The Canadian artist Jennifer Castle has long been one of our favorite songwriters, and we are ecstatic to welcome her, and her haunting, transcendent new album Angels of Death, to Paradise. Today, The FADER has premiered “Crying Shame,” the devastating first single from the album they claim “everyone will fall in love with,” which is now available to preorder.
Nap Eyes are streaming their new album via NPR Music and CBC Music ahead of its March 9th release. NPR praises the band as “masters of subtlety,” evocatively describing the most transparent and personal Nap Eyes’ album to date: “I’m Bad Now slithers through 11 tracks like a phosphorescent python, its diamond-shaped scales emitting both glimmer and gloom.”
Nap Eyes have unveiled the next single from their forthcoming album, I’m Bad Now. Accompanying “I’m Bad” is a video directed by Halifax-based filmmaker Seth Smith and inspired by Renaissance portraiture, which The FADER premiered today. Also, Uncut declares the album a masterpiece on par with the Go-Betweens, Belle & Sebastian, and Television.
Mind Over Mirrors will release their massive new double album Bellowing Sun on April 6th. After premiering the first single “Matchstick Grip” with NPR Music, today the band shares their second single “Zeitgebers,” defined by an exuberant kosmische pulse, via The Quietus.
Many thanks to Uncut and Stephen Deusner for their feature review of Red River Dialect’s Broken Stay Open Sky: “Gentle, thoughtful compositions that mix straightforward observation with naturalistic imagery and philosophical inquiry.” MOJO gives it 4 stars and calls it “thrillingly combustible.” Grip a copy for the full review and Q&A with David Morris, and pre-order “Broken Stay Open Sky” today (all orders include 3 free album downloads).
APRIL 2018 // MIND OVER MIRRORS // PARADISE OF BACHELORS // MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART CHICAGO // “For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars, pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons, across eternal seas of space and time.” – Henry Beston, The Outermost House (1928)
The acclaimed new album by Gun Outfit, their most brutally beautiful statement yet, is now available where’er you may range, above or below the earth. Out of Range contains the band’s most conceptually sophisticated and lyrically ambitious material, while remaining their most musically subtle, understated, and accessible album to date, completing their gradual metamorphosis from punk aesthetics to a truly cosmic country—wherein “country” is a geography, a structure of feeling, not a genre. What other record begins with Orpheus and ends with Samuel Beckett?
The Weather Station is out today, finally fully with us in the world, and now more than ever, we need these songs of emotional and psychological complexity and interrogative clarity amid ambiguities. Take a listen and a look, buy a copy, and (re)discover the power of Tamara Lindeman’s singular songwriting, which is being compared to the short stories of Raymond Carver, or akin to “Sam Shepard writing haiku.”
In keeping with the “Western expanse” themes evident on Out of Range—warped tales of Western civ melting into those of the American West—and the “intoxicating” song’s title and lyrics (which name check Dutch Renaissance artist Brueghel the Elder), the video was shot on Super 8 film during the band’s EU tour last year in various locations, including the Bronze Age stone circle known as Long Meg and Her Daughters.
Hear the whole record before its Oct. 6 release. “I’ve been a fan for a while now and always quite enjoyed her albums, but this one is on another level. These songs sit in a place between thought and expression, where the music flows confidently from heart to tongue. It’s filled with feminist politics, kindred spirits, conversations and heartbreak, all well played as inspired gems. She’s lived these words. They are her being. They are her stories.” – Bob Boilen
