Jake and Jaime are hitting the road this spring—separately, sadly, but in great company. Jake will be touring the pubs, cafes, and boltholes of the UK and EU for the first time, with our bud Daniel Bachman, this April and May, while Mind Over Mirrors will be touring with Brokeback.
If you require a mind-expanding tonic to our national spell of ignorant, truculent insanity, the new Mind Over Mirrors album Undying Color is available today in your favorite record shops and online merchants, digital and physical alike. Listen, read critical acclaim for the album, learn about Secretly Group’s Our First 100 Days Project, and catch up on current and upcoming PoB tours.
Mind Over Mirrors will release their expansive new album of ecstatic drones inspired by the cyclical patterns of the natural world next week. Today The Quietus is streaming the album in full alongside an interview with Mind Over Mirrors mastermind Jaime Fennelly, who discusses expanding the project’s line-up to a full ensemble and how he settled on the album’s title.
After presenting debut single via NPR Music’s Songs We Love, the Durham, North Carolina singer and guitarist now shares “Furniture Man,” a desperate tale of poverty, dispossession, and imminent homelessness, as relevant and heartrending now as it was when first recorded in the 1920s. Aquarium Drunkard calls him “a national treasure.” Jake plays Chapel Hill tonight and opens for Wilco this month and next in Chicago and New York.
On the eve of their first-ever tour of the UK and EU, Nashville’s Promised Land Sound holed up in the studio with Pat Sansone (Wilco) and Billy Bennett (MGMT) to cut their first official recording since their acclaimed 2015 album For Use and Delight. It’s now available as a digital-only single, with a premiere by Clash, who call it “heavenly.”
Mind Over Mirrors has shared “To The Edges,” a strobing, drone-centric track from Undying Color, via XLR8R. Featuring drifting wails from vocalists Haley Fohr (Circuit des Yeux) and Janet Bean (Eleventh Dream Day), as well as percussionist Jon Mueller, it showcases the unique combination of Indian pedal harmonium and analog synthesizer that makes Jaime Fennelly’s music so singular. Don’t miss the Chicago release show at Constellation on March 3.
If you need a distraction from the eldritch horrors of Inauguration Day, take a lesson from the Fully Qualified Survivor. Get thee to your local record store to grip what is shaping up to be one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2017. Or, as Laura Snapes (Pitchfork, NPR, Guardian) recently recommended: “If you’re looking for a peaceful record for this torrid week, 50 is it.” Check out Uncut’s career-spanning 7pp. feature and new rave reviews in The Times, Daily Mirror, i, etc.
As we brace ourselves for this week’s ersatz presidential pomp, rank and rancorous politics, and righteous protests and marches, please allow us to ask one philosophical question no pundit but Jake Xerxes Fussell is asking: “Have You Ever Seen Peaches Growing on a Sweet Potato Vine?” Today NPR Music premiered this first Natural Question from Jake’s forthcoming album, with Laura Snapes writing that his “burly, winking voice is made for storytelling.”
Nashville’s Promised Land Sound today embark on their first-ever tour of the UK and EU, so please try to catch a show and show them some love. You will not be disappointed; we first fell for them as a live band, and while their two albums, including For Use and Delight, are remarkable, their shows are a whole other elevated experience. We’ll have something very special to share from the lads very soon, so stay tuned.
Fussell follows his celebrated s/t debut with a moving new album of Natural Questions in the form of transmogrified folk/blues koans. This time these radiant ancient tunes tone several shades darker while amplifying their absurdist humor, illuminating our national, and psychic, predicaments. Featuring art by Roger Brown and contributions from three notable Nathans—Bowles, Salsburg, and Golub—as well as Joan Shelley and Casey Toll.
