This fun compilation released in the US by Runt Records (and originally in Italy by Abraxas) showcases the work of Francesco De Masi, Bruno Nicolai, Lallo Gori, Mario Migliari, and Vassil Kojucharov. The first three composers make up most of the compilation, with Migliari and Kojucharov only getting one track each on the album.
The sixteen tracks span films ranging from many of the Sartana franchise including Nicolai’s gorgeous title tracks to C’e’ Sartana…Vendi la Pistola e Comprati La Bara! (There is Sartana…Sell the Pistol and Buy a Coffin!) and Buon Funerale Amigos…Paga Sartana (part 1) (Have a Good Funeral, Friends…Sartana Will Pay). “Stranger,” with its bold vocals, is a fun track.
Many of the DeMasi pieces are collaborations with famous Italian guitarist and composter Alessandro Alessandroni, whose fine guitar work is all over tracks like “Monetero’s Plan” and “Vento e Whisky” (which has a great horn section that sounds like it wandered from the set of an Italian crime thriller to play on the score for Stranger).
Migliardi’s title track for Prega il Morto e Ammazza il Vivo (Pray for the Dead and Shoot the Living) sizzles like a rattlesnake on a warm rock. Nicolai’s title track for Gil Fumavano le Colt…Lo Chiamavano Campsanto (They Call Him Cemetery) is a classic with its expert whistling, symphonic strings, hollow-body guitar work, and vocal chorus all mixing together for a perfect blend. The vocals on DeMasi’s “Gold” are so bold they’re almost over the top and ridiculous, but they hold back just enough to make them amazing in their own right. His title track for 1963’s Il Segno del Coyote (The Sign of the Coyote) could fit on practically any John Ford film.
It’s a collection that’s over too soon, even with sixteen tracks on it, and a good reminder that Ennio Morricone (God rest his soul.) wasn’t the only formidable composer of spaghetti western soundtracks.
I did a deep dive of the music of Midnight Oil in celebration of their final tour. Don’t miss them if they come close to you, or drive eight hours to see them if you must. Here’s the set list from the show:
Australian punks The Chats announce their new album, GET FUCKED, out August 19th on the band’s own label, Bargain Bin Records, and share a new single/video, “6L GTR.” The announcement arrives in the midst of their North American tour (tickets on sale now). Their debut full-length, High Risk Behaviour, dropped just as the pandemic struck, and The Chats have duly been through the same frustrating two years of broken dreams and shredded itineraries as every other combo. Undeterred and now stocked to overflowing with frustration and fury, they strike back with GET FUCKED, an incendiary, hyper-adrenalized blitz from punk heaven, showcasing a rockin’ new guitarist, and an electrifying all-killer-no-filler 13 tracks which perfectly capture the band’s explosive energy. It is, quite simply, another laugh-out-loud, pogo-through-the-floorboards stroke of motherfucking genius.
The Chats took lockdown as a chance to plan their next move, which is when they enlisted Josh Hardy after the departure of their last guitarist. Sometime in ’21, Eamon Sandwith, Matt Boggis and Hardy decamped to southern Queensland to write at their friend’s place, Vinny’s Dive Bar. Once they’d worked up a rollicking batch of new tunes, they had actually planned to record again near Melbourne, with Billy Gardner, who produced High Risk Behaviour, but due to pandemic border closures, they nailed it instead in six days at Brisbane’s Hunting Ground facility with Cody McWaters, who’d worked on a single for Eamon’s other band, Headlice.
“They weren’t like hardcore working days,” Eamon reveals, “we would start at 11 and finish at 4, and in the middle of that we’d go to the pub for lunch for two hours, and have a few beers. Then we’d go, ‘Oh shit, we better go back and do some recording!’ Our work etiquette wasn’t great.” Consequently, GET FUCKED, while tackling umpteen eminently relatable beefs ranging from surfer-dude racism to the usual dire impecunity, feels like a classic high-velocity punk-rock party album like they just don’t make ’em anymore – think early Ramones, think MDC’s debut, think invite your mates over and rock hard all weekend.
GET FUCKED opens with “6L GTR,” a swingeing takedown of a speed-crazed status-symbol driver – a critique piqued when Eamon spotted the titular licence plate in an airport carpark. “I don’t even know if the car itself was actually a six-liter GTR or anything,” he chuckles. “To be honest with you, I don’t even know what a car like that would look like! I can’t drive! That was the thing, we were just trying to get into this dude’s head.” The video was made by animator and illustrator Marco Imov who spent days creating the band in character form. “They hinted that it would be cool if instead of being directly about the car, it should be about the band wanting the car,” explains Marco. “From there it kind of wrote itself down.”
The more you listen to it, the more you realize that there was only one plausible title for this second Chats album. After all the incarceration and boredom, The Chats are in peak match fitness to deliver the excitement we all crave for the months ahead.
GET FUCKED TRACKLIST 1. 6L GTR 2. Struck By Lightning 3. Boggo Road 4. Southport Superman 5. Panic Attack 6. Ticket Inspector 7. The Price of Smokes 8. Dead on Site 9. Paid Late 10. I’ve Been Drunk In Every Pub In Brisbane 11. Out On The Street 12. Emperor of the Beach 13. Getting Better
THE CHATS TOUR DATES Mon. Jun. 27 – Paris, FR @ La Maroquinerie Tue. Jun. 28 – Brussels, BE @ La Botanique Fri. Jul. 1 – Werchter, BE @ Rock Werchter 2022 Mon. Jul. 4 – Amsterdam, NL @ Melkweg Tue. Jul. 5 – Berlin, DE @ SO36 Wed. Jul. 6 – Hamburg, DE @ Moltow Backyard Thu. Jul. 7 – Cologne, DE @ Gebäude Fri. Jul. 22 – Adelaide, AU @ Adelaide Showground Fri. Jul. 29 – Luxembourg, LU @ Rotondes Sat. Oct. 8 – Sacramento, CA @ Aftershock Festival
Keep your mind open.
[Zoom over to the subscription box while you’re here.]
Today, composer/producer Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp) has announced New Pleasures, a new album slated for release on July 15th. With the record,Arp sculpts angularities into fresh, alluring shapes, expanding and contracting song form into brain-teasing sound design. The sensation the music offers is almost rubbery; it makes you feel as if you could flex, bend and squeeze your body inside out – a vivid, deconstructed take on high-definition pop, avant-garde, and dance music forms. Drawing on the promise of futurism, New Pleasures reflects the slipperiness of time, the multidirectional, non-linearity of memory; how our minds shift millisecond to millisecond from past to present to future and back again.
Lead single “New Pleasures” comes alongside a striking video directed by acclaimed filmmaker Adinah Dancyger.
“That space between idea and reality, fact and fiction—which drives ‘New Pleasures’—is so often inhabited by commerce, which conjures our fantasies for us,” Georgopoulos explains. “And there we find desire. For connection, luxury, distinction. We think we’re immune to its psychology because we’re conscious of it, but in some ways, it drives everything.”
New Pleasures is the second chapter in Arp’s ZEBRA trilogy and advances the narrative begun with 2018’s acclaimed ZEBRA; pastoral in mood, expansive in style, the record acted as a dawn on a nascent, Edenic landscape, reminiscent of a beautiful, long-lost Fourth World album. In this world, the music approximated the patient cadence of geological time – the way time suspends when you watch a river in motion. There was, nonetheless, the presence of something alien on the horizon.
Now, Arp drops us deep into the grid of the city. New Pleasures fast-forwards a few centuries, locating listeners in a post-industrial Sprawl (to borrow an expression from William Gibson’s Neuromancer) of concrete and glass, imbuing the album with the flinty glow of commerce, the sleek rhythms of industrialization, and the cool finesse of brutalism. The result is a collection of futuristic pop interiors with glinted exteriors; a prismatic inquiry into machine sentience, the economy of desire, and myriad forms of possession.
“Sometimes the most alien thing is simply seeing what we take for granted from a slightly different angle.” – Arp
Keep your mind open.
[It would bring me new pleasures if you subscribe.]
Brijean announces their new Angelo EP (out August 5th on Ghostly International) with lead single “Shy Guy” and new tour dates. Angelo, named after Brijean Murphy‘s 1981 Toyota Celica, features nine songs Brijean have crafted and carried with them through a period of profound change, loss, and relocation. It finds percussionist/singer Murphy and multi-instrumentalist / producer Doug Stuart processing the impossible the only way they know how: through rhythm and movement.
The months surrounding the acclaimed release of Feelings, their full-length Ghostly International debut in 2021 which celebrated tender self-reflection and new possibilities, rang bittersweet with the sudden passing of Murphy’s father and both of Stuart’s parents. In a haze of heartache, the duo left the Bay Area to be near family, resetting in four cities in under two years. Their to-go rig became their traveling studio and these tracks, along with Angelo, became their few constants. Whereas Feelings formed over collaborative jams with friends, Angelo’s sessions presented Murphy and Stuart a chance to record at their most intimate, “to get us out of our grief and into our bodies,” says Murphy.
Like much of Angelo, lead single “Shy Guy” offers levity and movement in spite of the sorrow, and is a motivational anthem for the wallflowers among us. Murphy sets up the daydream: “We are in junior high, we’re on the dance floor, what’s going down, who is dancing, who is not, how are we gonna make them dance?” The narrator, the MC, hypes up the room as conga-driven rhythms bounce between languid synth and guitar lines. “Show me how to move…I feel something…I know you feel it too,” Murphy sings sweetly, calling back to the opening lines of Feelings, and this time the audience chants it back.
On Angelo, Brijean explores new moods and styles, reaching for effervescent dance tempos and technicolor backdrops, vibrant hues in contrast to their more somber human experiences. Angelo beams with positivity and creative renewal — a resourceful, collective answer to “what happens now?”
In support of Angelo, Brijean will play their first headline shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Brooklyn, and make international appearances with Poolside in London, Berlin, and Mexico City.
Brijean Tour Dates Sat. June 25 – Denver, CO @ Color Field Thu. Aug. 11 – San Francisco, CA @ The Independent Sat. Aug. 13 – Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon Wed. Aug. 17 – Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere Rooftop Fri. Aug. 19 – Sun. Aug. 22 – Long Pond, PA @ Elements Festival Sat. Aug. 27 – Mexico City, MX @ Auditorio BlackBerry
I got to Chicago’s Riviera Theatre too late to catch Leah Flanagan‘s solo acoustic set, but I did see that she had a good number of people paying rapt attention to her as she played her last song.
Midnight Oil, on their final tour, had packed the venue. The Riviera always seems to be about fifteen degrees warmer than outside of the building – and certainly more humid – and the night of June 10, 2022 was no exception. At least two people had to be helped from the main floor due to heat exhaustion during Midnight Oil’s set.
The Australian powerhouses put on a killer show that lasted over two hours and had two encores.
The first thing you notice when you see Midnight Oil is that lead singer Peter Garrett‘s voice has lost none of its power. He was hitting high notes and punk rage screams right out of the gate on “Nobody’s Child.” They thanked the Chicago crowd, stating that the city had always been good to them throughout their career.
There were a lot of great cuts, both new and classics. “Truganini” had everyone jumping. “Gadigal Land” and “The Dead Heart” had everyone singing along. It was also cool to hear “Kosciusko,” an oldie but goodie, and, of course, “Beds Are Burning” is still as powerful as it was when it was first released.
There was also, as to be expected at a Midnight Oil show, plenty of political talk and activism. The band highlighted the plights of Native Australians and Americans, the climate change crisis, the absurdity of the U.S. health care industry, and the circus of our political climate.
“King of the Mountain” and “Dreamworld,” each in its own encore, had everyone pumping their fists and getting charged up to change the world – which is always what Midnight Oil have wanted us to do.
Don’t miss them if they’re near you, or even if they’re a long drive away. Again, it’s their final tour. They’ve stated that they will continue to make music, but this is your last chance to see them live. They’re not the kind of band to do multiple “last tours” for a cash grab. They keep their word.
JayWood – the moniker of Winnipeg musician & songwriter Jeremy Haywood-Smith – announces his new album, Slingshot, out July 15th on Captured Tracks, and shares its lead single/video, “Just Sayin.” Since 2015, JayWood has captured the young writer’s journey of self-discovery and heartache through unique songwriting and an ever-evolving sound. After the loss of his mother in 2019 and a global standstill with multiple social crises throughout 2020, Haywood-Smith yearned for forward momentum. “The idea of looking back to go forward became a really big thing for me—hence the title, ‘Slingshot,’” Haywood-Smith explains. Feeling disconnected from his past and ancestry after the death of a parent, Haywood-Smith made a conscious effort to better understand his identity and unique Black experience living in the predominantly white province of Manitoba. Through a year of self-reflection and reconnection with his roots, Haywood-Smith has made the biggest leap forward for JayWood by simply looking back. Slingshot is a self-portrait of JayWood at his surface and his depths, merging fantasy scenarios, personal anecdotes, and infectious pop and dance instrumentals.
The narrative for Slingshot takes place in the span of one day. From the first track to the last track, JayWood takes you on a journey that touches on themes of childhood, religion, and identity. While writing and recording the album, Haywood-Smith put together a complex “script” mapping out all of the plot points, environments, characters that make up this surreal version of his real life. Musically, Haywood-Smith wrote and performed a bulk of the track’s instrumentations, but the LP has notable appearances from Canadian contemporaries Ami Cheon and Mckinley Dixon, and fellow Manitoban musician Kayla Fernandes who fronts the doom-metal band Vagina Witchcraft. One song was co-produced with Jacob Portrait of Unknown Mortal Orchestra.
Today’s “Just Sayin” was originally written by Haywood-Smith with the intention to be given to another artist to perform, but he pushed himself to expand his vocal range and embody the confidence that pop music requires for the track. “The song is about creating equal opportunity for people in need, and lending a helping hand if you can,” says Haywood-Smith. “It’s a super simple thought that I think could easily get overlooked, but having a catchy reminder like this might subliminally provoke some thought.”
Jeremy Haywood-Smith was born and raised in the Canadian prairies, spending most of his life in the city of Winnipeg. He taught himself how to write and record during the early days of the JayWood project, but has developed through challenging himself to never fear change. Despite the culturally homogenous nature of his hometown, Haywood-Smith takes inspiration from a wide range of Black performers and artists working in all genres and eras. For Slingshot, visionary artists like Kendrick Lamar inspired Haywood-Smith’s approach to storytelling and world-building. “I love Kendrick’s ability to pull from life experiences growing up and conveying a message that’s greater than himself,” says Haywood-Smith “This album felt like I was making something that I would want my younger self to hear.”
