Sam Outlaw
(full band)
Worry Dolls + Michaela Anne
Night & Day Cafe, Manchester
Thursday 27th July, 7.30pm
Having spent much of 2016 on tour with his good buddy Margo Price, now is Sam's time to shine with the release of his brand new Ry-Cooder-produced album 'Tenderheart'.
Website / Watch / Watch
“There’s a tender heart beating for you…”
Cynicism comes easy, but having a soft heart takes real guts. Sam Outlaw’s new album Tenderheart dares to tread gently and look inward, with unapologetic sentiment and un-ironic nods to country music’s greatest neon rainbow chasers.
Since the release of his 2015 debut Angeleno, Outlaw remains one of LA’s only modern country singers to earn international acclaim. And with his follow-up Tenderheart he shows an impressive refinement of his artistic identity. Sonically, the album further elaborates Outlaw’s “SoCal Country” sound: a sun-bleached, Baja-influenced twang that deftly points to country’s neo-traditionalists and LA’s legendary singer-songwriters. Thematically Tenderheart is a thesis on self-discovery and the power of love – a course set with the opening chords of “Everyone’s Looking For Home.” The opening track is a cinematic, mariachi-laced meditation on Outlaw’s own conflicted quest for peace amongst the chaos of his chosen path.
Along the way he also takes a look around, and Tenderheart’s revelations are most potent when filtered through Outlaw’s distinctive Los Angeles vantage point. “Bottomless Mimosas” is emotionally hollowing in its portrayal of west coast existentialism while “Bougainvillea, I Think” and “Dry In The Sun” round out this trio of ‘Los Angeles songs’ that explore the city’s faded beauty and define “SoCal Country” beyond instrumentation.
“Trouble,” one of the album’s standouts, makes being bad sound pretty damn good with determined ‘Side A’ swagger and kicks off a song cycle that chronicles a heart’s bend, break and mend. “She’s Playing Hard To Get (Rid Of)” showcases acerbic wit in teary three-four time, setting the scene for “Two Broken Hearts” – a wounded lovers’ getaway story with an open ending. Over the course of these thirteen songs it becomes increasingly apparent why his clever intertwining of country tropes and crisp modernism has so impressed country music fans, critics and songwriters alike. (Alt-country pioneer Ryan Adams just recently praised Outlaw, calling his work “beyond great songwriting”.)
Angeleno’s critical acclaim also led to 18 months of international touring. He entertained thousands of festival-goers with a prime slot at Stagecoach, made four trips to Europe, toured Australia twice and played several hundred gigs in the USA. After all those miles it’s fitting that Tenderheart bottles the energy of the songs that have become mainstays of his live show. Fan-favorites like “Diamond Ring” and honky-tonk sing-along “All My Life” finally get proper studio treatment, along with “Look At You Now,” a regular highlight of his acoustic tours overseas – where Outlaw is nominated for AmericanaUK’s International Album of the Year alongside Sturgill Simpson and Margo Price.
Not one to mess with a winning combination, Sam called on many of the same musicians that made Angeleno such a success: harmony singer Molly Jenson, pedal steel pro Jeremy Long and guitarist Danny Garcia, along with Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes) and Bo Koster (My Morning Jacket). Produced by Martin Pradler and Outlaw and recorded in the San Fernando Valley, Tenderheart also features Erwin Vasquez and Mariachi Teocuitatlan, a local mariachi group who appeared in the video for Angeleno’s title track.
Now two years into his new life, Outlaw has learned that great dreams can only be achieved at great cost. And at its core, Tenderheart is the outcome of another lesson learned: if your heart stays true, the sacrifice is worth it.
'Angeleno made him a legitimate contender to be the biggest country star L.A. has produced since Dwight Yoakam.'
LA Weekly
'Sam Outlaw is rewriting the sound of Country, 2,000 miles from Nashville'
CBS This Morning
'An instant classic'
NPR Music
'[Outlaw is] leading the rebirth of L.A.’s modern country scene.'
Rolling Stone Country
Tickets for this show are £12.50 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from Piccadilly Records in Manchester or online from here.
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Hurray For the Riff Raff
The Crescent, York
Tuesday 15th August, 7.30pm
We've been trying to tempt them for a couple of years so we're very pleased to welcome Hurray For The Riff Raff to York for the first time. After near universal praise for the recent album 'The Navigator', tickets for this show will probably fly out so grab one quick if you want in.
'Her boozy, morning-after croon is still gorgeous, but now there’s elements of Puerto Rican bomba and salsa, son cubano, doo-wop, and even the spoken-word poetry of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe she haunted as a teen. Her band has gone through a variety of lineups, but this one feels like a clean slate.'
8.1 - Pitchfork
'The Navigator might be full of site-specific anger and yearning, but like its predecessors, it is incredibly easy on the ear. The songs just flow--slinky, sad or elegant in their own ways.'
5/5 - The Observer
Website / Watch / Listen
Full bio:
It had been a successful, if tumultuous, ride for Alynda Segarra, who’s been spreading a new kind of roots-conscious folk music across the country from her adopted hometown of New Orleans. But as far as the Bronx native had come with her band, Hurray for the Riff Raff, there was still a missing link to her story. “The more I toured, ending up in the middle of nowhere bars from Texas to Tennessee,” said Segarra, “I just started feeling more and more like, I don’t belong here, I gotta get back to my people, you know?”
After many years in New Orleans, Segarra found herself getting antsy. Hurray for the Riff Raff had four albums under its belt, with the last one, Small Town Heroes, featuring “The Body Electric,” a song that NPR’s Ann Powers called “The Political Song of the Year” in 2014. Yet even though her musical career had begun by running away from home at 17, busking for survival and honing her craft through dreams of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie, and Woody Guthrie, Segarra realized she is a Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx with a different story to tell.
To find her way back home, Segarra became the willing vessel for a character she calls “The Navigator,” from which her new album takes its name. She describes The Navigator, a/k/a Navita Milagros Negrón, as “this girl who grows up in a city that’s like New York, who’s a street kid, like me when I was little, that has a special place in the history of her people.” Through The Navigator, the listener hears an ambitiously interwoven, cinematic story of a wandering soul that finally realized she needed to connect with and honor her ancestors.
Segarra quickly went to work with producer Paul Butler, whose work with British soul singer Michael Kiwanuka she deeply admired, to capture the cinematic, old but new quality she wanted. It also meant assembling a core group of percussionists like Kansas City-based Juan-Carlos Chaurand and Devendra Banhart's drummer Gregory Rogove to play everything from Cuban to Puerto Rican to Brazilian backing beats. The result is an interconnected set of introspective songs, grounded in Segarra’s eclectic rustic root style, yet adorned by elements of son montuno, plena, and a kind of Mink De Ville retro-doowop rock.
Segarra drew early inspiration from cult favorite Rodriguez, a Mexican-American who translated working-class stories from Detroit into powerful rock ballads, and the Ghetto Brothers, an underground band from the 1970s South Bronx who stitched Puerto Rican nationalist messages into a rough-hewn fabric of Santana and Sly and the Family Stone Afro-Caribbean funk. She reached back to her cultural ancestors in the form of the radical political group the Young Lords and the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe. “I would just try to have the rhythm in my head and write the lyrics,” said Segarra. “Then I went back and added everything else, it was like poetry?”
Poetry permeates The Navigator, like when Segarra juxtaposes the feeling of growing up in a box in the sky on the 14th floor of an apartment building with the feeling her father had flying for what seemed like an eternity in a propeller plane from Puerto Rico to New York in the song “14th Floor.” Or when, in the elegiac piano-driven ballad “Pa’lante,” named after the Young Lords newspaper that showed the way forward, she inserts the sampled voice of legendary poet Pedro Pietri reading from his seminal opus “The Puerto Rican Obituary.” The Navigator is a restless observer, perched at the nexus of Allen Ginsberg’s East Village and the Nuyorican Poets Café, confessing the blues and dancing the punky salsa steps of a lonely girl, a hungry ghost.
Like a song-cycle from an imaginary Off-Broadway musical, The Navigator rises from the ashes of loneliness and striving, honky tonks and long walks by the river of urban dreams. From the wistful melancholy of “Life to Save,” to the stubborn resignation of “Nothing’s Gonna Change That Girl,” Segarra’s voice speaks with a husky weariness that coexists with a naïve curiosity. It’s the voice of a rebel who wanted everyone to think she was so tough, and nobody could take her down, but at the same time was yearning for love and magic, some kind of an awakening.Long-time Riff Raff fans should feel at home in The Navigator’s World. There’s always been a little bit of syncopated Caribbean strut to down home rock and roll, Appalachian rags share a similar root with Spanish troubadours and the blues is the same in any language. On The Navigator, Segarra’s voice has never been more soulful, whether she’s decrying urban gentrification on “Rican Beach” or mourning the lies people tell on “Halfway There.” Like the moment we’re living in, The Navigator is as much about the past as it is the future.
With its 12 tracks and its Travelers, Sages, and Sirens, The Navigator comes straight at you from the intersection of apocalypse and hope. This album rides Patti Smith’s high horse while straddling a thin line between love and hate. Segarra may lament the Trumpsters who want to “build a wall and keep them out,” but she knows that, like the outcasts she embraces, “Any day now/I will come along.” There’ll be no more hiding at the dimly lit intersections of class, race, and sexual identity—now we will all come into the light.
“I feel like my generation, through groups like Black Lives Matter, is really focusing on that type of intersectionality—if one of us is not free, then none of us are free,” said Segarra. “The Navigator’s role is to tell the story, tell it to the people who don’t know their own story, so they can be free.”
Tickets for this show are £13 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Kark Blau
Laura Gibson
The Crescent, York
Saturday 19th August, 8pm
Well this gig took a turn for the better! Now a co-headline show with Karl and his band joining the fun. This will now take place at the Crescent in York.
Karl Blau
Karl Blau is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and DIY icon who helped turn his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, into an indie-music mecca. He has released more than 40 records in 20-odd years, many self-released in handmade packaging and mailed to subscribers, and others on iconic indie Northwest labels K and knw-yr-own. Blau has also toured and recorded for years with Laura Veirs, the Microphones, Little Wings, D+, and Earth.
On 'Introducing Karl Blau' the enigmatic vocalist charts a new vision of country music. A Northwest indie hero, Blau channels darkness and hope in a cinematic collection of Nashville country hits from the 1960’s and 70’s. Produced by Tucker Martine, the record features performances by Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Laura Veirs, Jon Hyde, Eli Moore (Lake), Steve Moore (Earth, SunnO)))), among others.
It all started with cutting a 7” single, a cover of the 1969 Tom T. Hall hit “That’s How I Got to Memphis”. Blau, whom Martine had come to know from sessions with Laura Veirs among others, asked if he could try singing it. “I knew what a special artist Karl was, but I had no idea what a powerful interpreter of songs he was,’ Martine says. The collaboration, pairing Blau’s deeply sonorous voice with Martine’s warm, modern arrangements, recast the Nashville hit in a new light.
The record, all covers, is a crate-digger’s feast of forgotten hits and deeper cuts; most of them from the Nashville country-soul renaissance in the late 1960s and early 70s – Tom T. Hall, Bobby Bond, Allen Reynolds. Other songs are from the Bee Gees (To Love Somebody), Link Wray (Fallin’ Rain), or Townes Van Zandt (If I Needed You). The project was a labor of love for Martine, the son of a Nashville songwriter who grew up listening to many of these songs.
Tucker Martine, known for his distinctive production work on music by My Morning Jacket, the Decemberists, and Laura Veirs, was first introduced to Blau’s early music by Veirs. “I was transfixed by Karl’s voice and completely absorbed by the world of sound he had created. I felt like I had been shown one of the great hidden treasures of music.”
'It shimmers with an enchanting beauty that this writer at least has yet to find in any other song this year.'
The 405
'A dark and glorious vision, reinterpreting Nashville country-soul hits from the '60s and '70s.'
**** Mojo Magazine
'The songs are rendered sincerely, with elegant, understated phrasing.'
**** Uncut Magazine
Laura Gibson
Both literary and raw, with a love of a traditional folk music and a bent towards experimentation, multi-instrumentalist/singer-songwriter Laura Gibson has toured four continents, and is a frequent collaborator. She just recently received an MFA in Fiction Writing from Hunter College, while working on her forth release, the wise and vulnerable "Empire Builder", which Pitchfork called her best record to date. Laura recently collaborated with French artist The Avener on the single “You Belong”, featured in a worldwide ad campaign for Zadig & Voltaire.
Website / Watch / Listen
'Her best record to date...Gibson offers a cathartic tale of loss and redemption, set against a gorgeous sonic backdrop. She sounds newly confident, invigorated, and free.'
Pitchfork
'Captivating.'
**** Mojo
'There isn’t a song here that isn’t a low-key delight.'
**** Q
'A triumph'
8/10, Uncut
Tickets for this show are £9 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue and The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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BMX Bandits
Jasmine Minks
The Crescent, York
Sunday 20th August, 7.30pm
We're welcoming Scottish indie legends BMX Bandits to York in August. They've a new record in 2017 and so far it sounds totally great. As an added bonus newly reformed Aberdeen five-piece Jasmine Minks are in support.
Website / Watch / Listen
BMX Bandits
'If I could be in any other band, it would be BMX Bandits.'
Kurt Cobain
'Britain’s ultimate cult group'
The Guardian
BMX Bandits were formed in the ex-industrial town of Bellshill by songwriter and lead vocalist Duglas T Stewart out of the ashes of The Pretty Flowers, a group that featured Stewart alongside Frances McKee (The Vaselines), Sean Dickson (The Soup Dragons) and Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub).
BMX Bandits' songs mix melodic qualities and humour with, at times, raw and heartbreaking pathos. Duglas describes their songs as being his world put to music.
Starting with the exuberant 'E102' in 1986 BMX Bandits released a series of singles on Stephen's Pastels' 53rd & 3rd label, where they were label mates with The Vaselines and Beat Happening. Later they joined Creation Records, home of Teenage Fanclub, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream and many others. The group's most celebrated song is the autobiographical 'Serious Drugs', recorded in 1991 but not released until 1993. Oasis did their first UK tour dates supporting the Bandits as a favour to Creation label boss Alan McGee.
Stewart split with his long term musical partner Francis Macdonald in 2005 but 2006 saw a new wave of concert activity and the release of My Chain. Stewart's writing on the album was compared to Brian Wilson, Michel Legrand, Ennio Morricone and even Alan Bennet. The line up was expanded by the arrival of Stewart's friend David Scott and new female vocalist Rachel Allison. The follow-up, 2007's Bee Stings, was influenced by classic girl group pop plus the mellow A & M sound of the late 1960s and early '70s.
A highly acclaimed feature-length documentary called Serious Drugs - Duglas and the Music of BMX Bandits was premiered in Glasgow in 2011, followed by a series of international festival screenings and an international DVD release. The film featured in Sight & Sound's top films of the year list. The band released the album BMX Bandits In Space in 2012 on Elefant Records. In Space has been hailed as their most accomplished release so far, “a stunning, brilliant and beautiful album”.
The group have completed recording their forthcoming album BMX Bandits Forever, due for release on 19th of May 2017 on Elefant Records. BMX Bandits Forever is BMX Bandits darkest album so far but ultimately it's still an album full of love and hope.
The album features the band's newest member, multi-instrumentalist and singer Chloe Philip. Chloe brings an extra exuberance to BMX Bandits live shows and is the perfect partner in crime for chief Bandito Duglas and his muse. Duglas' main collaborator on Forever is Stuart Kidd who first joined the band in 2002. As well as being a key member of the BMX Bandits musical family Stuart has contributed to recent releases by many other artists including Euros Childs, Norman Blake, Gulp, The Wellgreen, Snowgoose, The Pearlfishers and many more. Forever also features a brand new collaboration between Duglas and Brian Jonestown Massacre leader Anton Newcombe.
The line-up of the group continues to be ever changing but the heart and soul of the group remains the same, an extended musical family led by the inimitable Duglas.
Jasmine Minks
Aberdeen indie five-piece Jasmine Minks were long time artists for Alan McGee’s Creation and Poptones labels, releasing a number of singles and albums over the years.
This song is for family loved ones now gone but never forgotten, and particularly for Wattie’s brother and band friend (Phil Duncan) who is currently fighting Motor Neurone Disease (MND). All monies (and we mean every penny) will go to Scottish MND. Phil is focused on fundraising for MND and this is one initiative that aims to do just that. Any airplay would be terrific and a real boost! MND is such a cruel disease. We send you this song for you to have a listen. If you could play it on radio then we’d be eternally grateful. Every single play matters. Phil cycled for Scotland and competed against many top riders (Tour de France guys such as Robert Millar, Malcolm Elliott, Allan Peiper etc) so it's hurtful seeing such a fit guy struck down.
We hope you like the song and can give it airtime and get awareness of MND out there at the same time.
Website / Listen
Tickets for this show are £15 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band
The Crescent, York
Tuesday 22nd August, 7.30pm
We're very pleased to welcome genre-pushing Philadelphian Chris Forsyth to York for the first time with his merry band of psychedelic cohorts the Solar Motel Band in tow.
Website / Watch / Listen
Philadelphia’s Chris Forsyth has long proven himself a skillful and inventive modern guitarist, one whose combination of hard-won chops and dazzling natural ability can easily awe the sort of people who maintain Tumblr pages devoted to photos of pedal boards. It’s always been pretty clear that the guy, to borrow a phrase, knows the literature. But on the new double LP The Rarity of Experience (No Quarter), Forsyth proves himself to be equally as adept a composer and bandleader as he is guitar stylist. Though the album may be loosely divided by a more frenzied and fiery first half and a mellower, more idiosyncratic second act, to view The Rarity Of Experience as merely two sides of a coin would be inaccurate, as Forsyth’s Solar Motel Band, over the course of nine originals and a cover of Richard Thompson’s “The Calvary Cross,” sustains momentum while evoking a wide range of moods.
The Solar Motel Band is Forsyth’s not-so-secret weapon. Much has already been written about the dynamic rhythm section of bassist Peter Kerlin and drummer Steven Urgo, whose sensitive and powerful contributions continue to establish the firm foundation upon which the group creates its unique synergy. Non-touring member and frequent Forsyth collaborator Shawn E. Hansen adds variety and verve to the Solar Motel Band’s guitars/bass/drums format with his expansive and expressive use of Sequential Circuits’ new Prophet 6 synthesizer. And second guitarist Nick Millevoi, the newest member of the group, proves a crucial ingredient and a perfect foil, complimenting Forsyth’s Stratocaster slink with flashy passages of tremolo picking and a distinctly raunchier, more robust tone.
Forsyth knows how good his band is, which is probably why he has chosen to revisit two of his previously released tunes, both originally released on 2012’s Kenzo Deluxe as a solo pieces. The Rarity of Experience’s reimagining of “Boston Street Lullaby” is a clinic in tension and restraint, while “The First Ten Minutes of Cocksucker Blues,” replete with the hand drum patter of percussionist Ryan Sawyer and the spacey tenor sax and trumpet of the New York ecstatic jazz stalwart Daniel Carter, becomes a groovy flux that evokes Getatchew Mekuria sitting in with Amon Duul II.
Cecil Taylor once observed that “the roots [of a musician] show more in maturity than in youth.” If this is true, “The Rarity Of Experience, Pt. 2” may provide the album’s most revealing glimpse into Forsyth’s teenage playbook, pitting the arachnidian guitar wanderings of The Days Of Wine and Roses against the rhythmic lurch of Remain In Light. Similarly, on the gorgeous “Harmonious Dance,” Forsyth’s bubbly auto-wah, combined with Hansen’s saturated synth twinkle and the rhythm section’s slippery minimalism, flashes back to Tortoise’s jazzy period circa TNT.
Few modern groups would sound equally at home onstage at the Fillmore East circa ‘69, CBGB’s circa ‘77, and Lounge Axe circa ‘96, but the Solar Motel Band of The Rarity Of Experience is such a band. It unequivocally places Forsyth at the top of a very short list of modern bandleaders worthy of carrying the torch of the masters.
Tickets for this show are £8 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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GospelbeacH
Miranda Lee Richards
(full band)
The Crescent, York
Saturday 26th August, 7.30pm
The Castle, Manchester
w/ Nick Mitchell
Sunday 27th August, 7.30pm
GospelbeacH
Brent Rademaker of further, Beachwood Sparks and The Tyde brings his new band GospelbeacH over the UK for the 1st time this summer. The touring band also features ex-Slowdive and Mojave 3 drummer Ian McCutcheon.
GospelbeacH play dreamy American roots music and their new album Another Summer Of Love is released June 16th on Alive Naturalsound.
On Another Summer Of Love, like Gram Parsons, Rademaker has drawn nourishment from the openness of Southern California and the sunny, hopeful feeling that epitomises his work is in full effect here. From the kick-off 'In The Desert', which slyly references The Jam to the jaunty swing of 'You’re Already Home' which pays a subtle tribute to Rademaker’s hero Chris Hillman’s 'Girl With No Name', this is what Americana is supposed to be and sometimes is not. Smart, informed, soulful, well-executed and avoiding the slick assembly-line of 2017 Nashville, this is the kind of record that true fans of well-crafted tuneful rock live for.
Website / Watch
Miranda Lee Richards
Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Miranda Lee Richards started her musical career when she became friends with Kirk Hammet from Metallica, who taught her to play guitar. Early demos of her songs reached the ears of Anton Newcombe, and she joined his band The Brian Jonestown Massacre. She sang on their albums Give It Back, Bringing It All Back Home Again, and Stung Out In Heaven, and appeared with them in the seminal documentary DIG!.
Her music a mix of folk, psychedelia, country and indie pop and her new album Existential Beast is released June 16th on Invisible Hands Music.
Website / Watch
Tickets for this show are £8 in advance.
You can get York tickets in person from the venue, The Inkwell, Jumbo Records and online from here.
Manchester tickets are available from here.
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Sam Outlaw Band
Michaela Anne
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Sunday 27th August, 7.30pm
Having spent much of 2016 on tour with his good buddy Margo Price, now is Sam's time to shine with the release of his brand new Ry-Cooder-produced album 'Tenderheart'.
Website / Watch / Watch
“There’s a tender heart beating for you…”
Cynicism comes easy, but having a soft heart takes real guts. Sam Outlaw’s new album Tenderheart dares to tread gently and look inward, with unapologetic sentiment and un-ironic nods to country music’s greatest neon rainbow chasers.
Since the release of his 2015 debut Angeleno, Outlaw remains one of LA’s only modern country singers to earn international acclaim. And with his follow-up Tenderheart he shows an impressive refinement of his artistic identity. Sonically, the album further elaborates Outlaw’s “SoCal Country” sound: a sun-bleached, Baja-influenced twang that deftly points to country’s neo-traditionalists and LA’s legendary singer-songwriters. Thematically Tenderheart is a thesis on self-discovery and the power of love – a course set with the opening chords of “Everyone’s Looking For Home.” The opening track is a cinematic, mariachi-laced meditation on Outlaw’s own conflicted quest for peace amongst the chaos of his chosen path.
Along the way he also takes a look around, and Tenderheart’s revelations are most potent when filtered through Outlaw’s distinctive Los Angeles vantage point. “Bottomless Mimosas” is emotionally hollowing in its portrayal of west coast existentialism while “Bougainvillea, I Think” and “Dry In The Sun” round out this trio of ‘Los Angeles songs’ that explore the city’s faded beauty and define “SoCal Country” beyond instrumentation.
“Trouble,” one of the album’s standouts, makes being bad sound pretty damn good with determined ‘Side A’ swagger and kicks off a song cycle that chronicles a heart’s bend, break and mend. “She’s Playing Hard To Get (Rid Of)” showcases acerbic wit in teary three-four time, setting the scene for “Two Broken Hearts” – a wounded lovers’ getaway story with an open ending. Over the course of these thirteen songs it becomes increasingly apparent why his clever intertwining of country tropes and crisp modernism has so impressed country music fans, critics and songwriters alike. (Alt-country pioneer Ryan Adams just recently praised Outlaw, calling his work “beyond great songwriting”.)
Angeleno’s critical acclaim also led to 18 months of international touring. He entertained thousands of festival-goers with a prime slot at Stagecoach, made four trips to Europe, toured Australia twice and played several hundred gigs in the USA. After all those miles it’s fitting that Tenderheart bottles the energy of the songs that have become mainstays of his live show. Fan-favorites like “Diamond Ring” and honky-tonk sing-along “All My Life” finally get proper studio treatment, along with “Look At You Now,” a regular highlight of his acoustic tours overseas – where Outlaw is nominated for AmericanaUK’s International Album of the Year alongside Sturgill Simpson and Margo Price.
Not one to mess with a winning combination, Sam called on many of the same musicians that made Angeleno such a success: harmony singer Molly Jenson, pedal steel pro Jeremy Long and guitarist Danny Garcia, along with Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes) and Bo Koster (My Morning Jacket). Produced by Martin Pradler and Outlaw and recorded in the San Fernando Valley, Tenderheart also features Erwin Vasquez and Mariachi Teocuitatlan, a local mariachi group who appeared in the video for Angeleno’s title track.
Now two years into his new life, Outlaw has learned that great dreams can only be achieved at great cost. And at its core, Tenderheart is the outcome of another lesson learned: if your heart stays true, the sacrifice is worth it.
'Angeleno made him a legitimate contender to be the biggest country star L.A. has produced since Dwight Yoakam.'
LA Weekly
'Sam Outlaw is rewriting the sound of Country, 2,000 miles from Nashville'
CBS This Morning
'An instant classic'
NPR Music
'[Outlaw is] leading the rebirth of L.A.’s modern country scene.'
Rolling Stone Country
Tickets for this show are £12.50 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue or Jumbo Records in person or online from here.
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Margaret Glaspy
The Crescent, York
Sunday 10th September, 7.30pm
We're very pleased to welcome Margaret Glaspy and her band to York for the first time in September.
Press:
'A mesh of tight rhythms, swinging guitar grooves, and smoothly sailing vocals.'
The Line of Best Fit
'Margaret Glaspy’s first album is a
fabulous miniature, clocking in at just 34 minutes, that gets better
every time you listen to it.'
The Guardian'At their best, these songs share the self-scrutinizing intimacy of Elliott Smith and the imaginative melodic intonations of Joni Mitchell, two of Glaspy's most obvious influences.'
Pitchfork
Website / Watch / Listen
Bio:
Emotions and Math is not simply the name of Margaret Glaspy’s new debut album. That expression drills right to the heart of the New York singer-songwriter’s proper introduction, a mission statement both artistic and personal. On its surface, the title track talks about being a touring musician and figuring out how to see your partner, looking at the calendar and calculating how you’re going to spend time together. But Emotions and Math also sums up an epiphany she had while making the record.
“In a lot of ways, it’s kind of how I operate,” says Glaspy. “I’ve always considered myself a free spirit, someone who goes with the flow, but actually I’m not exactly like that. This record really taught me that I’m super analytical and process-driven. I think they really do go together, emotions and math. Nobody is just one thing.”
As introductions go, these 12 songs waste no time in cutting close to the bone. This is a young artist with something to say, one who has found her voice, as both singer and songwriter, after years venturing down a crooked path. After cutting her teeth in New York and Boston, where she was a touring musician and played in other people’s bands, Emotions and Math signals an assured new direction for Glaspy.
Glaspy, who’s 27 and grew up in Red Bluff, California, self-produced the album, which frames her revealing ruminations in shards of jagged guitar rock. Building on its early buzz — Rolling Stone hailed first single “You and I” for its “hot barbs of electric guitar,” and BrooklynVegan declared it a “stomping rocker with a DGAF attitude". Glaspy prepares for a big year in 2016.
She’s a fierce believer in the power of specifics to tell universal truths, to capture emotions we’ve all felt but don’t necessarily hear reflected in pop music. Some truths are uglier than others, but Glaspy never backs down. Take “You and I,” which opens with a sentiment so gripping that Glaspy initially worried it would send the wrong message. “Tonight I’m too turned on to talk about us/ And tomorrow I’ll be too turned off/ And won’t give a fuck/ About you and I,” she sings with a punk sneer that turns up often throughout her debut.
The album also showcases Glaspy’s finely tuned ear for production. Throughout “Emotions and Math,” she keeps the recordings clean and urgent, without an ounce of fat on them. She had plenty of practice; having recorded demos of the album twice at home before eventually ironing out the wrinkles at Sear Sound studios in New York. Glaspy auditioned her players and kept the sessions brisk and loose, running through songs a few times with musicians still reading the charts she had written out. “Everyone was on their toes, waiting for the right moment,” she says.
That freewheeling vibe ended up imbuing the songs with the same brittle energy and warm intimacy Glaspy brings to her live performances. In a bit of comic relief, “You Don’t Want Me” is a duet with herself, an imagined conversation between an insecure woman and a man who has to reassure her. “You don’t want me,” Glaspy sings dismissively, countered by her own voice, slightly distorted and pitched lower: “I do/ You are on my mind/ Every night of the week/ Stop being so naïve,” Glaspy sings.
“It’s taken a minute,” she admits, “but I’m so glad that I waited to record my debut. I went through so many different phases before I got to where I am now. It feels like it took 26 years to make this album."
Tickets for this show are £12.50 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from the venue or Jumbo Records in person or online from here.
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Siobhan Wilson
The Basement, York
Sunday 17th September, 8pm
Siobhan Wilson was brought up in Elgin, Morayshire and after some time absorbing the French culture in Paris returned to Scotland to the city of Glasgow where she currently resides. Since returning to Scotland Siobhan self-realised an EP, receiving critical praise and radio play across the BBC network (Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 6 Music, BBC Scotland) and been championed by Lauren Laverne (BBC Radio 6 Music) as one of her Headphone Moments.
Website / Watch / Listen
As well as playing many major venues and festivals in the UK (Celtic Connections, Cambridge Folk Festival, Wickerman), Siobhan Wilson has toured in the USA, France, Sweden, Belgium and Poland. She's performed with Willy Mason at T in the Park and supported the likes of Idlewild, Martha Reeves and Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
Press:
"We played this very track on Monday and, to be honest, the reaction to it was huge. Her voice, that instrumentation, those melodies!" -
Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6Music Blog
“Swoonsome, jazz-inflected melodies in abundance” - Vic Galloway, BBC Radio Scotland
“Mesmerising… a hugely exciting talent” - The Scotsman
Tickets for this show are £8 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Basement in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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John Murry
The Basement, York
Wednesday 20th September, 8pm
Website / Watch / Listen
John Murry was adopted at birth into the family of William Faulkner. Some have speculated that the Faulkner blood might also run in his veins, but that should be left for a Southern Gothic novel yet to be written (or perhaps re-written). Raised in Tupelo, Mississippi, in the shadow of Elvis, his undiagnosed autism led to troubles at an early age which led to prescribed medication, which led to unprescribed medication which led to being institutionalised for addiction and mental health issues at a too young age. Eventually, discarded onto the streets of Memphis, he found music, which became the one constant positive force in his life. Memphis led to San Francisico and San Franciso led to heroin and heroin led to a near fatal overdose on the corner of 16th and Mission, so harrowingly memorialized in his song Little Colored Balloons.
Music again came to his rescue and led him to Tim Mooney (American Music Club) and the group of musicians that helped create his 2012 masterpiece “The Graceless Age”. The album was hailed by MOJO magazine and received a 5 out of 5 rating, UNCUT called it a “masterpiece”, both magazines included it in their Top 10 albums of the year; American Songwriter put it in their Top 5 of the year and The Guardian included it in their best of the year as well. The accolades rolled in and John toured the world. He entranced and devastated audiences with his raw, unfiltered live performances, and it looked like his trajectory was set, that music had won and would have the final word. And then Tim Mooney, John's mentor, his beacon, his bedrock, died suddenly and unexpectedly... and John's world fell back in to chaos.
Over the next few years, John would lose the footing that he had struggled so hard to establish. He would lose his wife, his daughter, temporarily his freedom and ultimately his country.
Somewhere along this journey, John crossed paths with Michael Timmins of Cowboy Junkies. John had opened for the band at a show in Glasgow and Michael watched side-stage transfixed by John's performance. Over the next few years the two of them kept in touch, they talked about the music business, politics, books, but most of all they talked about music. And they talked about making an album together. Michael wanted to capture the rawness of John's songs, capture the vibe that he experienced that night in Glasgow and was even more convinced of this approach when John came through Toronto opening for Chuck Prophet and did a solo set at The Horseshoe Tavern, which was as disarming and emotional as the set of music that he had experienced in Glasgow a couple of years earlier. “On The Graceless Age you can hear John’s affinity to artists such as Mark Linkous and Mark Lanegan, but seeing him on stage, with just his guitar and his songs reminded me of Townes (Van Zandt), that raw-boned, exquisite beauty, so real that it borders on the uncomfortable, you feel you should look away, but it's just too compelling to do so. The pain, the intensity, the honesty just draws you deeper”.
Eventually John completed his descent and landed in Kilkenny, Ireland where he found some solid ground as part of a welcoming arts community. Michael then convinced him to travel to his Toronto studio where Michael put a band together consisting of brother Peter Timmins (Cowboy Junkies) on drums and Josh Finlayson (Skydiggers, Gord Downie, Lee Harvey Osmond) on bass. John brought along Cait O'Riordan (The Pogues, Elvis Costello) whom he had met in Ireland and who wanted to be a part of John's journey. The five of them put aside five days to record all bedtracks and overdubs, with the brief that they would let the songs dictate where the journey took them, spontanaity was the order of the week. Michael Timmins describes the sessions, “I felt that it was important that John got out of his own way and that we set up a situation where he would just play and sing and the rest of us would just react, no second guessing, just react and capture the moment. It was a very inspired and inspiring week of playing and recording. Very intense. And I think we captured the raw essence of John's writing and playing”.
A Short History Of Decay is an intensely personal document of an artist's fall from grace. It contains all the tragic elements of that unwritten Southern Gothic novel: the revelations of a man coming to terms with the personal shortcomings, the flaws and the perverse twists of fate that led him to the end of one journey and the beginning of another.
Tickets for these shows are £13 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Endless Boogie
Avenging Force
The Crescent, York
Thursday 21st September, 7.30pm
After many years pestering, we're finally able to announce New York rock band Endless Boogie are landing in York in September.
Website / Watch / Listen
Press:
'Endless Boogie superimpose wild guitars on even wilder ones.'
Uncut
Full bio:
Thoughts on Endless Boogie ‘Vibe Killer’
Aaron Burr's attempt to seize the Texas Territory for his own dominion has beguiled composers 'n bands for ages. Allegedly Aaron Copeland's 'Appalachian Spring' was originally entitled 'Blennerhassett Spring' til Martha Graham had a snit & threatened to tell his socialist pals he was active in the Lavender Mafia, the fuckin’ witch. But hey, it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. Lowell George supposedly had a concept album in the can (aka, 'Carolina Parakeet') what was all about it, then Neon Park said he refused to draw a bird sportin Burr's noggin, so George ended up makin 'Thanks I'll Eat It Here' instead. Then died not long after. Now that's just a damn shame! And so this fascinatin’ tale of (alleged) treasonous expansion would end up in limbo until Endless Boogie took up the quill & recorded this new, inspired masterpiece entitled, 'Vibe Killer'. It's like a history lesson plundered deep outta the archives of Straight/Bizarre.
Our story opens w/a jowly narrative enunciated by Top Dollar (as Aaron Burr) callin’ out all them sissy Dem-Rep blaggards, letting 'em know he's on his own path. Naturally what follows is some tasty sun zoom riffage a’tween TD 'n The Governor and the wiley Sweenhound, backed solidly by the Razo/Druzd rhythm union. In fact, through the whole of this opus, Druzd effortlessly marshals through the sonic undertow while Razo rudders his bass like a brilliant pulse in a spasmodic vortex. Top Dollar, the aforementioned Herr Sween & The Governor gnash, morph, crystallize while the jams flow; it's 'Mirror Man' bum-rushin’ 'Pretties For You'. Before ya know it, we're at track 5 ('Back In '74') where the plot ostensibly takes us to a memory've Burr enterin’ college, but is surreptitiously more about the year Top Dollar gave up on Grand Funk in favor of Josefus. You're followin’ all of this, right? So as we amble into the ether of this brilliant opus, we can surmise by title 6 ('Jefferson County') the end is near. Burr (aka, Top Dollar) reflects on everything from Wilkinson's betrayal to the excellent meals while in captivity at Fort Stodden, then suddenly, NO, it's him, Top Dollar-with full Endless Boogie heft-soarin’ high above the hobo fires that flicker along the bank've the Ouachita River, drownin’ out forever the simperin’ harmonica bleats’ve tyranny. It’s almost enough to make you wanna smoke a ham. Friends & collectors, Endless Boogie have never not occupied the Catbird Seat. Winners gonna win, yo. They, like Aaron Burr himself, understand manifest destiny & no amount of port nor Madeira will take them down. Shit, might as well bring the sherry too. Who knows, maybe your mom's a fan.
Roland Seward Woodbe Burr, Texas (Wharton County) 2017
Tickets for these shows are £12 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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The Surfing Magazines
(The Wave Pictures / Slow Club)
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Saturday 22nd September, 7.30pm
The Surfing Magazines are a garage rock supergroup. The band contains one half of Slow Club and two thirds of The Wave Pictures. Dominic Brider, who has played with many local bands and is an extremely groovy dude, completes the line-up on drums. The principle influences of the band are Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground and all the great surf guitar music of the 1960s. The Surfing Magazines intend to rock out and blow your mind, and then to mellow out and soothe your mind, and then to rock out again. Listening to their music is like riding a rock and roll rollercoaster. They are at war with today's pretentious prog-indie-rock millionaires and bongo pop demigods. The Surfing Magazines are the real deal. The Surfing Magazines have got soul. They hope that their music will get you to dance.
Website / Watch / Listen
Not content with their already ferocious work rate, with three album releases in 2016 alone and over twenty in total between them; members of The Wave Pictures and Slow Club’s 11-track debut as Surfing Magazines is an intriguing and exciting mishmash of musical styles – soundtrack surf, weird pop and Americana.
Speaking on ‘Lines and Shadows’, the first track revealed from the record, the band incorporate a quote from writer Dashiel Hammett whilst speaking on the track:
“The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two [Hammett]. This is definitely the type of song that puts two and two together and gets twenty-two.”
Pulling in influence from all of the great surf music of the 60s and the band’s musical inspirations of Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, the band are professedly ‘at war’ with today’s pretentious prog-indie-rock millionaires and bongo pop demigods. They intend to ‘rock out and blow your mind, and then mellow out and soothe your mind, then rock out again’.
Tickets for this show are £8 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from Crash Records and Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Micah P Hinson
& The Holy Strangers
The Crescent, York
Sunday 24th September, 7.30pm
Website / Watch / Listen
Micah P. Hinson’s new album “Presents The Holy Strangers” is described by the artist as being a “modern folk opera.” Telling the story of a war time family, going from birth to love, to marriage and children, to war and betrayal, murder to suicide – spanning all of the strange and glorious places life can lead. We follow their story, we see their decisions, we see their faults and their beauty. We live with them, we die with them.
Two years in the making, Micah wrote and recorded The Holy Strangers in Denison, Texas, incorporating ancient reel to reels, analogue keyboards, old Tascam and Yamaha desks. The recording only entered the digital realm once pre-mastering took place.
Split across two pieces of the vinyl, the 14 tracks which make up The Holy Strangers are at times sparse and haunting; at other times luscious, maybe even euphoric. From the Johnny Cash-style country single “Lover’s Lane,” to the album’s broad, spoken-word centrepiece “Micah Book One”,
The Holy Strangers covers a lot of ground over the course of its hour long running time, appealing to both long-time fans and new ones alike.
Micah P. Hinson Presents The Holy Strangers is released 8th September 2017 on Full Time Hobby. Micah will be touring Europe throughout September and October with a full band.
Tickets for these shows are £15 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Jolie Holland & Samantha Parton
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Tuesday 3rd October, 7.30pm
Fifteen years ago, Jolie Holland and Samantha Parton - two founders of the wildly popular group The Be Good Tanyas - first joined forces. Now they come together once again, with a worldwide touring schedule and new studio album coming in 2017. Their new project, as always, is a page from the big book of North Americana and outsider folk.
Website / Watch
Holland grew up in Texas, and by her teens was performing as a traveling musician. In the late ’90s, she called San Francisco home before making her way to Canada where she co-founded the Tanyas with Vancouver singer-songwriter Samantha Parton. Parton had spent her post-high school years traveling with her guitar, and drawing strong musical inspiration from visits to the southern US; she spent time living in New Orleans, Holland's ancestral home.
After contributing to the Tanyas’ acclaimed Blue Horse LP, Holland moved back to San Francisco while Parton continued to tour and record with the group until a serious car accident took her off the road in 2012. With this new creative incarnation, expect to hear newly written originals, fresh arrangements of The Be Good Tanyas material, and songs from their individual catalogs.
Tickets for this show are £15 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from Crash Records and Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Matthew E. White
(solo)
'An intimate evening previewing works in progress and older classics.'
The Crescent, York
Friday 20th October, 7.30pm.
Matthew E. White is in the middle of work on his new album and would like to share and try out some of his works in progress and older classics. With the UK and Ireland so close to his heart, a tour of smaller clubs seemed the only logical place to give such an intimate and open performance that shows some of his songwriting process.
Website / Watch / Watch
Tickets for this show are £14 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York and Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Acid Mothers Temple
& The Melting Paraiso UFO
The Crescent, York
Tuesday 24th October, 7.30pm
The legendary Japanese psychedelic rock five piece led by Kawabata Makoto return to York in October.
Website / Watch / Listen
In 1995 the quartet of Kawabata Makoto (Musica Transonic, Mainliner, Toho Sara), Koizumi Hajime (ex. Mainliner, ex. Seventh Seal), Suhara Keizo (Arijigoku, Rashinban), and Cotton Casino (Mady Gura Blue Heaven) formed a new group and started to record their improvised jam sessions.
A group of social dropouts of every description – musicians, dancers, artists, farmers, channellers, ex-yakuza, mermaid researchers and professional vagrants – known as the Acid Mothers Temple Soul Collective, had already begun to coalesce around Kawabata. Then Higashi Hiroshi (ex.Yumejin) joined.
In January 1996, some local residents got the wrong end of the stick and assumed that their house was a hideout for members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult that had committed the gas attack on the Tokyo subway. In the end, they were forced to move out of the original Acid Mothers Temple Soul Collective house and their group began to transform from a hippie commune into a true collective of souls. “Acid Mother’s Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.” was released on cassette tape by Acid Mother’s Temple label.
The group released their self-titled debut album on PSF Records (Japan) in November 1997. The album was selected as one of the 50 best albums of the year by the British music magazine, The Wire. Since then Acid Mothers Temple have toured the world over, performing and recording in many guises, reaching every possible audience. They've released literally hundreds of singles, albums and CD-Rs and played every psychedelic happening worth it's salt worldwide.
Tickets for these shows are £10 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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The Proper Ornaments
The Fulford Arms, York
Sunday 29th October, 7.30pm
The Proper Ornaments formed in London around songwriters James Hoare (Veronica Falls/Ultimate Painting) and Max Oscarnold (TOY).
Website / Watch / Listen
The two in met at a women’s clothing store in Nothing Hill, where Max’s girlfriend was trying to steal boots from. The two bonded over a mutual love of The Velvet Underground and released their first single, “Recalling”, in 2010 through San Francisco label Make a Mess. They followed it up with an eponymous five-song EP for No Pain in Pop in 2011 and in 2013, a single (“Waiting for the Summer”) for Lo Recordings, which then released all their output to date on a collection (also titled Waiting for the Summer) later that year. After signing up with Fortuna Pop in the UK and Slumberland in the US, and revamping the line up with the addition of drummer Robert Syme and Daniel Nellis on bass, the group toured with Metronomy, TOY, The Horrors, Crystal Stilts, Woods and returned with their debut album, Wooden Head, in the summer of 2014, when after a promotional tour of UK and Europe they packed the 100 Club in a memorable night.
Their sound gathers elements of classic UK indie pop with shimmering jangling guitars that blend with rich harmonies reminiscent of the west coast 60’s groups, and in their live shows they take these sounds to a more motorik and heavier realms.
Tickets for these shows are £8 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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The Dream Syndicate
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Wednesday 1st November, 7.30pm
With a brand new album ready to go for Tom Waits Anti- Records, The Dream Syndicate have finally decided to extend their reformation to the UK. They will play two shows in London and this one in Leeds. Steve Wynn, Mark Walton, Dennis Duck and The Miracle 3's Jason Victor. We've been in Steve's ear for years and needless to say we're absolutely delighted to be hosting.
Website / Watch / Listen
Full beautiful story:
Like a lot of bands and other incendiary devices, the Dream Syndicate began in a basement.
In the final days of 1981, Dennis Duck, known in the LA scene as the drummer of post-punk stalwarts Human Hands, met up in Los Angeles for a subterranean rehearsal with Steve Wynn (guitar, vocals), Karl Precoda (guitar) and Kendra Smith (bass), three scruffy and noisy kids of no particular renown. Despite mostly consisting of long jams on CCR’s version of “Susie Q” and a few embryonic Wynn compositions, the rehearsal left the quartet feeling they were on to something that, if nothing else, was the sound they had been seeking and most certainly not finding on the local scene.
That sound was long songs of feedback and drone and psychedelic rave ups centered around cheap guitars plugged into broken amps. Guitars! Long Songs! Psychedelic garage music (well, basement, technically)—not things that were in fashion at that moment of time.
“We fully expected to be hated,” said Wynn. “But we also figured that if we liked this music as much as we did that somebody else would have to feel the same. We set out to be a band that could be somebody’s favorite band—even if for only a handful of people. Love us or hate us—that was our gauntlet at first.”
But that gauntlet was met by more people and more quickly than expected. Within 3 weeks the band recorded a four-song demo tape for $100 that ended up being their first record, a self-released EP on Wynn’s Down There Records label. The record immediately got press locally and nationwide, airplay on Rodney Bingenheimer’s “Rodney On The Roq” program and other similarly outlier stations across the country, hitting various indie charts along the way. It was only a matter of months before they were offered a record deal by Slash Records to make a debut album for the label’s Ruby imprint. Nine months after that basement jam session, the band was label mates with the likes of X, The Blasters and The Germs.
That debut record, “The Days of Wine and Roses” was recorded in three consecutive midnight-to-8am sessions—“because the rates were cheaper during the graveyard shift,” Wynn states. “We would finish in the morning and go straight to our day jobs and then go right back to the studio.” Fueled by adrenaline, junk food and the knowledge that they were making the record they’d always wanted to make, The Dream Syndicate made an album that continues to make all-time Best Album lists and influence bands to this day.
A lengthy US tour followed in early 1983, the band finding themselves welcomed as outsider heroes by fans who had also been looking for something else, that something that the Dream Syndicate had imagined in that first basement session. It felt somehow gratifying, startling and inevitable all at the same time. The band came home, wide-eyed conquering heroes but only a few weeks later, Kendra Smith left the band to concentrate on a new project, Opal (which later became Mazzy Star) that she started with David Roback.
Smith was replaced by Dave Provost on bass just before the band left for a three-week cross-country tour with U2 who were exploding with their breakout “War” album. The chance to play much larger venues to many more people put the band in the spotlight and a bidding war ensued with the band signing to A&M Records in the summer of 1983 and going into San Francisco’s Automat Studios with Sandy Pearlman (Blue Oyster Cult, The Clash) a few months later to record their second album, “Medicine Show.” This one took a little longer— five months to be exact. There are enough stories to fill a few books on that session but the album that came out in May of 1984 showed the band in a new, expansive light and got great reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.
Dave Provost left the band and was replaced by Mark Walton, a local bass guitarist and acquaintance of Precoda’s. An eight-week tour with REM followed, forging a friendship and collaboration with the Athens band that continues to this day for Wynn in The Baseball Project. Following a triumphant European tour, the
band came home and, once again, the burn and grind of the road took a toll on the lineup. In the final days of 1984, only three years after that first rehearsal, Wynn broke up the band only to reform a few months later with Paul B. Cutler, of 45 Grave, on guitar. It was a fresh start and began four solid years of constant touring in the US and Europe as well as two more albums—“Out of The Grey” and “Ghost Stories,” the latter produced by Elliot Mazer of Neil Young fame—that showed the band’s sound and Wynn’s songwriting evolving and picking up new fans along the way.
Despite playing more shows to larger and larger audiences, the band split up at the end of 1988. “It just felt like we had done everything we had set out to do. It was starting to feel a little rote, a little redundant and even a little perfunctory,” says Wynn. “Maybe we were just tired and worn out but it felt like a good time to stop.”
In the years that followed, Wynn made many well-received solo albums and also performed as part of Gutterball and the aforementioned Baseball Project while Walton founded the Continental Drifters, a band that built quite the groundswell of love and cult following of their own over a ten year career. Duck reformed Human Hands and also kept active on the Los Angeles avant-garde Los Angeles Free Music Association scene which he had been part of before the Dream Syndicate. In the meantime, the three remained friends, occasionally joining each other on stage.
In 2012, Wynn was asked to perform at the prominent Walk On Project Festival in Bilbao, Spain by a good friend who annually organizes the charity event. “I tried to get my band or the Baseball Project to do it but they were both busy. I really wanted to play the festival so I said, ‘hey, how about the Dream Syndicate?’ He thought I was joking but I wasn’t. It felt like time to give see what the Dream Syndicate meant and would sound like in a whole new era and setting.”
Neither Karl Precoda nor Paul B. Cutler were up for the reunion and Wynn immediately thought of Jason Victor, who had played in his solo band since 2001 and had played most of the Dream Syndicate catalog on stage at one time or another. “Jason not only knew the material—and was actually quite the student and expert of the band—but he also had that perfect mix of freakout noise and dissonance mixed with a whole lot of talent and ability. He was like everything I loved about both Karl and Paul’s playing but with a whole new twist. He was the perfect ingredient to bridge us from the past to the present.”
The reunited band took everything in baby steps. A few shows here and there—a couple of European tours, sporadic US dates (the first being a still talked-about set at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival)— “We were playing just enough to become a band but not enough to spook the giddy reality that it was actually happening.” The shows were exciting---for both the band and the eagerly awaiting fans, many of whom weren’t even alive when the band were around the first time. The next step was to see if the excitement and newfound chemistry would extend to the studio.
“It just felt like a good idea to see how it would work in the studio,” says Wynn. “From the start we said we had to love what we recorded or else we would make sure that nobody ever heard it. Nothing in between.”
Steve, Jason, Mark and Dennis retreated to Montrose Studios in Richmond, Virginia with old pal and Green On Red founder Chris Cacavas on keyboards and acting as co-producer with the band. From the first day of recording it was apparent that the band was making an album that would live up its history and take their
story into the present.
Wynn says, “In a way it feels like if "The Days of Wine and Roses" would have been made in 2017. Which is to say that it's true to what we did before but it's also a whole new thing. There's no doubt it's a Dream Syndicate record and yet it's not quite exactly like anything we did before. I guess a lot of that has to do with the "new guy," Jason Victor who joined the band on guitar in 2012. He's just incredible and really shapes the sound much in the way that Karl Precoda and Paul Cutler did in the previous lineups. It makes for a good push-and-pull, jousting 2-guitar adventure like our old records and also like many of our favorite bands--I guess you could compare it to other Dream Syndicate lineups but I'd just as soon compare it to Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry.”
And to continue the thread from the past to the present, the closing track “Kendra’s Dream” was co-written by none other than original bassist Kendra Smith who also sings the lead vocal on the track. “I felt that she was exactly the element that the song needed and I just felt so good about her being with us on the record. I’m so glad she said yes.”
And is there a concept? Is there a story line to the record?
“I tried to imagine the characters and personalities and narratives on "The Days of Wine and Roses" and then wondered, "well, what ever DID happen to those people? What are they up to now? Did things work out for them?" I just took where I was at and where the band was at back then and turned the hands of the clock
forward about 35 years. You know, just like real life.”
Real life that began in a basement in 1981 and now feels very much above ground and ready to continue the tale in 2017. And the circle never ends.
Tickets for this show are £17.50 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from Crash Records and Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Psychic TV
Band On The Wall, Manchester
Tuesday 7th November, 7.30pm
We're teaming up with DV8 Festival and TV's Over to bring legendary alternative act Psychic TV back to Manchester for the first time in a very long time. Tickets are on sale now and we do not expect them to last long.
Website / Watch / Listen
Psychic TV was first born in 1982 at 50 Beck Road, Hackney following the termination of Throbbing Gristle the year before. Six months later the duo completed the nucleus of the new unit with ex-TG’er Peter Christopherson. By that time Genesis had already conceived, named and pioneered the genre “lndustrial Music” with Throbbing Gristle. Along with groups like The Velvet Underground, Throbbing Gristle is and remains one of the most influential rock groups of the last 30 years; if you haven’t heard their music, you will certainly have listened to someone who has. In Throbbing Gristle, Genesis and company synthesized the influences and philosophies of Gen’s close friends and collaborators, including Beat writer William S. Burroughs; Beat poet and painter Brion Gysin; psychedelic shaman Dr Timothy Leary; queer activist film maker Derek Jarman; and those of legendary occultist Austin Osman Spare, theorist John Cage and various seminal underground authors, thinkers, artists and film makers. The group “TG” produced some of the most unsettling and thoughtprovoking music of all time. Their pioneering “Industrial” sound and self-sufficient approach to record distribution has had a profound impact, becoming key elements of underground music production and distribution ever since.
Right from the outset, Psychic TV in turn made highly innovative and unflinchingly provocative music blending elements of psychedelia and dance with Industrial sounds (named “HYPERDELIC” by Genesis). As with TG, the details of Psychic TV’s packaging, marketing and the radical lifestyle of the musicians were all treated as equally crucial components of the final aesthetic statement. For some 14 odd years, Psychic TV recorded and released dozens of live and studio albums ending up in the Guiness Book Of Records for releasing more albums in one year than any other artist (even Elvis!). Psychic TV was terminated in the mid 90′s as Genesis pursued further musical goals with his spoken-word and expanded poetry/video installation project Thee Majesty.
In 2003, drummer Edley ODowd of New York City’s legendary rock band Toilet Boys gently but persistently persuaded Genesis to rekindle her rock spirit and Psychic TV. Edley succeeded and they played their first public show that December. The reactivated ensemble led by ODowd, has been touring the US, Europe and Russia and releasing music ever since. Presently motivated by a love of performance & recording, Genesis calls this most current lineup ‘the best version of Psychic TV ever’.
The full history of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and her varied seminal musical exploits of the past three decades as well as her soclo-cultural (or should that be politico-sexual? Or all the above!) adventures would easily fill a book (and has ... Soft Skull/Shortwave Books published “Painful but Fabulous: The Lives and Art of Genesis P-Orridge” in 2003 and more recently with “Thee Psychick Bible” in hardcover in 2009 and paperback in 2010). Genesis continues to exhibit artwork around the globe (Most recently at Art Basel Miami and The Serpentine Gallery, London).
Already living a creative further chapter of her “life” book Genesis continues to provoke and explore in her very public private life; from replacing all her healthy teeth with solid gold permanent replicas in an homage to Pierre Clemente in Luis Bunuel’s “Belle De Jour.” Littering the dictionary and culture with new words for new, original ideas Genesis can be said to follow the serious process and joy-filled strategy of “When there is no example imagine it, when there is no word for it invent one.”
Tickets for this show are £22.50 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from Band On the Wall in Manchester or online from here.
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Blue Rose Code
The Basement, York
Wednesday 8th November, 8pm
Ross Wilson finally returns to York, this time Blue Rose Code is a trio and will be playing songs from their forthcoming album released in November.
Website / Watch / Listen
Press:
'Blue Rose Code is as slippery as an eel; a genre dodger; a mess of influences and contradictions. This rare display of soul and emotion will not be boxed, a sign of something special.'
Spiral Earth
‘An affirmation of love that links human relationships with the natural world. As sublimely paced as Astral Weeks-era Van Morrison.’
Folk Radio UK
Full bio:
Edinburgh born Ross Wilson spent his creative formative years in East London, then moved to South England “to be by the sea’s energy” but it is in his homecoming that he has found where his heart is. Life wasn’t always simple for Wilson. “I have swapped one type of chaos for another” says Wilson. “On my darkest day I found my benediction”.
Now a committed enthusiast and creative whirling dervish, Wilson has seen the past few years produce his most exciting work including the album ‘The Ballad of Peckham Rye’, which was nominated for the prestigious Scottish Album Of The Year Awards in 2014 and featured a roll-call of remarkable talent, including Danny Thompson, Karine Polwart, John Wetton, Aidan O’Rourke and Kathryn Williams.
'Grateful', the first single from the new album, was released at the end of 2015 and was playlisted on BBC Radio Scotland for a full five weeks. In unprecedented fashion, the following two Blue Rose Code singles were playlisted by Radio Scotland, making three in a row.
Further praise has come from the most unexpected of quarters in Hollywood A-lister, Ewan McGregor. Ewan explained, “My uncle Denis Lawson, gave me a copy of The Ballads Of Peckham Rye, it’s beautiful and I can’t stop listening to it.”
McGregor is featured on the follow up album ‘…And Lo! The Bird is on the Wing’ along with Scotland’s Jazz and Folk greats, music legend Danny Thompson and Nashville Gospel singers, The McCrary Sisters.
Speaking about the album, Wilson says “It’s an album for music fans and musicians, a challenging record. I’m passionate about that fusion of folk and jazz and where it intersects with songwriting. Working with these musicians has been a game changer.”
Live performance is where Blue Rose Code connects strongly with their audiences; having toured the length and breadth of the UK, selling out venues wherever they go and leaving a trail of fans in their wake.
Recent festival highlights include: Celtic Connections, Edinburgh Fringe, Looe, Summer Isles, Lindisfarne, Southern Fried and Underneath the Stars.
2017 has already seen BRC play to 1000 people at Glasgow’s City Halls and an appearance on BBC Radio 2 as part of ‘Live from Celtic Connections with Mark Radcliffe’. An anticipated third self-released album is due in November.
Ross Wilson has spent most of his musical life curating; he sculpts his band to every mood and temperament in order to create the perfect happening. From attrition to intense moments of ecstatic love, Wilson’s lyrics challenge the ear and soften the heart.
As the man at the helm of Blue Rose Code, he is, part director, part sculptor…total chameleon.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Shopping
Gauche
The Crescent, York
Wednesday 8th November, 7.30pm
More info to follow.
Tickets for these shows are £6 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Daniel Romano
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Sunday 12th November, 7.30pm
Prolific singer/songwriter and Rock ‘n' Roll chameleon Daniel Romano will release his seventh solo album Modern Pressure next Friday, May 19, via New West Records. In celebration of the record’s release, Romano will embark on a U.S. tour that includes shows in Boston, Washington DC, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Nashville, and Chicago before heading to Europe to finish the job.
Noisey previously announced Modern Pressure’s release and premiered the video for album track "Roya" calling it “a dreamy, laid back head-nodder featuring shuffling shakers, jangly tambourine, and ever-present, slinking guitar lines.” Of the 12-song set, they praise, “It's sonically spiritual to 2016's Mosey, and shows Romano continuing to sharpen his signature sound, combining elements of retro-tinged rock 'n' roll, country, and psychedelia to create a vibrant tapestry of tunes that feel just as at home in 2017 as they might in 1965.”
Propelled and resourceful as he is prolific, Romano recorded Modern Pressure at a minimalistic cabin in secluded Finnsäs, Sweden with additional string and horn players being added at Baldwin Street Sound in Toronto, ON. Engineered by long-time collaborator Kenneth Meehan, the fevered pace of work lent itself to the unrestrained and undeviated nature of the songs themselves. Songs that were written in observational scrutiny beneath the overcast atmosphere of 2016 and vigorously tackle the present-day heaviness we contain in the jotting bones of our guilty expressions. The twelve tracks boldly ask, “What age is this? What blooming weight do we carry?”
Website / Watch / Watch / Watch
Daniel Romano took the stage for the first time in 1993 as the eight-year-old drummer for his family’s rhythm and blues band. He has since released six solo albums, on which he is the sole performer of all instruments, and launched a pioneering punk rock project called Ancient Shapes that Canadian metal blog Hellbound asserts is “an outstanding new work in its own right.” Romano has simultaneously acted as a producer, engineer, artist, composer, arranger, and videographer. Over the past decade, he has gained three Polaris Music Prize nominations and three Juno nominations, as well as been awarded two platinum albums and Juno Awards for his performance, production, and arrangement work with artist City and Colour.
His 2015 New West Records debut If I’ve Only One Time Askin’ garnered rave reviews from NPR’s Fresh Air, Rolling Stone Country, Mojo, Uncut, Boston Globe, and Exclaim!; and it set the stage for the release of Mosey, which Pitchfork praised as “songs that look to the great beyond” and The Line of Best Fit named one of "The Fifty Best Deep Cuts of 2016.” The album features actress Rachel McAdams on standout track “Toulouse.” McAdams is one of many impressive collaborators whom Romano has worked with throughout his career, including The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie, legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, and trailblazing bands The Constantines and The Sadies.
'Mosey is clearly not just the work of an absurdly gifted musician, it's the product of an exceptionally vibrant mind.'
**** Uncut Magazine
'This is ain't your average country record.'
**** The Line Of Best Fit
'Mosey is highly approachable and magnetic without being mawkish, but it also speaks clearly to Romano's various frustrations with his generation. These 12 tunes are as poetic as they are powerful, and house a hefty amount of meaning.'
**** Exclaim!
Tickets for this show are £12 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from Crash Records and Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Jim White
Cicada Rhythm
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
Monday 20th November, 7.30pm
A genuine one of a kind. The genius (yes, genius) singer-songwriter returns with his eighth album of story songs from his highly engaging southern-states perspective. Jim has seen more of this old world than most the rest of us put together and he's pretty good at relaying the info as anyone who's ever seen him perform will testify.
Press:
'Terms like "alt.country" are far too prosaic to contain music which might equally be called post-bebop, spook-folk or ghoulish horror soundtrack.'
The Guardian
There's also the fact that you won't hear another record like it this year, possibly ever-- all the comparisons that can be made to Tom Waits, Lambchop, Grandaddy and Vic Chesnutt will only tell a small part of the story.
Pitchfork
Bio:
Raised in Pensacola, Florida, a town crushed between the church and heroin, Jim’s songs reach deep into the underbelly of the South. One time Pentacostal, fashion model, New York taxi driver, drifter, pro-surfer, photographer, film-maker, his music is the conduit for all the stories he collected along the way. His previous albums ‘Wrong-Eyed Jesus’ [1997], ‘No Such Place’ [2001] and ‘Drill a Hole in That Substrate…’ [2004] were acclaimed as masterpieces of ‘outer space alt.country’ and established Jim as a phenomenal maverick talent. Jim also starred in the BBC4 film ‘Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus’, an award-winning road-movie exploring Southern culture through its music and stories. Now living in an old farmhouse in the backwoods of Georgia, Jim White may have finally reached a place called home, but his other search, for what he calls ‘the gold tooth in God’s crooked smile’ continues in this new set of backyard tales.
Tickets for this show are £13 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from Crash Records and Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Rob Heron & The Tea Pad Orchestra
The Crescent, York
Tuesday 21st November, 7.30pm
MRob Heron & the Tea Pad Orchestra are one of the hardest working bands in the UK roots circuit.
With thousands of touring miles under their belts, they have earned themselves a sizeable fan base in the UK, Europe and beyond. Based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, they play their own brand of Western Swing, Blues, Gypsy Jazz and Country, or “North Eastern Swing” as they've coined it.
Website / Watch / Listen
Their style is more eclectic than most, influenced by early 20th century American music, with the addition of “razor-sharp” solos, great arrangements and original songs; their music harks back to a golden age whilst staying perfectly modern. The songs are penned by Rob Heron, a crazy fool for country music and a full time dandy-cowboy. His songs are full of character, satire, and good old fashion hollerin’.
The band, a hot six-piece, features Ben Fitzgerald (guitar), Tom Cronin (mandolin), Colin Nicholson (accordion), Ted Harbot (double bass) and Paul Archibald (drums).
Their debut album, ‘Money Isn't Everything’, caused a sensation when it was released in 2012, winning a host of rave reviews – many of them 5-star. Their second album, "Talk About The Weather" (released July 7th 2014) is also gathering some notable radio play and reviews.
The best way to experience Rob Heron and the Tea Pad Orchestra is at a live show!
Press:
'That's one hot band right there!'
Huey Morgan, BBC Radio 2
'Rob Heron evokes the spirit of Bob Wills and Django Reinhardt with a quintet that shuffles and boogies with panache. Infectiously good-humoured.'
Uncut Magazine
'Amazing musicians who play with both passion and a sympathetic regard for the history of the genre.'
Maverick Magazine
'On this, their second album of skewed Texas swing, gypsy jazz and hot, humorous country blues they’ve added reeds and horns for a big, thick sound, but their spontaneous combustion is always unstoppable.'
Scotsman On Sunday
Tickets for these shows are £10 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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Peggy Seeger and Family
‘The First Time Ever’ UK Concert Tour
The Crescent, York
Monday 27th November, 7.30pm
Peggy Seeger and Family - ‘The First Time Ever’ UK Concert Tour
“Each first time ever is the last time that that first time ever will happen. The first time I die will be the last time I live. I was born joyful. This is the first and last time I will write my life.” Peggy Seeger, from ‘The First Time Ever: A Memoir
To coincide with the publication of her memoir (Faber & Faber, Oct 5th) and accompanying CD, singer songwriter and feminist icon Peggy Seeger will take to the road this autumn for a 20-date UK concert and literary festival tour. At 82 she is the undisputed queen of folk and political song with a charisma that shines as brightly as ever.
Concerts will feature Peggy and family members performing her and Ewan MacColl’s most treasured songs from a career spanning over 60 years interspersed with readings from her memoir and plenty of whip-smart banter.
Peggy has always had the ability to take an audience from laughter to tears and back again in the space of a few songs. Her memoir achieves the same in just a few paragraphs. Put the two together and it’s guaranteed to be a memorable night.
Website / Watch / Listen
The Seeger MacColl family are one of folk music’s most loved dynasties. Singer, songwriter and feminist icon Peggy Seeger performs with Neill and Calum, her sons with Ewan MacColl. Join these three exceptional musicians for a gloriously relaxed evening of great music and witty family banter. Expect to hear songs of love, politics and storytelling, including some from Peggy’s award-winning latest album alongside Ewan MacColl’s best loved songs. This is an intimate evening with a remarkable family that will linger long in the memory.
Press:
“Peggy may be folk royalty, but there’s nothing either reverent or nostalgic about this joyous performance”
The Guardian
“A memorable warm and charming evening of great music,
family humour and grace.”
Irish World
“Glorious”
The Times
“An effortlessly intimate affair”
The Scotsman
Tickets for these shows are £18 in advance.
You can get tickets in person from The Inkwell in York, Jumbo Records in Leeds or online from here.
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