So as you can see, the new Bon Voyage record has moved from being tentatively called “Lies”, to being definitely called “Lies”. As you can also see, the album has a stellar seductive cover. This is the most seductive sensual cover I’ve ever seen Tooth and Nail put out. If you’re wondering where I found the cover someone on the Velvet Blue Music Message Board was checking out the Invisible Creature Blog, and found it.
Speaking of which, that message board is quite the interesting place to hang around. Check it out! Jim and I are on there as happinessiseasy and lfh respectively. Send us private messages and say hi!
Semi back on topic, Invisible Creature is the studio that is also doing artwork for the new Joy Electric album, “My Grandfather, the Cubist”. It’s run by brothers Ryan and Don Clark who were in the Tooth and Nail hardcore band Focused, then the Solid State (Tooth and Nail’s hardcore label) band Training for Utopia, if I’m remembering my history correctly. The Clark Brothers used to run Asterik Studios who did tons of album sleeves for Tooth and Nail, including Starflyer 59’s “Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice” and Joy Electric’s “The Tick Tock Treasury”, as well as the album sleeve for Funeral for a Friend’s “Hours”. Asterik Studios has now split into two different studios: Wonderful Union and the aforementioned Invisible Creatures.
Random asides aside, there’s more yummy Bon Voyage info to feast upon. Here it is, straight from Bon Voyage’s Myspace Blog:
“The new album “LIES” is completed and scheduled for a release date this
June on Tooth and Nail Records. New photos have been completed, and the
artwork for the record is currently underway. The myspace page will be
going thru an overhaul with new photos, new music, and release
information…please check back periodically as we are hoping to have
the new page up here in the next month or so.”
June can’t come soon enough, not to mention a tracklist, and some new tracks to listen to!
So this is sort of week old news, but we’ll pretend like we’re on the cutting edge and this news just surfaced today. Everyone play along okay? So here it goes! Mates of States new record, “Re-Arrange Us” is due out May 20th on Barsuk Records. (You realize this means that May is going to have three straight weeks of killer releases with Death Cab’s “Narrow Stairs” out on the 13th, the aforementioned Mates of State out on the 20th, and then Joy Electric’s “My Grandfather, the Cubist” out on the 27th. All we need now is something rad to come out on May 6th to have a whole month of badass music!) Things in parentheses aside here’s the scoop straight from the album page on the Barsuk website:
“Though conceived as a duo, Mates of State have never failed to generate a trademark wall of sound built on dozens of varied voicings of keys, drums, and alternately lushly-layered and playfully-dueling vocals. On re-arrange us they move beyond these boundaries (their traditional organ sound is a distant memory, replaced with organic piano and synth sounds) with additional instrumentation — not to mention a quantum leap in songcraft apparent on instantly indelible gems like now, jigsaw and get better. Throughout re-arrange us, Kori’s piano and the emergence of both Mates’ lead vocals from their trademark harmonizing signal the next stage of Mates of State’s evolution.”
Sounds like this is going to be another curve ball in a month of curve balls, considering the new Death Cab is supposed to be quite the “divisive” record, and the new Joy Electric is supposed to be their most minimalistic ever featuring the truest recordings of Ronnie’s voice ever. It’s gonna be a good curve ball though, since Mates of State have yet to disappoint me. Here’s the tracklist for all you crazy Mates kids, like me:
01. Get Better
02. Now
03. My Only Offer
04. The Re-Arranger
05. Jigsaw
06. Blue and Gold Print
07. Help Help
08. You are Free
09. Great Dane
10. Lullaby Haze
The Barsuk website promises mp3s up soon. Sounds good to me! And, if you didn’t know Kori has an awesome blog called “Band on the Diaper Run” on Babble. It’s hilarious and heartwarming. You should all read it. As a last odd aside,”Help Help” was also the title of a killer song, written by bassist Jeff Ament, on the Pearl Jam album “Riot Act”.
“The new Starflyer 59 album “Dial M” has just been completed and is off
to be mixed next week by JR McNeely. We are looking at a late summer /
early fall release with select tour dates to follow. We are very
pleased with the results and hope you enjoy the new record. More info,
new songs, etc. coming soon.”
I guess I’ll be finding out soon if my supposition was correct that all the A-sides of “The Ghosts of the Future” 7″ boxset are an album to themselves and not the next true album Starflyer 59 was recording. Either way, I’m excited and you should be too. After all the release of a new Starflyer 59 or Joy Electric album is always a monumentally exciting event. Speaking of that, don’t forget that the new Joy Electric record “My Grandfather, the Cubist” comes out May 26th! Hopefully we can get some rad coverage of that leading up to the release.
Okay kids, it’s finally available to order! You know you want it! So go order it at Velvet Blue Music! Of course you can order it from CDbaby, but I’d rather give Cloud my money! That said I just ordered it!! Oh yeah, for those of you weirdos who don’t like owning actual copies of the album and would rather buy mp3s you can get it at the iTunes store. I just used it to find out that the name of the song in the video we posted months ago is called “Strength Early”. I guess I may as well give a tracklist, while I’m starting at the iTunes store listing. Here you are:
01. A Concealed Weapon
02. Strength Early
03. Business Casual
04. The Life Highrise
05. The Mayflower Compact
06. It’s Not Effective
07. That’s Getting Personal
08. Love My Way (Psychedelic Furs Cover)
09. Don’t I Know the Way
10. The Pure in Heart
Death Cab for Cutie released (streaming from their MySpace) the first single from their forthcoming album, Narrow Stairs. It’s an 8 and a half-minute jam called “I Will Possess Your Heart,” where the at least the first half is a bass-infused groove reminiscent of a more mid-tempo, jammier, “National Anthem.” It’s pretty good. The lyrics strike me as typical Gibbard fare. I think it could’ve been shorter, but they warned us. People are already preemptively calling this Album of the Year, which is a bit far to go after one single, but it definitely has promise.
Honestly, though, it’s not quite as much of a change as I was expecting, given the original promises/threats. Take a listen:
EMI is still sore about In Rainbows, so they’re doing the only thing they can do: trying to milk as much money from the Radiohead properties they do control as they can. They’ve already released all the old albums in a box set. What else can they do? Oh, yeah, a Greatest Hits album.
How can you blame them? If I owned stock in a major record label, I think I’d be on the phone with my broker right now. Granted, not everyone can afford to take the Screw You approach that Radiohead did, but it’s definitely becoming less and less important to have a deal with a major. The music industry is in a tizzy over the fact that technology is just plain making them unnecessary. It makes sense. Home recording software has been lessening the cost of getting quality recordings, and the internet/digital media have made distribution methods cost nothing. Scripted Failures has been recording pretty good DIY recordings for years, and we have practically no funds. With just a little money spent on the right equipment, we could probably make a pretty good sounding album at home.
So this Greatest Hits thing. It’ll sell. It’ll sell well. If you casually like Radiohead, you’ll probably pick it up. If you’re a die-hard fan, and you own all the original albums, you might still pick it up, as Justin says, “just to have”. Radiohead can’t do much about it, but drummer Phil Selway doesn’t seem to pleased about the prospect: “It’s well within their rights to do it. *sigh* So we’ll have to see.
But as I say, for us the main thing is that we’re excited about the
process of releasing In Rainbows and what we’re doing, around the
touring, around the way we’re able to release it, and most importantly
around the music itself.”
If you’ve been reading our blog you know two things: number one, we haven’t updated in a long while (sorry, things have been hectic in Scripted Failures land cause we’ve been writing new songs), and number two that we’re quite stoked on The Foxglove Hunt. A quick recap: The Foxglove Hunt is Rob Withem of Fine China writing all the songs, playing guitar, and singing, and Ronnie Martin of Joy Electric doing all the programming and synth work. We’ve known for awhile that the album would be out sometime this year, but now we finally have a month, an album title, an album cover (obviously since you can see it right here), and some other rad news.
The Foxglove Hunt’s debut album “Stop Heartbeat” will be out in March on Common Wall Media which released Fine China’s amazing last record ever, “The Jaws of Life”. If you head over to the Hunt’s myspace, you can hear the finished versions of the two demos that have been up for awhile (”That’s Getting Personal” and “Business Casual”), as well as a new song called “The Life Highrise”. If that wasn’t enough you can also buy an mp3 single of the, I assume, album track “Don’t I Know the Way” that comes to you on an old school 1.44 MB floppy disk. How fucking cool and retro is that? Hell, it’s so retro I’m going to have to use my older PC in the garage just to get the damn mp3, since my laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive. And if I read the picture right it looks like they might be only making 300 of these, so you better jump on it. I’ve already ordered mine.
As for the three songs up, I’ve only allowed myself to listen to about thirty seconds of each, which was enough time to find out that “That’s Getting Personal” and “Business Casual” were the finished album versions, and that “The Life Highrise” sounds good. If you read Ronnie’s blog on the Joy Electric myspace, you know that he is incredibly stoked about the record. He said that these were Rob’s best songs ever and that it was the best project he had ever produced and worked on. If Ronnie’s that excited you know this record is going to kick ass. Now all they need to do is post a tracklist and a link to preorder and we’ll be set!
This would have been up sooner, had Yahoo mail’s spam filter not thrown the Joy Electric newsletter in the spam folder, but the new Joy Electric album is entitled “My Grandfather, the Cubist”, and is due out on May 27th on Tooth and Nail Records. Also the Joy Electric website has been updated with a sort of cubist influenced look and a rather lengthy interview with Ronnie. Unfortunately there’s not a new track to listen to or a tracklist up yet, but hopefully both those will happen soon. We’ll report it here as soon as it happens. Get excited!
Stereogum has a great list of new albums coming out in 2008. They missed a couple that I’m looking forward to, though:
The Autumns, Fake Noise from a Box of Toys: Early 2008 (Bella Union)
Damiera, TBA: 2008 (Equal Vision)
The Little Ones, TBA: April 15, 2008 (Astrelwerks)
Justin will be posting his “Most Anticipated Albums of 2008″ very soon.
