// Category Archive for: New Music Tuesday

Stream “A Note To Self” By Parenthetical Girls: Upcoming Album, Spring Tour

By Less Lee Moore

The eclectic, engaging Parenthetical Girls released a series of EPs over the last few years entitled Privilege. These were limited edition and only available via mail order. Oh, and each one was hand-numbered n the blood of one of the band’s members.

Now they’ve condensed the 21 songs that make up the five-part series into 12 tracks, all of which have been remixed and remastered. The Privilege album will be released by Marriage Records and the band’s own Slender Means Society Label on February 19.

To support the release, Parenthetical Girls are embarking on a Spring tour, beginning March 6 in San Francisco.

Obviously, none of us have the patience to wait for either of these momentous occasions, so the band has thoughtfully provided a streaming track, “A Note To Self.”

Additionally, they’ll be producing a series of video commercials for Privilege, beginning with the one below (a clever homage to Brooke Shields’s infamous Calvin Klein jeans ads from the 1980s).

For more on Parenthetical Girls, check out their website.

Tour Dates:
03/06 Portland, OR – Holocene
03/07 Berkeley, CA – Starry Plough
03/08 Los Angeles, CA – The Smell
03/09 Phoenix, AZ – Trunk Space
03/10 Albuquerque, NM – Low Spirits
03/12 San Antonio, TX – Korova
03/13 – 03/16 Austin, TX – SXSW
03/17 Dallas, TX – Spillover Music Festival
03/19 Birmingham AL – Bottletree
03/20 Atlanta, GA – The Earl
03/21 Chapel Hill, NC – Local 506
03/22 Washington, DC – TBA
03/23 Philadelphia, PA – PhilaMOCA
03/24 Hamden, CT – Outer Space
03/25 Brooklyn, NY – Glasslands
03/26 NYC – Bowery Electric
03/27 Montreal, QB – Divan Orange
03/28 Toronto, ON – Double Double Land
03/29 Ann Arbor, MI – Arbor Vitae
03/30 Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle
03/31 Minneapolis, MN – TBA
04/02 Denver, CO – Hi Dive
04/03 Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby Court
04/04 Boise, ID – Flying M
04/07 Seattle, WA – Chop Suey

Music Review: Ty Segall & Mikal Cronin, Reverse Shark Attack (Reissue)

By Less Lee Moore

The second of two Ty Segall reissues, Reverse Shark Attack features Segall and his current touring bassist Mikal Cronin (who has quite a few releases with and apart from Segall). While just as dirty sounding as The Traditional Fools (review), these tunes are less garage rock and way more psychedelic, with brain-asplodin’ feedback that seems to lurch forth physically from the speakers.

It’s patently obvious that I’m going to be biased towards a song called “I Wear Black,” but it also happens to be good, snatching the heavy beat from “Wild Thing” and inserting a growling chorus of the song’s title.

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Music Review: The Traditional Fools, S/T (Reissue)

By Less Lee Moore

The prolific and talented Ty Segall has another album out today. It’s actually a reissue, but one that was previously only available on vinyl and has been out of print since its release. The Traditional Fools—comprised of Segall, Andrew Luttrell, and David Fox—put out only one album, but it’s killer. Its intensely dirty sound is more akin to Segall’s Slaughterhouse than Twins, but it is instantly loveable. It helps that despite the lo-fi recording, these guys were tight as hell.

The opening track, a cover of “Davey Crockett” by beloved legends Thee Headcoats, will either thrill or piss off fans of the original, but it’s obviously coming from a place of respect. It also sounds fantastic.

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A Man Lost In Time: Bowie Returns With New Single, Album

By Cait Brennan

It came like a bolt of lightning in the dead of night: news of a new David Bowie album, his first in a decade, announced with no advance notice in the wee hours of his 66th birthday. The Next Day, Bowie’s 30th studio album, produced by Tony Visconti (!), will be released March 8 in Australia, March 11 in most of the rest of the world and March 12th in the US, with a new single, “Where Are We Now?” available on iTunes now.

Watch the full video on Vimeo.

After health issues sidelined Bowie in 2004, fans have been hoping against hope that the singular rock and roll icon would one day return to music, but there was scant evidence it would ever happen. His suitably theatrical return sent social media into a frenzy, putting him atop Twitter’s trending topics within minutes. Radio stations around the world scrambled to play the track first, with BBC 6Music earning honors as the World Premiere play, edging BBC Radio 2 by a few short minutes.

“Where Are We Now?” is a meditative ballad of “a man lost in time, walking the dead,” recalling in both lyrical geography and atmosphere his Berlin trilogy, coupled with a sound reminiscent of his most recent albums Reality and Heathen. The track is accompanied by a hearteningly weird video filled with expressionist imagery and the Thin White Duke himself transformed into a tiny malformed creature with two heads, one of which is a girl.

Henceforth, Christmas is officially moved to January 8.

The album is available for pre-order via iTunes in both standard and deluxe editions (the latter featuring three bonus tracks). Visit davidbowie.com/the-next-day for the latest.

Music Review: Big Dipper, Crashes On The Platinum Planet

By Chelsea Spear

Of all the bands from the Boston Rock Class of 1990, Big Dipper weren’t the first candidates for the “Most Likely to Succeed” superlative. They wrote songs with undeniably catchy melodies and witty lyrics, and their shows at mid-sized East Coast clubs never failed to attract an audience.

Unfortunately, they had signed to Homestead Records, whose history of poor distribution and corrupt business practices restricted their reach to all but their most diehard fans. Though they jumped ship to Epic at the close of the decade, a series of shakeups at their label left them with little support. By the middle of the ’90s, “Dippah” (as their local fans called them) had joined fellow Beantown heavy-hitters Tribe and O Positive in the great cutout bin in the sky.

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Music Review: The Edie Adams Christmas Album

By Cait Brennan

Ernie Kovacs is rightly regarded as television’s first genius. Dynamic, irreverent and uncompromising, Kovacs pushed TV technology to its limits in the service of his anarchic comic brilliance. More than that, Kovacs was larger than life. His personal motto was “Nothing In Moderation,” and he lived up to that billing until the day he died.

Few mere mortals could hope to keep up with his madness. But he met his match the day he met Edie Adams. Smart, sexy, sultry and with a voice like butter, Adams was everything Ernie needed: merry co-conspirator, brilliant comic foil, and a tremendously versatile actress and vocalist that brought elegance and heart to the proceedings. Kovacs’s life, and for that matter his untimely death, cast a big shadow, and Edie’s talents have often been unfairly overlooked.

Thankfully, the lady’s finally getting her due. From the formidable Kovacs/Adams archive and the good folks at Omnivore Recordings comes The Edie Adams Christmas Album, featuring Ernie Kovacs, a warm, charming, and nostalgic record featuring 15 never-before-heard holiday classics. It’s the perfect antidote to contemporary holiday angst and a testament to Adams’s vocal gifts.

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Music Review: School Of Seven Bells, Put Your Sad Down EP

By Less Lee Moore

The only downside to a new School of Seven Bells EP is that I’m in no way tired of Ghostory, their full-length release from February of this year (reviewed here). This is a good problem to have.

Put Your Sad Down opens with the 12-minute-plus title track, which takes a while to build, but has a beautiful payoff, an extremely skillful hybrid of straight-up dance music and SVIIB-style dream pop. It’s what My Bloody Valentine might sound like if they hadn’t broken up after two albums. The lyrics are straightforward and sexy; “Put Your Sad Down” is the rare song that sounds exactly like what the lyrics imply. The song’s intensity eventually tapers off only to dial it up again with an impressive subtlety and finesse.

“Secret Days” (listen here) signals a shift to pre-Ghostory SVIIB, with a heavy drumbeat and decidedly South Asian influence in the music, and a wordless vocalized chorus that’s pure magic. I wish I liked “Faded Heart” more, however. It sounds like a clichéd remix of a superior song that’s buried somewhere inside, although that core does show the anthemic pop sheen of Abba.

The next song, “Lovefingers,” is a cover of the 1968 song by Silver Apples from their 1968 self-titled debut album. Here the original’s psychedelia is replaced with a spooky, Middle Eastern mysticism with wonderful results. The repetitive pulse of “Painting a Memory,” the EP’s final song, nourishes a hypnotic dance beat with more South Asian sounds in Alejandra Deheza’s vocalizations. It also shows that the band sounds best when they give themselves enough time to let the ingredients of their recipes simmer for a while.

Although Put Your Sad Down isn’t as consistently excellent as Ghostory, it is after all an EP and one with an overwhelming ratio of hits to misses. It’s definitely whetted my appetite for the band’s next full-length release, whenever that may be.

Put Your Sad Down is out today from Vagrant and can be ordered from the band’s website.

Music Review: Ultimate Creedence Clearwater Revival – Greatest Hits & All-Time Classics

By Danny R. Phillips

In the opening line of Alec Palao’s liner notes for the new three-disc set Ultimate Creedence Clearwater Revival, he makes the following statement: “If any one act could legitimately stake a claim to be America’s Beatles, then that would be Creedence Clearwater Revival.”

That is some bold shit.

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Music Review: Sophie Auster, Red Weather EP

By Chelsea Spear

From the first notes of her debut EP Red Weather, Sophie Auster creates a compelling mise e scene. The angular piano riff and cacophonous arrangement that propel the first song, “Run Run Run,” invest the song with a palpable sense of urgency. Auster sketches out a minimal narrative that deepens this mood, and you feel her voice in the pit of your stomach as surely as you hear it.

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Graveyard Smash: John Zacherle, Monster Mash/Scary Tales

By Cait Brennan

Ever since the creeping dawn of that undead-zombification machine known as television, monster movies and horror hosts have been joined at the hip, like a mad scientist and his freakishly deformed sidekick, like Jan and her pan, like Rosie Grier and Ray Milland’s racist head. From Vampira and Ghoulardi to Dr. San Guinary and Morgus the Magnificent, horror hosts were an indelible part of pop culture in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.

But nowhere is there a horror host whose career—and life—has lasted as long as John Zacherle. The rockingest of horror icons, Zach got his start as Roland (pronounced “Roland“) on Philadelphia’s WCAU before pulling up stakes to New York and becoming “Zacherley” (same ghoul, different name). Now 94, the eternal Cool Ghoul is almost certainly the last survivor of the golden age of horror hosts, and he still looks as good . . . he still looks as . . . he still looks like Zacherle, and he’s still out there making convention appearances and delighting generations of horror fans.

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