UPGRADE SOUL is an award-winning, digital graphic novel featuring an original score by celebrated experimental musician/composer Alexis Gideon. Every bit as dense and strange as the book that inspired it, Gideon’s soundtrack mines jazz, hip hop, and giallo influences to sculpt a gloriously unpredictable soundscape punctuated alternately by passages of head-bopping bliss and skin-crawling tension.
Leo Rondeau deals in stories candid and honest and plainspoken. Based in Nashville TN, his own story finds root in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota, where Rondeau grew up surrounded by country music listeners and pickers spanning three generations. “It was always around me,” he says.
This aspect of his adolescence bolstered an unwavering sense of self and place in his work that sets Rondeau apart from peer musicians. A child of the rural American west and owning family lineage within the Turtle Mountain band of the Chippewa Indian tribe, his own history and worldview are engrained in the lines of his songs. This is about a type of honesty that means more than simply telling the truth. It’s a voice that either lives within you or does not.
His latest album – Right On Time — is available now.
Following Guided By Voice’s sprawling double-album Zeppelin Over China, Robert Pollard has written and recorded another full-length in record-breaking time. It’s Warp And Woof, exuberantly barreling through twenty-four songs in just thirty-seven minutes with a brevity similar to mid-90s GBV albums Alien Lanes and Vampire On Titus. GBV kicked this one out in a flash, recorded in studios, club soundchecks, hotel rooms and even in the tour van.
After completing Zeppelin, Pollard felt the itch to record a few EPs. Just as GBV had done back in 1994, he would use them to channel his everflowing ideas to an outlet. But when a magical boombox writing session produced six fully formed songs in under half an hour, Pollard realized he had an album on his hands. What to do?
With a band so formidable they’ve been dubbed the Golden Age of GBV, they completed much of the recording on the road. The 2018 Space Gun Tour provided impromptu recording venues. Pollard recorded vocals in hotel rooms, complimentary condominiums, and small studios. Doug Gillard cut guitar tracks for “End It With Light” through his Mesa Boogie rig at the soundcheck at the Ottobar in Baltimore. Bobby Bare Jr. recorded his spacey main rhythm guitars for album closer, “Time Remains in Central Position” at the same show, but in the backstage green room. Kevin March added drum tracks in a studio in his hometown Montclair, New Jersey. Gillard played guitar on “Bury the Mouse” in a van hurtling at 60-plus m.p.h., and Mark Shue laid bass on “Angelic Weirdness” as he balanced on the speeding van’s bench seat….
Based out of Brooklyn New York and making music for 7 years, Hawk and Dove have been writing and touring and making community wherever they can. They have just finished an album that describes one man’s miracle cure adventure – to address his failing young [early onset parkinson’s] brain, while also looking at our generational search for luxury and ease at the expense of other people’s further-away-lives. Order now!
Ian Noe’s highly anticipated full-length debut album, Between The Country, will be released May 31 on Thirty Tigers. Recorded at Nashville’s RCA Studio A with Grammy Award-winning producer Dave Cobb, Between The Country includes 10 new songs written solely by Noe. In addition to Noe (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, vocals) and Cobb (acoustic guitar, electric guitar), the album also features Adam Gardner (bass, organ piano), Chris Powell (drums, percussion) and Savannah Conley (backup vocals).
Recorded over three days in August 2018, and released March 15, 2019, Beowulf Umbrella’s She’s Studying Evil is the work of Tommy Keene band alumni Brad Quinn and John Richardson, along with session musicians on call at Richardson’s Drum Farm Studios in Menomonie, Wisconsin. Although a studio project in essence, Quinn performs under the Beowulf Umbrella name in Japan, where he lives, in both solo and in group configurations. The Dadaesque name of the group comes from an unpublished short story by Richard Brautigan. The EP includes performances by bassist and keyboardist Kevin Dailey, guitarist Adam Ollendorff, plus guest appearances by Mike Schlenker (lead guitar on “She’s Studying Evil”) and Paul Chastain (“Just Say the Word”).