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Tuesday, Oct 15 2019, 6AM
“I think a lot of people were as shocked as I was upon hearing the news of David Berman’s passing,” singer Klara Söderberg said. “It didn’t seem real. It left me completely devastated. So I wrote the song ‘Strange Beauty’ to try to make sense of my feelings.
"Sucker Punch" is the B side to Tokyo and were only released on vinyl for Sub Pop Singles Club. They've now been made available on streaming services.
Back in 2014 there were rumors The Sundays would be reuniting but that hasn't happened.
Indiana/Chicago dream pop duo Whimsical will self-release their 3rd full length album, Bright Smiles & Broken Hearts on Nov 5, 2019. The band is fronted by singer Krissy Vanderwoude who you may recall from recent releases by The Churchhill Garden and The Blue Herons.
While Whimsical has often been categorized in the shoegaze/dream pop genre, they say “We’re not trying to copy anyone. We always put our take on it. But, I’ll be the first to say that as much as we think we are “shoegaze” or “dream pop,” we are just as influenced by everything Robert Smith and The Cure has done.”
Elbow: Giants of All Sizes review – a rich vision of broken Britain - read The Guardian review for their album of the week here: bit.ly
Part 2 is out this Friday. In a previous press release frontman Yannis Philippakis had this to say about releasing two albums: "They're two halves of the same locket. They can be listened to and appreciated individually, but fundamentally, they are companion pieces."
Philippakis said that the albums do address the environmental crisis our planet faces. "There's a definite idea about the world being no longer habitable in the way that it was," he said. "A kind of perilousness lack of predictability and a feeling of being overwhelmed by the magnitudes of the problems we face. What's the response? And what's the purpose of any response that one individual can have?"
Philippakis added: "Lyrically, there are resonances with what's going on in the world at the moment. I just feel like, what's the utility of being a musician these days, if you can't engage with at least some of this stuff? These songs are white flags, or they're SOSs, or they're cries for help... each in a different way."
Bono told BBC Radio 2's Chris Evans that he tried to copy the gravel-voiced singer Joe Cocker when recording his vocals for this song.
This isn't the only MMJ/Erykah Badu collaboration. My Morning Jacket got Badu's help to cover two of her songs, "Tyrone" and "Twinkle", and Badu also helped out on MMJ's "Wordless Chorus" and "The Day Is Coming".
Wilco’s 11th studio album, apparently, is Jeff Tweedy confronting rockism (the belief that rock is the natural state of music. In short: the celebration of all things guitary and “authentic” over music that is shiny and instant). “Rockism is not intellectually an honest place to be, so this is more just a personal observation of what I don’t want to do,” he has said. Tweedy also said of rockism: “I’m afraid that we are not going to have any audience any more if we don’t keep perpetuating this.” So Ode to Joy will not scare away the existing fans: it’s not an experimental album at all; in fact it’s so stripped back it’s sometimes arid, with acoustic guitar and a deadened, deliberately martial and plodding drum kit the dominant sounds
“Before the Bombs” pits an anonymous couple against some unspecified atrocity in an unnamed part of the world. What is “the only thing” the bombs couldn’t take away from the doomed lovers? I’ll give you one guess.
Toronto producer and crooner Seth Nyquist, who performs as MorMor, is back with a new single, "Won't Let You". It's his first offering since releasing his latest EP, Some Place Else, earlier this year.
Blue Hawaii is a two person electronic project consisting of Ra and Ag, who met doing parties and shows in Montreal and continue to create together despite living in separate cities - split between Montreal and Berlin. “Open Reduction Internal Fixation” is their fourth LP and continues the thread of dreamy electronic pop and dance floor playability.
See them Nov 17th at the Kremwerk + Timbre Room Complex in Downtown Seattle. Tickets & info: bit.ly
Amen Dunes performing "Miki Dora" live in the KEXP studio on August 14, 2018: bit.ly
Tuesday Morning reached Number 18 in the UK singles charts and also culminated in The Pogues' last performance on Top of the Pops.
The Waterboys were not fans of the synth sound that was big in 1985, but when Mike Scott heard the Prince album Purple Rain, he realized it could work if done right. The This Is The Sea album is peppered with these sounds, played by the group's keyboard player Karl Wallinger, but they're most prominent on "The Whole Of The Moon." It came full circle when Prince performed the song at shows in 2014 and 2015.
Michael Kiwanuka will be at The Showbox on January 29th! Tickets and info: bit.ly
You can get both of Sault's albums, 5 and 7, on vinyl from their bandcamp page. Both albums are in preorder to ship later this month: saultglobal.bandcamp.com
Hill wrote much of the material for her debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, while pregnant with her first child, Zion David. She credits the pregnancy for re-igniting her creativity: "I had the desire to write in a capacity that I hadn't done in a while. I don't know if it's a hormonal or emotional thing... I was very in touch with my feelings at the time." She added: "Every time I got hurt, every time I was disappointed, every time I learned, I just wrote a song."
We were lucky enough to have Fly Moon Royalty grace the our public gathering space on KEXP Soul Day 2016, and they burned it down with a rendition of "Grown Man", featuring two backing vocalists and some slinky, sexy guitar work. See it hereL
youtu.be
KEXP Presents: Black Belt Eagle Scout w/ Hikes & Slashed Tires at the Tractor on October 24th! If you don't win tickets, buy some here: bit.ly
Hurray For The Riff Raff were live on the Morning Show June 15, 2017 and of course played :Hungry Ghost": bit.ly
"Kim Gordon’s voice is one of the great instruments in post-punk history" - Pitchfork. Read their review of "Murdered Out" here: bit.ly
PJ Harvey told Q in 2001, "I wanted everything to sound as beautiful as possible. Having experimented with some dreadful sounds on Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love - where I was really looking for dark, unsettling, nauseous-making sounds - Stories From The City... was the reaction. I thought, No, I want absolute beauty. I want this album to sing and fly and be full of reverb and lush layers of melody. I want it to be my beautiful, sumptuous, lovely piece of work."
Watch IDLES' epic performance in the KEXP gathering space from May 29th bit.ly
This beat came from the guitar riff on The Knack's 1979 hit "My Sharona."
According to Rudy's Bandcamp page, "Fools" "sounds like: if portishead made electronic music"
Jacques Greene only has a couple US tour dates - October 23rd in Brooklyn and the 25th in Los Angeles.
Public Service Broadcasting's "Go!" was the KEXP Song of the Day March 17, 2015. Find "Go!" and subscribe to the podcast here: bit.ly
The lead single from 18, Moby explained during a performance of the song at the 2003 Glastonbury festival that he wrote it in New York after the September 11 attacks to express a sense of hopefulness.
The song was not specifically about Nick Drake, as some suppose, but merely dedicated to his memory. Laird-Clowes recalled to Mojo magazine in a 2011 interview: "The song was created in a Southgate bedsit where Gilbert Gabriel had a room. We wrote it while sitting on a floor. Just two guitars - one nylon strung with just three strings on it, while the other was the same guitar that was on the cover of Nick Drake's Bryter Layter. We had the idea, even before we sat down, to write a folk song with an African-style chorus. We started it and when we got to the verse melody, there was something about it that reminded me of Nick Drake, who I had been turned on to in 1972 by Roundhouse DJ Jeff Dexter. It was Jeff who first informed me what a brilliant record Bryter Layter was. He claimed, 'I know where that guitar is and one day we'll get hold of it.'
I was working at the RCA record factory in Ladbroke Grove at the time and bought Nick Drake's guitar for £100. When the single was completed I dedicated it to Nick."
O’Flynn says about "Sunspear": "I wanted to make something for the summer dancefloor that people could have fun to. It was about taking the sample and recontextualising it to make something more modern whilst keeping the original feel, adding additional percussion to up the energy.”
Gabriel used a horn section (the legendary Memphis Horns, who played on several hits from Stax Records) on this song, which led to criticism that he was trying to copy the style of Phil Collins to gain commercial success. Collins was using horns and getting a lot of radio play with songs like "Easy Lover" and "Sussudio." Gabriel has said that this was never his intent and that he was more of an influence on Collins, his bandmate with Genesis.
Liz Phair’s debut memoir, Horror Stories, arrived earlier this month. In an interview with Stereogum, Phair said of “Good Side,” “I think there’s a sense of counterbalancing the weight of my memoir being concerned with the darkness and haunting aspects of the past. ‘Good Side’ captures the optimism and acceptance I feel even in the face of disappointments.” She also name-checked several current artists that she’s been listening to, including FKA Twigs, Kim Gordon and Angel Olsen. She is planning on a full length album out in 2020.
Hear Big Thief's KEXP in-studio at noon on the 26th! That night they're playing a sold out show at The Moore.
Tomorrow at 1pm you can see Aldous Harding live in the KEXP studio! Sign up starts 90 minutes before. She's playing the Tractor tonight!
Regarding the song's meaning, Frontman and songwriter Conor O'Brien told The Sun it, "is a sort of ode to meaninglessness, that absolute void that we all feel at some stage in our lives, if not every single day. It sort of proposes that this void is the very thing that binds us all together as human beings on this planet."
No plans tonight? Go see Pete Yorn at The Neptune! Tickets & info: bit.ly
Beach House performed "Myth" on the David Letterman Show May 12, 2018. See it here: bit.ly
Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face) is the title to a chillingly horrific yet classically poetic 1960 film from acclaimed French director Georges Franju. In it, a gifted plastic surgeon is involved in a near fatal auto accident which horribly disfigures the once beautiful face of his beloved daughter. Along with his assistant, he abducts young women so that he may surgically remove their facial features and graft their beauty onto his daughter.
DJ Abbie hosted a live in-studio with TR/ST in May. Find the audio here: www.kexp.org
Dead Soft are playing the Belltown Yacht Club on November 21st. Tickets are not on sale yet but sign up to be notified here: bit.ly
The equally eerie video for "Seven" was a directive collaboration between vocalist Katie Ball and guitarist David Noonan alongside Graham Patterson. Here’s what Ball had to say about the video:
We made the video for “Seven” with our friend Graham Patterson. Through the imagery we explored themes of perspective, perception and faith, taking inspiration from the lyrics. Most of the props in the video are things from my bedroom that we made into villains. We were interested in using mixed media in the storytelling so we included some paintings and made some stop motion animation too.
Check out the video for “Seven” bit.ly
Moon Duo will be live on KEXP on November 26th at noon! Sign up starts 90 minutes earlier. That night they're performing at Neumos. Tickets and info: www.neumos.com
Grab "Some Sunsick Day" here: bit.ly It was the Song of the Day for 9-22-16 as featured on the Morning Show.
Roderick Wolgamott of Sky Cries Mary on the '90s Seattle Scene: bit.ly
