PLAY DUMB, the first single from The Crookes 3rd album SOAPBOX.



The Crookes - Play Dumb

Brass Bed - "I Am just a Whisper"
from their new album In the Yellow Leaf
in stores 04.15.16

pre-order now on LP and CD:
http://modernoutsider.bigcartel.com/artist/brass-bed

http://www.modernoutsider.com
http://www.brassbedisbrassbed.com

Being an undiscovered commodity has its advantages. Growth, movement, exploration, metamorphosis and misfires can be weathered without scrutiny or expectation. There’s no mistaking that Brass Bed is not a young band. Now in their early 30s, the band’s essential trio of Jonny Campos, Peter DeHart and Christiaan Mader are too old to be wunderkinds, too young to be cult, but just old enough to understand themselves.

With their 4th LP, In The Yellow Leaf, BB continues to contemplate the slipping horizon. Where others confront mortality with a self-seriousness that belies a fundamental insecurity, principal lyricists Mader and Campos encounter the void with winks and shrugs.

That’s the most impressive hidden growth of all – the development of a poetic sensibility appropriate to their stage of life. At one time collegiate Wilco-acolytes, cribbing Jeff Tweedy’s romantic nihilism and Jim O’Rourke’s texturizations like teenagers raiding a liquor cabinet, BB now wears a mask commiserate with their age.

They’ve grown up. They’ve learned about shit. They can talk about it honestly now.

Yellow Leaf finds the band in much the same headspace as their 2013 breakout The Secret Will Keep You: angsty vortices of sound draped over pop idioms constructed with a grad student’s eye for abstraction and musical grammar. With the help of guitarist Ben Jones (Generationals, Youth Lagoon) and a pilot recording with engineer Chris Woodhouse (Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees), the band rediscovered the exuberance of guitar rock and forced it to grow up.

Faced with an audience not yet listening, BB turned up. Where other bands age into balladry, BB traded their ill-fitted pining in for decibel urgency and caterwauling feedback. Their musings sit much better over fuzz, spit, and glistening reverb.

The result is a record that is as eclectically inventive as it is fundamentally raw and abrupt. Lead single “I Am Just A Whisper” captures the band’s ability to charm snakes of anxiety while creating enough speed to allow melody, decay and sustain to hover over the scurrying madness like whispers. Thematic center-piece “Yellow Bursts of Age” evokes a haunting innocence arranged with studio-ghosts that vanish like falling evening snow. From all this it may seem as though BB is trapped in a cycle of morbid meditation. But consider the apostate sarcasm of “Maiden Voyage” and witness that Yellow Leaf is a cradle for artists at peace in an unsettled universe.

Brass Bed used to be wide-eyed pop dreamers. Now they are realists finding wonder in the dark comedy of mortality. They are the eponymous bursts of age – kids hopping into leaf mounds and making the most out decay.

Brass Bed - "I Am Just a Whisper"

Dana Falconberry and Medicine Bow
"Dolomite"
taken from the forthcoming new album From the Forest Came the Fire
in stores 04.01.16

www.danafalconberry.com
www.modernoutsider.com

On their new album, From the Forest Came the Fire, set for an April 2016 release via Modern Outsider, Dana Falconberry & Medicine Bow invite the listener to look upon the world through new eyes, to ponder the intuition that drives a cormorant to dive deeper and deeper. From the Forest Came the Fire guides us past the forest's edge, beneath the surface of the water, and up the base of the mountain, leaving listeners awestruck at the meeting of natural landscapes and the supernatural forces that lay within them.

Intricately layered and multi-textured, Falconberry’s avant-folk songs are the aural equivalent of the disparate and wondrous landscapes of these United States. Trace the back roads branching out from Dearborn, Michigan and the Leelanau Peninsula across the country to Austin, Texas to understand Falconberry’s personal and musical history. An adept lyricist, Falconberry has always captured the stunning imagery of her surrounding physical geography, evident on her last album, Leelanau, which depicted memories from her young life in Michigan. The songs garnered praise from The New York Times, NPR, and SPIN and helped secure appearances at Austin City Limits Festival and Fun Fun Fun Fest and opening gigs for Califone, Daniel Johnston, and Heartless Bastards.

Where before Falconberry evoked the beauty of the natural world, she seeks now to understand its mystery, delving into the anthropological magic of places, nostalgically channeling the voices of past lives. Inspired by her late grandmother Isabelle, the album unfolds like a surreal dream quest. Falconberry chases ghosts through a thicket of trees, over rocky ridges, across the vast expanse of a thirsty desert, mapping out an intangible terrain like a spiritual cartographer. Written in a series of solitary retreats into remote areas of the Ozarks, Lincoln National Forest, the Buffalo River, and White Sands, New Mexico, these songs chronicle an introspective, metaphysical journey set to a backdrop of the American continent.

Anchored in solid rhythms and buoyed by ethereal instrumentation, the songs are excellently produced; musical motifs flower brilliantly before receding into shadowy strings and arrangements feel simultaneously lush and spacious. Much of the album was produced and engineered by Spoon’s Jim Eno at his Public Hi-Fi studio in Austin, TX, and the remainder was recorded by Christopher Cox and Grant Johnson of Fat Fuse Music. Both producers possess a clear grasp Falconberry’s sonic palette and help capture the songwriter’s most arresting work to date.

Drawing from her early experiences with classical music through her work as a ballet dancer, Falconberry couples traditional notions with influences from Austin’s diverse independent music community to create intricate, modern folk songs with an experimental edge. Backed by Christopher Cox (bass), Gina Dvorak (banjo, guitar), Karla Manzur (keys), Matthew Shepherd (percussion), and Lindsey Verrill (cello), Falconberry continues to work with the same cast of musicians she assembled prior to Leelanau. After four years of collaboration, the band has developed a close friendship that transfers to all aspects of their sound. The band’s increasingly integral role in the project prompted Falconberry to adopt the moniker “Dana Falconberry & Medicine Bow” for the first time. 

Falconberry’s transfixing live performances have the ability to turn a chattering bar into a pin-drop silent room, but she also enjoys finding inherently quiet spaces to perform her elegant chamber pop. After playing shows at both White Sands National Monument and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Falconberry is making steps to orchestrate an entire tour of U.S. National Parks to support From the Forest Came the Fire in the Summer of 2016.

Dana Falconberry and Medicine Bow -  "Dolomite"

in dreams fur summer

Cover of Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love"

"Can't Help Falling in Love"

Cover of "American Girl" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers for the ALL ATX VOL 4: LOW DOWN VIOLET CROWN compilation benefitting HAAM, SIMS, AMF, and Black Fret available at Waterloo Records:

http://waterloorecords.com/UPC/888295498623/Various_All-ATX-vol-4-Low-Down-Violet-Crown

AMERICAN GIRL

Curtis Roush
Cosmic Campfire Music 
release date: 02.09.18 on Modern Outsider 
pre-order now: http://smarturl.it/curtisroush

Fusing bedroom soul with the ambient expanses of shoegaze, singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Curtis Roush explores love and loss away from the purview of his psych-rock comrades The Bright Light Social Hour. Roush was born in Austin, Texas. Suffused with the 70s album rock of his Californian parents, Roush picked up his first instrument, an acoustic guitar, at age 13 in a vain attempt to win back the affections of his 8th grade girlfriend. After his first romantic defeat, Roush buried himself in instruments and musical genres shifting from the metal and classic rock of his teenage years, the hardcore and post-rock of his college years, and into the expansive psychedelia as a member of The Bright Light Social Hour.

Coming off years of heavy touring and relationship upheaval, Curtis Roush composed the songs of his debut album, “Cosmic Campfire Music,” on a laptop during fleeting moments in motels, a tour van, and his parents’ spare bedroom. A reflection of these hushed, quieter spaces, these songs conjure an existential meditation on love - how it rarely arrives, how it often leaves. Working with producer Erik Wofford at Cacophony Recorders, Roush tracked the album to analog tape over one month in the winter of 2016. He played every instrument.

The second track “Getaway” releases an early blast of propulsive energy from its Motown churn and crackling guitar. Album centerpiece “Polestar” nestles its country-tinged yearning in stately slide guitar and languid synths. On “Never Leave You Cold,” Roush ponders devotion over a breezy motorik rhythm before exploding into an immersive hymn of professed love. The album closes with the interstellar gospel of “Space is Empty (Come With Me)” - a seven minute epic reflecting on defeat and rebirth following the disastrous 2016 election. From its calm confessions to its skyward gaze, “Cosmic Campfire Music” is a listen for hushed respite before the long struggle ahead.

Cosmic Campfire Music (MP3)

Curtis Roush - Real Love

Moving Panoramas - Texas Blues

Independent record label based in Austin, TX. 

Dana Falconberry and Medicine Bow - "Dolomite"

Modern Outsider Records

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