PRE-ORDER JENNIFER CASTLE’S ANGELS OF DEATH:

$9.00 – $30.00

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Or support via:  Bandcamp  (LP/CD/digital) |  Other Options (LP/CD/DL/stream)

 

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.

“On May 18, Castle will return with a new album for everyone to fall in love with, Angels of Death, and today The FADER is proud to host the online premiere of the LP’s enchanting lead single “Crying Shame.” Castle’s silken vocals are grounded very much in the shit of everyday life, creating poetry out of personal crisis that never lapses into self-pity, as a bass obligingly droops along and piano chords crash like waves of vapor.”  –The FADER

A sublime meditation on mortality and memory, ghosts and grief, Angels of Death casts a series of spells against forgetting and finality, in the form of mystic-minimalist country-soul torch songs about writing, time travel, and spectral visitations. Castle wrote and recorded this breathtaking follow-up to the acclaimed Pink City (2014) in a 19th century church near the shores of Lake Erie, where her family also lived and experienced a constellation of losses that inhabit these bruised musings. Jennifer reflects on the album:

“The fictional concept of death rears its head in so many of my songs, always on the periphery, or as a side note, or a reminder, a punchline or the bottom line, always sniffing around like a death dog. For once I wanted to try to put it in my center vision. In order to talk about death, I armed myself with the only antidote I know: writing. Is this a record about death or a record about writing? Hard to tell in the end. I began to think of poetry as time travel. I tried to write messages to the future.” 

Death is just the beginning. For the full story on Jennifer and her Angels—including Sappho, Joan Didion, Ana Mendieta, Al Purdy, et al.—please read on.

 

 

“It’s easy to point the finger at others and cry blame; ‘Crying Shame’ honours the long finger always pointing inward—tears spilling from the inner eye, etc.”

 

 

Contingent on manufacturing schedules, we will ship your pre-ordered album approximately a week in advance of the May 18, 2018 worldwide release date. All pre-orders include an immediate 320k MP3 download of lead single “Crying Shame“, as premiered by The FADER. 

For digital-only preorders, please visit Bandcamp (which also offers uncompressed, high-resolution audio files) or your favorite digital marketplace.

 

Photo by Cash Honey 2018.

 

ACCLAIM FOR JENNIFER CASTLE

“Castle reaches a pitch of mystical transport so gorgeously ethereal she seems about to drift off into lands that don’t appear on any map.”  – Greil Marcus, The Believer

“Castle’s music is not so much of the earth as floating above it, untethered to the natural order of time and space. Her songs live in that gray area where observation mutates into rumination, and where the physical world dissolves into psychic terrain.” – Pitchfork

“Ravishing, soulful … stands comparison with the best of Judee Sill and Joanna Newsom.” – Uncut

RIYL: The Weather Station, Itasca, Steve Gunn, Aldous Harding, Joan Shelley, Cass McCombs, U.S. Girls, Meg Baird, Bill Callahan, Julie Byrne, Nadia Reid, Joanna Newsom, Angel Olsen, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Linda Perhacs, Judee Sill, Sibylle Baier, Vashti Bunyan, Kath Bloom, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Felt.

 

The Muses have filled my life
With delight
And when I die I shall not be forgotten.
– Sappho

but muses leave me while i make my coffee
and muses don’t come watching in the bath
and muses if you ever catch me in the news
you can kill me muses any way you choose
– Jennifer Castle