Our fourteenth year as a record label is nearly behind us, and herein lies its final Paradisiacal dispatch. Our eleventh annual Krampus Day Sale is live! Through December 17, get 30% off anything in our webstore or Bandcamp with coupon code KRAMPUS.
The video for this track, the first to follow the album’s release on October 18, finds songwriter Nigel Chapman—now having, perhaps, passed through The Neon Gate—wandering through a pastoral cemetery, a postmodern disciple of W.B. Yeats contemplating mortality and nature, and undercutting that self-serious persona in scenes goofing around and performing live with his three bandmates, Brad Lahead, Josh Salter, and Seamus Dalton.
Today, November 1, the Day of the Dead, Jennifer Castle’s magnificent seventh album (and third with PoB), Camelot, is here, among us and very much alive within us. It’s Uncut’s Album of the Month, earning a 9/10 rating and effusive praise as “an enthralling and richly detailed career peak”: “Jennifer Castle’s Camelot, as mapped on her seventh album … is a battleground of opposing tensions, set against the divisive times of the present. There are ambiguities and contradictions, ecstatic visions and crises of faith. And a quest, not for some imagined grail, but for earthly and private resolutions. It’s all fixed to music of the exquisite variety, from radiant acoustic studies to billowing symphonic pop. Camelot feels like a landmark in Castle’s career. It’s certainly her most all-embracing record to date.”
Welcome, intrepid traveler; step through The Neon Gate. Today you can finally hear the entirety of the wild, fascinatingly kaleidoscopic new Nap Eyes record, their fifth and furthest out long-player. Today the band has also shared the fifth short visual, for the lead track “Eight Tired Starlings,” as well as a clutch of Spring UK and EU tour dates.
“Dark Mystery Enigma Bird” is the final pre-release single from Nap Eyes’ much anticipated forthcoming fifth album, The Neon Gate. This disjunctive avian fable told through a stream-of-consciousness narrative provides, with its sun-dappled surreality, perhaps the most immediate earworm melodies and arrangements on the record. The single is accompanied by an absorbing, technicolor hand-drawn animated video, as innocent as it is irreverent, created, through a painstaking process, by filmmaker Dr. Cool. It depicts a phantasmagorical tale of a truckload of wild zebras who commandeer the vehicle transporting them and set off on a fantastic adventure in a psychedelic landscape.
Jennifer Castle us back with the achingly beautiful, incantatory new single “Earthsong,” anchored by a compelling spare solo performance and coiled chord progression, an ambiguous appeal to … a wounded lover? a wounded saint? our wounded planet? According to Castle, “‘Earthsong’ was one of the last songs I wrote for what would become Camelot (out November 1). Seeded from hope, imagination, destiny and resistance, the line that works on me like medicine is ‘I belong to the world.’ Feels good to say and mean that.”
Following the release of the breathtaking “Blowing Kisses” single and video (as featured in Season 3 of FX’s The Bear), the celebrated songwriter and poet Jennifer Castle has announced Camelot, the album—and kingdom—it calls home. Listen to the new single “Lucky #8,” an irrepressible ode to dancing as a bulwark against the “tidal pools of pain” and the “theory of collapse” (featuring special guest Cass McCombs) and watch its accompanying acrobatic video. Get 30% off the Castle back catalog with coupon code CAMELOT.
Nap Eyes’ adventurous new album The Neon Gate is out October 18. Preorder it today, and listen to the new single “Passageway,” featuring an accompanying visual.
On the ravishing country-soul ballad “Blowing Kisses,” her first new song in three and a half years, the celebrated Canadian songwriter Jennifer Castle contemplates time and presence, love and prayer—and how songwriting and poetry both manifest and limit all four dimensions: “No words to fumble with/I’m not a beggar to language any longer.” Featuring a sweeping string arrangement by Owen Pallett, performed by Estonia’s FAMES Skopje Studio Orchestra, “Blowing Kisses” can be heard in its entirety during the pivotal scene of the penultimate episode of the third season of FX’s The Bear.
Following their first new music in three years (“remarkable lyric writing” –FADER; “quietly devastating” –Exclaim), Nap Eyes presents a languorous adaptation of a phantasmagorical poem by Russian Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). “Demons” depicts a perilous nocturnal journey by carriage, beset by eerie apparitions of uncanny but uncertain spectral nature. The band unravels the knotty verse into a fluid melody, gliding adeptly through the snow, observing the eldritch scene.
