News

I Stand Corrected is the debut of a new talent AND a new label, Country Thyme. When a label's formed to release a record, you'll usually hear something crucial upon dropping the needle: in this instance, the sounds of an honest-to-god, old-school song cycle in best riches-to-rags style. Classically uneasy, this claustrophobic journey rises and falls on the songs of E.R. Jurken and his spectral tenor, haunted via multiple overdubs, making heart stopping orchestral pop with the orchestra mostly muted.

I Stand Corrected took some... (read more)

Keys, the debut album from Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles is, from the get-go, music that grows as it goes, a living organism, determined to be more than a simple collection of guitar and banjo duets.

Bill and Nathan met a few years ago, but after the first night they hung out, it felt as if they’d known each other for awhile already. A year later, they were booked to play as a duo at Cropped Out. They'd sent provisional ideas, thoughts and music... (read more)

Broken nation time! Dark skies over our days, an increased reliance on black-market products. Wanna buy some 5-year old sunshine? With 2020 hindsight, it’s looking pretty good. Now you can treasure yours forever, with a special 10" release!

Smash-cut to 2015. Ty Segall and Cory Hanson with guitars on their chests, stretching songwriting muscles and finding, to their delight, new possibilities at every run up the neck – a new normal every second. This means trading vocal parts mid-song, then trading back again, modulating madly through... (read more)

An electrical tension enters the room – a guitar, left to its own devices, surfing the breeze. Breaking in the air, smiling from ear to ear. And so! The Peacers are back with their third album.

Three years since they went about their sophomore affect, Introducing the Crimsmen – and the time has been kind. You know how it is in these important years, everything changing. Lots goes down, lots to go back through later. The second The Peacers record was made by the second The Peacers... (read more)

2021, and the voices that nobody thought to ask for — New Bums, that's who — are echoing once again from another rented return deep in their nocturnal urban jungle, where all the folly and failure in the world is like an elegant fever dream you want to have every night, and do. Why now? Why them? Why not? Besides, New Bums — Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny and Skygreen Leopards' Donovan Quinn — have a new album coming, and "Tuned to Graffiti" is... (read more)

From the barely-there annals of private press, hippie folk-rock history… comes a reissue of the one and only Bill Stone LP, on Drag City/Galactic Zoo Disks. Bill Stone started out playing in a few small folk ensembles and stepping out with occasional solo gigs, which led to the 1969 recording of Stone on a 2-track Panasonic tape recorder in a pottery studio (!?) in Boothbay, Maine.

This private press rediscovery bears the distinguishing marks of the period, its gently interlocking acoustic and electric arpeggiation weaving... (read more)

A lifelong Californian, Cory Hanson has naturally found himself standing to the left of most of the country. The west may be only what you make it; these days, the roadside view looks exceptionally sunbleached and left behind. His forthcoming long player, Pale Horse Rider, eyes the city, the country and the fragile environment that holds them both in its hands — a record as much about Los Angeles as it can be with it’s back to the town and the sun in its... (read more)

For those who find the passage of time a one-way process of attrition, here’s good news for you. In the eight years since AZITA's last long-player, her fevered brain has barely rested; the proof's in the unbounded physical and mental activity, music and entertainment we hear in her new album, entitled Glen Echo.

Since the time of her solo debut, AZITA's written and arranged on keyboards - but here, AZITA composed on guitars for her new songs. Not simply for swagger or a... (read more)

Now that they're back, they're back to swinging in front of the charge! Dope Body's relentless rock futurism has reignited their catalog in the past year with not just one but two new releases, the LP-and-digital Crack a Light and it's digital-only predecessor, Home Body. With these releases, Dope Body has come all the way back around to their experimental genesis, while continuing to evolve the identity that they've been growing ever since.
 

In the past decade, the ... (read more)

Listening back to this year's Gold Record, is a sentimental journey; once again, one hears the intuitive coming together forming richly behind Bill Callahan's titanic voice. Across the stereo spectrum, the gentle conversation of Bill and Matt’s guitars, the subtle percussion of bass and drums, striking notes both decorous and discordant, like the naturally occurring sound meant to accompany and express lives lived everywhere.
 

A fitting addition to Bill's encompassing vision of our lives together and apart... (read more)