ALTER.NATION #39
The Soft Cavalry, Róisín Murphy, Bleached, Shannon Lay, Torche, Van Dale, Pixies, Lost Under Heaven, Girl Band, Dude York, Lana Del Rey, Tei Shi
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ALTER.NATION #39 on deezer
The Soft Cavalry - Dive
Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell's announcing a new band named the Soft Cavalry, which is a duo with her husband Steve Clarke, who she married last year. In July, they’ll release their self-titled debut album. “I’d always had ideas but never felt that anything I had to say was worthy of anyone’s attention, let alone my own,” Clarke said of the collaboration. “I wish that I could have done this fifteen years ago but, in reality, I simply couldn’t have. But I’m not one to overly wallow. I’d rather plough the various levels of confusion into songs.”
Róisín Murphy - Incapable
...On “Incapable,” the Irish singer invokes a particularly loaded term, singing from the perspective of a woman estranged from the very ability to love... It’s a sneaky tune. At first, it sounds celebratory: “Never had a broken heart,” she admits, as her longtime accomplice Richard Barratt (aka Crooked Man) threads a hypnotic deep-house groove with slinky hints of disco. It sounds like a boast; her voice is somewhere between blasé and bulletproof. But as the song builds, and she contemplates her curious, almost inhuman remove, her tone turns searching, then desperate. With the chorus, she cuts to the chase: “Never had a broken heart/Am I incapable of love?/Never had a broken heart/Yet I’m unavailable for love.”... For a song about inner turmoil, “Incapable” is strikingly smooth. It glides on for more than eight minutes, disco riffs tracing delicate circles in the air as the synths rise higher and higher. Like the best dance music, it’s an invitation to get lost—only here, it seeks catharsis in the shadow of another’s emotional failure.
Bleached - Kiss You Goodbye
“Tell me everything’s OK/ Baby, we’re a hurricane,” they sing over a groove-inflected pop beat. “Kiss you goodbye for the last time.”... “We all saw ‘Kiss you Goodbye’ as an opportunity to pay homage to our roots in the valley,” Juliana Giraffe says in a statement. “Not only are we all sibling sisters coming together, but also all San Fernando valley girls at heart. What better way to celebrate that than a quick shout out to backyard bbqs, body builders and a little boogie nights on a Sunday in beautiful Woodland Hills.”
Shannon Lay - Nowhere
Folk musician Shannon Lay revealed her Sub Pop signing with a Karen Dalton cover a few weeks ago, and today she’s announcing her first album for the label, August, which is fittingly out in August. Its proper lead single, “Nowhere,” is a gently lilting puzzle piece, Lay’s voice locking into place as she embraces confusion: “Nobody knows where I am going/ I just close my eyes and I find/ The place in my dreams,” she sings.
Torche - Slide
The great Miami band Torche have been around since 2004, when they rose from the ashes of hardcore monsters Floor. In that decade and a half, no other band has sounded like Torche. Torche have always made their home on the American metal underground, and they alone have found a way to combine the fuzz-bass rumble of doom with the adamantine hooks of stadium-sized ’90s alt-rock... drummer Rick Smith says, “’Slide’ is one of the first songs Eric came to the table with, fully realized and arranged. Eric is a total beast of a songwriter. I suggested he use the first three Gary Numan records as inspiration and he came back at us with some melodically sound material that nailed the Torche vibe.”
Columbus fuzz-pop trio Van Dale have been kicking out classic indie guitar jams for the better part of a decade, and they’re about to serve up some more. Today the group announces their new album The Visitor... The nervy rocker “Numbskull” finds a hard-hitting sweet spot between Weezer and Nirvana, the band bashing away furiously while singer-guitarist Joe Camerlengo launches from his lower register into an aggressive wail. His refrain, “I don’t really think I’ve ever been away,” is joined to an intense rhythm that breaks loose into tension-relieving shouts of “YEAH!” The results are scrappy, dynamic, combustible, and just plain rad.
Pixies - On Graveyard Hill
Indie legends Pixies have been sharing snippets of a new song the past few days. Today that song is here. “On Graveyard Hill” was cowritten by Black Francis and Paz Lenchantin, who memorably took over for founding bassist Kim Deal a few years back. It’s their first release since 2016 album Head Carrier, a spooky and characteristically rambunctious rocker marked by references to “the witching hour” and squalls of unmistakable Pixies guitar. They’ve been playing it live on tour this year, and the studio version is out now.
Lost Under Heaven — the team-up between former WU LYFer Ellery James Roberts and Ebony Hoorn — put out their sophomore album, Love Hates What You Become, at the very beginning of the year... “‘Teen Violence’ is an allegorical tragedy about an Androgynous Prophet of the Divine Feminine who is brutally silenced by an aggressively ignorant society that is unable to comprehend his/her vision due to the paralysis of Cultural Immaturity,” Roberts said in a statement. “It is a song of our time: this formative moment in human history where we are faced with a plethora of crises that threaten the extinction of the species. Our Politics fail to make adequate response as the wider culture continues to fracture into increasingly oppositional individualist hysteria.”
Girl Band - Shoulderblades
...Girl Band are announcing The Talkies, a new album produced by Fox, and sharing lead single “Shoulderblades”... This one is a return to their all-consuming form, and its gnarly, acetic underbelly makes most other “indie” rock feel like child’s play. It’s noisy and pulsating — at times heavy on the psyche as there’s a palpable battle for space occupation. It opens with a vacillating atmosphere, and shrieking guitars seem go in and out of focus around the lyrics. As the drums kick in, lead singer Dara Kiely eerily screams, only adding to the push and pull felt with the lack of melodic consistency...
Dude York - Box
Last month, the Seattle trio Dude York announced their new album, Falling... they’re back with “Box,” a riffy and bright track about the prospect of being alone forever that sounds like it could be blasting out of a stereo. “I’ll never love again/ No, not me/ I’ll never love again indefinitely,” Peter Richards sings.
It pairs nicely with their last single, an alternate point of view with a love that didn’t come as easy...
Lana Del Rey - Doin' Time
...Lana Del Rey shared a snippet of a cover of Sublime's "Doin' Time." The song was a single on the O.G. frat-reggae band's multiplatinum self-titled third album, released in 1996. Lana writes in the Instagram caption that the song is "Coming soon," and according to the future single releases listed on All Access, her cover of "Doin' Time" will hit radio on May 20.
The new snippet comes as Lana Del Rey prepares her upcoming album Norman Fucking Rockwell, which has yet to receive a release date...
Tei Shi - A Kiss Goodbye
Tei Shi, aka Colombian-Canadian musician Valerie Teicher, is preparing to drop the follow-up to 2017’s tremendous Crawl Space. We don’t have details on the new LP just yet, but today she’s sharing its lead single, “A Kiss Goodbye.” The track is a breathy retro Brazilian pop exercise transposed into languid modern production. “So I lead with my body/ Follow with my head,” Tei Shi sings. “If you got what you wanted/ Let me walk away.”...
The Soft Cavalry, Róisín Murphy, Bleached, Shannon Lay, Torche, Van Dale, Pixies, Lost Under Heaven, Girl Band, Dude York, Lana Del Rey, Tei Shi
