Lonesome Magic Vice Harvest

from their "s/t" debut album - out NOW on Trouble In Mind Records (www.troubleinmindrecs.com)

"Ultimate Painting" by Ultimate Painting

Siren is the fifth album by British rock band Roxy Music, released in 1975.

End Of The Line

Ohio

First single from Meg Duffy's Hand Habits. Debut LP out Feb 10, 2017 on Woodsist Records.

"Meg Duffy, aka Hand Habits, is a singer, songwriter and guitarist from Upstate New York. She has been putting her time in on the road and in the studio over the past two years with pacific northwest band Mega Bog, and the Kevin Morby Band, making an impression on everyone she comes across with her natural charisma and uncharted talent as a multi-instrumentalist. But let Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void) be her open invitation to the world to step inside and take a much deeper look into who Duffy actually is. Tracked in an Upstate New York living room, then finished in her current home in Los Angeles - it is appropriate that this album was recorded by Meg herself - for Meg, who has an acute ear for detail, has touched every corner, has seen every vision 'til its end. Because of this, Wildly Idle feels incredibly intimate, like a secret between her and the listener. It hits soft, like warm water, and before you know it it is all around you - a bath, and Meg's whisper has made its way inside you. Like many bedroom-debuts before it (Microphones, Jessica Pratt, Little Wings, Grouper)  let this be the first of many to come, for Meg has music in her touch - and this is only the beginning. But let us not look to the future now, but instead stand alongside her, our trust in her will, both humble before the void, with her first chorus as the mission statement; 'hold you like a flower, hold you like an hour glass'."- Kevin Morby

HAND HABITS - All The While

PRE-ORDER 7" Postcard/card postcard: http://artishardrecords.limitedrun.com/products/584916-penelope-isles-cut-your-hair-pcc01

Our 2017 singles club will be taking the form of a monthly postcard from some of your favourite bands, and we're kicking that off right now with Penelope Isles.

Following their Comfortably Swell EP which we reissued to coincide with Cassette Store Day 2016, the Brighton via Cornwall foursome jump right into the new year with a fresh audible bowl cut in the form of Cut Your Hair.

25th Jan – Tooting Tram & Social, London
26th Jan – Cookie Jar, Leicester
28th Jan – Wharf Chambers, Leeds
30th Jan – Maguires Pizza Bar, Liverpool
31st Jan – Mothers Ruin, Bristol
2nd Feb – Woodlane Social Club, Falmouth
3rd Feb – Unit 23, Totnes
4th Feb – Green Door Store, Brighton
7th Feb – Old Blue Last, London

Penelope Isles - Cut Your Hair

written by bed.
produced by larry crane at jackpot! recording studio in portland.
mastered by adam gonsalves at telegraph audio.

Replay

From the album Warrior, available April 6, 2018 from Western Vinyl

Bandcamp: https://airwaves.bandcamp.com/album/warrior
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/warrior/1337353378?ls=1&app=itunes
WV: http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv167

The album cover for Warrior, the third full-length by Brooklyn-based band Air Waves, features a ominous, androgynous figure standing with a bicycle, wearing a gas mask adorned with a daisy.  The remarkable image was taken on April 22nd, 1970 at the inaugural Earth Day celebration in New York City by Nicole Schneit’s dad, Martin Schneit.  Forty-seven years later, artist Em Rooney hand-painted Schneit’s original black & white photo, resulting in an image that radiates with Warrior’s indefatigable spirit, strength, and love.

Like many queer women, Nicole Schneit is a warrior by necessity, fighting for basic rights, dignity, and acceptance.  Such determination in the face of hardship and injustice runs in Schneit’s family; her new album was inspired in part by her mom who was diagnosed with fallopian cancer last year.  As she explains, “The doctor told her she had a fifteen to twenty percent chance, and her response was ‘I’m going to get this mother fucker.’ So the title ‘Warrior’ and the song are about her. After chemotherapy,  surgery, and then more chemotherapy, all the cancer in her body has left and she's currently in remission. I feel like most of the people in my life, including myself, are warriors and have overcome obstacles that seemed impossible to defeat.”

The dignified fighter archetype referenced in the album’s title is explored on each of Warrior’s eleven pieces of bittersweet, empowering indie pop.  According to Schneit the song “Gay Bets”, written after the 2016 election is “about being gay and being proud and open. I was thinking about hate crimes spiking and the current state of the world. My friend Jennifer Moore, who sings on the track, was my partner a long time ago, so I felt like I was writing a fuck you to Trump, for trying to take away queer rights, women's rights, people's rights.”  The song “Tangerine” was inspired by the film of the same name in which two trans women try to make ends meet as prostitutes. This movie, a dark docu-comedy shot in the contrastingly sunny setting of L.A., reflects Schneit’s battle between identity and society via Brooklyn pop rock that swings between the pastel-tinged and the downright melancholic.

On the album’s gorgeous closer “Blue Fire,” (inspired by the Adrienne Rich poem "The Will to Change") Schneit equates her post-presidential-election anxiety to a flame that grows and recedes, as she pleads for herself and listeners to remain calm. Like its namesake, the track burns slowly and brightly into one of the most glowing points on the record, leaving the listener smiling with thoughtful hope.  Warrior’s highlights, and all of the unmissable, satisfying pieces that tie them together show Schneit’s perseverance and resilience through crumbling relationships, personal adversity, and the current political climate, all leading to her most powerful collection of songs to date. Understated, subtly sophisticated, and equally empowering and comforting, Warrior launches Air Waves above the apolitical complacency of too many of the group's contemporaries.  Schneit proudly declares her mission statement: “I want these songs to be heard by people in my queer community, but also by anyone that wants to feels strong, powerful, and included.”

Warrior

Air Waves - "Warrior" ft. Kevin Morby

A Quality of Mercy 12" released via Fat Possum Records May 25th 2018. 

Pre-order here - http://smarturl.it/AQualityOfMercy12 

https://www.facebook.com/RVGBAND/ 
https://www.instagram.com/___rvg_____

RVG - A Quality Of Mercy

From Fran's debut album out 11/15 on Fire Talk.

Pre Order / Pre Save: ffm.to/franaprivatepicture

The trick is to make a confession entertaining. A Private Picture, the debut album by Chicago’s Fran, delivers a collection of extremely personal experiences that have been distilled and abstracted to the point that you can see yourself in their imagery, find analogs to your own emotional history in their scenarios –when you hear them, it’s a conversation. It’s therapy, if therapy was allowed to turn you on and make you shake what you got. At its core, Fran’s music is about sharing a truth -–telling it, confessing it, yelling it—in the service of human connection. Or, as Jacobson puts it, “I feel that I am a songwriter for the same reason I wanted to be an actor. I want to tell the truth. I want to challenge myself to get closer and closer to the core of an experience, an emotion- I want to say it, sing it, in a way that says exactly what it is. I cry when I write songs because I am constantly making discoveries, about myself, about the world, about the best way to convey and connect and get closer.”

A Private Picture

Fran - So Surreal

Completely improvised (except for covers, obviously). out of tune guitars, in-tune violin, old Tascam 4 track. recipe for fun/disaster!


Most of these tracks are 16 years old at LEAST, and they document the First World Struggle of one girl, a too-big guitar at the beginning, no clue what a power chord is, and a fortune spent in Radio Shack. Metal cassette tapes; and using the AUX function on my double cassette tape deck to spend hours mixing the levels, etc., for the final result (i.e. "I GIVE UP”). Also a flaw: I never wrote song lyrics ahead of time. Ever. And I'd play one guitar track, record it, and then build everything else in the song on top of that. Keeping my voice going as the same direction as my guitar wasn't an easy feat. But I had SO MUCH FUN, and was in a band for awhile in my early 20's, and we were on the radio, and I played electric violin and sang in front of drunks in college clubs, and for 15 minutes, I was doing what I have always loved above all else (besides writing).

Classically trained violinist since age 7; performing arts schools galore for music and creative writing. self-taught all else (take mercy on my soul).

Ohio

Sarah Sorenson

Related tracks