The year is winding down, and new music is scarce. But we’ve got a last video premiere to share for 2015, and it’s a good one! Marion Hodges wrote about the California band Jet Trash earlier this year, and now we’ve got another track from their debut EP available for your perusal in video form.
JET TRASH – “WHAT THEY WANT” (from the EP Jet Trash, available now, digitally & on cassette from Burger Records imprint Wiener Records) WATCH HERE…
For over a decade, Through The Sparks’ indie psych has resonated with music fans and critics alike. Singer Jody Nelson’s dark subject matter along with the band’s complicated instrumentation has made them one of the more unique bands in the genre. Yet, on their latest album and third overall, Nelson took a more positive tone, and its reflected on the tune we’re premiering today. “Self Immolation” features heavy jams that would make Crazy Horse proud.
“Human sacrifice is a running theme on Transindifference,” Nelson explains. “It’s one thing that turns up in every culture and mythology, and is just bizarre, even in the most vanilla, missionary-style American suburban Christianity—it’s the basis of the thing. So, I wanted to look at it from every angle.
“As for inspiration for ‘Self Immolation,’ there were a string of self-immolations—six or seven of them—in 2013 during the Bulgarian elections, during a state of political unrest. I, admittedly, don’t know much about the details, but it was politically and economically focused, which seemed so bizarre to me. Religious reasons would make more sense. The first person to die was a photographer/mountain climber/adventurer type. He died on the Bulgarian equivalent of the Fourth of July, a couple of weeks after setting himself on fire ceremoniously in front of a municipal building. With ‘Self Immolation,’ I reset the thing from an American perspective, so it takes a much more absurd turn, naturally. It was originally titled ‘The Fifth of July.’
“I wanted to work in a sense of apprehension and images of the mundaneness of American weekend/holiday culture for contrast. The structure of the song might say more than the lyrics themselves about the actual act of kneeling down on a white sheet and dousing oneself with gasoline and striking a match. The outro takes on a giant overblown guitar-rock persona, which is both earnest and decidedly American. Not holding back some of those tendencies on this record was a conscious decision as well. Honesty through inauthenticity and fiction.” LISTEN HERE…
Big personal changes tend to be creative goldmines for songwriters, and country singer-songwriter Caleb Caudle has had no shortage of them over the last few years; the young outlaw relocated back to his home state of North Carolina and stopped drinking. These two transitions provided a wealth of inspiration for his latest album, Carolina Ghost, which drops February 26 via This Is American Music. Check out the album’s first single, “Steel & Stone,” below. LISTEN HERE…
On a chilly evening in early December, the East Nashville skyline was aglow in a bright, periwinkle haze. Not the haze that neighborhood troubadour Todd Snider sang about on one of his many tributes to his side of the Cumberland River, the kind that emanates from a tightly rolled joint smoked next to the local liquor store. On this night, the light came via a massive, multi-story rig from the set of ABC’s Nashville, filming an upcoming episode here, in the “hip” part of town. It was the sort of blue glow that’s usually reserved for the deep-sea section of aquariums, where kids press their noses against the glass to get a better look at the sharks, leaving snot trails in their wake.
It’s appropriate, anyway — lately, East Nashville, and its music scene in particular, has felt more and more like a fishbowl. For the past few years, as Americana has morphed into the new rock & roll and outlets from The New York Times to The Guardian have examined everything from the lure of its coffee shops to its music-making garages, the attention has turned a town into a trend, a place into a verb. Once known as somewhere starving artists flocked for cheap housing and cheaper beer, but feared by tightly-wound suburbanites, it’s now a stop for tour buses looking for guys like Avery Barkley, the “dead sexy East Nashville hipster” on Nashville. READ MORE…
This has been a weird December for New Yorkers: warm weather, heavy mist, darkly cloudy skies. Forecasts predict a Christmas nearing 70° and no snow until mid-January. That makes Sara Rachele’s “Merry Christmas Baby” the answer when your family asks you to put on music this week — or, if you’re a Christmas orphan, just the thing to listen to alone on Friday morning.
Rachele’s new track is a reverb-drenched, macabre take on saccharine winter classics that deserves play even when the snow melts; it might be about Christmas, but with its heavy haze, psych guitars, and Rachele’s slow-burn croon, it could easily soundtrack a heady, humid beach bender, too. The track is darker than Rachele’s earlier (and equally good) output, which shares the same retro stylings but often opts for a cleaner pop sound. The progression into thicker effects suits her voice, which floats through the more complex production without sounding out of place or getting lost in the fuzz.
Unsurprisingly, Rachele draws comparisons to Julee Cruise, whose memorable appearance on Twin Peaks defined their shared brand of surreal doo-wop-inflected ballads. But Rachele’s is an updated version that takes its roots a little more seriously, and one well worth catching live when she plays Rockwood Music Hall on December 30. Whether or not she plays this song post-25th is up to her, but either way it’s a gift for anyone who prefers unsettling chills over shiny holiday spirits. Listen to Sara Rachele’s “Merry Christmas Baby” below. LISTEN HERE…
Caleb Caudle has already proven he’s a top-notch singer and songwriter, a true alternative to mainstream Nashville country minus the outlaw pose. The North Carolina-based artist’s breezy brand of Americana is authentic and thoughtful, sonically somewhere between folks like Ryan Adams, Steve Earle and Jason Isbell, and country icons like Kris Kristofferson and Gram Parsons. He’s a hard-working independent artist who’s been burning up the road, playing countless shows, and honing his craft for years. And now that a trio of simpatico Nashville-outsider contemporaries by the name of Isbell, Sturgill & Stapleton have suddenly kicked the doors open for new and refreshing sounds in country music, he’s poised for a breakthrough.
Caudle’s new album, Carolina Ghost, is out Feb. 26 from This Is American Music, and lead single “Piedmont Sky” (premiering today at Paste) offers up a down-home preview of what’s to come—which is a whole lot of evocative and impressionistic Southern lyricism, wrapped in an impeccable mix of vintage and contemporary country sounds.
Raised just south of the Virginia/North Carolina border, Caudle has shared bills with artists such as Isbell, Robert Ellis, Justin Townes Earle and many other Americana A-listers. His last record, 2014’s Paint Another Layer on My Heart, was a critical favorite that landed him on more than 40 year-end lists. And now, with Carolina Ghost, Caudle has penned an album inspired by a new relationship and a recent move from New Orleans back to the Piedmont.
Recorded at the Fidelitorium in Kernersville, N.C., Carolina Ghost mixes Caudle’s voice with the swoon of pedal steel, the swell of B3 organ, and layers of acoustic and electric guitar. The end result is pure Caudle, shot through with the optimism of a road warrior who—nearly a decade into his career—has discovered not only the thrill of hitting the highway, but the comfort in putting down roots. LISTEN HERE…