Wave Generators (Height Keech & Nosaj) just released After The End – check the clips for "I'm Setting Up In A New City," "Lower East Side" and "True North."
Wave Generators – After The End
A lot of people spend their days vaguely anxious about the pandemonium they can feel about to sweep down on all of us. They see the cracks in the societal dam holding back total chaos, and – knowing it could go sideways any minute- they have a hard time going about their day… enjoying their lunch… relaxing on the weekend. It’s like a splinter in the comfort zone in their brains… They can’t focus on anything because they’re way too aware of the cracks spreading in the thin ice we’re all walking on during these waning days of the empire.
But that’s not even the actual issue. The real problem is: they just don’t have the right soundtrack cued up for when that proverbial excrement hits that spinning fan blade of reality. To put it another way, they haven’t heard Wave Generators yet.
This is the album you’re going to want to reach for when you swear allegiance to Lord Humongous, Master of the Wastes, and start cruising around with your crew of marauders looking for fledgling-city-states growing in the husks of abandoned corporate campuses that you can sack and pillage and then hold a little post-raid-party in the ruins.
This is the music that plays from the speakers mounted to the giant drill that the army of mole people drives through 5th avenue as they commence their invasion of the upper crust. Even though the headline news is, “this means the destruction the surface dwellers’ society and the age of Mole-Man dominance,” you can’t help but wonder, “where can I hear more of that subterranean battle anthem though?!”
This is the soundtrack you want in your earphones when your life drops you into a straight up movie scene foot chase scene, tearing through active restaurant kitchens, jumping rooftop to rooftop. It’ll be way too intense to fully enjoy it and you’re gonna be winded as hell because you’re not Tom Cruise and it you’re being honest with yourself; you’ve neglected your cardio. But the way the tracks line up with the near death moments and the inevitable moment when you think you’re home free but then round the corner and smack face first into the biggest of your pursuers, …. It’s all so satisfying it’s almost worth it that you’re about to be jammed into the trunk of a mid-90s Ford Taurus.
Wave Generators is exactly what you‘ve been looking for, without ever knowing you were looking. But don’t expect to take any breaks now that you found it. If anything- now that you have this last crucial tool you’ve been looking for, your busy season begins. Crank the volume, get out there, and get after it.
- Luke H. Simmons
Get a copy of Wave Generators' new album "After The End" via Bandcamp right here. Watch their latest videos below.
Party For Joey, a Sweet Relief tribute album celebrating the work of NRBQ's Joey Spampinato, is out now via True North.
Here's the scoop from True North...
True North Records has just released Party For Joey: A Sweet Relief Tribute to Joey Spampinato, which features a lengthy list of friends and fans of the NRBQ founding member/bassist saluting him with 14 versions of their own previously unreleased versions of Spampinato-penned songs.
A Sweet Relief Tribute to Joey Spampinato is an inspired album recorded by an astounding group of musicians including Los Lobos, Bonnie Raitt, Peter Case, Ben Harper, The Minus 5, Buddy Miller & Jim Lauderdale, Chris Spedding, Robbie Fulks, Deer Tick, She & Him, Steve Forbert and Al Anderson who are all generously donating their proceeds from these recordings to the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund to support Joey with his current health issues. The Sweet Relief Musicians Fund provides financial assistance to all types of career musicians and music industry workers who are struggling to make ends meet while facing illness, disability or age-related problems.
Joey Spampinato, a singer, songwriter and bassist, was co-founder of the legendary NRBQ, a rock quartet whose genre-defying music continues to inspire generations of music fans and fellow musicians. Many of those musicians answered the call from Joey’s wife Kami Lyle and producer Sheldon Gomberg when they contacted them about recording one of Joey’s songs for an album to help raise funds for Joey when it was revealed he was battling cancer.
Check out the contributions from Peter Case, Ben Harper (with Keith Richards, Charlie Musselwhite, Don Heffington & Benmont Tench), Buddy Miller & Jim Lauderdale, The Minus 5 and Al Anderson following the complete track listing below.
Party For Joey: A Sweet Relief Tribute to Joey Spampinato
Al Anderson – “You Can't Hide” - Original Release: 1980 on Tiddlywinks
Los Lobos – “Every Boy, Every Girl” - Original Release: 1987 on God Bless Us All
Deer Tick – “That I Get Back Home” - Original Release: 1980 on Tiddlywinks
Ben Harper with Keith Richards, Charlie Musselwhite, Benmont Tench, Don Was & Don Heffington – “Like a Locomotive” - Original Release: 1989 on Wild Weekend
Peter Case – “Don't Knock At My Door” - Original Release: 1972 on Scraps
She & Him – “How Can I Make You Love Me” - Original Release: 1983 on Grooves in Orbit
The Minus 5 – “Don't She Look Good” - Original Release: 1979 on Kick Me Hard
Steve Forbert – “Beverly” - Original Release: 1986 on Uncommon Denominators
Buddy Miller & Jim Lauderdale – “How Will I Know” - Original Release: 2013 on Smiles
Bonnie Raitt & NRBQ – “Green Lights” - Original Release: 1978 on At Yankee Stadium
Robbie Fulks – “Chores” - Original Release: 1979 on Kick Me Hard
Penn And Teller – “Plenty of Somethin’” - Original Release: 1997 on You’re Nice People You Are
The Nils & Chris Spedding – “That's Alright” Original Release: 1977 on All Hopped Up
UK singer/songwriter Michael Chapman's True North album (produced by Steve Gunn) is out February 8th on Paradise of Bachelors.
The masterful follow-up to his universally celebrated 2017 album 50, Michael Chapman’s True North finds the elder statesman of British songwriting and guitar plumbing an even deeper deep and honing an ever keener edge to his iconic writing. This authoritative set of predominantly new, and completely devastating, songs hews to a more intimate sonic signature—more atmospheric, textural, and minimalist than 50, stately and melancholy in equal measure. Recorded in rural West Wales, True North unflinchingly surveys home and horizon, traveling from the Bahamas to Texas to the Leeds of Chapman’s childhood, haunted by the mirages of memory and intimations of mortality. Joining him on this introspective journey is a cast of old friends and new disciples: once again Steve Gunn produces and plays guitar, and fellow UK songwriting hero Bridget St John sings, collaborating with cellist Sarah Smout and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole, who has accompanied everyone from John Cale to Scott Walker to Terry Allen to Björk. Check out "It's Too Late" below.
Michael Chapman’s elegiac new record True North, the latest chapter in the long story of one of our greatest living guitar stylists and songwriters, navigates the same treacherous and tenebrous territory of time. The album begins with the gnawing regret of “It’s Too Late,” and every song Chapman sings thereafter directly references the passing of time—its blind ruthlessness, its sweet hazy delights—in noirish language almost mystical in its terseness and precision. (The two transportive, gorgeous instrumentals, one per side, both have appropriately evocative—though decidedly not Northern—pastoral place names for titles: Eleuthera is an island in the Bahamas where Chapman habitually holidays every winter, and Caddo Lake straddles the border between Texas and Louisiana.) This is Chapman at his darkest and most nocturnal, yes, but also his most elegant and subtle, squinting into the black hours with an unseen smile.
“Sometimes no disguise is the best disguise of all,” he sings on the unaccompanied ballad “Vanity & Pride,” offering a lyrical key to unlock the album. By the time True North is out in the world, Chapman will be seventy-eight years old and will have released nearly as many records, a staggering achievement. True North represents the most nakedly personal album of his career, his most authoritative, unguarded, and emotionally devastating statement. His universally celebrated full-band 2017 album 50 flirted with much-deserved triumphalism, offering a retrospective of his illustrious career, revisited in the company of the fellow UK songwriting hero Bridget St John and a rowdy gang of younger acolytes including Steve Gunn, James Elkington, and Nathan Bowles. (Intergenerational collaboration has been central to Chapman’s periodic reinventions and perennial relevance since the 1960s—he is the only musician ever to have played with Mike Cooper, Mick Ronson, Elton John, Don Nix, Thurston Moore, and Jack Rose.) The distinguished quartet of old friends and new disciples that supports him on True North features old friends and new disciples alike, but the sonic strategy this time is intentionally subtractive rather than additive. Once again Steve Gunn produces and plays guitar, and Bridget St John sings, collaborating with cellist Sarah Smout and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole, who has accompanied everyone from John Cale to Scott Walker, Elton John to Terry Allen, Felt to Björk to Brian Eno. Cole is the album’s secret weapon, contributing sublime, skyscrapingly sculptural steel leads, weaving in sympathetic warp and weft with Chapman’s and Gunn’s guitars and Smout’s hovering cello.
Throughout the band hews to an intimate, hushed sonic signature that is more atmospheric, textural, and minimalist than 50, stately and melancholy in equal measure. Without a regular rhythm section—Gunn and Chapman provide occasional, austere drums and bass on an ad hoc basis—arrangements drift dreamily, ebbing and flowing, following Chapman’s confiding growl and helical guitar figures wherever they lead. Michael cites the Jimmy Giuffre Trio’s performance, without a rhythm section, in the 1959 film Jazz on a Summer’s Day as “a revelation” and direct influence on True North. The production hearkens back to Chapman’s classic Millstone Grit (1973), as well as recalling Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (1997); True North shares something of that album’s spectral gloaming, midnight heartache, and sly, self-knowing winks. Integral to the shift in scale and the production decisions were the remoteness and natural beauty of the recording environment. True North was recorded at Mwnci Studios, a residential studio in rural, woodland West Wales. Jimmy Robertson, who has earned nine Mercury Music nominations for his work with the likes of Depeche Mode, Ride, and Arctic Monkeys, engineered and mixed.
Compositionally, True North finds Chapman plumbing an even deeper deep and honing an ever keener edge to his iconic writing. Compared to 50, these recordings feel narrower in range, less overtly narrative and dynamic and more impressionistic and restrained, but they are correspondingly more piercing and arrow-like in their rending impact, more concerned with an archer’s deadeye aim than pyrotechnics. And Chapman’s aim remains true. Whereas 50 featured two new songs among radical reinterpretations of material from Chapman’s deep catalog, True North includes twice as many new numbers among its quiver of eleven arrows—“It’s Too Late,” “Eleuthera,” the fiery “Bluesman,” and slow-rolling album centerpiece “Truck Song”—confirming the exultant return of Chapman the songwriter. The other songs were selected from various obscure corners of Chapman’s vast catalog (“Youth Is Wasted on the Young” was previously recorded with Thurston Moore and Jim O’Rourke for a compilation, for example.) In these renderings they receive their definitive treatments, utterly transformed. “After All This Time” and “Full Bottle, Empty Heart,” two of the moving duets with St John, are as weightless and lovely as “Hell to Pay” is alternately brooding and menacing.
True North zooms in and focuses the lens more tightly not just musically, but also visually. The title suggests the geography of memory, evoking the Northern England that is Chapman’s home, ancestral and current. Born and raised in Leeds, for many years he has lived in isolated, ravishing Cumbria, near Hadrian’s Wall and the Scottish border. The jacket photographs date to 1963, when Chapman was working as a photography instructor at a college in Bolton, Lancashire, after completing his postgraduate degree. During this period he stopped playing music for three years to concentrate on visual art. It’s fitting that these beautiful, ghostly images of a vanished North grace the album artwork, because, more than any other record in his oeuvre, True North surveys home and horizon.
Following the levitating lament “Youth Is Wasted on the Young,” Chapman leaves us with a moment of levity, the solo number “Bon Ton Roolay.” Appropriately, this sole moment of unbounded joy and ragged hangover humor dissolves. It remains unfinished, unseamed and tossed aside with a chuckle. The work of time is never done. Where Chapman says good times, he means years, means life.
