ALTER.NATION #104
The Jaded Hearts Club, The Nude Party,Frankie & the Witch Fingers,Rodrigo y Gabriela,Robert Plant, Drive-By Truckers, Hot Chip, Beatrice Dillon, Róisín Murphy, The Jaded Hearts Club
weekly favtraX
1 1 - 1 0 - 2 0 2 0
"I Put a Spell on You"
The Jaded Hearts Club features frontmen Miles Kane (The Last Shadow Puppets) and Nic Cester (Jet), guitarists Graham Coxon (Blur) and Jamie Davis, Matt Bellamy (Muse) on bass and drummer Sean Payne (The Zutons)...
Bellamy and Davis started working on an album, with Bellamy producing, focusing on lost Northern Soul classics, supplemented by their raw, soulful takes on some famous standards. Davis says “We just love the story of how Northern England fell in love with American soul music even after it stopped having hits, and used that music to soundtrack a good night out.” Adds Bellamy “Like Jazz which reinvents old songs, we are continuing the tradition of how bands like The Beatles & The Stones started out - finding great soul and blues standards and recording them in a more modern style.”
After two years of near-constant touring in support of their self-titled debut album, the Nude Party headed back to their communal farmhouse in the Catskills to work on another full-length with Black Lips' Oakley Munson. The resulting follow-up, Midnight Manor, finds the six-piece still cranking out riff-fueled, freewheeling rock jams about booze and women (and the music industry). Indebted to '60s and '70s acts like the Velvet Underground, T. Rex, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks throughout, the 12-track set has both swagger and nervous energy to spare...
Los Angeles-by-way-of-Indiana foursome whose music takes tough garage punk and runs it through a heavy psychedelic filter.
Frankie & the Witch Fingers - Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters…/ MEPEM
Frankie & the Witch Fingers - Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters…/ MEPEM
When momentum is in full swing on Frankie and the Witch Fingers’ ‘Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters’ it is boundless. In a greenhorn’s hands, this fired-up haste could be a ghastly listening experience, but fortunately, the L.A.-based foursome handles abundant vigour with a supreme deftness, which they honed to a superlunar level on 2019’s ‘ZAM’. Like its predecessor, ‘MEPEM’ continues to shed further layers of the band’s lo-fi garage- rock-of-yore DNA in favour of a richer and groovier psychedelia, but most importantly, it is a more polished manifestation of their own sound, and never has it been this thick...
Mexican guitar duo that plays an appealing amalgam of classical, Latin, world music, and heavy metal.
As the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant seemed invincible, a "Golden God" in the words of journalist/filmmaker Cameron Crowe. Plant may have embraced rock stardom at the height of Zeppelin's zenith in the mid-'70s, but the singer spent the decades following the band's 1980 dissolution exploring the road less-traveled. Beginning with his 1982 solo debut, Pictures at Eleven, Plant pursued a feverishly adventurous solo career, embracing synthesizers and art rock that seemed to be the antithesis of Zeppelin's majestic hard rock, but he'd also later dabble in sampling and world music
Boasting a mix of Southern pride, erudite lyrics, and a muscled, guitar-heavy attack, Drive-By Truckers became one of the most well-respected alternative country-rock acts of the 2000s. Drive-By Truckers - The New Ok / Sea Island Lonely
British alternative dance act formed by Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard, known for their melodicism and witty, affecting songwriting.Hot Chip - Late Night Tales: Hot Chip / Workaround Two feat. Beatrice Dillon
... On their first mix album in over a decade, Hot Chip focus on tracks from the 2010s instead of digging for vintage cuts, a choice that adds a welcome freshness to the set. They also emphasize selections from female and non-binary artists that make for some of the collection's most striking moments... Beatrice Dillon's taut fusion of experimental techno and jazz on "Workaround Two." Within its artfully calibrated ebb and flow of propulsive cuts and restful ones, the mix circles through contemplative, danceable, and sensual moods...
Former Moloko frontwoman who explored adventurous electronic pop in her solo career. A purveyor of adventurous, omnivorous pop, Róisín Murphy makes influences as far-flung as disco and hot jazz her own. As a solo artist, she builds on the eclectic style she forged as Moloko's frontwoman in increasingly confident and distinctive ways. 
A supergroup comprised of members of the Last Shadow Puppets, Jet, Muse, Blur, and the Zutons, the Jaded Hearts Club was formed by guitarist and founder Jamie Davis, who rounded up his famous friends to perform as a cover band for a birthday party. Influenced by Northern soul and Motown, they made it official in 2020 with the release of their debut album, You've Always Been Here.
When guitarists Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero released Mettavolution in 2019, it marked their first studio outing in five years. Their goal was to "reconnect with the physical rush and emotional core of the music we first made together." They succeeded. It not only charted but took home the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. Their 92-city world tour was met with wildly enthusiastic responses. The pair claimed the jaunt "was the very moment we felt truly complete as artists and musicians." The duo planned on continuing their road sojourn in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic intervened. Thankfully, they recorded most of those shows. This 81-minute, double-length set contains performances of the entire Mettavolution album with select concert staples...
Robert Plant launched the Digging Deep podcast in 2019 as a way for him to explore the intricacies and oddities of his body of work. A year later, he released Digging Deep: Subterranea, a double-disc deep dive that effectively functions as a soundtrack to the podcast. Plant talks about Led Zeppelin tunes on Digging Deep, but Subterranea pointedly concentrates on his solo career. It's a compilation that strives to make overarching connections, so it doesn't proceed in a chronological order, nor does it have all of his hits. Neither his oldies folly the Honeydrippers nor Raising Sand, his Grammy-winning collaboration with Alison Krauss, are here, nor are there big rock radio hits like "Little by Little" and "Tall Cool One." Instead, Digging Deep: Subterranea places 1993's Fate of Nations at the forefront and follows its strands front and back, creating a moody, adventurous bit of autobiography. Maybe it doesn't deliver the hits the way most compilations do, but it certainly captures the musical wanderlust that defines Plant's career.
Musicians play music. That's what they do. Unless they suddenly can't go out and perform for people because, say, there's a global pandemic that has almost entirely shut down live music. Life in a divided nation under the rule of Donald Trump was already weighing heavy on the minds of the Drive-By Truckers on 2016's American Band and 2020's The Unraveling, and being stuck at home and unable to tour, with little to do but watch their nation burn, hasn't made them feel any better. In many respects, 2020's The New OK is an album that came to be because the DBTs couldn't do much else...
 |
... On their first mix album in over a decade, Hot Chip focus on tracks from the 2010s instead of digging for vintage cuts, a choice that adds a welcome freshness to the set. They also emphasize selections from female and non-binary artists that make for some of the collection's most striking moments... Beatrice Dillon's taut fusion of experimental techno and jazz on "Workaround Two." Within its artfully calibrated ebb and flow of propulsive cuts and restful ones, the mix circles through contemplative, danceable, and sensual moods...
...A swirl of mirror ball sparkles and dry ice fog, it spoke to Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's transporting version of disco as well as Murphy's skill at sweeping listeners into a world of her own. It was a potent start to her collaboration with Barratt, who went on to craft similarly elegant music steeped in house and disco traditions as Crooked Man. On 2020's Róisín Machine, he and Murphy continue to bring out the best in each other...
The Jaded Hearts Club - You've Always Been Here / Fever
The Jaded Hearts Club features frontmen Miles Kane (The Last Shadow Puppets) and Nic Cester (Jet), guitarists Graham Coxon (Blur) and Jamie Davis, Matt Bellamy (Muse) on bass and drummer Sean Payne (The Zutons)...
Bellamy and Davis started working on an album, with Bellamy producing, focusing on lost Northern Soul classics, supplemented by their raw, soulful takes on some famous standards. Davis says “We just love the story of how Northern England fell in love with American soul music even after it stopped having hits, and used that music to soundtrack a good night out.” Adds Bellamy “Like Jazz which reinvents old songs, we are continuing the tradition of how bands like The Beatles & The Stones started out - finding great soul and blues standards and recording them in a more modern style.”
The Jaded Hearts Club, The Nude Party,Frankie & the Witch Fingers,Rodrigo y Gabriela,Robert Plant, Drive-By Truckers, Hot Chip, Beatrice Dillon, Róisín Murphy, The Jaded Hearts Club
