Summer Salt is a rock’n’roll three-o of best pals. With influences of bossa nova and oldies, they create the perfect soundtrack for chillaxin’ by the pool. Matt has the voice of an angel, Eugene has that in-the-pocket drummin’, and Phil’s bass is funny. Limited to 500 copies on color vinyl.
Bright Hopes! is the third release from Mike Crawford & His Secret Siblings. The collective spent three years recording 16 songs with 50 people and over 100 minutes of music. From the start Bright Hopes! has been a gigantic community art project. The 16 songs fill three LPs with accompanying triple-gatefold artwork and 12 page booklet. Available now!
Jerry Jean‘s twelve new songs explore the strains of modern living, human connection, and renewal. Cinematic and grand, the album features honest vocals and an expansive piano-driven backdrop adorned with lush strings. The LP was recorded with all live instruments for an organic, chamber pop sound. Do We Reach Home is an everyman’s journey through longing, disillusionment, and hope.
Produced and arranged by Jerry Jean in NYC, mixed in Los Angeles by Bryan Cook (Train, One Republic), and mastered in Portland, Maine by 11 time Grammy winner Bob Ludwig, the album was engineered to stand the test of time.
The second full length release from Brandon Krebs. “Avant-Garde Pop for everybody, filled with romantically gloomy soulvoyages.” Refuge In Exile’s instantly breathtaking sweep and rhythmic hooks challenge its title’s reveal of how it was made intimately and mindfully in an uncertain two-year period of the artist’s life.
On What In the Natural World, entrancing guitarist and singer Jake Xerxes Fussell follows his celebrated self-titled debut (produced by William Tyler) with a moving new album of natural questions in the form of transmogrified folk/blues koans. This time these radiant ancient tunes tone several shades darker while amplifying their absurdist humor, illuminating our national, and psychic, predicaments. Featuring art by iconic painter Roger Brown and contributions from three notable Nathans—Nathan Bowles (Steve Gunn), Nathan Salsburg (Alan Lomax Archive), and Nathan Golub (Mountain Goats)—as well as Joan Shelley and Casey Toll (Mt. Moriah). Available for pre-order now from Paradise of Bachelors.
The Charlotte, NC based Sinners & Saints features Perry Fowler on guitar, vocals, kick snare, and harmonica and Mark Baran on stand-up bass, vocals, kick drum, tenor banjo. Since the bands’ formation in 2011 Sinners & Saints has brought their live show to many a main stage or festival with a combination of small regional tours in the Southeast and regular appearances across their native Charlotte.
On The Other Side, the group’s sophomore album, will be released on March 10, 2017. Sinners & Saints’ sophomore full-length album was recorded in Winston Salem at Electromagnetic Radio Recorders by Doug Williams and mastered by Dave Harris at Studio B Mastering. Lacquers were cut by the team at Well Made Music.
ADIOS is Cory Branan’s death record. Not the cheeriest of openings, but like all of Branan’s mercurial work, it’s probably not what you think. As funny and defiant as it is touching and sad, this self-dubbed “loser’s survival kit” doesn’t spare its subjects or the listener.
Not even Branan’s deceased father is let off the hook. In the tender homage “The Vow” he drolly cites his father’s favorite banality “that’s what you get for thinking” as “probably not the best lesson for kids.” For most songwriters that would be the punchline but Branan pushes through words and, in his father’s actions, finds a kind of “genius in the effortless way he just ‘did’.”
Not all the death on ADIOS is literal mortality. “Imogene” is sung from the wreckage of a love that once “poked fun at the pain, stoked the sun in the rain” but ends with the urgent call to “act on the embers, ash won’t remember the way back to fire.”
The trademark lyrical agility is mirrored sonically. Never a genre loyalist, ADIOS finds Branan (much like his musically restless heroes Elvis Costello and Tom Waits) coloring outside the lines in sometimes startling shades of fuzz and twang. While unafraid to play it arrow-straight when called for (“The Vow,” “Equinox,” “Don’t Go”), ADIOS veers wildly from the Buddy Holly-esque rave up “I Only Know” (sung with punk notables Laura Jane Grace and Dave Hause), through the swampy “Walls, MS” to the Costello-like new wave of “Visiting Hours.”
Mastered by John Baldwin, lacquers cut by Clint Holley.
Tokyo guitarist/songwriter/singer Suzuki Junzo‘s new album! Known from his work with Miminokoto, 20 Guilders, Overhang Party and more, Junzo’s Shark-Infested Custard mixes psychedelia, blues, drone, noise and rock into an intoxicating singular blend. Limited edition of 250 copies in a screen printed cover featuring art by Eric DeJesus (Easy Pop Art Research, We Have Heaven).
William Ryan Fritch is a composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer currently based in Oakland, California. His compositions are characterized by his unique range as a multi-instrumentalist and audio engineer, allowing him to realize large ensemble arrangements found in folk, Indie-rock, electronica, hip-hop, World and orchestral music as a solo endeavor.
Subscribe to the Lost Tribe Sound: Prelude to the Decline (Subscription Series) to receive ‘Eagle Hunters’ at a discount and a whole lot more here: losttribesound.bandcamp.com/album/prelude-to-the-decline-subscription-series.
Paste announces a return to print with Paste Quarterly—a luxurious print magazine with the new vinyl Paste Sampler—launching March of 2017. You can subscribe now via their Indiegogo campaign. Each issue will feature insightful long-form content and a vinyl album with exclusive tracks recorded at the Paste Studio in New York. The magazine will sell for $20/issue or $70 for a year’s subscription (four magazines plus four vinyl samplers). And we’re offering some bonus goodies for those who sign up in the next 45 days. Thanks to Paste for bringing GGR into the fold on this!