Following on from debut single 'The Church', which sold out immediately and reached number one on Hype Machine, Manchester-born, L.A. resident Patience - aka Roxanne Clifford - returns with 'The Pressure', taking her crystalline synth-pop further into the dry-iced corners of a club in 1983. Marrying a cold production, aided as before by Happy Meals’ Lewis Cook’s engineering, with the inherent sweetness in her vocal, 'The Pressure' never relents, with pulsating waves of harmony and crisp snare cracks building like the greatest early Mute Records 7” they never released, an ode to relationships and the craziness they inflict on us.
With a bittersweet stream of melancholy trickling through the half speed drum machine, her plaintive appraisal of life’s turmoil, a period spent changing, aches across the ages. On the flip, 'Wait For You' is the make up after the pressure of the fall out. Following on from her sister-band Veronica Falls’ penchant for covering Roky Erickson, Patience’s quietly dramatic take on his sweet love song is enhanced by Clifford’s Mancunian lilt and the drone-pop synthesizers humming sweetly. Dressed in Clifford’s harmonies, the song’s sweetness brings a soothing counter-balance to the A-side.
Beginning as a harbour for Clifford’s songwriting while Veronica Falls were on hiatus, Patience has now blossomed into a persona channelling Italo-disco, classic British synth-wave and Clifford's uncanny knack at writing melodies that catch the heart and ear of the listener. It’s a calling that Clifford has been answering since her first guitar groups, but with Patience, Clifford’s solo vision is pure, streamlined, and liberated by her new sound. Clifford’s prowess as a singer has also taken many forms including guest vocals for various acts, most notably Metronomy and Franz Ferdinand.
Patience constitutes just one exciting avenue of Clifford's craft, a testament to the song prevailing over the context. The future is bright, one just has to wait.
DIORAMA return to the musical front. ZERO SOLDIER ARMY, released on the 9th September 2016, follows the renowned album EVEN THE DEVIL DOESN’T CARE, a week-long fixture in the Top 3 of the German Alternative Charts.
From the highly-explosive opener ZSA to the surreal finale STAY UNDECIDED, DIORAMA celebrate their typical mix of dark electro, indie and progressive rock.
“The songs were conceived in a time of increasingly complicated global crises which coincide with fanatical nationalisms and other delusions. We wanted to counteract our bewilderment in the face of the fiasco we’re heading towards with a term symbolising defencelessness and militancy at the same time – the ZERO SOLDIER ARMY,” explains Torben Wendt. “We have no weapons. But we have love, freedom, and music. And Gin.” – “What counts is: not to abandon naivety, to fight destructive powers and to revive dreams that are in danger of getting lost. While producing ZERO SOLDIER ARMY, we rediscovered how much we love this powerful, electronic sound, and we took it one step further. This album is a hundred per cent Diorama, from the first note to the last.”
The CD artwork was created in cooperation with Stefan Alt (ant-zen) and, apart from atmospheric shots of Leipzig-based photo artist “Propeller”, it contains a booklet-size stencil of the band logo – an exclusive collector’s item.
After almost 30 years of silence, O Veux make their comeback with 2 double vinyl compilations and a very special performance on the 1st of October at Café Café in Hasselt with Jo Billen a.k.a. Een Huis and Marcel Vanthilt (DJ Set).
More than 40 tracks spread over 2 double vinyl compilations.
Belgian post punk band O Veux will issue two self-titled archival releases via Softspot Music (US) and OnderStroom Records (BE). The OnderStroom compilation features unreleased & live recordings from 1981-1982, never before released on vinyl. The Softspot release features O Veux’s complete studio recordings from 1982-1986 with additional unreleased tracks. For fans of Mars, DNA, Cultural Decay and De Brassers.
The Flemish Region of Belgium is unfamous for its punk, post punk and Coldwave music in the 1980s, and yet a trove of bands like AA, The Cultural Decay, and Kebab came up in Flanders and self-released small runs of their own music. Another one of these unfamous bands was O Veux.
In the early 80s four unemployed guys from Hasselt, Belgium sought out raw, progressive music in order to escape the boredom of their daily lives. Heavily influenced by the Hasselt music scene, a breeding ground for left-of-center groups, the guys decided to form their own band. Despite the fact that none of them could actually play an instrument, they were committed to the fundamental belief that anyone could play if they so desired. So Rudi Reners, Marc Vandezande, Valentin Smeyers and Ivo Geurts bought the cheapest instruments they could find.
After touring and gigging relentlessly all over the world, Mathieu Vandekerckhove (also Amenra, Kingdom, Sembler Deah) locked himself in to compose the follow-up to the introspective journey that was 2012’s universally acclaimed masterpiece “Now and Forever”. The brand new album follows the same path of meditative drones and deep and subtle melodies, blurring lines between ambient and postrock music.
The journey that “Now and Forever” started is on “Forever and a Day" explored in more intricate depth, with layer upon layer of mesmerizing aural waves that floods and grabs its audience. The subtle but distinct contribution of Dehn Sora (Treha Sektori, Sembler Deah, Ovtrenoir) adds to the overall direction of the album, with melancholic and pensive moods being entangled with a sense of longing, aspiration and belief. “Forever and a Day” is another milestone in Vandekerckhove’s oeuvre.
“Now and Forever” was a dialogue between a father and his son -- as the title of the new album suggests -- the bloodline is continued on “Forever and a Day”, with a dialogue between a son and his father.
The cover art depicts a sculpture made by Syndrome’s Mathieu Vandekerckhove’s father. The sculpture was made around the time Vandekerckhove was born, and it was prominently on display in the family’s living room.
It literally was a centerpiece in the young and adolescent life of Vandekerckhove, with him growing up in constant proximity of the sculpture. Now in his adult life, the sculpture becomes the centerpiece of his musical development.
The bronze sculpture not only resonates with Vandekerckhove’s past, present, and future; it also perfectly connects with the musical story he tries to convey: the work of art has no limbs, but only a torso and a head with no eyes. Despite it being a motionless entity, it emanates a lot of force. However, that force is caged in the prison of its own body. It knows no freedom, there’s a constant notion of absence, a dark and brooding void; sorrow, bereavement and grief.
It’s adamantly clear that to Vandekerckhove the image is much more than a decorative ornament; it depicts his coming of age — both musically, but also on a deeply personal level, confirming the journey we’re invited to partake in come September will be a spiritually profound one.
Following the release of their album ‘You Know Who You Are’ earlier this year, New York-based Nada Surf are set to release a new live album entitled ‘Peaceful Ghosts (Live with Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg)’, which is due out Oct 28th via City Slang.
‘Peaceful Ghosts’ came about after front man Matthew Caws received a surprise email asking about a potential collaborative project from FM4. A little over a year later, the result is a beautiful record, showcasing a completely new side to the alt-rock four-piece. The depth added by the orchestra only strengthens the power and majesty of Nada Surf’s recognisable sound. ‘Peaceful Ghosts’ was recorded across two live performances in Vienna & Potsdam and the ‘Out of the Dark’ video is a montage of photos taken during part of the album’s recording in Vienna.
In the summer of 2015, Matthew Caws – the singer/guitarist of Nada Surf – was sitting at his kitchen table in Brooklyn frantically writing what would become Nada Surf’s seventh album, the critically acclaimed You Know Who You Are (2016), when an email arrived that would delight and terrify him. Once a year, FM4 in Austria chooses an artist for a national orchestral concert that’s broadcast across the country, and they reached out to Nada Surf asking if the band would like to be the next. Soon after receiving the FM4 request, the band secured a similar offer from Radio Eins in Berlin to perform live on air with the Babelsberg Film Orchestra, which derives its name from and is affiliated with the legendary Babelsberg Studios where notable films such as Metropolis,Dr. Mabuse and The Blue Angel were made.
“If we said yes, we'd have to choose a composer to write the parts and then decide which songs he or she should write for. We'd have to decide these things soon. Well, that was out of the question,” recalled Caws. “Deciding what kind of Thai curry take-away I should get that evening was about as distant a decision as I could imagine, while the small matters of which songs would go on the new Nada Surf record, who would mix them, what the album would be called and what the final verse of the song I was working on right then would be, loomed ahead. I would try and answer these questions after that curry, but making decisions about a concert months later was more than I could handle.”
Instead of passing up the opportunities Nada Surf asked their good friend, multi-instrumentalist Martin Wenk, whose own band Calexico had done the FM4 Vienna Radio Symphony concert in 2013, to oversee the details with composer Max Knuth, while the band focused on putting the finishing touches on You Know Who You Are. For those of us unable to make it to Europe in June 2016 to listen to the fruits of this collaboration either in-person or over the airwaves, the band is making it available now with their album Peaceful Ghosts.
On Peaceful Ghosts, the orchestrations cover a broad stylistic range, James Bond at one extreme and joy and wonder of Walt Disney at the other, with a whole range of surprises in between. Classics such as the delicate melancholy of “Blonde On Blonde” unfold to surprising new places with soaring countermelodies, while new favorites from You Know Who You Are, including “Rushing” and “Out of the Dark”, showcase the power and majesty of the original without losing the lyrical and musical subtlety that has become the hallmark of Nada Surf for the past twenty years.
