It’s Friday! Celebrate with some doom metal courtesy of Windhand. Is doom metal really all that celebratory? Sure, why not?
“Grey Garden,” the lead single off of the Richmond, Virginia band’s latest, Eternal Return, is a solid slice of fuzzed out, psyched out, doomy goodness. Check it out.
Eternal Return is out today on Relapse Records.
It hasn’t been all that long since we last heard from The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart (they just put an album out last year) but TPOBPAH frontman Kip Berman is back with a new project – The Natvral.
Described by Berman as “neither solo project nor side project,” The Natvral certainly shows off a different, much folkier side of his songwriting, with Berman citing the likes of Richard & Linda Thompson, Leonard Cohen, and Ted Leo as influences. After listening to the title track of his Know Me More EP, I’d suggest another possible influence in there, as it gives off a little bit of an early Paul Simon vibe as well. Check it out.
The Natvral’s Know Me More is out tomorrow (October 5) on Kanine Records.
It really does come as something of a surprise that Sarah Shook didn’t grow up immersed in country music. Listening to the North Carolina based singer-songwriter’s sophomore album Years, you’d be forgiven for assuming that she grew up in honky-tonks and started mainlining country sounds from birth rather than coming to it later in life as she apparently did. Shook’s catchy, relatable songwriting embodies the spirit of country music so well and throws in a touch of punk rock for good measure too. I could go on about it, but who better than Sarah Shook herself to describe it? As she puts it:
This record is about finding a way. A way through exhaustion, depression, betrayal, hangover after hangover, upper after downer after upper, fight after never-ending fight. It’s about picking yourself up and dusting yourself off after years of being trampled and beaten down, jutting your chin out, head high, after they’ve done their worst, and saying, “Still here.”
This record is shouting “f**k you, I do want I want” from the rooftops to the mother******g cosmos.
Really, what more could you want from an album?
The album is full of gems such as “New Ways To Fail” (with its skateboarding-themed video that we wrote about here), “Parting Words” and album opener “Good As Gold” which features one of my favourite lyrics on the album (“No, it won’t be long ’til the wrong song comes on at the right time”).
Sarah Shook & The Disarmers will be playing a show at The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern on Saturday, August 25. It should be a good one. If by chance you can’t make it or you need something to tide you over until the show, you can check out the lyric video for “Good As Gold” below:
I remember 2013’s Rain Plans like it was yesterday.
No, really. While I listen to it quite frequently, it had also made me erroneously peg Israel Nash as a gritty, melancholy country songwriter. And I haven’t touched country since I said good-riddance to braces/dentists in high-school. But in reality since Rain Plans, he has put out an expansive album with Silver Season, shifting more towards a more open form of Americana.
From the opening moments of “Rolling On” from Nash’s new album Lifted, all I hear is optimism. It paints an expansive ambiance and slowly drapes that landscape with strings of hope like multiple bunches of wisteria. Incidentally, that comparison is apt because the same chorus is its only vehicle besides the guitar highlights at the very end. It is really very soothing. But then again, when I listened a third time a portmanteau of “Take My Breath Away” (Berlin) and “I Will Follow Him” (Little Peggy March) materialized. Now I can’t get those 5 notes out of my head to keep rolling on. Damn it, where has all the optimism gone?
