i think i better follow you around

Shana Cleveland (La Luz) has shared the first single, “Faces In The Firelight”, off her upcoming solo album Manzanita out March 10th via Hardly Art.

TRACKLIST:

1. A Ghost
2. Bloom
3. Faces in the Firelight
4. Mystic Mine
5. Light on the Water
6. Quick Winter Sun
7. Bonanza Freeze
8. Gold Tower
9. Babe
10. Ten Hour Drive Through West Coast Disaster
11. Evil Eye
12. Mayonnaise
13. Sheriff of the Salton Sea
14. Walking Through Morning Dew

The video for “Faces In The Firelight” was directed by Two Seraphim. Shana shared this about the video: “We created a fantasy realm in my backyard to visualise the sweet strangeness of the time and place when I wrote these songs: pregnant and often alone in the wilderness”.

Shana shared this about the song: “The song is about watching Will tend to a huge burn pile that was still going long after dark and realising that out there in the dark field he looked like the ultrasound image we had on our fridge. I was thinking that the greatest act of love might be to wait for someone. To say, ‘I’ll be here whenever you’re done, whenever you’re ready.’”

Yo La Tengo have shared the second single, “Aselestine”, off their upcoming album “This Stupid World” out February 10th via Matador Records.

The visualizer video for the song was done by Sabrina Nichols.

Yo Las Tengo will go on a USofA tour starting next month, with some of the shows already sold out.

shame have shared their new single, “Six Pack”, off their upcoming album “Food For Worms” out February 24th via Dead Oceans.

TRACKLIST:
1. Fingers Of Steel
2. Six-Pack
3. Yankees
4. Alibis
5. Adderall
6. Orchid
7. The Fall of Paul
8. Burning By Design
9. Different Person
10. All The People

The video for “Six Pack” was directed by Gilbert Bannerman and animated by Cyrus Hayley. Bannerman said this about the video: “The idea was to make a parody of a middle aged bloke thinking he’s a king for going to the gym once. I read a lot about Napoleon and thought it would be a laugh to make it about him. The style comes from trying to make my youth spent playing PS1 not entirely wasted.”

Charlie Steen said this about the song: “”Six-Pack” is essentially the opposite of a Room 101; instead it’s a room where all your wildest desires can come true and will be showered upon you. Be it commodities, self-obsession, foods and B-lister celebrities, it’ll all be there if you want it to. You’ve done time behind bars and now you’re making time in-front of them. It’s time to make up for anything you’ve lost or wasted, it’s time to get it all.”

Willis Earl Beal announced he has released an EP, “3”, via his Bandcamp.

TRACKLIST:

1. TO THE CORE
2. NOTHIN HOLDIN’ ME
3. FOR YOU (MY LIGHT)

https://nobodyakawillisearlbeal.bandcamp.com/album/3

The only thing NOBODY shared was: “”3” is the perfect number…meaning harmony, wisdom and understanding.
It is the first number to which the meaning “all” was given.
It is the Triad; containing beginning, middle and an end…
Body, Soul, Spirit”.

If you have not listened to any of his songs yet then now is the time for you to dig into it.

Everything But The Girl have announced the release of their new album, “Fuse”, out April 21st via Buzzin Fly. With this announcement they also shared their first single, “Nothing Left To Lose”.

TRACKLIST:

1. Nothing Left to Lose
2. Run a Red Light
3. Caution to the Wind
4. When You Mess Up
5 .Time and Time Again
6. No One Knows We’re Dancing
7. Lost
8. Forever
9. Interior Space
10. Karaoke

The video for the opening track was directed by Charlie Di Placido.

Tracey Thorn shares this via a press release: “After so much time apart professionally, there was both a friction and a natural spark in the studio when we began. However much we underplayed it at the start, it was like a fuse had been lit. And it ended in a kind of coalescence, an emotional fusion. It felt very real and alive. Ironically the finished sound of the new album was the last thing on our mind when we started in March 2021. Of course, we were aware of the pressures of such a long-awaited comeback, so we tried to begin instead in a spirit of open-minded playfulness, uncertain of the direction, receptive to invention.”

Ben Watt shared this: “It was exciting. A natural dynamism developed. We spoke in short-hand, and little looks, and co-wrote instinctively. It became more than the sum of our two selves. It just became Everything But The Girl on its own.”

Belle & Sebastian have announced the release of their new album, “Late Developers”, out January 13th via Matador. With it the single “I Don’t Know What You See In Me”.

TRACKLIST:

01 Juliet Naked
02 Give a Little Time
03 When We Were Very Young
04 Will I Tell You a Secret
05 So in the Moment
06 The Evening Star
07 When You’re Not With Me
08 I Don’t Know What You See in Me
09 Do You Follow
10 When the Cynics Stare Back From the Wall
11 Late Developers

Stuart Murdoch shared this about the lead single: “We’d (Pete Ferguson) actually been talking for a couple of years before we got this together. He’d just signed to a major label, he was a fan of Belle & Sebastian, and he asked if there was anything we would want to collaborate on, or could I contribute some lyrics. He would reciprocate, and when this song came in I said, ‘Let’s do this one with the band, we’ll sing it for you and you can be in complete control, produce and mix it’. We thought it was strong enough to go on our record. Ferguson is so much younger than me, so there’s a whole swathe of music that’s passed me by, things I would never think of, which is what you want from a collaborator”.

Spoon shared their cover of David Bowie’s “I Can’t Give Everything Away”, from Bowie’s last album “Blackstar”, it is now available to stream anywhere, everywhere.

Britt Daniel shared this about the cover: “’I Can’t Give Everything Away’ is a tune Alex Fischel and I have been playing since we learned it for an acoustic and piano show in Mexico City in 2016. It’s just a fantastic song, and as the last song on Bowie’s final album it doesn’t disappoint. We recorded this version live in December 2021.”

Loraine James released her most recent album, “Building Something Beautiful For Me”, via Phantom Limb.

TRACKLIST:
1. Maybe If I (Stay On It)
2. The Perception Of Me (Crazy N*****)
3. Choose To Be Gay (Femenine)
4. Building Something Beautiful For Me
5. Enfield, Always
6. My Take
7. Black Excellence (Stay On It)
8. What Now (Prelude To The Holy Presence Of Joan D’Arc)

Through a press release Phantom Limb shared this: “We are long-term fans of both Eastman and Loraine James. Using their rare, fortuitous connection with Julius’ surviving brother Gerry, the label began this new project in summer 2021, hoping to continue the current tide of efforts to reinstate Eastman’s rightful place in 20th-century composition. Loraine was offered a zip drive of Eastman originals (courtesy of Gerry Eastman), Renee Levine-Packer & Mary Jane Leach’s illuminating biography Gay Guerilla (University of Rochester Press, 2015), and transcribed MIDI stems (courtesy of Phantom Limb A&R James Vella), and the resulting album Building Something Beautiful For Me carries the Eastman torch with finesse and sensitivity. Loraine employs samples, melodic motifs, themes and imagery, and inspiration from Eastman’s canon, slicing, editing, pulling apart and playing samples like instruments to craft a stunning album that venerates Eastman’s genius while adhering to her own. Speaking in similar tongues as young, gay, Black, independent creatives in a challenging environment, the two musicians are bound closely together, despite a six-year gap between their lives ever intersecting. James includes the original Eastman title in many of her tracks, appending the source material in parentheses to mark the lineage of the work – a clear, traceable thread from the heavenly to the sublime”.

“Building Something Beautiful For Me” is a tribute to Eastman, in the samples and the essence and the pride, but it also projects James identity within it.

Gruff Rhys has announced the release of the soundtrack to the film “The Almond & The Seahorse” out February 24th via Rough Trade, and with it the lead single, “Amen”.

TRACKLIST:
1. Skyward
2. The Brain and the Body
3. People Are Pissed
4. Layer Upon Layer
5. Gruff Rhys & Victor La Masne – Orea
6. Joe’s Theme
7. Sunshine and Laughter Ever After
8. Gruff Rhys & Osian Gwynedd – Variation with Strings
9. Amen (Album Version)
10. Low Cello
11. Liberate Me From The Love Song
12. Love Love Love
13. I Want My Old Life Back
14. Forest Waltz
15. Dance All Your Shadows to Death
16. Library to Kiss
17. Staccato with Cello
18. Small Talk
19. Toni’s Theme
20. Ffenestr
21. Penbedw
22. Arogldarth
23. Amen

The video for “Amen” was directed by Ryan Owen Eddleston.

Gruff Rhys shared this about the score / soundtrack: “The soundtrack for The Almond & the Seahorse was recorded largely in pandemic conditions, so it was a matter of recording in bursts of possible activity in various friends’ studios, homes and even scout halls as chance permitted. It’s a varied quilt work as a result. As sonic flagpoles I wanted to signify the film’s location in Liverpool and the Wirral by liberally, but hopefully not too obviously, using the Mellotron synthesizer (as famously used in ‘Strawberry Fields’ by the Beatles and therefore in my mind it represents that great city sonically) and the Cello as a nod to its use by Gwen’s character in the film. I was encouraged by Mike Jones the editor to take things to a more acoustic, emotional and ragged place. That, I hope, roughly explains the trajectory of the recording and how the varied music contained in this record came about. I hope you enjoy this colorful scrapbook of a soundtrack and get a chance to watch the film.”

The film stars Rebel Wilson and Charlotte Gainsbourg and is directed by Celyn Jones and Tom Stern. The synopsis of the film is this: “An archaeologist and an architect fight to re-imagine a future after a traumatic brain injury leaves them adrift from the people they love.” The trailer is below.