CIMS In The Groove
GRAMMY Award-nominated, multi-Platinum artist and alternative pop maverick Halsey returns with her third full-length album Manic featuring her 5x Platinum hit "Without Me" and "Graveyard." The success of "Without Me" has made Halsey the first and only female artist to have at least three songs chart on the Billboard Hot 100. It now ranks as the longest-running Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hit by a female artist of this century.
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Aurora features reimagined versions of the band’s biggest and most popular songs with special guests including Lacey Sturm (ex-Flyleaf), Scooter Ward(Cold) and Spencer Chamberlain (Underoath), to name a few. Speaking about Aurora, BREAKING BENJAMIN’s founder/frontman, Ben Burnley, had this personal message to share,”This album is a celebration of our incredible fans; for those who have been there since hearing ‘So Cold’ for the first time in 2004, and the new ones who have joined us on this amazing journey along the way. We’ve always shared a unique emotional connection to our music with our fans, and this album attributes to those dark times and euphoric ones. From wherever you joined along the road to Aurora, this one is for you. Thank you.”
4-panel wallet w/ 6-panel folder insert
Dan Bejar initially conceived of Have We Met, his 13th album as Destroyer, as a Y2K album. He was already active during the era but not heard overhead in a cafe or salon, which is perhaps what the idea of the Y2K sound evokes nearly two decades later. Bejar assigned frequent producer and bandmate John Collins the role of layering synth and rhythm sections over demos with the period-specific Bjork, Air, and Massive Attack in mind, but he soon realized the sonic template was too removed from Destroyer’s own, and the idea of a concept was silly anyway. So he abandoned it and gave Collins the most timeless instruction of all: “Make it sound cool.”
The result is not a startling departure from 2017’s new-wavey, Thatcher-era yearning ken, but unlike that more bandoriented approach, the only actual instruments that appear here are bass and electric guitar. MIDI instrumentation will of course invite Your Blues and Kaputt nostalgia, the two other John Collins-heavy affairs, and to some degree that’s valid. Each contrasts cavernous empty space and synthetic sounds, but rather than whimsical theatrics or sleazy orchestral pop, Have We Met is buoyed by precise, plasticky guitar shredding three-dimensionally across massive percussion—the loudest and dirtiest drums on a Destroyer record to date.
The Family Songbook is a tribute to the family's American heartland heritage. The album includes four recently unearthed songs by their grandfather, Carl E. Haden, friend to the Carter Family, Porter Wagoner and other icons. The songs were written during the Depression when he was in his 20s - "Who Will You Love," "Ozark Moon," "Memories of Will Rogers," "Grey Mother Dreaming." Other notable songs - "Every Time I Try" written by the triplets brother, Josh Haden; Kanye West's "Say You Will"; Americana standards "Wayfaring Stranger," "I'll Fly Away," "Wildwood Flower," "Pretty Baby," (shortened from "Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby"). The Family Songbook features renowned musicians: Bill Frisell, Greg Leisz, Doyle Bramhall II, Don Was, Larry Taylor, Woody Jackson. The Haden Triplets are: Petra: violin, Tanya: cello, Rachel: bass, keyboards. The sisters individual credits: Petra - sought-after collaborator on violin and voice; recording and touring credits include Bill Frisell, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Nancy and Beth ("punk-vaudeville" act created by Megan Mullally and Stephanie Hunt); Rachel - toured with Todd Rundgren, lead singer on Weezer B-side, former member of that dog; Tanya - visual and animation artist.
A person whose words are so potent that they cause the people and beings around them to vibrate is said to have a "silver tongue." It's apt, then, that Mackenzie Scott-who has spent the 2010s making boundary-pushing pop music under her Torres moniker-has chosen to call her fourth album, and first on Merge, just that. Recorded at O'Deer in Brooklyn, New York, Silver Tongue is a full-scale realization of the world Scott has created over Torres' last few albums. Even when singing in more subdued tones, Scott's voice is fervent, her lyrics stirring and unyielding as she draws from both the divine and the everyday
Dan Deacon’s most emotionally open record and his most transcendent, Mystic Familiar is the result of obsessive work, play, and self-discovery. The album’s 11 kaleidoscopic tracks of majestic synth-pop expand his sound with unfettered imagination and newfound vulnerability.
'We should try again to talk,' Frances Quinlan writes. It not just a lyric'it's a suggestion, a warning, a plea, a wish. This request is woven throughout Likewise, her forthcoming solo album, amidst dramatically shifting motifs. Some are jubilant, some are dreamy and abstract, and a few are sinister, but within each dark void that Quinlan explores, there is a light peering back at her. Frances Quinlan has built an identity for herself over the past decade as the lead songwriter and front-woman of the Philadelphia-based band Hop Along, and her distinct voice is among the most recognizable and inimitable in music. While the band began as Quinlan's solo project (originally titled Hop Along, Queen Ansleis), Likewise (out January 31st on Saddle Creek) is Quinlan's debut under her own name. To make the record, she enlisted the virtuosic skills of her bandmate Joe Reinhart, and together they produced the album at his studio, The Headroom, recording in stints over the course of a year. With a renewed openness to explore different sounds, Quinlan supplements her typical guitar-based instrumentation with synthesizers, digital beats, harps, strings, and a wide variety of keyboards. The shifting and exploratory nature of these musical arrangements allow her lyrics and vocals'which have always been at the forefront of her music'to reach emotional depths like never before. Her vocal tones beckon a kaleidoscopic range of emotions across all nine songs on the album, from soft and ruminative to enraged and commanding; from conveying powerful messages to highlighting small, yet poignant, moments. Quinlan is a voyaging songwriter. Throughout Likewise, she confronts what confounds her in the hopes that she will come out on the other side with a better sense of what it is to be human. She presents listeners with a complicated, albeit spirited vision of what it could mean to truly engage with another person, to give a small piece of oneself over to someone else without expectation. Although such is likely to be a lifelong effort, these songs prove evident that light can still permeate from unsettling depths.
When Poliça's Channy Leaneagh fell off her roof while clearing ice in early 2018, she smashed her L1 vertebrae and battered her spine, leaving her in a brace with limited mobility for months. Yet Poliça's fourth album, When We Stay Alive, is not about one debilitating accident. It's about the redemptive power of rewriting your story in order to heal, and reclaiming your identity as a result. When We Stay Alive possesses a new confidence in its sound, reflected in its fierce, determined songs and anchored by the heavy synths and punctuating beats of Poliça co-founder and producer Ryan Olson. Over the last several years Olson and Leaneagh have widely collaborated with musicians from all over the world: both with Bon Iver, and Leaneagh individually with Boys Noize, Lane 8, Sasha, Leftfield, and Daniel Wohl; Olson with Swamp Dogg in addition to countless musicians from the Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon's 37d03d collective. As a result, When We Stay Alive features one of the largest musical casts of any Poliça record to date. To create the album, Olson brought his favorite collaborators into his studio for all-night sessions. He'd then send Leaneagh the files to write lyrics to while recovering at home, which she'd record alone or with engineer Alex Proctor. Drummers Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu colored the songs with a new approach ' drastically changing the rhythmic dynamic from previous efforts by creating an indistinguishable hybrid of live and electronic instrumentation--and bassist Chris Bierden provided a melody-laden low-end as well as more layered backing vocals than ever before. On Poliça's first three albums, Leaneagh focused on restructuring the world and her relationships within it. On When We Stay Alive, she realizes the power in restructuring her inner self. The album's title references the idea of moving forward through life ' our experiences, both good and bad ' and what happens next with the strength we find. 'I had been living unconsciously in past trauma,' Leaneagh says. 'I don't want to deny something happened ' this is not about repression ' it's about taking the power back from the past, holding the power in the present, and creating a new story for myself.'
He’s a man Pitchfork calls “a pioneer” with a voice recognized by Rolling Stone Magazine as the sound of resilience. Now, Kirk Windstein, wielder of the sludge sledgehammer and unmistakable earthmoving bellow of Crowbar, stomps forward as a solo artist for the very first time. On a Dream In Motion, the inaugural effort from his eponymously monikered incarnation, the Dark Lord of the Southern Riff stretches his creative wings as he introduces new emotional depth and sonic texture that strengthen, rather than tarnish, the metal monolith’s career legacy and rightly revered catalog.
Two-time GRAMMY-nominated band The Lumineers are back with their third album, III, a cinematic piece presented as a narrative in three chapters, with each one centering on one main character. III’s concept began while the band was writing in the Catskill mountains, where producer Simone Felice works. Decidedly darker than their previous work in concept, but replete with their trademark expressive vocals and dynamic arrangements, III boldly and expertly goes in an artistic direction not yet traveled by the band. The Lumineers have enjoyed substantial commercial success; their 2012 self-titled debut featuring the hit single “Ho Hey” was certified triple-platinum in 2018, and their sophomore album Cleopatra was certified platinum in the same year after its 2016 release. They’ve had multiple #1 hits on the Triple A and Alternative radio charts, and have sold out tours across the world; over 300,000 tickets were sold on 2017’s Cleopatra world tour. The Lumineers have also supported icons and their musical heroes on the road, including Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and U2’s Joshua Tree tour.
Wolf Parade - Dan Boeckner, Spencer Krug, and Arlen Thompson - will release Thin Mind, the group’s fifth album for Sub Pop, on January 24th, 2020. The 10-track record was recorded by John Goodmanson at Risque Disque on Vancouver Island, BC, mixed by Goodmanson at Bogroll Studios in Seattle, WA, and mastered by Noah Mintz at Lacquer Channel Mastering in Toronto, ON. Thin Mind has sci-fi, post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives interwoven throughout. These themes emerged while working at Risque Disque, which Boeckner jokingly describes as a Dutchman’s failed utopia, a problematic structure with a post-apocalyptic vibe: the studio is housed in a stone barn hand-built by the Dutchman in the middle of the woods, using local materials and based on his memory of a building he loved growing up in the Netherlands. Thin Mind finds the core members of Wolf Parade working as a trio, as they did on past albums Apologies to the Queen Mary and At Mount Zoomer, with songwriting duties evenly split between singers Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug. The album includes the singles “Forest Green,” “Julia, Take Your Man Home,” and “Against the Day,” the latter of which features a rare, co-vocal performance from Boeckner and Krug.
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2020 release, the 14th studio album from the British electro-pop duo. Hotspot was mostly written and recorded in Berlin and Los Angeles and produced and mixed by Stuart Price. Features the singles "Dreamland" (featuring Years & Years) and "Burning the Heather".
Recorded over the course of a series of freewheeling, improvisatory sessions, Kingdom In My Mind is The Wood Brothers seventh studio release and their most spontaneous and experimental collection yet. A testament to the limitless creativity of the unharnessed mind, the record explores the power of our external surroundings to shape our internal worlds (and vice versa), reckoning with time, mortality, and human nature. The songs here find strength in accepting what lies beyond our control, thoughtfully honing in on the bittersweet beauty that underlies our pain and sadness with vivid character studies and unflinching self-examination. Deep as the lyrics dig, the arrangements always manage to remain buoyant and light, though, drawing from across a broad sonic spectrum to create a transportive, effervescent blend that reflects the trio s unique place in the modern musical landscape.
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Hailed as “The new master of the slide guitar” by the Montreux Jazz Festival and “The real thang” by the legendary Bootsy Collins, Jack Broadbent has spent the past few years wowing international audiences with his unique blend of virtuosic acoustic and slide guitar, and poignant folk and blues-inspired vocals.
Following a string of successful shows opening for legendary artists, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Johnny Hallyday, Robben Ford, and Tony Joe White, Jack has headlined a string of international tours, playing sold-out shows in Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the US, and Canada.
Drive-By Truckers is kicking off the new election year with The Unraveling, their first new album in 3 1/2 years (the longest space between a new DBT albums ever). Those years were among the most tumultuous our country has ever seen and the duality between the generally positive state of affairs within the band and the turbulent world outside (or as Patterson Hood puts it: "watching so many things we care about be decimated and destroyed”) informed the writing of this album to the core.
Bombay Bicycle Club's long-awaited new album, Everything Else Has Gone Wrong, is set for 1/17 release. It is the eagerly anticipated follow-up to the British band's acclaimed No 1 charting, Mercury Music Prize nominated 4th album `So Long, See You Tomorrow, released back in 2014. The new album was largely recorded in the US alongside Grammy Award winning producer John Congleton (St. Vincent/Sharon Van Etten/War on Drugs) and features their euphoric new single `Eat, Sleep, Wake (Nothing But You).
It's country music but not as we know it which begs the question: Have these Bad Kids of 21st Century rock 'n' roll finally grown up on their ninth studio album? Are they at peace with themselves? Have they made a record their parents could listen to? The Black Lips new album 'Sing In A World That's Falling Apart' continues to flick the middle finger to one and all. This ain't another gaggle of bearded southern sons fleeing their collective suburban upbringings and collegiate music education. There aren't the usual clichés about drinking, honkytonks, and heartbreak. These are, after all, the same Black Lips who rescued the waning garage punk subgenre by not sounding or dressing their musical predecessors. They also dug contemporary hip-hop and punk and actualized themselves Like so many dramatic moments in the Black Lips career, 'Sing In A World That's Falling Apart' was born out of crisis. The band's stylistic evolution through decades of prolific touring and recording took them where no garage punk band had gone before - huge venues, network television shows, and major music festivals. Here Black Lips are at their grimiest, most dangerous and equipped with the best collection of songs since the aughts. Skidding onto the asphalt in a shower of sparks, they roll on with an unapologetic southern-fried twang, pacing the beast, every now and then dropping a psycho howl into the rubber room madness lurking underneath the truckstop fireworks. This ain't your granny's country album. And conversely this ain't your mama's Black Lips.
ANDY SHAUF is becoming one of the most important songwriters of his generation. His songs are tuneful vignettes of small moments and big hearts. On his latest, The Neon Skyline, Shauf intertwines stories of a group of friends who frequent a local dive bar, and through them, makes poignant observations about human nature with a novelist’s detail and melancholic humor. The songwriting is down to earth, yet sophisticated and inventively melodic. The Neon Skyline is a creative leap for this already acclaimed artist.
2020 release. "Letting go can be a scary prospect," says Son Little. "But there's beauty in it, too. Everything you leave behind opens up space for something new in your life." That was certainly the case with his album, Aloha, his third studio album. Recorded at Paris's iconic Studio Ferber, the entire project was an exercise in letting go, in ceding control, in surrendering to fate. While Son Little (the stage name of songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Aaron Livingston) still plays nearly every instrument on the album himself, he put his songs in the hands of an outside producer for the first time here, collaborating with French studio wizard Renaud Letang (Feist, Manu Chao) to create his boldest, most self-assured statement yet. Equal parts vintage and modern, the collection blends classic soul, old-school R&B, and adventurous indie sensibilities into a timeless swirl fueled by gritty instrumental virtuosity and raw, raspy vocals. It's an ambitious work of vision and reflection, to be sure, but more than that, it's an ecstatic testament to the freedom that comes from torching the map and trusting the currents of life to carry you where you belong.
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Singer, songwriter and producer Chelsea Cutler reveals her long-awaited debut album, How To Be Human, will be released in January 2020! Cutler also announces she will be hitting the road next year on her "How To Be Human" Tour kicking off on February 15th in Dallas at Canton Hall and making stops at New York's Terminal 5, Boston's House Of Blues, as well as in Chicago, Philadelphia, Nashville, San Francisco and more.