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The acclaimed singer-songwriter, Nick Waterhouse, releases final single "(No) Commitment" ahead of new album The Fooler out April 1, an immaculate record that offers up new riches and fresh perspectives with every spin.
The Fooler is a song-cycle of sorts, the arc of the album telling a tale of a city and its denizen, partly a farewell to and reclamation of a version of Waterhouse’s past existence framed by a city that is part dream, part reality and part potential. A place filled with 45s produced by people like Bert Berns or released on Scepter, Wand, Atlantic and Verve and heard on the jukeboxes in iconic San Francisco institutions like Tosca, Specs and Trieste in North Beach.
Of the single, "(No) Commitment," Waterhouse explains: "The party is on the third floor: all the hallways are dingy and the steps’ runner threadbare. You hear the music blaring through the walls from the stairwell corridor. Behind a decayed blue door it’s all the same faces as the last long barroom you’d passed through. The same words, the same patterns, the same concerns. They’ve played out on screens almost as much as they’ve hung like smoke in these leather and denim realities. Heavy, hairy heads hanging down to hear words from slouching corner bound figures… Tune in, like a radio antennae, to the din of the room, the chatter and the laughter and the poses, the murmur and rumble of dingy apartment rooms crammed full of these hanger-outers. The double bass turns everything slow motion and descends, the hard hand of the drummer pushes his stick into his ride cymbal in time with the snare.. a bell tolls with the lowest piano hammer of your mind."
Maria Chiara Argirò is releasing a deluxe version of her acclaimed concept album Forest City, which includes brand new track "Unreal."
Something of a palette cleanser ahead of Maria's new album - which she is laying finishing touches to now - Unreal is a reworking of a track that found its way into Maria's live set whilst supporting Emma-Jean Thackray last year. It quickly became a crowd favourite and was recorded in the summer of 2022, beautifully merging hypnotic beats with swelling synths and a soaring brass section.
On the track, Maria offers: ‘This song is inspired by a tune I wrote a few years back. I explored the concept of real and unreal, blending and pushing both organic and electronic sounds. I wanted to create a steady rhythm blurred together with looped vocals and a synthy dreamlike soundscape.’
"Unreal" arrives alongside a mesmerising video, with AI generated visuals synchronising the timing and intensity of the noise in the animation to the rhythm and dynamics of the music using over 15,000 different images. Directed by Edoardo Ottone.
Forest City has graced Italian end of year polls, with radio support from BBC 6 Music, BBC Radio 1, KCRW, KEXP, RAI 2, FiP, and has been featured in Vogue, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The Fader and Pitchfork. With fans like Four-Tet, as well as album track Greenarp being featured on Netflix series Elite, Maria had an amazing 2022 and there is only more to come this year. She will be supporting Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at Kings Place in April, and playing The Great Escape in May. Earlier this year, Forest City remixes dropped from Byron The Aquarius, Salami Rose Joe Louis and Terracassette.
Iguana Death Cult return with a brand new track entitled "Pusherman," premiered by Under the Radar. This new track is the second single off their forthcoming LP, Echo Palace (due 5/12), which was introduced last month with a track entitled, "Sensory Overload."
Speaking on their newest release, the band wrote: "This is one of those songs that just sort of happened while fooling around. Talking about it now already feels kind of surreal but we were literally trapped inside my home because of the curfew that was installed due to covid. Guitar in hand, we were reviewing the state of the world and the growing division and distrust we saw not only in the media, but amongst the people we know. Someone joked that we should quit the band and go into the vaccine business and so, we had our chorus. A chorus that ends on a more serious note that we don't want to be victims of our time. I tried to make the lyrics ambiguous enough that you don't really know which side the narrator is on. In the end we're just all people living different lives."
On the track's video, they continued: "'Pushermen.' It kind of sounds like an action movie doesn’t it? Sadly we came a couple of million short, so Hache came with the idea to do a casting video for a fictional film called: 'Pushermen.' The scenes we did were loosely based on the movie 'Superfly.' If you know, you know."
Sam Blasucci, best known as one half of Mapache, a duo just as instantly recognizable for their elegant, intertwined guitar parts as they are for their devoted, Nudie-Suit wearing fanbase, shares a new video for first single "Turn Yourself Around" off forthcoming debut solo LP Off My Stars (due out June 2, 2023).
Blasucci explains, "I wrote this song in January 2019 at the home of fellow LA musicians Anna Pomerantz and Colby Buddlemyer. It is about my curiosity at the beginning stages of romance. Years later, this song became a sort of theme song for our dear friend Roman, featured in the music video, and his late husband Al (1936-2022). Roman and Al were to be in the video together when Al rather suddenly passed, so we decided to make it a tribute to him. Some words that feel like "Turn Yourself Around" to me are water, intoxicated, glow, cold, mercy, fog, and blue. Al moves about and we stay put and here is ‘Turn Yourself Around’ for now."
When Blasucci was writing the songs that would become Off My Stars, he found himself less focused on the guitar and more gravitated toward a different instrument: piano. The mother of Clay Finch, his Mapache bandmate, was getting rid of one, and so Blasucci took the piano, carefully transporting it to his home in Ojai, California, with the help of a few strong friends, including Farmer Dave Scher of Beachwood Sparks (and a Mapache collaborator). “Farmer Dave wasn’t even wearing shoes,” Blasucci remembers, laughing. Once the piano was safely in there, he became deeply attached, playing on it multiple hours a day: “It’s changed the way I think about music, having all the keys laid out in front of me,” he explains. “Having that sort of changed everything.”
Also inspired by his recent time riding out the pandemic in New Orleans, where the clubs may have closed but the music never stopped, Blasucci used that piano to start writing one of the most inspired batches of songs of his career thus far. New gems like “Turn Yourself Around” and “Sha La La” were developing with a Southern swing and classic songbook sparkle, and when assessing the growing stack of music he was working on, Blasucci realized that there was something about these tunes that wasn’t quite suited for a Mapache record.
Infused with an honest, personal perspective about settling into adult life—about developing as a person and a partner and a family member—these songs were straight from the heart, a clear window, recently Windexed, into the life of one of the most talented members of the L.A.-area underground rock scene. Using just as much inspiration from the music of Ronnie Wood and Sade as the films of Ingmar Bergman and the writing of Brian Doyle, Blasucci started to see a vision of songs that are all “fully autobiographical.”
Blasucci reached out to songwriter and producer Johnny Payne, and the two decamped to Dan Horne’s Lone Palm Studio, the home/studio where Mapache has in the past both recorded and abided in. Blasucci’s direction to Payne—acting as producer and as multi-instrumentalist, performing on everything from shaker to “guitar pancake”—was simple: no pretense, no affect, no Mr. Cool. This approach is most evident through covers on the record—like a stripped-down, achingly beautiful version of Dido’s ubiquitous “Thank You,” or a New Orleans-porch-worthy version of the Cranberries’ classic “Linger.” “There was nothing ironic or gimmicky about wanting to do those,” notes Blasucci. “I just really, really love those songs.”
Also covered on Off My Stars is a raw take on Jimmy Fontana’s timeless ballad “Il Mondo,” sung in its original Italian by Blasucci, who belts it in a performance that ends with him giving it all he has, his voice cracking as he reaches the song’s epic finale. “Il Mondo” is a song that Blasucci particularly wanted to do as a means to get more in touch with his Italian roots—and this wouldn’t be the only way he’d tap into family on the album.
On “Proud of You Dad,” Blasucci dug into his archives for a song that’s he had for some time, originally having written and recorded it just for his father, David Blasucci, a musician who was at one time a touring member in the band Toto, and who has performed and acted in Christopher Guest movies like A Mighty Wind. “If I ever told you this while we were in the same room / I know you would cover your ears and run,” Sam sings over a rustic, campfire acoustic progression. As Sam explains, David was a crucial influence on his taste: “A lot of the underlying styles that influenced the rest of the songs on the record definitely come from what he introduced me to,” Sam says. But Sam is his own man now, writing the new chapters of his own life with an aw-shucks tone that belies his prolific workload. Even through the pandemic—and even with the ongoing backlogs at pressing plants—Blasucci has still managed to put out beloved Mapache records in each of the last three years, and he and the band have no plans to slow down anytime soon. “I’m definitely the type of artist that is constantly creating,” Sam says, matter of fact. “And I can’t seem to really stop.”
Read more up on Ravens Sings The Blues.
London multidisciplinary artist Rarelyalways releases his debut album WORK. The 14-track album includes the previously released singles "REVIEW," "URGENT," "LET'S," and "Voice note 0142" along with the focus track "WORK," which arrives with a video directed and edited by MadeInEden, the visual architect of WORK. Rarely's full-length debut is full of dazzling, cavernous and mysterious sonics created by the self-described "shapeshifter." On WORK, Rarely actively blurs the lines of jazz, hip hop, and experimental rock to create his own unique and entrancing sound.
About WORK, Rarelyalways stated, “It brings delight knowing another project has been released, provisions granted marked me favored as certain opportunities came out of nowhere. Time will tell whether my mental fortitude went in vain. I told Wale, LP 'WORK' needs to be completed before I die.”
WORK follows Rarelyalways' collaborative Manic EP with Hanni El Khatib, featuring the stand out single "Lamenting" as well as his 2020 EP Baby Buffalo. His debut EP was described by The FADER as, “a concise exhibition of his minimalist swagger," with Pitchfork adding, "though Rarelyalways comes out of the London jazz scene, his music has its own distinct flavor."
Rarelyalways learned from a young age that music had functions beyond entertainment. Born in London to a West African family, he was raised by his single father, a drummer who played mainly gospel tunes during hours-long services and would bring Rarely along for afternoons in practice spaces where the young musician learned the power of playing for playing's sake. Rarelyalways went on to attend The BRIT School and eventually entered the South London gig circuit where he would play trip hop and heavy rock in the orbit of artists like King Krule, Henry Wu and the Tomorrow's Warriors jazz collective. With his music often taking on a dark, mysterious tone, Rarely is able to roam freely outside the prescribed structures of hip hop, jazz or anything else, by creating a conversational abstract style that can mold according to a song's message.
Listen to the full album at this link.
Be sure to check out the track by track feature of WORK up on DUMMY.