What a surprise to wake up to our first Grammy nomination, for our own Brendan Greaves’s exhaustive book accompanying Terry Allen’s collection of radio plays and long-form narrative audio works.
Following the release of their album Abundance Welcoming Ghosts in September, Red River Dialect have announced a string of UK tour dates for February 2020. The band also play their sold-out album launch tomorrow night, Saturday 16 November at Servant Jazz Quarters. To celebrate, they’re sharing the beautifully animated video for “BV Kistvaen”, made by animator and band member Robin Lane Roberts.
The Texas art-country legend shares “Death of the Last Stripper” and “City of the Vampires” along with details about his new 2xLP Panhandle Mystery Band record (featuring a vinyl engraving by the artist), Austin preview concert, documentary/concert film, Miami art exhibition, and Moby Dick t-shirt.
Allen’s heartbreaking, hilarious new album, the spiritual successor to Lubbock (on everything) (1979) and his first set of new songs since 2013, explores all manner of tragicomic disasters, abandonments, betrayals, bad memories, failures, and fare-thee-wells, featuring the full Panhandle Mystery Band, including co-producer Charlie Sexton, Shannon McNally, and Jo Harvey Allen; mainstays Bukka Allen, Richard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines.
When the circus comes to town / In the city of the vampires / And there’s nary a soul to be found / When the sun glints off the church spires / The citizens have all gone to their basement / To wait for the night time in their coffins / So you better go exercise the elephants / Ohh Ohh while you can
Today is El Día de los Muertos, an apt day to celebrate Itasca’s captivating, sublime new album Spring, which is now in stores and streaming worldwide. Songwriter Kayla Cohen’s careful, impressionistic prose and swoon-worthy arrangements have earned acclaim from, among others, The Fader, NPR, Uncut, and MOJO, whose lead review lights on themes particularly redolent on the Day of the Dead.
Kayla Cohen directed the video, shot on Super 8 in both CA and NM. “It’s influenced heavily by the opening sequence in Heart of Glass, the film by Werner Herzog, which shows blurred scenes of Bavaria, Germany and Yellowstone National Park, against a soundtrack by Popul Vuh,” she says. Spring is out Nov. 1. Check out rave lead reviews from MOJO and Uncut.
Now available to stream and purchase worldwide. Recorded right before songwriter David Morris moved to a Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, and featuring guest appearances from Joan Shelley and Tara Jane O’Neil, the record has earned acclaim from Uncut, MOJO, and notably, The Guardian, who chose it as their Folk Album of the Month, perceptively describing it as “anti-colonialist folk … a wide-eyed, curious creature, willingly alert to the world.”
Itasca has shared “Lily,” the opening track to her forthcoming album Spring, today, alongside a music video shot on Super 8. In an essay for The Talkhouse, Cohen writes about the song’s origins, inspired by the ghostly hallucinations of a water lily she experienced on the long drive from LA to New Mexico, where she composed the songs on Spring. The video depicts a dance of domesticity between mythological figures Ceres (played by Cohen), Pan, and Bes.
Ahead of the release of Abundance Welcoming Ghosts on September 27, hear the album’s third and final single “Red River,” which narrates the history of the language—a creole of Cree, Scots, Gaelic, and Ojibwa spoken in Manitoba—from which the band take their name, and the colonial dynamic replicated in the process: the “narrowing Throat of the World.” Uncut writes the band’s “most sunny and easygoing record to date… exudes enlightenment.”
