With courage, conviction and donkey-jawed diction
“I use the words “you” and “I” in the album’s lyrics a lot because the songs are kind of like lovers in that way. More than diary entries, a lot of them are lovers saying the lyrics to the other person.”
I spoke to SASAMI about her brilliant debut album SASAMI - read up over here
“A few years on from those early songs, Stella Donnelly’s Beware of the Dogs sees her having grown musically and emotionally, and attacking various hard-hitting topics, both personal and political, with a more worldly perspective. However, the tracks on Beware of the Dogs brim with a character and cheekiness that brings enough levity to ensure unbridled enjoyment while dealing with these angering topics.”
Stella Donnelly’s debut album Beware of the Dogs is one of my favourites for a while - read my full review here.
“Absolutely. I feel like sometimes you can only really tell something in video or art or music; sometimes it’s the more subtle things that you can’t really get through in just a Facebook post or chatting to people. Someone like Julia Jacklin really manages to tell these really subtle nuanced stories in her songs; ‘Body’ and ‘Head Alone’ both do that. It’s a complex thing she’s talking about, it’s in a relationship sense, and she manages to get that across.”
I got to speak to the luminous Stella Donnelly all about her debut album Beware of the Dogs - check it out
“Listening to Hand Habits’ new record Placeholder is to wreathe yourself in mental indecision and insecurity, but from the inside of Duffy’s creations the feeling is one of relief; you are imbued with the knowledge that these are universal struggles, and that in itself is beautiful.”
The new Hand Habits album placeholder is an absolute stunner - read my full review
“I would pretty frequently have dreams where I was playing a song, where I was hearing a song and then you wake up and you can’t quite recall it. It felt so much like that to me, where the words are indistinguishable and the melody is just barely there when you wake up. I feel like that place is where all of my music comes from, wherever dreams or your unconscious lie, it all comes from there. It’s very representational of something really important.”
Jessica Pratt’s new album Quiet Signs is a thing of true ephemeral beauty, so I jumped at the opportunity to sit down and discuss it with her. Check out our conversation over here.
“When I was at uni I was doing English with Creative Writing, and I did a big poetry dissertation, and all those poems are written in a very different style and different mind-set than I bring to writing lyrics. I definitely strive to make my lyrics feel as much like poems as possible, but I definitely think of them as a different kind of animal too, because they’re always married to the music and those things enrich each other. With a poem there’s only what’s on the page, so I think poems have to be more muscular.”
I sat down for an illuminating conversation with Northern Irish singer Naomi Hamilton aka Jealous of the Birds - check out what she had to say over here
“The wizardry of Josin’s music comes from the symbiosis between her compositions and the emotional weight of her expression. Each song on the album feels like an expedition into the Blank Space, but each time the emotion that comes resonating back from the void is slightly different.”
A criminally overlooked debut album by Josin is the subject of my latest album review for the 405
“Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers have a natural chemistry, and frequently bring out the best in each other. Sonically, Better Oblivion Community Center doesn’t stray too far from the comfort zones of either, being mostly slow-rocking folk numbers, but intertwining their different narratives works incredibly well.”
One of my favourite old artists, Conor Oberst, teamed up with one of my favourite new artists, Phoebe Bridgers, to form a band called Better Oblivion Community Center, so of course I had to review their album.
“Steve Gunn’s music is not showy and it doesn’t attempt to attract attention, despite the expansive and expert playing involved throughout. The Unseen In Between has the potential to be a victim of its own naturalness; it’s such a finely-hewed record that people will step into its sound and enjoy it with such ease that they might take it for granted, believe it’s something classic they already know.”
I love what Steve Gunn does in his glorious guitar-centric albums, check out my full review on The 405
“What we were trying to do on the record is start from the most accessible place, only to mutilate or contort it.”
I sat down with the three-headed beast that is Flasher for a very interesting conversation - read for yourself.
“it’s a record sung both to and about dearly departed loved ones (she lost three beloved grandparents directly preceding the writing), leaving her with her songs as a place to confess the demons they’ve left her with. Through Will This Do? we follow Mastrodimos’ across a year’s worth of loss and gruelling self-rebuilding, told in lightly poetic and heavily uncompromising terms, bolstered by the addition of 3 new bandmates.”
We did a week of “overlooked” albums of 2018 on The 405, my pick was the exceptional Will This Do? by Long Neck - read why over here.
“Quite a lot of the record, for me, is reflecting on breaking those mind-made manacles, being chained to things that just don’t serve you in life. And also the sense of transformation, to enliven yourself, to live as what I would regard as a more fully alive, higher potential lifestyle. I think Love Hates What You Become, follows the desire that we had with the first record, which was sort of a bit like a “how did you get here? why are you here? how do you get out of here?”; [this album] the questions are “are you satisfied? are you happy with the way in which you are existing on the micro and macro of the community and the planet?” - that’s in amongst all of it.”
Ellery Roberts and Ebony Hoorn, aka Lost Under Heaven, gave me the in-depth early scoop about their forthcoming album Love Hates What You Become - get involved over here
“I think it’s important after we express hurt and pain to have fun and to continue to live our own lives and not allow people to ruin our lives just because they have some issues. It’s important to turn towards the people that we love and say “OK, well let’s make something else together now, something positive.””
Miya Folick just released her wondrous debut album Premonitions, and she gave me a charming and candid interview all about it - have a read over on the 405.
“Featuring all the songs from C’est La Vie, and reaching back over a decade for classic cuts, Phosphorescent pulled out all the stops for the final night of their tour”
I am delighted to report that Phosphorescent remain one of the must-see live acts on the planet - my full review of their end-of-tour blow out is over here.
“Pill’s music sounds like the city, and the varied lives lived within it; guitars, drums, bass and saxophone all seem to come at the songs from their own angle, collide in the middle and together form twisted, gnarled and python-like power punk songs. Pill are more interested in following this mutual path that their instruments are carving out for them – and the expressive flourishes that spark along the way make Soft Hell a simmering and passionate listening experience.”
Pill’s new album Soft Hell is one I want everyone to get behind - read more about my love of it in my full review
“Connan Mockasin is musically following largely the same paths that he worked with on his LP, Caramel; dreamy, laid back and smooth songs, but Jassbusters comes from a more lovelorn and unkempt source. He shows hints of inspiration by entwining his richly beige rock with Pacific instrumentation, to great effect, but never seems to guide the songs to anywhere particularly memorable.”
Connan Mockasin’s new album Jassbusters isn’t up to all that much, in my humble opinion. The 405 has my full review.
“I was excited to listen to words for the sounds without immediately knowing the meaning. In fact, my whole thing with the record is sounds come first, and then the meaning always follows in this beautiful way; especially when I do a mesostic or a phonetic translation - like ‘Why Sad Song’ is a phonetic translation of a song in a different language.”
I totally geeked out when I had the opportunity to speak to Julia Holter, and she obliged with a pretty in-depth discussion of her new album Aviary - check it out
“The perpetual motion of her moods is woven into the very fabric of the delicate but powerful abysskiss. Although the lyrics are often abstract, they document the personal travails of these times, and she described the completion of the album by saying “another skin is being shed.” All of this speaks to Adrianne Lenker’s preternatural gift (practically a necessity) for songwriting, and the way that she devotes body and mind to her music.”
Adrianne Lenker (of Big Thief) is some kind of wizard and an utterly magical songwriter - I tried to encapsulate my thoughts about her new solo album abysskiss in my review.
“‘C’est La Vie’ kind of locked it in place for me as the keystone that reached out and gave all the other songs a place to live, a common thread. I think it worked as the first lyrics on there in a sense that I do think that this is a different kind of record than the ones before, and I think I wrote in a different way on this album. To me, it feels more direct than in the past.”
I got to speak to one of my absolute faves, Matthew Houck aka Phosphorescent, about the creation of his new album C’est La Vie - read up, read up!
“Viagra Boys create post-punk songs in the ilk of The Men or Parquet Courts, but blues is also a distinctive vein running throughout new album Street Worms. This is infused through their ace-in-the-hole saxophone use and also Seb’s tales of woeful characters in each song– although these are not just down-on-their-luck losers, but mentally unwell societal outcasts.”
Sweden’s Viagra Boys are a darkly humorous lot, I tried to sum up their debut album in my review for The 405.