#dangerbird

[theartingace]

was doodling more faces when all of a sudden, Life on our Planet happened so have an assortment of sort of ancient creatures! Generic brand Therapsid! An Amphibian(?)! a dunkle tadpole! Also detail for my vaguely gorgonopsid guy's face because look at him <3

[half-a-tiger]

JASON LYTLE - “Nylonandjuno”, from the Grandaddy multi-instrumentalist and producer’s 2019 instrumental album ‘Arthur King Presents Jason Lytle: NYLONANDJUNO' out via Dangerbird.

Film by Mind Palace

[dustedmagazine]

Swervedriver — Future Ruins (Dangerbird)

Photo by Steve Gullick

Swervedriver was always a bit too heavy and abrasive to fit neatly into the shoegazer scene. Early singles like “Son of Mustang Ford,” off the 1991 album Raise bucked and reared wildly, more akin to American post-grunge outfits like Dinosaur Jr. or Sonic Youth than dream-fuzzed Oxford neighbors like Ride. Mezcal Head in 1993 layered a narcotic buzz of vocals over inflammatory riffs—the guitars in “Duel” are monstrous, blistered and radiant—noisily obliterating any gestures towards pop. When the band came to America, it toured with amps-up sludge rockers Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins. Even the band’s radical turn to pop, Ejector Seat Reservation, had a howling entropy under the melodies, far more so than Teenage Fanclub who seem the closest relation.

Swervedriver broke up in 1998, but like many bands of similar vintage, reunited in the aughts first at the 2008 Coachella festival and later in a series of tours. In 2015, Swervedriver released its first post-reunion albums, I Wasn’t Born to Lose You. Dusted appears not to have reviewed the disc, but the Quietus summed up the positive but not rapturous reception, saying, “All in all, there is freshness and intrigue for those that need it—and for those that don't, a reliable consistency with their 90s incarnation. The new Swervedriver may be clean and sentimental, but the ‘petroleum spirit’ of their youth still keeps its pace.”

Future Ruins, then, is Swervedriver’s second post-break-up album, reconvening four long-time members—Adam Franklin, Jimmy Hartridge, Steve George and Mikey Jones—for a very recognizable iteration of the band’s sound. It’s quite good, though, of course, wildly out of sync with what’s going on in music right now. If you ever liked Swervedriver, you’ll like this a lot.

“Marywinter,” the single, starts with a thump and bash of cymbals, the drums drawing hard-edges around billowing atmospheres of sound. Franklin’s soft murmuring voice slips in and out of the mix, like a tendrils of seaweed getting pulled down into surf. There are hard, prickly sounds—a woozy MBV-like guitar pull-off, a squall of bass—jutting out from the roil of sound, but the effect is calming, a white noise rush of static colored with melody.

Elsewhere, Swervedriver waxes contemplative, as in the slower paced title cut, and the dreaming closer, “Radio-Silent.” “Everybody’s Going Somewhere” slips off the leash a bit, with spoken word vocals set against chilled translucencies of guitar and electric keyboards; it sounds more delicate and interior-facing than the large-scale bangers. Yet even these have a tranquility within the roar. “Golden Remedy” hazards a saw-toothed guitar riff, hard and rough and stinging. But the melody laps around it like a sea of codeine. You know it probably hurts but you can’t feel it from inside this cloud of calm.

None of this is so very different from Swervedriver’s catalog, or indeed from the guitar-crashing dream pop of Adam Franklin’s Bolts of Melody, but it is very fine anyway. In these latter days of everything available at once, what’s the point of linear progression anyway? Music is music, always crowding around us. If it sounds good, why not? And indeed, “Good Times are Hard to Follow” sounds pretty damned good with its banging, squealing guitars, its whipped-cream-fog-bank mass of vocals. In it, Franklin contemplates history, singing perhaps of a love affair, perhaps of a life in music, “I love the way it starts, but I hate the way it ends, the end denies the start of its sense.”

Not yet it doesn’t. Not by a long shot.

Jennifer Kelly

[abductionradiation]

Window Rock, AZ -- This week, Hataałiinez Wheeler aka Hataałii shares his second single “President’s Got Me All Night Long” for Dangerbird’s Microdose Single series. The track spans just under 3 minutes long and its timelessness will have you in a hazy dream. Hataałii’s deep croons are mesmerizing and add a layer of vintage pop to the track. The instrumental on “President’s Got Me All Night Long” has a smooth dreaminess to it that echoes elements from the slacker pop genre. There’s a soft buoyancy to the track that feels whimsical and impermanent - drifting in and out of reality and dreamland.

On the track, Hataałii shares “I made President’s Got Me All Night Long in my friend Kai's dorm room during my first semester at UNM. We'd all go there after class sometimes and just hang out. I think It's important that I record in an environment where I can let loose and be myself, and typically (if it isn't by myself) it's been with other Natives.”

Connect with Hataałii:

Twitter | Instagram

[pleasantmag]

Slothrust Announce Deluxe Album, ‘Parallel Timeline (Origins)’

Photo Credit: Lindsey Byrnes 

Rising alt-rock band Slothrust has today announced their forthcoming deluxe album Parallel Timeline (Origins), set to be released on March 16th via Dangerbird Records. Parallel Timeline (Origins) will feature demo + new versions of select tracks from the band’s latest record Parallel Timeline, as well as commentary from bandleader Leah Wellbaum and drummer Will Gorin. 

Stream “waiting (demo)” below. 

To pre-save or pre-order the album, please visit this link.

Bandleader Leah Wellbaum shares: “I wrote and recorded the demo of ‘Waiting’ in my house in Glendale in early 2019. I was trying to be really honest with myself at the time while remaining optimistic. I want this song to serve as a reminder to people that it is possible to break out of the cages we keep ourselves in. Even if the moments are fleeting. Healing is not linear. Look for signs in nature.” Slothrust will be hitting the road this spring in celebration of their latest album on The Parallel Timeline Tour. Check out the dates below.

Upcoming Tour Dates:

3/17 – San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar

3/18 – Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room

3/19 – San Francisco, CA @ Independent

3/20 – Sacramento, CA @ Goldfield

3/23 – Boise, ID @ Treefort Music Fest

3/25 – Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall

3/26 – Seattle, WA @ Crocodile

3/27 – Bend, OR @ Volcanic Theatre Pub

4/7 – Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar

4/8 – Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church

4/9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere

4/10 – Asbury Park, NJ @ Asbury Lanes

4/12 – Richmond, VA @ Richmond Music Hall

4/14 – Durham, NC @ The Pinhook

4/15 – Asheville, NC @ The Grey Eagle

4/16 – Atlanta, GA @ Aisle 5

4/17 – Nashville, TN @ 3rd & Lindsley

4/19 – Cincinnati, OH @ Urban Artifact

4/21 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall

4/22 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry

4/23 – Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon

4/24 – Davenport, IA @ The Raccoon Motel

4/27 – Kansas City, MO @ Recordbar

4/28 – Wichita, KS @ Wave – Indoor

4/30 – Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theater

[gloriousnoise]

New Mediocre: Mattress Bitch

New Mediocre: Mattress Bitch

Video: Mediocre – “Mattress Bitch” Directed by Keely Martin and Piper Torrison. Single out now on Dangerbird. I got my flu shot and covid booster last night. At the pharmacy while I was waiting my turn there was a family with a five-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl getting their first dose. The little boy was nervous. His big sister agreed to go first. She was a boss and didn’t even cry. She…

View On WordPress

[dustedmagazine]

The Colorist Orchestra and Howe Gelb — Not on the Map (Dangerbird)

This collaboration between Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb and the pop/chamber music collective known as The Colorist Orchestra is both spare and lavish. Its intricate rhythms are played on a wide array of both actual percussion instruments and household implements pressed into musical service, tracing prickly, staccato cadences across swooning strings. The music, written by Gelb but reimagined and rearranged by the Orchestra’s leaders Aarich Jespers and Kobe Proesmans, has a bit of Giant Sand’s Western swagger, its Latin romance, its tango-rhythmed stops and starts, but also something close to contemporary classical sound.  Think So Percussion in a cowboy hat.

Gelb’s lyrics are, per usual, surreal and evocative. He mutters the words to “Dr. Goldman” in his cracked baritone, lush patterns of violin, reed instruments and jungle sounds springing up in the long pauses between phrases. The song is feverish, lurid, elliptical, suggesting the outlines of a story about wildlife, extinction and the limits of scientific knowledge. A little googling reveals that Dr. Goldman is the scientist who used camera traps to document the existence of the Zanzibar leopard, long thought to be extinct. Knowing the backstory makes the song a bit less cryptic, but even so it pulses with heat and mystery.

Gelb’s long-time collaborator Pieta Brown sings on a handful of songs. Her own “Sweet Pretender,” is fluid and country dulcet, but also gets a transformation from the Colorist Crew. By the end, its engaging melody has run into a buzz saw of hard rhythms and distortion, roughing it up and upending expectations.

Still to get at the magic of putting Gelb’s songs in Colorist hands, you have to look to “More Exes.” It begins dryly, laconically, with Gelb chanting in monotone over an undulating bed of jazz bass, Latin rhythms and tremulous violins. It blossoms into melody at the chorus, Gelb singing with Brown, then cuts back to its swaying, clopping rhythm. The wordplay is clever, as always, but not showy about it, fluttering from romantic exes to exes in tic tac toe with hardly a raised eyebrow.

Like all Gelb albums, it’s a bit of a slow burner, letting you in gradually, allowing its complexities to bloom over repeated listens like an old wine that develops in the glass. But very much worth it.

Jennifer Kelly

[slowmassmusic]

First show in 15 months this weekend. Come through.