UNIVERSAL HEARTBURN

Beauty can be sad; we're all proof of that - and when the damage is done, we tend to look back and find the beauty of the meaning in everything that came before. We're just as inclined as everybody else to push the nostalgia button - after all, all our old used-to-be's number in the thousands (of songs)! Why not wander through the past, pausing thoughtfully to touch an artifact here and there? We advocate this activity. And if... (read more)

Drinks are Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley. They've just released their second album, Hippo Lite, and have decided to grace select stages across the USA to perform it. Celebrate! What can one say about Hippo Lite? How about the following: "whirring, eliptical and feverish" (Mojo);"a mini-adyssey in quiet post-punk experimentation, brought to life with playfulness, eccentricity, and sly compositional sophistication" (Pitchfork); "An Absorbing and clever (album) that gets stranger as it goes on" (The Guardian); "a beautifully strange bit of primitivistic... (read more)

Continuing in the Colonel Parker model, the powers that bleat saw fit to collect a patchwork of Palace Musics and Will Oldham songs for a follow-up to LOST BLUES AND OTHER SONGS.  Mostly it was an act of gentle rebellion against the failure of the GUARAPERO session in Cotati, California, which cost a lot of effort and money.  There were great performances recorded at that session, two of which, “Call Me a Liar” and “The Sugarcane Juice Drinker” are collected on this LOST BLUES... (read more)

Given John Renbourn's extensive catalog, the forthcoming Live in Kyoto 1978 might seem like an addition that only a true Renbourn-head could appreciate, but we are here to tell you that things are not what they seem to be. Or at least, that little factoid of fake isn't! Regardless of whether or not you consider yourself a newbie or an old guard in the world of John Renbourn, Live in Kyoto 1978 showcases the talent and magnetism of a celebrated legend in the... (read more)

Blonde and brunette. Dog and cat. Lemon and onion. Friend and foam. The change has been made! You can scratch your seven-year itch freely now: Ty Segall & White Fence are become one again, regrooving what we once called Hair into what is now Joy.  

Hair grew out of a simpler time, man! If, as the dyphrenic duo indeed affirm on Joy, rock in 2018 is dead, don't come around here looking for no burial. Instead, find Tim and Ty... (read more)

GUARAPERO success notwithstanding, Will Oldham’s connections with the Dirty Three’s Mick Turner and Jim White continued to strengthen.  All three participated in the European tour by the Boxhead Ensemble in support of the documentary film DUTCH HARBOR.  Later, Turner sent Oldham some recordings he’d been working on.  These were solo recordings done on guitar and organ, using loops in an organic fashion still pretty much unique to Mick Turner.  The pieces were meditative, organic, and inspiring.  Turner asked Oldham if there was... (read more)

Something has been missing from the last few mini-millennia we've all been living through here in the two-thousand-teens, but it is a discreet thing; have you noticed at all? Listen freak - if you can raise your thousand yard stare from the heart of the campfire embers, you might be roused by the sign that's been posted on your cabin wall: our old favorite neo-troubadours Espers are manifesting once again! Re-birthed into an inextricably changed world after the interminable gap of nearly a decade, Espers... (read more)

Ty Segall's Goblin Phase One North American tour is just about over. Whoa. EPIC. Now that he and the Freedom Band have knocked the rust off cages all around the country, it must be time to get alone, right? Yeah man! For a couple weeks - then the European tour. So, alone time later in June, then? Sure, for a little minute. But then it's time for the BEST kind of alone time - a solo acoustic tour. Just Ty, the guitar - and... (read more)

1980: it was the dawn of a new age, a generation and more plunged into the abyss. But what of Death?

The Hackney brothers were no different from anybody else - in the heat and tumult of the 1970s, they'd seen that new world coming. They'd raised their voices righteously, transforming with outrage and hunger their all-in-the-family power-trio Rock Funk Fire Express into the proto-punk legends called Death. These were the sounds the world knows today as For the Whole World... (read more)

The new scent of Wand has almost arrived! And as Wand gets closer, their vision comes into a blur of focus and other things. Like dig the effortless anthem-itude of "Pure Romance".  And the video - boy howdy! It recalls days of absorbing the dim flicker of a television set into the wee hours of the morning just to catch a glimpse of new music videos by somebody GOOD! "Pure Romance", shot and directed by Cory Hanson, emits a warm glow hearkening back... (read more)