Mirror Travel - "Stoner"
from the album Mexico
In stores October 15, 2013 via Modern Outsider Records

For the past four years, Follow That Bird was one of the most buzzed about bands from their hometown of Austin, Texas. And considering how many bands are packed into that one city, that ain't faint praise. They were picked by Matador Records to be the lead single on the 2010 Austin-only compilation Casual Victim Pile, and snapped up enough accolades to have Bill Callahan have them support him on tour and ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead ask them to be the opening act on their full tour of the Western US last summer.

After that...everything went a little awry. The band's label folded, taking with it the money promised them to record their debut full-length. But instead of seeing that as a major roadblock, the trio saw it as the perfect chance to forge their own path. With it came a new band name - Mirror Travel - and a chance to further strengthen their belief in the power of the music they were creating together. Or as Tiffanie Lanmon put it, "We had to walk into the desert and do things our way."

The desert Lanmon (drums) is referring to is the one that surrounds Marfa, Texas, where the she, Paul Brinkley (bass/vocals) and Lauren Green (guitar/vocals) decamped for two weeks to record with Gory Smelley (YACHT, Eleanor Friedberger, Grouper) at Marfa Recording Studio. It was just the isolating experience the band needed to bring their album Mexico into the world.

The results? One of the most warmly engaging records you're likely to hear this year. With Smelley's help, Mirror Travel were able to more fully embrace the dreamy garage pop sound that got them to where they are today.

Opener "Sands" may give the impression of a band lost in a shoegazer wilderness, but let the punchy Nuggets-style bassline and reverb-slathered drive of the next track "I Want You To Know" shove aside all those preconceptions. The rest of Mexico flows by with the same steady gaze and attack, with occasional upticks and dips in tempo and temperature.

Looked at as a complete package, Mexico is a document of a trio who, as their name change would suggest, are taking themselves more seriously and looking at the road ahead with much more purpose and intent. Like the long drives between tour stops and the seemingly endless desert that helped inspire these songs, you're meant to drink this album in slowly, steadily, and with your eye fixed on the horizon.

www.modernoutsider.com

Mirror Travel - Stoner

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"

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. 

Mirror Travel - Stoner

Modern Outsider Records

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