Dean & Britta preview holiday album collaboration with Sonic Boom

Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips recorded a holiday album 'A Peace Of Us' with Sonic Boom. Listen to "Pretty Paper" below.

Here's the scoop...

In a season where we all seek comfort, tradition, and a return to a home of sorts, a trio composed of indie music’s foundational members are gifting us A Peace of Us (out November 22)—an album of diverse holiday tunes filtered through their musical imaginations. Dean & Britta, well-known from their work defining a genre with Galaxie 500 and Luna, join Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, another bastion of indie’s collective adolescence, to bring to life a collection that draws from early ‘60s pop, garage, country, James Bond soundtracks, Christmas carols, and electronica. Dean Wareham recalls a sentiment from his DJ friend Chris: “You can experience all the emotions of Christmas through music: love and hate, joy and heartache, nostalgia, regret, anticipation, and frustration.” 

Their venture into a holiday album was organic, spurred by a few cover tunes over the years, a Christmas special during the pandemic, and finally collaborative sessions between Dean & Britta in L.A. and Sonic Boom in Portugal. The trio all contributed vocals, with guitars by Wareham, bass and keyboards by Phillips, effects, and mixes by Sonic. The result is an album of exploration as well as comfort, “like Bing Crosby...on acid,” Britta adds, the tracklist a reminder that the holidays are complex and tragicomic. 

As is often the case with holiday merriment, the album has a soft undertone of the bittersweet. Wareham sings one of David Berman’s final songs, “Snow is Falling in Manhattan,” one Dean believes is “destined to be a holiday classic.” Its lyrics foreshadow Berman’s tragic death: “Songs build little rooms in time / and housed within the song's design / is the ghost the host has left behind.” 

The Christmas blues surface again with Willie Nelson’s “Pretty Paper,” rendered here as a duet between Britta and Sonic Boom, their pulsing synth-heavy production updating the song for a darkened nightclub rather than a bright honky tonk. This collection steers clear of the usual Christmas chestnuts, but fans of classic indie haze may find a new favorite in “Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy” (created for Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s 1977 TV duet). Wareham notes that “Our favorite version is the German one by Marlene Dietrich, so that was our jumping-off point.” All three sing this one together: Wareham’s tenor, then Sonic Boom’s thrumming baritone, and finally Phillips’ soothing contralto making the plea for peace. 

If collaboration is the fuel, peace and mutual understanding is surely the fire, and A Peace of Us has us gathered around it. “Christmas is mostly for children anyway,” says Dean. Sonic adds, “Or the inner child in all of us. Goodwill to all men. Hopes and fears for the year to come. And light in the darkness. Where this festival began.” 

You can pre-order a copy of Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom's A Peace Of Us album via your platform of choice right here. Check out the video for "Pretty Paper" following the tracklisting below. 

A Peace Of Us - Dean & Britta with Sonic Boom

1. Snow Is Falling in Manhattan

2. Pretty Paper 

3. Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?

4. Old Toy Trains

5. Snow

6. Silver Snowflakes

7. Stille Nacht

8. You're All I Want For Christmas

9. Christmas Can't Be Far Away

10. He's Coming Home

11. Little Altar Boy

12. If We Make It Through December

13. Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy

14. Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

Spacemen 3's Pete Bain joins Flowers Of Hell for Roky Erickson salute

Here's Flowers Of Hell with Pete Bain ripping through the 13th Floor Elevators' "Rollercoaster" at London's 100 Club recently. 

Spacemen 3 Vs. Wooden Shjips

It takes a special breed of record nut to operate a vinyl-only label at a time when the format is supposed to be obsolete. Rarer still is the sort with exceptionally good taste like Dominic Martin (of Earworm Records notoriety) whose UK-based Great Pop Supplement label has snuck out an impressive series of high quality artifacts presenting superb music by uniquely talented fringe artists in aesthetically dazzling packages – we're talking multi-fold handmade sleeves, embroidered bags, photo mounted envelopes, nut-bolted balsa wood, stickers, packets of seeds, the works.
So when you buy a GPS record, you don't just get to hear a couple of great songs by a Swedish one-man-band or a Japanese psych unit, you've also got a snazzy conversation piece to impress that friend who thinks they've got everything MV + EE and Jack Rose have ever done.

To mark the label's 50th release milestone, Dom has just issued a red wax split pairing an early demo version of Big City by Spacemen 3 with a fabulously fuzzed-up cover of the Playing With Fire album corker I Believe It courtesy of San Francisco's Wooden Shjips, perhaps the only currently active group who could do it justice. As a neat final touch, it comes housed in a sleeve created by Spacemen percussionist Natty Brooker. I'm getting a buzz just looking at it. 
The good news is that instead of the typically miniscule pressings of say 111 or 220 copies which Great Pop Supplement have been known to drop in the past, gps 50 was reportedly issued in an edition of 1000. However, the bad news is that according to Dom, the entire run "literally vanished in an afternoon." But whatever the conventional vinyl vendors didn't stockpile for mailorder purposes was very likely hoovered up speculators hoping to quintuple their investment on eBay. So don't fret, you'll be seeing the single turning up online for months if not years to come.

   

Links
http://www.greatpopsupplement.com/