Astral Swans
All My Favorite Singers Are Willie Nelson

Equally inspired by serene 60’s folk, 80’s no-wave alienation, and the insouciance of 90’s grunge, Astral Swans’ music is spacious yet constrained, hauntingly personal and oddly sincere. The skeletal “Let Their Faces All Blur Out” races softly with the punk rock abandon of early Sonic Youth and Eric’s Trip; “What Calms You Down, Freaks Me Out” bears the ominous pleasance of Syd Barrett, Arthur Russell, Nick Drake, and fellow Calgarian Chad VanGaalen. More structured than Swann’s Extra Happy Ghost!!! project (produced by VanGaalen), this album’s experimental spirit denies the haphazard “singer-songwriter” label that some might attach to Astral Swans.
 
Set for release on Dan Mangan’s Madic Records on February 24, these twelve songs lavish in Swann’s startlingly sardonic reflections, in his own words, “confronting our strange ways of experiencing personhood, in the moral gorge between ideals and inadequacies”. Tracked live in Swann’s living room, and later embellished in an old Calgary warehouse with local experimental/improv mainstay Brad Hawkins (Ghostkeeper), All My Favorite Singers Are Willie Nelson is flawed if not for its air of accidental perfection, normalizing existential struggle with rhythm and harmony, a natural marriage of the sweet to the acrid.
 
More Media Reaction for Astral Swan’s You Carry A Sickness/Park Street 7 Inch
 
“introspective late 60s folk à la Nick Drake filtered through an avant-garde 90s lens” NOW Magazine
 
“a deftly composed, razor-sharp hook wrapped in ectoplasmic ecstasy — a ghastly beautiful exhumation of cryptic poetics and dirge-laden, yet comforting singsong” Beatroute
 
“unembellished vocals float atop a spectral reverie, anchored by sparse percussion and permeated by rays of ’60s-organ sunshine” Weird Canada
 
“a haunting lo-fi hymn”  The Georgia Straight

01 There Are Ways To Get What You Want

02 Beginning Of The End

05 What Calms You Down, Freaks Me Out

06 You Carry A Sickness

Madic Records

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