MERCURY REV announce new studio album, "The Light In You", released 2nd October on Bella Union.
Concert : 08.11.2015 Botanique, Brussels
Bella Union are excited to announce the long-awaited return of US alt-rock legends Mercury Rev whose new album The Light In You will be released 18th September via the label. The band have just unveiled a track from the LP entitled ‘The Queen Of Swans’, which is streaming HERE, and announced an extensive European tour, the dates of which are below.
As Mercury Rev began recording their eighth studio album in autumn 2013, when asked what people could expect, co-pilot Grasshopper responded, “Steel Resonator Mandolin. Timpani. Sleigh Bells. All sorts of electric guitars…..” He subsequently added, “It is the best stuff we have done in a long, long time. Gonna be big sounding!”
Two years on, The Light In You more than lives up to its billing. The record is filled with wondrous and voluminous kaleidoscopic detail, but also intimate moments of calm, and altogether stands up to the very best that this notable band of maverick explorers has ever created. Its ecstatic highs and shivery comedowns also reflect a particularly turbulent era in the lives of Grasshopper and fellow co-founder Jonathan Donahue, of calamities both personal and physical, but also rebirths and real births (Grasshopper became a father for the first time in 2014). There's a reason for the seven-year gap since the band's last album, Snowflake Midnight.
“It was one of those otherworldly life sequences, when everything you think is solid turns molten,” explains Jonathan. “But also, when something is worth saying, it can take a long time to say it, rather than just blurt it out.”
As well as The Light In You being the first Mercury Rev album with Bella Union, it’s also the first with only Jonathan and Grasshopper at the controls, as scheduling conflicts and travel between the Catskills and Dave Fridmann's Tarbox studio became too great to overcome. On The Light In You, Jonathan and Grasshopper decided they were best served being based at home in the Catskills for once. Surrounded by longtime friends such as engineer Scott Petito and bassist Anthony Molina, Jonathan and Grasshopper quickly found their stride recording themselves in their own basement studio as well as venturing out into the daylight to record tracks at some of their old haunts like NRS and White Light Studios. The two even found time to arrange backing vocal harmonies and record with Ken Stringfellow at his studio Son du Blé studios in Paris.
Yet from its title down, the album clearly reflects the core relationship between Jonathan and Grasshopper, best friends since they were teenagers, who accompanied each other through the musical changes, band fractures and exulted breakthroughs that has marked Mercury Rev’s career since they emerged with the extraordinary Yerself Is Steam in 1991.
“You can go as deep as you want with the title, on a metaphorical, spiritual level, or just poetic license,” Jonathan suggests. “It’s the beacon that shines and allows us to see ourselves – and then there’s the music between Grasshopper and I, which is how we reflect each other. The arc of the album, lyrically, is someone who’s gone through an incredible period of turbulence, sadness and uncertainty, and as the album progresses, a light appears on the water.”
The album’s track-listing follows a similar trajectory, from the opening slow-build cascade of ‘The Queen Of Swans’, through the epic lonely beauty of ‘Central Park East’ and the album’s half-way peak between ‘Emotional Freefall’ and ‘Are You Ready’ before the closing sequence, with the exhilarating pop beacons of ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Rainy Day Record’ sandwiching the more tranquil ‘Moth Light’. The light is reflected both by the album’s brilliantine colours and imagery drawn largely from the elements and the seasons, creating a world as only Mercury Rev know how. “It’s like taking a drug, but not actually taking a drug,” Grasshopper reckons. “Just sit back and enter and immerse yourself.”
Since Snowflake Midnight, Jonathan and Grasshopper have stayed productive, for example with their improvised collective, Mercury Rev's Cinematic Sound Tettix BrainWave Concerto Experiment at John Zorn's club in NYC, creating live soundtracks to favourite films at various junctures across Europe (most recently in London as part of Swans’ Mouth To Mouth festival in 2014). There were also occasional festival shows such as headlining 2014’s Green Man festival to celebrate the deluxe version of 1998 opus Deserter’s Songs.
“Playing tracks again from Deserter’s Songs helped us look at where we’ve been, and where we were going,” says Grasshopper. “Though by no means did we want to make Deserter’s Songs Two, we did feel we had some loose ends to tie up.”As Grasshopper once commented about Deserter’s Songs, “It’s special because that was the one that brought us back from the brink.” The Light In You is special for that very same reason.
The Light In You will be released worldwide on 18th September via Bella Union.
Brought together by a shared enthusiasm for bleak UK punk and a history of playing in hardcore bands, Berlin based Diät have created a sound that they have described, perhaps not entirely seriously, as ‘tough new wave’. Fans of Crisis, Killing Joke and The Mob should be pleased by the band’s unlikely synthesis of depressive drift and cranked, accelerated energy.
Their debut LP, Positive Energy, will be released this week on Iron Lung Records in the US and Adagio830 in Europe.
Recorded last Winter while huddled in a practice space overlooking the industrial landscape of frozen East Berlin, the album finds Diät reining in the threads of malignant enthusiasm still peppered throughout their earlier recordings to focus on the cynicism and dejectedness that binds them as a band.
Intending to create an album that showcases each song individually and plays out like a mixtape, Diät have boldly attempted to create a sound of their own - the sound of checking your account balance to see if you’ve been paid yet…but you haven’t.
The band is streaming Positive Energy in its entirety below, they will be appearing at Toronto's Not Dead Yet Festival, as well as the Five Wretched Years Of Blackest Ever Black party at Berlin's Berghain club.
Alien Vampires launch video teaser new album featuring guest appearances from Ministry, Mayhem and Psyclon Nine members
Out of the blue the dark electro hit machine Alien Vampires have released a 2 minute and a half long video teaser for their upcoming album "Drag You To Hell" which will be out later this Fall on Alfa Matrix.
Nysrok and Nightstalker spent the last couple of years at The Old Truman Brewery studio in Brick Lane (Shoreditch) London (UK), conceiving the newest Alien Vampires chapter.
More details on the new album will be announced soon, but we already know that the album will feature guest appearances by Sin Quirin (Ministry), Attila Csihar (Mayhem,Sunn O), Charles Edward Alexander Hedger (Mayhem) and Nero Bellum (Psyclon Nine)!
In a period of governmental and cultural transition, former The Pipettes front-woman, GWENNO SAUNDERS, releases a political concept album inspired by an obscure 1970s Welsh language sci-fi novel, subtly disguised as a blissful kraut-pop record.
Written by Gwenno and produced by Rhys Edwards, Y DYDD OLAF (The Last Day) turns its back on predictable commercial aspirations and lifts a defiant middle finger in the direction of the mainstream.
Taking its cue, and title, from Owain Owain's 1976 novel about a dystopian future where the robots have taken over and are busily turning the human race into clones through the use of medication, Y DYDD OLAF blends big themes (including patriarchal society, government-funded media propaganda, cultural control, technology, isolation and the importance of, and threat to minority languages), great tunes, and a real sense of revolution to produce a powerful, politically-charged concept album.
After years on the peripheries of the mainstream - firstly as a professional dancer, then as a singer and musician – Gwenno returned to her home town of Cardiff in 2011 to produce music that's free of industry expectations, sales targets and commercial shackles.
First with Peski Records, where a limited edition pressing of the album sold out in weeks, and now signed to Heavenly Recordings, she has found the perfect home for her brand of left-field electro-pop. And with the parallel world of 1980s underground - and ground-breaking - Welsh-medium music by artists including Malcolm Neon, Llwybr Llaethog, Datblygu and Ectogram, not forgetting the German Krautrock movement of the 1970s, and early electronic music pioneers Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire inspiring her music, outlook and aspirations, Y DYDD OLAF feels at once retro, contemporary and futuristic.
The album, which is sung entirely in Welsh, apart from one song in Cornish, is a cultural document and a celebration of what is unique about life in modern day Britain.
The song is taken from the group's upcoming debut album, I, released on September 25 via Laser's Edge.
The group is led by former Crippled Black Phoenix members Karl Demata and Chris Heilmann alongside singer Keith Gladysz of Diet Kong and Typical Reptiles, keyboardist Elisa Montaldo of Il Tempio Delle Clessidre and drummer Mattias Olsson, formerly of Anglagard.
Demote says of bandmate Montaldo: “The first time I heard Elisa play, I knew we had to be in a band. Her innate melodic approach and instinctual understanding and knowledge of ‘anything prog’ is simply remarkable.”
Montaldo adds: “Karl asked me to join the project at the very beginning. My idea of prog is somehow more vintage, more typical 70s Italian style. After various experiments on arrangements and sounds, I went to Karl’s studio to record most of the keyboards, where we found the right balance.”
Read here our interview with the band.
