last Exit is sometimes a little too wispy, it's still a fitting soundtrack for getting lost on the open road.
Little Barrie are a London-based trio led by ace guitarist Barrie Cadogan, whose sound is an exciting blend of hard rock, blues, soul, and funk that calls to mind classic bands of the '60s like Traffic and Cream... By the time of 2020's Quatermass Seven, the band had staked out a place all their own sonically and Cadogan was firmly entrenched on the short list of best guitarists of his era...
Rest In Blue 4:20
Repeater #2 4:02
After After 8:10
from Quatermass Seven 2020
After the release of their 2017 album Death Express, Little Barrie suffered the tragic loss of drummer Virgil Howe, and the remaining two members of the group, guitarist Barrie Cadogan and bassist Lewis Wharton, took some time deciding whether they wanted to keep the band going. When they did choose to make more music together, they called in drummer Malcom Catto of the London jazz group Heliocentrics. The trio began jamming in the drummer's basement studio, liked what they came up with, and turned their ideas into a set of songs. Recorded simply on vintage equipment, the seven-song Quatermass Seven album crackles with energy and shines like a gritty diamond as the three players delve deeply into grooves so deep they feel bottomless... It's a heady mix of vintage sounds, just like the band usually put on tape, but a little freer and tougher thanks to Catto's jazz background, the urgency of Cadogan's singing and playing, and the sense that the emotional stakes are a little higher...
Circles Around the Sun is a contemporary instrumental rock band that formed with the specific purpose of creating intermission music for Fare Thee Well, a series of reunion concerts played by the surviving members of the Grateful Dead during their 2015 tour. Those shows celebrated the band's 50th anniversary and served as their official send-off, while Circles Around the Sun was designed to reflect the Dead's spacy and grooving overall feel...
When I Was at Peace 5:19
Added Addition 5:43
from Meets Joe Russo 2019
Circles Around the Sun (CATS) announced their completed collaboration with drummer Joe Russo in July of 2019. Guitarist Neal Casal spoke of the band's excitement about the completely improvised session recorded at the drummer's Brooklyn studio. The band's and Russo's paths had been entwined for a decade via their work with various Grateful Dead side projects (Phil 'n' Friends, Further, etc.) and Cass McCombs. On August 26, three weeks after CATS had completed sessions for a third album, Casal took his own life.
Meets Joe Russo is an informal jam that is startling for its sheer musicality. Cut live from the floor in a single day, it showcases just how intuitive the interplay was between Casal, keyboardist Adam MacDougall, bassist Dan Horne, and drummer Mark Levy. The addition of Russo's drumming only adds to that depth of field...
A nervy post-punk outfit from Brooklyn, Geese made an improbable rise from local high school rockers to internationally supported buzz band in just a few short years. After graduation, the band's intricate home-recorded singles suddenly attracted a slew of high-profile record labels; they ultimately signed a joint U.K./U.S. deal with PIAS and Partisan, which led to the release of their eclectic 2021 debut Projector...
Rain Dance 3:23
Fantasies / Survival 4:27
Disco 6:47
from Projector 2021
Geese are a quintet of native Brooklyners who formed during their freshman year of high school. They are also one of the most hyped exports to emerge from the borough in years with a complex and energetic sound built from scraps of post-punk, prog, and a deep lineage of New York rock & roll. During the front half of 2020, the band's home-recorded demos suddenly became a target for serious label attention and, having just graduated from high school, Geese found themselves fielding offers from both sides of the Atlantic. New York's Partisan and London's PIAS won out in a joint deal resulting in the release of the band's full-length debut, Projector. Members Cameron Winter (vocals, keyboards), Gus Green (guitar), Foster Hudson (guitar), Dominic DiGesu (bass), and Max Bassin (drums) project a sense of confidence and benefit from the kind of chemistry forged during youth... Throughout the set, Geese cover a nice range of dynamics, indicating the depth of their influences and tastes. Projector is an impressive debut and all-around solid effort from a band at the start of a promising career.
At some point in the early 21st century, Radiohead became something more than a band: they became a touchstone for everything that is fearless and adventurous in rock, inheriting the throne from David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and the Talking Heads. The latter group gave the band its name -- it's an album track on 1986's True Stories -- but Radiohead never sounded much like the Heads, nor did they take much from Bowie, apart from their willingness to experiment. Instead, they spliced Floyd's spaciness with U2's messianic arena rock heft, bridging the gap with guitar skronk borrowed from the '80s American underground.
Everything In Its Right Place 4:11
Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box 4:00
Like Spinning Plates ('Why Us?' Version)
from Kid A Mnesia 2021
Three years after conquering the alternative rock world with the landmark OK Computer, Radiohead followed with one of the most anticipated albums of the era. And everything changed. 2000's course-shifting Kid A was a jarring transformation: icy atmospherics, digitized beats, meandering soundscapes, and enough gloom and anxiety to make their previous output almost cheerful in comparison. With their crunchy guitars and snarling attitude seemingly left behind in 1997, the response was swift and divisive: critics either hailed it for its artistry or mourned the loss of their beloved art-rock misfits. Nonetheless, the album hit number one around the world and became widely recognized as one of the most influential and iconic albums of the decade. Eight months later, Radiohead delivered another dose of existential dread and experimental wizardry with 2001's weirdo sibling, Amnesiac. Even though listeners had been primed for what was to come, the public still wasn't ready. Recorded during the same sessions (and fully intended as its own entity, not just a B-sides cast-off), the set delved even deeper into the extremes of this new sonic aesthetic, pushing the limits of the average fan's patience with complex time signatures and song structures, stretching themselves even further away from The Bends. In some respects, the complex Amnesiac was less harsh and robotic than Kid A, injecting warmth into the machine with layered production, hypnotic programming, and very human touches like piano, strings, and even a brass band.... As a snapshot of this crucial turning point in the Radiohead discography, Kid A Mnesia presents a band taking its first steps into a thrilling new phase, one that would alter their trajectory and push them further into the unknown.
Originally the post-rock project of composer/keyboardist/vocalist Ryan Lott, Son Lux grew over the course of the 2010s to include guitarist/composer Rafiq Bhatia and experimental drummer Ian Chang. Combining live instruments with computer-manipulated acoustic performances, samples, and Lott's strained vocal delivery, Son Lux's bold, dystopic sound often correlates with anxious lyrics about a fearful future.
Warning 3:02
Prophecy 4:49
Bodies 2:41
from Tomorrows II 2020
Son Lux released the first installment of their Tomorrows trilogy in August of a turbulent 2020. Fourth months later, and loosely reminiscent of the second movement of a classical symphony, Tomorrows II proves to be a relatively more hushed, introspective volume. Like Tomorrows I, it was recorded with group members and contributors separated in such far-flung locales as New York, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, and Budapest...
London's TOY borrow from shoegaze, Krautrock, and classic psychedelia to make pulsating, absorbing music.
Down on the Street 4:43
Fun City 5:09
Sixty Forty 7:13
from Songs of Consumption 2019
TOY started 2019 with one of their lushest releases and ended it with a study in minimalism. On the full-length Happy in the Hollow, they indulged in as many styles and sounds as they could pack into its songs, but on Songs of Consumption, they don't pile on layer after layer to keep things interesting. Both rawer and more electronic than any of their previous music, this covers EP finds TOY drawing on the evocative simplicity of vintage synth pop, minimal wave, and electro-punk as they reimagine songs by artists ranging from the Troggs to John Barry. Not only does the band have an enviable record collection, they know how to pick songs that challenge them. They begin the EP with one of their biggest departures: Their taut version of "Down on the Street" trades the Stooges' raw power for sullen synth rock with a cruise-controlled Motorik beat... The band gives Nico's "Sixty Forty" a makeover that's nearly as radical, miniaturizing its dark, rolling majesty into something more intimate but just as poignant... Their dedication to stripping these songs down to their bones yields especially fascinating results on "A Doll's House," where they translate the complexity of John Barry's composition with just a handful of instruments. Even when TOY returns to a more familiar sound, they do it creatively...
The Dutch band Eerie Wanda are led by vocalist/songwriter/guitarist Marina Tadic, whose warmly intimate vocals are paired with melancholy pop songs influenced by psychedelia (as on their debut album, 2016's Hum) or, as on their second record, 2019's Pet Town, sweet early-'60s ballads and rockabilly.
Pet Town 3:27
Rockabiller 3:32
Hands of the Devil 2:35
from Pet Town 2019
...There are traces of girl group sweetness, soda shop, rockabilly, and lots of Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town" in the sound Tadic and her mates create. It's quiet and peaceful, but never boring thanks to the richness of Tadic's voice and the power of her lyrics. There's a disarming directness to both the melodies and the words, and though one might miss Verhulst's pulsing basslines or the electric guitars, the unbroken mood Tadic creates is entrancing. .. Pet Town makes for the perfect record to calm down at the end of a typically bonkers day or as a brief respite from the storm during the middle of it. Tadic's vocals are endlessly soothing, the arrangements are comforting, and the warmth of the songs emanates from the speakers like gentle heat waves from a crackling fire. Stripping back from the already gentle sound of Hum could have been a step in the wrong direction' instead, it's a perfect evolution and a wonderful album.
After initially appearing as a semi-anonymous psychedelic country jam band, Rose City Band was revealed to be the project of Wooden Shjips/Moon Duo guitarist/vocalist Ripley Johnson. He worked with indie giant Thrill Jockey to reissue the band's 2019 self-titled debut after a self-released pressing quickly sold out. ..
Rip City 3:49
Rivers of Mind 6:34
Fog of Love 4:22
from Rose City Band 2020
Mysterious and calm, the debut album from Rose City Band rolls in slowly like the morning fog. Produced by Moon Duo/Wooden Shjips member Ripley Johnson, the project filters the softer side of the Grateful Dead's jammy explorations through a gentle, spaced-out haze. Where other late-2010s disciples of Garcia and Weir sometimes reworked the Dead's amped-up boogie rock tendencies, Rose City Band's self-titled debut leans more into the moments of soft, cosmic elegance that sometimes arrived deep into lengthy space jams... Rose City Band is ultimately less about the songs, or even the jamming, and more about the muted, textural palette it stretches out on.
South London's Goat Girl combine incisive social commentary with a sound that stretches from punk to country to electronic pop. On 2018's self-titled debut album, they set their frustrations about Brexit, sexual harassment, and relationships to a snarling mix of punk, country, and goth; when they returned with 2021's On All Fours, they didn't sacrifice any of their bite for the album's more expansive sound and viewpoint...
Jazz (In the Supermarket) 4:34
The Crack 3:12
Where Do We Go From Here? 4:14
from On All Fours 2021
Even for a young, buzzed-about band, the three years between Goat Girl's self-titled debut album and its follow-up On All Fours were notable. Along with more typical shake-ups like lineup changes (bassist Holy Hole stepped in for founding member Naima Jelly), the group endured guitarist/vocalist L.E.D.'s diagnosis of stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma and six-month course of chemotherapy. Happily, Goat Girl's second album reveals that they've only grown stronger together in the wake of these events. There's a greater feeling of connection and cohesion in these songs -- which makes sense, since they took a collaborative approach to songwriting this time out -- and their experimental and pop impulses are more clearly defined and cleverly integrated... Both nervier and more confident than their debut, On All Fours is a huge step forward from a band that's well-equipped to bring post-punk's legacy into the future.
2021
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